Robert Cervero

Q&A session on TODs

Director, University of California Transportation Center, Mar 20, 09.

Tagged with transportation, urban planning, environment, transit oriented development, tod

The new director of the University of California Transportation Center discusses how to use market-based forces in undertakings such as transit-oriented land development to undo our enslavement to cars and rescue us from other perils of sprawl.

Earlier this month, Robert Cervero, a professor of City and Regional Planning, assumed the directorship of the University of California Transportation Center (UCTC), a federally-funded research center established in 1987.

Cervero received master’s degrees in civil engineering and city planning from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a PhD in urban planning from UCLA. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1980 where he is also the Director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development. His area of expertise is sustainable transportation policy and planning. For the past five years he has been an instructor of transportation planning courses for the National Transit Institute and the World Bank Institute.

NewsBITS sat down with Cervero to ask him about joint land use and transportation, sustainable transportation, transit-oriented development, public-private partnerships, and the effect of new state legislation.

Q: How would you describe your research?
A: I focus on the relationship between cities and regions, transportation, travel behavior, more or less taking the perspective that the design of cities, where people live, work, shop really sets the stage for where people travel and how people travel. In many ways, if you want to get to the systemic nature of a lot of problems, such as congestion, air pollution, it’s centrally tied to how we organize and define our cities. So if there’s a lack of affordable housing near job centers, and if people are displaced way out in Livermore, you’re going to get very long commutes.

So you can simply treat transportation as a way to respond to the symptoms—such as congestion—and design and build more roads. But increasingly the evidence appears to me that in many ways this further spawns sprawl and many other problems.

Q: Where do the solutions lie?
A: Even though I have a master’s degree in engineering and planning, over time I have evolved away from focusing on technology and operations and supply side solutions to more broadly the notion that how do we more resourcefully and sustainably design cities and regions. I would almost pitch it as a form of demand management. You can manage demand by pricing and parking policies and things like that, but you can also put people closer to jobs and shopping and walking and biking. It’s just another form of demand management.

Q: Not just sprawl, but energy use, congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, right?
A: Increasingly we’ve realized there are a lot of broader environmental benefits. It’s not just reducing congestion and emissions, we have problems of time pollution. We spend so much time traveling to and fro that people no longer have quality time to invest in their neighborhoods or their civic activities. They arrive home exhausted from their long commutes. Sociologists have tied this to social disaffect, where people sort of disassociate themselves from neighborhood affairs. So, I would suggest there are even more deeply-rooted problems associated with transportation problems.

Q: How does this relate to joint development—or integrating transportation and land-use planning?
A: I have long been a believer in mass transit simply because it is the most resourceful means of mobility. Transit, in my view, has always been a means of mobility we should be promoting and advancing. Of course, anyone who has spent time in Europe or in many other parts of the world, realizes what can happen if you carefully coordinate transit investment with urban planning. You get much more walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods. A good share of trips can be handled more quickly, more efficiently, more economically, more resourcefully by transit.

Q: So you’re saying our system doesn’t work?
A: It’s not to say that our system is broken; a lot of people like the freedom and individualism of the private car. But I think the difference you find in Europe is that people do own cars, they’re just not enslaved to them for any and every trip. They’re much more judicious and selective when they use the car or don’t. So if you live in a place like Stockholm or Copenhagen, if you go into the central city, everybody takes transit. Stockbrokers, day workers, school kids, everyone. But for regional destination trips, shopping, sports events, or if you’re making a late-night trip or doing big volume shopping they drive. For a weekend excursion they drive. So they are not anti-car, but the cities are designed so that transit is a respectable option for many.

Full story: Q & A with Robert Cervero: UCTC’s new director talks about the future of transit-oriented development
Source: NewsBITS, Spring 2009 issue

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