Motivation
Not being discussed here, is what you do with a static or declining growth area – but all of these problems about land use and transportation infrastructure are far less pressing.
People want:
- The economic growth/vitality that supports their family, military expenditure etc.
- To have the low crime, good schools, etc. that are common across lifestyle choices
- The ability to choose their own lifestyle (living in the bustling city with people, the house on an acre, the farm, etc.)
- And to have easy access to all those things e.g. without traffic
- And to not pay more than they have to to get these things
But in providing all these things together, there are several critical constraints:
- Pollution mitigation spacing (e.g. putting the refineries downwind and away from houses)
- Efficiently centralizing related businesses, so that they have the best chance to stay in business: for example a computer manufacturing hub, or all the seaport infrastructure, warehouses, etc. and making sure there is space to efficiently add more (since the population/demand will continue to increase)
- The more land you give to individuals, the more roads you have to build, and the longer the transit time
- The more trips from A to B, or from A to C,D,E…and having flexibility, this means you have to build more roads
- Not knowing (amongst other things) the future mix of lifestyles of people that move in – therefore not knowing how many high-rises vs. McMansions to build
The typical problems seen in the historically unplanned modern large city (and above i.e. megalopolises) are:
- The polluters would not have been placed so close to houses (health and lifestyle loss)
- There are gross imbalances between residential and commercial uses, so that excessive traffic/trips are generated (deadweight economic loss, also pollution impacts)
- People who don’t prefer one lifestyle or another, are forced to buy into a more expensive (to themselves and society) usage (e.g. single family home instead of apartment, buying multiple cars) because of lack of available/worthwhile housing in proximity of e.g. their workplaces
- The overall traffic and density mismatches cause speculative activity, excessively expensive housing due to now constrained supply, etc.
- Aggregate grossly wasteful use of land because of individual/non-coordinated parcel requirements like setbacks, leading to less parks/farmland
In this regard, as with other problems that implicate a historical angle and future scenarios, we should consider the ideal arrangement(s) to provide the desired goods; this provides us with the reference point(s) to determine the incremental decisions and path forward when trying to balance interests.
The Emergence And Necessity Of The “Service Road Network”
Briefly, we need to consider the point at which individual residential/business needs begin to enter into the space where tradeoffs must be made to avoid these gross inefficiencies (vs. the individual HOA or business district type preferences which are essentially aesthetic, or a rural town where e.g. polluting facilities arbitrarily can be placed away from existing construction). To do this, it is convenient to frame it using a concept which implicitly has existed for many, many years, but usually is never referenced in an urban planning discussion because the point at which any given province historically has held at approximately this transit level, has been so transient. We now discuss the “service road network”.
Consider a medium-sized (1 million residents) typical American city, in the heartland (so it never had a huge downtown with skyscrapers, beachfront properties, etc). In such a city, you typically would have firefighting, construction/demolition, sewerage/water, and other sorts of services, often provided via heavy machinery, for the benefit of multiple citizens and their properties. In a farm/rural scenario, the heavy machinery services are small-scale (e.g. septic tanks) and not worth doing outside of good weather scenarios; so you could drive your heavy machinery on the dry dirt and that would be efficient enough. However, in the city setting, the contractors have to be able to get to varying job sites easily, and they can’t do that if they are trudging over sogged non-roads, with a totally fragmented right-of-way/access due to landowner permissions/rights/usages.
Additionally, you have certain services like ambulances and police response that require prompt and consistent travel times to the various city locations. Although they don’t have the same heavy pavement requirements, you can understand that from an efficiency perspective, if I already have to move all these heavy trucks, I may as well use and/or expand the existing network and much more cheaply accommodate these other requirements. Likewise, your farm-to-market and commercial deliveries traffic would be adding their own marginal requirements, and the efficiency improvements clearly would justify such spending.
Hence, the typical city should have a “service road network” regardless of whether workers live on worksites or skyscrapers, commute via car or bike, etc. This concept is conceptually similar to the need for a rural area to have farm-to-market roads, where it is grossly more efficient to have the residents pool funds to put some long-distance roads in to facilitate the movement of goods in and out of the farms and ranches. The farmers might pave their own driveways, have a small town for gatherings, etc. but those are essentially separate from their primary business needs.
The beginning of the major non-pollution land use conflicts amongst users is partially caused by and partially coincides with the usage on the service road network. A service road network capable of handling all of the city-infrastructure, construction, etc. needs of a city, is significantly underutilized, and recreational use is essentially free. There are very limited rush hour periods and limited backups except for special events. Moreover, as the service road network provides essentially no-cost access to property, therefore it is economically efficient to put structures along it, especially ones that don’t suffer much from traffic noise. At a lower density, a city does not require anything more than a service road network. But as population grows, traffic flows become imbalanced e.g. because there is a commuting road leading to a large factory, and the residential traffic starts flowing around the major businesses, links in the service road network reach their capacity, and the right-of-way to expand it is gone, because all the businesses built up along it.
