Smart Growth and Transportation: Issues and Lessons Learned (2005)

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1The questions concerning smart growth are as var-ied as its definition. They include the following: 1. What exactly is smart growth? Does it mean no growth, stopping Wal-Mart, and limiting growth to the inner city and suburbs? Or should all new development be high density, mixed use, with transit service? 2. How much impact can smart growth have on travel patterns or the total miles traveled by a household or in an entire region? 3. Will the public choose to live, work, and shop in the types of development called for in smart growth initiatives? 4. What are the underlying goals of smart growth? Can current programs achieve these goals? Despite continuing debates about such questions, states, regions, and local governments are adopting smart growth programs, principles, and goals. The pub- lic and decision makers are calling for transportation systems, funding, projects, and plans to support smart growth. Transportation professionals and the agencies they work for are trying to respond. To do so, they must identify the characteristics of smart growth–supportive transportation systems, and then they must determine how they can provide such systems while continuing to achieve their traditional goals of transportation system stewardship and enhancement of mobility. Two Transportation Research Board committees, the Statewide Multimodal Transportation Planning Com- mittee and the Transportation and Land Development Committee, collaborated to organize a conference on how transportation professionals can provide trans- portation systems to support smart growth programs. A conference planning committee was formed (the mem- bers are listed on page ii). The committee did not want the conference to engage in the smart growth debate. Numerous conferences, workshops, and meetings are held every year that focus on some aspect of that debate. Instead, the committee decided that the conference would start with the acceptance of smart growth prin- ciples (see Box 1; a more detailed description of these principles is provided later). Executive Summary BOX 1 Principles of Smart Growth • Create a range of housing opportunities and choices. • Create walkable neighborhoods. • Encourage community and stakeholder col- laboration. • Foster distinctive, attractive places with a strong sense of place. • Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost-effective. • Mix land uses. • Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas. • Provide a variety of transportation choices. • Strengthen development and direct it toward existing communities. • Take advantage of compact building design. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 1

This decision was meant not to minimize the value of the many smart growth debates but instead to focus on an immediate need in the transportation community. In September 2002, more than 130 transportation and planning professionals met in Baltimore, Maryland, for a Conference on Providing a Transportation System to Support Smart Growth: Issues, Practice, and Implementation. The conference was organized around five main questions: • Why: Why is smart growth a transportation issue? • What: What does a smart growth transportation system look like? • Where: How does smart growth differ with loca- tion (urban infill, suburban redevelopment, and fringe growth)? How do institutional arrangements vary by location? • Who: Who must be involved to achieve a smart growth transportation system, and what institutional obstacles exist? • How: How can transportation agencies support smart growth? What are the available tools? The conference planning committee, speakers, and attendees represented a broad range of agencies, views, and geographic locations (the attendees are listed at the end of these proceedings). Included were smart growth advocates and skeptics; transit agencies and highway agencies; national, state, regional, and local agencies; those advocating change in the trans- portation system and those struggling to accomplish the change; and so forth. Overarching conclusions from such a diverse group are understandably few and far between. Nevertheless, two conclusions appeared to pervade the conference, although they were not voted on or endorsed. Transportation is inextricably linked to land use and, therefore, to programs such as smart growth. This almost, but not quite, went without saying in the conference. As Charles Howard stated in his conference closing statement, “Transportation is a land use. And land use is a transportation strategy. . . . It is incumbent on us to . . . move the transportation planning process into a new era and actually link [transportation and land use] and make some rational decisions about land use in transportation.” Transportation systems that support smart growth are much more nuanced than is typically discussed. Smart transportation systems include all modes—auto- mobile, transit, and nonmotorized. Reducing the dis- cussion to “transit versus highway” ignores the need for both to provide mobility. Smart facility design—road- way design was mentioned most often—is also critical. Designs that provide safe and aesthetic pedestrian and bicycle transportation are crucial. Beyond these overarching themes, many important points were raised in response to the initial five ques- tions. • Why: Why is smart growth a transportation issue? Alan Pisarski and Gregg Logan started the confer- ence by describing relationships and current trends in population growth, residential and commercial devel- opment, travel, demographic characteristics, and com- muting patterns. Current trends combined with changes in the U.S. population lead both to believe that many of the basic trends and patterns will continue into the future—for example, the demand for automobile travel and the dispersion of development to the suburbs. However, both saw market trends that tend to favor smart growth development. Reid Ewing summarized a number of research stud- ies supporting his statement that “land use planning is a form of long-term travel demand management.” In particular, he focused on the finding that households take a fairly constant number of trips regardless of the type of area they live in, but the length of the trips and the percentage of automobile trips decline as the popu- lation density increases. All of the presentations in this session emphasized the strong connections between land use and trans- portation and the importance of integrating the plan- ning for them. The National Association of Home Builders survey finding (Logan’s presentation) that roughly one-third of the public might be interested in acquiring housing in in-town locations was mentioned frequently during the remainder of the conference. • What: What does a smart growth transportation system look like? Two terms used in this session were frequently heard during the following conference discussion: “orderly dispersion” and “functional mobility.” “Orderly dis- persion” recognizes that growth will continue to occur but the goal must be to guide the development and the accompanying transportation system improvements to optimize the use of the current transportation system and new system investments. “Functional mobility” recognizes that “build your way out of congestion” has been a great rally cry but has never been a reasonable goal. The real goal is to maintain a level of mobility so that the community still works—freight can move, employers still want to locate in the community, and residents still want to live there. The session speakers all focused on the fact that smart transportation is not just about reducing vehicle congestion but also about providing choice of travel 2 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 2

modes, convenient travel by multiple modes, shorter distances between activities, and better accessibility. • Where: How does smart growth differ with loca- tion (urban infill, suburban redevelopment, and fringe growth)? How do institutional arrangements vary by location? The two sessions covering the “where” questions included examples of smart growth and smart growth transportation in areas with very different histories and levels of urbanization. The driving forces behind smart growth, the definition of smart growth, and the institu- tional arrangements differed among the areas. However, many of the smart transportation features are remarkably similar: encouraging development near existing transport service; providing alternatives to the automobile and making those options safe and desirable; protecting or increasing roadway connectivity, particularly arterial roadways; managing the existing facilities; and working closely with the community and decision makers. • Who: Who must be involved to achieve a smart growth transportation system, and what institutional obstacles exist? The speakers in the sessions discussed how smart growth and smart transportation systems are possible in a variety of administrative or institutional settings. Smart transportation can be one of the most popular state programs with elected officials. Neighborhood conservation projects, downtown beautification proj- ects, and road improvements that incorporate context- sensitive design features are all positive smart transportation projects that provide good “ribbon- cutting” opportunities for local officials. In addition, many of these projects can be completed quickly. A more detailed discussion of context-sensitive design may be found in Sam Seskin’s presentation. Several of the speakers in this session (and in other sessions) reminded the conference attendees of two fun- damental goals in smart transportation: (a) more choices in transportation and housing and (b) the devel- opment of land and the provision of complementary transportation service. Neither of these goals is hard to sell to the public or decision makers. • How: How can transportation agencies support smart growth? What are the available tools? This session focused on the practical topic of the types of tools available to transportation agencies to accomplish smart transportation. The tools discussed spanned a wide range of areas and included many aspects of transportation design, traffic calming, transit service design, highway design, the management of access, and planning for community bypasses. Examples of tools were found in rural areas, small towns, suburban communities, urban areas, and reclaimed industrial areas. One central theme ran through all the presentations: the importance of working with the community to design transportation improvements. The Conference on Providing a Transportation System to Support Smart Growth was considered a success by the organizers and participants. There was a sense that many ideas and practical tools had been discussed. 3EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 3

4Opening Remarks Charles Howard, Washington State Department of Transportation During the next several days we will explore thetopic of transportation and smart growth and lookat better defining what parts of transportation support smart growth. Welcome to the Smart Growth Conference and thank you for coming to Baltimore. The members of the con- ference planning committee are Brian Bochner, Texas Transportation Institute; Bob Dunphy, Urban Land Institute; Jackie Grimshaw, Center for Neighborhood Technology, Chicago, Illinois; Mary McCumber, Puget Sound Regional Council; Frank Moretti, Road Infor- mation Program; Catherine Ross, Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, Atlanta; and Sam Seskin, Parsons Brinckerhoff. Liaison members of the conference planning com- mittee include Anne Canby, Cambridge Systematics; Andrew Farkas, Morgan State University; Chris Forinash, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Charlie Goodman, Federal Transit Administration; Roy Kienitz, Maryland Department of Planning; Neil Pedersen, Maryland State Highway Administration; and Alex Taft, Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations. All of the committee members worked hard to help put these conference sessions together. I also thank the sponsoring organizations. This con- ference is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Maryland Department of Transportation, the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and Morgan State University. Two committees of the Transportation Research Board, the Statewide Multimodal Transportation Planning Committee and the Transportation and Land Development Committee, organized the conference. The purpose of the conference is to define trans- portation elements that support the goals of smart growth. The definition will be developed through the experiences of transportation professionals, meaning all of you who are attending the conference from across the country. The other purpose is to share that defini- tion with the broader transportation and smart growth communities. In putting together the conference, the committee asked five questions: why, what, where, who, and how? That is what the sessions of the conference are meant to cover. “Why” addresses the question of why smart growth is a transportation issue. This session will set the stage for the remainder of the conference. “What” gets to the definition of the transportation elements that support smart growth. That will be the purpose of the session tomorrow morning, and we’ll have two presenters, Steve Heminger from the Bay Area and Harrison Bright Rue from Charlottesville, Virginia. Tomorrow afternoon we will focus on “where,” rec- ognizing that for the different types of development tak- ing place—urban infill, suburban redevelopment, and fringe growth—transportation and growth needs are different. Transportation that supports smart growth 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 4

necessarily needs to recognize and serve those differ- ences. We will explore these dimensions with three case studies. On Tuesday morning, we will be looking at “who,” the institutions at the state, regional, and local levels that are necessary in supplying transportation that is supportive of smart growth. We will also look at state and metropolitan planning processes and how well they support smart growth. Finally, Tuesday afternoon we are going to look at tools—the “how”—that people are using across the country to address smart growth in transportation. 5OPENING REMARKS 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 5

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Why Why Smart Growth Is a Transportation Issue 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 7

