Riding the Tide in Norfolk

Last week I had a chance to ride the Tide light rail, an addition to the transportation system in Norfolk, Virginia that's coming up on one full year of operation. We utilized the park and ride at the Newtown Road Station, at the eastern end of the line, and traveled to MacArthur Square in the center of Norfolk. Conveniently, the same day pass could be used for the ferry to Portsmouth, so we walked the two blocks down to the port and crossed the river just in time to serendipitously catch a Memorial Day parade down High Street.

It's not exactly obvious that the Tide, in its current form, would be successful. The Hampton Roads region is not terribly dense. Robert Cervero has estimated that light rail needs an average of 30 people per gross acre around the stations to be in the top quarter of cost-effective transit systems in the country. The stations along the Tide average around 5 people per gross acre. Overall public transportation ridership in the Hampton Roads area has been very much below the national average, a statistic that does not bode well for new investment. On top of this, the route defies a fairly standard rule of transit planning. A transit system ideally should have destinations at both ends, in order to maximize usage for both directions of travel. When Virginia Beach decided to opt out, it left the end of the line stranded in the middle.

Yet the service has done fairly well in terms of actual ridership. Between August 2011 and February 2012, weekday trips have average around 4,700, which significantly exceeds the initial 2,900 projection for the first year. (I wonder if ridership might be undercounted somewhat. On our way back to the parking lot, I noticed that some riders who were done for the day handed off their day pass to strangers who were just arriving.)

However, it's still several decades too early to adequately judge the Tide. Like all infrastructure, the Tide will likely shape the conditions of its own success over time. The Newtown Road station might remain a park-and-ride because of its highway access, but I can imagine a sizable parking garage being erected next door as demand grows. It's already the most popular station. Light rail shifts some burden of parking away from downtown, so that the more valuable downtown land can be redeveloped into more productive uses.

The stations in between are poised for transit-oriented development. Norfolk planners have anticipated this and specifically zoned the areas around these stations to utilize the infrastructure to its fullest extent. Neighborhood associations in the area are also supportive. Ironically, the same low densities around the stations that might have caused elected officials to think twice about the whole project could be a net benefit. There's potential.

The long-term success of the Tide will ultimately depend on its expansion to other major destinations in the region, especially the Virginia Beach oceanfront and the Norfolk Navy Base. The City of Virginia Beach seems to be warming to the idea. Their 2009 Comprehensive Plan designated most of the proposed corridor for growth, and identified light rail as a viable transportation alternative. Then, the city purchased right-of-way that could be used for the alignment in 2010. Once again, Virginia Beach will hold a referendum on light rail.  In November, voters will decide whether to use "reasonable efforts to support the financing and development of The Tide light rail into Virginia Beach."

Principle and Power in Federal Transportation

The Republican majority in the federal House of Representatives laid down the gauntlet last week in what is shaping up to be a dramatic fight over the future of transportation in the United States. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed their bill along partisan lines, while the House Ways and Means Committee ousted transit funding entirely from the Highway Trust Fund.

These proposals have instigated strong reactions. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, a moderate Republican, called it "the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.” Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff considers it “a huge step backward.” The New York Times and Los Angeles Times issued scathing and unequivocal editorial rebukes.

Whether or not this bill makes it through the full House in its current form, or through a compromise with the much more bipartisan Senate, it's at least serving the useful purpose of drawing widespread public attention to a clear decision before the American public. In the interest of paying attention, I've cobbled together a few principles that have generally been used to evaluate federal transportation policy. I believe they are all sensible, even if they do not fit together as neatly as one would like.
 
User Pays, User Benefits

What makes the marketplace, in general, such an effective tool for allocating resources is the alignment between the costs of a decision and the benefits accrued to the decision-maker. If you buy the stick of gum, you get to chew it. If you want gum, you have to pay for it. Because of this linkage, each of us is able to perform hundreds of tiny cost-benefit analyses everyday, using our own preferences and brainpower, to maximize quality of life and minimize waste. In the aggregate, goods and services are shifted to where they are used most effectively.

Because of monopolistic tendencies, transportation infrastructure cannot be fully handed over to the private market. However, at least since the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, officials have tried to emulate its logic by requiring infrastructure to be paid for directly by those who benefit from it, and in proportion to the benefit they receive. A user fee sends a price signal to the consumer, empowering each person to decide what travel is worth to them, while also sending an investment signal to the government provider, allowing it to allocate more funds when more maintenance and capacity is necessary.