The people of the city do not have practical discretion on the existence and use of its service road network for services. By contrast, they do have discretion over its use by commuter and residential traffic, by directly regulating trips and/or transportation equipment or storage. They also have discretion over the land use and density along it, which is driving the demand for trips, as well as those trips’ location.
Review Of Land Use And Transportation Options
That is, you can choose to reduce/redirect traffic loads by:
- Eliminating the trip altogether (e.g. by reducing population or need to commute/shop/gather)
- Changing the endpoints of the trip to be closer, or connected by more capacious transit
- Unconnecting or upgrading a transit connection (e.g. banning cars, widening a road) – but remember the existence of the service road network (as well as your tourism accommodation for car travelers) practically limits your ability to fully unconnect traffic
In those regards, the power of the government relates to:
- Dictating what people can do with the land that they used to “own” (and now have e.g. development rights to, operating under government building codes and business operating rules, hence they are operators and not owners)
- Dictating which people can drive on what roads under what conditions
- Practically, dictating which people can own which types of cars
- Chartering/securing right of way/building bus lines, mass transit lines, etc. – any type of transit capacity increase
Expressing Citizens’ Desires As Functions Of Transportation Options
Recalling the desire to accommodate the pool of citizens’ desires, and to do so with minimum expenditure/waste, from most beneficial to least, the critical planning criteria are:
- Minimize required commute distance/times for those who must commute to work, and ban hybrid and other such regular on-site work arrangements for office work (reducing waste)
- Placing families with children in close proximity to schooling to reduce their commutes (although note there is a heavy assumption on out of home schooling – which is not necessarily valid. But the point being that you put the parents close to the schools that their children attend, and everyone else not close)
- Similarly, people with dependents like elders need to be able to co-habit or live very close by
- Avoiding cul-de-sacs and other road patterns/land use that increase travel time (regardless of traffic) and create chokepoints.
- Building common amenities for multiple lifestyles that can be underutilized like parks, pools, etc. in proximity, but also to avoid people accessing them via single roads/chokepoints (avoiding inefficiently laid out transit networks that have underutilized capacity/increase residents’ travel time)
- Allocate residential districts that acommodate particular lifestyles, and place the larger employers/businesses along the perimeters of such districts so that they can be accessed by a smaller set of large-capacity transit means (the basic idea of giving everyone the lifestyle they want)
and hence the major tool of city organization becomes land-use by building districts specifically for each type of lifestyle, with enough spare residential capacity allocated in every district to accommodate e.g. job changes.
Common Approaches To Inter-District Transportation Planning
Recall that the above list of criteria talked about essentially required travel, since very few people would choose a longer commute to work. However, there is a tradeoff between living with your family/friends, vs. living close to work; not everyone can have an optimal commute in a free-market economy. Thus one of the major questions concerns the extent to which individuals can choose to live in a district that is not proximate to their employment. Of course there are very desirable central districts, as well as desirable outer districts, because of either the financial considerations (for appreciation or low operating cost) or due to the enhanced satisfaction of lifestyle factors. One of course would consider that you would fill them up, build your skyscrapers, etc…but then you have no space for people with “good” jobs proximate to those districts. One possible solution is to force a minimum wage that ensures the workers can live in those districts. The other problem is that these people, if they have a commute, generate trips onto the public roads to go to their usual place of business, therefore requiring transit upgrades. One possible solution is to apply a commuter tax based on the trips that are being generated.
Practically speaking, there are a few cases that frequently arise under such a system:
- If the city dwellers who have the excess of Class A office space work out an arrangement with 3 of their surrounding suburbs for workers, the city dwellers get their lower taxes/amenities and the suburbs get their roads when the two of them split the costs of the highway upgrades.
- If the outer suburbs want to commute into the employment centers across a neighborhood, the neighborhood only has to give the economically viable right of way (allow construction of sufficient grid streets, highway corridor potentially with home buyouts). If the outer suburbs want to keep growing and keep paying to upgrade their chokepoint corridor all the way to a subway, then let them. But the folks living in neighborhood in the middle pay extra fees to use the outer suburbs’ upgrades.
- If the city dwellers are choked already, they can pay for their local BRT and nothing else, so the suburban dwellers won’t get any additional inputs to the city across the neighborhood line. The city dwellers might choose to use an entry tax or permitting scheme.