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9Introduction Anne Canby, Cambridge Systematics First, many in our business are not yet ready toacknowledge or recognize that transportation is,in fact, an essential element in land use. For years, we have tended to say, “It’s not my job.” I think those days are probably over. Second, and because of that, I think we have a huge opportunity. We in the transportation business need to offer ideas about what land use plans and zoning ordi- nances ought to look like to make transportation work better. For years, we have been told (and I just got it 10 days ago from a county planning director), “We plan, you build.” I think that dynamic needs to change, and I think we have an opportunity. They won’t like it, but we should lay out different types of land uses in terms of what transportation improvements would be needed. Third, I think we can recognize that some of the things we’ve done in the past have not helped the issue of con- gestion and have, in fact, added to it and helped fragment some of our communities. My motto for this is, do no harm and don’t create your next problem. Quite often, we’re really good at that. Next is the importance of having a vision in your community—this is very, very critical. A lot of people outside our business as well as inside don’t pay enough attention to it. It is important because it provides a foundation to move forward in a much more collabo- rative and coordinated fashion. You can build on that. If you have a vision you can lay out for your whole area—whether your state, region, city, or whatever— develop a set of metrics: here is where we are today, here is where we will be if we keep doing what we are doing. Then you can start looking at some scenarios. When Ron Kirby presents on Tuesday morning, I’m hoping he talks about some of the work that is going on here in the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, and Mary McCumber will probably have some thoughts on that subject when she makes her presentation. In our business, it boils down to really understand- ing trip choice. There are some fundamental differences in transitioning to a new system, because we are living with such an automobile-oriented design in terms of development as well as transportation that you can’t just lay transit on top of it. It requires a much broader array of customer considerations. Pedestrians and their needs become very important. Development patterns and site design become very important, and these are not things we traditionally think about. Transit demands a different mind-set when you’re looking at land use. Finally, many communities all over the country are focusing energy and investment where they want activ- ities to occur, and this can do wonders to leverage pri- vate investment. Baltimore is a perfect example. All of this matters because the market (and you’re going to hear about that in a few minutes) is changing on us tremendously. Rick Rosan, President of Urban Land Institute, used a figure a couple of months ago when we were on a panel together. He said that by 2010, child- less households in the United States will make up 70 percent of our population. That got my attention. That is a huge number. The National Association of Realtors had Anton Nelessen do a visual preference survey. He makes the 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 9

point that about 60 percent of the people surveyed do not like the current pattern of developing housing sub- divisions separated from everything else, with all the commercial buildings lined up along the arterials in an automobile-only environment. We have that design to excess in every community we live in. But this is not a product that our customers are in love with. I think the opportunities to change are there. Health and exercise: Recently, just last week, the Institute of Medicine said we need an hour of exercise a day. We have basically designed exercise out of our lives, unless you go to the gym or the pool. We could rethink that issue, and I think that is going to be a growing issue as well. The percentage of people in this country who are obese is shocking—30 percent—and that is not just fat, that is obese. Another issue is the economy and jobs. Several months ago Governor Patton of Kentucky was speaking to a conference on historic preservation, and he made the point, which I think is also very telling, about jobs. People are going to live where they have the kinds of attractions and amenities and environment that appeal to them. Employers are going to come to them because that is the nature of the workforce as we look ahead. The state has a program called Renaissance Kentucky, which focuses on Kentucky’s downtowns, and I hope Jim Codell, Secretary of the Transportation Cabinet, will talk about that on Tuesday morning. The governor said we need to take advantage of our unique assets because that’s part of what makes people want to come to my state instead of yours. He is aware of this, and I think a lot of other governors are as well. Finally, I come to cost. We are about to enter what I call the “wailing period,” otherwise known as reautho- rization, about money. I was looking over the Transportation Research Board publication Costs of Sprawl—2000. Anton Nelessen also referenced this. A figure he cited startled me. He said that if we were able to increase both the density of our nonresidential uses and the floor–area ratio—the density by 20 percent and the floor–area ratio by 10 percent—we could save almost 190,000 lane miles and $110 billion between now and 2025. That is worth thinking about. Let me now introduce what I think will be a great panel. The first speaker is Alan Pisarski, who wrote Commuting in America and has just finished the third edition of the Bottom Line Report for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. He did it for the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, and now whatever we are going to call the third rendition. He is “Mr. Numbers” in our business. Second is Gregg Logan, who is a Managing Director of Robert Charles Lesser, a real estate development ser- vices firm that does a lot of land use and development analysis for the development community. He has some very interesting things to tell us. Finally, Reid Ewing, who is the Director of the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers and the Research Director for the Surface Transportation Policy Project and is involved with Smart Growth America, will close with some thoughts on what smart growth ought to be from his perspective. 1 0 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 10

1 1 Transportation Trends and Smart Growth Alan Pisarski, Independent Consultant Iam happy to be here in Baltimore to talk abouttransportation trends and smart growth. I will startwith the need to talk about transportation broadly. We often say we are going to talk about transporta- tion, and we forget about freight and start talking about passengers. If we say we are going to talk about passengers, we talk about commuting instead of other passenger travel, and then we get into a fight about transit versus highways and think we are talking about transportation. My point is there is a whole array of activities and things to think about and how they fit into the context of the discussion. Figure 1 elucidates the first point about the share of total travel that belongs to commuting. Trip growth [these data are from the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS)] has occurred in all of the different trip purposes. Work trip commuting has grown, of course, through the baby boomers. But other areas of activity have grown even more substantially. Figure 2 shows similar information from census data. I have a question mark on that, because in Commuting in America 2, my closing thought was that driving alone had just about peaked, that transit, car- pooling, and walking had hit the bottom, some kind of base level, and I was wrong. Driving alone has contin- ued to grow. Carpooling has continued to decline. Transit is trying to hold on at about 5 percent. It actu- ally lost about a 0.5 percent share. Walking continues to decline. But the pattern is very different. Let me be a little more explicit about this. The change from 1980 to 1990 is shown in Figure 3. We added about 18 million total workers, and the number driving 0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 1977 1983 1990 1995 Other Social/Recreational School/Church Family/Personal Business Work FIGURE 1 Daily trips per person by purpose. • SOV 75.7% versus 73.2% • Transit sort of holds at 5% • Carpool declines again • Walking also declines • Work at home gains some • SOV growth almost exceeds growth in number of workers as in 1990 1990 2000 All workers 100% 100% Drive alone 73% 76% Carpool 13% 12% Transit 5% 5% Taxi 0% 0% Motorcycle 0% 0% Bicycle 0% 0% Other 1% 1% Walked only 4% 3% Work at home 3% 3% FIGURE 2 Work trip modal trends—more of the same? 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 11

alone rose by about 22 million. So the growth in the number of people driving alone in that decade exceeded the growth in the number of workers. All of those new workers effectively wanted to drive alone. A large num- ber of other workers stopped carpooling and walking and went into the single-occupant vehicle (SOV). If I had this chart for almost any major metropolitan area in America, it would have looked almost identical. Maybe two or three metropolitan areas had slight variations— some had done a little better on carpooling and some had gained on transit—but fundamentally, this was the national pattern. This time around, 1990 to 2000, it is much more variable. If you look at the national patterns, they are quite similar to the previous survey. Drive alone does not exceed the number of workers because carpooling grew a little. The real point is if you look around the nation, there is considerable variation. There are states that increased in transit. There are metropolitan areas that increased in transit. There are areas that increased significantly in carpooling. So you can’t say that we have a national uniform pattern. I think one of the pos- itive things is that we are beginning to see significant variation among areas. But Figure 4 still shows the 40- year trend. This is the national trend, and nobody ever likes to see it, but this is America’s long-term trend. Let me talk now in more general terms of what we were like and what was happening in this past century. These, to me, were the dominant aspects of our trends in the last century. The point that needs to be reiterated and isn’t discussed often enough is that we have come through a really tough time. We have come through an explosion in the number of workers as a result of the baby boomers and women joining the labor force in extraordinary numbers. Figure 5 shows the change in age distribution of the population over the 1995–2005 period, and there is an extraordinary flow of baby boomers through the age cohort structure. It is a classic case of the boa constrictor swallowing a pig that is working its way through the system. Think 2010, when the first of the baby boomers hit 65, and you under- stand where we have been. We have been through an extraordinary period that overwhelmed a lot of our resources. The future is more stable in many respects than the past, and some examples of the trends I think are sig- nificant are shown in Figure 6. The most important is lower population growth. We can talk about what the census showed, but basically, and particularly in the saturation areas, the future is not going to have the vir- ulent growth that we have seen in the past. That doesn’t mean that some places aren’t still going to catch it—Atlanta, Las Vegas, and so forth. But Figure 7 shows one example of what I’m talking about. Fewer workers mean fewer commuters, and this figure shows the pattern of new workers added to the workforce. We added considerably fewer workers in the decade ending in 2000 than we had in the bubble from 1970 to 1990. There are “forces of change” that I think are going to be operating on us over the next 25 to 30 years. The first is what I call a “democratization of mobility”—the arrival of minority groups and immigrant populations into a high-mobility society. Second, immigration is still going to be a significant, in fact dramatic, force. Third, this terrible problem we have in America called “afflu- ence” will always be, I hope, an influence on our behav- ior and activities. Fourth is a lack of skilled workers—something that Anne Canby mentioned and that we need to focus on considerably. The last is what I call “dispersal technologies” (technologies that allow people to live further apart). The point we need to make as background to all of our discussions is this: if transportation is always about time and distance, in many respects we can say that distance is no longer the massive factor it used to 1 2 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED –5,000 0 5,000 10,000 15,000 20,000 25,000 Total Workers Drive Alone Carpool Transit (w/Taxi) Walked Other Work at Home FIGURE 3 Net modal change, 1980–1990 (thousands). 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 Private Vehicle Public Transportation Walk/Home FIGURE 4 Forty-year trend in mode use (millions of commuters). 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 12

be. Time is now the driver, particularly on the passen- ger side and particularly among women, but on the freight side as well. Time is the immense factor that governs so many different choices and explains the continuing shift to the SOV. Figure 8 shows the 100-year trend in automobile ownership. We started at 200 people per car in 1910, and 5 years later we were down to 40. By the mid- 1930s, everybody in America could be in an automo- bile. By 1955, they could be in the front seat. Today, the adults and cars are about equivalent, except that we are not quite at saturation. These are 1990 data, because the 2000 data are not available yet. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and some of the other major cities, there are significant percentages of zero-car households, particularly among certain groups. The Baltimore/Washington area is in the 35 to 40 percent range. The black population without vehicles is a very high segment of the population. Figure 9 shows the dis- tribution of zero-car households among population groups. The proportion of zero-car households among Hispanics is similar to the proportion among African Americans, although it is not quite as dramatic. This is highly correlated with size of metropolitan area, partic- ularly among the black population; it is less so for the white population. Even in rural areas, 17 percent of black households do not own vehicles. That represents a massive potential reservoir of vehicle ownership. The modal choices by racial group in suburbs, center cities, and nonmetropolitan areas show basically the same pattern, with the black and Hispanic populations lagging the white population by about 10 percent (see Figure 10). We can speculate about where that is going in the future. I mentioned immigration. Figure 11 has this rather extraordinary shape to it, indicating the dramatic effect of immigration in the United States today. That chart 1 3WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE –4 –2 0 2 4 6 8 5-YEAR AGE GROUPS M IL LI O NS Under 5 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 • The baby boomers coming of age—working age and driving age • Women joining the labor force in vast numbers • Extraordinary growth in just- in-time freight • Extraordinary growth in foreign trade • NOW WE HAVE NEW CHALLENGES FIGURE 5 Age distribution changes in U.S. population, 1995–2005, and related trends. • Lower Population Growth • Lower Household Growth • Lower Labor Force Growth • Saturation of Driver’s Licenses • Saturation of Car Ownership • Lower Domestic Migration Trends FIGURE 6 The future is more stable than the past. 12.2 19.8 18.4 13.3 0 5 10 15 20 25 1960–70 1970–80 1980–90 1990–00 M illi on s of W or ke rs Ad de d pe r D ec ad e FIGURE 7 Fewer workers = fewer commuters. 0 50 100 150 200 250 1910 19151920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1995 Pe op le p er C ar 2.6 1 .3 FIGURE 8 We are at vehicle saturation: population-to- vehicle ratio, 1900–1995. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 13

