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What What Does a Smart Growth Transportation System Look Like? 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 37
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3 9 Introduction Mary McCumber, Puget Sound Regional Council Iâm Mary McCumber and Iâm from the Seattle met-ropolitan region. Our session addresses the âwhatâin the question, âWhat does a smart growth trans- portation system look like?â Weâre going to look at that question from some different perspectives: from the East Coast and the West Coast, from a medium- sized metropolitan area and a large metropolitan area, and from a national perspective. During the break, youâre going to do some hard work. Youâre going to consider what you heard from this panel that you would like to try in your region. What are the impediments that you face in doing that, and what are the potential solutions to these impediments? We will have a good discussion. Iâm going to introduce our panel. The first person will be Harrison Bright Rue. Harrison is the Executive Director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission in Charlottesville, Virginia. Harrison is and has been a planner, builder, developer, trainer, and founder of the Citizen Planner Institute, whose work- shops have gained national attention for their practical approach to complex urban design transportation and sustainability issues. Harrison will be followed by Steve Heminger, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) in the San Francisco Bay Area. MTC is a very successful metropolitan plan- ning organization (MPO). We in the Seattle region copy almost everything they do and donât do it quite as well, but we look to them for the work they are doing on regional transportation planning. MTC allocates about $1 billion per year in transportation funds. Iâll follow Steve and talk for 5 minutes about the Seattle metropol- itan region and what a transportation system looks like within our region. Then we will have a national per- spective from Frank Moretti, who will comment on the various presentations. Since 1992, Frank has been the Director of Policy and Research for the Road Information Program, which provides transportation policy analysis on transportation conditions, funding, safety, air quality, and regional planning issues. 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 39
4 0 Recent Transportation and Land Use Planning Experiences in Charlottesville, Virginia Harrison Bright Rue, Jefferson Planning District Commission Iâve been in the Charlottesville area for about 7months; before that, I was in Honolulu for about 4years, and in Miami for 6 years before that. Charlottesville is a very different area, and Iâm intrigued and delighted to be there. It is a five-county region along with the city of Charlottesville. The pop- ulation of the region is about 200,000, about half of that in the MPO. We have four rural counties with 15,000 to 20,000 people each. So with the complexity of the politics and all of this creative work weâre doing, Iâm actually working for a majority board whose elected officials are from very small, rural counties. Every time we go to the public, we have to explain who we are. These figures are a small sample of what we use in public presentations. You have to explain what an MPO and a planning district are. You take them through the different things we do just to begin to get them thinking about coming up with solutions. If you are going on public process, people have to feel like you might actually be able to do something about it, which is very complex when you start talking regionally. It is really hard to make things happen regionally. When I first went there, we decided to pull together the rural planning effort, which was separately funded and separately run, with the MPO planning effort and call it the United Jefferson Area Mobility Plan. We just finished a series of workshops this spring in every county. We worked with a different set of people; for example, it might have been the Chamber of Commerce in one county. We basically gave them the process and said, âYou tell us how you want to run it.â One county said it wanted the meeting to be its county comprehen- sive plan meeting. So, we did all the technical support for the county comprehensive plan mobility section. We get together and we work around tables with a set of simple rules. We actually train folks on how to do that, but we never go to the public without talking about how we are building on previous efforts, starting with Mr. Jeffersonâs legacy. When we talk about sus- tainability, I always like to wear a kid tie to remind myself to think about planning for future generations. In this country, the idea of planning for seven genera- tions actually goes back to the Iroquois Confederacy, before even Mr. Jefferson. Figure 1 shows a list of individual studies about sus- tainability in commercial corridors and so on in the region. We came up with sustainability accords shown in Figure 2. I also want to introduce Hannah Twaddell. Hannah was with the MPO for 15 years, long before I got there. A lot of this is bragging about her work. I almost see this as a constitution for everything we are doing in the region, whether it is transportation or land use, affordable housing, workforce development, or farmland preservation. We try to come up with these 1998 principles and apply them at the beginning of every project we do. We also look at specific projects we are working on right now. I do the workforce development. We are starting a Homeless Management Information System in coordination with a plan for the aging. We also like to brag about work that the city of Charlottesville is doingâa great study by Torti Gallas, looking at com- mercial corridors and changing the zoning. They are actively working on that right now. 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 40
The county of Albemarle, which surrounds Charlottesville, is working on a neighborhood model. Current trends and zoning are resulting in typical sprawl; however, it would like to see a more pedestrian-friendly livable community. It is having difficulty in changing the zoning to produce the latter. Obviously, it would like to see boulevards rather than typical eight-lane arterial design so pedestrians only have to cross two or four lanes at a time, rather than all eight. What we are building out in the county is density without delight. Folks can tell and are annoyed. You can see the buildings are not that ugly, but they are not located in pedestrian-friendly areas. When we look in our region, going back to 1995, this is some scary stuff. Figure 3 shows housing densi- ties in the planning district. Under current average housing density, if you subtract the swamps and hills, instead of 200,000 people, you would have around 1 million if it were built out. So current zoning would allow five times the population. Nobody likes to see that. If you look at the 2000 census (Figure 4), you can see these individual dots are one person, and all the black in the middle is Charlottesville, the MPO area. At the top right, over one county border, is where all the affordable housing is going. To the right is where another big hunk is going, right over the county border. That is why we have to think regionally. So how do we make this happen? Departments of transportation are the butt of jokes. Local folks find themselves powerless. It is very hard to plan regionally. But letâs put some science and some dollars behind it. The Eastern Planning Initiative (Figure 5) is one of the initiatives for which Hannah got a Transportation and Community and System Preservation grant. It looked at a 50-year vision (Figure 6) and the dollars behind some of the elements, in addition to the regional plan (where 4 1WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? ⢠Sustainability Council Accords ⢠Regional Build Out Analysis ⢠MPO Long-Range Plan (CHART 2021) ⢠Charlottesville Commercial Corridor Study ⢠Albemarle Co. Neighborhood Model (DISC) ⢠Transit Development Plan (CTS) ⢠Charlottesville Neighborhood Plans ⢠Jefferson Area Eastern Planning Initiative ⢠Rural County Comprehensive Plans FIGURE 1 Recent regional planning efforts. ⢠Encourage and maintain strong ties between the regionâs urban and rural areas ⢠Strive for a size and distribution of the human population that preserve vital resources ⢠Retain the natural habitat ⢠Ensure water quality and quantity are sufficient to support people and ecosystems ⢠Optimize the use and reuse of developed land and promote clustering ⢠Promote appropriate scale for land uses ⢠Retain farm and forest land ⢠Develop attractive and economical transportation alternatives ⢠Conserve energy ⢠Provide educational and employment opportunities ⢠Increase individual participation in neighborhoods and communities FIGURE 2 Sustainability accords. (a) (b) FIGURE 3 Thomas Jefferson Planning District housing density: (a) current average housing density and (b) build-out average housing density. 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 41
