Advanced Introduction to Urban Transport Planning 9781800374065, 9781800374072, 9781800374089

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Advanced Introduction to Urban Transport Planning

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. The aims of the series are two-fold: to pinpoint essential principles of a particular field, and to offer insights that stimulate critical thinking. By distilling the vast and often technical corpus of information on the subject into a concise and meaningful form, the books serve as accessible introductions for undergraduate and graduate students coming to the subject for the first time. Importantly, they also develop well-informed, nuanced critiques of the field that will challenge and extend the understanding of advanced students, scholars and policy-makers. For a full list of titles in the series please see the back of the book. Recent titles in the series include: Cities Global Administration Law Peter J. Taylor Sabino Cassese Law and Entrepreneurship Housing Studies Shubha Ghosh William A.V. Clark Mobilities Global Sports Law Mimi Sheller Stephen F. Ross Technology Policy Public Policy Albert N. Link and James B. Guy Peters Cunningham Empirical Legal Research Urban Transport Planning Herbert M. Kritzer Kevin J. Krizek and David A. King

Advanced Introduction to

Urban Transport Planning KEVIN J. KRIZEK

Professor of Environmental Design, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

DAVID A. KING

Assistant Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, USA

Elgar Advanced Introductions

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Kevin J. Krizek and David A. King 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933701

02

ISBN 978 1 80037 406 5 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80037 407 2 (eBook) ISBN 978 1 80037 408 9 (paperback)

To Greta, who enthusiastically accepted the transition from mobility to accessibility

Contents

Acknowledgementsxi 1

The premise of cities and its relation to urban transport planning 1.1 Proximity and closeness 1.2 Planning for cars make other modes less useful 1.3 How to read this book

2

Considering justice in the design of transport systems 2.1 Early actions, long-standing implications 2.2 Three important tenets 2.3 Streets reveal priorities 2.4 Historic responses 2.5 Mending faults 2.6 Considerations on transport justice 

10 10 12 13 14 15 18

3

Past and emerging foundations for transport planning: access 3.1 Flaws of mobility 3.2 Accessibility 3.3 Access measures 3.4 Access tools and thinking 3.5 Modes of travel 3.6 Considerations on foundations

21 22 23 26 29 30 33

1 2 3 7

vii

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

4

Economics of supplying and using urban transport systems 4.1 Supply and demand curves 4.2 Equilibrium and elasticity 4.3 Streets as economic goods 4.4 Types of costs, defined 4.5 Externalities 4.6 Considerations on economics

5

Planning and design interplay: regions, districts, neighborhoods50 5.1 Regional issues 52 5.2 Regional versus local matters 54 5.3 Land development initiatives to enhance access 55 5.4 Transit integration 56 5.5 Unpacking built environment factors and travel 58 5.6 International application focused on bicycling 59 5.7 Considerations on planning and design: regions, districts, neighborhoods 61

6

Planning and design interplay: street space and how it is used 6.1 Speeds of movement 6.2 Widths of thoroughfares 6.3 Design-scaping streets 6.4 Curb parking 6.5 Off-street parking 6.6 Freight 6.7 Transportation demand management 6.8 Considerations for streets and how they are used

7

Engineering standards for streets: evolution and significance75 7.1 Standards 77 7.2 Road hierarchy 77 7.3 Rethinking performance measures  79

38 39 40 43 44 46 47

64 65 65 66 68 69 70 71 72

CONTENTS

ix

7.4 Standards  7.5 Considerations for engineering

80 81

8

Finance and institutional interplay 8.1 Federal funds and institutional reforms 8.2 User fees and general taxation 8.3 Local option taxes and property taxes 8.4 Transport referenda and direct democracy 8.5 Value capture 8.6 Considerations on finance and institutions

85 86 89 90 91 92 93

9

Data and models used in transport planning 9.1 Original models 9.2 Demographic and employment data 9.3 Four-step models  9.4 Travel demand and decay effects 9.5 Influence and value of transport models 9.6 Improved modeling 9.7 Considerations on data and models

10

Interdisciplinary sciences as applied to urban transport and opportunities 10.1 More data, dissolving boundaries, and emerging opportunities 10.2 Imageability and perceptions of urban space 10.3 Uses of urban space 10.4 Rates of change in city structures 10.5 Transitioning to new transport networks 10.6 Considerations on interdisciplinary approaches to transport 

11

Visions, new currents, and altered processes for transport planning  11.1 Preferences, innovation, and alternative futures 11.2 Evolving standards and regulations 11.3 Performance measures

96 97 97 98 101 103 104 106 108 109 111 113 114 116 118 121 122 126 127

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

11.4 Pricing  11.5 Integrative and entrepreneurial spirits 11.6 Considerations for futures and uncertainties 

128 129 131

Index135

Acknowledgements

This work has been shaped through too many collections of experiences to do justice to identifying any one of them; hundreds of students have provided valuable feedback to prior versions of the explanations contained within. We thank Stephen Harries at Elgar for the opportunity to contribute to the Advanced Introduction series. In offering her keen eye in editing the manuscript, Cindy Christian took the weed-Wacker to prior versions. Don Berry, the commensurate transport engineer and ping-pong player extraordinaire, is responsible for first exciting Kevin to the ‘art’ and science of measuring traffic signal cycle lengths at the corner of Lake and Waukegan.

xi

1.

The premise of cities and its relation to urban transport planning

Planning for cars makes all other travel modes less useful

Most people rarely consider urban transport issues until something goes wrong—they miss their bus, get stuck in congestion, hit a pothole or almost perish while bicycling on a road designed for cars. The aim to minimize these occurrences is not enough to define urban transport planning. Rather, that craft is fueled by a need to express what cities are about: easy exchange of commerce, knowledge, services, and more. Cities, at their core, provide a solution to transport issues by allowing people opportunities and stimulation; they provide firms with needs, materials, and markets. Urban environments bring all of these aspects, and more, closer together. Yet, to unleash the opportunities created by these markets, urban transport must work in ways that are regulated, but not constrained. This is the challenge facing urban transport planners. Cities and regions create prosperity which results when economic activities specialize and innovate, taking advantage of other firms doing the same. Retail agglomeration is aided when individual stores locate close to one another. Shoppers appreciate the choices and convenience this brings. Other commercial firms might lean toward locations that have access to both market and production suppliers. For many residents, the reason to live in a city is as straightforward as exchanging labor for goods in efforts to achieve a higher standard of living. All of this is enabled by the economic fortification that cities provide and the closeness is availed geographically speaking. Infrastructure and transport technologies have always been primary vectors that have shaped regional economies. When global trade developed centuries ago, cities grew around ports that fostered shipping. New York City leveraged the advantages of its natural harbor to grow into the 1

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

city it is today. Later, after the railroads, locations like Chicago fortified because of investment in rail networks and connections with deep water ports on the Great Lakes. Later still, Interstate highways and air travel allowed other regions without marine ports to thrive, such as Phoenix in the Sonora desert. People move to cities for all types of reasons. It might be as basic as finding a better job to achieve a higher standard of living, which is enabled in dynamic urban economies. For others, it might be about social interaction and cultural opportunity, pleasures as simple as “eating out,” attending a cultural event, or even the Malthusian desire to be around other humans. Young adults tend to like cities because so many other young adults are there, doing what young adults do. The appeal of cities, furthermore, can be seen in the fact that many people travel to other cities for holiday.

1.1

Proximity and closeness

Agglomeration effects, which are the benefits from unplanned activities and interactions, stem in part from the lack of physical space separating people and their activities.1 Urban settlements, which is where three-quarters of the US population live,2 share a common denominator: proximity, closeness, and density are prized. These characteristics open the door to opportunities and demands that differ from settlement patterns that are exurban or rural in character. Behind this door are choices: different types of housing, jobs, restaurants, and whatever else a resident might seek, and these choices extend to different types of travel—driving, transit, bicycling, walking, and even new types—each with different needs and characteristics. Regardless of whether residents live in central cities, adjacent neighborhoods, first ring suburbs or even second ring suburbs, they seek frequent and easy access to basic services. Services might be as basic as education, health care, food, employment; they might extend to social functions. Facilitating how these services are made available to residents should be what comprises the heart of urban transport planning.

THE PREMISE OF CITIES

3

However, these qualities—together with the positive attributes resulting from the physical proximity that they provide—ironically, are not the characteristics that mainstream transport planning has embraced. Those qualities rather go to the ability to travel quickly and free from auto congestion. As a result, mainstream transport planning has largely been guided by ensuring reliable travel by car. This mission has come at the expense of other travel modes. From its inception, the transport planning profession was framed as an activity to tackle the problem of congestion and chaos, an ambition reflected in one definition of transport planning as the field of government intervention aiming to ensure the effective and efficient movement of people and goods. Free-flowing car travel might be one element that allows people to reach the services they seek on a daily basis. But it doesn’t have to be and it certainly need not be the only way. Urban environments have many virtues, especially when varied choices for ways to get around town, conceivably, are available. People pay a premium to live in places with high accessibility by walking and public transport to jobs, shops, good schools, and other desirable amenities (Sohn et al., 2012). For places with high accessibility by automobile, they pay a smaller premium. This holds true for most cities across most populations, realizing there are always exceptions. This book helps diagnose the present condition to prescribe perspectives on transport planning that reflect the challenges and opportunities facing today’s cities. Transport planning is not an engineering problem to solve. Rather, we frame the craft as a political issue about what is important to both humans and regional economies. One of the main reasons cities in the United States, Canada or Australia function differently than those in Europe or Asia can be traced to the physical characteristics resulting from policy and planning decisions. US cities rely on car-based transport relative to their peers. These decisions are influenced by history, culture, and values. They are also political.

1.2

Planning for cars make other modes less useful

Our focus on the ramifications of planning for cars—in this opening chapter and periodically throughout the book—is fueled by the existing potential for using other forms of transport to serve short-distance travel

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for which cars are too often relied upon. Across all large US metro areas, every other time someone gets in a car, they travel less than 6 km (Krizek and McGuckin, 2019). More detailed analysis for weekday travel from Chicago, Dallas, Portland, and Sacramento reveals more than half of all trips fall under 6 km (Tomer et al., 2020). Looking even more closely, multiple-millions of trips, cumulatively across all US cities, fail to extend more than 2 km. These findings underscore the importance of recognizing that trip origins and destinations are mostly proximate to one another in urban environments. Many types of vehicles are capable of satisfying most of these trips, including those that are smaller, cleaner, and more affordable than cars. We fully recognize that trip length is tied to varying levels of proximity that is allowed by downtown cores versus historic neighborhoods versus first or second ring communities or even traditional suburban locations. What often goes unrecognized, however, is that in even the most auto-reliant places such as Los Angeles county,3 the same core message stands true: a strong market exists for short distanced travel. These trips could be easily absorbed by innovative forms of mobility other than standard cars, a mode of travel that carry exorbitant cost to society, the environment, and overall safety. To support new mobility, it is important to first understand how planning for cars makes all other travel modes less useful by making them more difficult. The amount of road space that cars need spreads out development (Figure 1.1). Building roads for higher speeds makes being outside of a car less pleasant and less safe. The parking that is needed harms other modes of travel and once someone leaves home in the morning with a car, they are likely to use that car for all the day’s travel. Conversely, improving other modes complements all other non-driving modes. For instance, walkable neighborhoods are also easy for bikes or to serve with transit. None of this is to argue that cars should be eliminated from cities. Rather, we stress that historically, US urban transport planning is largely about planning for cars, which makes planning for all other modes harder because of space, speed, and storage requirements.

THE PREMISE OF CITIES

5

Note: Car-oriented transport infrastructure is prevalent in almost all cities across the globe—and in Los Angeles it stands out. But even in cities across the US, owing to the nature that they are urban, the distance for most trips between origin and destination is less than 6 km.

Figure 1.1

Automobile-oriented infrastructure in urban centers

Change with respect to these efforts is afoot. New tools from real estate agencies, job searching platforms, food delivery services, transit systems companies, and public facilities management organizations are providing means to allow many people to view transport services differently. Rather than just asking, “how fast can I get there?” people are increasingly asking, “how can I optimize the acquisition of needed goods and services?” This shift is just one symptomatic change affecting the mindset of many. It strengthens efforts that have been accumulating for years about the need for new approaches to build complete transport networks for other modes of travel (Figure 1.2). It supports a claim that urban transport planning has been nearing an inflection point and significant change is now within arm’s reach. Look no further than advances in ride-hailing, micro-mobility, and the diminished role of funding. Shifting sands suggest that momentum is building that could amount to more than a quixotic effort to get more cars off the road. There is mounting political support and accumulating knowledge for ways to improve pedestrian spaces, design better streets, operate better transit services, and provide for safer bicycle travel. The marks of past transport

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

planning practices that are etched into the fabric of cities are deep but are not indelible.

Note: Urban transport is about connecting origins with destinations. Important in this pursuit is the need to provide complete and safe networks to do so—including walking, bicycling, or transit networks—that have an efficacy currently made possible by car networks in most cities.

Figure 1.2

The need for complete transport networks

In considering the amount of city land devoted to moving cars together with the entrenched legislation to further such practices, it would be remiss of us not to respect the strong path dependency in place. Through municipal, state, and federal legislation, transport is a heavily regulated endeavor featuring many private players and innovation. It cuts across issues including the economy, employment, environment, and health. Billions of dollars in taxes, fees, tolls, and fares are collected to advance the aim of urban transport planning. Our aim in this book is to provide a foundation of knowledge to guide future transport planning; to allow future planners, decision-makers, and even the public to undertake more informed decision making (Krizek et al., 2009). We present a summary of current conditions and point to those that could be changed. Our desire is that it provides a call for others

THE PREMISE OF CITIES

7

to help define the next generation of mainstream transport planning (Bertolini, 2007) and allow innovative practices to diffuse (Rogers, 2010).

1.3

How to read this book

No single title can do justice to the range of topics under the umbrella of urban transport planning. We are therefore required to make hard, deliberate, and strategic decisions about what topics to include and how to sequence them, all within the constraint of 50,000 words. We balance readability with meaningful content to offer a compelling narrative arc and strong framework; we expect instructors to fill out this scaffolding by stressing their own priorities, additional readings, and exercises. We provide a guide to the processes, issues, and actors involved in planning and managing transport systems, with a primary focus on passenger travel within metro areas. We have also shied away from providing a “how to” manual, instead favoring an approach to encourage interest and curiosity. We explain prevailing theories and how higher-level thinking could yield different results from past planning—that is, if different assumptions and/or political processes are installed. For some, the text might read more academic than practical, an approach we felt important because the present-day conditions that have affected transport planning fall out of strong societal preferences and policy decisions from past centuries. Historical precedents deepen our appreciation that conditions can change, together with the constraints that need to be overcome to enact that change. Each chapter introduces an adage at the outset—one that is indicative to the material of that chapter specifically and also applicable to the general pursuit of transport planning. The chapters are sequenced to invite curiosity about how and why things are the way they are and most chapters pose pressing questions that allow us to expound on various issues. We close each chapter with “considerations”—an opportunity to reflect on emerging priorities. Throughout, we point to international applications to demonstrate proof-of-application examples. Most of the evidence for our claims comes from our study of cities in the United States, which also maintain strong currency to cities in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—other countries that have led the world in creating

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

car-dependent cities. Applications would vary considerably when applied to cities in Europe and other parts of the world which have even greater diversity in their transport networks, urban form, and governmental structures. Owing to the political nature of transport planning, the next chapter addresses justice as a key component of transport planning. The third chapter describes the foundations of urban transport, and how we got to where we are. Economic implications of transport are explained in Chapter 4 as transport has many externalities, both positive and negative, which require intervention to support or mitigate. Transport allows agglomeration economies to thrive, which creates economic spillovers. Yet congestion, safety, carbon emissions, and other issues cause harm to society that drivers do not pay for. In Chapters 5 and 6 we focus on planning and design issues, including how metropolitan spatial structure, at different levels, affects travel and uses for the space in streets. Chapter 7 introduces the history of engineering-based concepts and how they manifest themselves in current issues. Chapter 8 covers how transport is financed and the institutions that are responsible for planning transport. In Chapter 9 we describe the data and methods used for travel behavior analysis, which is a central analytic approach to transport planning. Chapter 10 describes the development of transport scientists, who bring new skills and planning concepts to the field. Chapter 11 discusses approaches to address the uncertainty associated with new transport futures, the role of pricing and performance measures, and urges readers to adapt the craft of urban transport planning to achieve heightened currency in changing times.

Notes 1. From a global economics perspective, it is also helpful to recognize that more access has economic multiplier effects as it can affect how, as the price of commodities, goods, or services drops, their variety increases. The steel industry requires the cost-efficient import of iron ore and coal for the blast furnaces and export activities for finished products (i.e., beams, coils). Manufacturers and retail outlets and distribution centers handling imported containerized cargo rely on efficient transport and seaport operations. Transportation links together the factors of production in a complex web of relationships between producers and consumers. The outcome is commonly

THE PREMISE OF CITIES

2.

3.

9

a more efficient division of production by the exploitation of comparative geographical advantages, as well as the means to develop economies of scale and scope. According to the US Census, just over 80 percent of Americans live in places classified as urban. This includes cities, suburbs, and exurbs. About 50 percent of Americans live in places they consider suburban, about 27 percent live in urban places, and the balance live in rural places, according to surveys, see:  https://​www​.census​.gov/​programs​-surveys/​geography/​guidance/​geo​ -areas/​urban​-rural/​ua​-facts​.html; and https://​www​.bloomberg​.com/​news/​ articles/​2018​-11​-14/​u​-s​-is​-majority​-suburban​-but​-doesn​-t​-define​-suburb. In Los Angeles County, widely regarded as one of the most spread out and auto-oriented in the US, the length of an average trip is roughly 10 km based on the following rationale. Using available data (https://​planning​.lacity​.org/​ eir/​CoastalTrans/​deir/​pdfs/​appendixF​.pdf), the average daily VKT (vehicle kilometers traveled) is ~35 km. Once the ~18 km average commute is adjusted by number of workers (4.5M/10.1) and is subtracted (22−5.1) this leaves 27 non-commute VKT. Assuming a per capita trip rate of 5.8 km, multiplied by the share of trips are non-commute (73), yields 2.6 trips. Dividing 27 by 2.6 yields, a 10.4 km trip with two important caveats: it is an average measure and not a median value, which can provide a superior measure of central tendency and these calculations pertain to the entire country, which has more spread-out developments and is known to embody some very long trips which drive up the average.

References Bertolini, L. (2007). Evolutionary urban transportation planning: An exploration. Environment and Planning A, 39(8), 1998–2019. Krizek, K. J., and McGuckin, N. (2019). Shedding NHTS light on the use of “little” in urban areas. Transport Findings, November. https://​doi​.org/​10​.32866/​10777. Krizek, K., Forysth, A., and Slotterback, C. S. (2009). Is there a role for evidence-based practice in urban planning and policy? Planning Theory & Practice, 10(4), 459–478. Rogers, E. M. (2010). Diffusion of Innovations. Simon and Schuster. Sohn, D. W., Moudon, A. V., and Lee, J. (2012). The economic value of walkable neighborhoods. Urban Design International, 17(2), 115–128. Tomer, A., Kane, J., and Vey, J. S. (2020). Connecting People and Places: Exploring New Measures of Travel Behavior. Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. https://​www​.brookings​.edu/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​10/​Corridors​-of​ -Demand​.pdf.

2.

Considering justice in the design of transport systems

Equity is a process, not an outcome

Transport underpins all dimensions of city planning and development, especially justice and equity. It serves as a lens through which many woes of society are created and perpetrated. City officials decide about how to invest, or not, in infrastructure, service, and operations in ways that raise fundamental questions of who gains accessibility, and who doesn’t. We argue that transport planning must treat issues of justice as central to the field rather than issues to be addressed post hoc or not at all. Societal power relationships have, for years, reinforced systemic biases in transport planning and practice. Such practices have made problems of justice, inclusion, and representation worse at nearly every turn. These issues are made all the more painful by the long-lasting nature of transport infrastructure and its cumulative effects. They deepen patterns of inequality in cities in ways that reverberate for decades. They inform what people get access to and, therefore, infrastructure conditions one’s inherent mobility, which is often considered a basic right.

2.1

Early actions, long-standing implications

Early and famous scholarship chronicles patterns of how streetcars allowed residents to suburbanize (Warner, 1978)—and with that, form their own local governments, which acted as a kind of income and wealth pooling. Many of the earliest suburbs then provided for their moneyed neighbors better schools, parks, and amenities without having to support lower-income populations or the cultural and recreational offerings of 10

CONSIDERING JUSTICE IN THE DESIGN OF TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

11

bigger cities. Even the first rules and finance mechanisms affecting land use and transport had embedded inequities. Depression-era federal programs intended to rescue the collapsing housing markets, sent land appraisers out to map areas in cities with higher prospects of favorable investment. These practices were enforced through federal mortgage lending requirements, local zoning codes and other public infrastructure spending. Decades later, the freeway revolts in the 1960s demonstrated righteous anger about how the placement of urban freeways decimated Black neighborhoods, such as the Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and cleaved others, such as in Richmond, Virginia. Many such neighborhoods were selected for freeways not because the routes were ideal, but because these neighborhoods had the least power to oppose them. Few Black neighborhoods had the political support that Jane Jacobs did when she stood up to and defeated Robert Moses’ lower Manhattan expressway plans.

Note: Transport services interact with the built environment at multiple scales and moderate what services residents do or do not have access to, thereby affecting issues of transport justice and accessibility.

Figure 2.1

Varying scales of transport considerations

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Decisions about where and what to build, and the accompanying operating characteristics, affect social and economic outcomes at multiple scales (Figure 2.1). Take, for example, how education is accessed for school aged youth. When children lack access to quality education early in life, they lose out on benefits that society might offer later. But how children get transported to that education—through busing, bicycling, or parents chauffeuring—produces many interlaced and knock-on effects (Bierbaum et al., 2020). One of the single largest transport fleets in the world, yellow school buses, take hundreds of thousand children to school every day (National School Transportation Association, 2013). They also were a powerful force that is tied to one of the most revolutionary Supreme Court decisions (e.g., Brown versus Board of Education).

2.2

Three important tenets

Transport justice has three critical tenets. The first concerns the placement of facilities. Infrastructure consumes space, but also creates externalities. Access is a positive externality, but noise, air pollution, and safety are negative ones. Nationwide, there is a consistent pattern where residential areas with certain populations have disproportionately been exposed to the negative externalities that transport decisions generate. A second addresses the manner in which transport services are provided. Creating new services or changing existing services will inevitably benefit some while taking away from others. If populations in the latter category were well served in the first place, this would not be a problem. It is a major concern if they are already disadvantaged. Cities may invest in new rail transit networks in an effort to entice wealthier drivers from their cars. When Los Angeles did this in the 1990s, it reduced bus services to help balance operating costs. This resulted in the formation of the Bus Riders Union, which successfully sued the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority to restore service cuts, in the affected lower-income neighborhoods. The third centers on enforcement as transport systems are intricately tightly tied up with policing (Seo, 2019). Black Americans and Latinos are far more likely to be pulled over for traffic violations than white drivers, and these interactions with the police can turn deadly. At the least, the

CONSIDERING JUSTICE IN THE DESIGN OF TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

13

traffic stops add additional financial burdens on those who are stopped for minor offenses who must then pay fines and fees. Policing on transit can quickly turn offenses such as fare evasion into criminal records that affect employment prospects. The choices that planners make as part of their daily work can make these issues better or worse, but these issues are too rarely treated as part of the calculus used to make these planning choices.

2.3

Streets reveal priorities

Many transport planners study equity through walking, bicycling, or transit discrepancies, and then provide remedy. Doing so, however, glances over the fundamental issues prompted by the largest transport asset in the US—roads—and how their use is appropriated, thereby revealing inherent frailties of most urban transport systems. Roads comprise more than 6.5 million km (four million miles) in the US,1 the round-trip distance between Los Angeles and New York City, 700 times over. They are, by far, the largest component to cities’ overall transport portfolios. The choice to give priority to purposes that maximize traffic flow for cars codifies a preferred used where mainstream transport planning assumes that people have access to cars. Of driving age Americans, this applies to 88 percent of the population; only Italy has a higher rate of car ownership.2 Assuming that most of the population has reliable access to a car holds 12 percent at a disadvantage. Households who lack access to a reliable car might have a physical impairment, health issue, or be too young or old to drive. But most often it is traced to being financial disadvantaged. This is not the way it always was. Around 1970, the median income of a household with a car was about twice of those without. Now, car owning households have median income almost four times that of those without. Outside of a few places, such as Manhattan, not owning car in the US is a predictor of poverty (King et al., 2019). Those with cars versus those without cars have mobility needs that differ (Sanchez et al., 2004), as their employment opportunities may not be in a business district well-served by transit or they share a single vehicle across many workers. These populations turn to other modes, usually

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

walking or transit, or simply not traveling at all. This is not to suggest that the solution to all equity problems is to provide everyone with cars, but merely to acknowledge some of the involved complexities. For transport analysts, matters are further complicated because the industry obsesses with using travel time as a primary metric to gauge success, thereby prizing faster vehicles. A willingness to pay for faster travel options increases with income, thereby affecting the monetary value of travel time. It creates an implicit bias towards higher-income groups, termed an income effect, which results when disadvantaged populations are disproportionately represented on some transport modes.

2.4

Historic responses

For decades, the benefits and costs of transportation investments have been distributed inequitably, with underserved people bearing a higher share of the burdens of the transportation system and a lower share of the benefits. Income and employment status can jointly affect the time and money available for travel (lower-income people often work in jobs that require commutes before or after rush hour when transit is less frequent, for instance). Income affects mode, trip frequency and travel distances, with lower-income people relying more on public transport, making fewer trips, and traveling shorter distances—often in areas of cities that don’t have conditions that allow these short trips to be made safely. The trickle-down effects of these historic trends and efforts to remedy them is challenging, underscoring the importance of approaching equity as a process and not necessarily an outcome. Concepts of horizontal and vertical equity are often called on to frame planners’ thinking. Horizontal equity means that all groups with the same needs receive similar services, an approach that may not provide needed services to targeted groups. Vertical equity corrects for these real or perceived concerns by allocating services based on different levels of need, such as income or disability status. But they do not include all aspects of equity, nor do they include the most important aspects, such as justice. Complying with state statutes and regulations, transport agencies are required to identify if a proposed project will have a disparate impact on

CONSIDERING JUSTICE IN THE DESIGN OF TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

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protected population groups or if it will generate a disproportionately adverse effect on one or more covered groups. It might be useful, for example, to know if in a bus rehabilitation project, how use of those buses subsequent to the rehabilitation will or will not result in disparate impacts on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Should there be substantive changes to the service levels in the future for which the rehabilitated buses will be used, that is, the vehicles are deployed in such a way that the nature and quantity of service in a particular area is changed, this would warrant a service equity analysis. These approaches, however, are mostly diagnostic. Prescribed solutions are weak. Most research and planning practice related to transportation equity has relied upon state-sponsored analytical methods and a critical assessment of these approaches is necessary (Karner et al., 2020). It is not enough to identify equity and justice concerns, and then propose addressing deficiencies with more of the same in terms of policy. Fundamental reforms for a more equitable transportation planning practice need to be grounded in a change in the worldviews themselves, thereby requiring a need to addressing questions of procedural justice and prescribing specific process design recommendations for the task at hand (Marcantonio et al., 2017; Martens, 2016).

2.5

Mending faults

While existing transport systems are problematic from the perspective of equity, equally troubling is the lack of consensus for correction. Solutions are complicated because, on one hand, they may be furthering access to an already troubling mode of transport, the car. Otherwise, remedies might be supporting the appropriation of costly transit services. Still other options ask people to envision changing transport systems which, understandably, spur uncertainty and apprehension. Consider, for example, new designs for streets that favor certain ways of getting around town, walking and bicycling, that from many perspectives are not only cleaner than cars but also considered more egalitarian. Investing in bike lanes in disadvantaged neighborhoods could lead to a more equitable distribution of the health, environmental, and economic benefits that more walking and cycling can provide. But such initiatives

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are often met with opposition based on grounds of equity. In some cases, they are seen as causes of gentrification and displacement. Confronting these issues requires a nuanced understanding of the potential relationship between bike lane investment and sociodemographic change. In public health scholarship, for example, it is generally understood that due to greater access to education, information, or cultural capital wealthier populations tend to access and take up most new health initiatives first, causing an “inverse equity” affect. Sustainability-focused equity-based arguments in favor of increasing cycling might argue that wealthy communities, who produce more carbon, and have greater flexibility and ability to shift to lower-carbon modes first should bear the greatest responsibility for shifting to lower-carbon modes like cycling. In this “equity-based” argument, cycle lanes in wealthier gentrified communities would be seen as an advance in equity, a signal that wealthier communities are assuming responsibility for the greater “harms” caused to others by their outsized carbon output. There is no shortage of this type of thinking and efforts to remedy the existing faults in transport systems get quickly called into question. In a fundamental sense, governments, in a democratic society, should work for the benefit of all people (the fact that they often do not is not proof to the contrary). For decades, transport professionals have ignored this—to put it bluntly—and have worked primarily for the benefit of people who have access to cars (perhaps based on the assumption that, once, we will all drive cars?). People with no or little access to a car were never completely ignored, but their situations were never taken particularly seriously and they were certainly not seen as being entitled to a decent “level of service.” Transit has long been planned to act as a social service, as a partial solution to the needs of those who don’t drive, but infrequent headways and limited service areas are not reasonable substitutes for the accessibility that cars provide, for better or worse. After decades of building cities around cars, it is no surprise, though an inconvenient fact, that people without access to cars are at an economic and social disadvantage in most places. Transport-related social exclusion is the most dramatic result of this biased approach that has been applied over decades. The insulting dependence of adolescents and the endless chauffeuring duties of parents is just one lamented outcome affecting households in advanced societies.