turned out to be wrong. It actually looked like this after the 2000 census (see Figure 12). They found 5 million additional people. I think what happened is that most of those people have been here for 30 years and the cen- sus just recently “found” them. I really have trouble believing that this dramatic growth rate occurred only within the past few years. But I think that is a factor that needs to be considered. Where those people are and where they are going to live are critical. I mentioned affluence. Figure 13 shows annual trips per household by household income (this is from the 1995 NPTS). The use of SOVs for commuting rises at every income level up to about $25,000. At the highest incomes, most people drive alone, except for high use of commuter rail, particularly around New York, Chicago, and other high-income places. If we wanted to talk about anything in smart growth, we could spend a whole day on why work trip length increases with income. From the supply side, lower- paying jobs are ubiquitous, while higher-paying jobs are rarer. On the demand side, high-income households have more choices, including where to work and live, and the ability to act on their preferences. Figure 14 shows the national commuting pattern within and outside of metropolitan areas in 1990. (Again, 2000 data are not available.) This was the standard: the dominant historical suburb-to-city pattern had become a suburb-to-suburb circumferential flow. The historical pat- tern had really slowed. But, in fact, this is a partial picture. Figure 15 shows the important details. The fact that this bears some resemblance to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore is not exactly accidental. There were dramatic levels of growth from the suburbs of one metropolitan area to the suburbs of another metropolitan area, from 1 4 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 14% 16% 18% 20% 22% 24% 26% All White African American Asian Hispanic FIGURE 9 Percentage of households with no vehicle among racial and ethnic groups. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% Center Cities Suburbs Nonmetro White drive alone White carpool Black drive alone Black carpool Hispanic drive alone Hispanic carpool FIGURE 10 Private vehicle use by race and ethnicity. 0 2 4 6 8 10 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 M illi on s FIGURE 11 We are a nation of immigrants—again. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 Adjustment Immigration FIGURE 12 A “small” adjustment. 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 <10,000 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 70,000 80,000+ Household Income An nu al T rip s FIGURE 13 Annual trips per household by household income, 1995. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 14

central cities of one metropolitan area to central cities of another metropolitan area, and in flows from rural areas. The new census data showed that the state with the largest travel time increase was West Virginia. This is not because of those horrible congestion problems in down- town Wheeling. It is because as jobs in the Washington and Pittsburgh suburbs move farther out, West Virginia people are commuting to the Pittsburgh and Washington metropolitan areas. Vermont and New Hampshire had tremendous increases in travel time for the same reason. Figure 16 is based on the 1990 census. I would love to compare this with 2000 data when they become available. This shows counties with 25 percent or more of their workers commuting outside the county. I think it is a dramatic pattern. I put Figure 17 together for Commuting in America. Although this is a bit simplistic, it is a useful way to understand what is happening. The chart compares the number of jobs in Fairfax County, the top bar, with the number of employed people who live in the county, on the bottom. If everybody who has a job and lives in Fairfax worked in Fairfax, only 50,000 people would have to be exported every day. But they don’t. The mid- dle bar shows the people who actually live and work in Fairfax County. One-half million people flow in and out every day. So one of the issues is the ratio between jobs and workers, and the other issue is the match between the jobs and the workers. The same compari- son for Arlington County shows that its workers do not seem to match the skills required for jobs in the county. Prince George’s County, in Maryland, also tends to lack that match of skills. Although there are jobs and work- ers, the workers who live there leave the county to work, while other people come in to fill the jobs. The implications for planning are more subtle and perhaps more sophisticated than we know how to deal with. In Figure 18, if the jobs-to-workers ratio is above the line, the jurisdiction is a city. It has more jobs than workers. The question is how these jurisdictions respond, and how many people they are able to keep in their county for work, which produces shorter work trip lengths. The issue is going to be critical for the 50 metropol- itan areas with population exceeding 1 million. We had extraordinary growth in the number of such areas. 1 5WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE Nonmetro Area Metro Area Suburbs C.C. 22.0 15.2 35.4 5.9 24.3 FIGURE 14 Multiregional work flows, 1990 (millions of workers). C.C. = central city. C.C. Nonmetro Area Metro Area Adjacent Metro Area Suburbs Suburbs C.C. 22.0 15.2 35.4 5.9 24.3 1.1 0.3 2.0 1.4 0.6 2.3 1.0 3.4 FIGURE 15 Multiregional work flows, 1990, showing adjacent metropolitan area (millions of workers). C.C. = central city. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 15

Approximately 60 percent of our population live in these 50 areas. Another 20 percent live in metropolitan areas with populations under 1 million, and another 20 percent, or 60 million people, live in rural areas. Obviously, some of these metropolitan areas have seen extraordinary growth. Figure 19 shows the patterns of growth. The areas over 5 million are actually losing a little share to the smaller areas. It will be interesting to see what the final census data show. I want to talk a little about the question of trip length that I raised earlier. Trip length is the elucidation of the relationship between transportation and land 1 6 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED Up to 25% 25% or More FIGURE 16 Percentage of workers working outside county of residence, 1990. (Source: Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce.) 50,000 100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 350,000 400,000 450,000 500,000 Fairfax County Arlington County Employed Living in County Live/Work in County Jobs FIGURE 17 Job–worker balance in two Virginia counties, 1990. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 16

use. If all our trips have an economic or social transac- tion at their end, those transactions define both the pur- pose and the length of trips. It is important to understand trip length as a characteristic of some of the things we’re talking about. What does it mean when trip lengths get longer? It could mean that things are farther apart. Or it can mean many other things: decline in transportation costs, reduced travel times, and certainly higher incomes permitting people greater choices. I use this example: if you are looking for plain old bread, you tend to go to the first store you come to and just get bread. If you live in Washington and you really like Russian black bread with raisins, and there is a great bakery in Baltimore, you’ll go there for bread. Figure 20 shows trip length distribution by purpose. There is a kind of mix of trip patterns. Certain trips have stable lengths over time, because somebody on the desti- nation end of that trip length responds to circumstances. For example, as trip lengths to shopping centers or banks or schools or medical services get too long, somebody builds something closer to the customers and reduces those trip lengths. Other trips are variable in length because they involve visits to friends and relatives, entertainment, or recreation, which are functions of the metropolitan area size and where your friends happen to reside. I will jump quickly to freight just to make the point. The dramatic thing that has happened in freight is the value change in tons. Think of a truckload of computer chips. The commodity flow surveys say that something like 2 percent of the tonnage yields 40 percent of the value. In 1977, about 16 percent of value was less than 1,000 pounds, and that has more than doubled. Now 37 percent of the value of goods is in products less than 1,000 pounds. We have very small shipments of very high value, and people are willing to absorb high costs to protect those shipments. What is this new world that we are going to be liv- ing in? It will be stable, with an older population, peo- ple with a high value of time, goods with a high value of time, and high-cost transportation to meet those needs in a global economy. Skilled workers will be at a premium. In that world, workers can live and work almost anywhere. Obviously, that will not be true in every job category, but in many categories it will. Who are the immigrants? Where will they be? The current immigrant population is not ghettoizing. They come to America and they go directly to the suburbs. It is not a second- and third-generation thing. Yes, they are repopulating some of the downtowns, but a large portion is heading out to the suburbs directly. Mainstreaming of minorities will be an important factor. 1 7WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 0. 00 0. 50 1. 00 1. 50 2. 00 2. 50 3. 00 Montgomery Prince George’s Baltimore City District of Columbia Arlington County Fairfax County Work Outside County Jobs-to-Workers Ratio FIGURE 18 Jobs-to-workers ratio, in Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, 1990. • Las Vegas: up 700,000; 83% increase • Phoenix: up 1,000,000; 45% increase • Atlanta: up 1,200,000; 39% increase • Dallas: up 1,200,000; 29% increase • Los Angeles: up 1,800,000; 13% increase FIGURE 19 Examples of metropolitan areas with extraordinary growth in the past decade. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 17

I think we will be operating as what I call a challenged, affluent society. In this new world, the great issue will be the skilled workers—finding skilled workers will be the key. Where do they want to be? Where do they want to go? That is where employers will follow. I had a discus- sion here in Baltimore a couple months ago, trying to explain that even if this is true, not everybody wants to be on a mountaintop in Colorado. A lot of people might want to be in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore. The question of competition between areas is going to be significant. One important trend is that the workforce goes flat after the baby boom. It lays out into the future flat, even with the immigrants coming in. This means that the number of new workers out into the future is going to be very thin. If we have had too many commuters in the past, the issue in the future may be too few. The dependence ratio, the number of people depending on those workers, will begin to increase again, looking like it did in the 1950s. Instead of you taking your kids to the dentist, they are going to be taking you, but the dependence pattern will be the same. When I consider the factors that operate in dispersal, the one I think is most significant is one people don’t pay enough attention to—70 percent of workers live in a household with another worker. The option to live near work gets to be very messy when you have two- or three-worker households. While it is an attractive con- cept, it is difficult to bring about. In addition, there are many dispersal technologies in use—ground and air transport, overnight delivery, telephones and cellular phones, radio, television, computers, and the Internet— and the only aggregative technology I can think of is the elevator. If people can live anywhere, where do they want to live? What attracts them? Generally, an environment rich in amenities: natural beauty, cultural resources, intellectual stimulation, a flexible workplace. It is clear that employers are going to have to be more and more flexible. They will have to try to get more women into the workforce, keep older workers from retiring, and get retirees back in. The dominant factor in our future labor force policies will be the tremendous amount of pressure to get workers to participate in our national workforce. This is the challenge in an affluent society in which mobility will still be central in meeting our social and economic needs. 1 8 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% To or from Work Work-Related Business Shopping Other Family or Personal Business School/Church Doctor/Dentist Visit Friends or Relatives Social or Recreational 5 miles or less 6–10 miles 11–15 miles 16–20 miles 21–30 miles 31 miles or more FIGURE 20 Trip length distribution by purpose—most trips are under 10 miles. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 18