we are going to live), community plans (how we are going to live in those places), and an implementation strategy (how weâll get there). What makes up a great neighborhood is not news to most of you (Figure 7). But they have developed a whole set of diagrams based on existing towns and neighborhoods that folks love, so they recognize them. We looked at urban mixed-use areas around Charlottesville, suburban mixed-use areas, and small towns, and we diagrammed exactly what it is that made them work and made them loved. Then we looked at the various elements that would enhance the suburban areas and diagrammed what that growth might look like. In Figure 8, on the left is what it is now, and on the right is what it would look like if you infill that subur- ban development with the elements that people like as it grows. Then they plugged that into a model, into Excel spreadsheets, and developed some scenarios. Over 50 years, the dispersed scenario, or the sprawl version, would require widening all of those roads shown in Figure 9. The department of transportationâs new investments were mostly for bypasses and widening of country roads. If you add them up, they total $1 billion 4 2 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 4 Thomas Jefferson Planning District: 2000 population density by census block. (Source: 2000 census.) âCommunity Elementsâ Alternative Futures Quality-of-Life Goals 50-Year Vision Implementation Strategies Land Use / Transportation Scenarios FIGURE 5 Jefferson area Eastern Planning Initiative. Regional Plan (Where will we live?) Implementation Strategy (How do we get there?) Community Plans (How will we live?) FIGURE 6 The 50-year vision: Step 1. FIGURE 7 What makes a place a place? Open space, types and proximity of activities, size and character of buildings, size and character of streets, internal and external connections, and location of parking. 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 42
over 50 years. All of that would be in bypasses and wider roads, not transit. Under this scenario, 16 million miles are driven daily, and 44 percent of all miles driven are congested. In the two town centers and urban core scenarios, you would see a different pattern. Figure 10 shows less road building and much more transit express bus. This is because the growth was all focused on those town centers or urban core areas. The numbers are star- tlingâ$0.5 billion over 50 years (versus $1 billion), three-quarters of the miles driven daily (a 25 percent reduction), and 29 percent versus 44 percent of miles driven in congestion. If you add priority transit (Figure 11), you spend the same amount of money and you get a minor reduc- tion in miles driven and congested travel. There will be much more mobility and a little time savings. Contrary to the thinking when we first started, what made the difference was putting the growth into town centers. This is really the land use argument. That is where we have the bang for the bucks. We could spend another $0.5 billion on transit and get a bunch more reduction, but the big savings was in where and how you build the towns. We realize that all of our congestion is because we have only these major, primary roads. When they built the region, they left out that connected gridânot neigh- borhood streets, but roads parallel to the main routes. 4 3WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? FIGURE 8 Enhanced suburban mixed use. FIGURE 9 Dispersed scenario; $1 billion invested in bypasses and wider roads, not transit. Transportation results: 16 million miles driven daily, 44 percent in congestion. 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 43
The network between those town centers and neigh- borhoods is what produces the travel savings and the reduction in congestion. Remember I talked in the beginning about the sus- tainability accords. Figure 12 shows the measures of those indicators. Town center is the one that people actually like the most. There is less interest in the otherânobody really likes the words âurban core.â Everybody likes the words âtown center.â I think this is interesting. My friend here from Utah found the same thing. It is the middle road, exactly what they wanted. Notice the percentage of farms and forest saved and the percentage developedâthere is a big reduction from the sprawl scenario. The percentage living in clustered com- munities goes from 13 in sprawl to between 61 and 68 in the other scenarios. That is where we get the change. The implementation strategy is the really hard part. This is a neat model, and fun to use. It communicates well, but actually making the changes is hard. Getting that kind of regional agreement is very difficult. We just had another polite argument about it at our recent com- mission meeting. Some people in the outlying areas are very nervous about people from Charlottesville telling them what to do. So even though that is not what is going on, there is a real history of reluctance. The idea of each county making these decisions is key. You can have regional agreements and consensus, but you canât have regional land use regulations. People have to make these decisions within their own counties, building where it makes sense, maintaining the small town via- bility, building quality communities, preserving the rural areas, coordinating investmentsâthat is where our transportation work at the MPO comes in, along with ensuring equity. The bottom line of the Eastern Planning Initiative study is that walkable communities supported by a good transportation network are a viable, sustainable, less expensive alternative to building freeways to accommodate dispersed growth. Only one-sixth of the trips had to move from driving alone to walking, biking, or transit to produce those desired results. For most households, if you take 12 trips a day, one round-trip would make a difference. Some suggestions: for the states and federal partners, help communities conduct and coordinate their own planning; support integrated land use, community design, and transportation planning; integrate locally based MPO plans into state plans; help the departments of transportation and MPOs be proactive in creating 4 4 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 10 Town centers scenario before priority transit; $0.5 billion invested in roads and local transit. Transportation results: 12 million miles driven daily, 29 percent in congestion. FIGURE 11 Town centers scenario with priority transit; $0.5 billion invested in roads and local transit; $0.5 billion in priority transit. Transportation results: 11 million miles driven daily, 25 percent in congestion. GoodGoodGoodPoorWater Quality and Quantity Water quality and quantity 44Pct. Travel Congested Employment/education access 121155Annual Gallons Gas Consumed (billions) Conserve energy 181815Pct. Non-Auto Trips 68686113Pct. Living in Clustered Communities Optimize use/cluster/human scale 35353645Pct. Developed Retain resources/habitat/farms/forests 65656455Pct. Farms and Forests Retain resources/habitat/farms/forests Dis- persedMeasure/Sustainability Accord 212027 114110 4Transportation alternatives CoreMCoreL Town Ctr FIGURE 12 In sum: how the scenarios compare (all scenarios assume approximately 330,000 population and 220,000 employment). 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 44
urban communities; and then support inclusive processes. I want to talk a little bit more about specifics on how to make that happen. Our old approach, 30 years ago, was to tell you what we wanted to doâgo through and between places. If that is all we care about, pretty soon there will not be places worth going to. The new approach, context-sensitive design, can move lots of vehicles and still be safe for people and good for business. Letâs look at some of the details. Figure 13 is Charlottesville, Virginia. The portion of roadway shown on the bottom of the figure is the state road. The portion of roadway shown at the top is the county road. This is exactly where it crosses the river. You see the bridge and you can see the difference. On one side there is a nice median and trees. As soon as it goes over into the county, there is no median, and the road widens out. It carries exactly the same amount of traffic. It depends entirely on how the state works with local partners in the decisions to produce those details. We have discovered that the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) can do good work, and I think this would hold true in almost any of the other 49 states, when they are asked. Originally, for a new connector road, VDOT was going to build a five-lane underground tunnel. The city said it didnât need five lanes and didnât want the street to be buried; it wanted a street in the middle of the neighborhood that connects to other neighborhoods. This is three blocks from the University of Virginia, where there is a lot of pedestrian and transit traffic. They went through the battle and came up with a really nicely designed three-lane road with bike lanes and sidewalks and street trees and beautiful light fix- tures. Now, VDOT is proud of that, but it is not going to do another one unless that locality insists on it. So as customers, you have to make some of the choices. We are quite proud in Charlottesville that we are the first city in Virginia that has gotten road funding flexed toward transit. This has been an ongoing battle, and the governor finally intervened this year. Now there is $200,000 per year flexed toward transit out of urban roadway funds. That is a big deal in Virginia. Our battle is to get the first sidewalk built out of urban roadway funds. The state is also starting to look at installing round- abouts. The resident engineer asked me recently, âWhat is the name of that computer program that analyzes roundabouts?