Community Planning Month and transportation

Road Space Comparison comic by Randall Monroe, xkcd comics.

This comic is based on the first done in Germany performance of showing how much space different modes consume on the street.

-- October is National Community Planning Month

Books.  Two of the most important books related to transportation in terms of community planning are Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns: Better Living With Less Traffic by David Engwicht and Cities in Full by Steve Belmont.

Cities in Full is more technical, and now a bit out of date in its numbers, but it is great in putting numbers to the concepts laid out by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities, including what kind of densities you need to make transit viable.

It lays out the argument for "recentralization" or at least densification, to be able to provide successful communities not dominated by the car.

It's an important book for both land use and transit.  Another key distinction laid out in the book is the difference between "monocentric" and "polycentric" transit systems.

Polycentric systems are spread out, and don't support the kind of intensification and ability to reduce car use in the way that more concentrated monocentric systems do.

He uses the MUNI system in San Francisco versus the BART system serving the Bay Area as contrasting examples.  He also discusses the Metrorail system in Greater Washington as an example of polycentricity.  (SF has about 900,000 residents in 47 square miles. It also has a "transit first" mobility policy as part of the City Charter, passed by referendum.)

But the one thing I figured out that he didn't is that unintentionally, at the core in DC, 31 stations function as a monocentric network within the polycentric network, in a manner comparable to how the MUNI system serves San Francisco.  

Arguably, the five Orange Line stations from Rosslyn to Ballston function monocentrically too, but as a straight line, not as a criss-cross network.

David Engwicht was an activist opposing the widening of a freeway in his community.  He figured out that if there were fewer car trips, roads didn't have to be widened.  This is the basis of the concept of "transportation demand management."  Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns: Better Living With Less Traffic, discusses TDM, humane communities, and mobility.  

He also discusses this in terms of "exchange."  Cities were created to facilitate exchange--all types, not just commerce--in efficient ways, and he diagrams how "too much" road space hinders exchange.

The book is very accessible, less technical than Cities in Full.

Book chapter.  The transportation paper I reference the most in "Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis" by geographer Peter Muller.  It's a chapter in a great textbook, The Geography of Urban Transportation, and I don't have a current edition.  I know the paper has been updated since I first read it 15 years ago.

It's key.  It discusses transportation in terms of the Walking City, Transit (Streetcar) City, Recreational Auto, and Metropolitan City eras and how transportation and land use have been organized in those periods.  The Walking and Transit Cities have pretty much the same urban form, denser, shorter distances between destinations, organized to facilitate movement on foot and then streetcar.  It also works well for bicycling.

The Metropolitan City is organized at the scale of the speed of automobile.  It is spread out over hundreds of square miles, with the deconcentration of land use and the separation of land use.  Transit tends to be an inefficient choice as the distances between major destinations is long.

(I collect ephemera--gas station maps, postcards, ads, magazine articles, illustrating mobility patterns from the different eras.)

Bicycling.  It's been a long time since I've read it, but I recall that Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are changing American cities is very good on bicycling for transportation.

Transit First Policy, San Francisco. The City of San Francisco adopted a "transit first" development policy in 1973. For the most part this means that new development in the downtown core has been built without parking, but with access to efficient transit.

For the most part, US transportation policy says that sustainable mobility is a good thing to do, everything in practice and funding prioritizes automobility, and makes sustainable mode support optional, not required.

That's why the SF policy is so novel.

Transit (and bicycling) opposition.  Our land use and transportation paradigm is dominated by the automobile, and this is supported by "special interests" who benefit from it--oil producers, automobile manufacturers, the financiers and constructors of sprawl.  This makes moving transit and biking infrastructure projects forward very difficult ("Petro States of America," Bloomberg).

But it's not just special interests.  The average citizen committed to automobility somehow believes that supporting alternative modes puts into question everything they believe in, and they become vociferous opponents.

A great example is the election of Republican Larry Hogan as Governor of Maryland.  Maryland has strong transit systems in the DC suburbs and Baltimore.  As soon as he entered office he cut tolls on the road system, cut back support of transit, scuttled a new transit infrastructure project in Baltimore and attempted to do the same to the Purple Line in Suburban Maryland, although his involvement has led to a minimum of a five year delay in the project's execution.

More recently, his administration actively prevented the accommodation of bicycling on a Southern Maryland bridge connecting the state to Virginia ("Judge gives go-ahead for Maryland to demolish old Nice-Middleton Bridge: Bridge spans Potomac between King George, Va. and southern Maryland," Virginia Mercury).

Inerestingly, the federal government supported the demolition.  Instead, at key choke points/opportunities in the transportation system, bicycle access should be prioritized, not hindered.  By contrast, done by DC and Virginia there are bicycle connections across the Wilson and 14th Street Bridges, which are highway bridges otherwise.

I was surprised to learn when I was a bicycle and pedestrian planner in Baltimore County, that the Federal Highway Administration has tons of resources on bicycling and walking.  They just don't require the states to prioritize biking and walking.

Failures in execution make transit development and expansion that much harder.  Besides the fact that opposition to transit (and bicycling) infrastructure should be expected as a matter of course, failures in execution of projects tend to be blamed on the mode, not the execution or the politics around it.  But failures are seized upon by opponents elsewhere as justifications to not move forward on projects in their jurisdiction.  This is why I argue that transportation planners have a duty to the profession to not f* up ("Sometimes you have to wonder if transit/transit projects are being deliberately screwed up to make transit expansion almost impossible" "A tenure of failure doesn't deserve encomiums: Paul Wiedefeld, WMATA CEO").

Relatedly, my line is because opposition and opprobrium is part and parcel, it's best to start where you will be wildly successful and build from there, rather than in a place that "needs it more" such as on equity grounds, but presents many more barriers to success.

Examples of transit infrastructure project failures that make pursuing transit projects elsewhere more difficult include:

- DC's streetcar -- failures led Arlington County to drop their parallel project

- Maryland Purple Line -- years and years behind schedule

- HSR in California ("We Told You Why and How California’s High-Speed Rail Wouldn’t Work. You Chose Not To Listen," Reason Magazine)

I know they're libertarian and opposed from the outset, but it's a good example of what transit is up against.  All the more reason to be reasonable in the projects you set up and their expectations.  Why not make rail transit absolutely amazing in the Greater SF and Southern California regions first, then connect them?