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Less understood by transport planners is how households without the means to chauffeur each other around manage their travel needs on a daily basis. There are issues of class, ethnicity, and race wrapped into transport vulnerability, and researchers studying the problems often misdiagnose the causes and treatments. As an example, people of color are disproportionately hurt or killed in crashes involving pedestrians (Schmitt, 2020). Why is this? The color of one’s skin does not affect their ability to walk safely. The reasons are that people of color are pedestrians in places that are simply more dangerous to walk. Part of the reason is ongoing housing segregation, where Black or Latino neighborhoods form in places where they are not excluded. Where exclusion is less likely to happen are places with other problems, such as neighborhoods with high-speed arterial roads that create noise and air pollution. Thus, through residential sorting, certain groups are more likely exposed to harms caused by transport decisions. In these cases, one remedy is to improve crosswalks or sidewalks, but we still expect people to walk and bike in an environment designed for fast cars. One approach that helps, in part, to reconcile the conundrums affecting transport decisions and justice is to turn to the political philosophy literature which considers the fair distribution of material and non-material goods in society. Academics have started to turn to the political philosophy literature to understand in more detail what justice may imply in the domain of transport. Only recently has this mode of thinking been woven into transport planning under the guise of accessibility, with rationales to provide sufficient amounts of it for different populations. Transport can function in physical terms to achieve this aim with a goal to make decisions that favor fair transportation systems for all persons, with sufficient accessibility under most circumstances. The idea stems from the fact that while the financially disadvantaged may have different mobility options, they still need access to many of the same basic services as everyone else—food, health care, and employment. The manner in which access is provided could inform how to distribute transport services. The approach relies on a hypothetical scenario where those who use transport services are behind a veil of ignorance, an approach famously advanced by political philosopher John Rawls. In this vein, users don’t know if they are rich or poor, whether they will live in a suburb or in the city center, whether they are fit and healthy, or old and frail. They

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don’t know if they are a successful entrepreneur for a start-up company or a struggling single parent trying to make ends meet. The underlying principle here is “provision according to need”: those who need a lot get a lot, and those who need a little bit get very little. The fundamental uncertainty faced by residents behind the veil of ignorance—who they might represent—induces them to more seriously consider the plight of all in how a municipality’s transport system is designed. Users are to reach agreement on how a transport system is designed and how, once the veil is lifted, it will serve them in society. Rawls’ approach here engenders a social contract, extended in utilitarian terms as rational agents. It is optimistic thinking, admittedly, yet for any particularly population, the approach optimizes expected outcomes and not maximum ones. In using the veil, the aim is that transport planners can achieve quick or stronger agreement on how to allocate resources that will not leave any population stranded once the veil of ignorance is lifted. Not knowing who they will be, the people positioned behind the veil will design a transport system that will (virtually) always serve them, no matter who they will turn out to be. It helps distribute resources irrespective of educational attainment, income, race, or social class. Given the costs related to the provision of transport to all, the people behind the veil will also limit the resources they will spend on transport provision. The outcome of the thought experiment is then that people will agree on a transport system that provides them with sufficient accessibility. This agreement will never leave them stranded, no matter who they will be when the veil is lifted, while it does not absorb an unacceptable amount of the resources that are jointly produced in society.

2.6

Considerations on transport justice

Cities are creatures of society, which have long histories separating populations based on income, race, or, more likely, a combination of the two. Such conditions reveal themselves spatially and therefore, transport is a critical player that is often called upon to address inequalities. Concerns are dyed into the wool of all fabrics of the built environment. Declining

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resources, therefore suggesting deep cuts to the privileged to sustain service to those with greatest needs, add challenge to the landscape. Embracing the idea of transport justice quickly translates to challenging fundamental duties of government in the domain of transport. It challenges the system of road and gasoline taxes as a basis for financing infrastructure investments, unraveling them as unjustified schemes of coercive taxation, it challenges the professional basis of transport planning with its focus on the functioning of the transport system rather than a concern for people, and it radically re-envisions the entire transport domain as one to be based on rights rather than on the principle of demand in combination with some limited level of benevolence towards the mobility disadvantaged. Even if no transport poverty would exist, the transport domain would require a major overhaul to bring it into line with other domains of government intervention like housing, education and health care, which in many countries are firmly based on principles of justice. (Martens, 2020, p. 383)

In terms of more actionable steps to address equity concerns as brought forth by transport issues, one can conceive of a hierarchy of approaches (Levine, 2013). At the lowest level, one in which short-term gains are emphasized, mobility would be provided to those who need it. This might be achieved by more easily availing cars to those in need—an approach, however, that has deficiencies in respect of longer-term outlooks. A second might be to enhance mobility while also removing barriers by which proximate services could be better made available. This might mean changing single use zoning restrictions (Manville et al., 2020) and better enabling land uses to be mixed. A third approach is what cities should point to for their north star, and prizes notions of equitable access across the board. It includes lower-level strategies, together with approaches to treat the social dimension that can generate exclusion even in the face of accessibility that would be enabled through physical conditions of integrated land use and transport alone.

Notes 1. 2.

Kilometers of US streets/roads: https://​www​.bts​.gov/​content/​public​-road​ -and​-street​-mileage​-united​-states​-type​-surfacea. Global car ownership: https://​www​.bloomberg​.com/​news/​articles/​2015​-04​ -17/​a​-pew​-survey​-charts​-global​-car​-motorcycle​-and​-bike​-ownership.

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References Bierbaum, A. H., Karner, A., and Barajas, J. M. (2020). Toward mobility justice: Linking transportation and education equity in the context of school choice. Journal of the American Planning Association, 1–14. DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2020.1803104. Karner, A., London, J., Rowangould, D., and Manaugh, K. (2020). From transportation equity to transportation justice: Within, through, and beyond the state. Journal of Planning Literature, 35(4), 440–459. DOI: 0885412220927691. King, D. A., Smart, M. J., and Manville, M. (2019). The poverty of the carless: Toward universal auto access. Journal of Planning Education and Research, Online First. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​%2F0739456X19850171. Levine, J. (2013). Urban transportation and social equity: Three transportation-planning paradigms that impede policy reform. In Naomi Carmon and Susan S. Fainstein (eds), Policy, Planning, and People: Promoting Justice in Urban Development. University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 141–160. Manville, M., Monkkonen, P., and Lens, M. (2020). It’s time to end single-family zoning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(1), 106–112. Marcantonio, R. A., Golub, A., Karner, A., and Nelson Dyhle, L. (2017). Confronting inequality in metropolitan regions: Realizing the promise of civil rights and environmental justice in metropolitan transportation planning. Fordham Urb. LJ, 44, 1017. Martens, K. (2016). Transport Justice: Designing Fair Transportation Systems. Routledge. Martens, K. (2020). How just is transportation justice theory? The issues of paternalism and production: A comment. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 133(C), 383–386. National School Transportation Association (2013). The yellow school bus industry. Industry White Paper Prepared by NSTA. Sanchez, T. W., Stolz, R., and Ma, J. S. (2004). Inequitable effects of transportation policies on minorities. Transportation Research Record, 1885(1), 104–110. Schmitt, A. (2020). Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. Island Press. Seo, S. A. (2019). Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. Harvard University Press. Warner, S. B. (1978). Streetcar Suburbs (vol. 133). Harvard University Press.

3.

Past and emerging foundations for transport planning: access

Transport facilities feed virtuous and vicious cycles

Transport planning has historically adhered to a doctrine known as the mobility-based approach. The primary aim was to move things, in particular, private cars. This approach was seeded by the 1920s (discussed more fully in Chapter 7), and grew as those responsible for building and managing transport systems increased the capacity of streets by modifying their geometry (i.e., through specifying turning radii, lane widths, side curb placement) and how they intersected with each other (i.e., traffic signals). These interventions all worked to favor the speedy flow of cars. Prioritizing free-flow travel translated to minimizing delays, which was measured by optimizing a system that balanced the volume of traffic (e.g., number of motor vehicles) relative to the capacity of the system (maximum flow rate), known as the volume-to-capacity (v/c) ratio. This measure, and its many derivatives, was—and still is, in the eyes of many—the predominant criterion used to assess the performance of road transport systems. Most state DOTs (Departments of Transportation) still target ranges for the v/c ratio of 0.70 to 1.0, depending on facility type and location; when the v/c ratio falls outside such a range on a given link, the system is deemed deficient. Ensuring that traffic moves, what the transport lexicon calls mobility, is important, no doubt. For those whose work intersects with transport, and for the public at large, good mobility is an important concern. It is an aim that has enjoyed a history lasting almost a century. Policies supporting it are some of the most globally accepted in efforts to assess the success of transport systems.

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Yet gauging the success of an urban transport system solely by viewing it through the lens of the v/c ratio exposes many issues. Primary among the issues is what happens when the ratio consistently creeps above 1.0. Congestion, measured by vehicular delay, sets in. Traditionally, transport planners have two options: decrease volume or increase capacity. The former option is typically treated as sacrosanct, as reducing the volume of traffic implicitly translates to diminished economic activity, which is not the aim of most initiatives in cities. Many departments of transportation therefore address this condition by building more capacity; usually, this means widening roads. A cycle is triggered, described later in this chapter, where more road space is called for to satisfy anticipated demand. One core issue that surfaces is that this demand is largely insatiable by cars and leads to, as is prevalent in most cities, the extremely auto-oriented system that has resulted (Handy, 1994). This results in more traffic, which is exactly the issue that is most often used to rally dissatisfaction with transport issues from residents.

3.1

Flaws of mobility

There are two principal flaws in the conventional mobility approach. Both undermine the resulting character and quality of the transport planning. The first flaw is the near universal assumption by planners that all development will increase auto traffic. Neighborly objections to new apartment buildings or grocery stores, typically, are not aimed at people or businesses. Rather, they target the notion that neighbors think that everyone coming and going will drive. New visitors and their cars will clog local streets and make parking harder to find. Traveling by bicycle or on foot rarely bring the same concerns with traffic, noise, or pollution. Assuming that people travel only by car bakes the primacy of autos into the planning process.1 Perhaps the only time neighbors think that other people won’t drive is when they object to a new transit investment based on the false notion that it will bring crime to their neighborhoods, as though a bus is a substitute for a getaway car.

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A second flaw considers that congestion is measured as a factor of delay relative to free-flow travel speeds. Most travelers are less concerned about speed relative to optimal conditions. What matters to them is their exposure to congestion. How long are they stuck in traffic? In suburban commutes, it might be that speeds are low, but time stuck in traffic is high. For urbanites, speeds are also low; yet, because their trip distances tend to be shorter, exposure to congestion might be less. Planners only focusing on the severity of delay end up prescribing the wrong treatment to the problem, which is to try, yet again, to increase speeds. Journalists covering the transport beat know they have a story each year when the Texas Transportation Institute Urban Mobility Report (TTI UMR) releases its annual congestion index. The index measures delay against free-flow travel speeds to estimate congestion, referred to as a mobility index, and the report has disproportionate influence on transport planning practices. The inherent problem is that it measures delay, focusing only on speed. Cities rank higher in the index where people drive faster.

3.2 Accessibility But more speed is not the quality people cherish about cities. The ability to travel swiftly is not what makes cities economically productive, nor interesting. Rather, what makes cities desirable is how easy it is to get to the places people want to go. In contrast to the TTI UMR (or any index measuring just mobility), a better metric rewards places where, even at low speeds, such as walking, bicycling, or local buses, one can reach many destinations. Mobility is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a more comprehensive goal. Urban travel is generally thought to be derived, meaning that its demand is prompted by activities offered at a different location. Commute trips are triggered by work at an office or factory; shopping trips are prompted by a need for groceries, and so on. What residents seek from their transport system is ability to ease the process by which these demands are satisfied—what the transport lexicon calls accessibility. We, and many others (Handy, 2020; Levine et al., 2019; Levinson, 2019), contend that the craft of urban transport planning is better served by tending to the

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principles to achieve access rather than mobility, which ends up being about speed. Good access means a resident can easily reach the places they need to go.2 This can be true even if the nearby streets have poor mobility—that is, they are congested and have low speeds, or what is often called by traffic engineers a “poor level of service.” Scholarly interest in accessibility as a transport concept is derived from a proud line of thought, reflected in seminal works, notably Hansen (1959) and Wachs and Kumagai (1973). For most people, the similar and more familiar access measure is WalkScore, which rates locations based on how many destinations are within an easy walk. They all imply the same thing: any location in a city embodies a level of access which can be measured, most simply by counting the number of destinations that can be reached within a given time parameter. The area that can be reached is displayed as an isochrone on maps; adding additional minutes to travel times opens more area to the number of accessible locations. The area of an accessibility ring from 20 to 30 minutes is larger than from 10 to 20 minutes, and even larger than 0 to 10 minutes. When the goal is to maximize the opportunities available in a short window of time, shaving off here and there adds up to minutes. Several deviations from this core concept allow different measures of access to exist. Many of them are complex to calculate or interpret, yet all of them invoke two core tenets. The first tenet stems from the forces that attract travel—the character of services that would be worth traveling to. Many factors influence work to affect the attraction of the destination. For groceries, the attraction to a particular store would be moderated by the size of the store as that affects the assortment or quality of goods that sit on the shelves. The attraction of the store could even vary by person, reflecting different tastes. A bald-headed person is not likely to be interested that a barber shop just opened down the street. A cinema matters little to someone with a distaste for movies. The closest sushi restaurant, even if it were just around the corner, might not be the one that is preferred. Similar logic applies to schools, places of work, or religious institutions. One can quickly grasp the breadth of a continuum that is available to gauge how the tenet of attraction plays out. Regardless of individual preferences, all of these considerations factor into the land use compo-

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nent and one point is key: the location and character of the service being demanded—its overall attractiveness—plays a key role and provides one lever that could be relied on in the pursuit of improving transport planning. The second tenet of access hinges on the manner in which any origin is connected to its destination, the network component. How easy or difficult is it to get there? Traditional transport planning, as mentioned, assumes that travel is something to be minimized; time spent on the network is considered a disutility. Factors that impede fast travel, such as congestion, creates resistance. But resistance doesn’t need to be only about speed. Distance and time, both derivatives of travel speed, are often used as suitable proxies for analysis and policy. There are, however, many ways to measure resistance, all of which encapsulate some factor that allows travelers to conceive how easy it is to get to a destination. Most people view transport networks only in terms of roads and streets, yet networks take many forms: railways, bike lanes, sidewalks, or monorail lines. Whether travelers use any one of these hinges on how well those networks allows mobility to happen. Each transport network, regardless of the mode, is built from links and joined by nodes; nodes also provide terminal locations to store the vehicles during periods of inactivity (e.g., parking lots or driveways). The characteristics of these networks contain characteristics that are prized over others. The network of the US Interstate system clearly prizes speed travel, for example. The Paris Metro cherishes spatial or temporal coverage, often the case for transit agencies, as they aim to provide a station within 500 m of all residents and various hours of the day when the service will be provided. Some networks might be informal (e.g., desire lines going between buildings on a college campus). Others have histories of lacking continuity (e.g., sidewalk systems in suburban communities). Furthermore, it is not unusual for different modes of travel have their own language to refer to key characteristics. Transit agencies, for example, are concerned with service span and areas. Span is used to describe the hours of the day when companies offer service, such as from 5 am until midnight, or perhaps 24-hour service. Round-the-clock service is expensive for transit agencies to provide, but it can be a lifeline for workers on late night or early morning shifts, who are more likely to be hourly workers

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in lower-wage jobs. The area speaks to the geography that it might cover, which is usually coincident with administrative and political units. In cases where metro regions transcend political boundaries, service areas may extend across jurisdictions via operating agreements, or the area may have a regional transit provider. In either case, the distribution of service across the geography usually prompts political wrangling about which parts of the service area should receive higher levels of investment.

3.3

Access measures

These two tenets of accessibility, attraction and resistance, can be put together into one equation to allow analysts—even laypersons—to understand how concepts play out in transport planning. The most common formulation to do so uses logic similar to Newton’s law of gravity to understand how two different locations in a city interact.3 In his masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) Isaac Newton wrote that “Every object in the Universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers for the two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two objects.” Generically, this translates to the interaction between two masses being proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to their respective distance. For urban transport, we can adapt the language: masses are the attributes of locations, the attraction, and distance is commonly used as a resistance component, as represented by the following equation:

Where: A = accessibility (or interaction) between two different point in a city, i and j Oi and Dj = characteristics of the origins or destinations

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d = distance or time required to travel between the points, Oi and Dj β = a proportionality constant related to the rate of the event, often called an impedance factor, to be discussed more in Chapter 9. Figure 3.1 represents how this logic would play out for three towns of varying size—Sir the largest, Newton the smallest—with drawn-to-scale distances separating them. While Sir is closer to Newton, the larger size of Isaac makes up for the longer distance, thereby producing more interaction between Sir and Isaac. The same logic can be applied to understanding which grocery store a family might go to or which health club to frequent.4 A balance exists between the forces that pull people to amenities and those that push them, a balance that can be mathematically represented and comprises a basis for transport planners to draw from as they aim to understand flows in cities.

Note: Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravitational force is an often relied on and valuable framework to understand how different parts of cities interact with each other and subsequently, how core tenets of access come together.

Figure 3.1

Interactions based on the gravity model

Dynamics affecting the flows of interaction in cities influence access which feed into vicious and virtuous feedback loops. An issue that is often contemplated in planning is whether transport influences land use or if land use influences transport. The answer to both questions is yes. A change

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to either, the land use or the transport network, works to trigger a cycle using the logic shown in Figure 3.2. As transport networks improve, they make land easier to get to, more attractive, and more developed. As land is more developed, it serves as a magnet to draw increased transport investment. The steps throughout the cycle in Figure 3.2, which is adapted from and more fully described in Levinson and Krizek (2018), provides a basis for dynamics which are universal in cities. The interactions can be “positive” insofar as they are characterized by an enlarging, not dampening, effect, thereby spurring a virtuous cycle. Alternatively, disinvestment in a given category of infrastructure (e.g., transit, roadways, sidewalks) can turn away travelers, thereby leading to greater disinvestment and creating a vicious cycle.5 These dynamics help understand which parts of cities thrive and which parts dive. Furthermore, they might play out over different time periods: decades, weeks, or even during an evening rush hour and for any part of the cycle presented Figure 3.2. The concept could similarly be applied to a bus service. Suppose a transit line has an average wait time of fifteen minutes. Should bus frequency increase on the route, users benefit from reduced waiting times. This property of increasing returns is one of emerging networks. The phenomenon was first described by the University of Minnesota economist Herbert Mohring (1972 and is now dubbed the “Mohring Effect”. Each additional bus reduces wait time. More ridership increases revenue, increased revenue can be used to improve the rate or frequency of service, and more service induces additional riders. The more frequent the service, all else equal, the more likely people are to use transit. These two examples, admittedly focusing on changes to the transport service, represent a starting point to initiate movement in other parts of the transport and land use development cycle. They help show how changes feed processes to creating access, which then feeds more travel, and makes destinations more attractive, resulting in subsequent direct and indirect impacts. In any step throughout the cycle, questions emerge as to whether the effects will be large enough to be meaningful, beckoning the transport planning.

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Note: Any changes, made to either the transport network or the land use in a city, trigger factors that create (or diminish) access. Depending on the scale of the change and the time frame being analyzed, these factors form a self-reinforcing feedback cycle.

Figure 3.2

3.4

Feedback in the cycle of accessibility

Access tools and thinking

Viewing urban transport planning through the lens of access, not mobility, not only captures how cities function, it also provides useful information to aid future planning. A variety of tools, geospatial applications based on accessibility metrics, are becoming increasingly available. They assist government, communities, businesses, and individuals in achieving two key goals. First, they facilitate deeper insight into the extent to which a certain place, service, person, or group of persons is reachable, and by whom, from where, and using which resources. Second, and by means of taking into consideration the insights gathered, they aid decision-making processes that are concerned with accessibility issues. It might be a private decision such as where should one buy a house to enjoy a satisfying level of access to local services, schools, and health care. They might involve highly complex interactions affecting access for a large swath of a city, affecting a large number of people.

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Consider a relatively recent trend in many US cities to build new streetcar lines. Limited resources for transport projects that could have been used to increase access for those in need have been steered towards boutique projects to boost access where it is already high. In Portland, for example, during the original debates about the Portland Streetcar, those in support of it (the powerful and wealthy) failed to understand that the streetcar offered little value from a transport perspective—not just relative to a bus line that could have run in the same place, but in some cases even compared to no project at all. Accessibility analysis would have revealed that a streetcar arriving every 15 minutes and averaging 9 km/hour minimally impacts accessibility; its market overlaps too much with what most people can do by walking. Straightforward calculations based on the above formula would have revealed this. The example reflects a larger issue: many transport projects tend not to be made to improve accessibility (or mobility for that matter), but to favor particular places with new investment (King and Fischer, 2016). The streetcar renaissance is the most visible example, at least in the United States, but investments in any array of boutique transport projects can be read similarly. Constituency groups as varied as downtown real estate interests and artists’ organizations have pursued downtown trolley projects in many cities simply to anchor place development. These investments might also claim broad environmental benefits, but in the end, they more show how transport can be used to sell real estate and might provide a land value uplift—a benefit that might not endure if the novelty wears off. Relying on access tools can inform these debates, but only if the constituencies are open to understanding the benefits in broader terms rather than along the lines of self-interest.

3.5

Modes of travel

It is important to be mindful that destinations in cities can be reached through any array of means. Different transport modes have unique characteristics (i.e., speed, comfort). Traditional practice considers four modes: cars, transit (bus and rail), bicycling, and walking, as those are the means widely considered to be available to the masses and the ones that public policies have chosen to prioritize.

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Yet, active innovations in mobility are blurring the lines between these modes and a spectrum of possibilities are quickly emerging. At one end lies small capsules carrying single individuals to geographically dispersed destinations (e.g., cars—human driven or not). At the other end lies large capsules carrying many individuals to geographically concentrated destinations (i.e., mass transit). The in-between estuary is now being filled in with wide ranges of options including everything from small buses, small cars, larger bikes, and forms of micro-mobility (e.g., hoverboards). The emerging scene is loosely analogous to when, more than 500 million years ago, species evolution enjoyed its most intense burst. Many major animal groups appeared for the first time in the fossil record, forming what is called the Cambrian explosion. New species were created. But not all survived—a period of rapid evolution and selection. A similar phenomenon is playing out as more innovative forms of getting around town are coming into use. Many of these modes are previously unimagined by politicians and residents. No universal criteria exist to compare and contrast the characteristics for all existing and new types of vehicles. The handful of options that have historically been relied on are shown in Figure 3.3, graphically representing how they might rate according to three different criteria (Tolley and Turton, 1995). Travel speed might be important from the standpoint of a user; the car or a metro rate well in such criteria. From other standpoints (e.g., government), the required space per traveler to operate (or store) the transport might be important. Thirty years ago, Münster (Germany) was ahead of the curve in pushing forth this awareness. As increased car use was choking the city’s core and deteriorating the social fabric in its city streets, the community staged a three-part demonstration. In the cobblestoned main street in town, the Prinzipalmarkt, they staged visions of three different mobility futures. The first part of the demonstration depicted what the street would look like if 72 people were transported by car. The entire length of the street was consumed with metal boxes filed behind one another in four rows. The second showed people grouped into the size of bus. The third had 72 bicyclists grouped in a platoon. The resulting three-paneled figure, one for each act, communicated to residents a convincing testimony to the space implications for different

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modes of transport. The last panel, showing people getting around by bike, gained currency in the minds of locals. Twenty years later, an advocacy group on the other side of the globe, in India, drew widespread attention by posting the figure to Facebook.6 So powerful was the message that it was locally reenacted by authorities from other cities in Australia and North America. Other criteria could be brought to bear, including the financial costs (to users, to the public, to government budgets),7 greenhouse gas emissions, energy use,8 a vehicle’s utilization rate (over its life or just for a trip), person throughput,9 and the access that the vehicle provides to spatial opportunities. Any assessment depends on spatial context and should not be considered the final step but rather be used to understand evolutions of mobility options in cities, discussed in Chapter 11. In an effort to combine a variety of factors into a single performance index, in the aggregate, and over multiple criteria, the middle bar in Figure 3.3 represents a performance index as some modes simply perform better than others. A key aim for transport is to offer alternative ways of getting around cities and to find combinations that provide users the comfort they seek while government agencies find solace in accepting the price tag for these modes.

Note: Different modes of transport have highly variable space and speed characteristics; depending on the criteria to be optimized, some can better perform than others.

Figure 3.3

Transport modes and example performance index

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3.6

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Considerations on foundations

Even though transport professionals understand the derived nature of travel demand, most still frequently understand their mission as facilitating mobility, usually automobility. This is reflected in most conventional measures to evaluate transport outcomes. In a policy environment in which movement is treated as an end and not a means, this is not surprising. Yet, new policy environments are emerging that are based on access and three global considerations contextualize perspectives, built on access approach, that we present throughout the following chapters. The first is to recognize that cities are comprised of systems of components such as buildings, transport infrastructure, or fleets of vehicles. Each component has a shelf life that is important to think through. Residential and commercial structures are long-lived and highly durable. The costs to reconstruct them are high, or local regulations make reconstruction prohibitive. These built components in communities change slowly as it is common for buildings to last centuries; expected effects in terms of travel accrue slowly.10 In contrast, vehicles change frequently as they wear out. Few cars are driven more than 300,000 km, suggesting a life span of between 8 and 12 years. Timing matters, and the shelf life of any element that forms the urban system is an important consideration when thinking through ways in which access can be moderated. Second, most urban areas represent mature systems. Where existing access levels are high and transport networks are extensive, most improvements will result in a marginal change. The larger the level of analysis (e.g., a larger city or metro area), the less impactful any single, incremental improvement will be. The larger the transport network, the smaller the increment in accessibility of one additional link or one improved link (Levinson and Krizek, 2018). Even a relatively large and expensive transport project such as a new interchange or transit hub would have limited impact when placed in the context of a metro area with many such facilities. Similarly, improving a road network can be expected to generate only marginal accessibility gains. While mature systems can suffocate nascent ones, under the right conditions the supply of a specific transport feature has the potential to grow quickly. This is because network improvements typically have non-linear effects. The first increase in supply likely leads to a greater increase in

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demand than does the second increase in supply (i.e., laying the first 100 km of transit service will have greater impact than the last 100 km because the relative influence of the former is greater). This means that where certain components of transport supply are lacking, yet demand as influenced by the land uses is high, increases in supply of a transport service (such as Bus Rapid Transit or shared e-scooters) could be expected to product noticeable gains, depending on the characteristics of the present network and the suitability of alternatives.11 Third, economic growth can be spurred absent of costly transport infrastructure. For many this is difficult to envision because the land use growth that is visible to the naked eye is mostly associated with high-priced, auto-oriented infrastructure (Banister, 2015). Perceptions tend to be clouded because significant technological mobility breakthroughs in past decades—e.g., electric streetcar systems just prior to the 1900s, shaping new parts of cities, or the internal combustion engine over the past century, fueling auto-oriented infrastructure—have been accompanied with costs in terms of consuming physical space. Yet, wide-ranging forms of mobility, and in turn accessibility, can be furnished in cities in ways that are far less expensive and consume less space than those employed in past decades. This suggests that the location and type of transport investment is critical and technological breakthroughs can dramatically influence accessibility in future cities. The impact of any breakthrough depends on the scale of the change relative to the existing system and how it will be set up—physically, financially, socially—to achieve the common access aims of modern-day cities. Cumulatively, these three considerations show how important it is that urban transport planners not only focus on accessibility, but also the timelines and levers by which access can change. They need to be adaptable in their approaches to solve the pressing challenges society faces with climate change, public safety, economic activity, and justice. Transport is at the heart of all of these issues and the following chapters help equip planners with the knowledge to spearhead the ideas in the years ahead.