â They want to start looking at that for themselves. The state owns virtually all the roads in the entire system. We know that as the region grows, travel times are going to get worse, and we are interested in looking at grayfields along Route 29, coming up with new land uses, and working to develop a bus rapid transit (BRT) system in those areas. We are required to develop a balanced plan; we just usually donât quite do it. So that is our focus right nowâto come up with an investment plan that is balanced and coordinated with land use. We have been trying all kinds of public relations tools and interesting ways to look at these problems. We went out and packed one of the local streets with cars and then we started thinking in terms of moving people. We realized if we put those people on something like BRT, we could move the same num- ber of people in one of the four lanes, and then focus on how they are going to get around once they get off the bus and use bike lanes and transit. We have an incredible amount of people-carrying capacity in our existing asphalt and concrete infrastructure. It is more of an operational and land use planning decision than it is about building all new roads in some cases. We looked at some intersections. The Southern Environmental Law Center, as part of its lawsuit against DOT, looked at some ways to move through traffic at big suburban intersections and came up with a plan to bury the through traffic and get pedestrians across an eight-lane road. What we are trying to do at the MPO now is a study that will put the science behind this, and we want to do the engineering work to see if something like this would really work. We are also looking at parking lots. It is one thing to make it easier to walk across the parking lot of the supermarket, but in our work in Honolulu on the BRT line, we looked at development opportunities in the grayfield malls and ways we might turn some of those into neighborhoods. There was an old Sears shopping center in La Brea, California, that now has new neigh- borhoods and commercial development on top of the old parking lot. It is being done around the country. We are also looking at intersections that can be reclaimed, building by building. We do visualizations just to check with people that this is what they want, and then we 4 5WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? 44 FIGURE 13 Charlottesville, Virginia (state road at bottom; county road at top). 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 45
figure out which rules we have to change to produce it. It usually starts with parking. We looked at ways to take gas stations back and still move the same number of people and cars. It comes down to effective public processâgetting people to the table; having a well-designed process; com- ing up with a comprehensive, exciting, visual plan; and proceeding with model projects even before the plan is done to get the publicâs faith. It doesnât replace gover- nance and good business with anarchy. The people in the process, the designers, do their work. The develop- ers on the projects and the decision makers, usually the elected officials, still make the tough decisions, and the plans get built. It doesnât matter what you call itâit is getting peo- ple from the public and private sectors together to do the work. We always do citizen planner training for the groups on the basis of the principles in our manual. You know most of these principlesâcomparing places that are 6,000 years old with places that we know and love today, whether downtown Charlottesville or the new Disney Celebration. They copy our old towns. We like to get people out on the road, doing the roadwork, walking around, comparing streets. We involve young people and do the facilitator training. You have to make a plan. It doesnât have to be fancy, but people have to get their hands on it. It is always important to have them summarize, in their own words. It doesnât matter whether you do it on the computer or a crayon draw- ing. It has to have clear, simple principles, like the one we did in Honolulu to get the BRT approved. There were three goals: improve in-town mobility, strengthen islandwide connections, and foster livable communities. Everybody can remember those and it is almost enough to act on. The people in Honolulu were the ones that decided they didnât want a light rail line because of the wires and the cost. We went back to the drawing board and came up with BRT. Iâll end with one more visualization to inspire us. Figure 14 shows a really nasty, ugly, suburban highway in paradiseâHonoluluâand we came up with some ideas for separating out through traffic from local traf- fic and reclaiming all that great, developable area next to the road. These are some of the policy angles: work- ing with the adjacent landowners, assuming that a proj- ect would be initiated by somebody that could help make it happen; moving the buildings up to the street; landscaping; adding bike lanes, parking, and the street grid between the properties at the rear; and then seeing the mixed-use buildings come in one at a time, on adja- cent properties. Then we thought, âThis really isnât practical; we need to separate out the lanes. We can add the trees and make it look pretty, but if we separate out the through lanes from the service lanes and have a good plan for dealing with that at the signals, then we might have a chance of building something like what is shown in Figure 15.â This has been done around the country, and some streets in Washington are like that. So, whether you are building an on-road bike path, an off-road bike path, or whatever your first effort is, you sometimes need one of the most ungainly coalitions you can imagine to get it done. 4 6 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 14 Ugly suburban highway in Honolulu. FIGURE 15 Improved suburban highway. 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 46
4 7 Big and Small Things in the Bay Area Steve Heminger, Metropolitan Transportation Commission Iwill give a rather different talk from Harrison Ruethat I hope is complementary, because his wasquite practical and hands-on. Mine is a bit more philosophical and more in the vein of trying to chal- lenge some of the assumptions that I think underlie this debate about smart growth. I believe it is possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Sometimes, that is just fine and we ought to get away with lifeâs messy little compromises and move on. But I think the case of smart growth is such a tough uphill climb that if we are carrying too many untested assumptions on our back, we are going to make it a lot harder. We are also going to give more ammunition to critics who already have plenty of ammunition. So I think it is important to do the right thing for the right reasons, and that is why Iâm going to try to highlight some of those points. I think the first thing to highlight is the angle of decline, which is quite tall. I will read you one of my favorite quotes, which I think sums up the forces going in the other direction. This is from Harry Culver, the developer of Culver City in Californiaâone of the great suburbs of America. âWhenever you can take a family out of an apartment house, out of the dust, dirt and smoke of a crowded city where it is throwing its rental money out the window each month and its health with it, and place that family in a fresh, pure, health-giving district in a home of its own, I want to say to you that you are not only starting that family out on the road to success, but you are rendering a service to the commu- nity and a service to humanity.â That says it all, and that has been the creed for many years. In fact, it still is. This is a more recent quotation from a gentleman at Rutgers, a bit less ringing in its call, but I think thor- oughly persuasive in its logic. âAs you go farther out, your taxes fall, your housing generally costs less, your schools improve, you get increasing amounts of public recreation facilities, you are safer from crime, and you are more likely to be surrounded by people like your- selves.â That last point is very important and often is not talked about in forums about smart growth. Given its ability to deliver all that, no wonder the public loves sprawl. This is what is arrayed out there. I had omitted the next sentence of the quotation but Iâll mention it now: âThe only thing that is going to stop sprawl is if we run out of money to serve it.â The next point Iâm going to make is that we are basically on the verge of doing so. Figure 1 shows interesting data from the Federal Highway Administration, which I would encourage all of you to look up. FHWA surveyed the 19 largest met- ropolitan areas in the country and looked at their long- range plansâwhich are, on average, from 20 to 30 yearsâto figure out where the money is going. So this is not looking back or fighting all the battles of the past 30 years, the highway revolts, and so forth. This is looking forward. Where do we intend to go? A couple of remarkable things surfaced. One of them is that we are going to spend about half the money on public tran- sit. That is a very sizeable investment, especially given transitâs current mode share. Figure 2 shows the same data sliced a different way. On average, these 19 areas are going to spend two- thirds of the money on operation and maintenance 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 47
