A L T E R N A T I V E ROLES OF T R A N S P O R T A T I O N

IN U R B A N P L A N N I N G

ROBERT L. KNIGHT De ~euw, Cather & Co., 120 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A.

(Received 22 July, 1976)

Abstract. This paper explores the function of transportation in modern urban life, and suggests the more active use of transportation investment planning as a tool for advancing urban planning objectives other than the satisfaction of estimated travel demand. Since unrestrained supply of transportation facilities to meet projected desires appears to be likely to fail both in environmental preservation and the long-term satisfaction of travel demand, strategies for reduction and redirection of that demand are emphasized.

In recent years urban planning has come to be recognized as an important element in the struggle to correct and prevent environmental pollution. At the root of this is the realization that over the long term, further degradation of the quality of our air, water and

land resources can best be prevented by avoiding the urban development practices which cause many of those problems. Unfortunately, this is not as simple or direct as it might

seem. Constraints on the effectiveness of urban planning are many; effective tools are few.

This paper's thesis is that one of the most powerful tools is the planning of urban transportation investments and operations. It is also often misunderstood and therefore not used to its realistic, attainable potential for furthering the objectives of urban planning - particularly that of environmental protection and enhancement. In this

paper some of these misunderstandings are discussed and some strategies suggested to increase the effectiveness of transportation as a major tool in urban planning for environmental quality.

Urban planning tends to mean different things to different people. Among other things, it can encompass aesthetic urban design, functional organization of activities in space, the design of social welfare programs, and economic, environmental and social impact analysis. Most recently, the term has been applied to the review and coordination of the programs and policies of city agencies as diverse as fire protection and welfare. This follows the model of the Federal Office of Management and Budget, as well as current trends in state-level planning (Rosebaugh, 1976). As a result, it is sometimes hard to know what a particular urban planner is qualified to do, just as it is hard to know whether a particular 'mechanic' is qualified to work on cars or computers.

However, for this paper's purposes, a slightly narrower definition is most appropriate, if only to allow a clearer focus on a few tangible issues. Therefore, urban planning is defined here as the continual attempt to protect and enhance the way the

physical urban environment funct ions. Its most common tools tend to be land use control mechanisms such as zoning and environmental impact review. Most of its objectives are not fixed, but rather vary from place to place and even year to year. They depend on local governmental priorities and our expanding knowledge about the nature

Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 7 (1977) 215-220.All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1977 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

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of society's needs. But the main thrust is fairly constant; urban planning seeks to control some of the side effects of powerful forces such as private land use decisions which otherwise could unexpectedly impair the overall quality of life. Economists sometimes call these non-market effects or externalities. Some examples include the public hazards of building in flood plains or on unstable slopes, the overloading of schools or utilities due to too-rapid growth, and the pollution of sensitive ecological or human environments by over-concentration and mislocation of industrial facilities.

One of the biggest difficulties often cited in urban planning is the usual lack of effective tools for achieving its objectives. Whether against or in favor of current planning efforts, one would have to agree that not many of our ambitious urban plans are ever realized. This is partly because the planner is only one actor in a complex public process of resolving conflicting interests. But it is also partly because of our failure to understand the power of the tools which are available. Transportation is a case in point.

At any particular moment there exists a certain demand for travel and goods movement in a city. There is also a massive transportation supply system which responds to this demand in some way. This includes fixed facilities such as streets, highways, railroads, transit lines and pipelines; vehicles including transit buses, trains, jitneys, taxis and private cars and trucks; and operating policies and regulations such as financing authorizations and user licensing.

Thus transportation is a powerful force in urban life. It is a major consumer of scarce energy resources. It generates most of our urban noise and air pollution. It occupies a substantial part of our time. Its public and private costs are staggering burdens. Its provision or lack determines our access to jobs, educational and social opportunities, and markets for our goods and services. Ultimately, our collective decisions on where to live, work and interact in other ways are heavily influenced by transportation. These decisions in turn establish much of the form and function of cities. This is the essence of the impact of transportation on urban planning. This suggests that transportation facilities and services can be major causes of urban environmental planning problems, but also perhaps powerful tools for the achievement of some of our environmental objectives. Thus it is useful to attempt some alternative ways of thinking about and planning for our transportation needs, in order to bring some of those tools into use.

Traditionally, planning for transportation facilities and operations has tended to accept the demand for urban travel as given, and concentrated its efforts on figuring out the best ways of serving that demand. In the early years of urban freeway building, there were some unexpected and unpleasant side effects of this strategy: neighborhoods were destroyed, others were damaged by noise and visual blight, and property values rose and fell on a massive scale. Furthermore, in many eases the anticipated relief from traffic congestion and delay was short-lived as new travelers appeared in unprecedented numbers to take advantage of the new facility's speed or convenience.