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Notes 1. There are some objections to new transit lines in suburban areas based on perceived increased crime risk. We do not address these objections here as we see such claims as racist in nature and not made in good faith. 2. Many reasons suggest that travel should not solely be considered something purely to minimize. People generally favor some commute over no commute, and the quality and safety of the transport that is provided affects one’s propensity to travel (Krizek, 2018). 3. The gravity model has been used to estimate patterns of migration, commodity flows, traffic flows, commuting, and more. 4. Access can be measured as the attractiveness of a place as an origin (how easy it is to get from there to all other destinations) and as a destination (how easy it is to get there from all other destinations). However, these are not symmetrical. For the former, the emphasis is on accessing opportunities located in other places; in the latter, it is about the opportunities located in that place. 5. During the 2020 pandemic, transit agencies feared a “death spiral” where they can’t afford to maintain the service, and in turn this means that riders will not return to transit, leading to additional cuts. 6. Münster graphic drawing support: http://​www​.500eco​.com/​exhibits/​twenty​ -year​-old​-german​-sustainability​-poster​-finds​-fame​-on​-facebook. 7. For example, a cost accounting for different vehicles could be performed (Condon and Dow, 2009). 8. Of all types of transport modes, the standard bike stands alone in its ability to take the energy metabolized from food and efficiently transform it to a means of locomotion invoking both powers of balance and navigation. No doubt the bicycle is a powerful piece of transport technology—so powerful that it commanded a double take from the wizard of Apple computers, the late Steve Jobs, after perusing a Scientific American 1979 article (Wilson, 1973). That study reported on the efficiency of locomotion: the energy required to travel a given distance, by species. Condors topped the list, using the least amount of energy to move a kilometer. Birds and bees were not far behind. Humans, by themselves, not so much. But a new standard was set once a human was placed on a bike. Sufficient calories are found in single banana for humans to transport themselves on a bike for five miles. The efficiency of being able to propel themselves three times faster than walking, but using five times less energy, is what prompted Jobs to reflect on how a computer is equivalent to a “bicycle for our minds.” 9. For example, measures of person throughput see: https://​ nacto​ .org/​ publication/​transit​-street​-design​-guide/​introduction/​why/​designing​-move​ -people. 10. For example, if reducing VKT is considered to be a primary goal—coinciding with reductions in energy use and CO2 emissions—the result would be a mere reduction of between 1 percent to 11 percent by 2050. This is not a dramatic move of the needle considering the effort expended (National Research Council, 2010). In this case, VKT savings are slow to accrue because the existing building stock is highly durable. Building more compactly rep-

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resents opportunities that are limited largely to new housing, as it is built to accommodate a growing population and to replace the small percentage of units scrapped each year. 11. Nascent transport networks are at a stage where new links strengthen the existing network in ways that have a strong impact. These improvements gain momentum—and impact—eventually snowballing to the point that the networks coalesce into a formidable whole. Small improvements have a strong impact as they snowball. For young networks, Metcalfe’s law can explain how adding single nodes triggers the rapid growth of links in a non-linear and powerful manner.

References Banister, D. (2015). Great cities and their traffic: Michael Thomson revisited. Built Environment, 41(3), 435–446. Condon, P. M., and Dow, K. (2009). A cost comparison of transportation modes. Foundational Research Bulletin, 7, 1–13. Handy, S. (1994). Highway blues: Nothing a little accessibility can’t cure. Access Magazine, 1(5), 3–7. Handy, S. (2020). Is accessibility an idea whose time has finally come? Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 83, 1–6. 102319. Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76. King, D. A., and Fischer, L. A. (2016). Streetcar projects as spatial planning: A shift in transport planning in the United States. Journal of Transport Geography, 54, 383–390. Krizek, K. J. (2018). Measuring the wind through your hair? Unravelling the positive utility of bicycle travel. Research in Transportation Business & Management, 29, 71–76. Levine, J., Grengs, J., and Merlin, L. A. (2019). From Mobility to Accessibility: Transforming Urban Transportation and Land-Use Planning. Cornell University Press. Levinson, D. M. (2019). The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access. Network Design Lab. Levinson, D. M., and Krizek, K. J. (2018). Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus. Routledge. Mohring, H. (1972). Optimization and scale economies in urban bus transportation. The American Economic Review, 62(4), 591–604. National Research Council. (2010). Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions—Special Report 298. National Academies Press. Tolley, R. S., and Turton, B. (1995). Transport Systems, Policy and Planning: A Geographical Approach. Routledge. Wachs, M., and Kumagai, T. G. (1973). Physical accessibility as a social indicator. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 7(5), 437–456.

PAST AND EMERGING FOUNDATIONS FOR TRANSPORT PLANNING

Wilson, S. S. (1973). Bicycle technology. Scientific American, 228(3), 81–91.

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4.

Economics of supplying and using urban transport systems

You are not stuck in congestion, you are congestion

Transport infrastructure is costly to provide and maintain. Most of it is installed on land that is publicly owned, often bequeathed through centuries. Where this is not be the case it requires leasing, buying, or acquiring the land through eminent domain.1 Many of the original railroad barons in the 1800s were ahead of their time, purchasing ribbons of land across the United States to lay their track. The US rail network has shrunk considerably since the peak extent in the early 1900s, but railroads still own rights-of-way for valuable land whether or not tracks still exist, as some cities who are looking to refurnish rail transport are increasingly realizing. The thinking goes that if land can be procured and assembled, a major hurdle for new services has been cleared. Once land is procured, resources can be garnered to build transport. Consider concrete alone, seemingly endless kilometers of it, which is used to tie together highways, roads, streets, boulevards, lanes, and everything in between. Building the Interstate Highway System in the US, at the time, was the single largest public works project in the history of humanity. It is also costly to furnish a rail transit system by laying down tracks, providing power supplies, and up-front costs such as the transit cars.2 These projects involve building physical networks that span metropolitan areas. Regardless of their type, most of this infrastructure enjoys a long life (50 years or more), begging the need to think through life cycle costing, rates of deterioration, maintenance, and rehabilitation. It means learning about who uses it, for what purpose, when, and how. Understanding issues of demand also informs who is willing to pay for it and maintain it.

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39

The Federal Highway Administration has reliable measures of how many cars use most freeways on a daily basis, and in the US all public transit systems release detailed ridership data monthly. Making others aware of the demand might be used to make a political statement. In the summer of 2009, the City of Copenhagen installed its first electric and publicly visible bike counter by the city hall. One purported reason was to demonstrate, to residents, and the world, that they were a bicycling capital as evidenced by the fact that the city was now on the verge of, on a daily basis, having more bikes than cars enter the center. Leaders wanted to help justify the investment of transport infrastructure.3

4.1

Supply and demand curves

Counts—whether automobiles, bicycles, or people—demonstrate a demand, which can be used to assess a condition relative to a supply. A market is at play and market dynamics can be used to assess the performance of the system. In a large city, there is not one market but hundreds or thousands of them—as many markets as there are different preferences for travelers and the destinations they frequent. Consider just a few large markets, such as urban freight, auto commutes, and late-night transit use. Each responds to different demands for travel, responding differently to changes in prices and service. Travel with respect to freight and 9-to-5 commuting rarely vary by time. Packages have to be delivered as scheduled and workers must be on time for their shifts. This type of travel is inelastic, a concept more fully described later. Late-night travelers may decide not to go out at all if service is spotty. Each time a person decides where and how to travel they are responding to signals that assess the price and characteristics of that trip such as the time of day, the mode, the distance, whether cargo needs to be carried, or if it is necessary to protect oneself from the weather. Travel is therefore considered a normal economic good where the demand for a system and its supply exhibit separate curves. The price declines as the demand increases, or demand decreases as the cost increases. Demand is typically represented through a downward sloping demand curve and its specific shape hinges on how well complements or substitutes are provided. For a commute trip, for instance, the curves

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for solo commuting might account for the potential to switch to transit or work from home. If more competitive alternatives to driving existed, this would increase the elasticity of the demand for driving. Transport costs are typically represented by a supply curve, behaving inversely to the demand curve, and rise with the amount of travel demanded (e.g., the number of travelers seeking to use a facility). Should transport costs be high, such as a toll on drivers to cross into Manhattan, consumers are less likely to use it, especially with ample transit service available.

4.2

Equilibrium and elasticity

Supply and demand curves intersect at an equilibrium point, meaning that for each party—for example, the cities providing the service and the residents demanding use of it—there is little reason for either to move away from their current position. It represents a compromise between what the city, as service provider, is willing to furnish and what travelers are willing to pay. Transport analysts loosely assume equilibrium means that services are close to their maximum efficiency and travelers are content, mostly. Perceived through the lens of individual travelers, satisfaction levels are high, and from the vantage of city or department of transportation administrators, resources are being used effectively. Any variety of forces could disrupt a point of equilibrium; for example, a car crash, an exodus from a sports stadium or simply more people seeking to get between A and B. That disruption might be felt by transit users being required to huddle up closer to others or road users having to sit on the freeway for a few more minutes. Anxieties rise, dissatisfaction grows and travelers become weary. They begin to weigh other options and pressure mounts on public officials to respond. Historically, local governments, transport departments, and transit agencies respond not by directly addressing demand through measures like pricing (e.g., charging more for the service through tolls or fares). Instead, they usually seek to increase the overall supply of the service by running more buses, giving buses dedicated lanes, or building roads (e.g., expanding a roadway from four lanes to six). Increasing the supply of transport services, in turn, serves to induce more travel demand and provides an important issue for transport planners to understand (sometimes referred

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to as the elasticity of demand or latent demand—a concept embedded in stages of the feedback cycle presented in Chapter 3. Induced travel applications can apply to any and all modes of travel and most often, but a popular description was introduced in a landmark publication by Anthony Downs (1962), again with his book, Stuck in Traffic (2000), and yet again with his next book, Still Stuck in Traffic (2005). Imagine a primary route connecting a neighborhood to a major employment site that is heavily congested. If the capacity were doubled overnight, the next day traffic would flow rapidly because the same number of drivers would have twice as much road space. But very soon word would get around that this road was uncongested. Drivers who had formerly traveled before or after the peak hour to avoid congestion would shift back into that peak period. Drivers who had been using alternative routes would shift onto this now convenient freeway. Some commuters who had been using transit would start driving on this road during peak periods. These forces, known as triple convergence, suggest that demand upon the expanded road during peak hours would make the road as congested as before its expansion. In applying standard economic principles to these dynamics, the process would involve plotting the volume of driving (traffic) on the horizontal axis and the cost of driving (e.g., time) on the vertical axis. The volume of travel that is observed on a road is where the supply curve intersects with the demand curve. By adding capacity to the system, a city is equivalently shifting the supply curve to the right. The cost of driving is reduced and a new supply curve emerges. This yields a new point at which it intersects with the demand curve, resulting in an overall increase in the volume of travel; a new equilibrium point then emerges (see Figure 4.1). The number of travelers increases from T1 to T2. Those new travelers are said to be “induced” by the new service; they would not travel if the cost were above C1, but will if the cost falls below C1. The increase that results from lowering the cost of traveling is the induced (or latent) amount. A challenge lies in identifying the source of the new demand, which is an intellectual black hole, of sorts, for transport planners. Is demand actually new? Does it shift from a different route? A different mode? Traveler responses vary by the type and amount of substitutes that are available. A concept used to formally define and measure these relationships is known as the elasticity of demand. It is defined as the change in quantity

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divided by change in price (again, see Figure 4.1) and is used to estimate, for example, how certain increases in price (e.g., travel time, operating costs, and accidents, as well as user charges) might correspondingly decrease the demand. Elasticity measures are usually presented as the percentage change in travel demand given a 1 percent increase in roadway capacity (or some other measure of supply-side improvement).

Note: Supply and demand curves define points of equilibrium and changes to supply curves help define the elasticity of demand.

Figure 4.1

Transport supply and demand curves

For example, an elasticity of 0.5 signifies that for every 1 percent increase in roadway capacity, there is a 0.5 percent increase in traffic—that is, roughly half of the added capacity gets absorbed by additional traffic.4 But these estimates depend on the time frames being studies.5 Many research studies confirm, in the case of roadways and congestion, that relationships over the long run are relatively inelastic, roughly 1:1. There is an appreciable induced demand effect and there is no real change in the level of congestion. Discussions of elasticity are not limited to induced demand, however. Similar findings can be inferred from any analysis looking at, for example, changes in transit demand prompted by increases in fares, price premiums on homes closer to transport services, or how many more people might bicycle should a new path connecting two destinations be built.

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4.3

43

Streets as economic goods

Whether it is better for society to respond to increases in travel demand through more roadways, transit, or other, raises important questions. Most cities, currently, have an enormous supply of infrastructure to support auto travel, and most of the time there is substantial excess capacity. It may not seem that way to those who are periodically stuck in congestion, but on average, consider how many hours of the day most roadway space sits vacant. Most streets that people use were built using funds that were collected by taxes from city or state governments. Once built, access to them was generally given away for free—more accurately, access to them was permitted at a cost much less than what was required to build it. To the extent that there is a fee associated with the use of road, it is one largely buried to the user, through taxing gasoline (i.e., the gas tax) or, for local streets, through property taxes. If users even realize they are minimally paying for these services, it is in an indirect manner—that is, if they think they are paying at all. In many respects, many people might consider streets to be a public good, like a lighthouse or clean air, in that access to their services are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. If this is the case, direct taxes and fees are almost impossible to assess. Some people consider them a common good—something that serves the public interest and is not expected to generate a profit. Common goods suffer similarly to public goods in that there are fewer true cost signals to read to understand the market. In the use of streets, there is rarely a “real” price that has been ironed out by a “true” travel market that is not heavily subsidized. Therefore, estimating the demand, what people are truly willing to pay for the service, is indirect. While there are many benefits from having a large public network that can be used by many and is well-maintained, this argues for urban transport systems as a common good. The common good approach is strongest, however, without talking about pricing but rather property taxes. In the eyes of some, streets are excludable, as selectively placed bollards can be used to keep traffic out.6 Therefore, streets can be thought of as a club good and many transport systems can be privatized. This is not the case now, but it is a possibility. Consider France’s rail system, buses in the

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United Kingdom, toll roads, New York’s Citi Bike, etc. But streets can also be considered private goods because they are both excludable and rivalrous. You are not stuck in congestion, you are congestion, is one popular adage, and your use makes my use more difficult. Taken to the extreme, there’s not enough space to accommodate everyone. But currently, access to most transport systems for most people are not considered rivalrous or excludable, and therefore, market signals, at best, are indirect to read. Analysts have therefore devised approaches to back into estimates of what travelers might be willing to pay. Costs might be measured by asking people their opinions—their stated preferences concerning hypothetical scenarios—about how they value a particular transport facility. For example, they might ask how much transit commuters might be “willing to pay” for a service that was markedly improved from a current situation by being either faster, more comfortable, or both. An alternative approach is to identify how the transport services influence other related markets, by uncovering how people “revealed” their preferences through the decisions they make. To understand, for example, how much people would be willing to pay for access to a bicycle facility, one could look at housing prices (a revealed choice) vis-à-vis bicycle lanes to learn of a relationship. This is a technique known as hedonic pricing, which is just one approach under a broader suite of revealed preference approaches (Krizek, 2006).

4.4

Types of costs, defined

The most reliable means to gauge how much people are willing to pay for travel, as mentioned above, is to measure how much they actually travel. As travelers weigh different options that affect how much they travel, they do so by thinking about—explicitly or implicitly—wide ranges of issues. Each person has their own calculus. Front runner considerations include comfort, time flexibility, time reliability, and overall convenience, all of which are highly individualist criteria. These accompany the time that is needed and the actual money that is expended (i.e., the gas required to fill up the car, the transit fare to ride the bus, or the carbohydrates necessary to pedal across the town).

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Combining all of these factors helps form what is known in the transport industry as the generalized cost  of travel, weaving together monetary costs and non-monetary costs, such as time and perceptions of safety. Generalized cost is a concept mostly used to understand perceptions of the user (traveler). Other approaches and labels uncover costs that apply to both users and service providers. Both groups, for example, importantly differentiate between average and variable (marginal) costs. Average costs are the total costs of infrastructure, vehicles, or other aspect of the transport system that spread across all users. The average cost of a road would be the cost of construction divided by the total number of drivers who used it. The average cost of a vehicle is considered in terms of how many kilometers it has been driven. Once the expenditure is made, average costs—per kilometer, per use—decline with more use. And, average costs decline as the number of users increases. Variable (marginal) costs account for producing one more unit of an output or a service—accruing more use of a street. They might be measured in terms of additional vehicles using the system or the cost of petrol. More cars on the road makes the pollution worse. More trucks on the road causes more damage to the concrete.7 There is good rationale why trucks are weighed and sometimes banned from streets: the forces exerted from their continual use expose frailties to the concrete system, thereby deteriorating more quickly. Variable (marginal) costs continue to increase as users increase. Should a user of the transport system be charged the marginal cost, they will make the trip only when the value to them of doing so is at least as great as the cost of providing it. Marginal cost is the change in total cost when another unit is produced; average cost is the total cost divided by the number of goods produced. For transport planning, an individual will make a trip only when the value to them of doing so is at least as great as the cost of providing the service they are using. The marginal costs of driving borne by drivers in most settings, particularly throughout the US, are extremely low. Once someone owns and insures a car, the actual costs of driving anywhere are minimal. Over half of all trips taken are less than four miles, which even with an SUV-obsessed population means about a quarter of a gallon of gas is

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used, or about $0.60.8 Parking is usually free, so the out-of-pocket cost for an individual trip is less than a soda. This helps explain why Americans drive to the corner store to buy a single soda: the small marginal cost. Few people would pay for a $4 round trip on transit or the full fare of an Uber just to buy a single item at a convenience store, but most Americans will drive for the same purpose without thinking twice about it. There is nothing inherently wrong with having the overall costs of travel be low. For many travelers, it is a welcome dimension—one that helps advance their quality of life while not dramatically affecting their pocketbook. But when a good is underpriced—especially in the manner that car travel is in the US—the knock-on effects are many. There’s too much congestion, too much pollution, too much danger, and overall, too much of the negative attributes that comes with traveling in cars. Consider the motorist who, on average, drives almost 14,000 miles per year in the US. They purchased approximately 700 gallons of fuel for this, of which $0.18 of each gallon goes to the federal Highway Trust Fund— about $126 per year.9 This tax does not come close to representing the costs that car travel imposes to society. The roads used cannot be suitably maintained at such tax levels, yet alone built anew. Moreover, the tax charges motorists the same amount per vehicle mile regardless of when or where they travel. Transport economists argue that raising the variable costs of driving is the only way to shift a substantial share of drivers to other modes. There’s no shortage of approaches to do this. It might be limiting and pricing parking, lowering speed limits, adjusting priorities at intersections or increasing the other costs of car use. These strategies and more have found success where implemented. They’ve been used to significant effect in exemplar European cities to moderate car demand. For the user’s perspective, any of them raise the overall cost of driving, by car, and by doing so, increase the competitive advantage of using transit or bicycling.

4.5 Externalities Yet, costs aren’t only borne by the traveler or the provider. There are costs to society resulting from transport planning actions, and users are

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rarely held responsible for addressing these consequences. It might be the pollution from the tailpipe of cars which is emitted into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to global greenhouse gases. It might be particulate matter (PM) 0.25 from tire wear that works its way into surface water contamination, also contributing to air quality issues for nearby residents. Cumulatively, these represent exorbitant other costs to society that are unaccounted for—the classic definition of a negative externality. These costs are a by-product of travel which are not accounted for in the transaction. In these situations, an often turned to approach involves applying a tax as introduced by French economist Arthur C. Pigou (2013). By applying what has been labeled a Pigouvian Tax on the behavior in question, one can increase the marginal private cost by the amount generated by the negative externality, thereby addressing market inefficiencies. Therefore, the final cost (original cost, plus tax) will reflect the full social cost of the economic activity and the negative externality will be internalized. Using this approach, one can see how if travelers had to pay the full costs of their travel choices, many would choose to save money by switching to less expensive modes, such as transit, bicycling, and walking.

4.6

Considerations on economics

The total costs of providing any form of transport sums those to the carrier (capital, terminals, routes, operations, maintenance), users (travel time, gas, insurance), and externalities (safety, pollution, noise, space). Dynamics affecting how transport costs play out depend on the geographic scale, perspective (user versus provider), and long- versus short-term time frames. There is no agreed upon way to account for these costs, but transport planners have a responsibility to understand the difficulties of addressing them. One argument against pricing public services at the marginal cost is that disadvantaged populations are less able to pay than others and may need the services more than others. Pricing is an efficient means of allocating resources, but an inefficient means of achieving income redistribution or other social objectives. It is more efficient to price public services at marginal cost and make appropriate lump sum payments to needy population

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groups, but matters rarely work that way in practice. In truth, this argument is pervasive, and ultimately damaging to transport systems. Prices are set to subsidize everybody regardless of need, and the overall system works poorly—roads are at a standstill twice a day and the transit service is too infrequent. A better system would be to charge travelers the full cost of their travel, and then directly subsidize those who need it. The external costs of transport should be reflected in the actual costs of travel through higher fuel prices, or through some form of road user charging. Some insurance companies recognize this and offer mileage-based insurance, which allows for people to save on insurance by driving less. Demand management reduces congestion and improves environmental quality, but it does require public support to work effectively. This would help reduce the numbers of trips and trip distance, change modal shares, and promote more efficient vehicles. Ultimately, there is one rule of transport economics to take away from all of this. If the goal of a transport planner is to reduce environmental damage from the transport system or to increase transit ridership or to promote alternatives to people driving alone everywhere, then the variable costs of car travel must increase. As long as driving is cheap, people will choose to drive. The economics of transport are clear on this, yet planners have avoided taking steps to remedy this situation for decades.

Notes 1.

Eminent domain is a legal process through which the state can force a sale of private property in exchange for fair market value. It is a common process for land assembly, such as needed for infrastructure. 2. Once transit lines are built, the costs of providing service are dominated by labor costs. Operating and maintenance costs are real and substantial, but the decision about whether or not to build new infrastructure is rarely affected by these outlays. In many places, the US is overbuilt on infrastructure and has to decide where to reduce it, and the transit service is always threatened by reductions when budgets get tight. 3. Copenhagen has since added several bicycle counters to better document how evolving transport services affect transport demand. 4. The signs will be different than pure price elasticities. 5. Some studies estimated that a 10 percent increase in capacity per capita was associated with an increase of between 3 percent and 11 percent distance traveled (Noland, 2001). Others (Cervero, 2002) found that average elastic-

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ities varied by geographic level and by time frame. For example, elasticities of vehicle travel as a function of capacity ranged from 0.15 to 0.30; over a ten-year horizon they increased from 0.30 to 0.40, and from 0.40 to 0.60 across a 16-year horizon. Looking at matters at a larger unit of geography (i.e., the county), elasticities ranged from 0.32 to 0.50; and at an even larger unit of analysis (i.e., metropolitan scale), short-term elasticities were 0.54 to 0.61. Similar studies from the removal of roads (increasing the time cost instead of the money cost) have shown that just as increased capacity results in increased demand, capacity reduction reduces demand. 6. The popular routing app Waze regularly recommends drivers take the shortest path by measure of time. In the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, a very wealthy neighborhood, locals grew so tired of Waze treating their local streets as non-excludable and directing non-local commuters to pass through their streets that they started staging fake car crashes at key intersections in order to fool the algorithms into thinking the streets were inaccessible. 7. The most important variable for assessing road damage is axle weight. 8. Based on US average 2020 prices. 9. States collect their own fuel taxes.

References Cervero, R. (2002). Induced travel demand: Research design, empirical evidence, and normative policies. Journal of Planning Literature, 17(1), 3–20. Downs, A. (1962). The law of peak-hour expressway congestion. Traffic Quarterly, 16(3), 393–409. Downs, A. (2000). Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion. Brookings Institution Press. Downs, A. (2005). Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion. Brookings Institution Press. Krizek, K. J. (2006). Two approaches to valuing some of bicycle facilities’ presumed benefits: Propose a session for the 2007 national planning conference in the city of brotherly love. Journal of the American Planning Association, 72(3), 309–320. Noland, R. B. (2001). Relationships between highway capacity and induced vehicle travel. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 35(1), 47–72. Pigou, A. C. (2013). The Economics of Welfare. Palgrave Macmillan.

5.

Planning and design interplay: regions, districts, neighborhoods

The access that matters is local and regional

In the 19th century, Johann Heinrich von Thünen, a farmer and amateur economist, was one of the first to document how the costs of transport relate to how land is used. He turned to his farm in Germany to demonstrate how where he grew crops determined his profit. Published in Isolated State in 1826, the principles he laid out are relevant today because they describe a balance between how land is used—its cost, its value—and the transport costs to get the harvested product to market. His theory was based on a simplified world of agricultural production, growing tomatoes, apples, or wheat. The transport costs, b, for any yield from one acre’s growth differed such that btomatoes > bapples > bwheat. In graphing calculations, he produced a sloping line to show the value of the land relative to the distance from the city’s core. Von Thünen’s model has since been built on in work from geography, economics, regional science, and more to demonstrate how land that is developed is more intensively used and therefore more expensive. Where it is more intensively developed, there are more activities and destinations that can be reached in a given amount of time. Where there are more activities, accessibility is greater and land is costlier. This phenomenon is embedded in all models involving land, transport, and land rents. It affects the desirability of urban amenities; their relation to transport, shown in Figure 5.1, provides a representation of how an example bid–rent curve would play out with multiple subcenters in a city. Where von Thünen’s model is useful to understand production and market locations, modern metropolises rely mostly on workers who work in offices, factories, and other places they need to access. They live in residences, which have different constraints than farms. Still, constraints exist 50

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and there is a need to balance these constraints across levels of geography, available time in the day, and more (Levinson and Krizek, 2018). To understand how households and firms make location decisions, scholars and planners work from the assumption that firms locate in places based on trade-offs between inputs—including employees—and land costs, and households choose where to live based on a trade-off between commuting costs and housing costs. Economic principles guide the success of planning approaches to moderate the cost of different modes of travel.

Note: Bid–rent curves strongly influence accessibility patterns in cities. Typically, with increasing distances from access to the amenities available in central cities, the value of land declines. However, more transport services and land use improvements can improve access and therefore trigger increased land rents further from the core.

Figure 5.1

Levels of access affect cost of land

Wide-ranging policies inform, and are informed by, how land is used, which strongly influences transport and the attractiveness of different modes. The dynamics can play out over multiple scales of geography ranging from entire regions to how a square meter of street space is used. Broad labels such as urban form, built environment, or community design are liberally applied to capture these phenomena, but to the degree there are differences between them, they are subtle and lack consensus. This chapter and the next whittle down from a city region to a parking space,

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to describe an array of initiatives that expose the fundamentals of these dynamics.

5.1

Regional issues

The dramatic rise in automobile travel after WWII generated widespread interest in how metropolitan areas function. Emerging conditions gave rise to how new roadways affected outlying forms of development and how different cities balanced these new demands. Ideas to explain some of these phenomena can be found in the writings of another German, Walter Christaller, who spent time between the two world wars studying settlement patterns in and around Bavaria in the southern part of his country. He theorized that rather than viewing cities simply as single entities with hierarchies (big, medium, small), settlements actively engage with one another and create systems. He found that developments of different size are roughly equidistant from one another and that concentrations of economic activity and public services follow predictable patterns. The spatial arrangement, the size, and the number of settlements can be traced to higher- and lower-order goods—all of which are based on thresholds and ranges of transport activity. Central places emerge to maximize each one’s market area subject to transport costs and what it costs to provide the infrastructure to get there. Employment was the predominant economic concern for policymakers in post WWII cities and regions. Jobs were, of course, roughly associated with where people lived. Commuting therefore was a primary topic of focus. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, commutes became increasingly less about getting to centers of cities and more about the growing gaps between where people lived (increasingly in the suburbs) and where they worked (increasingly in other suburbs). Planners therefore turned their attention to reconciling the balance between these two phenomena. The popularity of the jobs–housing balance idea was aided in part by interests from urban sociologists and urban economists who studied a subsidiary line of thought known as spatial mismatch. The concept asserted that a balanced community—one in which residents can both

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live and work—is superior to one that is not balanced. Implicit in the concept is a broad mix of housing types to accommodate households (workers) in a range of income categories. It assumes that workers choose to work as close to home as possible (or that workers choose homes as close to their jobs as possible). To either balance jobs with housing, to shorten commutes, or to lessen the problematic nature of commute travel, cities employed different strategies. For example, starting in the 1970s, interest from the environmental movement collided with concerns of congestion to prompt carpool lanes. In other cases, there was heavy investment in transit, such as express buses which were meant to ease a suburb-to-downtown commute. Other places, such as Phoenix and Seattle, spawned “urban villages” to create employment centers that would shorten commutes. The growing suburb-to-suburb commute remained a challenge. To help fuel regional growth, new transport infrastructure, often exclusively oriented to cars, provided a magnet for office and retail development, especially near freeway interchanges. The residential component that followed prioritized relatively low-density development which was insufficient to anchor a competitive or robust transit network. Most transit systems maintained a hub-and-spoke design that best served existing central business districts, and offered poorer service in the suburbs without concentrated employment centers. Interest in the work commute remained strong into the 1990s for scholars, but then began to wane. By this time two-earner households were commonplace, which yielded a more complex residential location puzzle for households to optimize. As telecommuting grew and the internet proliferated, many planners suggested physical travel might be less important (even before the 2020 pandemic, telecommuting in the US had grown to a larger share of commutes than public transit). Researchers began measuring the expected and observed commute patterns; they show that actual commuting far exceeds the predicted amount. This extra or unexplained commuting, termed “wasteful commuting,” helped show that efforts to minimize commute travel might not always work as well as intended (Small and Song, 1992). Ideological differences will always color the debate over the effectiveness of policies focused on commute travel, the efficacy of these policies, or

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their implementation. Some of the trouble stems from the scale of analysis as jobs and housing will always be balanced on a global scale, but rarely ever for a neighborhood. The question is not unlike discussions of carrying capacity and ecological footprints.