(O&M) of the existing system. That is simply because the systems are old, they are large, and they are very costly to maintain. That leaves very little for expansion. If you look, in fact, at the largest areasâthe exception being the great one of Los Angelesâmost of the large areas are spending even less than the average on expan- sion. The Bay Area is at 74 percent O&M, Washington at 80 percent, Chicago at 81 percent, Detroit at 84 per- cent, and Boston at 81 percent. That is important, because that is not just for the central city or the town centers. That is for the whole metropolitan region. So one point is that this strategy, which is not neces- sarily a purposeful smart growth strategy, of spending money on the existing infrastructure is going to have a beneficial effect on those town centers and urban cores, because that is where most of this O&M money is spent. The new lines, out on the fringe, are not going to get most of this money. It will be the old systems, the big, heavy rail systems and the big highway systems that were built originally. That is Point 1. Point 2: I titled my talk âBig and Small Things in the Bay Area.â The second big thing we are trying to do about smart growth, which is called by a much longer, complicated title, is basically an effort by five regional- level agencies, MTC being one, in a nine-county region with 7 million people, to figure out how to grow smarter. Figure 3 shows what got us started on the proj- ect. It shows that the Bay Area, defined as the nine counties that touch the bay, is growing fairly slowly. Over this 40-year period, they grow fairly slowly, espe- cially compared with the 10 counties that ring the 9 counties. In some cases you see population doubling over 40 years, which is pretty phenomenal growth. In 1990, about 75,000 people were commuting from outside the Bay Area into it, and the projection is that by 2020, it will be 250,000. That is basically because we like to build jobs and not houses; that is our motto in the Bay Area. When you do that, you force people into very, very long commutes. This is the one that really scared us, because if that was going to happen, we as trans- portation professionals have to ask how we get all those people into jobs in the Bay Area. That is essentially the challenge we are dealing with in our region. That is the challenge we were trying to deal with in this strategy. It is a challenge that perhaps is unique to our region, given the extreme housing shortage that we have. But at some level this challenge is fairly common across the country in terms of that dispersion. In this strategy, we looked at the three alternatives to the current base case shown in Figure 4. The base case is at the bot- 4 8 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 1 Transit 35% Operations and Maintenance 2 Transit 15% Expansion 3 Road 28% Operations and Maintenance 4 Road 21% Expansion 5 Other 1% 1 2 5 3 4 FIGURE 1 Regional transportation plans, top 19 metropolitan areas: average expenditures. (Source: FHWA.) Metro Operations & Area Maintenance Expansion New York 69 31 Los Angeles 48 52 Chicago 81 19 Washington, D.C. 80 20 San Francisco 74 26 Philadelphia 73 27 Boston 81 19 Detroit 84 16 Dallas/Ft. Worth 43 57 Houston 53 47 Atlanta 51 49 Miami 64 36 Seattle 45 55 Phoenix 47 53 Minneapolis/St. Paul 50 50 Cleveland 91 9 San Diego 64 36 St. Louis 43 57 Denver 47 53 Average 63 37 â Percent â FIGURE 2 Regional transportation plans, top 19 metropolitan areas: O&M versus expansion. (Source: FHWA.) Decrease Increase up to 60% Increase 61% to 100% Increase over 199% FIGURE 3 Total population growth: percentage change, 2000â2040. (Source: California Department of Finance.) 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 48
tom. The current trends show where the underlying development will be. The alternatives, where the new growth is going to occur, are gradually more and more dispersed. The central cities alternative really focuses on San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, concentrating huge amounts of new growth there that are not currently projected to occur. The smarter suburbs alternative looks more at greenfield development. Naturally, we are focused right now on the one in the middle, called network of neighborhoods. It is basically a transit-oriented development alternative around our rail systems in the Bay Area, and that seems to be the one catching peopleâs fancy. Figure 5 shows the consumption of greenfield acres for each alternative. I think this is where you can over- sell smart growth and where the better arguments lie. In the base case, we have not only 83,000 acres of green- field development in our region, but 45,000 acres out in the Central Valley and the Sacramento area. Those are residents we are exporting out there because we donât want to build them houses. The comparison of the alternatives is quite stark. This probably gives you a sense of the scale of the political challenge of accom- plishing any of these alternatives, because the first alter- native would have no greenfield developmentâall infill. Even the third one would have less than half of the development in our region. What does that do to air quality? Figure 6 shows that it does not do much. That is one point to make right here. Smart growth, especially in the near term, but even in the long term, does not have much of an effect on air quality, at least here. One reason that these data are a bit peculiar to our region is that we are taking about 200,000 people who would otherwise live outside the Bay Area and bringing them back in. They are bringing back their cars and their kids and all their problems, and that will have a countervailing effect, to some extent, on the infill bene- fits that you would gain through less travel and maybe taking more transit. My observation has been that this is one point where we have tended to oversell smart growth. For example, in comparing the base case with Alternative 2, in Figure 7, you can see where we seem to be headed. There is almost no detectable difference between the two alternatives. By 2020, no one knows what we will be driving, but it is going to be a lot cleaner than it is today. That is probably the one thing we know for sure. Secondly, you donât find very large differences in transportation. If you look at the base case in terms of 4 9WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? (a) (b) (c) (d) FIGURE 4 Maps show the impacts of three smart growth alternatives [(a) Alternative 1, central cities; (b) Alternative 2, network of neighborhoods; and (c) Alternative 3, smarter suburbs] and (d) the Current Trends Base Case on urbaniza- tion in the Bay Area in 2020. They indicate the primary areas of change in each alternative and the base case, includ- ing redevelopment of already developed areas (infill) and construction on currently undeveloped lands (greenfields). FIGURE 5 Consumption of greenfield acres for each alternative. FIGURE 6 Effects on air quality. FIGURE 7 Trip characteristics under the alternatives. 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 49