Planning for major transportation facilities has improved since those early years. In effect, the existence of some of the environmental impacts has been recognized and their consideration built into the planning process. More recently, some land use and energy-consumption impacts are beginning to be considered as well. This has led to the

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present interest in more efficient methods of moving large numbers of people, notably the various forms of rapid transit.

However, the general intent of planners still tends to be to meet projected travel demand with an adequate supply of facilities and services. Environmental concerns have been added to the planning process, but primarily as constraints rather than main objectives. That is, we are still often trying to build facilities to transport people and their goods wherever they think they want to go. In most of our transportation planning we have advanced only to the point of trying to emphasize the selection of facilities and services which do a better job of environmental and energy conservation as well. This is a major improvement, but we need to go farther.

Consider for a moment the whole process of urban transportation. It is possible to make some kind of estimate of how many people and vehicles are going daily from any point A to point B and even to project this as a future 'demand'. We have a variety of computationally sophisticated methods for doing this. Bus transportation demand is not just trips per day; there are many variables. The trips are by certain travel modes instead of others; they occur at certain times and not others; they are made for a variety of purposes. Perhaps most important, they occur in the first place only because the activities at either end - say home and work - happen to have been located in those specific places by people who had other choices.

Thus, depending on how deeply one delves into the determinants of travel demand, we can uncover more and more aspects of that demand which might not have to be accepted as given or fixed in evaluation of transportation problems and solutions. This is especially true for long-range regional transportation needs, but it applies to many current local issues as well.

This suggests that perhaps we need to question the basic premises of our transporta- tion planning a bit more. As with many other things, we may be starting in the middle of the problem rather than at the beginning. That is, instead of only trying to solve all the problems of transportation supply, maybe we should give more attention to prospects for influencing the demand. This is not to say that individual travel freedom should be reduced, but rather that individual travel choices should reflect their true costs to society a bit more.

The conventional approach of providing facilities and services to meet all anticipated demands, despite the costs and other impacts, is one extreme planning strategy. The opposite extreme might be direct control over all travel demand, for example, through very strong restrictions or even governmental initiative in all land development. Neither of these extremes is realistic or desirable, even i f the objective is to improve environmental quality. But between such poles lie many other options which may be reasonable even in cases where they are not now being considered. A range of such options can be identified, and is worth examining as a means of broadening our vision.

A first option is to increase capacity of present facilities. This approach accepts the demand and tries to meet it, typically with widened streets and freeways. Many of our present environmental and urban planning problems are results of such thinking, as already discussed.

Somewhat less extreme is the strategy of increasing efficiency of present facilities

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and services. This approach is still supply-oriented, but less extreme in that it seeks to avoid some of the costs and other impacts of the first. The federal government is now placing substantial new emphasis on this through its so-called 'TSM' (Transportation Systems Management) program for placing funding emphasis on low-cost urban transportation system efficiency improvements such as bus lanes on freeways rather than major new construction projects. Other examples of this approach include the rising interest in encouraging more use of existing buses, taxis, jitneys and car and vanpooling.

A third option is to shift to more effective facilities and services. This strategy still accepts the size of the demand, but begins to change the premises about what kind of supply is required. It is not necessarily 'more of the same'. Here an example might be San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) System, since its main effect is to offer a new alternative to the Bay Bridge and freeway system for getting into downtown San Francisco. In goods movement, containerization and intermodal transfer systems provide other examples of new alternatives. Unfortunately, these new systems of transportation tend to be very expensive and hence sometimes not very cost-effective despite their other advantages.

A yet more aggressive strategy might be termed fine-tuning' of demand. The best example of this is staggering work hours to reduce the peak-hour transportation demand and therefore the scale of facilities required. This is now being done on a small scale in many places, but on an effectively large scale in only a few - notably Lower Manhattan in New York. Other examples might include downtown auto-free zones and restriction of non-priority truck traffic on congested facilities such as the major bridges during rush hour periods. This type of strategy is focused on adjusting the characteristics of demand rather than the supply of transportation, but still does not challenge the point-to-point daily volume of demand directly.

Going still further along the scale of options, a logical next step is redirection of travel demand. One very direct way to shift travel from one path to another is simply to refuse to provide the necessary capacity on the original route. Some researchers like to point out that most new urban highway facilities built or expanded to accommodate expected demand have tended to fill up quickly to the same level of congestion which existed before. For example, this seems to have been the case on the Bay Bridge since the opening of the BART system. New travelers have apparently appeared to take advantage of the greater capacity, according to early findings of the BART Impact Program (Ellis and Sherret, 1976). Another example is San Francisco's consistent refusal to build or expand highways. The huge traffic tie-ups and general paralysis once predicted has not occurred. People simply kept doing pretty much what they had been, which was tolerable. One conclusion of such observations is that the 'do-nothing' alternative in planning may deserve serious consideration in some cases instead of its usual use as a straw man to illustrate the relative advantages of new systems.