5.2

Regional versus local matters

Transport planning researchers and practitioners gradually turned their attention to broader issues. They expanded their purview to better include broader issues around where people live which, over the years, comported with a gradual decline in commute travel relative to a household’s total travel. Where prior thinking emphasized commute travel, employment locations, and travel congestion (matters with regional implications), new concerns such as proximity to retail shops, parks, schools, and services that are close to one’s residential neighborhood became increasingly important. This meant that travel for maintenance-type trips (like shopping and appointments) and discretionary-type trips (like entertainment) fueled an evolution that helped give rise to issues of non-work travel. Planners began, in part, re-engaging with geographic scales that were used to build original neighborhoods (Unwin, 1913). It drew attention to how dimensions of land use arrangements affect different types of travel. Gauging access to regional centers of activity (called regional accessibility) and access to services within district or a neighborhood (called local accessibility) more fully characterized the structure of a community. The inherent dynamics affecting the two scales, local versus regional (Handy, 1992), share the same theoretical framework. But differentiating them defines ends of the spectrum which help to better define the range of policy responses that were applicable to address emerging transport concerns. For example, most able-bodied individuals can comfortably walk 2.5 km in 30 minutes; via bike this extends to 5 or 6 km. Knowing how far places are and how long it takes to reach them via these types of modes, minute windows can be a guiding principle for planning. In the UK, local accessibility has been referred to as the “pint of milk test,” where access to a shop to buy daily necessities is seen as part of improving local accessibility. In practice, as cities around the world are developing 15-, 20-, or 30-minute

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neighborhoods as planning goals, where all daily needs are within those time bands on foot, bike, or transit, the need to grasp concepts of local access rise in importance. These dialogues prize providing a wide array of places to go and alternative ways to get there using a diversity of development types and street design to better support alternatives to driving (discussed later in this chapter and the next). A well-functioning metropolitan transport system balances between the two scales and the distinctions are more fluid than they are rigid. In the end, the best access is both regional and local, and planners need to balance the demands of each. Measures gauging regional access often have a stronger association with vehicular travel1—as they should because they are set up to capture amenities further away such as sports stadia, beaches, shopping malls, and employment that are economically viable in a regional market. Fast-moving transport conduits such as highways, commuter rail, or bus rapid transit are set up for this. Measures of local access, in contrast, are not set up to gauge longer-haul travel. Rather, they are essential to measure access to services that might not require vehicular travel. They are set up to gauge access to choices for different modes. They can be therefore be expected to have less impact to gauge reductions in vehicular travel.

5.3

Land development initiatives to enhance access

Popular planning approaches emerged to bridge local and regional accessibility and did so to varying degrees of success. For example, New Urbanism leaned on classic forms of urban design, primarily the ideals of streetcar suburbs and Main Street districts. Towns were oriented around commercial centers often served by transit. A sister movement, Smart Growth, evolved from statewide growth management initiatives and drew its name from legislation and programs developed by the state of Maryland. It is rooted more broadly in public policy principles, though it too includes similar urban design principles. Another approach, transit-oriented development (TOD), incentivizes building dense residential and commercial nodes within approximately 500 meters of transit stops. TODs, typically, are at higher capacity rail stops or bus rapid transit stations. They satisfy both local and regional accessibility goals as the regional part is addressed through long-haul services, or trunk lines, that

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connect to an employment center. While TODs started as a complementary policy to light rail transit, they have evolved into a set of development regulations affecting inner-suburban areas and other opportunities for infill development. These locations can help improve the overall quality of the transit network by placing potential riders and destinations within the network rather than extending a line where the network is less dense. Regardless of their flavor, these “avant-garde”2 development types come with high expectations. They are expected to conserve land, provide housing alternatives, decrease vehicular travel, and afford more opportunities for travel through transit, cycling, or walking. With respect to any one or more of these aims, however, it is common for them to be seen by analysts as underdelivering. The reasons why are as broad as they are long. For example, critics of New Urbanism have charged that its charter masks some important value conflicts that planners grapple with because many New Urbanist projects are built in suburban or exurban areas. These locations pass up an opportunity to strengthen land use and development patterns within already built-up areas. They therefore fail to reduce the ecological footprint or environmental impact of the development, leaving environmental sustainability at best an afterthought.3 Specific to transport, these approaches implicate more use for transit, walking, and cycling, less use for cars, and sometimes, a combination of all. Their success in achieving these aims, however, remains tied to two critical factors: minimum parking requirements and density thresholds. The first means that people continue to own and use cars, even if other options exist. The second means that a robust transit service has a hard time gaining real traction.

5.4

Transit integration

Transit, the often relied on alternative to cars in these approaches, requires carefully thinking through core conditions to attract users. Operators are advised to diligently reconcile four competing trade-offs, balancing: (1) ridership versus coverage; (2) connections versus direct service; (3) peak

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service versus base service; and (4) operation in exclusive rights-of-way or in mixed traffic conditions (Walker, 2012). Even if planners have a plan to reconcile each of these four tensions, the transit that is pursued in areas of cities with lower densities will suffer in its ability to provide baseline, fixed-schedule transit service. That level lies around 15 dwelling units per hectare (Pushkarev and Zupan, 1977; Spillar and Rutherford, 1990) and the clear majority of development in cities from the US, Canada, or Australia fails to meet this threshold. It’s not until transit is used in areas approaching 50 dwelling units per hectare that it thrives in providing the type of services (e.g., frequency and coverage) most people envision. There is, of course, wide range between these two thresholds. Such measures represent only residential densities and interspersing employment or commercial uses can help boost the feasibility of primarily residential developments on the lower end of the range. Nonetheless, a patchwork of semi-transit-friendly nodes isn’t as desirable as a dense set of nodes with edges that blend together. Both impediments, parking availability and density, are largely reflected though local zoning regulations, particularly suburban types, which favor large development lots and single-family housing. These highly regulated land use markets, a function of local government, limit the supply of compact developments, despite evidence of increased interest in such communities (Levine, 2010). Changing elements of these regulations prompts concerns (e.g., about congestion, local taxes, or home values), which are often at odds with others such as housing affordability or climate change. They help explain why metropolitan-wide or state policies aimed at controlling land use and steering development and infrastructure investments are not widespread. Thus, land-use policies aimed at achieving sweeping changes in current development patterns are likely to be impeded by political resistance from existing homeowners. The expanded application of alternative development regulations and improved development outcomes, such as LEED ND4 and form-based codes, reflect planners learning from these failures associated with conventional standards. That learning is slow to take root, however. One strategy that accepts relatively lower densities but can be effective in extending the viable coverage of transit services is to use bicycles or

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ridehailing as feeder modes to transit. This helps solve what is called the “first mile” and “last mile” problem because it makes transit stations beyond walking distance more attractive, thereby extending what is called the catchment area (Kager et al., 2016; King et al., 2020).5 However, many components to the transport system need to be in synch to allow this to happen, including: safe bicycle parking, attractive bicycle routes to access nearby transit stations, and reliable and frequent trunk line service that goes to sought-after regional destinations.

5.5

Unpacking built environment factors and travel

To fully consider the developments across the access spectrum, this last section characterizes components of the neighborhood that are local in character. There is no shortage of research that aims to unpack which components matter more in terms of predicting different types of travel. Popular accounts, for example, began by capturing three core Ds (Cervero and Kockelman, 1997). Density of development is repeatedly shown to have a necessary, but not sufficient effect. Therefore diversity (closer proximity of retail and services) and design (better street connectivity and supportive conditions on the street) were woven into the mix. More recently, distance to transit and destination accessibility have been added as two additional Ds to both strengthen the predictive power of the models and also to tease out which element mattered more.6 Given that studies vary in how they measure these elements and their outcome measures, it can be challenging to summarize the results. General agreement exists, however, on hypotheses asserting that good proximity is achieved by mixing land uses with high density. When combined with good connectivity that is afforded by the street network, it is common to expect less driving and more use of other modes. When baseline conditions are reinforced with good design, especially for nonmotorized modes, more travel choices become more attractive.7 Outstanding questions will always remain, such as how much of what type of component is needed to produce change and whether other Ds should be accompanied to better explain the neighborhood travel that results. It might be helpful, for example, to know not only that these elements of the built environment influence travel behavior but also how big that effect is.

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Towards this end, results show, for example, that household population density has a weighted average elasticity of –0.04, which means that a 1 percent increase in density is associated with a 0.04 percent decrease in VKT—a decrease that is small but not insignificant (Ewing and Cervero, 2010). There is, however, significant range in the elasticities suggesting considerable uncertainty about the impact of various elements and their application always depends on context. The literature is more ambiguous on the influence of street connectivity, pedestrian infrastructure, traffic, personal safety, parks and open space, and aesthetics. In studying reams of research, what remains clear is that neighborhood-level features of built environment influence travel choices that are both available and attractive to individuals. For the most part, features such as density, land-use mix, and street connectivity moderate how far individuals are from their destinations and detailed characteristics of the network help understand the cost of overcoming this distance, by what mode, and how frequently. The goal is to understand the choices of travelers and it characterizing the built environment in ways that define the choices that it provides make the most sense.

5.6

International application focused on bicycling

To demonstrate how some of these planning and design features relate to access and levels of bicycling, we focus on an application from three international settings — Boulder (USA), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), and Medellín (Colombia) — to consider how, and why, cycling levels vary as attributed to different dimensions of the built and natural environment. Our thinking is guided through gauging the two tenets of access (attraction and resistance) by using various measures of a city’s urban form (Figure 5.2). Attraction is captured by measuring overall population density and degree of land use mix. More of both of these dimensions generally supports more bicycling. Resistance is captured through a variety of dimensions. The first combines street density with the percentage of streets with bicycle lanes. Street density is important because it translates to shorter blocks and more frequent intersections, which have many effects on traffic; vehicular

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traffic will be slower in these conditions, increasing the perceived safety of bicycling (Marshall and Garrick, 2011). Safety precautions are heightened for those streets on which bicycle lanes are present.

Note: Relatively easy-to-collect and straightforward measures of cities can represent how features of the urban form coalesce into indicators of attraction and resistance, thereby influencing measures of access.

Figure 5.2

Urban form determinants for bicycling access

Note: Relative scores for urban form measures can be used to discern different levels of access with higher attraction (in the numerator, in grey) and lower resistance (in the denominator, in black).

Figure 5.3

Threshold to measure and advance bicycling access

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Generally, streets with unsafe characteristics for bicycling lead to more deaths (Morrison et al., 2019), which is proxied by the number of annual deaths on roadways. A fourth dimension is topography; bicycling, in the absence of e-bikes, is an onerous activity for most. Topography therefore matters in that most cyclists, when biking to get somewhere rather than strictly for exercise, want to avoid steep hills. Figure 5.3 then displays how results from these measures could be combined to reveal how, relative to one another, the dimensions combine to advance or retard overall measure of access. Amsterdam is used as a gold standard of bicycling access where each of the five dimensions score high. Measures suggest that higher values in the numerator and lower scores in the denominator show how access can be advanced. Boulder’s overall bicycling access is largely brought down by the lack of street density, safe routes to get where people want, and land-use mix. Medellín’s bicycling access suffers largely owing to unsafe street conditions and high variations in topography.

5.7

Considerations on planning and design: regions, districts, neighborhoods

Transport planners balance actions to provide both local and regional accessibility and each is important to provide for functioning multi-modal urban transport systems. Rush hour travel was most important for years as planners focused on the commute. But as commute travel is commonly less than 20 percent of all urban travel, focus turns to other matters such as non-commute travel and neighborhood concerns, which can offer more travel choices for daily activities. Transport strategies to realize gains in both levels of access have implications for modal investments, such as planning for transit, transit and bicycling, bicycling, walking, and all sorts of combinations between each. Density, land-use mix, and street connectivity are all complementary factors to creating highly accessible neighborhoods and regions. The following chapter pursues transport planning and design concerns more focused on the street level of geography.

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Notes 1. Regional access measures have elasticity levels closer to −0.05 to −0.25, as opposed to −0.02 to −0.12 for local access (Boarnet, 2012). 2. Considered as such in large part because they do not follow the standard, suburban model of development. 3. As an example, a complaint made by Andrés Duany, the architect who co-developed New Urbanism, is that Manhattan could not be built today due to environmental regulations. 4. LEED ND stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Neighborhood Designation, a rating system developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. 5. The Dutch, OV-fiets, bike–rail network integration is among the most effective in the world. The rail company, in 2004, started their own bike rental operation and with a simple swipe of a card the power—in terms of temporal and geographic flexibility—of short distance transport is reliably enabled through bicycles. Starting with four stations, in a dozen years, operations have grown to 180 stations with 15,000 bikes. Over 0.05 million people now use the system it for 3 million rides per year. 6. Some of these tenets are easier to measure than others and that there is consensus on how some measures might serve as good proxies for other, more elusive ones. For example, the average age of buildings (e.g., those built prior to 1950) helps gauge locations with high local access; likewise, street density might proxy for intersection density. Each helps increase the predictive power for walking trips—not ironically, only eked out in predictive power by assessing the availability of an auto. 7. Levels of bicycling and walking may increase without a commensurate decrease in driving, however, prompting some to question the value of the findings.

References Boarnet, M. G. (2012). Frontiers in land use and travel research. In Rachel Weber and Randall Crane (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning. Oxford University Press, pp. 634–668. Cervero, R., and Kockelman, K. (1997). Travel demand and the 3Ds: Density, diversity, and design. Transportation Research: Part D, Transport and Environment, 2(3), 199–219. Ewing, R., and Cervero, R. (2010). Travel and the built environment: A meta-analysis. Journal of the American Planning Association, 76(3), 265–294. Handy, S. L. (1992). Regional versus local accessibility: Neo-traditional development and its implications for non-work travel. Built Environment, 18(4), 253–267.

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Kager, R., Bertolini, L., and Te Brömmelstroet, M. (2016). Characterisation of and reflections on the synergy of bicycles and public transport. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 85, 208–219. King, D. A., Conway, M. W., and Salon, D. (2020). Do for-hire vehicles provide first mile/last mile access to transit? Transport Findings, 2020(May), 1–7. Levine, J. (2010). Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use. Routledge. Levinson, D. M., and Krizek, K. J. (2018). Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus. Routledge. Marshall, W. E., and Garrick, N. W. (2011). Does street network design affect traffic safety? Accident Analysis & Prevention, 43(3), 769–781. Morrison, C. N., Thompson, J., Kondo, M. C., and Beck, B. (2019). On-road bicycle lane types, roadway characteristics, and risks for bicycle crashes. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 123, 123–131. Pushkarev, B., and Zupan, J. M. (1977). Public Transportation and Land Use Policy. Indiana University Press. Small, K. A., and Song, S. (1992). “Wasteful” commuting: A resolution. Journal of Political Economy, 100(4), 888–898. Spillar, R. J., and Rutherford, G. S. (1990). The effects of population density and income on per capita transit ridership in western American cities. Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Compendium of Technical Papers, 327–331. Unwin, R. (1913). Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs. T. Fisher Unwin. Walker, J. (2012). Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit can Enrich our Communities and our Lives. Island Press.

6.

Planning and design interplay: street space and how it is used

Cities are about proximity and people; why give up valuable space to cars

How urban street space is designed and used for different purposes and modes of travel has important implications for how people move about in cities. Most of this space is given over to cars, especially in US cities, thereby affecting anyone outside a car and restricting other uses for that space. Wide travel lanes for cars means higher speeds, which makes walking or cycling less safe and less pleasant. These practices translate to needs of on-street parking, which consumes a great deal of land. What’s more, these actions push destinations farther apart from each other, cumulatively resulting in environments where it is harder to attract people to transit or other shared modes. Transport planners are advised to be mindful of how auto-centric designs can quickly cascade. Mounting decisions lend power to forces that limit travel choices to mostly driving, which leads to an anti-urban planning error. None of this is to say that cars have no role on urban streets. Streets can be and still will need to be principally conduits for movement, but center stage need not always be granted to the car. There are existing and new breeds of streets—and uses in the streets—which can bring harmony to how multiple travel modes use them, perspective subverts other functions that have been viewed as nothing more than collateral uses (Sadik-Khan and Solomonow, 2017). Creative use of street space can even generate new revenue streams for cities, thereby supporting economic development. This chapter focuses solely on the planning and design implications for street space. Again, it uses a winnowing scale of geography to consider streets as a whole, to curbs, and to parking spaces. The aim is to bring attention to emerging models and considerations that are increasingly on the radar for cities to address. 64

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6.1

65

Speeds of movement

The thirst for driving that was engendered as cities expanded streets throughout the 1960s and 1970s and the resulting tension between fast-moving cars and other street users is one that continually challenges transport planning. The deteriorating effects of fast-moving cars were popularized in the 1960s and 1970s (Gehl, 2011). Higher speeds heighten the risk of crash by increasing the likelihood of being involved in a crash, and the severity of injuries sustained by all road users in a crash. Lower speeds are critical for giving people reasonable alternatives to driving. The odds of a cyclist getting injured on a 32 kmph road is 21 percent lower than on 48 kmph roads (Aldred et al., 2018).1 Speed limits on many streets are set, by law, through observing the velocity at which people travel—setting default limits at the 85th percentile of observed speeds. This practice emerged in the nascent decades of traffic engineering and reflect the profession’s preoccupation with “traffic service” to increase vehicular throughput. It was explicitly intended as a starting point to set the speed limit, not the last word (Taylor and Hong Hwang, 2020), and what was slated as a single source of information morphed to assume arbiter status of policy. However, transport planners have started to push back on the 85th percentile rule. In failing to account for safety or environmental aspects, it is a problematic guideline as it favors auto traffic. Lower traffic speeds on streets make bicycling safer or improves the pedestrian experience and communities are increasingly adopting initiatives such as “20 (mph) is plenty” to create city-wide, default speed limits on streets. But in states where the 85th percentile approach is required, such as California, communities are unable to lower speed limits due to state law, which requires speed studies. As more drivers drive faster, speed limits might be raised to reflect a higher 85th percentile, reflecting one standard practice in transport planning that is pseudo-scientific with problematic incentives.

6.2

Widths of thoroughfares

A contributing factor to high speed limits can be traced to wide streets as expansive viewsheds, from the automobile driver’s perspective, naturally

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feeds going faster. Wide roads free of visual obstacles allow drivers to focus far down the road rather than immediately in front of their vehicle. This leads to increased speeds as drivers are more comfortable going fast. Combined with the 85th percentile rule, speed limits continue to increase, which makes walking or biking less pleasant and safe. Heightened concerns about street widths are increasingly being identified. The urban design literature suggests a rule of thumb is for street widths to be a reflection of building heights—a ratio of three feet of building height for every one foot of street width to allow natural light and fresh air—ratios that are far exceeded in most non-European contexts. For example, it is common for cities to require minimum street widths in order to maintain emergency services, where fire rescue needs to stipulate that streets are wide enough for the longest laddered fire trucks to easily navigate and turn around. In cities throughout the world, fire departments are expected to buy trucks that fit available streets—a situation that is largely reversed in the US. Street widths affect the ease of crossing streets for pedestrians. The wider and faster a road, the harder it is to cross during a traffic light cycle, which may require pedestrian islands that give shelter part way across an intersection. Rules of thumb are to never to require a pedestrian to cross more than 40 feet at a time without a median refuge. On small blocks, yield streets (or queuing streets) could be used. A single traffic lane in an urban environment can maintain a capacity of between 650 and 1,200 vehicles per hour, depending on the intersections. Accommodating driver error through more generous dimensions might improve safety—for users in those vehicles. The implications of street design become most apparent when thinking through important safety parameters.

6.3

Design-scaping streets

A more specific application to address the width of streets is to modify how they are used by multiple users. The transport network in the Netherlands is widely regarded as one of the finest in the world. The almost 40,000 km of separated bicycle paths that span this tiny country leads to that claim. But equally impressive for transport users are the “whole” streets that appear throughout the country, in cities and towns of all sizes—streets

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through highly active commercial areas that are shared across multiple modes. Pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and other users co-harmoniously exist in the same space and much of this success is enabled though the careful attention devoted to understanding lane widths, curb heights, turning radii and other details (Fietsberaad CROW, 2017). Such details help vehicles to travel more or less at the same speed. In urban settings, as many as six modes of transport commonly compete for the same space within the street network, including cars, trams, buses, bicycles, pedestrians, and sometimes even horse-drawn carriages. Outside of Dutch settings, however, many of these ideas have difficulty gaining currency.2 Many alternative models to streets have been posed over the years. Each share an aim to promote human-scaled travel modes, but do so through different street design practices that relate to the broader transport network. One predominant approach in North American cities is to rely on “complete streets” which conceptualize separate zones of movement for different modes and bring better balance between different transport demands. An inherent challenge for complete street initiatives is the need to more clearly grant legal authority to those responsible for implementing them and outlining processes to balance the trade-offs among the uses that the streets are supposed to accommodate (Hess, 2009). Better tending to these issues will help solidify their ability to transform deeply institutionalized auto-oriented street building practices. At the other end of the spectrum, woonerfs, translated from Dutch as living grounds or residential yards, prize sharing the entirety of a space among different purposes. The entirety of some towns in the Netherlands have been built around this concept. In other contexts, mostly spread throughout Europe, the woonerf has evolved into shared space concepts that are broader than just traffic calming (Vanderbilt, 2008). These models have had less impact in North American contexts. However, there is evidence to suggest that green streets, shared streets, or low-stress streets are being increasingly practiced in communities.

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6.4

Curb parking

An additional factor that influences the character of streets lies in how some of the space is used for stationary vehicles. Car parking is prominent here and can generally be grouped into two categories: curb (on-street) and off-street, with different planning implications for each. Curb parking, which has traditionally received minimal attention, is complicated owing to its knock-on effects (i.e., potential revenue sources for cities, trade-offs with vehicular lane capacity, pressures from retail groups or residents). However, with the growth in e-commerce and ridehailing many cities and planning groups have started to focus on ways to improve curb management. One way to think about curb space is curbs play a transitional role in our transport systems between travel and place. Cars, trucks, buses, and bikes all need access to curbs to shift passengers or packages from movement to their destinations. Transport planners have addressed these issues through the design of curb and street space, using prices to manage demand and regulating who can use the space, and when. When choosing the appropriate approach, local conditions need to be considered, such as if there are issues of snow removal in winter or is there off-street space where activities can be moved. Downtown Tempe, next to Arizona State University, has an effective management strategy to balance these many users. The city implemented a graduated parking price scheme, where meters charge a price that is highest along the main commercial street and declines the farther away you park. This is designed to encourage people to park in parking lots away from the heavily trafficked street. The city also designated two parking spaces in the middle of each block face as commercial delivery zones. These do not have meters, but are available during the day to accommodate delivery trucks near their destinations. Finally, the city designates the commercial loading zones as special pick up/drop off (PUDO) zones in the evenings when commercial deliveries are rare but taxi and ridehailing activities increase. Overall, the coordinated strategy manages their curb demand while accommodating multiple modes in a busy district. Curb prices can be dynamic, where they change with demand. Prices can be set so that approximately one space per block is always available. UCLA economist Donald Shoup, who literally wrote the book on parking (Shoup, 2017), calls this the 85 percent rule (which is coincidental to

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the 85th percentile rule for speed), where prices should be set so that 15 percent of spaces are available at any time. Under these conditions, anyone who arrived at their destination would be able to park on the street if they desired. In 2011, San Francisco implemented a pilot project called SFPark, where real-time data were collected through embedded sensors to measure occupancy for 7,000 of the city’s 28,000 metered parking spaces. These data were used to determine price changes—increased prices if occupancy was too high and decreased prices if occupancy was too low. Overall, the city saw a slight reduction in the average parking rate, though rates increased in some places. Search time for parking was reduced substantially, as well. The city adopted city-wide demand-responsive parking pricing in 2017. While the SFPark program was decidedly high-tech, no fancy tools are needed for pricing parking. Seattle estimated parking occupancy by assigning interns to simply count the number of parked cars, and used these data to alter rates.

6.5

Off-street parking

Most cities require off-street parking for all development. Zoning rules for each possible type of land use have formulas to prescribe how many parking spaces the developer or business must provide based on the size of the business. For instance, in many cities, office buildings are expected to provide three spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space. Since a typical parking space is about 350 square feet, it is common for developments to provide as much space for parking as they do for all other uses. The precision city planners use to determine how many parking spaces each business must provide puts a veneer of science on extremely dubious assumptions. Typically, cities either replicate formulae from cities’ parking requirements or they consult the Institute of Transport Engineers Parking Generation Manual. This manual provides statistical examples of parking demand based on observational studies. For instance, an entry for a fast-food restaurant would include data for restaurant sizes in square feet, and the peak parking occupancy on the day the observations were taken. The manual then plots these data and calculates a regression line to predict the number of spaces needed per

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unit of area to accommodate peak occupancy. If this is all you knew about the process, it seems like sound policy making. However, it is common for sample data to be conducted at suburban locations with few alternatives to driving, and the number of cases included in each land use category tend to be small (perhaps a few dozen at best). These observation sites are hardly representative of the diversity of land uses that are available in urban areas. By applying auto-oriented standards everywhere planners diminish opportunities to travel without a car. These minimum parking requirements thus provide ample parking just about everywhere, even in places with good transit access or robust bike networks. Parking is the most common use of land in many cities. Los Angeles has nearly 19 million parking spaces, enough for more than three for each vehicle in the county. The Phoenix region, which is the fastest growing region in the country, has over 12 million parking spaces, which is more than four per vehicle (Hoehne et al., 2019). One problem with this is since nearly all development is required to build so much parking, there is so much of it that almost no one charges anyone to park. Shopping malls are surrounded by fields of parking that everyone pays for indirectly through somewhat higher rents and prices. Office workers are given free parking as an employment perk, though if an employer offered a transit pass or bicycle instead that would be taxable income. So, required parking becomes free parking, conveniently located everywhere you want to go.

6.6 Freight Moving goods (urban freight), as opposed to people, typically lies outside the bounds of urban transport concerns. The issue is rising in importance, however, with the recent and dramatic rise of delivery services. Freight trucks are increasingly competing with other vehicles on the roads. Also, importantly, they are claiming valuable street space while delivering. For those promoting walkable neighborhoods, bicycle lanes or parking management, freight becomes easily overlooked and is a relatively new claimant to space in cities. In places where goods movement is considered

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on an ad hoc basis, trucks double parked for deliveries or blocking bike lanes create problems for transport planning. In commercial districts urban freight brings substantial challenges to transport systems. Drivers, who are responsible for hauling heavy goods and packages, want to park as close to their destination as possible. For buildings without loading docks or alleyways, this means the front door. In these cases, trucks are parked either at the curb or in the travel lane next to it for the few minutes it takes to complete their tasks. This double parking can inhibit traffic, but blocks buses and forces cyclists out of lanes demarcated specifically for their use. Strategies to manage urban freight include designated curb space for deliveries, which may be limited by time of day. In the US, these zones are usually indicated with a curb painted green or red. Other strategies are developing overnight delivery programs. Overnight deliveries have the advantage that there is usually less traffic overnight, which allows drivers to complete more deliveries per shift, but businesses have to be able to receive deliveries at hours they may not otherwise have staff. European cities are increasingly using cargo bikes, often electric, as a preferred last mile solution to haul goods. Smaller than vans or trucks, they fit with local preferences and character better than larger vehicles. For freight companies, cargo bikes are cheaper to buy and maintain than conventional vehicles, yet they require infrastructure for the safety of the drivers.

6.7

Transportation demand management

All of the factors presented in this chapter and Chapter 5 (e.g., land use, design dimensions, parking, and more) converge under the banner of transport demand management (TDM) which refers to suites of policies that work to reduce dependence on solo driving. In recent years, developers in expensive cities, such as San Francisco and New York, have offered Uber or bike share credits to tenants in lieu of required parking spaces. Suburban office campuses are often required by cities to develop strategies to minimize solo commutes. The Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, for instance, offers private shuttles from San Francisco. This plus other incentives for carpooling have reduced the share of workers who drive alone to 70 percent. While this is high from a central city

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standpoint, it is substantially below the US average of 86 percent. Other policies might be showers and bike storage at offices to promote cycling, or guaranteed ride home programs that let employees who don’t drive to work regularly take taxi services to get home in case of an emergency or if they work late. All of these strategies have been shown to be effective at reducing solo commuting. What is effective for TDM will be affected by local conditions, available alternatives, and other resources. But as transport projects are expensive to plan for and build, and take a long time to build, this suggests there are many benefits to accrue from more seriously considering measures to moderate demand. This approach, in some respects, is an about-face to strategies that have been largely relied on in the past (i.e., seeing the world through the eyes of the v/c ratio and viewing the v component as untouchable for fear of decreasing economic activity). Coordinating land development with transport investment is a long-term goal to pursue, and can be effective, but offers little opportunity for change immediately, which TDM strategies offer. Lastly, during the 2020 pandemic, employers around the globe learned quickly that working from home was a viable strategy for many more employees than previously thought. A large shift to working from home will have all kinds of related consequences, from more demand for homes with private offices to less demand for expensive commercial office space, but also on the need for road and transit investment if peak hour commuting declines permanently.

6.8

Considerations for streets and how they are used

With few exceptions, the focus of street design for vehicles other than cars has most often centered on creating safe and/or attractive facilities by building bicycle lanes or other piecemeal street calming measures. This purview is limited because it fails to recognize the inherent value of an alternative type of mobility device—one that would be used to go all over town. We ask, given alternative types of vehicles with respect to speed, height, exposure, and lighting requirements, what avenues are available to guide a reconceptualization of how streets might be used? Are cyclists just using another form of vehicle similar enough to the car to make many of the auto-oriented design strategies work (Forsyth and Krizek, 2011)?