The gas tax, the primary user fee feeding the Highway Trust Fund, has been imperfect. You pay a fixed amount per gallon, whether 100% or 0% of the miles driven are on federally-funded roadways. Hybrid vehicles pay much less than automobiles with traditional combustion engines for the same product, and electric vehicles pay nothing at all. For these reasons and more, transportation analysts are in hot pursuit of a more comprehensive VMT fee. But, for now, the gas tax is the best we’ve got.

The House transportation bill has been criticized from across the political spectrum for breaking the User Pays, User Benefits precedent. The bill expects to make up for a $50 billion revenue shortfall by selling leasing rights for oil extraction in Alaska and off-shore, a move the Competitive Enterprise Institute has labeled “drilling for roads.” Even if (big if), enough money is eventually generated by this scheme, getting the horse back into the barn of a closed fiscal loop will be very difficult politically.

Transportation analyst Alan Pisarski cautioned:

"The loss of the user pays principle would further diminish the trust fund and the whole concept of a balanced relationship between spending and use."

Internalize Social Costs

If we want individuals to be able to set national priorities by making hundreds of tiny cost-benefit analyses throughout the day, then each person ought to be shouldering the true costs attributed to their actions. The fact is that, more than any other mode of travel, driving imposes costs that are not paid by the driver. The Freakonomics guys put it this way:

"What are the negative externalities of driving? To name just three: congestion, carbon emissions and traffic accidents. Every time Arthur gets in a car, it becomes more likely that Zelda — and millions of others — will suffer in each of those areas."

They estimate these costs to be about 10 cents a mile, or the equivalent of a $2/gallon gas tax. As a point of reference, the federal gas tax has stood at 18.4 cents/gallon since 1993. (If you happen to believe that global climate change is an international hoax perpetrated by scientists, then you can feel free to shave 13 cents off their gas tax estimate). On top of this, some other costs forced upon non-users are non-residential parking, air quality, stormwater runoff, and noise and aesthetics. Obviously, reaching an agreement on the exact price of all of these values is difficult, but intangible costs are real.

Sometimes the User Pays, User Benefits principle and the Internalize Social Costs principle are presented as mutually exclusive, as if the gas tax can either be only a user fee or a tax. But it can certainly be both, as long as the funds generated are used to benefit the user as well as offset the costs imposed by the user. There are many ways to offset the costs, spending on transit historically being the most significant.

The Safe Routes to School Program is a good example of an internalization of social costs. There's nothing inherently unsafe about children walking to school, at least since humans neutralized threats from large predators. However, the presence of automobile travel introduces a new threat that either endangers schoolchildren or forces them to shift over to more costly modes. That's why it makes sense for each driver to chip in about a dollar a year to offset this impact. The House transportation bill would eliminate Safe Routes to School, along with all other programs dedicated to walking and bicycling.

Scale to Geographic Range of Impact

Two hundred years after Hamilton and Jefferson argued over federalism, the debate between state and federal power in the United States has never been adequately resolved. At least in theory, the answer to this question for transportation can be determined empirically: the scale of governmental authority over a system ought to match the geographic range of impact from the system. This was essentially the conclusion reached in 1987 by the (now defunct) U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations:

“This concept of the geographic range of highway benefits is a key test to determine which unit of government should bear responsibility for highway finance.”

According to this test, the entire transportation network can be teased apart, from federal interstate and intercity rail to neighborhood roads and trails, and responsibility assigned to the scale of government that matches the particular component. Grey areas can be smoothed out by cost-sharing ratios or various kinds of block grants passed between governments.

The ACIR was right to focus on the geographic scale of the network, but they were wrong in a few ways. First, actually sorting infrastructure by scale is hard to do. They considered the Interstate Highway System the classic case of national interest, but, in reality, many interstate trips made within metropolitan areas will never cross a state line. Motorists use the interstates for commuting, bypassing congested local roads, and various other daily tasks. If the federal role in transportation were selectively limited to highways alone, it would introduce a host of distortions into the regional and local systems, forcing them to accommodate an inefficient overemphasis on driving. The federal government, in this case, would have the responsibility of offsetting its own impacts.