transit trips, percent bike and walk, and so on, there is a larger difference between the base case and Alternative 1, in which we had a lot more infill and den- sity in the major urban areas. With Alternative 2, which is more decentralized but still transit based, you pick up some benefit, but not a significant one. Again, I think there is a countervailing effect here of moving a lot of those in-commuters back into the region. I wanted to amplify this because we did a different analysis several years ago that shows a larger difference. This is the more telling point in terms of policy makers and the public. In this analysis we compared the com- pact land use scenario. In Figure 8, the bar down at the bottom is probably analogous to Alternative 1ânot identical, but similar. We compared it with infrastruc- ture investment. In our region, of course, since we spend money on virtually nothing but public transit, we looked at all transit options. So one was a rail package at the top worth $12 billion. The second was a bus package worth $3 billion. The third was a ferry pack- age worth $2 billion. You can add them all together and you will get up to the compact land use scenario in terms of benefits. This is a very telling point for policy makers. Land use changes can affect the use of the infrastructure youâve already built. These comparisons show that if you spend $10 billion on new transit, you will get about the same percentage increase in ridership as if you got more peo- ple to live where the existing stations are. That is the bot- tom line here, and I think that is a pretty powerful message. Iâm done with the big stuff nowâon to the small. These are two of our programs, and I encourage people to lie, cheat, and steal them because that is why we developed them. One is called Transportation for Livable Communities, or TLC. The other is called HIPâ Housing Incentive Program. They are both funded with federal flexible funds. David Burwell, at the Governorâs Conference, showed that half of all the flexing done with federal money has occurred in California. We have done our share in the Bay Area. In this case, we are flex- ing highway money to these livability and housing incentive programs. TLC is intended to support transit-based develop- ment, as well as bicycle, pedestrian, and other kinds of activities at the community level. We have a planning program as well as a capital grant program. Weâve done quite a few projects by now. We are well into the sev- eral dozen projects that have moved through the plan- ning and the capital phase, and just last year we started going to ground breakings. It is always nice to see the program actually take root in the region. The planning program is intended to get these proj- ects jump-started. They are often difficult to do. Sometimes youâll have a good planner, letâs say at Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), who wants to come up with a good project at a rail station, but he doesnât know who to talk to in the community. Sometimes it will be vice versa. One of the purposes of this program is to bring those two people together so that we can move the project through. We fund this planning com- ponent, by the way, not out of federal flexible funds, but out of our own agency budget. It is about $500,000 a year that comes out of our bottom line into the plan- ning program. But the capital program is funded with federal flexible funds. The grants can go up to $2 mil- lion. We do have a local match component because of federal requirements, but we encourage overmatching to leverage the money further. The new one is called HIP, which is more or less a straight bribe to local government to build more housing and, in particular, to build more housing near transit. The Bay Area has an acute housing problem, so we wouldnât mind if they built any housing, but if we can get people to build more housing near transit, we kill two birds with one stone. The more dense the housing, the more money they get. They get a bonus for affordable housing. We just started this program, so we really donât have many results yet, and we are still waiting on the out- come. The critics say what we are really doing is not âincentivizingâ but rewarding, and that may be true. But over the long term, rewards turn into incentives. As my former leader, Larry Dahms, used to say, carrots are sticks painted orange. Let me conclude with some concrete results: pedes- trian and bicycle access improvements at the suburban Concord BART station, a path in Marin County, and a downtown linkage in Santa Rosa, a downtown area that was split in two by a freeway. This is an attempt to try to piece it back together. East Palo Alto is a very depressed, low-income commu- nity, and the idea is to get more development there. It is right next door to Stanford University. They are going to 5 0 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 0 2 4 6 8 10 Rail ($12.4 B) 3.3% 5.9% 0.4% 9.5% Bus ($2.4 B) Ferry ($2.0 B) Compact Land Use Scenario Percent FIGURE 8 Comparison of blueprint packages, 2020 (percentage change in transit trips). (Source: MTC.) 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 50
create a transit villageâan important example because it is near a bus transfer facility. This doesnât all have to be rail. We are doing it near bus and ferry facilities in our region. I would like to leave with you the message that we donât need to oversell, because we have a pretty good product and a lot of good reasons to do it. I mentioned at the outset that quote about when you go further out there are more people like you. In my view, one of the strongest arguments for smart growth and infill is to get people back into more integrated, urban settings where their children can grow up in that kind of an environ- ment and attend those schools. In my view, this is one of the last chances we have to deal with the subject that has bedeviled America for its entire history. I donât think we can approach this only as transportation pro- fessionals, saying if we can reduce vehicle miles of travel, then we ought to do smart growth, because it probably wonât reduce vehicle miles of travel. But we should do smart growth for the right reasons, and we need coalitions to move the ball forward. 5 1WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 51
5 2 Smart Growth Transportation System in Seattle, Washington Mary McCumber, Puget Sound Regional Council Iâm going to take a few minutes to reflect on whata smart growth transportation system looks like inanother metropolitan region. On the basis of the two presentations weâve had so far, a lot depends on local conditionsâsmart growth is a nice, big idea, and there are many different ways you can deal with the transportation system. The solution really depends on where you are and what issues you are facing. Iâm going to talk about the Seattle metropolitan area and how we are dealing with this issue. We are the Central Puget Sound region. We are a large region, more than 6,000 square miles. Seattle is the metropolitan center, but we have lots of govern- mentsâwe like local home rule. We have four counties, 82 cities, and hundreds of special-purpose districts. Weâve gotten a lot of growth over the last decades, much of it related to jobs, and we have some concerns at the moment, but we have been a very high-growth area. We currently have 3.3 million people. Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, we grew in different ways. We started to grow outside of our cities with much more sprawling land use and, even more important, without adequate infrastructure. Some good things happened to us. In the early 1990s, we had new mandates to âget our act together,â and we had a popu- lation that was concerned about the wonderful place we live and what we were doing to it. So we passed, as a state, the State Growth Management Act in 1990 and 1991. Charlie Howard and I played a key role in that. We also were fortunate that the new federal legislation, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act and the Clean Air Act amendments, complemented what we needed to do because of the state growth strategy. We were also fortunate because we were so concerned as a region in the late 1980s about what was happening within our region that elected officials voluntarily came together and agreed to a regional growth and trans- portation strategy. It was called Vision 2020, and to my knowledge, it was the first in the country. It was about concentrating growth, protecting businesses and open space in rural areas, and doing an urban growth area, which was very controversial. We werenât like Oregon and we took a long time to realize how right they were that the growth pattern should be within the urban area. We put a lot of focus into centers, diverse places throughout our region where people could live and work in quality communities, and connecting them with a good transportation system. This vision, which was not required but which we did as a region, was in place in time to meet all those new mandates. We were pretty lucky. When I say that, some of the elected officials say they knew what they were doing, but I think it was more luck than anything else that those things came together. We have started to measure our progress. Right now, we are putting out a new report called Puget Sound Milestones: A Monitoring Report. It is on our website (psrc.org), and highlights will be in our next monthly newsletter, Regional View. We measured the period between 1995 and 2000, the urban growth period: 16 percent of the land within our four-county region con- tains 86 percent of the population and 96 percent of the 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 52
