When highway capacity expansions move ahead in corridors with inadequate transit, there may be a legal basis for challenge on environmental grounds, at least in the US under Federal environmental law. At least, one Federal judge in Wisconsin thinks so.
UPDATE: More on the case in an excellent piece by Kaid Benfield here at Atlantic Cities.
My thoughts on Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel Ecotopia are up today at Atlantic Cities.
The Driving Boom is over.
So argues the U.S. PIRG's Frontier Group think tank in a report released this week entitled "A New Direction: Our Changing Relationship with Driving and the Implications for America's Future" (follow the link for a download of the full document). From the end of the Second World War until sometime around 2004, both in terms of the total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on US roads and in terms of VMT per capita, the distance driven by each person, increased every year by approximately 3%. The chart below displays this trend; the rapid increase beginning in 1946 peaks in 2004, and has begun to decline or level off.
The PIRG report suggests a number of reasons for this emerging trend. Most obviously, fuel costs have increased dramatically since 2002 (more than doubling), and the recession and continued lagging economy have taken their toll on the ability of people to afford to travel by car.
But perhaps even more importantly, the mobility patterns of young Americans within the Millennial generation, here classified as people born between 1983 and 2000, are also changing:
Millennials are demonstrating significantly different lifestyle and transportation preferences than older generations. They drive less on average than previous generations of young people. More of them say they wish to live in cities and walkable neighborhoods. And more of them are drawn to forms of transportation other than driving. Moreover, the Millennials are the first generation whose lifestyles are shaped by the availability of mobile, Internet-connected technologies, social media, and the innovative forms of social connection, commerce and mobility that those technologies are spawning.
Among people ages 16 to 34, VMT per capita declined some 23% between 20001 and 2009, while their transit passenger miles increased by an astounding 40%. Moreover, in 2011, fewer 16 to 24-year-olds even had a license to drive than any year since 1967.
There are complex ripple effects of this trend: declining congestion and air pollution, but also reduced funds to pay for all sorts of transportation projects normally funded by gas tax revenues. Increasing fuel costs create an incentive for consumers to purchase more fuel efficient vehicles and for manufacturers to produce them, which reduces the size of this funding stream. Likewise, the mode shift powered by the increasing share of trips on transit, carsharing and cycling also contributes to an overall diminution of the gas tax.
The changes in travel behavior described in this study create both challenges and opportunities. The data now support a reconsideration of our priorities in transportation planning at all levels, but in the short term, funding to actually build the kind of infrastructure and operate the sorts of systems to capitalize on this trend is anything but secure.
The call for presentations is out for this year's GIS in Transit Conference, October 16-18, 2013, at the Keck Center of the National Academies in Washington, D.C. The conference planning committee is seeking proposals focused on uses of geographic and spatial analysis to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of transit planning, operations and marketing.
Some of the examples of topics the organizers have in mind will look familiar to Human Transit readers: using GTFS feeds to publish transit data and third-party applications for transit are just two from a much longer list. Proposals are due April 15. Have a look at the call for presentations for full details and submission requirements, or visit the conference website for more information.
I've recently learned of a new resource for sharing knowledge and best practices related to transit planning: transitwiki.org. The project is funded by Caltrans and managed by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, and is a novel response to California agencies' financial constraints that have limited the ability of staff to travel and attend conferences. As you would expect, much of the content so far is drawn from contributors' experiences working in California, but the wiki contains quite a lot of generally useful information on a variety of topics related to transit funding, management, planning, and operations. For more information, visit the website or the project's new twitter account.
Rhonda — Click here to pay by credit card — Jarrett
If you've arrived from the link in today's article in the New Zealand Herald, welcome! The best introduction to my own thinking on the Auckland network redesign, with remarkable maps, is here. Meanwhile, the post below is a big-picture argument about the set of choices that the redesign proposes, and the relationships among them …
Charles Blow in the NYT has a piece today arguing that Rosa Parks was not the meek figure of legend but something of a firebrand, "as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr." Cap'n Transit thought this might be a good time to ask, "What happened to Montgomery's bus system?" He found the answer in a remarkable 13-year old piece in the Nation, by JoAnn Wypijewski:
From 1977 to 1999 a white … Republican named Emory Folmar was mayor, and he made the bus system scream. … Advertising income disappeared after Folmar tried to bar an anti-death penalty ad and then decided that if he couldn't discriminate among advertisers he wouldn't have any at all. By the fortieth anniversary of the bus boycott, service had been cut by 70 percent and fares had doubled, to $1.50. Student and old-age discounts were eliminated. In 1996 midday service stopped. Finally, in 1997, the City Council said there just weren't enough riders or revenue; the traditional system of big buses and fixed routes was finished.
However, things have clearly bounced back this piece was written in 2000. Today Montgomery has a simple, radial fixed route system of 16 routes, running at headways ranging from 30 to 60 minutes with some evidence of a downtown pulse. It's not much service in the context of a metro area of over 350,000 — especially one where a state capitol and university. But you start where you are, or where you retreated to.
The Newport Game Board is slightly large for some email accounts, so it can be downloaded here:
What advice would you give to this emailer? I'm not especially up to date on development approval processes, and have seen none that really capture the crucial Be on the Way issue:
I was wondering whether you were aware of any municipalities who require a 'transit impact study' or something like it on new residential construction?
Here in Halifax (and I'm sure this is very common), an applicant must do a traffic impact study for any new development to demonstrate that the existing road network won't be wrecked by their plans. However, it seems to me that identifying and labelling transit-unserviceable projects during their approvals process would be a good thing. As you say, choices can be made, and they can still be built, but the fact that they can never reasonably be serviced by public transit should be labelled during the decision-making process.
Are you aware of any examples of this being required during rezoning/development approvals processes?