1 9 Development Pattern Trends and Smart Growth Gregg Logan, Robert Charles Lesser & Company I’m not a transportation expert, so it is a littleintimidating to be in this room full of transporta-tion experts talking about transportation. My area is land use, and we like to think that what it is and where you put it has a lot to do with transportation. I am going to look at some of the trends that have determined the development pattern within which you put your transportation solutions. Where did growth go and why? What was that growth? Then we will look at some new trends. I totally agree that demographics are destiny. I want to go deeper into that and look not only at the short-term trends over the next 5 to 10 years but also at some of the things we know about how people make decisions at different points in their lives, and how that influences where they go in terms of product and location choices. I’ll go through some of these trends quickly because I suspect you spend a lot of time thinking about them. We see faster growth in suburbs versus cities in the past decade. One important thing in thinking about the development pattern we have now and the type of development pattern we will have in the future is “driver” and “follower” uses. By “driver” use, I don’t mean a car, I mean housing—looking at where housing went and how that led to retail jobs and later office jobs following the housing. If there are some shifts or oppor- tunities to shift where housing goes, what happens to those retail and office jobs? The suburbs have been growing rapidly as office locations. One of the trends we see now and as we look into the future is that a greater percentage of all jobs will be in office space. So following where office space has been and where it goes in the future tells us a lot about where job growth goes overall and the kinds of transportation systems needed to connect it. Many of our metropolitan areas went from one dominant center to multiple centers. Where will the future growth pattern be? Will it be these other centers, those edge cities? The interesting trend here is edgeless areas. Bob Lang did a study with the Brookings Institution looking at office space data from 13 metro- politan areas. In the top four markets in particular, a really strong percentage of the growth is going into edgeless areas. So we seem to be, at least in many fast- growing areas, beyond the edge city phase. Some of the edge cities, in fact, may experience in the future or may already be experiencing a growth pattern similar to that of cities as they lost their dominance. As edge cities age and decline, we may see more edgeless areas, whose growth seems to be driven by this office employment happening at every highway interchange. I’m going to use Atlanta, Georgia, as a quick exam- ple, not only because I’m based there and I know the market well but also because I think it shows a lot of symptoms similar to those of many fast-growing areas. Figure 1 orients you to some of the statistics I’m going to show in a minute. The darkest area is what we call in-town; the little bit lighter areas are what we call inner-suburban; the lightest areas are suburbs; and the unshaded areas are suburbanizing. This is done, for the Atlanta area, by superdistricts. In planning for our future transportation and growth in the Atlanta region, we are looking at the past 10 years. Does that represent the growth pattern we will experience in the future? 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 19

Figure 2 is a fair share chart showing which areas are gaining and losing household market share. On the chart, a score of 1 equals equilibrium. If your score is stronger than 1, you are gaining market share at the expense of other areas. If your score is less than 1, you are losing market share. Figure 2 looks at the household fair share distribution and shows the in-town markets at substantially less than inner-suburban, and substan- tially less than the suburban markets. The outlying sub- urbanizing areas are gaining market share at the fastest rate with the lowest density of development. The big question in Atlanta and other fast-growing areas is whether that will remain the pattern. In the future, we see the area becoming even more difficult to serve with transportation other than the car. What were some of the factors driving those trends? The demographic information presented here was excel- lent—I’m thinking about the baby boomers and their influence on land use and the “pig and the python” anal- ogy. When the baby boomers were children, they gener- ated a lot of school construction; as they moved into the family-forming years, they generated a lot of demand for first-time home buyer housing in the suburbs. As they came into the workforce, their employment participa- tion rate increased, and we saw tremendous growth in employment and development of office space. 2 0 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED In-Town Inner-Suburban Suburban Suburbanizing Paulding County West Douglas East Douglas SW Cobb South Cobb Coweta County West Fayette South Fulton Shannon Airport East Fayette South Clayton NE Clayton Tri Cities SE Atlanta SW Atlanta NW Atlanta NW DeKalb NE Atlanta Buckhead South DeKalb South Rockdale North Rockdale SE DeKalb NE DeKalb Lilburn Snellville East Gwinnett Central GwinnettNorcross Roswell North Fulton Forsyth CountyEast CentralCherokee North Cherokee Woodstock NW Cobb Marietta NE Cobb Sandy Springs North Gwinnett Chamblee Rivandale Cu m be rla nd SW De Ka lb South Henry East Henry North Henry FIGURE 1 Example: Metropolitan Atlanta. 0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 In-Town Inner-Suburban Suburban Suburbanizing FIGURE 2 Household fair share, 1990–2000. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 20

The leading edge of the baby boomers is now 56 or 57 years old. I said a minute ago that they would hit retirement age at age 65 in 2010, but the age at which people make retirement housing decisions actually starts a lot younger, at 55 to 60. It is really happening now. There are other segments—Gen-X households, the echo boom, and so forth—that are important to think about in addition to the boomers. How they influence suburban growth and might influence other kinds of growth in the future must be considered. Bob Dunphy has written about the “drive for value” trend. He discussed how people make a trade-off between spending more time in their car in exchange for lower housing costs. In a lot of markets, the trade-off that people thought they were making is turning out to be more than they bargained for, in terms of the com- mute going from 20 minutes to an hour all of a sudden. They didn’t move further out; mobility decreased. One of the things that we are trying to quantify is how that change in the equation changes future behavior. But cer- tainly, the drive for value is something that is heavily favored in the suburbs. In any study of how people have distributed them- selves in a particular market, it is hard not to think of race as a huge factor over the past 20 years. White flight, urban schools and perceived urban school qual- ity versus suburban schools, comes back to the boomers—the 78 million people in that generation were in their family-forming years when schools were a big driver. We have to ask whether schools are going to continue to drive the majority of housing decisions in the future. There is a perceived lack of geographic barriers in a lot of markets, and it is certainly true where I’m from in Atlanta—we didn’t think there were any barriers until we met the Clean Air Act amendments, and then we realized there are a few barriers. Jobs follow the boss. We saw, again in terms of “driver” and “follower” land uses, that jobs were really a follower use as the boss moved to the suburbs. We saw the best-paying jobs move to the suburbs where the exec- utives lived, not coincidentally to areas that also tended to be the toughest in which to build any kind of afford- able housing, or what we call “workforce housing,” which is a significant issue. The retail jobs are following the housing and the transportation infrastructure. You all understand that better than I. That alone is not enough, but certainly the kinds of transportation infrastructure we have created allowed that to happen. From my field, land use, there are many difficulties and challenges in doing infill versus edge development. It’s not that developers are not willing, or that it can’t be more profitable to develop infill, but there are just so many more barriers. This issue greatly influences what kind of development pattern we will experience in the future and how easy it will be to capitalize on demand other than at the edge. Land cost is the most obvious. Development and regulatory costs will be a little higher in the suburban areas—maybe not as great as some peo- ple claim, but a factor. There is a challenge in finding large-enough tracts in infill locations versus at the edge. The “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) and “build absolutely nothing anywhere” (BANANA) groups make it much more challenging from a political perspective. What are some of the future trends in growth and development patterns? If the past is the future, what do past trends suggest? We would see continuing dispersed household development, decentralization of jobs, office space developed at even lower densities as this edgeless growth continues beyond edge cities, and difficulty in providing any sort of nonautomobile transportation due to the lack of density. I was asked to say how that affects transportation. I know you understand this stuff much better than I, but I do see most growth occurring in these suburbanizing areas. If trends continue, that type of development will be difficult to serve with any kind of nonautomobile transportation, and building more roads is part of the pattern and traffic congestion gets worse. That is one scenario. Are there trends that suggest something different? Is some of the location of future growth malleable, and could it be influenced by policy to occur in different locations? The short answer is yes, and there are some significant market forces that I think can lead us to a different outcome. The past is not necessarily the future. But there will need to be policies to support that, because the stars are not aligned in that direction. I want to start with who we are today and give you some bad news in just a minute. The baby boomer gen- eration, that “pig in the python,” has had a dramatic impact on land use, and we will look at where they are going. I also want to take a little longer-term perspec- tive, 25 years out, and look at the smaller Gen-X gener- ation and the echo boom and the kinds of land use decisions they are making. One of the reasons to look beyond the baby boomers all the way to the echo boom is the statistics on growth in one-person or nonfamily households. Over the next 8 years we will see growth away from families. But it is also true that 10 years after that, beginning 8 years from now, as the echo boomers get into their family-forming years, there is the potential for family formation to increase. This population pyramid (Figure 3) shows that as we go forward 25 years, all of us baby boomers are going to be in our late 60s and 70s. And Gen-Xers are as old as we are now, and there are fewer of them. Notice that the female column is a lot bigger than the male column. I will be specific about that in a minute. Another trend is economic growth. In spite of current short-term 2 1WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 21

economics—what is going on in the economy right now—I’ll just say that I think it has nothing to do with land use. If you look at what creates demand for goods and services and makes an economy go, it is demo- graphics. The demographics through the end of this decade are very strong. We have this huge 78 million population of the baby boomer cohort in their peak spending and earning years. Although some of their 401K plans have become 201K plans, lots of them are still in their peak earning years, and they are still buy- ing luxury cars and second homes. When we think about impact on land use, this is clearly a trend we have to consider. In the near term, through this decade, growth in pop- ulation and jobs maintains strong demand for housing and office, industrial, and retail space, which will go somewhere within regions. The age distribution of the population seems to imply the need for empty nest space for a lot of aging boomers. Although many boomers are working on their second family and having kids in their mid-40s (the “kiss retirement goodbye” group), huge numbers of boomers are getting into their empty nest phase now and then into the retirement phase. But it is the Gen-X “singles and mingles” who are late starting families that are already driving a lot of the demand for in-town housing. We keep trying to build more of it for empty nesters, but when we look at who is really behind the trend and having the biggest impact on in-town hous- ing, it has been that Gen-X cohort. Gen-Xers moving back in town have had a big impact even on central city growth in the last 10 years. They have also had an impact on job growth and where jobs have gone, espe- cially in the dot-com boom and bust cycle. The tech- nology category is down but not out. An awful lot of technology jobs, if not a majority, will be created in the future. Many of the people who work in those kinds of jobs looking for venture capital today—what they think is cool is not suburban. The aging baby boomers are looking at different lifestyle choices. We are seeing an increased demand for better-located housing and different kinds of housing products. Demand for various types of residential hous- ing—town houses, condos, and senior living facilities— is already higher than what is currently supplied. If we think the past is the future, we are going to see an even greater imbalance in supply and demand for those kinds of products, which suggests a lot of different things in 2 2 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED Over 100 Age 95 to 99 90 to 94 85 to 89 80 to 84 75 to 79 70 to 74 65 to 69 60 to 64 55 to 59 50 to 54 45 to 49 40 to 44 35 to 39 30 to 34 25 to 29 20 to 24 15 to 19 10 to 14 5 to 9 5.0 4.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 Percent Male Female 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 Under 5 Baby Boomers Gen-X Echo Boomers FIGURE 3 U.S. population pyramid, 2025. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 22

