Federal Transportation Planning in the Region: Part Two

Washington Post photo by James Thresher.

Clearly, the repercussions from BRAC prove that transportation planning tends to not be a big enough part of federal government decision-making. Agencies move, and the states and localities have to pick up the cost (granted a goodly portion comes from the Federal Highway Trust Fund) and create the infrastructure in response.

By further decentralizing and sprawling, transit becomes less effective. This is the point about WMATA being a polycentric system designed to abet sprawl and assist suburbanites.

WMATA planning, 1965. Image via Zachary Schrag.

Someone wrote to the Sprawl and Crawl column in the Examiner (see "Metro LED’s are cheap, cheap-looking") writing about how "no one is talking about extending transit to Fort Belvoir" as a result of military agency relocation to that facility.

Not true, I wrote about it extensively last summer and I have written about the impact of BRAC in Maryland too. And many others have considered it, and in fact, BRAC is what is driving talk about extending the Green Line to Fort Meade.

But something people don't appear to understand is the need for density in transportation planning and the provision of effective transit service.

The writer thinks that 10,000 people is a lot of people. It is maybe, but not in the context of the entire Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is 6,509 square miles. Without knowing the origins of the employees, and where they are in the area, and whether or not they can be served efficiently, you can't make those kinds of decisions.

Spending billions to extend service to Fort Belvoir likely makes little sense in the context of other transit infrastructure investments that can generate more transit trips and more mode shift away from single occupancy vehicle trips and automobile trips more generally. But since Virginia, Maryland, and DC all do their own planning, albeit through the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the best investments are not necessarily what go forward first.

This gets back to accessibility planning, and the necessity of it, not just within DC, but throughout the region... Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, should be required to perform accessibility planning, and to pay for the cost of expanding transportation infrastructure when required as a result of their actions.

Below is something I wrote about this in the context of DC, but it pertains at all levels.

Accessibility planning. In the Netherlands, the City of Utrecht has adopted an "ABC location policy" which classifies "development areas according to the conditions of transport." Places are rated based on their public transit infrastructure and automobile accessibility.

- A places have excellent public transit capacity and limited automobile capacity;
- B places have both good public transit and automobile access;
- C places have poor public transit and excellent automobile capacity.

Sites are rated and building uses are directed to the locations that can best accommodate both the land use and transportation system requirements in ways that maximize national transportation planning priorities of prioritizing road use for business use, public transit, car-sharing, and bicycling. Parking requirements are scaled according to the availablity of transit, and transportation demand management planning systems are in place to shape optimal mode shift targets. (European Academy of Urban Development, 1998).