Secondly, they only considered the geographic range of benefits, without considering the geographic range of costs. Air pollution drifts across state lines, all U.S. citizens share the costs of treating crash victims through insurance premiums and medicare/medicaid, and carbon emissions are global. There is certainly a federal interest in keeping these costs down.

The House bill is being sold as a further step toward devolution of federal control to the states, but no spatial evidence has been provided for why the current balance should be shifted in that direction. Scale changes over time. A small metropolitan area may have once had a transportation network that could easily be contained within a state boundary, but the emergence of megapolitan areas might necessitate passing government oversight up the ladder to some degree.

Fix it First

The lifetime costs of infrastructure should be accounted for in the original decision to build. In other words, maintenance takes precedence over new construction, and federal funding formulas ought to appropriately prioritize it. This is simply a manifestation of the broader principle: live within your means. Deferral of maintenance is exactly the same thing as taking on debt. The interest rate may start out low, but it is ratcheted upward exponentially by the bank of physics. And physics cannot be bailed out.

A 2011 Report by Smart Growth America showed that states spent 57% of their federal appropriations on building new roads, while simultaneously accruing a backlog of maintenance on existing bridges and highways. The same organization calls the House transportation bill, unlike its equivalent in the Senate, still short of the mark in resolving this.

Provide Accessibility over Mobility

It’s not about the journey; it’s about the destination. Most of us travel in order to achieve a purpose that has nothing to do with transportation: visit your parents for dinner, work at the office, see Yellowstone, deliver a package to a customer. The old paradigm of transportation planning held that maximizing mobility was the primary purpose of the system, and the metric of success was defined in terms of vehicle miles traveled. But mobility is just one means to an end. The ultimate goal of transportation is to empower humans to meet their own goals by connecting where they are with where they want to be.

The paradigm shift from mobility to accessibility brings multimodal travel options and the interconnections between transportation and land use into sharper focus.Todd Litman says:

"An efficient transport system is multi-modal, encouraging travelers to use each mode for what it does best: walking and cycling for short trips, ridesharing and public transport for travel on congested urban corridors, and automobile travel when it is truly most efficient overall, taking into account all impacts."

The House bill would maintain the current federal funding formulas that reward states for inducing more driving. State A with destinations spread out from each other would be considered more "successful" in providing mobility than State B with dense cores of activity, even if State B actually facilitates more connections between origins and destinations. State A would be apportioned more federal funds.

President Obama's Sustainable Communities Initiative has been a tentative first step toward this more rigorous and robust understanding of transportation. The House transportation bill does not attempt to build upon this discussion in any recognizable way.

Support Household Resilience

Even if the federal government does manage to balance its transportation budget, this achievement would matter little if it has the effect of pushing struggling American families further underwater. There is a broad moral consensus that each individual deserves the opportunity to better oneself through hard work and personal responsibility, but the reality is that holding a job and operating a household are preconditioned upon an affordable and reliable means for getting around.

Americans that live in a place with no options beside driving face constant pressure, what the New America Foundation refers to as the "Energy Trap."

"Every 25 cent jump in the price of gas siphons $90 million a day away from the recovering American economy. Because we have few choices but to commute to work in private cars, we are trapped by high gas prices.

The energy trap is particularly hard on American households. The average family of four making $50,000 a year spends nearly $8000 a year on their cars, maintenance, and fuel combined--more than they pay for taxes or medical care."

It's is important to note that a car-dependent system of transport not only restricts the 9.1% of American households without a vehicle available, but it squeezes those who are able to scramble together the funds to provide personal mobility. Families under pressure are less likely to take risks on their career, and may neglect other important elements of their budget. And one little leak in the hull, maybe a few more dollars at the pump or a "check engine" light, might just sink the ship.

Create jobs

We've come to expect politicians in recent years to tout the job creation potential of their proposals, so it's not surprising that the House transportation bill even includes the word "jobs" in its title. While the primary purpose of federal transportation may be to connect people with their destinations, the bill is also rightfully judged by how the planning, construction, and operation of the sector itself moves money through the economy.

In one sense, all government spending creates jobs (the money has to go somewhere, right?). But not all spending is equally constructive. An analysis of the funds spent on the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) showed that:

"For every billion dollars spent on public transportation projects, 16,419 job-months were created. A billion dollars spent on highway infrastructure projects created only 8,781 job-months."