terms of where we develop, what we develop, and what kind of transportation we connect it with. It is also important to think about how home-buying factors change with age. Figure 4 shows that crime is always important. We always want to feel safe and secure. But the importance of school district declines with age. That huge baby boom population flocked to the suburbs because school district was important or because of white flight. At the same time that school district declines in importance, the location of shopping increases in importance. In other surveys we find that convenience becomes more important with age. So it is important to think about not just the sheer numbers of people, but the kinds of attitudes they have and what drives their location and product choices as they get older. Figure 5 looks at just one dimension, the percentage of those over 55 who prefer living in-town versus living in a suburban area. The preference for the town house goes from under 10 percent at ages 24–34 to almost 25 percent at age 55. We touched on changing household composition. The greatest growth is in childless couples and nonfam- ily and single-person households. Again, the Gen-X household is already driving demand for in-town hous- ing, which has an impact on land use. If some of the boomers, and it doesn’t take many of them, make a dif- ferent housing choice, that has a very substantial impact on the overall development pattern. We see an increased demand for all kinds of attached housing, from inde- pendent to senior living facilities. This is the household shift over the next 10 years (see Figure 6). Data 10 to 25 years out would show the fam- ilies with kids segment increasing a little, still dwarfed by the singles, by the families with no kids, and by the nonfamilies, but no longer declining. That is because of the echo boom households having kids. We have done a lot of surveys with different types of households, asking them what kinds of choices they would make in the future. Those kinds of preference surveys are a little suspect, because people largely have to deal with the options that they have. In most of the markets that we looked at, in guesstimating the demand for what we would broadly call “new urbanist” or “smart growth” housing—more compact, denser, closer to work or shopping or services, supporting a more convenient lifestyle—we find that about half as much is being provided in those markets as is actually demanded. In a lot of markets, although we try to give survey respondents a good picture (verbal or pho- tographs) of what we are talking about, generally they haven’t experienced it. So we think the percentages are probably a lot higher. But today at least 35 percent say they prefer something other than the conventional sub- urban, single-family, detached house. Let’s look at the growth. Given those demographics and the shift over the next 25 years, and the share of households that will be older or have a different house- hold composition, either a one- or a two-person house- hold will be a candidate for something other than a 2 3WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 25–34 35–44 45–54 55+ Crime Rate School District Highway AccessLocation of Shopping Public Transportation FIGURE 4 Home-buying factors change with age. 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 24–34 34–44 45–54 55 + FIGURE 5 Percentages preferring town house in-town versus home with more traffic in suburbs, by age. (Source: NAHB/Fannie Mae.) –1,000 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000 Singles Families w/ Kids Families w/No Kids Nonfamily HHs FIGURE 6 Households by type, United States. Over the next 10 years, the number of families with children will shrink, and singles and childless households will be the major market force. (Source: U.S. Census.) 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 23

conventional suburban dwelling. Anne Canby men- tioned that in 10 years, about 70 percent of all house- holds will have no children. We mitigated that by looking 10 to 25 years out; with those echo boomer households possibly having families, that percentage declines about 5 percent. But the point is that a huge share of the market has the propensity to choose some- thing other than conventional single-family, suburban housing. Our surveys today say that maybe half of that one- and two-person household market will choose nonsuburban housing. Of that 65 percent, some people will continue to choose suburban locations just because they like big houses and driving. But the potential is there for something different. Here are results from other surveys that have been done, one from a very proselytizing source for some- thing other than the status quo, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). Figure 7 draws from one of its surveys, and then I’ll show you one from a group that tends to be at the other end of the spectrum, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). NAHB comes to the same conclusion. According to CNU, about 53 percent of people would consider easy- to-walk-to stores as very important in their decision- making process. Another 50 percent say they would prefer less automobile-oriented street patterns. Thirty percent say they like townhomes in their neighborhood; 15 percent say they want a townhome, and that figure today, according to NAHB, goes all the way up to 25 percent. Thirty-three percent want narrower streets, sidewalks, and shared recreation facilities; 20 percent want smaller lots or cluster development; 50 percent want small lots; and 40 percent want something other than a conventional, single-family detached house. According to the NAHB survey (Figure 8), 35 per- cent said their most preferred option is to build new homes on vacant land in the central city or inner sub- urbs. These trends seem to support what CNU is saying. People want to keep talking about how the majority of households don’t want that, and they are right. The majority are not necessarily looking for something dif- ferent. But in Atlanta, in thinking about our future growth and the next million people, 35 percent of the market is 350,000 people. If those people make differ- ent sorts of location decisions, obviously that has huge impacts on our land use and transportation systems. There is a lot of evidence that at least one-third and probably more of the market will make different kinds of product and location choices in the future. This is a trend: greater new urbanism demand and supply in a lot of markets. The demand, we believe, is only being about half met. That means more demand for multifamily traditional neighborhood development. The transit-oriented development supports the trend of movement back to cities, to existing towns surrounding metropolitan areas, to suburban business districts as activity centers with greater convenience, urban lifestyle, and amenities. There is also a trend in terms of prices in this drive for value. At what point do people stop driving for value because the trade-off has just gotten to be too great? There is evidence, at least comparatively, from markets that hit that wall sooner. In comparing a Los Angeles or a San Francisco with an Atlanta, for exam- ple, where they have gone through that life cycle, peo- ple make different choices. Maybe it is not always what they wanted, but that drive-for-value trade-off became too great. The impact on land use will also make that number grow from one-third to something between one-third and that 65 percent who would qualify for something different because of money and time. We think about this not just in terms of housing but in terms of employment and how changing employment growth—the types and locations of jobs—will also have an impact on land use and transportation. It is a little murkier, to be quite honest. It is harder to analyze because we have a lot more data on household decision making than we do on employment. What do we think is happening? In thinking about where jobs go in the future and how that influences the development and transportation patterns, it is impor- 2 4 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED Consider an easy walk to stores “extremely important” 53% Prefer a less auto-oriented street pattern, with narrow streets to encourage walking 49% Would like townhomes in their neighborhood 30% Want to live in a townhome 15% Want “narrow streets, sidewalks, and shared recreation facilities” rather than “larger lots and wider streets” 33% Want smaller lots and/or clustered development 20% Wants lots of 1/6 acre or smaller 57% Prefer something other than single-family homes 40% FIGURE 7 Support for “new urbanism.” (Source: Congress for New Urbanism.) Most Preferred Second Most Preferred Third Most Preferred Build New Homes in Outlying Areas 29% 26% 45% Build New Homes in Existing, Partially Developed Suburban Areas 37% 51% 12% Build New Homes on Vacant Land in the Central City or Inner Suburbs 35% 23% 42% FIGURE 8 NAHB study on buyers’ preferences. (Source: NAHB study of 2,000 U.S. home buyers.) 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 24

tant to note that historically employment has followed housing. The housing went to the suburbs first. Then as Gen-Xers moved back in town, it caused the explosion in in-town housing demand over the last 5 to 10 years, really since about 1993. As we came out of the reces- sion, a lot of jobs did follow those households. That will continue to be the case. Different industry segments continue to grow or decline, with a lot of growth in the services sector. Business and personal services will make up a huge por- tion of the growth in the future. There will be much more competition within the so-called knowledge econ- omy for workers who, as I pointed out earlier, are enabled by technology to make broader decisions about where they locate. The increased mobility and wider choices available to workers will create competition between areas based on quality of life factors, because that is now their biggest economic development factor. What does that mean in terms of possible changes in employment location? The trends are conflicting. We see continued decentralization driven by where the boss lives. The boss, by and large, picked up and moved to the suburbs in the past 20 years, and that became the dominant direction of residential growth. But we also see evidence of office location following residential location, with some residential going urban. We also see some employers thinking about the quality of their locations, the quality of the environ- ments that they create. Some employers are concerned about the decrease in mobility in a lot of metropolitan areas and what sort of financial impact that has on them. Two examples are Bell South in Atlanta and Progress Energy in Raleigh, which have made deci- sions to consolidate their facilities closer in more urban areas that are served better by mass transit. I think they are evidence that congestion will encourage some people and businesses to make different location and product decisions. Also, employers are thinking about what kinds of environments they create for their employees. The pre- vious presentation mentioned that we are going to see a lot of competition for skilled workers. One way you compete for those skilled workers is to have good places for them to work. That is not necessarily going to be a suburban office park where you get in your car at lunchtime to drive a long way to pick up your shirts or go to lunch. In many cases, it will be a more convenient environment: existing suburban business districts, exist- ing towns, and in-town areas that already have those urban amenities. That will affect employment location because larger employers know that since their own employees can’t necessarily support all those amenities, they can’t supply them internally. We went through a cycle where employers brought a lot of amenities into large buildings, but their employees couldn’t support them all. But if they invite the outside world, they can have twice as many amenities for their employees, because other people support them. That is the defini- tion of an existing urban location. Another market factor is investment and profit. There is a very good annual survey done by Pricewaterhouse- Coopers to determine where pension funds and others who invest in real estate want to make investments. They tend to bet on 24-hour locations, and even some inner suburbs fail that test. They are looking for more vibrant locations. They have tended to favor easy investment decisions—investing in very similar products. Suddenly it occurred to somebody that real estate is a commodity and that if a particular segment—Kmarts or Wal-Marts, low-density suburban shopping centers—becomes over- built, they are all affected. However, the market favors special, unique locations, mixed-use environments, higher-value places. Over the past 10 years, some of those have actually performed better than their counter- parts, getting above-market rents and maintaining above- market occupancies. Maybe these are better investments. The dollars and cents are going to drive more investment toward these kinds of mixed-use developments—Citi- place in West Palm Beach, Reston Town Center in Fair- fax County. Places like that are outperforming the market. They also tend to do better in a recession, which has an impact on investment. On the barrier side, we have the demand for density versus the fear of density. One good example of density is the Duluth Town Center. This is characteristic of what is happening in a lot of small towns that are being engulfed by metropolitan areas. This is not just subur- ban versus urban. When we look at the development pattern and think about what will happen in the future, a lot of the future density or urbanity that people are seeking may not be in a traditional downtown or cen- tral city, but in these multicentered areas in existing small towns and urbanizing suburban business districts. Figure 9 shows Memorial Drive in Atlanta. The little circles are areas that we have identified as having the potential to become centers, town centers or activity centers. This is based on work the Urban Land Institute (ULI) has done on quantifying the principles of how to revitalize existing strip commercial areas. This is a huge opportunity because there are so many of these failing strips, and developers can capitalize on this trend of some households moving back in and no longer being able to drive for value because the value trade-off just is no longer there. A lot of these existing strips have huge opportunity, and this is just one little 6-mile area. ULI has a publication, Reinventing Suburban Strips. It has a 10-step program, and in this case we expanded it to a 12-step program, with the first principle being acknowledging that you have a problem. It is also a huge opportunity to create town centers like Duluth’s. 2 5WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 25

