The future of mobility?

Focus on transit,urbanism

Steve Hawley, May 08, 09.

Several transportation prognosticators interviewed by the American Planning Association believe that the US transportation system will experience broad changes by 2050.

Reid Ewing, a professor of city and metropolitan planning at the University of Utah, says that global warming will change the way we live and travel. Ewing says once the world hits peak oil - which one energy analyst firm believes happened in early 2008 - energy sources will be severely limited.

The article notes:

There will be two immediate results: “We’ll see incredible pressure to reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, and our distant suburbs will seem a lot less attractive.” Zooming costs will result in far less travel. “We will live in tight village-like arrangements,” [Ewing] says, and “walkability will be the centerpiece of urban planning.” Meanwhile, the distant suburbs will steadily lose value.

Ewing notes that compact development patterns generate up to 40 percent less carbon dioxide than typical sprawl patterns. But to make a dent in global warming, we must seriously limit new highway construction (because new highways generate new traffic) and focus on maintaining existing roads (using the funds from higher gas taxes). His advice to planners? Make compact development the default option in zoning codes and work to give metropolitan planning organizations more power.

Walter Kulash, a Florida consultant, says that even advanced highway technology has its limits, and that only a behavior change will fix the world’s transportation problems:

He sees the current recession as a time to rethink transportation funding generally. “Years of sometimes reckless spending of tax dollars by highway agencies subsidized rapid suburban growth,” he says. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the stimulus act signed into law in February, is a “golden opportunity” to build new public spaces that will help to create community.

Kulash asks, “Why should you have to drive a carbon-emitting monster on a six-lane arterial just to go the grocery store?”

(However, the Texas Department of Transportation spent over two-thirds of its stimulus money on new road projects, including Segment E of the Grand Parkway, which is, in the words of a TxDOT official, “an opportunity to open up areas for development” in outlying areas.)

Robert Cervero, professor of city and regional planning and director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks a behavior change is coming:

“Broadly speaking,” he says, “we have to shrink the transportation sector’s footprint and lessen the need for so much transport. The figures are awful: 40 percent of the land in many of our big cities is used for roads, freeway ramps, and parking. As we become more resourceful in our use of land, we’re going to see smaller transportation systems — bikeways and pedways, even automated people movers — what people once thought of as space-age tech. We’re going to see things like circulator systems that provide internal movement within self-contained suburban centers. And we’ll see urban development patterns that are much more oriented to transit — because of changes in the market, prices, and regulation, but also because of changing tastes.

Futurama: Transportation in Transition