Dear Joel,

I believe you are spot on and I've been surprised how little I could
find on economical comparisons of car-free development (glad if somebody
on the list can point me to relevant literature).

There are many open (and difficult)  questions to be answered: 
1.) living costs for the inhabitant? 
Not only transport, but retail and other daily goods and services.
Retailers may be smaller and more expensive but other
infrastructure-related costs (water, gas, communication) may be cheaper
due to higher urban densities.

2.) Costs for property and/or housing? What's the demand/offer?
 
Further, a normalization or reference scheme is necessary. It is not
sufficient to take a typical (car-based) residential area, one should
also compare on a bases of equal opportunities or accessibility, such as
number of reachable (on equal travel-time bases) work-places, shopping,
recreation, etc. 

I'd like to see a kind of macroscopic cost model where the major
unknowns are the independent variables that you can change. In Europe,
there are few (if any) new town developments and there is rather the
problem to estimate changes in costs when transforming a city (or a part
of it) in a car-free living zone (if possible with some degree of
autonomy). Thus, a cost-model that could be fit to a particular town
would be desirable. I know it will always be a crude approximation, but
at least we could get some equations where the major variables are
somehow related.  

I don't know if all this makes sense to you, but I just wanted to write
down some basic considerations in order to add some focus on the subject
and maybe to get a discussion started. 

Anyway I'd be happy to join in a research activity on economical aspects
of car-free living.

Best wishes,
Joerg



On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 16:09 -0400, J.H. Crawford wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have Markus Heller arriving this evening for several days.
> Debra Efroymson has said that she thinks that a financial 
> comparison between "conventional" development and carfree
> areas is required.
> 
> Given that the current global issue seems to be the inability
> of governments to pay their bills, it may be timely to publish
> some sort of comparison. This might be quite elementary in the
> beginning.
> 
> I'll discuss this with Markus. If any of you have any ideas
> on how to proceed, or a desire to join in, please let me know.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Joel
> 
> 
> -----                           ###                            -----
> J.H. Crawford                    .                    Carfree Cities
> [log in to unmask]              .            http://www.carfree.com
> 
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