jobs. That is a huge shift from where we were going with the trends in the 1980s. We are also releasing [in September 2002] data on how those centers and diverse communities throughout our area are doing. They are doing really well. It is hard to go against the trend that we are bucking, but major things are happening. Seattle is a very healthy metro- politan center. We are lucky in that, but a lot of good decisions contributed to it. Other older central cities are doing incredible things, provoking a major renaissance. Our rural towns that are growth centers are doing exceedingly well, and we have had major changes within some of those suburban edge cities that have reexamined their growth pattern. Because of all the growth management planning that occurred in the 1990s, we were able to build off the regional growth strategy being implemented at the local level and do a new regional transportation plan in May 2001, titled Destination 2030. We brought together all the elected officials within our four-county region. We have a big political convention and we all have to come together. They vote on the basis of pop- ulation, and we need a two-thirds vote to do a plan. So it is great in the sense that you get agreement; it is obvi- ously hard work to get all those people together to do something meaningful. We were able to address in that transportation plan update how to treat transportation on the basis of our regional growth strategy. We found that we had to do a lot of things. All that growth had occurred in a three- decade period without adequate infrastructure facilities. We needed to maintain and preserve our system. But we also needed some very big capital projects, so we had a system for moving around and choices within the urban growth area. We needed transit. We are still in a big debate about that, but we needed a high-capacity transit system. We needed roads within our region and we needed to finish the urban system within the urban growth area. We needed ferries, biking, walking, trans- portation demand management, transportation pricing, and all sorts of critical things that we talked about before. One of the biggest things that happened with the adoption of Destination 2030 was getting elected offi- cials in the region to stop talking about either roads or transit. We got people to talk about how we need both. It is not one or the other. It is the âwhereâ that matters. In parts of our region, we donât need any more roads. We have a great system. In other parts of the region, we need to complete the road system so transit and other things can work. In other parts of our region, within the urban growth areaâeverything Iâm talking about is within that 16 per- cent of the landâwe needed to have a complete trans- portation system. How can you bike, walk, and do other things if you donât have any way to move around? That was a breakthrough in our discussions. We are a place that cares about the quality of our community and environ- ment. We had been blustering for years. You canât build your way out of congestion. We still believe that, but we also believe we need a complete system within our region. Our map shows the regional growth strategy, the urban growth area, the centers, and the transportation system needed to make it happen. By working together in the same direction, these many jurisdictions and the state department of transportation all came together to agree on the strategy. The big âbutâ is that we need to make it happen. Weâre the land of process. We like to look at things and then relook at them and reconsider what we should be doing. We need to get out of that habit. We need to get much more specific on those projects, fund them, and complete the system. My conclusion is that I think it would be really diffi- cult to do what we have done in such a complex region without our state growth management legislation. That gave us the necessary impetus to ask what the regional growth strategy was and what the transportation system needs were within our region to make it happen. 5 3WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 53
5 4 Achieving Functional Mobility Frank Moretti, Road Information Program Icome at the smart growth discussion very con-scious of the fact that I have been in theWashington, D.C., area for the past 15 years, living in Montgomery County. As I go around the country and attend a variety of conferences, often on this issue, I sense that the two groups still tend to talk right past each other. To some extent, this is the challenge in smart growth. Being on the steering committee for this panel, I was the one who asked that we have someone from Charlottesville come out and talk to our group because I was very impressed hearing Hannah Twaddell speak on this earlier in the year. I think they have done a nice job in trying to bridge those sometimes contradictory messages. One message is that obviously we are experiencing tremendous growth. We donât have a transportation system that can really meet the needs of the growth that exists, and the bottom line is that we need to build more capacity and more infrastructure. The other message, I think a very appropriate one, is that for some reason we havenât done a very good job of building suburbs in terms of design and the type of trans- portation system that serves them. The way those com- munities are designed puts a lot of demands on our transportation system in an inefficient way. Unfortunately, the two issues are often discussed in a vac- uum. Not until you put them together do you really start to move in the right direction. Our speakers discussed good ways to do that. I think to some extent the census figures were a bit of a surprise to all of us. Much attention was paid to a real urban revitalization that occurred in the 1990s. Much less attention was paid to what was, by far, the predominant trend: significant dispersal of population. In Washington, I think sometimes we all tend to get so caught up in the rhetoric of these issues that we forget about what is actually happening out there in America. What was happening was significant and tremendous dispersal, often into suburban communities that no longer were even really attached to any city. The other thing the census documented is that urban density con- tinues to decline. Obviously, smart growth should prop- erly try to at least slow that trend, but I think we need to be very conscious of the decisions people are making. The reality, obviously, is that most growth is occur- ring on the fringe. New suburban communities are being developed, and obviously taking advantage of infill opportunities in suburban areas is very appropri- ate for growth. But at the end of the day, I believe it was Anthony Downs at the Brookings Institution who said that the real challenge is orderly dispersal. We have no ability to stop dispersal, but we need to do it in a smarter way. Unfortunately, if we deny that dispersal is occurring, we tend to create a situation where people pretty much do whatever they want instead of taking a more reasonable approach. Since we are going to see significant dispersal, letâs make sure it happens in a fashion that, as our speakers have discussed, is a much more logical progression. Yesterday I heard a phrase that is the stake through the heart of anyone in the highway industry as I am: âYou canât build your way out of congestion.â As someone who often works in the area of public opinion, I have to admit it has been a very effective mantra in 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 54
terms of convincing people of the inability to build your way out of congestion. I think a lot of people are real- izing that is really a false debate. The goal is not to get rid of traffic congestion in Los Angeles or Seattle. Building your way out of congestion suggests that we are trying to end traffic congestion. Clearly, that is not a reasonable goal. The real goal and the real challenge for a lot of large communities is to maintain some level of functional mobility so that your community still works. Obviously, the movement of freight in and out of areas is vital for their ability to remain viable. In the Washington, D.C., area, the business commu- nity has become active in transportation because it is finding out that employees donât want to move to Washington. They think traffic is awful, and there are obviously other issues of crowding and home prices that come into play. But again, we are not trying to build our way out of congestion. We are asking how a region like Seattle, with massive continuing growth, or certainly the Bay Area and other places, can maintain adequate mobility and remain a viable region that people consider a good place to live and businesses consider a good place to locate. When we put this conference together, we wanted to try to get into the real issues of how to pull together these sometimes disparate messages. I mentioned the Washington, D.C., area. To some extent it is the poster child for regions that moved toward a smart growth agenda in many ways, although not particularly in the community design area. Many of the suburban devel- opments over the past 20 to 25 years havenât been par- ticularly well planned. In essence, the transportation policy adopted over the past 25 to 30 years was to improve the transit system and not add any more