Speaking of the urban (or compact development) agenda

Not only did our friends from the Reason Foundation get their study results in the San Francisco Chronicle, they made the Philadelphia Inquirer also. In "Need more roads, not mass transit," they made the same point, that more roads works better than more transit.

The real point is that connecting land use and transportation planning works best. And that's what they are not focusing on. In a world where gasoline is ever more precious and expensive, a land use paradigm requiring 9-15 daily household trips by car to conduct various activities--going to work, school, shop, visit friends, etc.--is unsustainable.

And as long as a lane of road can only move so many vehicles through per hour, the focus needs to be on mobility and moving greater numbers of people, rather than focusing on moving individual vehicles, usually containing but one person.

But where is the funding for the urban agenda, so that we can spend our time writing op-eds and submitting them to various newspapers around the country?

On an e-list I'm on, a planner in California wrote:

One of the difficulties is that most planners, like most members of the public, just don't get it. Whether they believe that single-use zones are Nirvana or if they haven't been exposed to anything else, or if they aren't rising above their training, they aren't getting it. Adding to that is the well-taken point that agencies crib off of each other, rather than doing their own homework. So there are few agencies' thresholds and methods to emulate.

It starts in school, with people like David T. Hartgen, the author of the above cited piece, who is a professor of transportation studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Index Keywords: mobility