Some planners are thinking about the future of transport for those who live in the ’burbs.
If Bloomberg is indeed one of Big Climate’s media voices (it is), this story may indicate that some planners are thinking about the future of transport for those who live in the ‘burbs.
Spoiler: It’s not flying cars
In the Atlanta suburb of Peachtree City, teens and older people alike rely on little electric vehicles to get around. Is this a potential model for a more sustainable suburbia?
Author David Zipper goes on to explain:
As the school day ends at McIntosh High School in Peachtree City, Georgia, a flood of chattering teenagers flows toward the parking lot, keys in hand. A mini-traffic jam forms as the students hop in their rides and head home. It’s a scene one might encounter at countless high schools across the car-dominated suburbs of the US — except most of these McIntosh students aren’t driving cars, but golf carts.
With about 9,300 golf carts registered among its 13,000 households, this town 31 miles southwest of Atlanta might be the most golf-cart-friendly municipality in America. A hundred miles of car-free multi-use paths crisscross the town’s 25 square miles, and many shopping centers and public buildings provide dedicated golf cart parking. A cartoon of one of the little vehicles appears on the town’s official logo. “Golf carts really are our identity,” says Mayor Kim Learnard.
Peachtree City has all the familiar trappings of American suburbia, with its single-family homes, space-eating lawns and two-car garages. But its founders also developed a blueprint for a community where driving isn’t a requirement for many daily tasks, decades before the current wave of interest in building walkable communities. It offers a bevy of lessons for developments now emerging on the urban fringe—as well as for existing suburbs and exurbs that are struggling to reduce transportation emissions.
“The current wave of interest in building walkable communities.”
If there is a “wave” of interest for building such places, it is among, for the most part, planners of “fifteen-minute-cities” and their grim ilk.
“Suburbs and exurbs . . . struggling to reduce transportation emissions.”
Well, there’s struggling and struggling. . . .
But back to Zipper:
At Peachtree City Golf Cars, a local dealer offering sales, rentals and repairs, new golf carts go for about $13,000 for a four-seater and $16,000 for a six-seater, at most a third the cost of an average new automobile. Most of the town’s golf carts are electric, with owners charging them from a standard outlet in their garage or at public charging stations available at the town library, a local supermarket and other retailers.
Electric, of course.
Modest investments in lane striping and signage, plus local rule changes like those seen in other American golf cart communities, could make towns that were once car-dependent into fertile territory for golf carts as well as e-bikes, e-trikes and the various battery-powered microcars that are increasingly common sights on urban streets.
Suddenly, I hear the opening notes from The Twilight Zone tune. . . .