Dayomi Mathew

Walking being the oldest form of urban transport, and until the advent of major transformations in transport technology in the nineteenth century, most cities were structured in ways that supported walkability. Today, there is a change in transportation which emphasizes, the traditional pedestrian paths which are increasingly becoming non-regulated spaces when compared to the urban spaces for automobile modes. This change in emphasis is noticeable partly because urban walkability has rarely been planned for in the past few decades and ultimately may replace our automobile dependency. It has brought enormous changes to urban landscape in recent times particularly in the developed world. Automobile dependency comes in different ways, forms and degrees. For instance, there are few cities worldwide that are absolutely automobile dependent (where driving is the only form of transport). Even areas that appear to be highly automobile dependent often have a noteworthy amount of walking, cycling and transit travel among certain groups or in certain areas, although use of these modes tends to be undercounted by conventional transportation planning. Contemporarily, reducing car dependency has been discussed broadly in the scientific community by professionals in the built environment and of course by the general public. With increasing vehicular streets worldwide, it raises a swirl of questions, how did we get to this point of automobile dependency and are the alternatives more desirable? In answering this question, this paper identified and discussed extensively thirteen major distinct trends that are responsible for the automobile dependencies in most cities of the world.