Making Transit Work Insight from Western Europe, Canada, and the United States -- Special Report 257 (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Transit Use, Automobility, and Urban Form: Comparative Trends and Patterns
Transit Use, Automobility, and Urban Form: Comparative Trends and Patterns
Pages 17-64
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Transit tends to work best in compact cities with strong downtowns and central business districts that concentrate activity and minimize travel diffusion. While American central cities have lost thousands of residents and businesses to suburbs, Western European and Canadian cities have retained higher levels of both.
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Thus the population and employment densities needed to support transit ridership have dissipated in many older American cities, while in many others they were never there to begin with. Western European and Canadian urban areas have also decentralized and spread out, but on a more modest scale.
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ant! elevated found in many Western European cities—and a few large American ones (New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia)
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Indeed, few American cities curing the first quarter of the 20th century would have been able to grow as large or as rapicIly without the early help of electric rail (Smerk 1992; SaItzman 19921. In the largest American cities, commuter railroads and rapid raid systems contributed even more to this pattern of intense downtown development and residential decentralization; in most U.S.
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Miami, Houston, Phoenix, and many other cities that were only small towns when electric streetcars were introduced 40 years earlier were being shaped almost from scratch by automobiles and the highways that accommodated them. Though still rare at the time in Western Europe, more than 25 million automobiles were registered in the United States by 1935 (AAMA 1 997, 8~.
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By the 1960s, buses had become the main mode of public transportation, except in a handful of American cities that had retained limited streetcar service (Boston, New Oricans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco) or more extensive rapid rail systems (Middieton 1987,170; Saltzman 1992,31; Levinson 1996,72-73~.
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25,000 20,000 1 5,000 5,000 E1 Commuter Rail O Streetcar/Light Rail 1~1 Motor Bus O Trolley Bus Rapid Rail ~ ~ ~ $ $`, $ Note: Data on commuter rail ridership are not available for the period before 1973.
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Relative Stability in Western Europe ant! Canada Compared with American cities, the more establishect Western European cities at the turn of the century introduced electric streetcars at a slower pace and on a smaller scale.3 Many Western European cities had strictures against land speculation that made private investment in electric traction less appealing than in the United States (Jacobson and Tarr 1996,13~.
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UITP. Reprinted with permission from Public Transport International, No.
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Western European bus and raid transit systems, however, did not encounter the same degree of competition from private automobiles after World War Il. Hence a number of Western European cities (e.g., Nantes)
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UITP. Reprinted with permission from Public TransportInternational, No.
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Ridership in New York is exceptionally high by American standards. The more than 16 million people living and working in greater New York average more than 140 transit rides per year.6 Though transit usage in New York compares favorably with that in many large Western European cities, few other large American cities have ridership levels even half that of greater New York.
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The comparison indicates consistently higher levels of service in the Western European cities, irrespective of city size. Even the smallest Western European cities have more transit service than many larger American cities.
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1993; Stern and Tretvik 1993~. Even in the more compact Western European cities, automobiles offer tremendous flexibility and convenience for such transportation necks.
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estimated that density explains nearly 60 percent of the variations observed in transit ridership. They found that strong central business districts and high concentrations of employment near transit lines, especially rail lines, are especially critical factors in American cities.
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For nearly a half century, the American suburbs, not the central cities, have accommodated nearly all the country's urban population growth. Retailers, then other businesses, soon followed households outward.
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Although Western European and Canadian cities have not been immune to the forces of decentralization, they have been able to maintain
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The median density for the Western European central cities is about 3,400 people per square kilometer, compared with about 2,400 for the American cities. The average for the Western European urban areas is about 0.77 km2 per 1,000 people, whereas the average for the American urban areas is about 0.95 km2 (see Figure 2-81.
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: 1.7millio 0 9 0~25 km FIGURE 2-7 Comparison of urbanized land areas in selected U.S. and Western European cities.
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This is explained in part by the fact that urban population growth (and population growth in general) has been more modest in Western Europe during the past 20 years, thereby placing less pressure on suburban land develTable 2-7 Historical Trends in Central City Population in 1 12 Urbanized Areas of Belgium, Great Britain, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany, ~ 95 1-1 9g 1 (Cheshire 1 999, 572-573)
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Only 4 of West Germany's 25 largest urban areas grew by as much as 10 percent during the 1980s, and 11 grew less than 5 percent. On an even longer time scale, no Western European city can match the tremendous growth that has occurred in many American cities, such as Houston, during the past 50 to 100 years (see Figure 2-94.
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Table 2-9 Percent Change in Population in 25 Largest Urbanized Areas of the United States and West Germany, 1980-1992 (Bureau of the Census 1995; NUREC 1994)
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Ottawa's regional land use plan has designated a greenbelt around the central city, as well as several suburban centers outside the greenbelt that are slated to receive most new public infrastructure to accommodate additional residential and commercial growth.~7 Such coordinated land use and infrastructure planning at the regional level differentiates Canadian and American cities (see the discussion later in this chapter and in Chapter 4~. Indeed, this difference is often given as the main reason why large Canadian urban areas have managed to remain more conducive to transit usage despite large suburban population gains and the early proliferation of automobiles.
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4,300 or more 2,000 to 4,300 O to 2,000 Central City, Enlarged Scale Percent Change in Population (1991 to 1996) 25 or more _ ..1 Oto25 negative growth Total Change = 9.4 percent | FIGURE 2-10 Metropolitan Toronto's population density in 1996 and change in population from 1991 to 1996.
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;\ Population in Census Area i3 Up to 20,000 20,001 to 100,000 ~~ 1:~ ~ ~ `.l i. ~ ~ : N: ~~ / :~: ~::~$ ~~ :~ of TotalPopulation (1996)
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more conducive to public transit. As shown in Figure 2-13, nearly all of the 10 Western European central cities sampled earlier had attained at least half of what would be their maximum population by 1920.
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and Canadian cities. Although Canadian central cities have suffered less population decline than American cities, cars were introduced early in Canada.
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3. Although few Western European cities introduced electric streetcars as rapidly as American cities, German cities were the fastest to do so, while the cities of Great Britain were among the slowest (McKay 1976, 67-73~.
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The data provided for the Western European cities are based on Western European Union (EUROSTAT) measures of urbanized areas or "agglomerations" (NUREC 1 9949.
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In A Billion Trips a Day Tradition and Transition in Western European Travel Patterns (I. Salomon, P
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Edge Cities or Expanding Nodes in the Urban Network? A Comparative Analysis of Recent Urban Developments in Western Europe and North America.
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1997. Major Western European Players in Public Transport New Developments in the Western European Union.
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