Could you give up your car?
By: J. David Chapman/April 29, 2021
A few years ago, I wrote in this column about a part of London that literally did not allow parking. While I found eliminating parking from a community interesting, I am now considering a community built without automobiles. Yep, in one of the nation’s most automobile-dependent cities, a development is testing a new model of car-free living. The development, known as Culdesac, is located in Tempe, Arizona, and is a 15.5-acre neighborhood including 636 living spaces with 48,000 square feet of commercial and nonresidential uses. There is a small parking lot for the retail space, but none for the residential. Without the need to store cars, Culdesac devotes 40% of the neighborhood to plazas, paseos, and other public-use space.
This public space includes a dog park, a picnic park, a community pool, and a main plaza where neighborhood activities are hosted. The removal of cars allows for a rich use of fine-grain urban patterned development of narrow, shaded, pedestrian-only paseos and courtyards, activated by a small grocery, restaurants, coworking spaces, a light-rail station, and coffee shops.
The residential units face a network of shaded, semi-private, shared courtyards that are built to encourage socializing and designed to keep eyes on the street. The residential portion consists of seven two- and three-story buildings with at most eight units per building. The individual units range from 685 to 1,200 square feet.
The key to this type of development is mobility. Without cars, the connection to the rest of the community is light rail. Culdesac is located next to a light-rail station, and an adjacent plaza provides transit riders with access to scooter rentals, ride-share, and hourly car rentals. It has all been planned with ride-share zones to hail a ride and the car-share provides a method for longer weekend trips. The shorter trips are accommodated with e-scooter infrastructure and sidewalk delivery robots replace the need for trucks on site. Residents and visitors agree that the mobility aspect of the community is well-covered.
If one of the nation’s most auto-centric cities can do it, maybe yours can too. The market is responding well and everything built has been pre-sold or pre-leased with over 3,000 people nationwide expressing interest in living there. Are we ready for this and are you ready to do without a car?
J. David Chapman is an associate professor of finance and real estate at the University of Central Oklahoma (jchapman7@uco.edu).