It's official: Masdar won't be car-free (Update 5)

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Fundamental revisions to the Masdar City program, hinted at and leaked since spring, have been confirmed: Masdar City will be dedicated to developing and piloting sustainable technologies, but demonstrating what they can do on a city-wide scale will be left to others.

Here's what we know based on reports in a number of international news outlets.

• The overall deadline for completing all of Masdar City is now 2020-2025 instead of 2016. The cost will be roughly $18-20 billion instead of $22 billion. Given problems in the worldwide real estate market, these changes were expected.

• The city will not produce all its own energy, but will buy it elsewhere -- although promising the imports will be sustainably produced. This also was expected, due to reports the Masdar solar farm had efficiency problems due to dusting by frequent sandstorms.
  
• The first phase of the Dutch-made Personal Rapid Transit system will stay a pilot project, serving Masdar Institute (MIST) and linking to a parking lot. There will be no citywide network. This had been telegraphed too (TWIP, March 17, April 27), yet to see it as a final decision is a smack in the face. Masdar's particular PRT technology might very well be proven in operation. But relegated to parking shuttle duty, even if well-traveled, means that it will do nothing to settle the question of what PRT can do if deployed over a wide area.
  
• The 'podium,' a raised platform on which the city and its shaded pedestrian-only streets were to be built, will not extend beyond MIST. This is important, since Masdar City's utilities, waste handling and transportation were to take place beneath the podium. The PRT would operate here like a subway, out of the way of walkers and and bicyclists. Not having this space underneath the entire city basically ensures PRT will stay limited -- unless they decide in the future to go elevated (the original plan envisioned a second, elevated PRT system as an express service, but there is no current mention of it and we have to assume it has been shelved). But any elevated transit in that climate would put added air conditioning load on the PRT vehicles' batteries and therefore on the sustainable energy grid as well.
  
• Alternative power vehicles will likely be allowed into the city. Of course they will! No PRT subway means cars will have to be accommodated. The car culture has already infiltrated, with a CNG filling station being built (ibid.). No podium also means cars will be on the surface streets, disincentivizing walking and biking. Citywide public transit will also have to be on the surface, meaning some kind of bus or rail, which require rights of way. Again, bye-bye shaded streets. These design realities have now been confirmed, by Sultan al Jaber himself in remarks made to The National -- put simply, Masdar is turning to a privatized transportation solution, in order to cut costs associated with the public transit option.
          The main threat cars pose to the future Masdar sustainability equation is that if electric cars are driven the same way ICE cars are driven, an enormous load will be put on the power grid -- a constantly increasing one, unless Masdar strictly limits the number of cars.

The dominant paradigm beats transit again.

Coverage:

Bloomberg
Trade Arabia
AFP

DailyFinance
 The National: "Cars Replace Transport Pods"

The National: "vision unchanged," but "streets have been widened to carry more traffic"
Green Prophet: A big shrug from Masdar architect; project now "infamous"

Can it shake the failure meme?

Anyone who thought Masdar City was going to turn out perfectly was living in the kind of fantasyland the project's critics are now characterizing the ambitious 'eco city' project to be.

That said, it's amazing the degree to which it is so very easy for a recent wave of commentators to completely thrash this multibillion dollar sustainable technology experiment in the online press -- and with nary a whimper from the Masdar operation.

Just one well-placed negative story can be a nail in the coffin of an ambitious program, and for Masdar that item of sharpened hardware was September's "In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises," by New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff.

"Daring and noxious" is how Ouroussoff concludes just the third paragraph of his 1,800 word piece, and then likens Masdar City to the bane of urban planning, the gated community. Ourossoff then proceeds to imply Masdar won't get urban richness and texture until light rail arrives from Abu Dhabi City, and Abu Dhabi's class divisions will create a high end enclave -- versus ghettos (yes, Ourossoff uses that charged word) for everyone else.

The article ends with perhaps the most cutting metaphor: Ourossof turns Masdar City's 'podium' -- essentially a 'daylight basement' and engineering practicality -- into a PEDESTAL, raising Masdar and its version of sustainability "outside the reach of most of the world's citizens."

The response by the Masdar PR operation? Nada.

Ourossoff's lashing has been amplified in the succeeding weeks as the eco and green business media picked up on the story. Everyone loves it when the big ones fall.

This is not the first time Masdar has muffed precious media exposure. Last year they began talking about Masdar City as carbon neutral or almost neutral, instead of zero carbon/emissions.

And earlier this year was when Masdar allowed senior officials to put a knife in the car-free goal, when officials poo-poohed the PRT system while displaying no understanding of the concept, and opening the CNG station.

Masdar's PR silence has enabled these negative stories to become a meme -- Masdar City as already a failed experiment.

There are a lot of good projects going on at Masdar City. Regardless of whether the project as a whole winds up being sustainable, technologies like thin-film solar, concentrated solar, waste-to-energy, wind power, PRT, and more could be perfected and proven in everyday operation at Masdar, and then commercialized for widespread adoption. And who knows what kind of new ideas will come out of MIST.

Update: Waste-to-energy is out. So where are they putting the landfill?

And Masdar City continues to be a One Planet Living community, which commits the project to third-party sustainability principles, including social -- a big step forward for Abu Dhabi (TWIP, 5/6/09).

But because the failure meme is taking root, when anyone brings up green solutions developed at Masdar to activists, citizens, journalists and decisionmakers, the first response, the lazy response, is often going to be: Masdar -- I heard that failed.