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By Dom Nozzi
Often,
I notice people express the opinion that transportation is dependent on
land use. Similarly, I'm often told that land use comes first, and transportation
planning and development follows to accommodate the land use. That "land
use drives transportation."
But let's keep
in mind that transportation is profoundly a vicious cycle and significantly
changes behavior and markets over time. For example, when/if we add capacity
or widen major roads, we set into motion some enormous political and economic
pressures, and behavior changes. Widening a road will inevitably reduce
the number of bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit users (because it is
now more difficult, unsafe, and unpleasant to use the bigger road). This
creates more car trips ("induced travel"). And the induced travel created
by the widened road, is used, post facto, to justify the widened road
(a classic self-fulfilling prophesy). Because the bigger road carries
more high-speed traffic, it becomes unpleasant to live along the road.
So, over time, housing values decline along the road, and single-family
gets converted to student rental, multi-family for students, office and
retail. And because it is now more pleasant and fast to drive a car, people
are better able to live in remote areas and commute to their jobs in the
city (cross-culturally and throughout history, the average daily roundtrip
commute is 1.1 hours. Some people will relocate to more remote locations
to create a new equilibrium when the road is widened.)
Most people
dream of living in a "cabin in the woods." Therefore, wider roads create
a strong demand for sprawl housing, because the wider road reduces travel
time from home to daily destinations. Is sprawl possible without car travel?
Could a huge number of us live in remote locations if our transportation
system did not provide cheap and easy car travel? Most people would be
unwilling to live in low-density, outlying, sprawling areas -- or drive
a car for every trip -- unless roads are designed for high speeds
and high volumes, and parking is both free and abundant. All the conditions
that people dislike about the city -- whether real or perceived -- such
as noise, crime, etc., can be more easily fled if the newly widened roads
allow you to get to work each day in a reasonable period of time, even
if you live in an outlying area. The ultimate result is that as we add
capacity to streets, we set in motion a pattern of sprawl and strip, we
wipe out farms, and we accelerate the decline of in-town areas (our in-town
streets become little more than "escape routes").
Quite often,
our transportation planning advisory boards are dominated by home building
interests. Clearly, this industry realizes the fundamental importance
of widening roads to create sprawl residential markets for them.
As for retail
land use impacts caused by transportation, when there are so many cars
being carried by a bigger road, business people cannot resist putting
enormous pressure on staff and officials to rezone the businessperson
property to retail in order to take advantage of all those potential customers
driving by each day. This is precisely why we see so many big box retailers
clamoring for sites at major intersections. In fact, in the planning department
I work in, we get calls all the time from people who want to rezone from
residential to office or retail along our major arterial streets.
High-volume
big box retailers, except in large, high-density cities, are not viable
unless the public sector provides large subsidies in the form of high-speed,
high-capacity, multi-lane streets (big roads enable the big box to draw
cars from a regional "consumer-shed"). Not only that. These retailers
also depend on the public sector to allow them to build enormous
and free surface parking lots, and enormous building footprints.
As expected,
we so often have strip commercial - intense land use development pressure
-- on major roads near interstates. Could such streets have been anything
else other than strip commercial, given the street design and the access
to the Interstate? Are SF homes viable along such a street? If you owned
land along such a stretch, would it be rational for you not to do everything
in your power to get the local government to grant you the right to sell
to those 70,000 potential daily customers, as the "big box" retailer so
often wants to do?
I've seen land
use plans/maps prepared in the past, and I know that it is not a "plan"
at all. Almost entirely, when we talk about a mostly built-out city, it
is simply recording what is there already. Almost none of it is
a proactive vision of what the planners want. If we engaged in wholesale
land use changes in the land use map/plan to enact our sustainable, livable
vision, all of the planners would be in fear of losing their jobs and
all of the commissioners would be thrown out of office. Elected commissioners
and staff are forced, by political realities, to be reactive in our land
use "plan." Transportation, on the other hand, is something we can
make changes to, because it is often feasible, politically, to make the
change.
It matters
not a whit whether planners designate a site for retail or single-family
residential. Over time, what will happen to the property is determined
by the road design and traffic. If the land use designation does not correspond
to what is happening on the road, the land use will get changed, or the
land will be abandoned. If our street network is designed for modest car
speeds, modest car volumes, connectivity, and access (in other words,
transportation choice), we will get viable transit, bicycling, walking
and neighborhood retail and mixed use, not to mention higher densities,
more traffic congestion (which is, in some ways, a good thing),
compact development, and a control on sprawl. High-speed, high capacity
roads will give us the reverse, regardless of what our land use
"plan/map" says.