What is the conclusion from all of this? The future may not be the past; there are a lot of market trends that favor smart growth development as a much bigger part of the mix; and at least one-third of future growth is malleable. Demographically the world is changing enormously, and as the customers for real estate prod- ucts change, they will have different housing and loca- tion preferences. Congestion will also have a tremendous influence. In considering the trends of the past 10 years, those opportunities are inhibited largely by political and status quo barriers, not necessarily the lack of demand. The demand is there. If we are going to consider some alternative development patterns in the future, then we have to think about some of the policy issues that need to be addressed. When we look at where those high-paying jobs are, where those executives moved and then relocated their offices to, you find those are also the areas with the most exclusionary zoning practices. Those are the places where we are most likely to find an apartment moratorium or antidensity sentiment and forcing the old drive for value in commuting, because of a real lack of affordable housing. By affordable, I don’t mean Section 8 or subsidized—I mean workforce housing. In Atlanta, for example, a police officer, firefighter, or school teacher can afford a house generally in the $80,000 to $150,000 range, and you can’t find that where most of the best-paying jobs are going. When peo- ple make these exclusionary zoning decisions, those are the kinds of workers they are zoning out of their com- munity—workers a community needs. Sometimes they want only luxury apartments, which tend to rent for more than $1,000 per month, and for most fire and police officers and teachers—regular, middle-income peo- ple—that $1,000 rent is a stretch. These suburban busi- ness districts, where a lot of the jobs are, have the potential to urbanize and accommodate a lot more of the growth and take some of the pressure off of the edge in the future. But many of those places are even less likely to have any sort of workforce housing policies than cities are. They could potentially go through an accelerated experience of what happened in central cities. Housing and Urban Development and ULI have done a number of studies on how to address the whole 2 6 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 9 Context map, Memorial Drive, Atlanta, Georgia. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 26

middle-income residential infill opportunity. There are huge opportunities from a demand perspective, but a lack of incentives. It is very hard to go back and infill when you have antidensity sentiment, as expressed by NIMBYs. In looking at these areas that could accommodate more future growth, many of the suburban business districts are crying out for more housing. They may be only 50 percent developed and have lots of demand—and you may even be able to get there by light rail—but once you do, there aren’t sidewalks or other ways of getting around. You come back to the argument, “Nobody wants it, so let’s not build it.” But maybe nobody chose it because the opportunity to experience that more con- venient lifestyle by moving back into existing centers and corridors didn’t exist, because the mobility options just aren’t there in the suburbanizing areas. Structured parking is expensive, and some cities are realizing that maybe we shouldn’t subsidize cars only if they are moving. Trying to get that office space or hous- ing, in particular, back into core areas where people could live rather than drive to and from every day—if you take the structured parking out of the pro forma for that residential development, it suddenly becomes feasible. Existing urban areas could attract a lot more growth by changing their policies to allow them to sub- sidize that structured parking expense for projects. That would have a huge impact. To conclude, the opportunity is there, but there is no guarantee that we will have a different kind of future. 2 7WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 27

2 8 Land Use and Transportation Interactions Reid Ewing, Rutgers University In starting with the “You can’t pave your way out ofcongestion” notion, I was asked to talk about theinterface between land use and transportation. Alan Pisarski started by talking about transportation. Gregg Logan then talked about land use. I’m talking about the two together and the way they interact, which makes it very hard to build roads fast enough to keep up with demand. The first time I heard a department of transportation secretary say that was in 1991—it was an admission of defeat. That was in Florida, where the growth of vehicle miles of travel (VMT) was much faster than the growth of lane miles of highway. Even though Florida had passed a couple of gasoline tax increases, we were falling further and further behind, and the secretary made that bold statement. The Texas Transportation Institute publishes conges- tion data every year. One measure is called the travel time index, the ratio of travel time during the peak period to travel time under free-flowing or off-peak con- ditions. For all 75 areas in their database, congestion was worse in 2000 than it was in 1982. Why can’t we build our way out of congestion? There are some obvious reasons—for example, the lack of tolerance for tax increases. But one important rea- son is induced travel. It is a very controversial notion: roads create their own demand. Robert Cervero at the University of California–Berkeley, a top academic scholar in planning, just wrote an article for the Journal of Planning Literature, and I quote him here: “The preponderance of research suggests that induced demand effects are significant, with an appreciable share of added capacity being absorbed by increases in traffic.” According to his research, the elasticities are 0.63 from the road-specific studies and 0.73 from the areawide studies. This means that on the basis of many different studies, on average between 63 and 73 per- cent of the capacity added gets used up by induced travel. Although a jurisdiction may add capacity, the route changes and the longer trips and the new trips and the redistribution of jobs and housing use up a lot of that capacity. That makes it very hard to cope with congestion because the obvious solution, building more roads, doesn’t seem to be a very effective one, at least by itself. Ever since 1991, or maybe even before, we have been looking for alternatives besides adding to the supply of transportation. We hoped that travel demand manage- ment (TDM) would save us from worsening congestion. In the early 1990s, TDM solutions and ridesharing pro- grams, whether business based or areawide, were highly touted, but they are not nearly as highly touted now. Telecommuting was also thought to be our salvation, but it seems there are real limits to it because people get more out of work than just the work. It is a social activ- ity, and the possibility of advancement often depends on being there in person. We have been hearing about congestion pricing since I was a student, which was a long time ago. A researcher named William Vickery, who won the Nobel prize in economics, suggested putting meters on the top of everyone’s car and charging them extra for driving during congested periods. Yet there are virtually no examples of serious congestion pricing in the United States, and there are only a handful worldwide. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 28

That leaves us with land use planning, which we think of as long-term demand management. As the stock in the other ideas—demand management and supply enhancement—has gone down, the stock of land use planning has gone up. More and more people and departments of transportation are now saying, “We have to do some land use planning, or we have to work with the locals who are doing the land use planning, because they are approving all these developments and we can’t keep up.” What land use planning really means, in short, is finding ways to curb sprawl, because sprawl is blamed quite often for the congestion we see, even in low-den- sity suburban areas. How can low-density suburbs gen- erate that kind of congestion? Well, they can, because sprawl generates long trips and has other effects. I’m going to be talking a lot about sprawl today and covering the empirical research. However I feel about these issues, I’m going to remain empirical. By sprawl, I mean low density and segregation of uses. Uses like resi- dential and shopping are segregated from one another. Some of that is market driven; some is driven by land use regulation. But whatever the reason, it is segregated. One characteristic of sprawl is a lack of strong centers—a strong downtown, strong edge cities, and transit-oriented activity centers. A sparse street network is another—not well connected, not dense enough to meet demand. Then, unlimited outward expansion: it just goes on forever. I’ll refer to the alternative to sprawl as compact devel- opment. We are not European and I’m not suggesting that we all live in little villages at high density, even though it would be nice if there were more of those options available. I am not calling for that, but just not what we have today, which is so low density. There is so much low density and single use. The average suburban pattern is very low density. Employment and retail devel- opment are in strips rather than in mixed-use centers or even in single-use centers. Strips are much harder to serve than are centers with transportation infrastructure. They deny the possibility of multipurpose trip-making. As one example, Los Angeles is not as centered as one would like, even though it is dense and has a pretty good mixed- use pattern and some centers. It just goes on forever. That is part of our model of sprawl. So we want higher-den- sity, mixed-use, centered development, as opposed to scattered development. Now that I’ve defined sprawl, I’m going to be talk- ing a lot about its travel implications. I’ll start with what are sometimes referred to as micro or disaggregate studies. They use the individual traveler or the individ- ual household as the unit of observation. They look at why people take this mode versus that mode; why they go this far versus that far. There are really two distinct views of the world. One is the advocate’s view of land use and transportation and how the two interact. In this view, household life cycle and lifestyle define your activities. There is some attraction at the destination that spurs people to travel. According to the advocates, and that would include most planners and the new urbanists and probably most of us in this room, those activities are filtered through the land use pattern and the degree of accessi- bility to create our household travel. Accessibility affects everything. It affects the number of trips we make, the length of trips, the modes used on those trips, and ultimately VMT or vehicle hours of travel (VHT)— everything ultimately depends on accessibility. Then there is the skeptic’s point of view. Skeptics are people like Gen Giuliano and Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson and the think tanks that have sprouted up in Southern California. In effect, they say that the rela- tionship is just a simple linear one. The household char- acteristics create the activity patterns, which determine trip rates, lengths, and so forth. While accessibility exists, it is pretty much irrelevant because we are so mobile as a society, and the cost of travel is so low that people will drive everywhere whether they need to or not, and whether the pattern of development forces them to or not. Those are the two different views. This debate goes back to 1990. You would think after 12 years of argu- ing someone would give in, but in those early days some of the studies weren’t so great. For example, one famous graphic by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy, Australians who wrote Cities and Auto Dependence, shows gasoline consumption per capita, which is also VMT per capita, on the y-axis and density on the x- axis. It is an exponential function—gasoline consump- tion declines exponentially and dramatically as density increases. At the top left are American cities. Houston is at the very top, with low density and high gasoline consumption. At the bottom right are Hong Kong and Moscow, with the reverse. This chart implied that if density increased, VMT per capita would decrease dramatically. When this came out, even people who were favorably disposed toward their argument, academics and others, attacked it on the basis of methodology. A lot more separates Hong Kong from Houston besides density: transit availability and income, for example, and they hadn’t controlled for those things. So there was a lot of criticism and rebuttal articles, and rightly so. That kind of simplistic methodology has been sup- planted. We have more than 50 recent empirical studies. A paper I did for the Transportation Research Board with Robert Cervero looked at more than 50 studies in the past 10 years that were methodologically fairly sophisticated—they used statistical methods, controlled for sociodemographic factors, and collectively related all aspects of travel to all aspects of the built environment. 2 9WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 29