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Alternatively, can they be essentially a faster pedestrian, using basically the same infrastructure? Or are cyclists different from both motorists and pedestrians, with needs more complicated than safety and exercise, and with implications for urban design? Three-wheeled and even two-wheeled motorcycles provide more agile transportation that bypasses many of the issues that plague our current system. Although small, they are capable of carrying multiple passengers in close proximity, if need be. In a similar way that few people would want to climb to the 85th story of a building that fails to pass multiple tests from structural engineers, transport departments feel responsibility to enforce street design standards that are tried and tested. This leaves little room for innovation. To help build the knowledge base for evolution for streets, over the past decade the North American City Transportation Officials (NACTO) have been publishing studies that are widely praised in academia and practice. They have assembled a consortium of partner (member) cities who are endorsing new types of design manuals—for transit, bikeways, children and more—to prescribe new norms for how future streets are to be built or existing ones modified (Sadik-Khan, 2012). The prescribed alternatives rely on collections of experiments, which have been catalogued by the type of street, current traffic volumes, multi-modal concerns, and other transects of urban contexts. Given that these resources are advisory, they have yet to be institutionalized to the extent of the legislation described in the chapter on engineering. Enacting an avant-garde street design principle would likely require engineering approval.

Notes 1.

2.

The relationship between speed and being involved in a crash is affected by factors such as road type, driver age, alcohol impairment, and roadway characteristics like curvature, grade, width, and adjacent land use. In contrast, the relationship between speed and injury severity is consistent and direct. Higher vehicle speeds lead to larger changes in velocity in a crash, and these velocity changes are closely linked to injury severity. This relationship is especially critical for pedestrians involved in a motor vehicle crash, due to their lack of protection. For example, one approach that emerged in the US in the 1970s to address issues between cars and other users—at the time, bicyclists—was to merge users into limited street space. The idea of vehicular cycling was based on the assertion that cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of

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vehicles. Cyclists can, and should, carry on their ways in almost every stretch of road. Rather than embodying a trespasser mentality on streets owned by cars, cyclists could feel like “just another driver with a slightly different vehicle” and use a full traffic lane as if they were in a vehicle (Forester, 1993).

References Aldred, R., Goodman, A., Gulliver, J., and Woodcock, J. (2018). Cycling injury risk in London: A case-control study exploring the impact of cycle volumes, motor vehicle volumes, and road characteristics including speed limits. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 117, 75–84. Fietsberaad CROW. (2017). Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic. Forester, J. (1993). Effective Cycling. MIT Press. Forsyth, A., and Krizek, K. (2011). Urban design: Is there a distinctive view from the bicycle? Journal of Urban Design, 16(4), 531–549. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 13574809​.2011​.586239. Gehl, J. (2011). Life between Buildings: Using Public Space. Island Press. Hess, P. M. (2009). Avenues or arterials: The struggle to change street building practices in Toronto, Canada. Journal of Urban Design, 14(1), 1–28. Hoehne, C. G., Chester, M. V., Fraser, A. M., and King, D. A. (2019). Valley of the sun-drenched parking space: The growth, extent, and implications of parking infrastructure in Phoenix. Cities, 89, 186–198. Sadik-Khan, J. (2012). Urban Street Design Guide. North American City and Transportion Officials. Sadik-Khan, J., and Solomonow, S. (2017). Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution. Penguin. Shoup, D. (2017). The High Cost of Free Parking. Updated edition. Routledge. Taylor, B. D., and Hong Hwang, Y. (2020). Eighty-five percent solution: Historical look at crowdsourcing speed limits and the question of safety. Transportation Research Record, 2674(9), 346–357. 0361198120928995. Vanderbilt, T. (2008). The traffic guru. Wilson Quarterly, 32(3), 26–32.

7.

Engineering standards for streets: evolution and significance

A third of all land in cities is designed using an out of date, cookie cutter manual from the 1930s

The second industrial revolution (in the late 19th to early 20th century) was a period of rapid change for cities. Innovations in steel manufacturing, forms of propulsion, organizational structures, and standardization fundamentally altered the tools available that could be applied to societal and private problems. The social costs of urbanization were brought into view through the photographic essays brought forth by people like Jacob Riis (1971). Clean water and sewerage were connected with public health guidelines. Housing standards were improved to combat disease. Through all of this, streets were dominated by horsepower, and associated waste, while automobiles began to be produced in mass quantities that allowed for widespread adoption. Streets quickly became chaotic and the public demanded solutions. The First National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion was held in 1909 in response to the increasing chaos of public streets. This meeting, the earliest formal expression of professional interest in a systematic approach to plan transport, even solicited the support of President Taft who gave the opening address. The decade that followed helped conceive many city planning tools (Fischler, 1998), such as zoning, created in 1916 in New York City.1 A few years later, Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce, helped to institutionalize zoning on the political front, at the state and municipal levels, going so far as to produce his own Primer on Zoning. With legislation and financing now available for planning, a new form of public professional—the engineer-planner—was born, responsible for creating guidelines for how existing and future streets in cities were 75

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to be designed. These processes required addressing issues that existed in the early 1900s, but the newly needed mindsets laid groundwork that positioned street planning as a major form of public infrastructure. In these times, planners and engineers worked across what are now seen as firm professional boundaries (Schultz and McShane, 1978). The “Roaring Twenties” that followed were a period of commercial and cultural boom for cities, particularly western ones in North America, perhaps unmatched in previous history. These professionals included Frederick Law Olmsted Jr who became the first president of the American City Planning Institute. He continued the pioneering work of his famous father, by authoring many of the earliest traffic plans such as the 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles. Another, Charles Robinson, became one of the first university planning professors in the United States, writing both “The Width and Arrangement of Streets” in 1911 and one of the first planning texts, “City Planning,” in 1916. These new regulations were heavily influenced by civil engineers, and their impact was broad as, when applied to the design of streets, they modified an area which covers roughly one-third of the total land areas in cities. The space between buildings, commonly referred to as the rights-of-way, was designed to move vehicles which were larger and faster than people on foot or bike. This meant separating modes as cars were rarely, if ever, encouraged to mix with other users of the road. These mindsets began to form not only the existing rights-of-ways in cities, but also new ones. And where roads were placed was important, as they also affected where new sewer and electrical utilities would be laid. The findings of practitioners here were embodied into guidelines that were largely prescribed by uniform codes written by a select committee of engineers—a practice that continues to this day through the implementation of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). A representative group meets in a hotel meeting room twice a year to consider refinements. Of all disciplines that shape the domain of urban transport planning, the impacts of civil engineering are arguably felt the strongest as roughly one-third of a city’s land area is prescribed by a committee that meets biannually in a hotel conference room.

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7.1 Standards In this period of active reform, the character of any one street was dictated by straightforward criteria: how much car traffic it was intended to accommodate. A quarter century after the first Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line Bruce Greenshields conducted the first traffic study (Greenshields, 1936). He used a movie camera to take consecutive pictures with a constant time interval. He then counted the number of vehicles in each frame to calculate traffic volumes and flow. His finding centered on the chaos at intersections, which had been intuitively understood but not previously measured. Early attempts to control traffic at intersections had been signals manually operated by a police officer, until the electric traffic light was invented in 1912 with just green and red lights. These devices evolved over the next two decades around a national standard for their appearance: the three-indication red–yellow–green device, which are familiar today.2 Aside from additional signaling at intersections, the invention of traffic studies evolved into what are known as “warrant studies,” which are conducted to determine if minimum traffic conditions to “warrant” a signal are met. The minimum standards are set in terms of vehicle flow and delay, rather than other considerations such as safety. Nearly all cities require warrant studies for new traffic signals and other interventions that may affect street design and function. They also apply to crosswalks and may require engineers to be able to document significant pedestrian demand (e.g., more than 90 per hour) prior to “warranting” action.3

7.2

Road hierarchy

A formal hierarchy was established to prescribe the volumes of automobile traffic, one that has been rigidly institutionalized into traffic engineering, road standards, and road classification systems ever since. At the top of the hierarchy are freeways, which are high-speed, limited-access roads. In the US, Interstates are a specific type of freeway that must have at least two lanes of traffic in each direction that are physically separated, either through a wall or median. Most urban Interstates are separated by a wall to conserve space, while medians are more common in rural areas. Below freeways are arterials, which are designated major or minor, urban

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or rural. Arterials are high-capacity, high-speed roads that are managed with stoplights and intersect other types of road facilities. Arterials are a common designation for commercial roads. Collector roads sit below arterials, and these have yet lower speeds and capacity. Local roads sit at the bottom of the hierarchy. From the bottom up, local roads are intended to feed into the class of road above and finance implications also follow suit (Marshall, 2004).4 Many of the core features of streets were prescribed by the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways. First published in 1935, it is overseen by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and eight editions since then have included updates to consider improvements in technology and evolving networks. One change, for example, occurred in the 1970s prescribing the color and type of striping (i.e., single versus double striping, solid versus dashed). It provided allowances to jettison the use of centerlines if below certain thresholds, a street planning practice commonly found in communities throughout Europe and also a condition usually only met in neighborhood streets. In a recent edition, curbs, crosswalks, and traffic lights were installed for the first time to ensure that some pedestrian needs were attended to while waiting to cross streets. Through all of these so-called improvements, the concept of sharing street space between pedestrians and automobiles, however, is antithetical to the MUTCD. In fact, it goes a long way to prescribe conditions against such, suggesting just one need for an update to this inherent approach (Hawkins Jr, 2015).5 Developments over the years helped write a rulebook to help design the geometry of streets, affectionately referred to nationwide as the AASHTO Green Book. It followed the same suit as the MUTCD and in 1984 was prepared to formalize and standardize, among other things, how the geometry of any road would or should be built to accommodate this traffic. It focuses on the building process of roads—wider, straighter, longer, and faster roads—going so far as to state, “every effort should be made to use as high a design speed as practical to attain a desired degree of safety” and it serves as the pre-eminent industry guide to current highway and street design research and practices, even for small cities. Over the years, two other documents have emerged that guide the design and operation of the roadway system. One is the Highway Capacity

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Manual (HCM) concepts which prescribes guidelines and computational procedures that are useful to the capacity and quality of service of various roadway facilities, including all forms of street systems. It goes so far as to address the effects of transit, walking, and cycling on the performance of those systems. Then, the ITE Trip Generation Report plays an instrumental role in defining the root of the issue—how many cars are expected to be produced by any type of land use—so that the network can better accommodate the car (described more in Chapter 9). Within the enterprise of transport planning, few rulebooks (and supporting documentation) have had as strong an impact. The hierarchy that is spelled out applies to streets intended to: (1) move traffic across urban areas (expressways and arterials located outside or at the edges of neighborhoods); (2) provide access to individual properties (local streets located within neighborhoods); and (3) allow a mix of these functions (collector streets for connecting local streets to the city-wide network). The content of the Green Book has been carefully procured over decades of study of different patterns of traffic. Now in its 8th edition, the Green Book stresses “‘transportation of people’ rather than focusing primarily on moving vehicles. Also present are more detailed prescriptions for how different types of streets would be designed for various settings: rural, rural town, suburban, urban, and urban core” 6 (Chapter 2). The guidelines prescribed in these manuals are, for most transport officials working in cities, seen as mandatory to follow for their profession. Mostly rigid, they provide few allowances for deviations. After all, this is what standards do best. Yet, if transport systems are to evolve with changing technologies and societal pressures, how also should standards and the processes they follow?

7.3

Rethinking performance measures

In Chapter 3 we introduced the predominant approach to assess the performance of a transport system, the v/c ratio. Goodhart’s Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a good measure. The volume of cars using an intersection or segment of street relative to

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the capacity of the street (or intersection) is the Level of Service (LOS). The LOS guidelines provide levels (not standards) graded A–F. Most think of LOS as a measure of free-flowing traffic, from grade A to gridlock (F), though the original concept was a bit broader. The initial aim was to get the driver’s satisfaction, but vehicle flow was the most readily measured aspect of LOS. Overall, LOS was intended to help decide how much “failure” was tolerable for traffic engineering. The idea that roads should be widened until traffic was free-flowing at all hours of the day was thought of as nonsense, as it would require gigantic roads at peak hours that would be empty most of the day and night. The LOS guidelines were to help assess the quality of traffic flow. In 1965, those who created LOS did not foresee that their analytical concept would go on to be integrated into state and municipal laws and regulations in the United States. Unfortunately, this is what happened, and LOS guidelines are used to block prioritizing the movement and safety of people over vehicles. It is not hard to draw a line from their definition of LOS to tens of thousands of dead and mangled bodies in American streets over the decades since 1965. Level of service, like many standards and guidelines, it doesn’t tell engineers how safe a street is for pedestrians, or how convenient it is for buses. It measures only one thing: how many cars you can move through an intersection in a given period. Any delay in auto traffic is a bad thing, which can be addressed by converting sidewalks to road lanes, increasing lane widths to make speed easier, and removing crosswalks and on-street parking.

7.4 Standards With the professionalization of the engineer-planner, standards were heavily relied on to ensure consistency among the different components that were built for a transport system (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 1995). They were leaned on heavily in processes to build roadways, bridges, tunnels, intersections, traffic signals, freeways, and car parking. Standards helped convey an objective outlook to all things transport related. The process of pushing for the use of standards became a prominent characterization of traffic engineers as serious, dispassionate individuals who did things by the book.

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But pushed aside in all these developments is the fact that standards convey preferences and values. They should not be considered as objective. Standards help ensure practices are codified into law, other codes, and financial arrangements, which affect not just the transport system but the function of cities. For example, parking requirements are standards that set how many parking spaces a developer must build based on the size of the building and its use (see Chapter 5). Current crises involving transport are providing impetus to rethink and recalibrate, at least temporarily, the allocation of urban space. Even as many cities are repealing these requirements, developers are often still forced to adhere to building parking based on bankers who insist that the ITE Parking Generation Manual be used.

7.5

Considerations for engineering

Solving urban problems by relying on an engineering mindset has many advantages. In the 1920s and 1930s, when a refined approach was needed to address the emanating traffic problems on roads, a singular mindset was brought to bear: providing for cars. The belief arose during the mid-20th century that not only could the car help people travel between cities but that it should help people travel within them. The freedom allowed by cars on rural roads was confused with the inevitable future of cities, requiring that the street be adapted to the car, not the car to the street. Long-standing rules, codes, design standards, and performance measures followed suit. Furthermore, the momentum coming out of post-war optimism was so strong that few were willing to strongly consider the downsides. This mindset reflected the principle that the primary purpose of the street is as a conduit, rather than a place to be. Pedestrians therefore had to be given a safe passage through, while the street itself was surrendered to motor traffic. The result was bleak underpasses, railed crossings, and pedestrian traffic lights, all serving to annihilate the street as a public space and to undermine the sense of a walkable neighborhood. These major trends7—and the mindsets that informed them—now increasingly clash with at least three contemporaneous forces. First, the costs of and dependency on automobiles—to social equity, to the

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environment, to pocketbooks—are increasingly recognized by users, including municipal decision-makers. Second, varying and smarter mobility options are increasingly available. Bicycles, single-person cars, motor bikes, e-scooters, and hoverboards—all of which are smaller than cars—push the bounds of who claims space on streets. Where people driving cars were the primary, if not the sole, patron of streets just a few years ago, there is a noticeable rise in demand for other transport modes. These include delivery (e.g., post and courier services, online retail, and meal delivery), ridehailing and car-sharing, and other micro-mobility-as-a-service devices (e.g., scooters, electric bicycles, etc.). Third, more sectors of communities are calling for streets to be used as functional public spaces, not only for movement, but also socializing and civic engagement. These three forces alone beg for processes to manage streets differently from those of past decades. They point to a need to consciously pivot away from  car traffic  as a focus, towards  people; from issues regional in scale to local; from modeling exercises to thinking about how more human-oriented cities can develop. Cumulatively, these forces underscore a timely need to reinvent city streets. Traffic engineers have come a long way in recent years to better understand the nature of urban transport planning. What any city chooses to measure to gauge the success of transport systems reflects the values that they bring to the profession. Measuring vehicular traffic likely will bring harm to those walking and cycling. Ensuring pedestrian welfare may slow automobile users. City efforts measure attributes that are easy to measure. Pneumatic tubes counting the number of vehicles passing a single point are easy and reliable. Cities therefore have reams of data about volumes of traffic for almost any street in town. Measuring people is harder, as pneumatic counters have no idea how many people are in a vehicle, yet if we really wanted to plan a better transport system we would start with people as what is important to measure. More change in the realm of rightly defining the issue, changing the standards, and forecasting the right issues will help in the future.

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Notes 1.

Land use regulations date to the 1880s, but the 1916 New York City zoning code is generally regarded as the birth of zoning as it is known today. 2. In Syracuse, New York, the traffic light in Tipperary Hill was installed in 1928 with green on top and red on the bottom to reflect the importance of Irish immigrants in the community. New York State fought to have the light standardized to avoid confusion from drivers (especially if color blind), but the Irish population, in an act of defiance against letting the red colors of England stand above Irish green, threatened to throw rocks at the red light if it was allowed to be standardized. The light remains upside down, with green on top, and ample MUTCD compliant signs warning of the non-standard light on the approaching streets. 3. For more on warrant studies, see: https://​mutcd​.fhwa​.dot​.gov/​htm/​2009/​ part4/​part4c​.htm. 4. The classification of roads also matters for who pays for the facility. Freeways often have state and federal support, while arterials and collectors may be designated federal aid roads, which means that they are eligible for federal funding, but also subject to federal standards. Local roads are largely paid for through property taxes and are subject to local regulations. 5. For a summary of the FHWA’s 80th celebration of the MUTCD, see https://​ mutcd​.fhwa​.dot​.gov/​mutcd​_80​_bday​.htm. 6. For a summary of notable changes to the Green Book, see: http://​downloads​ .transportation​.org/​publications/​GDHS​-7​_SummaryOfChanges​.pdf. 7. See, for example, Exhibits 37, 43, and 46 for distillations of major trends affecting the modal scope and priorities of transport planning (Litman, 2020).

References Fischler, R. (1998). Toward a genealogy of planning: Zoning and the welfare state. Planning Perspectives, 13(4), 389–410. Greenshields, B. D. (1936). Studying traffic capacity by new methods. J. Appl. Psychol, 20(3), 353–358. Hawkins Jr, H. G. (2015). The MUTCD turns 80: Time for a makeover? Institute of Transportation Engineers: ITE Journal, 85(11), 14. Litman, T. (2020). Our World Accelerated: How 120 Years of Transportation Progress Affects Our Lives and Communities. Victoria Transport Policy Institute. https://​vtpi​.org/​TIEI​.pdf. Marshall, S. (2004). Streets and Patterns. Routledge. Riis, J. ([1890] 1971). How the Other Half Lives. Reprint, Dover Publications. Schultz, S. K., and McShane, C. (1978). To engineer the metropolis: Sewers, sanitation, and city planning in late-nineteenth-century America. The Journal of American History, 65(2), 389–411.

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Southworth, M., and Ben-Joseph, E. (1995). Street standards and the shaping of suburbia. Journal of the American Planning Association, 61(1), 65–81.

8.

Finance and institutional interplay

Transport is free, but sooner or later government will find a way to tax it

The proverbial “engine” of transport planning is the money to plan and build infrastructure projects. Money affects all decisions; few things are built without it. Fees, fares, and tolls are important pools of revenue for transport—and importantly, they can influence how travelers use transport systems. And so can taxes at the city, state, or federal levels. Sources are wide ranging. Considering that American politicians are, broadly speaking, tax averse suggests an immediate need to consider what has, historically, been a large source of revenue, federal fuel tax. That tax, $0.184 per gallon of gasoline and $0.0244 for diesel, was last raised in 1993. Its purchasing power has declined considerably, an implication that carries into transport finance. Over the years, the stagnant gas tax has helped push more funding to states, regions, and cities. Most US states have raised fuel taxes in the years since the federal rate was last changed, but taxing gasoline has a different political obstacle—most Americans are drivers, and transport spending is the second largest household expense, at about 18 percent of a typical budget. This impactful, and largely sunk, expense prompts travelers to be sensitive to having to shell out even more funds. Furthermore, most people want to have—and have grown accustomed to having—transport investment paid for by someone else. Yet transport is expensive to supply and maintain, so the money has to come from somewhere. Among the many sources of revenue for transport, some are more important than others. Federal spending, for example, is anchored by the federal gas taxes. For many years, the federal gas taxes that fed into the Highway Trust Fund were ample enough to satisfy federal desires for spending. However, since 2008 the Highway Trust Fund has not had enough dedicated tax receipts to cover outlays, and has required additional funding 85

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from US Congress. The future of the trust fund is not bright, as electrification of the vehicle fleet will further reduce its revenues. The state of the federal Highway Trust Fund has implications for transport at all levels. The lure of federal spending has declined as there is less money to spread around. Transport planning and policy has devolved to more local and regional levels. Unlike the devolution policies in the United Kingdom, in the US devolution has been more of a reaction to investment demands and the need for new sources of transport revenues (Winston, 2000). Not only has this changed the types of projects pursued, but as locally borne maintenance costs increase for roads and bridges, more states and cities are examining ways to reduce or eliminate facilities and thus obligations. Some states have embraced privatization of transport facilities through toll roads. One city, Chicago, privatized all city curb parking by leasing all of its on-street parking meters for 75 years to a private equity group in exchange for $1.15 billion in 2008. The group that bought the lease is able to set parking prices for the duration of the deal, and now the city has the highest curb parking rates in the country. This deal has been criticized on the grounds that the city gave up control of valuable assets, in this case revenue-generating parking meters, in exchange for short-term financial relief. By summer 2020, the equity group had collected $500 million more than the total paid for the contract. The next 63 years of parking meter revenue is almost pure profit, while the city receives no additional money and the city is unable to eliminate parking lanes for bus lanes without substantial penalty. Overall, while privatization is enticing for many cities as federal transport spending shrinks, the Chicago case is used as a cautionary tale about how privatization can harm local finances and inhibit planning innovation.

8.1

Federal funds and institutional reforms

The legislation that created the Interstate highway system in 1956 ushered in an era where transport planning was strongly influenced by federal spending. As part of the new Interstate construction, the federal government opted to pay 90 percent of the costs of construction. Cities and states found this irresistible and set to work in the 1950s and ’60s

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building highways through established cities, caused tremendous damage to communities of color, and exacerbating suburban sprawl. Highway planning, enabled through nearly free money for local planning efforts, was detrimental to cities. Furthermore, by the 1960s, mass transit was in steep decline in the US. Prior to the Second World War, most transit systems in the US were privately operated, and in the post-war years a process of municipalization started, where cities took over the existing systems that were suffering from disinvestment. In 1964 the federal government got involved with the Urban Mass Transportation Act, which for the first time provided federal support for urban transit. The rationale was that transit was critical for cities to provide alternatives to driving for people who do not drive. The 1960s was an era of institutional reform, as well. Transport planning had become more formalized and structured and new governmental agencies were created to manage the planning operations. With the 1962 Highway Act, federal transport legislation required the creation of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), which were responsible for developing long-range transport plans (typically 25-year plans). The MPOs grew up around policies set in motion by this act and were a recognition that transport issues were often regional in nature, and that metropolitan (urban) transport planning faces different issues than interstate or rural transport (Sciara, 2017). To receive federal funding in areas with a population of more than 50,000, MPOs must exist to coordinate efforts. The US Department of Transportation was created in 1967, elevating transport policy to a presidential cabinet-level perch. Local reforms followed these federal reforms, as public authorities were created to manage now-public transit systems and work with the new regional organizations. These three federal actions—Interstates, institutional reforms, and support for mass transit—had long-lasting effects on reshaping urban transport. Planning requirements to shape long-range plans pushed for both visionary approaches to transport and scientific studies of what to plan. Since these federal initiatives, the institutional structure of how to plan has remained largely the same, and is the framework from which today’s planning occurs. What allowed the federal government to spend substantially on transport, particularly freeways, was the success of the federal fuel taxes, which

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generated ample revenue for a wide variety of projects (Brown et al., 2009). Until the mid-1970s, the federal gas tax was limited to spending on Interstates, but with initial construction of the system nearing its end, and with transit still in need of investment, federal legislation was passed that diverted some of the gas tax revenues to transit investment and operations. Also, in the 1970s, major new transit investments were made in some cities. Washington, DC got their rail system during this period, and Atlanta, San Francisco, and others invested in heavy rail with federal support. In 1980, the administration of President Reagan altered the role of federal support, especially for transit, and new capital investment declined. States and cities began seeking local financial support for projects. The federal commitment to pay for transit was reduced largely because the gas tax no longer covered the expenses associated with roadways, so using some gas tax money to pay for transit was argued to be unfair. Combined with larger concerns with cities at the time—declining population, crime, the drug war, and other factors—mass transit and transport policy more generally started to become a partisan issue. This partisan lens through which transport planning is viewed continues to affect transport planning to this day, and has implications for social justice, climate policy, and local budgets. Federal transport policy did change in the 1990s through two major surface transportation acts. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), passed in 1991, put forth 14 “planning factors” (e.g., safety, consistency, energy conservation), for MPOs to more explicitly consider. For the first time, it gave MPOs more direct control over specific funds, tightly integrated transport and air quality planning, and encouraged stronger collaboration between different levels of planning. The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), passed in 1998, builds upon and reinforces many of same policies and programs of ISTEA, but increased the original six-year reauthorization levels by more than 40 percent. Overall, stronger MPO planning was expected to better reflect local priorities and needs and there are now more than 400 of them in the US to support these aims. Despite these efforts, the overall effect on urban transport planning has been modest. There are many reasons for this, from MPOs having minimal power to enact policies and too often having to balance the needs

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for their suburban constituents with the needs of denser cities. But a concurrent federal policy has had as large an effect as the structure of MPOs. The federal gas tax has not been increased since 1993. This has limited the power of federal money as more regions have had to look locally to raise money for investment. Since the 1990s, more states and cities have turned to local option taxes to make up for changes to federal spending. These local taxes come in a variety of forms, from sales taxes to value capture strategies. Some states have started to implement road tolls to pay for highway expansion, and some of these projects are operated as private roads. Most states have raised their state gas taxes to help raise money for investment. Often voters are asked to approve new sales taxes to pay for specific transport projects through referenda. Due to budget constraints, many places are considering the removal of roads that are too expensive to maintain, and states like Michigan are turning once paved roads into gravel roads to save money. The implications of these changes in financing transport are not fully known, but will affect the types of projects planners will grapple with in the years ahead. Transport planning will be much more than just planning for new infrastructure—existing infrastructure will be reconsidered, and removal of old facilities will be part of a planner’s job.

8.2

User fees and general taxation

How much should travelers—the users of the systems—pay for the infrastructure and external costs of transport? All transport modes receive some type of subsidy, further discussed below, but there is no clear guidance as to what a subsidy policy should look like. At the most basic level, governments must decide whether travelers should pay directly for the infrastructure they consume, such as through road tolls or transit fares, or should transport investment be widely available and paid for through general taxation, such as on land or sales. The argument in favor of subsidy is that transport boosts the economy, or that people need affordable access to transport services to have a job or go to school, or that environmentally virtuous modes need help to compete with driving. At issue for these considerations is a calculus of who benefits and who bears the costs. For instance, obviously a driver benefits from a road being

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available on which to drive. If this were the only benefit, perhaps drivers could be expected to pay for the full cost of providing the road. If a lot of drivers use the road, high quality materials and engineering standards are affordable with a small charge to each driver—those who benefit directly from the road can pay for it. This is essentially the story of the Interstate system during its construction, which was paid for through a federal gas tax that went into the Highway Trust Fund and for many years generated more revenue than needed for the construction and maintenance of the Interstates.1 But there are other beneficiaries of transport. Land owners directly benefit from the access that roads, transit, and bike lanes provide. As homeowners, we appreciate the access that the roads in front of our houses provide, and are willing to pay a bit more in property taxes to maintain them. We return to this idea of land owners financing infrastructure in the Value Capture section below.

8.3

Local option taxes and property taxes

Local option taxes are in a category of taxation that encompasses many types of taxes. Sales and property taxes are common, as are fuel charges, licensing charges, exactions, parking fees, and others. Overall, local option taxes are those that are levied and collected at the state, region, or city level. While some taxes are levied on things that are directly related to transport, such as vehicle licensing fees, many times the taxes are unrelated to transport, such as sales taxes. Whether the taxes are levied on transportation directly matters in that higher taxes will dissuade certain activities. If licensing increases in cost, fewer cars will be bought on the margins (or, perhaps more people will risk driving an unlicensed vehicle). What taxes are available depends on state and local law, so it is impossible to provide a full accounting of all types. However, the growth in these local option taxes is common across the country to pay for transport infrastructure and maintenance. Most local roads in the US are paid for through property taxes. These taxes are paid to state and local governments to pay for a variety of services. Local roads are generally maintained as part of an overall access

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strategy so that the post office, emergency services, and local residents are able to access all parts of the city. The US typically has what is known as split property taxes, which means that land is taxed at a different rate than improvements to a site, such as a house. The split tax is relevant to transport planning in that the higher rates charged to improvements compared to rates on land incentivize property owners to not fully utilize their land, and build less intensively than if the tax only was levied on land. The idea of a tax on land only can be traced to economist Henry George in the late 1800s.2 His idea was that land value taxes are the perfect taxes because land is fixed in supply, and the value of land is created by its location proximate to public services and the surrounding community. Taxing these land values does not distort the market for land. Few places have experimented with land value taxes, but one exception is Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, which tried a land tax in the 1970s. The results were denser building patterns and more intensive use of land, as is expected and desirable for planning multi-modal transport systems. Pittsburg was eventually caught up in the property tax revolts that swept the US in the late 1970s and abandoned their taxation experiment. The value of transport planners knowing about property taxes is that these taxes do influence the built environment above and beyond conventional land regulations such as zoning.