There also are some relatively common special cases:
- Mass shuttle to work site (for chemical plants and other hazardous/polluting facilities)
- Extremely high density, relatively temperate cities (Tokyo, NYC) can economically profit from a train/subway (until you get truly massive, it makes no sense to go beyond BRT). Although e.g. Moscow has an apparently good subway system for winter, practically speaking, most people aren’t doing winter work that requires a fixed commute without equipment (e.g. you have snow clearers and sidewalk cleaners, but those are local) and hence there is no reason to build the subway for winter commuting in the 21st century
- HOV and HOT lanes. Sometimes you may have a situation where the service road network or some moderate upgrade from it usually is adequate, but there may be a chokepoint like a bridge or other natural obstacle that creates big backups. In addition to the impact to contractors for work, emergency vehicles will have major issues with it. In this case, you create a HOT lane to enable the critical traffic to obtain acceptable service levels. (And you can stack buses into that lane too)
Who Decides And Who Pays
The final ideal topic to consider is the manner of paying for the roads:
– Everyone has to have a house, workplace, and other amenities. On the base service road network, because almost everyone relies on it, it doesn’t make sense to allocate specific sections, similar to how it doesn’t make sense to toll every road, because everyone winds up paying and it begins to approximate an overhead tax (e.g. out of income or sales tax) revenue.
– The question then is who pays for transportation services and infrastructure above service road network; in particular, the inter-district links, or major commuter links.
— There is an argument that everyone pays for “regional economic vitality” which is true, however that doesn’t get you to why I am building 17 bridges over rivers, or digging billion dollar tunnels to go 5 miles.
— The argument the suburbanites make is “the city is dense, subways/buses expensive, city’s problem that they chose to build this way”
— Issue is that city and suburbs usually unbalanced where suburbs commute into the city. Hence the city’s transportation problem partially comes from the suburbs and in particular the need to car commute in takes the ridership and even more importantly the capacity away from the bus system, which then leads to the financials not working.
— The argument the city dwellers make is “you chose to live in McMansion, don’t come to me with the bill for your billion dollar beltway project so you can spend only an hour in traffic each way”
— Issue is ultimately people are going to wind up generating inter-neighborhood trips. Even if you were generous/smart and got a job close to work, once your duty station or employer changes, now you’re back in the boat. Since we do two-earner families, moving may not be viable from either mileage/usage of roads or transit time perspective, since you now have two duty stations. This problem only gets worse as R&D becomes a larger portion of the economy and fickle consumer demand drives business profits. As currently we do not have a good answer for this, either in moving or staying where you are. If you think back to the good old days of company towns and small town industry, that was basically the situation, work at the big employer or move. The very disfavorable home economics, social life/keeping spouse happy, support network for family/friends, and negotiating position of the people in those towns caused the decline of that approach, along with the manufacturing job steady state/decline generally in developed world. Basically it winds up being a PCS system similar to military, where every three years you move for new position and/or job, which means spouse can’t have a job and kids never stick in one place. Almost uniformly the military families complain about that lifestyle.
— The argument workers make is that the city is clogged because people need to get to work, the leisure dwellers need to vacate
— True, but are we allocating space in the city by who pays/desires to live there, or who has a minimum-wage job and clearly is costing more money than value they are delivering? Why is minimum wage traffic privileged over that of the rich retirees who are enjoying their earnings?
From a perspective of special cases, it isn’t quite possible to distinguish even upgrades to the service road network. For the polluter case, of course you’re going to have to upgrade the road to and from the pollution area, the same way you would for the office commuters who are trying to avoid moving their kids out of the high school before they graduate. The ports also will require additional upgrades to move traffic, and of course they will require beltways/ring roads and bypasses.
So much for ideals. But, off rush hour, it’s really not a big deal most of the time, until you get to the skyscraper megalopolis, where there’s no question, you are getting complete subway and bus coverage, because you have no more space for popular car ownership.
The big problem comes when you have no economically viable right of way for the amount of traffic you are trying to move (approaches to increasing below). Typically this occurs when the suburbs and city never normalize commuting flow, so you have jams in either direction. It also can happen if population massively increases (millions of people) and you have choke points like rivers. Now you are back to the rationing/permitting schemes and it’s just a question of whom do you love more, the commuting workers, the city locals, or the tourists/service workers. Cities tend to try and please everyone and they all wind up back in the same choked, inefficient, unpleasant state.
Suggestions For Resolving The Common Problem Of Choked Arteries
The cheapest and best approach is, by far, is to make living in the city desirable by having low crime and good schools. Then the problems correct themselves. The following discussion assumes that doesn’t happen.
The next cheapest approach is that you allocate permits for the roadways during peak hours. The businesses inbound (as well as e.g. plumbing contractors and people who do not report to fixed business locations) get a fixed number of slots for their employees, and have to allocate arrival/departure times and parking. Too many deviations and you get fined. To support this, extended child care, etc. is provided.
The next level is that you auction/charge for the permits, especially the peak permits. You make the commuters decide who is important and needs to be coming from the suburbs (or likewise, the city).
Once the permit system no longer manages the load, you already have worked out a system of fairly regular arrivals and departures, with locations. You now have the information you need efficiently to plan a BRT, so you allocate lane(s) and run your BRT on the indicated schedule, updating as necessary.