The first sets of studies were of activity and neigh- borhood centers and how the design of those centers affects people’s travel. We found 14 studies of this type. Many contain binary variables, meaning you are either in one kind of place or in another kind of place (dichoto- mous), or in a third kind of place (trichotomous). The community or neighborhood type was the defining char- acteristic. What they found was very interesting. Trip frequencies were relatively constant across places. That is, whether you lived in a new urbanist community or in suburban sprawl, you made about the same number of trips. But the trips were shorter if you lived in traditional urban settings, and walking was more prevalent, dra- matically more prevalent. Transit was also more preva- lent, but to a lesser extent than walking. As a result of the shorter trips and the mode shifts, the higher percent- age of walking and transit trips, VHT and VMT were lower in the traditional places. Although the prototypical neighborhoods differed between studies and were based on different characteris- tics, in effect all neighborhoods were divided into two classes: automobile oriented versus pedestrian and tran- sit oriented, on the basis of when they were developed, their mixed-use pattern or lack of it, and whether or not the road network was interconnected. For a study I did back in 1993–1994 in Palm Beach County, Florida, we looked at all the aspects of travel characteristics for six communities, controlling for household size and income. In traditional places like downtown West Palm Beach, trips were shorter due to greater use of alternative modes. In another study, Robert Cervero compared Rockridge with Lafayette, both on the Bay Area Rapid Transit line in the East Bay. The percentage of walk and bicycle trips is much higher in Rockridge, which is a traditional place, versus Lafayette, which is actually, by our standards in Florida, pretty traditional, but not by the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area, where it is located. That raises an interesting question. In all of these 14 studies, is what really matters the design of communi- ties, whether they are dense and mixed, and whether they have continuous sidewalks and interconnected streets, or is their location within the region—more cen- tral and accessible to the rest of the region—what causes these types of places to differ so dramatically? I did a study in Palm Beach County that showed that the relationship between VHT/person and regional accessibility is fairly linear. This study and others have caused me to conclude that you are better off with any- thing in an infill, highly accessible site than you are with the best development you can do with high density, mixed use, and so forth in the middle of nowhere. We have 35 studies of local land use patterns, really an amazing number. There have been more of these than any other type of built environment travel study. We have tested the significance of residential density, employment density, land use mix, land use balance, and so forth. Again, trip frequencies are relatively con- stant. As density goes up, the number of person trips— not vehicle trips—stays the same. That turns out to be very important. In dense, mixed-use environments, trip lengths are shorter, walking and transit use are more prevalent, and VHT and VMT are lower. The same is true in very accessible environments. Larry Frank and Gary Pivo did one of an early set of studies around 1995. As it turns out, employment den- sity counts just as much as residential density for peo- ple’s mode choice. They found that the drive-alone single-occupant vehicle share is affected even more by employment density than by residential density. Another Cervero study shows the probability of commuting by transit or walking as a function of two variables, density and mix, controlling for household size. It turns out that for low-density environments, it doesn’t matter whether the land uses are mixed or not; the probability of transit use is about the same. When the density goes up, so does the probability of transit use. But mixed use doesn’t seem to be the big factor. For the probability of walking to work, land use mix is just as important as density. You get the same increase by going from low-density, single-use development to either high-density, single-use or low-density, mixed-use development. Then the final increase comes when you have both mixed use and high density in the same place. So both density and mix matter, and they are not, as some people have implied, one and the same. They are correlated, and the correlation is high, as you would expect, but they are different. Why is it important that the trip frequency is con- stant across density classes and mixed-use versus single- use environments? One study by Susan Handy shows that the average shopping frequency is constant—it doesn’t vary with local accessibility. However, the dis- tance traveled to shopping does vary. This means that better accessibility leads to less VMT or VHT. That is important because some people have claimed recently that new urbanist and other, more dense, compact developments will generate more trips because every- thing is closer and that will undo the good done by the shorter trips. That is just not true. It is not borne out by the literature. Finally, we have urban design elements—site design. We found only six studies—this was a year and a half ago [early 2001]—that looked at individual design characteristics such as sidewalks and crosswalks (how complete the sidewalk system is), street trees (presence or absence), active street frontage as opposed to dead space, parking lots and the like, and parking arrange- ments. Six studies looked at the individual characteris- tics, and then 10 that had composites of urban 3 0 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 30

design—a “pedestrian friendliness” factor. The finding here is that individual features don’t seem to make much difference. Just building sidewalks isn’t going to help without a land use pattern to support walking. There may be some impact on mode choice from all those urban design characteristics collectively, but the impact seems to be small compared with that of land use. Possibly those urban design features in a collective sense have some impact on VMT, but again, it is less than the impact of land use. The one exception to that finding (and I mention it because many of you are probably familiar with it) is the Land Use, Transportation, and Air Quality (LUTRAQ) study from Portland, Oregon. It showed that the pedestrian environment factor, measured in terms of ease of street crossings, sidewalk continuity, and other things, was more important than the density. That study considered VMT per household as a func- tion of many variables, including the pedestrian envi- ronment factor and accessibility to jobs. The pedestrian environment factor is supposed to be the most impor- tant thing, but that is the only study that reached that conclusion. I did a study in Miami where I measured absolutely everything I could in terms of street trees and sidewalks and so on. Only one variable was significant to the number of transit riders from a quarter-mile area: the number of marked crosswalks. If you think that just marking some crosswalks is going to make a big differ- ence, I differ with you. It is obviously picking up some other phenomenon I wasn’t able to measure that is cor- related with the presence of crosswalks. Land use made a tremendous difference in the number of transit riders. Land use is the key, and urban design is secondary. One last point: while the primary mode of travel to work seems to depend primarily on land use, once you are at work, urban design may be much more important in deciding whether you are going to walk to lunch, drive to lunch, or stay at your desk. A study by Bruce Douglas showed that in terms of VMT, even though workers in central business districts are making more trips during the day for personal business, eating, and errands, they generate very little VMT because so many of those trips are walk trips. They may have driven there, but they are walking or using alternative modes at lunchtime. Here is the bottom line. Many of you have heard about the smart growth index. It is the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) alternative to classic four- step conventional travel demand modeling. They put out the smart growth index software, and we provided the elasticity numbers that went into it on the basis of 14 studies. What does it all mean in terms of the degree to which we can, through land use, affect people’s travel behavior? Obviously, the big one in VMT is regional accessibility. If you double regional accessibility, VMT will decline by about 20 percent. Design and diversity and density all make a difference. Together they are pretty significant: a 35 percent reduction in VMT. Then there are macro studies on the cost of sprawl, and we are looking at the relationship between trans- portation outcomes. This is a partnership between Rutgers, Cornell, Smart Growth America, and EPA. We are measuring sprawl for metropolitan areas and coun- ties in every way we can, by using national data sources—census, Census Transportation Planning Package, and so forth. You can measure more than you would expect. Even the humble census can be used to measure land use characteristics. If you compute den- sity for census tracts, as we have, then look at the per- centage of the population living at more than, say, 12,500 persons per square mile, you have a transit- friendly density percentage, and it varies dramatically from metropolitan area to metropolitan area. Or you can measure how quickly density declines with distance from the center of the metropolitan area. With TIGER/Line files you can count the number of street segments, the number of centerline miles, and the area, and you can compute street network measures. You really can do a lot with existing national data sources, and we have worked on this study over a period of almost 2 years. We now have 83 metropolitan areas in the database. They are the largest areas in the country. They contain a little more than half of the U.S. population. We mea- sured 22 operational variables for those four factors— density, mix, centers, and streets—and one overall metropolitan sprawl index. Then, at the county level, we included many more counties that are part of those same metropolitan areas, six operational variables, and a county sprawl index. We used factor analysis (although I won’t go into the details), and it shows just how dense different places are. It tracks with your sense of places. We normalized them, standardized them, and put them all together into one index. We then looked at correlations between these indices, both at the county and at the metropolitan level, and different transporta- tion outcomes. So, our transportation data are from dif- ferent places—HPMS is the Highway Performance Monitoring System; FARS is the Fatal Accident Reporting System. Here are just a few of the results of our work. If you plot sprawl versus VMT per capita, the pattern appears to be downward sloping at a very significant level. If you then model VMT per capita in terms of those four factors, you find that both density and centeredness are important determinants of VMT at significant levels. You get VMT down by raising density or making your centers, like the downtown, stronger. The elasticity of VMT with respect to the overall index is –0.16, which 3 1WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 31

means that if you increase the value of the index by 10 percent, you get a 1.6 percent reduction in VMT. That is not huge, but it is significant. Sprawl versus walk share to work is upward sloping. It depends, again, on density and centeredness. Sprawl versus fatal accidents is downward sloping, like the VMT one, probably because VMT is the common ele- ment here. If people drive less, they do not kill each other as often. Here, density and centeredness are sig- nificant. I could talk in response to questions about why mix or streets might not have come out as significant in some of this. Ultimately, by looking at the micro studies or our macro study of the sprawl index, we get a consistent picture of the relationship between land use and travel, and it is the one I just laid out. 3 2 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 32

3 3 Discussion Reid Ewing: I have a question for Gregg. That one-third figure and the fact that only half of the current demand for more compact development is being met—how did you figure that out? Those are amazing statistics. Gregg Logan: I wish there were more data on it. But I have done some surveys of various state agencies that have obtained similar data to compare with that. We were retained by the Conservation Fund to try and answer that question. We did a small study in Atlanta. It was the first time that we asked people about differ- ent sorts of situations and gave them a set of trade-offs. We couldn’t just say, “Would you like something neo- traditional or not?” So we asked them a series of trade- off questions, and we took that same survey to nine other market areas. In each of those markets we then compared, as best as we could, how much of that kind of product was in that market by looking at sales data, building permit data, and so forth. Then, to make sure we were in the right ballpark, we obtained all the other similar studies we could find and made comparisons. Audience question: And the reason we don’t have that half, even if the market is supposed to respond to demand? Gregg Logan: It has a lot to do with the barriers. I could give you several examples of developers who have done those kinds of developments, where they have to get 30 or 40 variances to the existing code to do that project. Then when they talk to their lender to finance it, they hear, “Why don’t you have open parking, because everybody else does?” So they find it very hard to get financing approved. It is just so much easier to go out and find a site on the edge. Audience question: One of the things that has inter- ested me is the number of large metropolitan areas and how broadly they are expanding. It seems to me that as more of our population lives in these very large areas— the Baltimore area has just been called a consolidated area with Washington—the potential for very long trips obviously is connected to the fact that you have this very large metropolitan area. We have been talking more about the community or even the neighborhood level. I’m wondering if either Gregg’s or Reid’s work looks at this total scale of the metropolitan area and the impact that has on travel. The potential for somebody to have a 30-mile work trip increases dramatically with the size of the area. Gregg Logan: It is an interesting question from a land use perspective. When I looked at the East Coast/West Coast difference in driving from one county to another for work, it struck me that in Atlanta, there are 13 coun- ties in the nonattainment area dealing with the Clean Air Act amendments in an area that is about 160 miles across, in a metropolitan statistical area of 20 counties. You could fit all 13 of those counties in Los Angeles County or in Houston. Counties tend to be much smaller on the East Coast than on the West Coast. We tried to correlate multiple directions of growth, which seem to happen when an area gets above 4 million. Below 4 million, many areas have only one dominant center of growth. Size does matter. Reid Ewing: We included variables reflecting the size of the urbanized area. The final sprawl index did not include those variables, but at one time we had a five- factor sprawl index, and clearly the size of the urbanized 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 33