This is because ARRA transit projects spent less on land acquisition and raw materials and more on hiring labor with a diverse skill set to operate and maintain the system. Another study came to the same conclusion, only adding that infrastructure for bicycling and pedestrians created even more jobs per dollar spent.

Americans are going to eventually grow tired of empty "jobs, jobs, jobs" platitudes. The operative question is how much stable job creation is generated per dollar spent.

Power

The cynic wonders whether any of this matters.

Any bill will result in winners and losers, at least in the short-term before private interests are able to adapt to new conditions. Many of the largest interests are vested in pushing the transportation system along it's current trajectory. The Center for Responsive Politics has tracked over $13.5 million in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry toward candidates in the 2012 election, almost 9-to-1 going to Republicans. Oil executives, who understand the concept of return on investment, will likely be pleased if they can manage to open up new supply fields, solidify their demand from a car-dependent American populace, and even get a new Keystone XL pipeline thrown in as a cherry on top.

Then there are the voters. Yonah Freemark has shown a strong correlation between density and political affiliation, with Republicans much more likely to live in more sparsely populated congressional districts than Democrats. Constituents who may be accustomed to driving are probably less likely to approve investing in alternatives than those who stand to benefit directly from them (full disclosure: I own a house next to a bus stop). Although there are two major caveats here: some suburbanites live in locations that could potentially become transit-oriented and walkable with further investment, and there are some rural and exurban denizens who like it that way and don't necessarily want to see a new highway drop a big box store in their backyard.

Transportation really should be a pragmatic political arena. There are no deep moral conflicts that transcend the purview of reasonable conversation. Democracy functions best when citizens are able to think carefully about the alternatives before them, and the wake up call from last week may be just in time.

New study sheds light on roadway safety for all

Traffic safety has been one of those long-standing fault lines in the purported war between cars and pedestrians. In the one corner, we have traffic engineers who are given the task of designing roadways to maximize speed and capacity, while maintaining what is considered an acceptable level of safety for motorists. You do this by making the roadway as forgiving as possible with wider lanes, longer sight distances, and nothing to crash into along the side of the road. In the other corner, pedestrian advocates have insisted on slowing cars down with traffic calming, on-street parking, pedestrian signal prioritization and lots of other strategies to look after their own safety. As the story goes, each side is locked in a shouting match over whose safety is the most important.

Design Solutions for Balancing Traffic Conflicts and Speed. Source: Dumbaugh et. al.

But a new study that appears in the Journal of the American Planning Association sheds more light than heat on the subject. Eric Dumbaugh and Wenhau Li found that designs that make the travel safer for any road user make travel safer for every road user. Really, there is no zero sum game. We don’t have to pick one team. Thankfully.

The researchers looked at almost 300,000 crashes in the San Antonio area and considered all of the details of where the crash happened, not just how many cars use the road or how wide the lanes are. They asked: Is this a pedestrian-scaled “Main Street” or is it an arterial lined with strip malls? Are there big box stores around? How many intersections are in the area, and how many people live nearby? Then they considered who was involved in the crash. Two vehicles? A vehicle and cyclist? A vehicle and a tree? With all of these variables in mind, they determined which factors were better correlated with a safer environment … and for whom.

The results may not entirely satisfy either side, but they make sense. Freeways turn out to be pretty safe, showing a relatively small proportion of crashes. This probably has more to do with the lack intersections on highways, than it does the opulent shoulders and smooth grades. With access limited to a few exits and entrances, there are just fewer chances to collide with an oncoming vehicle. But just as the highway engineers may consider theories are vindicated, the research shows that places on the opposite end of the spectrum are just as safe.

“The presence of pedestrian-scaled retail uses, on the other hand, was associated with significant reductions in multiple-vehicle, parked-car, fixed-object, and pedestrian crashes. We attribute this to reduced vehicle speeds. Street oriented buildings create a sense of visual enclosure of the street, communicating to the driver that greater caution is warranted, and resulting in reductions in both vehicle speed and crash incidence.”

Consider all of the chaos of a Main Street scene. A driver is trying to parallel park while a cyclist dodges the opening door. Pedestrians are crossing at will, and delivery trucks are backing into their spaces.  Visual stimulation is everywhere. The old engineering models would take all of these inputs and calculate a daily bloodbath, but nothing of the sort is happening. It’s a highly functional environment. The key here is that both the Main Street and the Freeway are relatively safe for all road users, motorists and pedestrians alike (although let’s admit that pedestrian safety on the freeway is purely a function of their non-existence).