8.4

Transport referenda and direct democracy

In many states, especially in the Western US, transport spending is determined in part through ballot initiatives put in front of voters as a form of direct democracy. In these initiatives, voters are asked to vote for or against a package of transport projects and new taxes to pay for them, typically sales taxes. These referenda gained in popularity after the property tax revolts of the 1970s, where previously property tax assessments were opaque, and the rates were viewed as too high. Referenda, where voters would directly decide whether to raise taxes, were seen as a fairer approach that was more transparent, and now they are commonplace. Transport referenda, however, are not without issues. Transport planning has long overpromised benefits and underestimated costs regarding major infrastructure projects. Bent Flyvbjerg has studied these system-

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atic errors in megaproject planning, and shown that transport projects consistently go overbudget and take longer than expected (unplanned delays are part of the cost escalation). The challenge for referenda is that voters are asked to approve a specific set of projects, such as an expansion of a rail network, a new streetcar, or road repair programs, at a defined cost. The voters are asked to vote in favor of or against, for example, a 0.5 percent sales tax for 30 years to pay off a suite of defined projects. At issue is that the voters do not actually know the costs of the projects they are approving, and the suite of projects being voted on have to be designed to appeal broadly to a majority of voters. This means that transit projects are grouped with road expansion projects to build a coalition to approve the new taxes, even as the projects may be at odds with each other in terms of long-term goals.

8.5

Value capture

Transport offers access, which in turn creates value. As locations are easier to get to, they become more desirable for housing and commerce, pushing up prices from where they would otherwise be. Capturing these increased values can be used to pay for infrastructure as a form of internalizing the positive externalities associated with transport. Value capture is not a new idea. Early streetcar systems were often privately built and operated to service new neighborhoods as the profits were from land sales more than fares. In Hong Kong, the Rail + Property model closely binds housing development with rail investment and operation within the transport operator, the Mass Transit Railway (MTR). The MTR is a major property developer, and generates about one-half of their revenues from property development, which are used to maintain the transit system. Agencies need not be property developers for value capture to work. In New York City, the development of Hudson Yards on the west side of Manhattan was made possible by a new subway station that extended the existing 7 line that runs between Queens on the east side of the city and midtown Manhattan. This station was built to serve an area made available for development above existing rail yards, which was rezoned for development in 2005. The city then paid for the subway extension and site improvements to allow development through bonds that were backed by property taxes from the project. Value capture, as a mechanism, works

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like Tax Increment Finance, where the assessed value of a property is used as a baseline measure, and any increases in assessed value is attributed to the new investment. The property taxes collected on this increment are captured to pay for the project, typically by paying back bonds that were issued to pay for the project initially. London has also been active with value capture, paying for their new Crossrail commuter rail by capturing value increased along the line. The Crossrail project also happens to be built and operated by Hong Kong’s MTR, which is turning their experience with value capture and transit operations into a global business. The MTR operates transit paid with value capture in Beijing, as well. Value capture is not perfect, in that it works best where there is enough untapped value to pay for expensive investment. In Hong Kong, housing is expensive in part because building enough housing to reduce costs would be very expensive to serve by rail. There are desirable transport investments that will not pay for themselves, such as improved services in low-income neighborhoods, where better service is welcome but perhaps not rail-led gentrification.

8.6

Considerations on finance and institutions

The bulk of transport infrastructure in US cities is structurally deficient or obsolete; as assessed in grades by the American Society of Civil Engineers, roads and bridges consistently rate poorly. Remedying this condition is a seemingly technical question, but one with a political answer. What gets built and maintained requires political support and leadership which can make the planning process seem slow and rudderless, but a planner’s vision for what transport can be is still worthwhile. The question of how much to spend on transport is a question that centers on how much of something that is desired—by politicians, residents and more. What is society willing to pay for? Should politicians seek to minimize costs on transport, few of them would support building giant road projects that sit empty overnight; lesser-priced alternatives, such as bicycle lanes, rise in popularity as they are much cheaper to build and maintain for the volume of users. Yet residents prefer cars, and they like driving when it is easy. Therefore, roads and parking have lots of support even if they are costly to the bottom line.

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The federally dominated model of transport finance is changing. Electrification will reduce further the federal Highway Trust Fund as a source of spending. It is clear, however, that transport investments will increasingly rely more on local and state sources of funding, including additional user fees (Katz and Puentes, 2006). However, individual communities are generally too small and do not have the scope or scale to deal with these well-entrenched issues effectively. This complex message is starting to resonate as many metropolitan areas have begun the difficult process of reassessing transport plans. This evolving landscape will affect the types of projects that will be pursued—fewer big-ticket investments that were only affordable with federal help—as well as factors affecting how users relate with transport systems. It is easier to see how higher fees for driving, whether gas taxes, road tolls, or parking charges, will reduce the demand for driving by making it more expensive. As the vehicle fleet shifts toward electric powertrains, the fuel tax revenues will decline further for federal and state coffers. These may be replaced with per kilometer fees, which can be enforced through hardware attached to a car’s system or through software that connects online through a car’s existing connections. These trends in transport finance open new areas of planning transport— planning with prices. Rather than infrastructural solutions to congestion, prices can be used to incentivize travel at off-hours or switch drivers to telecommuters or transit riders. Higher local and state user fees will make driving more expensive in absolute terms, but also in comparison to other modes. Planners should not expect that higher costs for driving will automatically turn into higher transit ridership, however. Some drivers, when faced with higher costs, will simply not drive as much. Perhaps road tolls, plus more work from home policies in a post-pandemic world, mean that someone who used to commute to the office five days per week now only goes in once.

Notes 1.

The Highway Trust Fund is no longer solvent and has been spending more than it takes in since 2008. 2. Other economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, made similar arguments earlier but land value taxes are known as Georgist taxes.

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References Brown, J. R., Morris, E. A., and Taylor, B. D. (2009). Paved with good intentions: Fiscal politics, freeways and the 20th century American city. Access Magazine, 1(35), 31–37. Katz, B., and Puentes, R. (2006). Taking the High Road: A Metropolitan Agenda for Transportation Reform. Brookings Institution Press. Sciara, G.-C. (2017). Metropolitan transportation planning: Lessons from the past, institutions for the future. Journal of the American Planning Association, 83(3), 262–276. Winston, C. (2000). Government failure in urban transportation. Fiscal Studies, 21(4), 403–425.

9.

Data and models used in transport planning

Assessing the demand for transport services that don’t exist is like figuring out how many people will swim across a river

Where engineering and planning concerns intersect lie transport demand models, which are critical inputs to assess trends and assumptions about populations and economic changes. Such factors feed transport needs for decades far in advance. When American cities and regions changed dramatically after WWII as the population boomed and the metropolitan landscape suburbanized to accommodate growth, cities and suburbs needed transport investment in roads and transit to facilitate this expansion, and this investment was guided by a new, “rational” approach to analysis and decision making. The rational model of planning, which is still followed, involves defining the problem, identifying alternative plans, evaluating such plans, then implementing the plans and assessing success. The rational model hews to a scientific approach to planning that fits well with the problem-solving of engineering. Following the tradition of other engineering disciplines, transport planners set out to estimate future demand through a mathematically rigorous approach. Forecasting practices were developed to predict how much traffic would be generated (defining the problem), how much roadway infrastructure would be needed (identifying alternatives), and how other modes, like transit, could serve a role (evaluating alternatives). Processes to predict how many people go to and from destinations have not changed much over the years. Notwithstanding more detailed data and more refined analytical capabilities, core rationales are still the same.

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9.1

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Original models

The setting for the inaugural application to forecast traffic for urban areas was set in the 1950s through the Chicago Area Transportation Study (Weiner, 2016). The focus was decidedly auto-oriented and primary policy stakes were set as the capacity of streets, either through building new facilities or making traffic engineering improvements. The landmark study that was produced explicitly linked travel and activities (or land use); it called for a more comprehensive framework to understand larger contextual factors that were sandwiched by processes for land use projection and economic evaluation (Mitchell and Rapkin, 1954). The CATS study also sought to estimate how much travel would continue by transit. The original Chicago study divided transit trips into two classes: trips to the Central Business District (CBD), which are mainly by subway/elevated transit, express buses, and commuter trains, and other transit, which was the local bus system. Trend data were used to assess trade-offs between auto-ownership and use compared with transit use, and to estimate the effect that auto-ownership had on one’s propensity to ride transit. The model that was developed estimated an overall demand for travel which was then applied to an existing or proposed network of roads and transit systems. The process employed four steps, thereby coining an approach affectionately coined as the four-step model, derivations of which continue to the present day (Cervero, 2006). While applications of this modeling approach are nearly universal, so are its criticisms (more on these below). The underlying logic of the four-step model is not nearly as flawed as the assumptions that are embedded in the process (i.e., reliance on automobiles) and how the results are applied. This chapter briefly describes the motivation and approaches embedded in each of the steps: trip generation, trip distribution, mode split, and network assignment.

9.2

Demographic and employment data

Demographic and sociodemographic data come from a variety of sources. In the US, the main sources of these data are the Decennial Census, which counts each individual and household in the nation, and the American

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Community Survey, which collects additional data about household composition, income, housing characteristics, and commuting. Both surveys are collected by the US Census Bureau and available publicly. Other data, derived from local sources, are sometimes available, especially for larger cities and MPOs that maintain “in-house” data collection efforts. Employment and commercial data are also often collected, at least in the US, by the Census. The Quarterly Survey of Employment and Wages, the Current Population Survey, and the Longitudinal Employer–Households Dynamics (LEHD) are three examples of public, aggregated data that are gathered regularly. Some of these data might not be available at smaller units of geography commonly used in modeling applications and therefore requires adjustment. Other sources include privately collected data on market conditions and listings, as well as any state and local data available. Any array of information sources can be used to process tables that collate socio-economic, demographic, and land use data into the number of trips that would be generated for each unit of analysis, commonly referred to as a TAZ (Traffic Analysis Zone). TAZs are often defined, in part, by Census tracts in the US; they are generally scaled to about 3,000 people so there might be 200 of them in an average metro area, recognizing that the size and number of TAZs varies widely across regions depending on populations. In a dense area, they may be a single block, while in suburban areas they may be many square kilometers. In some recent modeling applications, in lieu of TAZs, the unit of analysis includes households, or sometimes, individuals. Regardless of scale, the analysis zones are typically referred to as production–attraction pairs, rather than origin– destination pairs for individual trips.

9.3

Four-step models

The first step of the modeling process is to estimate how many trips are expected to be generated by all land uses and the location of those trip origins. An activity system is created using characteristics of the built environment, such as residential locations and commercial locations. Individual homes, whether single family or apartments, are expected to generate fewer trips than commercial places. Consider how many

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trips a typical household might produce in a day; each adult commute is a round trip, an additional round trip to drop kids at school, go to the grocery store, and so on. According to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), the average household makes about 8.5 person trips per day, of which 5.6 are vehicle trips. Now consider a restaurant that serves 100 customers per day. While it is unlikely that each diner arrives alone, there will be dozens of trips generated at a minimum for a small restaurant. These estimates of trips that are generated, per element of the built environment, are put into a series of trips tables that are used to help gauge the demand for travel across a city or region for each TAZ. These numbers might not be calibrated to the type and number of trips that would be generated in different zones of the city at other times of day, thereby introducing bias into future calculations. Generally, there are three types of trips to account for within each TAZ: (1) trips that go from Internal locations to External zones; (2) those from External to Internal; and (3) External to External. Internal to External trips are those that originate in one TAZ and end in a different TAZ. External to Internal are those that originate in a separate TAZ and end in the TAZ of interest. External to External trips are those that pass through a TAZ. These last types come into play at the network assignment step, as well. Not in this process are Internal to Internal trips—usually of short distance—which typically go unaccounted for. The trips that are generated are distributed across the region by creating a matrix that links origins and destinations by TAZ, Tij,1 for each of several different purpose of trips (commute, recreation, etc.). This step calculates the number of trips between analysis zones, and does not include issues of which mode or how those trips engage with network components. This step invokes theories of the gravity model, introduced in Chapter 3, details of which are described in the next section. The third step, mode split, involves separating the generated trips from each origin zone to each destination into distinct modes. It results in estimates for the number of expected trips between all areas of analysis, and how many of all trips are by driving alone, carpooling, transit, biking, and all other modes. As planners have some role in managing all of these, measuring the mode split across all modes is a useful and

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common measure. Currently, just over 85 percent of all commutes in the US are someone driving alone, and about 5 percent of commutes are made by public transit, which is slightly below the share of workers who telecommute. But many variations of these course estimates exist, split by city, between cities and suburbs, and between people with different socio-economic characteristics. The fourth step then loads this demand onto a transport network, whether existing or proposed. That process works through tasks of “equilibrating” the demand onto a network, using assumptions of choice of routes, time-of-day, capacity constraints, alternative modes, and similar considerations. Specific refinements at this stage are many, and owing to space constraints, this work cannot do them justice. In current state-of the art practice models are almost exclusively disaggregated, meaning that they can be estimated on separate choice-based samples, and they could even be used to reflect the choice probabilities of individual trip makers. These latter models are known as activity-based models. Network assignment covers links on road and transit systems. For roads, highways, arterials and collector streets have traffic assignments. Local streets are typically not assigned traffic. These four steps are used to simplify and structure dynamics with countless inputs that are constantly changing. Gathering reliable estimates for population, employment, and land use can be challenging enough, especially for resource-constrained municipalities. Other cities have highly advanced modeling capabilities, for example, that can account for a broad array of policy options. For example, planners work to influence mode split through infrastructure changes, pricing signals, and changes to service characteristics. Such factors are typically outside the bounds of most modeling applications. More advanced applications may aim to account for them. Infrastructure changes might include dedicated bus lanes so that transit is never stuck in traffic, or additional separated bike lanes to encourage cycling by making it safer. Price signals could be road tolls or parking charges. Service characteristics include increasing bus frequency or timing traffic signals to improve traffic flow. Since the 1970s, many US cities have striped a large network of high-occupancy vehicle (carpool) lanes. Over the past decade, many of these carpool lanes have added a toll option for single drivers who are willing to pay for faster trips. Some of these policy levers could

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be used to refine feedback between each of the steps, thereby creating more temporally accurate estimates. The details affecting such feedback, however, are in short supply (Levinson and Kumar, 1994), and if and when it is incorporated, it is done inconsistently and divergently.

9.4

Travel demand and decay effects

Furthermore, output from any one of the steps could be useful for other planning purposes. The trip distribution step, as mentioned, aims to model the interaction between two places. Calculations and output that are produced can inform, for example, how different travel options that might be availed by the built environment might be used and the feasibility of others. It can help inform how many residents might travel 6 km for something from the hardware store versus 4 km (or 3 km for a loaf of bread versus 1 km). Logic informing this trip distribution step draws from the first law of geography, as popularized by the geographer Waldo R. Tobler, who suggested that, “All things are related but near things are more related than far things” (Miller, 2004). The available options to measure travel from any location in a city is typically gauged using relatively crude cutoffs; they are informed by how far away something is, which may or may not be measured as distance along the network (as opposed to what is referred to as a crow’s flying distance). The popular application Walk Score, accounts well for destinations within a set distance (e.g., 0.5 km), but not as well for those beyond. Standard isochrones use strict cutoffs such as 10, 20, or 30 minutes. However, people consider a 20, or a 30-minute trip differently from a 5 or 15 minute trip and more advanced applications would model the detail of how that cost function plays out. Using “distance decay” or “impedance” functions, it is possible to recognize that the value of an opportunity is lower if it is costlier to reach. Shorter distanced destinations would beckon more frequent travel, longer distanced ones less so and these functions help capture the severity of the distance effects that might inhibit or allow travel demand. Decay functions account for the fact that a destination that takes double the time to reach does not have half the accessibility; even if a location is

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just down the street, there is effort to get out of the home. To better gauge these dynamics, a friction factor (a cost function) is used to understand “time-weighted cumulative opportunities,” and nearby opportunities are weighted more heavily than distant ones. The most common decay functions are analogous to gravitational decay, in which the strength of the attraction decreases with the square of distance (thus the label “gravity-type” measures). Given their non-linear nature, it is common to assume a negative power law to represent how the phenomenon decays exponentially. The reciprocal one over the distance is most often employed, yet other non-linear functions can used, such as 1/cβ, to increase the precision of the estimates. The decay concept is universally applicable and the principles hold steady (Iacono et al., 2010). The strength of attraction decreases with the square of distance and the higher the value of β, the faster the fall in the number of trips with distance. Different contexts therefore beckon different estimates of β, which might depend on the type of travel being modeled (e.g., shopping versus pleasure), the mode (e.g., cycling versus driving), or the level of accuracy that is desired. Figure 9.1 shows how different measure of β would play out for different types of stores. More accurate estimates better calibrate the destination choice or trip distribution step of regional travel demand models.2 They can also be used to help planners understand how the built environment (i.e., distance to services) relates to how far people might be willing to travel by different modes. Using data for bicycling trips from most regions, for example, yields a curve showing that 80 percent of bicycle trips are less than 6 km. Comparing the details of a decay curve from bicycle travel with one produced from a transport model for car trips in the same distance band, for most cities, suggests similar shape and overlap, thereby providing opportunity to more strongly consider high rates of substitution between the two.

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Figure 9.1

9.5

Distance decay curves define impedance functions

Influence and value of transport models

Since the creation of regional Metropolitan Planning Organizations in the 1960s, planners have been required to create regional long-range transport plans that look approximately 25 years ahead. Models have been used at every step of the way. These projections and models use the recent past to predict the future. In relatively streamlined times, say the 1930s through the 1980s, this was perhaps appropriate. These trends were reasonable to consider, as automobility did for a time, increased economic opportunity and freedom. The profession therefore placed a disproportionate amount of faith in these projections, and to a certain extent, the motto of predict and provide still applies. Should a model predict more driving, the city builds new roads and more people drive. In a similar vein, if a school model predicted few students living downtown, a city doesn’t build schools, and families avoid living downtown. Absent from these efforts are discussions about whether people would have driven more without new roads? What would have happened if families had not avoided living downtown or given better schools? The outcome of any forecast is an informed guess; all models are wrong and some are useful. Most forecasts assume the conditions in the future

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will be steered by conditions resembling those of present times, or even more tenuous, how they were years earlier. Now these same assumptions are questionable and out of touch with social, environmental, and economic concerns. The forecasts might even be abused. Should a politician seek a particular transport project in their district, forecasters, most likely those working in consulting firms paid by the public agency, generate analyses to show these projects in the most positive light possible. Agency demands and political pressures whipsaw forecasters between clients’ demands for positive results and their professional integrity (Wachs, 1990). Should the projections prove false, there is little in the way of recourse, so long as they can get approval to begin construction, thereby leading to a phenomenon called a “commitment trap” which is too frequent in large-scale transport projects. Transport projects consistently overstate the benefits and underestimate the costs—estimates that are built on models (Flyvbjerg, 2008). Too often projects can be considered “right” because the model says so, even when wrong: a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting from the model itself. While the four-step approach is moderately successful as a tool to aid decision making and planning, it is not unusual for its outcomes to be the only input for decision making. Outcomes were never intended to be the sole arbiter of the value of a transport project. Yet, it provides local officials and planners a systematically produced answer as to what transport infrastructure needs to be built. Traffic volumes are consistently overestimated, and the four-step models are not good for modeling declines in travel or technological or economic shocks. This results in estimates of future traffic, typically for each segment of the transport infrastructure in question, for example, for each roadway segment or railway station. The current technologies facilitate the access to dynamic data, big data, etc., providing the opportunity to develop new algorithms to improve greatly the predictability and accuracy of the current estimations.

9.6

Improved modeling

The traditional planning models are data intensive, using detailed surveys that ask respondents about their daily travel in a travel diary combined

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with traffic volume and speed to forecast future needs. Traditionally, these data are collected through national and regional travel surveys which are conducted every few years.3 New and near‐continuous streams of data now provide opportunities to enhance our knowledge and aid evidence‐based policy. This means real-time delivery of information and rapid analysis—updating transport models every few years with new Census or survey data can be replaced with ongoing analysis of trends and behavior. Since the iPhone and other smartphones became ubiquitous around 2009, there have been countless innovations in urban mobility. Smartphones unlocked new approaches to existing technologies and attempts to solve long-standing problems. Uber is a good example, where the firm worked to replace taxi services in cities worldwide. Shared bike systems also benefited from smartphones. The phones allowed for Geographic Positioning System locations to help match vehicles and travelers, and allowed for easy payments at the touch of a button. Combined, many mobility innovations worked to take advantage of these seamless transactions. How these new data play out in logics that underpin the four-step process is uncertain. Some modifications are industry-accepted revisions; others might be patches to address a local policy directive. Improvements include using: more detailed socio-economic data, smaller zones to better capture shorter trips, widening the range of trip purposes (not simply modeling the journey to work and shopping), additional factors of the built environment that moderate travel by means other than automobiles. For example, in most US applications of the four-step model, many recent models reflect current policies such as carpooling choices resulting from high occupancy vehicle facilities and the presence of tolls on automobiles, and transit use is less of a factor. The most common way to estimate effects on other modes is through a logit regression model where options are nested within others. This means that the choice to carpool falls out of the choice to use a car in the first place). Sometimes, in lieu of a formal mode choice model, the sample uses a simplified process to factor in person trip tables to allow for the development of vehicle trip tables. Essentially, average vehicle occupancies reflecting total person trips versus total vehicle trips are used to produce the trip table of automobile trips while ignoring trips by other modes, but they are only used if the proportion of trips by other modes is small.

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This process helps show how vehicle trip tables are then assigned to the highway network; transit trips, if computed, would be assigned to the corresponding transit network. The role of transit varies by region. In New York City, for instance, transit ridership is extremely important in understanding regional travel patterns as the region carries about one-third of all daily transit rides in the US. In a region like Phoenix, transit ridership is quite low as only 2 percent of commutes are by transit.

9.7

Considerations on data and models

The technical-rational model that is firmly embedded within transport planning also shapes the study of transport policy. For transportation planners, the effectiveness of any plan depends on how individuals and households will change their travel habits in response to them. How can we predict these kinds of changes in the age of tremendous uncertainty? What is the overall value of these predictions? In responding to these questions, it is important to think through whether a planner’s role is to accommodate more of the same types of existing behavior or to influence behavior in new ways. Few results based on transport models are correct (nor are they necessarily expected to be) and the results of ones based on more egregious assumptions are less correct. However, this does not mean the results themselves are not useful. Extrapolating behaviors based on existing trend lines relies on assumptions that hold that every projection is wrong, but we just don’t know by how much and in what direction. Against these critiques, transport modelers note that the models they create are meant to be one piece of information used to decide whether a project moves forward. Nonetheless, real projects get built based on these models, and the models provide analytic cover for why projects are chosen. They have power.

Notes 1. 2.

T = trip; i = origin i; j = destination j In terms of more detailed modeling applications, trip generation models tend not to reflect travel impedance or other general measures of accessibility.

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3.

That is a step performed by splitting trips into productions and attractions. Travel times are estimated from functions used to assess the performance of links, which are used instead of initial link travel times. A process referred to as producing new skim trees is use. Any travel impedance measures are then employed in subsequent stages, like skim trees also known as interzonal impedances. Free-flow automobile travel times are most often used for the initial (and sometimes only) pass through of the model. Ideally, skim trees would reflect generalized costs for all modes and appropriately weighted in subsequent steps. That is asking a lot, however. Therefore, usually only interzonal impedances are directly computed using a weighted average of interzonal impedance to one or more neighboring zones. The skim matrix might be re-run to reflect terminal time for access and egress at either end of the trip. The National Household Transportation Survey has been conducted in some form since 1969. The most recent years are 2017, 2009, 2001, 1995, 1990 and 1983.

References Cervero, R. (2006). Alternative approaches to modeling the travel-demand impacts of smart growth. Journal of the American Planning Association, 72(3), 285–295. Flyvbjerg, B. (2008). Public planning of mega-projects: Overestimation of demand and underestimation of costs. In Hugo Priemus, Bent Flyvbjerg, and Bert van Wee (eds), Decision-Making on Mega-Projects: Cost–Benefit Analysis, Planning, and Innovation. Edward Elgar Publishers, pp. 120–144. Iacono, M., Krizek, K. J., and El-Geneidy, A. (2010). Measuring non-motorized accessibility: Issues, alternatives, and execution. Journal of Transport Geography, 18(1), 133–140. Levinson, D. M., and Kumar, A. (1994). Integrating feedback into the transportation planning model: Structure and application. Transportation Research Record, 1413, 70–77. Miller, H. J. (2004). Tobler’s first law and spatial analysis. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(2), 284–289. Mitchell, R. B., and Rapkin, C. (1954). Urban Traffic: A Function of Land Use. Columbia University Press. Wachs, M. (1990). Ethics and advocacy in forecasting for public policy. Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 141–157. Weiner, E. (2016). Urban Transportation Planning in the United States: History, Policy, and Practice. Springer.

10. Interdisciplinary sciences as applied to urban transport and opportunities

The best predictor of one’s trip today is the trip that was taken yesterday

City planning and civil engineering have historically been the fields that shaped urban transport. Most of the knowledge that is relied on is derived from these disciplines with clearly demarcated roles. Engineers work on traffic while city planners engage with matters of the built environment.1 At least from the perspective of engineering (and technology), the historical aims here have viewed mobility as a priority. One implication resulting from the siloed approach is that perspectives falling outside the bounds of either gets lost. By better bridging the silos, while also weaving in knowledge from other domains, a rich locus of information exists that could be better brought to light. Perspectives from the social sciences (e.g., geography, political science), hard sciences (e.g., neuroscience), design professions (e.g., architecture, landscape architecture), engineering (e.g., computer science, electrical engineering), humanities (e.g., anthropology), and more have much to offer urban transport planning that add depth and nuance to conventional models. Weaving together interdisciplinary knowledge with aims of both accessibility and mobility can offer keener insights for changes in cities that are possible. Boundaries are dissolving between the fields traditionally responsible for urban transport planning as new entrants to the profession are being welcomed. These additional perspectives are of particular interest when viewed against the likely fast-moving currents that lie ahead. Solving technological, environmental, social, and economic problems means not only abandoning the status quo but knowing what to shoot for. They suggest 108

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a rich opportunity to foster relations and interaction between mobility researchers from a variety of disciplines and those in private sector firms who develop new technologies to analyze the detailed travel data they collect. Decades of research from the hallways of the academy will continue to uncover characteristics about human behavior and cities. Some of these findings are relatively universal across populations and geographies. This penultimate chapter offers insights that a new breed of transport scientist2 could draw from by highlighting lines of thinking for how new perspectives on transport services can be learnt and put to work. In presenting just one interdisciplinary scenario among many that are possible, we describe factors triggering the demand for travel, strategies for better measuring, and strategies for change that can be enacted.

