No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Reducing the Effects of Distance
Transportation policy should aim to reduce congestion, says Alan Pisarski, author of Commuting in America. Yet too often it is actually aimed at “making things get worse — slower!”
“We can’t make it faster but we can try for reliably slower,” Pisarski quotes one transportation planner as saying. “These should be embarrassing if not pathetic goals,” he commented at the Preserving the American Dream conference in San Jose last week.
“Imagine if such goals were applied to schools or hospitals.”
In much of the U.S., notes Pisarski, more than 25 percent of workers commute across county lines to get to work. Click chart to see a larger image.
Pisarski argued that the appropriate goal for transportation should be “to reduce the effects of distance as an inhibiting force in our society’s ability to realize its economic and social aspirations.” You can download his PowerPoint presentation (850KB); if you would like a copy of the DVD of his presentation, email the American Dream Coalition.
Pisarski expects household incomes and wealth to increase, and points out that, as incomes increase, so too does household travel. But he also points out that impaired transportation systems can reduce people’s ability to earn incomes.
Pisarski reports that he has recently observed transportation planning processes in several states and urban areas. In each case, interests outside the agencies that are supposed to deal with congestion have raised congestion as a major issue, while the agencies themselves dragged their feet in trying to do something about it.
There are “no owners of the problem” and the public has little or no access to information, says Pisarski. At worst, agency planners regard congestion as a “tool” to achieve their goals. At best, it is simply not high on their priority list: in Atlanta, congestion relief was given an 11 percent weighting in evaluations of alternative transportation projects.
Pisarski argues that metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) should spend more time working on congestion relief and less on environmental issues. “Let me know when you have more freight economists than you have environmental analysts,” he tells MPOs.
Instead of trying to change behaviour, we should rely on technological fixes to transport
problems. Instead of focusing enormous resources on biking and walking, we should
recognize that freight transport is crucial to any urban economy. Instead of relying
on long-
More detailed solutions will be provided in Pisarski’s second conference presentation tomorrow.
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Reprinted from The Antiplanner