Whilst waiting for my bus on this morn I was taken aback by the massive number of automobiles that were zooming past me with only one occupant. I had decided to begin a quick and completely unscientific random sample.
In the 7 minutes or so that I was waiting at the bus stop I had counted a total of 174 cars. Of that quick sample only 34 had more than one occupant. Of those 34 vehicles operating at over 25% efficiency only one of the automobiles had more than 2 occupants meaning that only 1 out of 174 automobiles was operating at over what could be considered 50% efficiency.
Now we could begin to argue the semantics of "efficiency". Some could state that one would have to take into account vehicular mileage as well as designed seating capacity and eventually embodied energy to truly understand how "efficient" the automobile is, however I would like to base the premise that the vast majority of automobiles are designed with a comfortable seating capacity of 4 adult humans. Therefore I would state that any vehicle operating at less than full occupant capacity would therefore be working at less than full vehicular capacity.
This was my morning muse.
Of course my mind would then meander to hypothesizing whether a congestion charge upon commuting vehicles would encourage public transportation and cut down on the environmental (and economic impact) of under capacity commuting. Cleveland, however is one of those cities that doesn't suffer from expensive downtown parking or even a highway infrastructure operating at designed capacity, so in essence leveraging a congestion charge would probably pull businesses out of downtown to relocate in the suburbs even quicker then they would be doing without.
At about this point in my commute my bus had begun to traverse Public Square which in recent weeks has had the main cross traffic shut down to repair a sink hole that collapsed under the intersection of Superior and Ontario. The circular one way route around Public Square is still in use however the main cross intersection is closed to vehicular traffic in essence solidifying the main portion of Public Square into one actual large urban PUBLIC SQUARE which can be safely crossed and occupied by pedestrians (barring construction interference). While this traffic pattern may not be permanent it may prove worthwhile to at least take the time and effort to study how the square functions without the main vehicle intersection operating. Whether or not it may be feasible to completely reclaim the square for pedestrian traffic only and create a venue of events to activate the space or perhaps program it for a hybrid use of pedestrian and public transit only (with commuter vehicle traffic confined to circulate around the square) could, in fact, become a fine point of study and eventually contention into whether the city wants to become a walkable city at all.
I would argue that if public square became one large pedestrian location instead of multiple disparate elements segregated by high speed and high volume vehicular traffic that it may become a collection place for residents and visitors which may create opportunities for businesses looking for the next high profile location. There are few locations in the city that could actually be described as multi-nodal with Tower City being the fulcrum for many of the GCRTA's public transit systems (bus, rapid transit and soon the BTR) so the inherent exposure to such a location is already relatively high however short of street level business the are may be. Of course it is difficult to not further quantify that statement by referencing the prevalent surface parking that currently proves more economically feasible than office, retail or residential structures (hence it's proliferation) which is why downtown feels so very vast and empty anyway.
Hopefully someone is looking into it.
*edited because something wacky happened during the upload ~ed
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