area makes a difference in terms of many transportation outcomes. But, as I recall, and I don’t remember the exact results, it makes less difference than density or cen- teredness. So we can understand to some degree why we are getting long commutes in terms of sheer size, but it also has a lot to do with the way we are developing. Audience question: Reid, I was curious about your definition of “regional accessibility.” It sounds like we need to pay attention not just to the internal design and transportation aspects of the place but also to where it is in the context of the region and its closeness or acces- sibility to transportation systems. Is that what you are saying? Reid Ewing: That is exactly it. Regional accessibility is precisely the point. Regional accessibility is measured in two ways in the literature. The way I’ve measured it most often is by using a gravity model, which looks at the number of attractions at different travel time dis- tances from the point of origin. The more attractions and the shorter the time to reach them, the higher the accessibility. Happily, it turns out that accessibility mea- sures are easy to come by, because conventional four- step travel demand models compute accessibility as part of the trip distribution step. All you have to do is print them out. Others: Cervero, in some of his work, and the LUTRAQ study measured accessibility differently in terms of the number of jobs that could be reached in a given travel time. I remember in LUTRAQ it was how many jobs can be reached by car and by transit within 30 minutes. But in any event, your point is right—how- ever you measure it, accessibility is a very, very impor- tant aspect, meaning location is a very important variable in all of this. Audience question: In our metropolitan planning organization, 91 percent of new growth is at the edge. All over California, the number is from the mid-80s to the low 90s. In Portland, where they are trying very hard to make it different, 70 percent is at the edge. A lot of the smart growth that is occurring is infill, sort of occurring naturally. Isn’t our real challenge to make the communities at the edge smart growth from the start? Gregg Logan: I think that it is good to make them smart growth from the start, and I have read some con- vincing studies that suggest we should do that because it is too hard to do infill. But we are finding mostly political barriers in the way of making it happen. Political and maybe land cost and assembling similar parcels on an infill site—you don’t find these problems in greenfields. If you deal with those barriers, there is a lot of opportunity to focus not just on the edge but also inside the edge. Reid Ewing: I would agree with that. There is also a lot of vacant land, and we heard in both presentations that the demand for housing will change as our demo- graphics change. So, if 70 percent of Portland’s and 90 percent of Sacramento’s growth is at the edge, that doesn’t mean it will be the same percentage in 20 years when you and I are looking to avoid mowing our lawns, looking for something a little denser and more walkable. Audience question: Gregg, particularly in a place like Atlanta, there are barriers like the Clean Air Act. But aren’t there also other barriers in terms of availability of water, which we seem to be running out of, and other infrastructure constraints to expanding outward in addition to the Clean Air Act and Water Act? Gregg Logan: Absolutely. There are other barriers. Assuming that I’m right on the demographics and employment, I was trying to address the issue that there will continue to be growth, and we need to think about how to accommodate the growth. Here are the oppor- tunities. In the Atlanta region, Georgia fought with Alabama over who gets to take how much water out of the Chattahoochee, and the same thing has been going on between Arizona and California for decades. We could run into other limits to growth. I was trying to address not whether we grow, but when we grow, where do we put the growth? Does it continue to go to the edge to create more expensive infrastructure, or can we put it in other places that may also meet market demands and have social benefits? I think the answer is the latter, assuming that we don’t run into other barriers. Audience question: I would like to propose perhaps a different crystal ball to the panel and see if maybe you can help me refute this. A lot of talk has concerned the structure of roads and the structure of the built envi- ronment around roads. But what if there was a mode shift from large car down to small car down to motor scooter in this country so that very quickly, as that hap- pens, the density of traffic decreases? Could you argue why that might not happen and also tell us some of the things that would change in your modeling? I’m partic- ularly interested in that because when you look at afflu- ent Far Eastern countries, that is a predominant mode of travel, particularly in the cities. With Americans wanting to have it their way, driving, under their own power, this seems to me a possible alternative. Alan Pisarski: I’m struck by an experience that I had. I spent a lot of time working in Shanghai and with all of the scooters and motorcycles, you have the worst pollution in the world, mostly because of the two-cycle engines. My personal sense of where we are going may differ from that of some of the other members of the panel. I do believe the future belongs to the SOV and walking—those two things working together rather than transit. But that SOV isn’t going to look like a 1978 Buick. It is probably going to look like a cross between a golf cart and a Honda Insight, a hybrid small vehicle that will be able to play in most of the games 3 4 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 34

that the public demands in terms of value of time. So, I’m halfway to where you want to go. Audience question: I think your last chart suggested that the ozone, in fact, at high densities got worse again. Reid Ewing: I never noticed that. What you have in all of those slides are some outliers. Every slide has out- liers and the outliers are interesting, but they were dropped for the statistical analyses. On the very far end are New York City and Jersey City and San Francisco County and so on. We dropped, in all cases, New York and Jersey City, and in some cases had to drop others as well. With the exception of walk share on the journey to work, the pattern always looked linear to me, as opposed to some fancy thing that swings up again. It was surprising. I would have thought that ozone was one of the flat ones, like congestion, as opposed to one that sloped downward throughout. But it wasn’t. Audience question: I ask because we model the four scenarios for our area. The most dense, most transit- oriented one actually had the worst ozone—we ended up with an environmental problem on the other end because of the congestion and the slow air movement and the number of high-pollution days. That scenario has been stuck in my head for about 5 years. Reid Ewing: I don’t think it did, but in any event, it raises an interesting issue. You modeled it and we are looking at actual data. If you based anything on a four- step model, and I’m assuming you did, you probably weren’t capturing the true effects of mixed use and den- sity on people’s travel choices. The four-step model is just totally incapable of handling the kind of compact development Gregg was talking about that apparently one-third of the population wants. Audience question: Alan, what impact would the fast-growing elderly population segment have on tran- sit, because in many cases they either are giving up driv- ing or they are not driving at night, knowing that after they hit three light poles they have to stop? But they can’t walk either. Alan Pisarski: Let me make a really sharp distinction between “should” and “actual.” In straight, descriptive terms, the places where people use transit are work trips and school trips. Guess which trips older people don’t make. Older persons’ trip making is increasing and it is more like the rest of the population than it has ever been, except for the work trips. It is more automobile oriented than ever. I’m not suggesting that is a great idea. When this early elderly group gets to the 80-plus side, the issues of smart cars and intelligent transporta- tion systems may come together with the aging popula- tion and its safety problems. I’m just hoping we will get intelligent cars soon enough to deal with that question because it is going to be a tough one. I don’t see transit as a big response. Gregg Logan: One thing jumps out at me in looking at the senior population numbers and in working with communities and planning for existing dense areas whose residents are saying, “We don’t want any more high-density housing or apartments.” Look at the fact that 20 percent of seniors rent, for example, and look at the seniors’ population doubling. I think we are heading for a train wreck in terms of where seniors want to live and communities realizing that they need lots of that kind of housing in convenient locations where people don’t have to drive or drive long distances. Audience question: Although smart growth is gener- ally associated with higher densities, what about the other two-thirds of the market, which still prefers lower densities. Aren’t there ways in which they could grow smarter? Reid Ewing: Of course. We are talking about the four factors: density, mix, centeredness, and streets. Two of them don’t fall into your mixed-use category. I think density is saleable if it is done correctly. There is so much evidence that density can be done in a more acceptable way. We are not talking about huge increases in density; even incremental ones will help. I’ve always felt that mixed use was much more acceptable than the rhetoric implies. While there is resistance to density, I don’t think there is the same resistance to a mixed-use pattern, a more villagelike pattern of development. You have the centers and the streets and probably a lot of other things that you can manipulate to reduce the demand for vehicular travel. Gregg Logan: I would add that in looking at the opportunity to serve that third of the market, maybe half of whom are being served today, and thinking about future demographics, it suggests that two-thirds actually could be interested in something other than the low den- sity. We could start meeting the demand for that third that wants the density in a way that helps sustain the ability to have the low-density areas that surround it. If we don’t accommodate that, then we make low-density areas even less sustainable than they are today. Alan Pisarski: I’m often struck by the fact that the young have nostalgia for something they never experi- enced. I grew up in that high density called Queens, and I’m not sorry I’m not there anymore. I keep having this impression that many of these people who answer surveys say, “Boy, that really looks neat.” I wonder how long they will think it is neat when they are in it. I’m not trying to disparage it, but I guess I just have that question. 3 5WHY SMART GROWTH IS A TRANSPORTATION ISSUE 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 35

3 6 Working Definition of Smart Growth Charles Howard, Washington State Department of Transportation The conference planning committee had quite a bitof discussion about how much we should get intothe definition of smart growth in this conference. We decided that there has already been a lot of work on the definition of smart growth, and that is not the purpose of this conference. Our purpose is to further define the transportation aspects of smart growth. That was a pretty good question on the low-density areas as well and aren’t there smart things to do there. We are going to start to explore that tomorrow. That is definitely part of this. I want to discuss quickly the Smart Growth Network’s principles for smart growth and propose this as a working definition of smart growth. First of all, their principles of smart growth are to create a range of housing opportunities and choices; create walkable neighborhoods; encourage community and stakeholder collaboration; foster distinc- tive, attractive places with a strong sense of place; make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost-effective; mix land uses; and preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas. On the transportation side, the principles say pro- vide a variety of transportation choices. That is what we are going to be getting into. Further, if you look at what the principles talk about, it is better to coordi- nate land use and transportation; increase the avail- ability of high-quality transit; and create redundancy, resiliency, and connectivity. On the road networks, there should be connectivity between pedestrian, bicy- cle transit, and road facilities. Finally, a multimodal approach should be taken, and development patterns should be supportive. So, that is really what we are focusing on—trying to get a better handle on what that transportation part of smart growth means. The final two principles are to strengthen and direct development toward existing communities and to take advantage of compact building design. That is the definition we are working with and you will have it as a resource. We will not debate this; we will accept it and move forward. Principles of Smart Growth • Create a range of housing opportunities and choices. • Create walkable neighborhoods. • Encourage community and stakeholder col- laboration. • Foster distinctive, attractive places with a strong sense of place. • Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost-effective. • Mix land uses. • Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas. • Provide a variety of transportation choices. • Strengthen development and direct it toward existing communities. • Take advantage of compact building design. 63805_011_046 4/7/05 3:07 AM Page 36