Is it not much
easier to predict what will happen to the land uses along a street based
on the way the street is designed than to predict what will happen to
the street based on the land uses along it? Similarly, is it not more
feasible to predict whether there will be a sprawled, dispersed, low-density
community if we know, in advance, what the street system and form of travel
will be, compared to whether there will be future sprawled community based
on what the current land uses (or land use plans) are designated for various
properties? For example, West Palm Beach FL is currently experiencing
a dramatic, beneficial land use change throughout their city soon after
they re-designed their streets by removing travel lanes, calming traffic,
and doing substantial streetscaping. Land use improvements there are clearly
driven by transportation changes.
Transportation
engineers love to try to deny responsibility when their studies (which
are flawed because they don't accurately account for human behavior) show
that a road must be widened. The engineer usually claims that land use
drives transportation, and that their high-speed, high-volume roads are
merely "meeting the demand created by the land uses." "It's not our fault
that we must spend millions to widen roads, tear out houses, and ruin
the environment. We are forced to because of the land use." But this ignores
the fact that high-speed, high-volume roads create a vicious cycle and
substantially modify behavior, as noted above. The important danger of
this highly misleading claim from many engineers is that it leads us to
incorrectly believe that we have no choice. We must widen the road
because of the land uses on the ground. Too often, we are mislead into
believing that land use choices we made in the past are now forcing
us to widen the road.
Engineers must
not be allowed to wiggle out of culpability with such an excuse. The traffic
engineer who explains it is the land use that "forces" the road widening
seems sensible until you look closer and find out how the market brings
unbelievable and relentless pressure to change the designations when we
change the roads, and how human reactions to road conditions draws or
repels residences. If we are incredibly courageous and true to our principles,
we might be able to delay the re-zoning for a few years on a widened road
that is now hostile for residences. But that just means that because the
road carries so much high speed, high volume traffic, it is no longer
feasible to keep in residential because the quality of life is so miserable
(as a result, the residential building eventually is abandoned, or is
downgraded from owner-occupied to rental), or it is no longer rational
to keep it as a farm because you can make millions by selling it for a
shopping center or subdivision.
Here is what
Newman & Kenworthy (Cities and Automobile Dependence, 1989) have to
say:
"In general, [transportation]
modeling has assumed that land use is "handed down" by land use planners
and that transport planners are merely shaping the appropriate transport
system to meet the needs of the land use forecast. This is not the case.
One of the major reasons why freeways around the world have failed to
cope with demand is that transport infrastructure has a profound feedback
effect on land use, encouraging and promoting new development wherever
the best facilities are provided (or are planned)." (pg 106)
Why is Europe
so walkable and compact, and the U.S. is not? Is it that they are just
more educated and appreciative of the merits of walkable communities?
Or is it that they mostly developed before the auto age, whereas we developed
after the emergence of the auto age? And why is it that Europe
is now, after entering the auto age, starting to see the sprawl we are
experiencing?
The Florida
growth management law requires that "level-of-service" standards be created,
and that new developments only be allowed if they are built "concurrently"
with the infrastructure and services they would need. But the only concurrency
measure from the Florida law that matters is the road level-of-service.
Everything else - recreation, utilities, solid waste, etc. - is, for all
intents and purposes, ignored in comparison.
We are fooling
ourselves and doomed to a life of permanent, never-ending battles with
people who want to rezone SF land that they own and cannot use as SF due
to a wide road (granting that there are a few who could live in
a SF and put up with the noise and reduced property value - sometimes,
this is called "affordable housing"). 40 years from now, if we do not
fix our major streets to make them more livable, we will, though incremental
zoning changes, have those streets lined with offices and MF and retail.
And over those 40 years, we will have a bunch of planners, citizens, and
officials burned out on fighting those never-ending battles. In the long
term, as Walter Kulash points out, no force, not even 5 "no growth" commissioners,
can stop that incremental change after we have designed a street for high-speed,
high-volume traffic.
Yes, we can
succeed, in the short term, in keeping the SF. But that will only mean
that we'll have a bunch of vacant homes, and depressed property values.
Once the transport
system is in place, the market/political pressure to take advantage of
that system is unbelievably strong, and will overwhelm any countervailing
efforts. It hardly matters how courageous, visionary, or progressive a
planner or elected official is. If the roads are designed to encourage
sprawl, we will get sprawl. No zoning or land use designations (such as
"large-lot" zoning) can stop it, and there is no community in the US that
has succeeded by trying to control sprawl with designations. When we create
and construct our transportation plans, we have, essentially and indirectly
(and often unintentionally), established our future land use plans, not
vice versa. It is as simple as that, and it is time for us to realize
it.
