Chicken or Egg on Auto-Oriented Land Use Planning

The good folks at the always interesting Planetizen discuss the chicken and egg nature of doing land use planning for encouraging more people to walk, bike and use public transit (People Like Cars, and There's Not Much We Can Do About It, May 7, 2008, by Christian Peralta). Says Peralta:

"Even though many planners want to think that lots of people would relinquish their cars if they just had a light rail stop nearby, I feel like most Americans remain whole-heartedly committed to private auto ownership, single-family homes, big box retail stores, and the slew of other elements that have created the modern urban landscape."

So he asks if this is a chicken and egg situation where the physical landscape has to change before people consider changing their auto-oriented lifestyle. He seems to posit that it is a combination of city design, policy that increases the costs associated with driving and education to encourage behavior change. Most planners and transportation folks would agree.

I'd say its not so much chicken or egg. Planners do indeed need to move forward with designing for density and more around people and less around cars. They also need to coordinate these efforts with building more transit, bikeways and pedestrian-friendly environments and providing information and services that encourage their use. As an example, here in Arlington we believe that creating the conditions where more people bike, walk and take public transit rest on these three things:

1. Great planning that focuses density in transit corridors,
2. Providing a robust amount of multi-modal transportation infrastructure that focuses on people not vehicles, and
3. Great educational TDM programs.

All together these three things help contribute to a more vibrant, growing, prosperous and sustainable community.

Additional related information.

---

Chris Hamilton is the Commuter Services Chief for Arlington County, manager of CommuterPageBlog and a Metro/biking commuter from Rosemont in Alexandria.

Comments

[Richard Layman]

Generally, I don't find the op-eds at Planetizen to be all that scintillating, and this is another example.

In college, I used to run a course evaluation program, and a journalist from the Ann Arbor News was doing a story about teaching and he called me up. In response to his question about teaching at Michigan, I said "it depends." He said "well, even Michigan isn't Harvard or Yale." I said "That's not what I mean. For 13-17 years of their lives, for the most part, students are lectured at. How can they possibly know any other way for teachers to teach?"

Same thing here. As long as you live in a car-connected planning paradigm, the kind of writing offering by Christian Peralta makes some sense.

But places like San Francisco or Washington show that an urban grid with neighborhood amenities, a quality architectural environment, and a dense transit _network_ makes consideration of a car free lifestyle using transit, walking, and bicycling modes instead, with occasional trips in taxis or rented cars quite rational.

Even Arlington has to build this kind of network up. Rather than rely on the kind of urban grid that DC is marked by, instead ArCo is adding high population and building density to transit corridors, which is another way to do this.

In either case, it's not cheap--a transit system costs a lot to build and maintain--but it may be cheaper than repeating cycle of building commercial, tearing it down, rebuilding, and building more and more roads but still having congestion in the suburbs.

I am from Michigan and my father worked for Chrysler. Maybe my reaction against automobility is merely rebellion, but the fact is it is possible to live a car-less lifestyle and it is not crazy, but until people confront their paradigms and _learned_ behaviors, you can guarantee that people are "whole-heartedly committed to private auto ownership, single-family homes, big box retail stores, and the slew of other elements that have created the modern urban landscape."

Mr. Peralta is talking about the modern _sub_urban landscape, not the modern _urban_ landscape.

And frankly, I focus on the latter and don't care too much (and lack the time to address) about reforming the former.

But he's right about the impact of light rail. Building one rail line isn't building a system. Places like SF, NYC, and DC demonstrate you have to have a transit _system_ with multiple and connected lines, provide access to many destinations, especially the dominant work centers, in order to have significant impact on mode shift.