sig- nificant roadway capacity. We have gotten a world- class transit system, one that I ride every day that does a very good job and is quite effective and was certainly needed. But we have massive traffic congestion. When I moved into Montgomery County, to Gaithersburg, where probably 25,000 townhomes have been added, I was shocked on my way to the Metro sta- tion that I would have to drive along a two-lane road. One of the impediments was that one of the bridges had only one lane of traffic. It struck me that you could add 15,000 to 20,000 homes into a community and still have a one-lane bridge as one of the key roads to get people to the arterials. Montgomery County hasnât added the roads, and I find it somewhat refreshing that it has suddenly become the key political issue in the county. Politicians who traditionally would be talking about everything but transportation are now going into neighborhood meetings because that is clearly the dom- inant issue. What are you going to do? I think people in Montgomery County as in Northern Virginia arenât buying solutions that exclude expanding the roadway system. Obviously, that is the dominant mode of trans- portation. We certainly see the need for doing tremen- dous improvements in the area of pedestrian and bicycling facilities and continuing to improve the tran- sit system. But the public is not buying the idea of not expanding any key roadways. Obviously, Washington has tremendous sprawl. Ignoring that issue clearly does not hold back sprawl. The issue is how do you strike that balance between maintaining functional mobility, accommodating the vast majority of travel growth that we know will be on our roads, and moving your community in a direction of what I think is a much more rational way of designing communities and building new suburban communities in a way that is much more functional? 5 5WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 55
5 6 Discussion Steve Heminger: I liked the phrase âorderly dispersal.â I call it smart sprawl. I think that really is the challenge. The talk that I gave showed some very, very heroic assumptions about the amount of infill we would be able to do in the Bay Area and I really didnât tell you much about how we would do that because we donât know yet. One thing we do know is that we canât do it all with infill and we are going to need to learn how to grow smarter in the suburban areas. I think that means resisting the temptation to think we will do it by putting a rail line in every suburban community. There is not enough money in the plan to do that. Carpooling and telecommuting and express or rapid bus all are kinds of ways from a transportation point of view to try to serve new communities if they are developed in such a way as to support them, that would be smarter and that arenât going to cost us a fortune. I think that is an important stepâto talk not about highways or transit, but to talk about options, and about where you put the right option. Harrison Bright Rue: Orderly dispersalâto me, that was the town centers scenario that we looked at. Interestingly enough, when we went out to the public recently, we found almost unanimously the same desires in the urban community as we did in the very rural counties. Everybody wanted at least the option of living in a village or a neighborhood. They didnât know exactly how to go about that. I think that is our job as policy makers and as people who figure things out across agencies. But they wanted the choice; this is America. Our housing decisions are made on the basis of choice in the market and what is available. Of course, I think a town center is an easier thing to sell than dispersal, in terms of a marketing phrase. Mary McCumber: I wanted to talk about the disor- derly dispersal that occurred between 1960 and 1990 in the Central Puget Sound region in Washington State and the incredible job it is to come back to those areas. In the mid-1990s, when we developed the urban growth areas under the stateâs Growth Management Act, they were pretty big because you had already made major commitments to suburban development in those outly- ing edge areas. There was some infrastructure in other areas. So creating communities that use the land more effectively, doing the things we are talking about here at this conference, was incredibly hard. That is the chal- lenge we face now. It is a lot easier to deal with issues within Seattle or Tacoma, our central cities, than it is on those outer edges, which are legally committed to urban-style development. That is our challenge. I was taken aback by the fact that we are talking so much about dispersal and growth on the edge. If that edge never stops moving into the hinterland, I donât see how you ever come back and have the kind of discus- sion within those communities on the type and form of development within those communities. So it is a really tough issue in the United States and I donât think any of us can be very righteous about how great we are. But I contend that we are doing better in our region than we would have been if we hadnât taken the steps we did over the last decade. Audience question: There are several aspects of urban infill. What are your observations on the resis- tance of areas to urban infill? I know in Seattle there is 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 56
quite a bit of resistance in the neighborhoods to the up- zoning taking place. Also, what is an effective trans- portation strategy? In the city of Seattle, for example, a majority of people still use their cars to commute. It is a much higher transit percentage in the city of Seattle, but when you start infilling and densifying, you still have a significant auto component there. What are effective transportation strategies for denser urban areas? It is not like it is already there, because I donât think it is already there. We are starting to see growing congestion, which of course fuels the resistance to infill. Steve Heminger: The Bay Area probably has half the nationâs Sierra Club membership. Of course, those peo- ple donât want high density in their neighborhood either. So that question is a very significant one. Harrison mentioned that a lot of it has to do with words and pictures. We just had a campaign in one of our suburban areas, Livermore, on a growth issue and the antigrowth campaign mailer had nice, little subur- ban tract houses, and then right behind it was Cabrini Green from Chicagoâimplying, âThat is what will happen to you.â Part of it is that success breeds success. We can show people pictures; I now have some pictures of what this development looks like, and it doesnât look so bad. I donât want to be a Pollyanna about that. A lot of it has to do with incentives and bare-knuckle politics and having some leaders in those communities who are willing to say no to a lot of people who have shown up at a hearing. That is what it will take in many places. The second point is another good one as well, and I think it ties into this subject of oversell. When you do infill, it is not as if those folks are not going to bring those cars into those houses. They will. That probably is going to mean some increased localized congestion. That is part of what comes along with living in a city. Some of it is to tell people that part of the bargain is that we might have more crowding in the schools unless we build more schools, but part of it is also looking at strategies. We are just starting something in our region called carsharingâit is like a guerilla car rental agency. It is a timeshare on a car, like a condo. It is one way to take that pressure off, but I think first and foremost is being honest about it. When you bring folks into an infill setting, it probably means that more of them are going to use transit to get to work, but they are still going to tool around on the weekend with a car and you have to find ways to deal with that. Audience question: I am just giving some food for thought because our assumptions about how we will live in terms of driving behavior are very hard to pre- dict now. As people are starting to infill and move in and change their lifestyles, they are doing things like timesharing cars because they think they need them, and then after awhile, they donât need them and then they become a liability. But that shift happens over a period of time and there is this uncomfortable period where you have too many cars and old behaviors clash- ing with new density and designs. Just something to think about as we are modeling for the future. A question related to that: In the model that you all use, Steve, where air quality and congestion didnât improve much, were you using some of what Reid was presenting yesterday in terms of accounting for the influ- ence of design on walk trips? I think that is a pretty important thing that models traditionally donât account for, and it might make a big difference in our predictions. Steve Heminger: I wasnât here yesterday, so I canât answer. I think the largest message that I would draw from this is twofold. First of all, given what the fleet is going to be like in 2020, where people live will have a lot smaller influence than what they drive. Second, in this analysis, although not in every instance, we have a case where we are doing the opposite of orderly disper- salâwe are bringing all those people back into the Bay Area, and that will have the unavoidable effect of increasing the number of people in vehicles. Harrison Bright Rue: I want to mention two things. We are a small market, but we are approaching the car- sharing program and trying to be one of the first small cities that does it. It is a very real strategy and I encour- age you to look into it. The city realized that every weekend and evening we have 100 to 150 paid-for cars in our fleet, all the cars our employees drive around, that we could be letting the public use. So some cities already have that asset. It is something to think about. I wanted to go back to the first question. The key to getting over this NIMBY resistance is to push the deci- sions onto the neighborhood. In Honolulu, we got the neighborhood leaders together and did maps. The ques- tion was, âDo you want it to grow or not? If you think some places need to get fixed, mark them on the maps. Tell us how you want to fix them.