All that said,
I'm willing to concede that we should have our road and land use
plans work concurrently. So yes, we should designate outlying areas
for conservation and farms. But unless we concurrently get the transportation
right, we are wasting our time.
Here is an
excerpt from Kulash: "The packaging of 50,000 daily vehicles (and therefore,
a total daily population of 60,000 to 70,000 drivers plus passengers)
into a single arterial street leads inevitably to the irresistible urge
to sell things to this population, and creates a sellscape along the street.
"Containing this type of use of 50/50 [50 mph and 50,000 car trip] streets
is far beyond the will and ability of the typical local government. The
50/50 arterial is a gift-wrapped, gold-plated, gift to strip development.
Once in place, almost no power on earth will stop its march toward strip
commercial. Time spent berating local governments (counties and cities)
for not doing better with these monstrosities (and I've done my share
of this) is satisfying to the critic, but is unproductive. Once in place,
it is too late to do much about the 50/50 arterial.
"It is bad
enough that we inevitably get a sellscape on our 50/50 roads. What is
even worse is that get a miserable looking sellscape. Because of the inherent
design feature of the road -- the 50- to 60-mph design speed -- we evolve
a sellscape that is geared largely to the motorist passing by at 45 to
50 mph.
"Visually,
the sellscape is focused on a narrow cone, ranging several hundred feet
from the driver. This full sellscape is enjoyed only by those drivers
in the outer lane; things get worse as you get into the interior lanes.
This 50-mph sellscape can be interesting and can entertain, particularly
at first viewing. Some superior design and behavioral science talents
have gone into making sure that this scene attracts your attention.
The 50-mph
sellscape is the highway equivalent of newspaper headlines: they catch
your first attention, but don't 'impart anything more with closer inspection
or repeated exposure.
"At slower
speeds, the driver's field of vision broadens out to a wider angle. And
what does the sellscape offer as you look at it more closely? Does the
50-mph feature now reveal a 20-mph texture, a finer grain, a deeper level
of stimulation? No, it doesn't. It's hollow, empty. It has nothing further
to offer. And at the stopped condition (where we spend a good portion
of our travel time) how does the sellscape look? Even worse than at 20
mph, of course.
"To follow
the newspaper analogy, there are no bylines and no news story. No richness
of information. No inverted narrative. If you're not moving, the sellscape
doesn't want you, and can't use you. The street sellscape, like its television
counterpart in the 30-second and 15-second commercials, has to go for
the quick hard-sell. You do this by being strident, out-shouting the next
seller, demanding attention or raising the decibels.
"The individual
land uses on the 50/50 strip may be attractive in other settings. The
blight comes from how these are assembled into a 50/50 environment. For
example, offices can have great driver eye appeal or zero appeal. Fast
food restaurants that we like to criticize as auto-dominated can be part
of the ordinary sellscape or contribute substantially to driver eye appeal.
Commercial tourist attractions, a mainstay of our Florida growth, can
also range from terrific driver eye appeal to absolute zero.
"The idea that
you can keep local access off the arterial streets is simply preposterous
... Think about it -- we bundle together 50,000 vehicles with 60,000-70,000
occupants into a captive market. We make sure we don't give them any other
route. We ruin the roadscape, by the size of it, for anything else. And
then we, in theory, expect strip commercial to stay off? Get serious.
"The presence
of 70,000 persons daily passing along a road sets off strong, almost unstoppable
series of development actions ("sell them something") that greatly change
the intended operation of the arterial street."
In sum, keeping
a road at a modest width with a modest number of travel lanes in the face
of projected car traffic growth will, over the long term, result in less
per capita car trips on that road, less new sprawl into outlying areas,
less big box retail, more viable neighborhoods, a higher quality of life,
and more residential density near walkable, livable, neighborhood-scaled
town centers. Widening the road by adding travel lanes, over the long
term, would give us the reverse. The excessive capacities that we typically
build for our cities gives us too much sprawl, densities that are too
low, and auto dependence. I believe that we should put a moratorium on
adding street capacity to streets in our cities, before we wake up one
day and wonder how we let ourselves become another auto-dependent south
Florida, instead of a sustainable, sociable community featuring transportation
choice, safety and independence for our children and seniors, and a unique
community we can take pride in.
In the
long run, the street shapes the land uses that will form along it (and
community-wide) much more profoundly than how the land uses would shape
the street that forms through them. Let's not let the traffic engineer
fool us. Let's not put in big roads and then valiantly try (and fail)
to stop the sprawl and strip, and then flog ourselves when we are unable
to stop the land use degradation. Transportation comes before - and determines
-- land use. A high quality of life, and sustainable future, depends on
our realizing that.
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