that’s what they did in Seoul.

I managed to catch a wonderful show tonight on ABC2 which is part of the  e² series. e² is an ongoing PBS series about the economies of being environmentally conscious and deals with transport, design, nature and energy from numerous perspectives.

Tonight’s episode was about the removal of a major freeway in Seoul to uncover and recover the lost river Cheonggyecheon that Seoul had been built around. The main obstacle was one supported by the reasonable logic… that removing a major freeway would only congest traffic elsewhere within the city. That obstacle however was outweighed by the people’s desire to see something they remembered from their childhood restored (the freeway was only built in the 1970s) and a new lease of life offered to the noisy and congested Cheonggye area.

In 2001 Lee Myung-bak was elected as mayor on the back of his promise to restore the river and he proceeded to do so by ordering the removal of the freeway. Amazingly traffic studies showed that roads elsewhere did not become more congested and the average speed for travelling through the city actually increased slightly. In other words the traffic carried by the freeway dissappeared almost completely when the freeway did.

This outcome is now being used by some traffic planners as support for their notion of ‘induced demand’. Build a road and people will use it. They argue that traffic shouldn’t be described as ‘liquid’ where overflow will spill on to new movement corridors if needed. Rather, traffic can be described as a gas that will expand and contract into any space allowed for it. Which to some extent means that we can never build enough roads.

I can go on… but do check out the series and the extra vodcasts you can find on their website or download them through iTunes .

http://www.e2-series.com/