â You know they will say that they want walkable neighborhoods, windows and doors on the street, but not too much density. Then do visualizations of what might happen on that site. One picture shows a warehouse neighborhood and an intersection with a BRT stop, right next to a park. Then show them what it would look like over time. Bring it back to them and test it. We used their assent to these images to recreate the downtown development plan. Audience question: This is a rebuttal and a comment. The comment is, Look at what kinds of roads you are actually building. When you talk about arterials and following the âplumbing systemâ approach to an arte- rial so you can get to work, that is the old system. When you look at a typical urban area, average trip length is less than 3 miles across the board. There is a good opportunity to go back to a connected street system of smaller streets that probably occupy about the same amount or maybe even more of the landscape, but they 5 7WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 57
are streets that people can live with. I think that is what you are seeing when you have bad reactions to roads. It is not the idea of having a road, but that they are so darned ugly and they have been built poorly now for 40 to 50 years. The roads themselves are opposed by NIMBYs. I think the issue is more about design than about whether to build roads. Frank Moretti: I think certainly the public will say generically we want more capacity so we can get places, but at the same time, when it comes to their community, it becomes an issue of design. I think Montgomery County, where I live, is a pretty good example. The types of roads we need to build probably look a lot different from what we built in the past, in terms of the amenities that go along with those projects and the way they are designed. Some of the examples we saw in Harrisonâs discussion were pretty applicable. To some extent, that has been poorly managed by the business community and regional groups who keep saying we need additional capacity. They are still perceived as sell- ing a product that, to some extent, has gone out of style. In trying to get these two groups together, what needs to be discussed is connectivity, adding turn lanes in certain areas, and in some corridors where capacity does need to be expanded, achieving a high threshold. To do any capacity work in an urban market, the threshold appropriately is quite high in terms of how it affects that community. I think this discussion is the correct one; it is getting at real solutions that can work politically. I know in Wisconsin, to use an example, there is a proposal to do some expansion work on the freeway system there and the local governments are vetting it. As you can imagine, there is a great deal of discussion about its appropriateness. In the midst of that, the state legislature just passed a law that the region would have to expand capacity at the rate of travel growth, or something to that effect, unmindful of local political realities or how regional governments work. It is that dichotomy that needs to be addressed, between those who simply say keep adding capacity and the local real- ities that you have to be selective in how you do that. Audience question: I have another hard question for Harrison. I was a little surprised by the results of your travel demand simulations. They may have been about what we have expected, but the magnitude was greater than similar types of analyses Iâve seen in other areas, especially in terms of the amount of reduction in vehi- cle miles of travel. I was also a little bit surprised by the observation you made about the decrease in congested travel associated with the compact alternatives. I would have expected some localized congestion. I was won- dering if you could talk about the type of modeling you did for the purpose of this exercise. Harrison Bright Rue: Iâm going to hand that ques- tion about modeling over to Hannah Twaddell. She is actually the lead person for the study. For those of you who want to talk about the details, she has actually gone over to the consultant side and is doing similar work. But first, the key point from that study was really the connected roads. That is the orderly dispersal ele- mentâgiving people what they wantâa walkable vil- lage, in a town center, and even in those small neighborhoods out in the country. Growth implies not so much infill, but adding incrementally to the rest of the urban area, and then providing that connected grid. In Charlottesville, we have an eight-lane road and there are almost no parallel roads. Almost everything they are building is this one pod on that main road. So I think the real congestion benefits were in adding the con- nected roads. If you look at that $500 million invest- ment over 50 years, most of it was new roads and smaller-scale ones, connecting those things so you donât have to go out onto the main arterial. Hannah, do you want to handle the modeling? Hannah Twaddell: What we tried to do was take the work that Reid and Robert Cervero have done on the influence of design in shifting car trips to walk trips and build those assumptions into the modeling process. So we took those prototypical communities with enhanced suburban design, for example. When we ran scenarios where there were areas that grew in that enhanced sub- urban or urban mode, we made some assumptions on the basis of the research about the different shift you would get, the mode split you would get in walk trips. That wound up creating that market for transit. So I think that had a lot to do with the reduced vehicle miles of travel, but it was somewhat experimental. We tried to be as conservative as we could, but I have a feeling that is why it was different from what Steve got and what a lot of the models do now. We did use TRANPLAN. We used a typical four-step model for the modeling process. But we did change some of the assumptions about the mode split on the basis of that research on the influence of urban design. So I think that is probably the answer to your question about why this one looked a little different. It is kind of fun to start working on that and talking about how we can use our models a little differently to try to account for that. But I think crystal balls are hard in any case. Certainly, what I have picked up today is that we may have totally dif- ferent behaviors that arenât walking or driving that we need to account for, like motor scooters and golf carts and all the things that we may be doing 50 years out. Audience question: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have taken an active interest in this issue of livability in the past year and a half because of the health consequences. I would just like to introduce that 5 8 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 58
into the whole view because I think this area can benefit from our discussions. Principally, there are three health consequences we talk about: (a) the improvement in air quality; (b) obe- sity abatement, which you have heard about in the newspapers these days; and (c) safety, whether personal safety from crime or a reduction in motor vehicle crashes. Whether it is transit or infill, you are basically affecting those three things because you are either mak- ing more time for recreation and exercise or you are reducing the exposure to motor vehicle crashes, since there are 40,000 deaths in the United States from motor vehicle crashes a year, or you are reducing the amount of point source pollution. So I hope those three health consequences can be a part of all these discussions, if not in the foreground, at least in the background. 5 9WHAT DOES A SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM LOOK LIKE? 63805_047_078 4/7/05 3:03 AM Page 59
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