In cases where urban environmental quality considerations are given a very high priority, it may be reasonable to go even further and consider reducing the supply or capacity of certain transportation facilities. A relatively daring attempt at this approach

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has been the City of Berkeley's Neighborhood Traffic Reduction Program, in which through traffic has been discouraged or blocked from short-cuts through many

residential neighborhoods and forced back onto the busy arterial streets. Both the resulting benefits and problems have been large, as expected. This may be the forerunner of things to come elsewhere. Similar but somewhat less ambitious - and less controversial - programs have been carried out successfully in a few other cities.

Finally, demand may be shifted through directly influencing or controlling the locations of travel-producing or attracting activities. Examples might include limiting single-purpose downtown commercial development or encouraging the development of multi-use 'activity centers' to reduce trip lengths. This strategy may have the greatest potential for minimizing environmental problems, but it is also the most difficult to implement since it often challenges many of the traditions of American land development law and practice. However, such challenges are appearing more and more frequently in recent years, and some loosening of tradition can be expected.

Obviously in any given situation several of these options could be considered, as well as combinations. Further, within each of these general options are a variety of specific tactics dealing with transportation controls, services and facilities. But these few strategies just outlined do span a broad spectrum of planning approaches to meet the demand for transportation. Perhaps they will open up some avenues for pursuit by urban planners and others who approach transportation from an environmental rather than a travel demand-satisfying perspective.

As a final point, I would like to pursue a bit further one aspect of the last demand- shaping strategy mentioned - that of intentionally influencing the location of activities to reduce or guide the demand for travel. This has to do with the potential influence of one form of transportation, namely rapid transit, on land use and urban development patterns. It is often argued that one of the main benefits of a new high-capacity rapid transit system such as BART is that its speed and convenience will induce new development to cluster near its stations. This effect would promote more orderly land use, reduced travel, and thereby fewer adverse environmental impacts as well as lower infrastructure costs and taxes. This is easy to believe, particularly since it seems to be supported historically by the rapid development of streetcar suburbs early in this century and the even faster growth of postwar suburbia on land made accessible by high-speed urban freeways.

However, a variety of recent studies and observations suggests that modern rapid transit alone cannot be expected to create such development patterns. Under a close look, none of the postwar rapid transit systems on this continent display clear evidence of such powerful effects. This includes Toronto, Philadelphia's Lindenwold Line, San Francisco's BART and several others. In some cases, notably Toronto, some intensive development has occurred as desired around transit stations. However, in every case, the really critical factors seem to be the existence of strong land use policies encouraging such development, an expanding economic climate, active public support, and the availability of ample, developable, affordable land. The transit system seems to have been a stimulating but not sufficient factor by itself; where the other encouraging

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factors were not present, little if any development took place. Therefore, cities hoping to justify the cost of new transit systems on this basis (or recoup some of that cost through value capture strategies) must be prepared to back up their contentions with firm commitments to providing the other required factors. This is a big challenge, but it must be faced. New transit systems can provide major benefits, but they cannot replace other urban planning tools.

This paper has suggested that there are several different ways to think about and deal with transportation as a force in urban planning. Some of these strategies can be useful in applying the power of transportation investment to help solve environmental problems. To follow these kinds of examples requires courage and commitment, simply because they are different from most of our usual attitudes and approaches. Transportation investments can do much more for us than simply meet our single demand for travel, even though there are some limits on what mass transit, in particular, might be able to do by itself. This last point amounts to a challenge to urban planners and decision makers to develop the public support and land use policies needed to complement new transit systems.

But the main concern must be with broadening the way we view our options in transportation by tracing the problems all the way back to their sources in demand and questioning those premises. Planners and public decision makers must expand the range of options they consider in trying to respond to transportation needs and transportation-related urban problems. It is also important that urban planners and others with environmental perspectives participate fully in planning for transportation, again because of its power. At the very least, there must be open and active lines of communication between transportation specialists and urban planners, in order to avoid a too narrow approach to transportation policies and programs. We cannot afford not to take advantage of transportation as a positive, powerful urban planning tool if we are going to make our cities serve our needs for a safe, healthy and functional environment at reasonable cost.

References

Ellis, R. and Sherret, A.: 1976, Transportation and Travel Impacts of BART: lnterirn Service Findings, BART Impact Program, Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Berkeley, California.

Rosebaugh, D. L.: 1976, J. Amer. Inst. of Planners 42, 52. Trygg, L. L. and Knight, R. L.: 1975, Transit System Impacts on Urban Land Use, Regional Transporta-

tion District, Denver.