10.1 More data, dissolving boundaries, and emerging opportunities Transport planning has always been a data-intensive profession. Since smartphones became ubiquitous and cities adopted open data portals, however, the field has never had as much information from so many sources (smartphone apps, routing software, e-scooters, and more). New and real-time tools prescribe everything from routes for drivers and steps for pedestrians and all of this data can be linked to understand stronger relations between transport services and how they are used. Entire academic laboratories have been formed to study detailed threads of inquiry, and we expect enormous growth in these future endeavors. For example, how might parking availability affect economic development? Sensors in parking garages can help gauge shoppers’ duration. How might dynamic fare pricing affect transit ridership? Farecard reader technologies allow agencies to more easily trace passengers’ movements through the system. London planners have been particularly effective in using data from their Oyster card for planning purposes. They’ve employed detailed origin, destination, and interchange data to restructure bus networks in neighborhoods to better meet the needs of passengers, thereby making spatially targeted service changes in ways that conventional data rarely support. Technologies are also making it easier to

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associate personal travel with all aspects of the built form—extending from the architecture of building facades to the color of the pavement and including the spacing of street signs.3 These advances are important because as new forms of mobility technology emerge, it will be necessary to know how they affect how travelers move about and how they process elements of the built environment supporting this task. The character of streets will likely change with technological advances. Knowing more about the factors that trigger movements and reactions of people, either implicitly or explicitly, can help. Safety is at stake. Consider that traffic fatalities in the United States are a public health emergency, though they are lower than their historical high. In the early 1970s, almost 55,000 Americans were killed in traffic accidents yearly, including people in vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. By 2017 that figure had fallen to around 40,000, even with an increase in VKT. The overall decline confirms Smeed’s Law. Smeed, from the United Kingdom’s Road Research Laboratory, found that initially, with the early introduction of motor vehicles, traffic deaths tend to rise as more people buy cars. However, eventually deaths rise to an unacceptable level and safety becomes a concern for the public, policymakers, and manufacturers. Then, as manufacturers produce safer vehicles, cities improve roads and drivers become more adept, fatalities tend to decline, that is, if people are in cars—not for other road users. Over the past 50 years cars have become much safer, from seat belts, to air bags, to third brake lights, to the point that people inside of a car can survive crashes at very high speeds. Outside of vehicles, though, humans are more vulnerable than ever. As SUVs have gained in popularity, they have also increased in size, which makes them more dangerous than smaller cars.4 Understanding how and why street users undermine other users’ comfort levels is an issue of rising importance. For many people, fear of a crash prevents them from walking or cycling in the first place. Being able to detect where drivers encroach on cyclists’ space or act aggressively toward pedestrians can fill this important gap in knowledge. Video footage, matched with specialized software, can be used to analyze to assess where people walk, stop, and interact with others. It can also be used to measure cases where near misses between street users almost result in

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death. Many firms are working on projects to allow transport scientists to measure things like near-miss collisions and crowdsourced data, such as bikemaps.org, which collects data on collision and near collisions in cities worldwide, giving planners a better sense as to where the problems need to be addressed. Furthermore, users of existing and emerging transport modes, are diverging in their need to pay attention while on the streets. Operating a device like an e-bicycle or e-scooter requires a degree of vigilance from the rider not demanded by larger modes, which are protected through design and their own bulk. The imminent prospects for further technological advances—notably autonomous vehicles—will demand minimal attention from those using them. But for those outside of vehicles, it demands higher levels of user attention (Krizek et al., 2020). Understanding how users of these new human-sized and human-directed modes of transport respond is essential for the safety of both users and others in the environment. Eye-tracking research, for example, has the potential to offer valuable insights in this realm in terms of where riders are comfortable or fearful.5

10.2 Imageability and perceptions of urban space As a symbol of social life, cars represent both a possession and a space that is highly personalized. Anthropology researchers leverage mobility to directly engage in discourses on this matter. Historians focus on ways in which particular technologies, especially the car, have achieved dominance leading to cultures of “motordom” (Norton, 2008). These cultures can be quite brazen, such as California lowriders in Chicano communities, or can be subtle, such as the way that seemingly thoughtful neighbors oppose any new real estate development because they automatically assume it will cause car traffic to increase and make their own driving that much harder.6 One emerging need for planners stems from an opportunity to restore how people perceive their urban environments aside from the issues brought by cars. Owing to a variety of forces, including but not limited to an ingrained need to drive, windshield bias,7 and route aiding devices, many residents have lost sight of how close most destinations are in urban

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environments. Existing imagery that helps people connect how they move across town, mostly by car, with knowledge about nearby opportunities, we contend, has been deteriorating for decades. One approach to understand perspectives local to one’s neighborhood that has gained traction lies in Kevin Lynch’s magisterial Image of the City (Lynch, 1960). His imageability refers to the salience, legibility and interpretability of places in the minds of inhabitants. Urban imageability depends on cognition, as individuals experience and interpret urban environments in order to understand and make use of them. Traditionally, urban accessibility promotes travel experiences that fill cognitive maps and the image of the city. That image, in turn, shapes accessibility, informing the activities and destinations each person might access. The culmination is a synergy between urban designers, planners, geographers, psychologists, and neuro-biologists—all demonstrating the strength of the link between urban accessibility and imageability. The decoupling of imageability from daily mobility may, in turn, decouple it from accessibility. If urbanites no longer rely on their cognitive maps to tell them where to go and how to get there, the number of accessible destinations will likely change. After all, anyone with a smartphone has unlimited knowledge of surrounding opportunities; a quick search will offer many alternatives for how to get, for example, pizza or sushi. It is possible to discover new places more easily than ever before, notwithstanding reductions in one’s own spatial reasoning.8 Access should remain a critical concern for equitable cities and there are reasons to be wary of increasing dependence on technology. Effectively, we may arrive in cities where the benefits they provide are ever more disconnected from their form or organization. The decoupling of accessibility and imageability underscores the ongoing salience of Kevin Lynch’s exhortation that imageability not just be a matter of form, but also of education and experience, where learning the city is a necessary part of living in it.

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10.3 Uses of urban space New, granular data from geolocated devices has revived interest in studying mobility across time and space, which are dimensions that conventional travel surveys collected on limited bases. This interest allows researchers to easily leverage the pioneering work of Swedish geographer, Hägerstrand, who developed influential ideas about space–time pathways (Miller, 2016). Imagine the area around a given individual as being reduced to two dimensions on a plane. A third dimension would be the vertical axis and would represent time, creating a three-dimensional “aquarium” that represents the portion of space they travel and time. A stationary individual (e.g., at a desk job) would be represented as a vertical line between the start and end times. Travel across town would be represented by sloped line in the three-dimensional space–time between the two locations. A faster mode of travel means the individual will reach their destination sooner and the line will have a steeper slope, thereby helping discern the mode, distance, purpose, and location. The sequencing and duration of stops would be evident by deconstructing the space–time path. The value of space–time prisms is two-fold, both of which relate back to better envisioning the amount and type of travel one typically pursues. Transport scientists can more quickly learn about one’s travel through the course of the day. How much of it is close by to one’s home? How much is influenced by activities close to other locations? Personal and household characteristics such as gender, stage in the life cycle, income, employment status, and even religion still affect people’s ability, desire, and need to engage in activities at times in places, and even by mode. Travel varies by sociodemographic characteristics. Women make shorter trips; they are more likely to combine these into tours, multi-staged trips. They work closer to home, make a higher proportion of their trips for shopping and personal business, and conduct more of their travel on foot or by transit. What is unclear, however, is the degree to which these characteristics will hold true for a future that is tied to geography in new ways. As contemporary city planning initiatives increasingly prioritize the number of services someone can access close to their home (e.g., the 20-minute city), space–time prisms can help ascertain current levels and their distance to aspirational levels.

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A second factor ties to, as a whole, how far and how much people travel. As advances in transport technology have allowed faster travel, further distanced locations can be reached in the same period of time. This would increase the geographic spread of how far people travel. However, people neither spend more time traveling nor make more trips today on average than in previous decades. Time, a finite resource in people’s lives, is a scarce resource to allocate according to one’s utility—expressed by dollars per hour of pleasure. But travel can also have a positive utility— and at no time did this become apparent to many than during the COVID pandemic, when people yearned for reasons to leave their home. Of the 1,440 minutes in a day, how much of that time is spent, on average, going between activities? Transport folklore suggests that ever since the ancient Babylonians, and for today’s industrialized and non-industrialized populations, allocations of time for travel and for other activities have been relatively constant—there is only so much time per day people are interested in traveling, on average. This folklore has been introduced to recent times, coined as a “travel time budget” (TTB). People have an amount of time that they are willing (or may even prefer) to spend on travel and in the aggregate the theory has gained currency over the years. From all walks of life, on average, people travel a bit more than an hour per day. The TTB idea is most associated with transport researcher Yacov Zahavi, who used travel surveys throughout the world in the 1970s and 1980s to predict the stability and predictability of these behaviors (Mokhtarian and Chen, 2004), ideas that were later furthered by Cesare Marchetti who promoted the idea to an empirical constant (Marchetti, 1994). Space–time prisms can help expose all of the above-mentioned concepts into present day issues by better understanding how travel patterns are changing.

10.4 Rates of change in city structures The concepts mentioned above (i.e., the impact of new forms of travel, increased data, space–time prisms, cognitive accessibility maps) help understand individual behaviors and how people navigate their travel environment. It is possible to use this knowledge to improve urban trans-

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port, and overcoming implementation challenges draw from understanding the dynamics of urban change. The physical structures of cities are durable, in that the built form is designed to last decades, at least, while the placement of roads and streets can be indefinite. Of these built environment and transport components, some are more adaptable and have the potential to change quicker than others. We borrow from prior thinking (Wegener et al., 1986) to first identify how there are different physical stocks in cities—i.e., industrial buildings, residential buildings, roadways—together with dynamics that affect how each are used—i.e., economic structure, employment, migration. A change in one of these city stocks stimulates any array of factors (e.g., changes to the economy or rates of employment), which affect urban systems as a whole as well as the response to individual components. Each process has an ability write over some actions or to reverse the direction from past decisions and Figure 10.1 distills some of this thinking.

Note: Some components of cities are slow to change while others are quick; transport corridors can be quick to change character and hold high value in doing so. Source: Many depictions drawn from Wegener et al. (1986).

Figure 10.1

Change process in cities

As applied to transport, there are two important takeaways from this approach. The first derives from the dynamics affecting public versus

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private land. The system of property rights, as witnessed in many Western countries, provides both rigidity and staying power. After London was destroyed by fire in 1666, some of the best British minds, including Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and John Evelyn, endorsed efforts to modernize the geometrical pattern of their streets. Their plans for new public thoroughfares, however, were not realized. It was easier and quicker to rebuild the city along its old medieval roads. The location, amount, and geometry of space in streets largely stays the same over centuries. The shape and location of the physical stock are among the most durable in cities. A second takeaway centers on how uses that were dictated by past decisions can be easily written over. Of all the different components in cities, streets are nimbler than all other elements of the built environment. Using roadway space differently is more malleable than, for example, tearing down entire buildings or reformatting entire blocks. This space is easily adaptable and easily serves a different purpose from its current character within a month, a week, or even overnight. There is no technical reason streets used to accommodate rush hour demand cannot be used for other purposes on weekends, for instance. Many cities around the world have embraced ciclovias, where streets are closed to vehicles on a weekend day but opened to people walking or biking.

10.5 Transitioning to new transport networks Practices from cities across the globe lie at different points on a continuum in processes to reimagine street space and repurpose their use. Some of the oldest streets in the world, in Italy, remain in use today. They transition through life cycles, being fueled by new technologies and in response to economic or social and cultural trends. We see these former layers embedded in streets that are routinely maintained and torn up, where we witness vestiges of earlier lives—tracks from streetcars, horseshoes, and even ruts from Roman chariots. All of these changes occur while the dynamics associated with land use change happen at a considerably slower rate. This helps show the durability of the built form and the opportunity for change as each successive street innovation creates a different use and function.

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Consider the past post-industrialization period in the US, where streets, including many still familiar to many, have seen walking, omnibuses, streetcars, bicycles, and ultimately cars and trucks. The industrial revolution spawned new means of locomotion which required advances in the surfaces on which to operate. A prominent example lies in how bicyclists demanded better riding surfaces, which in turn helped to spur a national movement in the US for “good roads.”9 The smoother road surfaces, served through macadam road technology, which involves layers of crushed gravel, ensured better traveling conditions for all. Steamrolling companies furthered the movement10 and new provisions afforded in the streets and the devices that used the space evolved hand-in-glove. In towns throughout the Netherlands, street space is constantly evolving, relatively speaking. Here, it is not uncommon for a street or an intersection to be altered, almost overnight, by adding a bicycle lane, removing a traffic light or limiting the use of cars. Different types of brick comprise their composition, thereby allowing quick and modular reconstruction processes that are built into public works projects. Advocates have been, for decades, pressing for broad types of uses, beyond just moving cars, and these spaces are locations of hotly contested affairs. One consistent and top priority has been to consciously provide space for smaller vehicles, such as bicycles. By providing adequate space for them, the Dutch have realized many gains to their society. Reinventing the purpose of these public spaces is an ongoing activity. Streets in US cities, in contrast, are difficult to change, as they have been codified from the outset to satisfy automobiles—and subsequently, so too have countless layers of regulation, financing, and social norms. This orientation and use, however, is not sacrosanct. The manner in which streets evolve through the centuries is a phenomenon capable of being learned by engineers, planners, decision-makers, and most importantly, the public. Streets are more flexible than generally considered, and changing how streets are used is a highly effective way to meet the current challenges facing society. What happens in the space—the types of movement that are enabled with advances in technology—evolve over time. In his well-known book, How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand presents analog changes that occur to buildings (Brand, 1994). Successful buildings, meaning those that provide

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value over decades or centuries, are those that adapt. He broke down buildings into different layers that are adapted, maintained, and altered at different timescales, but the “bones” of a structure largely change most slowly. Applying the analogy to streets, the roadbed is both the site and structure of streets, and the pavement, curbs, striping, and such is the skin that changes in response to external forces, be they economic, technological, or other.

10.6 Considerations on interdisciplinary approaches to transport Regardless of the mobility types that will be afforded by the future, planners and transport scientists can rely on “close to universal truths” about human behavior and the potential for change in cities. Like most human behavior, travel is habitual. The strongest predictor of one’s trip today is the trip that was taken yesterday. But people do change with circumstance, such as a technological invention. No one used Uber in 2008 because it did not exist, and now about 10 percent of Americans use ridehailing monthly. Other basic truths—some mentioned above (e.g., travel time budget, imageability)—can be expected to hold true into the future and will have bearing to help predict future concerns and future needs. Changing societal conditions suggest that other assumptions might no longer be relevant. Conventional transport analysis is based on the premise that travel is a cost, and that travel times should be as short as possible. This is changing as the new technology allows greater travel time flexibility, including working remotely. It provides tremendous opportunity and choice in leisure activities, whether this means time spent online in the home, or taking the opportunity to book a last-minute holiday overseas, or adapting existing activities (such as shopping). As transport revolutions (e.g., electrification, automation, sharing) continue to churn through cities (Sperling, 2018), knowing how new and innovative forms of mobility are accepted into urban systems provides an important tenet to understand. Emerging and burgeoning markets for electric bikes provide just one data point to consider. Technology’s influence on future street etchings is inevitable and guiding principles, based on research evidence, are needed.

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Easing transitions for how new entrants are or are not accepted requires a sense of policy and regulatory innovation. By enabling experimentation, hedging bets on uncertain technologies, and directing resources to promote modes that move the most people in the least amount of space, cities can work to create a harmonious mix of mobility services that keeps residents safe, sidewalks clear, and traffic flowing—whatever the means of conveyance. The transport scientist has a role to understand the factors that influence how people travel and the parameters through which cities change—new knowledge which can go a long way.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

We are limiting these to land use and transport planning. City planners work on many more issues than only land development and civil engineers handle all types of environmental systems. Classic scientists run laboratory experiments in efforts to control as much as possible of the study environment in efforts to identify the causal effects of an action. Tackling an understanding of transport rarely has that luxury. Real world issues affect transport—outcomes that are conditioned by politics, culture, and personal preference. There are always confounding explanations as to why some outcomes are realized. Previously, these inquiries relied on highly aggregate information derived from proxy measures—or theories might have been tested with costly-to-collect data. SUVs sit higher off the ground and are more likely to crush someone’s torso than legs, which increases the chance of catastrophic organ failure. The larger size is compounded by higher speeds—reducing speed limits to 30 km per hour or lower greatly increases the likelihood of survival for someone who is hit by a vehicle. Emerging research applications using eye-gaze software (Rupi and Krizek, 2019) are able to shine new light on these matters. These neighbors are so common that city planners call them NIMBYs, which stands for Not In My Back Yard. Windshield bias is when people experience the city primarily as a driver, seeing the world through a windshield. By experiencing the city as drivers, their primary focus is traffic. They don’t recognize the perspectives of those who do not drive, and miss the details of the city that non-driving travelers see. Exclusive reliance on digital maps reduces our own spatial reasoning, leaving us ever dependent on information from others such as the Flynn Effect, which shows how steadily increasing IQ scores in the 20th century has been reversed in recent generations. The cause is disputed, but many researchers point to declining critical thinking skills due to the internet.

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9.

Similar efforts were seen around the same time in other countries at similar stages of development. 10. For example, Buffalo and Springfield were two large steamrolling companies that united and also yielded the name for the band formed by Neil Young, Richie Furay, and Stephen Stills.

References Brand, S. (1994). How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. Orion. Krizek, K. J., Otten, B., and Rupi, F. (2020). Emerging transport futures for streets and how eye tracking can help improve safety and design. In Justin Hollander and Ann Sussman (eds), Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm. Routledge, pp. 140–145. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City (vol. 11). MIT Press. Marchetti, C. (1994). Anthropological invariants in travel behavior. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 47(1), 75–88. Miller, H. J. (2016). Time geography and space–time prism. International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology, 1–19. Mokhtarian, P. L., and Chen, C. (2004). TTB or not TTB, that is the question: A review and analysis of the empirical literature on travel time (and money) budgets. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 38(9–10), 643–675. Norton, P. D. (2008). Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. MIT Press. Rupi, F., and Krizek, K. J. (2019). Visual eye gaze while cycling: Analyzing eye tracking at signalized intersections in urban conditions. Sustainability, 11(21), 6089. Sperling, D. (2018). Three Revolutions: Steering Automated, Shared, and Electric Vehicles to a Better Future. Island Press. Wegener, M., Gnad, F., and Vannahme, M. (1986). The time scale of urban change. In B. Hutchinson and M. Batty (eds), Advances in Urban Systems Modelling. North Holland, pp. 175–197.

11. Visions, new currents, and altered processes for transport planning

If you don’t know where are going you might not get there

Most planners, politicians, and members of the public expect that urban transport will change substantially over the next few years. Yet no one can be certain how and to what degree. Electrification of vehicles will affect funding for infrastructure; any new fees to make up for lost fuel taxes will affect consumer demand for travel. Innovative vehicle types and options for sharing will influence the type of vehicles people own and use. Yet to be invented vehicles will be traversing streets and automation will change how both people and goods move about. Given these factors, plus countless others both known and unknown, it would be a mistake to expect that existing urban transport systems will remain unchanged. Too many components are under internal and external pressure and anyone saying otherwise is either a charlatan or staunchly committed to the status quo. Consider alone the market for electric services. Over the next few years nearly every global automaker will start selling electric vehicles for mass market rather than the wealthy.1 Other changes will affect whether people travel at all. Telework was already the fastest growing commute choice in the United States (in share of national commuting), having overtaken transit in 2017, and the 2020 pandemic accelerated this shift toward working from home. At least some of this additional shift to working from home is expected to be permanent. Simultaneously, bicycles, particularly electric bikes, continue to explode in popularity. Both through sudden shocks and increments, changes are taking root through market forces and traveler demand that affect transport systems.

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Identifying the important components that will inevitably affect transport change is helpful. More challenging, however, is the pursuit to reconcile how any one of these changes will comport with emerging transport planning priorities. Most professionals associated with the transport industry agree that current transport practices fail to spur healthy environments or competitive economies. These practices, favoring cars, undermine the qualities that most people prize as part of livable communities. They do not ensure fiscal responsibility—far too many cities and states are delaying maintenance and cutting services in the best of times. And, all of these deficiencies are deeply rooted, whether in constituency and money politics, in state governance, or in the history of metropolitan development. Laying uncertain change on top of a broken system instills little confidence that municipalities can effectively navigate important shifts that are forthcoming (Marsden and McDonald, 2019). Reform is warranted and necessary. Yet it will not come easily. We do not claim to have solutions to these vexing problems. No one does. What we do know is that not knowing where one wants to go won’t get you there, nor will not knowing the hurdles that will need to be overcome. This last chapter aims to at least identify pillars that allow a new path to unfold by describing new visions, actions, and roles for planners. Ultimately, however, transport policy and the values that planners will follow in the future will need to be vigorously debated in the public realm.

11.1 Preferences, innovation, and alternative futures Driving is popular among the masses, no doubt. But planning processes that favor cars above other modes are unlikely to accurately reflect future consumer sentiment, simply because few alternatives are reasonably offered. Soviet residents waiting in long bread lines did not reflect the popularity of bread; they reflected the lack of alternatives to the bread line. Allowing new technologies and modes to develop, competition will eventually drive down the costs of alternatives and thereby increase innovation. Market forces reveal what consumers want, but only to the extent that existing policies do not stifle expression of those preferences. Rally cries for contemporary transport planning are increasingly echoing 500-year-old sentiments. In 1490, Leonardo da Vinci described the

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Vitruvian man. He used it to represent a concept that relates humans to nature and the workings of the universe. Da Vinci asserted that everything that was to be built should be constructed with the human’s perspective in mind. Cities were quite different back then, and it is unclear where Leonardo would stand on current transport discussions, though he did produce hundreds of sketches and written materials about human mechanical flight and the architecture of cities—all of which centered on human-scaled environments. In the 1970s Austrian civil engineer Hermann Knoflacher highlighted the over-consuming nature of cars in terms of how much space they require. He constructed a wood-frame outline of a car and allowed a pedestrian to hang it over their shoulders, showing the excess space someone driving alone consumes. The ridehailing company Uber riffed the idea to help make the point that sharing cars is space efficient in a 2017 advertising campaign.2 To humanize the emotional toll of the devastating crush of traffic, the video shows drivers in extremely large cardboard boxes, not automobiles, ending with the city being overrun by boxes. This resonates with our sentiments from Chapter 3 suggesting how the auto-oriented mobility paradigm was doomed to ultimately fail in the end. Even in cities of the new world, high mobility can still be achieved with devices are smaller than a standard car (King and Krizek, 2020a). What might a probable vision for urban transport look like in five years’ time? Much like at the beginning of the 20th century when “motordom” was taking root, many forms of innovation will be tried—lots of tinkering to find solutions that “work” for cities and their regulatory structures, entrepreneurs, and of course, the preferences of travelers. Perennial questions will require challenging new ownership models, payment systems, social practices, policies—not the least of which would be the regulations and codes that are used to design streets. As a new post-car system evolves, steel boxes that so many have grown to love (and hate) will be even more cherished as relics. Mounting indicators now suggest that the car, as most people know it—a two-ton object of steel, powered by refined oil, privately owned, seating four or more people, requiring its own territory for parking— might be a remnant of the 20th century. Some of this thinking is reinforced by dwindling supplies of oil (one new barrel is discovered for every four used), increasing evidence that vehicular travel is plateauing, and of

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course, younger generations show less interest in car-oriented “stuff” as prior generations. Furthermore, other forms of travel are becoming more available and attractive to use. Cumulatively, these factors can help one envision how alternative, post-car transport systems could develop—mixing new technology, new ways of organizing material goods and new preferences (King and Krizek, 2020b). It is easier to see how personal transport will leverage small and ultra-light, smart, battery-based vehicles that would be either hired or personally owned. These vehicles would be human-centric in size, much like bicycles. They would allow travelers to move about at speeds that bridge the competing needs of transport in modern-day cities with a rhythm in cities that prizes livability. Therefore, urban streets would be full of speed controlled micro-cars, minibuses, hybrids, driverless public transport, bicycles, and pedestrians. These smaller vehicles would be seamlessly integrated with larger-scale, long-haul, public transport systems. Should one need to travel more than 50 km away (e.g., to a meeting), this would be done virtually. The guiding principle for transport planners will shift from a system of ownership to one of access. While drawing concerns about the freedom to move without tracing, pay-as-you-go type enterprises will win the race and endure constant transformation. Smartphones will be used extensively with real-time scheduling, allowing seamless integration across multiple digital platforms. Municipal practices will learn from one another and the transfer of knowledge will be fluid. A city, for example, would borrow from the experience of e-bikes in China, battery replacement in Israel, public transport in Brazil, and electric vehicles in San Francisco, and guidelines for human-scaled streets from the Dutch. Cities will need to exploit small cracks in auto mobility systems based on niche developments that are already occurring. Perennial questions will center on the need to understand preferences for accessibility and how new niches of services would be seamlessly assembled into a new, socio-technical transport network. Furthermore, as transport technologies and preferences are expected to change (Figure 11.1), so will the reliance on long-range transport plans. They will be increasingly difficult to justify based on assumptions of past practices. Long-range planning is required through state and federal rules,

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but making 25-year plans also focuses the planners’ attention far down the road while only using yesterday’s technologies. For instance, Sound Transit in Seattle, which is widely credited with an aggressive approach to building voter-approved rail transit projects, explains on its website that the planning, environmental review, design, construction, and testing phases for each urban rail line take about 17 years to complete. Starting work now, a new line not currently on the books would be expected to open in 2037—not nearly soon enough to adapt to technological change or pressing problems. Shortening the planning, design, and construction horizon to under ten years would introduce flexibility to the process.3

Note: The design of cities has adapted to transport services (panel a); transport services have adapted to city design (panel b). Future urban transport systems will require highly adaptable processes to respond to constantly changing technologies (panel c).

Figure 11.1

Components of change in cities

Successful planners will leverage such uncertainty to improve the planning process and make it more flexible. They will incorporate new goals and values to reflect contemporary concerns. More effort will be devoted to understanding the uncertainty of any particular forecast. Decisions that favor adaptability will win the race. These are just a few ways in which transport planners will need to use their technical expertise and political experience.

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11.2 Evolving standards and regulations For innovation to thrive, status quo operations will need to be challenged. In cities, those operations are reinforced by existing standards and regulations, most of which prioritize driving cars, even at the expense of other choices. We accept that private vehicles will forever be part of cities. This does not mean, however, that cities must build roads to accommodate ever-larger cars and trucks in perpetuity. Following current regulations to lay future infrastructure reinforces a path dependency that allow few options for deviation. The durability of transport infrastructure means that decisions made today will create infrastructure lasting into the next century—when the world is expected to be in a very different condition. Street design standards provide desirable uniformity in how street transport facilities are managed across the country (and world). If a visitor to the United States wonders why so much of the cities and suburbs look the same and are hostile to walking, biking, and transit, these standards are to blame. They offer guidelines that are as unambiguous as possible, driven by philosophy to facilitate safe and expeditious movement of cars. If a city council sought to change streets to make, for example, streets more pedestrian friendly, executable actions behind this proposition, in theory, appear straightforward to implement: paint more crosswalks, increase the intersection crossing time for pedestrians or provide for higher quality sidewalk space. Unrealized in these actions, and countless others like them, is that these types of actions mostly run up against MUTCD rules that, for almost a century,4 have been meticulously refined and adhered to, to facilitate driving. For liability reasons if no other, transport planners and engineers adhere to standards and regulations, regardless of other (and better) guidance issued from other sources. City politics are riddled with apprehension about changing standards as it opens them up to risk. Transport planners might feel inadequate to challenge new design proposals put forth because of perceived lack of expertise and a general attitude of not being able to address engineering parameters. For many employees, it is best not to engage in practices that raise any liability concerns, whether it comes from the city attorney’s office or from the traffic and design manuals. They therefore end up slavishly adhering to standards and regulations as a crutch to shield themselves from lawsuits and from responsibility in

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decision making. This happens even though a mainstream, by-rote solution may be less desirable in its result than a new and creative approach. Such actions not only further legitimize existing standards, they fail to recognize sometimes detrimental outcomes. Following standards can foster nonsensical results such as curb cuts to comply with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements even if there is no sidewalk available, or using concurrency standards and on-the-books formulae to predict traffic which is blind to location context (transit-rich areas versus auto dependent ones).5 An engineer’s professional judgement is an important piece of information that feeds the decision making for any of these processes. Too often, this judgement, together with the liability argument, is leaned on as an effective combination to shut down new ideas, which extends to political risk taking. Practices built on existing standards and regulations will gradually lose their value as streets change to favor pedestrians, bicycles or some other yet to be conceived form of transport. One silver lining in being able to rely on this judgement is to realize that prescriptions offered through manuals are suggestions, not mandates. This window allows engineers to defend actions for new infrastructure treatments (e.g., experimenting with a new infrastructure treatment like special paint designed to cool the urban heat effects of asphalt). What’s more it allows them to set in motion a process to change existing standards through experimentation.6 Mounting pressures suggest it is necessary to work towards simple and predictable regulatory approaches that will better design future streets under effective democratic control. Doing so allows a higher proportion of new designs are that are regenerative of existing places and aligned to measurably higher well-being outcomes for residents.

11.3 Performance measures Clearly understood performance indicators help communities reflect, learn, and plan future transport systems. Yet being clearly understood does not mean that indicators indicate what is valuable or desired. From the early days of traffic engineering, performance indicators have largely been used to evaluate the performance of what data are easy to collect— namely traffic flow, volume, and speed. This focus on vehicles leaves

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people’s movement a secondary concern at best. Rarely are engineers or planners asked to develop facilities that allow the greatest personal access, rather the vehicular focus is a powerful tool for maintaining auto-centric planning because the performance indicators are so intuitive. Never mind that the performance of transport systems, mostly roads, have deteriorated over the past decades based on these very indicators. But as flawed as existing performance measures are, they represent the well-worn gears of the transport planning process. One notable recent success is California’s switch from Level of Service (LOS) impact to vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) when evaluating the effect of land development on the transport system. LOS is an A–F grading system of traffic speeds, where A is free-flow traffic and F is gridlocked. Engineers and planners work to maintain roads at grade C or above, so that traffic keeps moving, albeit delayed. Under the old rules, trip generation manuals were used to estimate the number of trips any new project would create, then these trips were assigned to a network model to estimate the contribution of these new trips. New trips were expected to add vehicles to peak hours; typically these evaluations would find that new development reduced the LOS for the nearby road network. If LOS was reduced below C, then additional mitigation measures may be required. In 2019, transport planners and advocates convinced the state to pass new laws that require new developments to measure the potential effects on VKT instead of LOS. Measuring changes in VKT not only allows for considering how mode share affects the impact of development on traffic, but better reflects goals beyond congestion, such as carbon emissions—and it stands as an example of adjusting the measures used for planning to better reflect values and priorities.

11.4 Pricing Current transport problems will not be resolved by pouring money into a broken system. Rather, the impact of any action will be strengthened by looking to initiatives that favor pricing to allocate scarce space. It might be congestion pricing and parking fees that ensure free-flowing traffic and efficient use of parking spaces. Some cities and states already charge tolls in freeway express lanes, and some states are considered per-mile fees

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for all miles driven. Local taxes and fees are growing as a share of overall transport revenues, and this trend is expected to continue. The major implications for planning are that the shift toward user fees presents an opportunity to manage demand through pricing rather than thinking of transport planning as mostly an infrastructure problem. Planning with prices requires embracing user fees. Too often, user fees are viewed as a tax, often on something people expect to get for free. They therefore face political opposition. That said, the political problem with new taxes and fees is not just that people do not want to pay new taxes. The problem with new taxes and fees is that people prefer the status quo to change; new taxes or fees that promise benefits in the future appear as immediate costs which are problematic (King et al., 2007). The main issue with new user fees, such as road tolls, is mainly one of implementation. Where road tolls have been installed, they have become popular after they became established. In London, congestion charges implemented in 2003 were installed shortly after, and in conjunction with, new bus services paid for in part with the toll revenue, so people saw that they had alternatives to the tolls. Ultimately, however, the success of transport planning depends a great deal on revealing the true cost of driving to motorists, and ensuring that adequate alternatives are available. If the price of driving remains much cheaper than alternatives, in money and time, there are few reasons to expect that our transport systems will even moderately change. Planning with prices is not only an opportunity, we argue, but also an imperative to address current or future urban transport challenges.

11.5 Integrative and entrepreneurial spirits Finally, there is a swelling perception, especially among young scholars and practitioners, that transport planning’s efficacy has been lacking in past decades. Practitioners are perceived to largely protect the status quo, and that the craft of transport planning has been unsuccessful over the last half century in solving congestion, environmental, justice, or other problems for which it is associated. An important dimension responsible for this condition lies in the integration of transport, land use, and budgeting agencies. Few, if any, requirements exist for different organizations

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to collaborate on major decisions concerning transportation, land use, social equity, and budgeting. If transport agencies focus more on vehicles than people, and if urban management professionals neglect the ways in which residential, commercial, and industrial land use policies may impact individuals’ transportation decisions, the urban areas managed are likely to become spatially fragmented.7 A common complaint from transport and land use planners is that each field is independent of the other, so coordinating land development and transport is difficult and often fails. There are ways to improve this, such as value capture, but we should not lose sight of another challenge: the silos within transport. Integrating roads, transit, bicycling, sidewalks, and new technologies will have a positive effect of reducing intermodal competition for scarce space and money. While those headed to work for government, consulting agencies, advocates, and other places have typically been marshalled to advise on matters of public service, ending their responsibility there absolves them of the consequences of their actions. To embrace the opportunities and challenges facing urban transport, planners will be well served to be more entrepreneurial in their approaches than in years past. Planning initiatives derived from a “predict and provide” approach have run their course and emerging is a spirit of “better use what is available.” A complete rethink is required about the role of transport planner from A to Z. For example, connecting a policy solution often requires an agent to “soften up” the policy community—an entrepreneurial spirit to help demonstrate how the politics fits with the proposal and how the solution can be executed, should it be taken up. Technical feasibility is an essential component, requiring the planner to eliminate inconsistencies, attend to the feasibility of implementation, and specify the actual mechanisms by which an idea would be brought into practical use. But given that societal values change over time and are influenced by politics, the emerging skills of the transport planner will likely require them to advocate for change that the community can support. We expect the emerging skills of successful transport planners will revolve around presenting different, feasible alternatives as legitimate policy options. Emerging initiatives, for example, might lie inside the Overton Window8 and it will be the transport planner’s role to bring them to fruition. Should

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initiatives have “value acceptability,” they must still compatible with the values of the specialists involved in the planning process. This means that solutions should be something that politicians care about, since they are needed to pass the laws. It also needs to be compatible with anticipated future constraints. Civil servants need to be convinced that the costs of the program will not exceed a financially acceptable level, and believe the proposal has a reasonable chance of being approved of by politicians and the public (Kingdon, 2011). There is a looming sense that planners in America lack the agency or authority to turn idealism into reality, that planning has neither the prestige nor the street credibility to effect real change. As transport planners navigate the uncertainties and complexity of new transport portfolios, skills that a 21st-century transport planner needs are evolving. Their capacities to communicate, coordinate, and cultivate acceptance and support within an institutional context that generally resists change become paramount skills to learn, foster, and refine (Glaser et al., 2020).

11.6 Considerations for futures and uncertainties We prepared this book to be nearly universal in its ability to apply to many contexts. We aimed to deepen the reader’s understanding of universal truths about cities and travel which change little with time. The dynamics that we relied on pull from forces (e.g., benefits, costs, time) that are general enough to be represented through the rationales afforded by the gravity model formula we provided. What will change are the coefficients that moderate how each of the forces play out, including the agents that might moderate those forces. For example, one law is that cities help form accessibility-based economies; we would be misguided to think that the characteristics of those economies change. Most cities are no longer manufacturing-based; they change. In a similar vein, we argue so does the need to model transport systems around cars. What matters is allowing residents to get what they need in the easiest manner and while yesterday’s cars were treated like royalty, being ushered in with supporting regulations, financing and more, there’s little reason to afford tomorrow’s cars the same luxury.

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Cars have also prompted many negative externalities that are hard to correct for. It is time to treat other modes that have minimal externalities with the same respect as cars were once treated. New transport facilities deserve to be celebrated and future types of ribbon-cutting events will likely be different. They will celebrate the overall access that is provided— to the workers who create them, the public-sector decision-makers who planned them, the elected officials who appropriated their funds, and the residents who use them. Furthermore, application of the laws will vary by the policy that is enacted, which vary by context. Strategies to implement value pricing, for example, will be received differently in a city known to embody progressive politics—the same when installing a protected bike lane or implementing a transit fare system. Context matters. Planners and engineers need to be fully aware of the suites of available tools, but they also need to know how to assess those tools that will have high probability of success. Social situations mutate. Today’s solution may draw self-criticism next decade. Perennial curiosity can go a long way to appraise situations if the truths are understood. Future decades may experience in higher energy prices and more aggressive carbon taxes. These conditions likely will yield considerably higher densities than currently exist in most portions of most cities. Macroeconomic trends, for example, in combination with growing public support for strategic infill, investments in transit, and higher densities along rail corridors might allow such a future to come to fruition. These assumptions, however, represent a significant departure from current housing trends, land use policies of jurisdictions on the urban fringe, and public preferences; they therefore might be unrealistic absent a strong state or regional role in growth management. The truth about what residents and businesses seek in cities is constant: potential access to many things. Transport strategies developed decades ago to furnish networks lost sight of this, if they ever recognized it (Levinson and Krizek, 2017). The need to plan for access is re-emerging and uncovering timely and appropriate solutions to improve access comprises a great planning challenge of our time. An atomized approach that lacks coordination, direction, vision, or, importantly, a sustainable stream of revenue, will not allow that challenge to be overcome. Therefore, planners, transport engineers, decision-makers, and the public will be

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responsible for making decisions that will strengthen the union between movements and places. By stretching our thinking we will be successful in channeling policy solutions that allow us to do more with less.

Notes 1. Electric vehicle markets vary by country. In 2020 electric cars are expensive luxury goods in the US and Europe, while China is the largest electric car market, by far, and their models are inexpensive and utilitarian. But Volkswagen, who sells more cars than any other manufacturer globally, claims that by 2030 over 40 percent of their vehicles sold will be fully electric. Battery costs are declining rapidly while performance is improving. Solar power and other renewable sources of energy are becoming cheaper while oil and fossil fuels are becoming more expensive to find and refine. We expect the electric revolution is here to stay. 2. The Uber video is available here: https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​oNyq2​ _92H0Y. 3. New York City changed direction from the 2005 proposal for the 7 train extension to Hudson Yards in Manhattan to revenue service in ten years; quick change is possible. 4. For a rich history of the MUTCD, its evolution, and its role in affecting streets, see: https://​ceprofs​.civil​.tamu​.edu/​ghawkins/​MUTCD​-History​_files/​ MUTCDm​arkingcolo​revolution​.pdf. 5. Trip generation tables, for example, have been shown to overestimate vehicular travel, as they only look at localized congestion effects (not impacts on the total network), and because the data is collected at suburban sites with few alternatives to driving. 6. For more on the FHWA process of experimentation, see: https://​mutcd​.fhwa​ .dot​.gov/​condexper​.htm. 7. An example to follow could be something like Transport for London (TfL), where TfL is responsible for all transportation facilities and services within the city. To invest more in cycling facilities, TfL can reallocate space and resources from within the agency. Integrating transport planning like this can overcome the bureaucratic tendency toward protecting its turf, regardless of societal need. During the COVID-19 pandemic, TfL was able to use its authority to reorganize streets to promote outdoor activities and human-scaled traffic. Such rapid and comprehensive action would be much more difficult if many agencies were required to meet a consensus. 8. For more on the Overton window, see: https://​ www​ .mackinac​ .org/​ OvertonWindow.

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References Glaser, M., Krizek, K. J., and King, D. A. (2020). Accelerating reform to govern streets in support of human-scaled accessibility. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 7, 1–4.100199. King, D. A., and Krizek, K. J. (2020a). The power of reforming streets to boost access for human-scaled vehicles. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 83, 102336. King, D., and Krizek, K. (2020b). Visioning transport futures through windows of opportunity: Changing streets and human-scaled networks. Town Planning Review, 92(2), 157–163. https://​www​.live​rpoolunive​rsitypress​.co​.uk/​journals/​ ahead​-of​-print/​43. King, D., Manville, M., and Shoup, D. (2007). The political calculus of congestion pricing. Transport Policy, 14(2), 111–123. Kingdon, J. W. (2011). Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (updated, 2nd edition). Pearson. Levinson, D. M., and Krizek, K. J. (2017). The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape. Network Design Lab. https://​ses​.library​.usyd​.edu​.au/​handle/​2123/​18972. Marsden, G., and McDonald, N. C. (2019). Institutional issues in planning for more uncertain futures. Transportation, 46, 1075–1092.

Index

85th percentile measures 65, 66, 68–9, 73 AASHTO Green Book 78, 79 access/accessibility 2–3, 21–35 access tools and thinking 29–30 accessibility 23–6, 29–30, 33, 34 attractiveness 24–5, 26–7 congestion 22, 23, 25 data and models 101–2 economics 43, 44 feedback loops 27–9 finance and institutional interplay 89–91, 92 future of urban transport planning 124, 128, 131–2 gravitational force, Newton’s law of 26–7 infrastructure 28, 33, 34 interdisciplinary sciences 108, 112–13 land use 24–5, 27–9, 34 measures 26–9, 33 mobility approach 21, 22–3, 24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34 modes of travel 30–32 network characteristics 25–6, 28, 33–4 performance index of transport modes 32 prioritisation of cars 21, 22, 31 regions, districts, neighborhoods 50–51, 54–6, 57–8, 59–61 spatial factors 31–2 street space 68, 70 streetcars 30, 34

transport justice 10–12, 13, 15–17, 18, 19 travel time 23–4, 25, 31 accidents 17, 40, 42, 65, 110–11 adaptability of planning 34, 115, 116, 125 agglomeration 1, 2, 8 see also proximity/closeness alternative transportation futures 122–5 American City Planning Institute 76 American Community Survey 97–8 American Society of Civil Engineers 93 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990) 127 Amsterdam 59–61 attraction 24–5, 26–7, 59–60, 102 average costs 45 bicycle lanes 15–16, 44, 59, 70–71, 72, 90, 93, 100, 117, 132 Boulder (Colorado) 59–61 Brand, Stewart 117–18 built environment data and models 98–9, 101, 102, 105 finance and institutional interplay 91 interdisciplinary sciences 108, 110, 115, 116 regions, districts, neighborhoods 51, 58–9 transport justice 11, 18 buses

135

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access/accessibility 22–3, 28, 30–31 bus lanes 40, 86, 100 data and models 97, 100 economics 40, 44, 45 engineering standards 80 finance and institutional interplay 86 future of urban transport planning 129 interdisciplinary sciences 109, 117 regions, districts, neighborhoods 53 transport justice 12, 15 Bus Rapid Transit systems 34, 55 Bus Riders Union 12 capacity (of road networks) 21–2, 41–3, 66, 68, 78–80, 97 cars access/accessibility 21, 22, 30–31, 33 carpooling 53, 71–2, 99, 100, 105 data and models 99–101, 102, 105 economics 39–40, 45–8 electrification of 86, 94, 118, 121 engineering standards 76, 77, 79–82 finance and institutional interplay 85, 90, 93–4 future of urban transport planning 122–4, 126, 131–2 impact of planning on other transport modes 3–7, 22, 70, 122 interdisciplinary sciences 110, 111–12, 117 ‘motordom’ culture 111–2, 123 parking see parking prioritisation of 1, 3–7, 13–14, 16–17, 21–2, 64–5, 70, 81–2, 97, 122–3, 126, 131–2 regions, districts, neighborhoods 53, 56 street space 64–5, 68, 71–2 SUVs 46, 110

transport justice 12, 13–14, 15, 16–17, 19 catchment areas 57 CATS (Chicago Area Transportation Study) 97 Central Business District (CBD, Chicago) 97 Chicago 2, 86, 97 Christaller, Walter 52 ‘City Planning’ 76 climate change 34, 57 ‘commitment trap’ 104 common goods 43 commuting 23, 94, 121 data and models 97–8, 99, 100, 106 economics 39–40, 41, 44 regions, districts, neighborhoods 51, 52–3, 54, 55, 61 street space 71–2 ‘complete streets’ 67 complete transport networks, need for 5–6 components of change in cities 125 congestion 1, 3, 8 access 22, 23, 25 economics 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48 engineering standards 75 finance and institutional interplay 94 future of urban transport planning 128–9 regions, districts, neighborhoods 53, 54, 57 congestion charges 129 Copenhagen 39 Covid-19 pandemic 53, 72, 94, 114, 121 Crossrail project (London) 93 curb parking 68–9, 86 Current Population Survey 98 da Vinci, Leonardo 122–3 data and models 96–107 built environment 98–9, 101, 102, 105 commuting 97–8, 99, 100, 106

INDEX

demographic and employment data 97–8, 100 forecasting 96–7, 103–4, 105 four-step models 97, 98–101, 104, 105 improved modeling 104–6 influence and value of transport models 104–5 infrastructure 96, 100, 104 original models 97 rational models 96, 106 travel demand and decay effects 101–3 decay effects 101–3 Decennial Census 97–8 defining problems 96 delivery parking spaces 68, 70–71 demand models 96–107 demographic and employment data 97–8, 100 Density (three Ds model) 58 Department of Transportation 21, 40, 87 Design (three Ds model) 58 design-scaping streets 66–7 direct democracy 91–2 Diversity (three Ds model) 58 Downs, Anthony 41 Still Stuck in Traffic 41 Stuck in Traffic 41 Downtown Tempe 68 economics 38–49 commuting 39–40, 41, 44 congestion 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48 economic goods 39, 43–4 elasticity 40, 41–3 equilibrium 40–42 externalities 47 infrastructure 38–9, 43, 45 rail networks 38, 44 streets as economic goods 43–4 supply and demand curves 39–40, 42 travel time 41–2, 47 types of costs 44–6

137

see also finance and institutional interplay education 2, 12, 16, 18, 19 elasticity 40, 41–3 electrification of vehicles 86, 94, 118, 121 employment data and models 97–8 interdisciplinary sciences 115 regions, districts, neighborhoods 52–3, 54–5, 57 street space 70 transport justice 13, 14, 17 engineering standards 75–83 engineer-planners 75–6, 80 performance measures 79–80 prioritisation of cars 81–2 road hierarchy 77–9 engineer-planners 75–6, 80 equilibrium 40–42 equity 10, 13, 14–16, 19, 81, 130 evaluating alternatives 96 Evelyn, John 116 evolving standards and regulations 126–7 eye-tracking research 111 Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) 39, 78 feedback loops 27–9 finance and institutional interplay 85–94 access/accessibility 89–91, 92 federal funds and institutional reforms 86–9 infrastructure 85, 89–90, 91–2, 93 local option taxes 89, 90–91 property taxes 90–91, 92–3 taxation 85–6, 87–8, 89–93, 94 transport referenda 89, 91–2 user fees 89–90, 94 value capture 89, 90, 92–3 see also economics ‘first mile’ problem 57 First National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion (1909) 75 Flyvbjerg, Bent 91–2

138 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

forecasting practices 96–7, 103–4, 105 four-step models 97, 98–101, 104, 105 freeway revolts (1960s) 11 freight 39, 70–71 fuel tax 19, 43, 85, 87–90, 94, 121 future of urban transport planning 121–33 access/accessibility 124, 128, 131–2 alternative transportation futures 122–5 evolving standards and regulations 126–7 infrastructure 121, 126, 127, 129 integrative and entrepreneurial spirits 129–31 performance measures 127–8 pricing 128–9, 132 traditional prioritisation of cars 122, 123, 126, 131–2 generalized costs 45 gentrification 16, 93 Geographic Positioning System (GPS) 105 George, Henry 91 Goodhart’s Law 79 graduated parking price schemes 68 gravitational force, Newton’s law of 26–7, 99 greenhouse gas emissions 32, 47 Greenshields, Bruce 77 Hägerstrand, Torsten 113 Hansen, W. G. 24 Highway Act (1962) 87 Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) 78–9 Highway Trust Fund 46, 85–6, 90, 94 Hong Kong 92, 93 Hooke, Robert 116 Hoover, Herbert 75 horizontal equity 14 How Buildings Learn 117–18 hub-and-spoke systems 53 Hudson Yards development (Manhattan) 92

identifying alternatives 96 imageability (of urban space) 111–12, 118 income 10, 13, 14, 18, 48, 52 infrastructure 1, 5 access/accessibility 28, 33, 34 data and models 96, 100, 104 economics 38–9, 43, 45 finance and institutional interplay 85, 89–90, 91–2, 93 future of urban transport planning 121, 126, 127, 129 regions, districts, neighborhoods 52, 53, 57, 58 street space 71, 73 transport justice 10, 11, 12, 19 interdisciplinary sciences 108–20 built environment 108, 110, 115, 116 dissolving boundaries 108–11 imageability and perceptions of urban space 111–12, 118 increased data 109–11, 113 mobility 108–9, 110, 111–12, 113, 118–19 rates of change in city structures 114–16 space–time prisms 113–14 technologies 108–10, 111, 112, 114, 116–19 transitioning to new transport networks 116–18 travel time 114, 118 uses of urban space 113–14 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA, 1991) 88 Interstate Highway System 2, 25, 38, 77, 86–8, 90 ‘inverse equity’ effect 16 Isolated State 50 ITE Parking Generation Manual 81 ITE Trip Generation Report 79 Jacobs, Jane 11 Knoflacher, Hermann 123 Kumagai, T. G. 24

INDEX

land use access 24–5, 27–9, 34 data and models 97, 98, 100 engineering standards 79 future of urban transport planning 129–30, 132 interdisciplinary sciences 116 regions, districts, neighborhoods 50–51, 54, 56, 57–9, 61 street space 69–70 transport justice 11, 19 ‘last mile’ problem 57, 71 LEED ND (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Neighborhood Designation) 57 legislation 6, 55, 73, 75–6, 86–8, 128, 131, 132 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990) 127 Highway Act (1962) 87 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA, 1991) 88 Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21, 1998) 88 Urban Mass Transportation Act (1964) 87 Levinson, D. M. 28 local option taxes 89, 90–91 London 93, 116, 129 Longitudinal Employer–Households Dynamics (LEHD) 98 LOS (Level of Service) guidelines 80, 128 Los Angeles 4, 5, 12, 13, 70, 76 Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority 12 lower Manhattan expressway 11 Lynch, Kevin 112 Image of the City 112 Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles (1924) 76 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) 76, 78, 126

139

Medellín 59–61 mobility 4, 72, 105 access/accessibility 21, 22–3, 24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34 future of urban transport planning 123, 124 interdisciplinary sciences 108–9, 110, 111–12, 113, 118–19 micro-mobility 5, 31, 82 transport justice 10, 13, 17, 19 mode split (four-step model) 97, 99–100 ‘Mohring Effect’ 28 Moses, Robert 11 ‘motordom’ culture 111–2, 123 MPOs (Metropolitan Planning Organizations) 87, 88–9, 98, 103 MTR (Mass Transit Railway, Hong Kong) 92, 93 Münster 31–2 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) 99 network assignment (four-step model) 97, 99, 100 network characteristics (access) 25–6, 28, 33–4 New Urbanism 55, 56 New York 1–2, 71, 75, 92, 106 Newton, Sir Isaac 26–7 North American City Transportation Officials (NACTO) 73 off-street parking 68, 69–70 Olmsted Jr, Frederick Law 76 Overton Window 130 parking 22, 46, 80–81, 100, 109, 123 curb parking 68–9, 86 delivery parking spaces 68, 70–71 finance and institutional interplay 86, 90, 93, 94 impact on other transport modes 4 off-street parking 68, 69–70 parking meters 68–9, 86

140 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

parking prices 68–9, 86, 90, 94, 100, 128 regions, districts, neighborhoods 51, 56, 57 street space 64, 68–71 Parking Generation Manual 69 path dependency 6, 126 pedestrians see walking performance measures 8, 79–80, 81, 127–8 Phoenix 70, 106 pick up/drop off (PUDO) zones 68 Pigou, Arthur C. 47 Pigouvian Tax 47 Pittsburg 91 pollution 12, 17, 22, 45, 46, 47 Portland 30 Primer on Zoning 75 private goods 44 property rights 116 property taxes 43, 90–91, 92–3 proximity/closeness 1, 2–3, 4, 8, 54, 58, 64, 73 public goods 43 Quarterly Survey of Employment and Wages 98 race 11, 12, 15, 17, 18 Rail + Property model (Hong Kong) 92 rail networks 2, 12, 25, 55 economics 38, 44 finance and institutional interplay 88, 92–3 future of urban transport planning 125, 132 rates of change (in city structures) 114–16 rational models 96, 106 Rawls, John 17 Reagan, Ronald 88 regions, districts, neighborhoods 50–61 access/accessibility 50–51, 54–6, 57–8, 59–61 built environment factors 51, 58–9

commuting 51, 52–3, 54, 55, 61 congestion 53, 54, 57 employment 52–3, 54–5, 57 infrastructure 52, 53, 57, 58 international application focused on bicycling 59–61 land development initiatives 55–6 land use 50–51, 54, 56, 57–9, 61 regional issues 52–3 regional versus local matters 54–5 transit integration 56–7 regression modeling 69–70, 105 resistance 25, 26, 59, 60 ridehailing 57, 68, 82, 118, 123 rights-of-way 38, 56, 76 Riis, Jacob 75 road hierarchy 77–9 road surfaces 117 Robinson, Charles 76 rush hour 14, 28, 61, 116 San Francisco 69, 71 Seattle 125 service span 25–6 SFPark program 69 Shoup, Donald 68–9 Smart Growth 55 smartphones 105, 109, 112, 124 social justice 16–17, 18, 19, 88 Sound Transit 125 space–time prisms 113–14 ‘spatial mismatch’ 52 speed limits 46, 65–6 speeds of movement 65 status quo transport planning 108, 121, 126, 129 street space 51, 64–73, 78, 85th percentile measures 65, 66, 68–9, 73 curb parking 68–9 design-scaping streets 66–7 freight 70–71 infrastructure 71, 73 interdisciplinary sciences 116, 117 off-street parking 68, 69–70 parking 64, 68–71 prioritisation of cars 64, 65, 70 proximity 64, 73

INDEX

speeds of movement 65 transportation demand management 71–2 widths of thoroughfares 65–6 streetcars 10, 30, 34, 55, 92, 116–17 subsidizing travel 43, 48 suburbanization 10–11 supply and demand curves 39–40, 41–2 Supreme Court 12 sustainability 16, 56 SUVs 46, 110 Taft, William Howard 75 Tax Increment Finance 93 taxation 46, 47, 129, 132 finance and institutional interplay 85–6, 87–8, 89–93, 94 fuel tax 19, 43, 85, 87–90, 94, 121 local option taxes 89, 90–91 property taxes 43, 90–91, 92–3 TAZs (Traffic Analysis Zones) 98, 99 technologies 1–2, 34 data and models 104, 105 engineering standards 78, 79 future of urban transport planning 122, 124–5 interdisciplinary sciences 108–10, 111, 112, 114, 116–19 telecommuting 53, 121 Texas Transportation Institute Urban Mobility Report index (TTI UMR) 23 ‘The Width and Arrangement of Streets’ 76 thoroughfares, widths of 65–6, 76 three Ds 58 Tobler, Waldo R. 101 TOD (transit-oriented development) 55 toll roads 40, 44, 85, 86, 89, 94, 100, 105, 128, 129 topography 59, 61 traffic lights/signals 66, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 100, 117 transit integration 56–7 transitioning to new transport networks 116–18

141

transport consideration scales 11–12 transport justice 10–19 access/accessibility 10–12, 13, 15–17, 18, 19 critical tenets 12–13 equity 10, 13, 14–16, 19, 81, 130 historic responses 14–15 income and employment 10, 13, 14, 17, 18 infrastructure 10, 11, 12, 19 mending faults 15–18 mobility 10, 13, 17, 19 placement of facilities 12 policing 12–13 prioritisation of cars 13–14, 16–17 provision of transport services 12 race 11, 12, 15, 17, 18 social justice 16–17, 18, 19, 88 veil of ignorance 17–18 transport referenda 89, 91–2 transportation demand management (TDM) 71–2 Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21, 1998) 88 travel diaries 104–5 travel time 14, 23–4, 25, 31, 41–2, 47, 114, 118 travel time budget (TTB) 114 trip distribution (four-step model) 97, 99, 101, 102 trip generation (four-step model) 97, 98–9 triple convergence 41 Uber 46, 71, 105, 118, 123 Urban Mass Transportation Act (1964) 87 urban villages 53 US Census Bureau 98 user fees 89–90, 94, 129 utilization rate 32 ‘value acceptability’ 131 value capture 89, 90, 92–3, 130 variable (marginal) costs 45–6, 47–8 v/c (volume-to-capacity) ratio 21–2, 79

142 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING

vehicle trip tables 105–6 veil of ignorance 17–18 vertical equity 14 virtuous and vicious cycles 21, 27–8 VKT (vehicle kilometers traveled) 58, 110, 128 von Thünen, Johann Heinrich 50 Wachs, M. 24 walking 4, 81–2, 101, 126 access/accessibility 23, 24, 30 interdisciplinary sciences 110, 116, 117 regions, districts, neighborhoods 54, 56, 57

street space 64, 66, 70 transport justice 15, 17 WalkScore 24, 101 warrant studies 77 Washington, DC 88 ‘wasteful commuting’ 53 woonerfs 67 working from home 53, 72, 121 Wren, Sir Christopher 116 Zahavi, Yacov 114 zoning regulations 11, 19, 57, 69, 75, 91

Titles in the Elgar Advanced Introductions series include: International Political Economy Benjamin J. Cohen The Austrian School of Economics Randall G. Holcombe Cultural Economics Ruth Towse Law and Development Michael J. Trebilcock and Mariana Mota Prado

International Conflict and Security Law Nigel D. White Comparative Constitutional Law Mark Tushnet International Human Rights Law Dinah L. Shelton Entrepreneurship Robert D. Hisrich

International Humanitarian Law Robert Kolb

International Tax Law Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

International Trade Law Michael J. Trebilcock

Public Policy B. Guy Peters

Post Keynesian Economics J.E. King

The Law of International Organizations Jan Klabbers

International Intellectual Property Susy Frankel and Daniel J. Gervais Public Management and Administration Christopher Pollitt

International Environmental Law Ellen Hey International Sales Law Clayton P. Gillette

Organised Crime Leslie Holmes

Corporate Venturing Robert D. Hisrich

Nationalism Liah Greenfeld

Public Choice Randall G. Holcombe

Social Policy Daniel Béland and Rianne Mahon

Private Law Jan M. Smits

Globalisation Jonathan Michie

Consumer Behavior Analysis Gordon Foxall

Entrepreneurial Finance Hans Landström

Behavioral Economics John F. Tomer

Cost-Benefit Analysis Robert J. Brent Environmental Impact Assessment Angus Morrison Saunders Comparative Constitutional Law Second Edition Mark Tushnet National Innovation Systems Cristina Chaminade, Bengt-Åke Lundvall and Shagufta Haneef Ecological Economics Matthias Ruth Private International Law and Procedure Peter Hay Freedom of Expression Mark Tushnet

European Union Law Jacques Ziller Planning Theory Robert A. Beauregard Tourism Destination Management Chris Ryan International Investment Law August Reinisch Sustainable Tourism David Weaver Austrian School of Economics Second Edition Randall G. Holcombe U.S. Criminal Procedure Christopher Slobogin

Law and Globalisation Jaakko Husa

Platform Economics Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller

Regional Innovation Systems Bjørn T. Asheim, Arne Isaksen and Michaela Trippl

Public Finance Vito Tanzi

International Political Economy Second Edition Benjamin J. Cohen International Tax Law Second Edition Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Social Innovation Frank Moulaert and Diana MacCallum The Creative City Charles Landry

Feminist Economics Joyce P. Jacobsen Human Dignity and Law James R. May and Erin Daly Space Law Frans G. von der Dunk Legal Research Methods Ernst Hirsch Ballin National Accounting John M. Hartwick

International Human Rights Law Second Edition Dinah L. Shelton Privacy Law Megan Richardson Law and Artificial Intelligence Woodrow Barfield and Ugo Pagello Politics of International Human Rights David P. Forsythe

Global Administration Law Sabino Cassese Housing Studies William A.V. Clark Public Policy B. Guy Peters Global Sports Law Stephen F. Ross Empirical Legal Research Herbert M. Kritzer

Community-based Conservation Fikret Berkes

Cities Peter J. Taylor

Global Production Networks Neil M. Coe

Law and Entrepreneurship Shubha Ghosh

Mental Health Law Michael L. Perlin

Mobilities Mimi Sheller

Law and Literature Peter Goodrich

Technology Policy Albert N. Link and James Cunningham

Creative Industries John Hartley

Urban Transport Planning Kevin J. Krizek and David A. King