The absolute worst places for everyone were the ones that fell between the cracks of the two paradigms. There’s one of these in your town. The wide highway with a traffic light every few hundred feet leading into strip shopping centers. They are designed to be Freeway-esque with plenty of room for you to veer out of your lane, yet with all of the conflicts of cars pulling in and out still there. These precautions are just a cruel trick, inducing drivers to take on more speed than they really should to their own detriment. Pedestrians are caught in the cross-fire with no armor, and before you judge them for having the audacity just to be there, remember that many service-sector workers have no choice. In the twentieth century we dreamed of the best of both words for our roadways – access and speed! - but ended up with the worst of both worlds.

Freeways will still be utilized for those long-distance trips between cities, at least while gas is still relatively inexpensive. They should continue to be designed to handle the high speeds they command, to allow drivers to travel safely. But within highly-concentrated urban areas, mindlessly applying these same standards wrecks havoc. In these cases, a design approach that takes into account the whole context of the street yields a much safer result for pedestrians and motorists alike.

A housing director who understands the full cost of housing

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan was interviewed on the financial costs imposed on individual families by lower density housing patterns. Ever since the Costs of Sprawl report was published in 1974, the talking points have mostly hovered around the increased fiscal costs to taxpayers of sprawl - you know, the pipes and roads, public services, environmental clean up, and so forth. Lately this story has been filled out with a more precise understanding of what individual Americans pay for this arrangement not just in taxes but in the everyday effort to balance the household budget.

Consumers need full disclosure of transportation costs

If Walkscore put walkability on the real estate map (it's getting better all the time, by the way), the new online tool Abogo might do the same for transportation affordability. Just type in an address and the home gets placed on a map showing average transportation costs for the surrounding neighborhood and the region. This is what you can expect to pay on a monthly basis if you choose to live here. Seeing this number in black and white may help diffuse the old drive-til-you-qualify myth - that you can find more house for the money the further from the city you move. Living in lower densities may pose less up-front costs per square foot, but the ongoing cost of getting to where you need to go on a regular basis is real and likely much higher. Abogo puts a number on that reality.

 The site is developed by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, who have been amassing an armful of data on transportation and housing for years now. Their Housing and Transportation Affordability Index presented this data last spring to tell the story of affordable living choices from a metropolitan area perspective, and the H+T Index site has already been incorporated into plenty of policy discussions, including the federal Sustainable Communities Initiative. Abogo is the next logical step, because it narrows the story to the consumer level where any real change in the marketplace will have to occur. Markets work best when information is available. As a homebuyer, the basic housing cost information is in your face. You literally have to write the check for your mortgage. Transportation costs are more nebulous, hidden in gas prices, insurance costs, saving for the next vehicle, parking, etc. Because of this, they have not typically figured into the home purchasing decision to the same degree.

I wanted to see how I stacked up out of curiosity. As a new homeowner, this tool is less useful to me now than it would have been a few months ago when we were looking, but it does put my home location in context. Abogo lists my block group as $830 a month in transportation costs for the average resident. We happen to keep meticulous budget records, and, from what I can tell, we’re  spending around $200 per month for transportation. This includes amortization on the vehicle, which is oldish and no-frills. We’re a family of three – pretty average on that account.  The difference probably arises out of the fact that I bike to work, and neither of us use the car every day. When we do drive – to the grocery for instance – it’s usually just a mile or so. Then there’s the occasional out of town trip.

I guess this means we have an extra $630 in our pockets each month just for some of these simple lifestyle tweaks. (Or it could mean the models are out of whack, but I've read through the methodology and it seems sound to me.)

Rational choices adding up to insane results

I really like Andy Clarkes' pithy description of one of our contemporary rituals:

"Just look at the madness we create for ourselves with the school trip: 20%-30% of morning rush-hour traffic in many metro areas consists of perfectly able-bodied kids being ferried to school by parents with better things to do with their time who won’t let their kids walk or ride their bikes to school because there are so many harried parents rushing their kids to school and the roads and sidewalks around the school aren’t safe. And frankly, many of the kids could use the exercise."

This evokes the old prisoners dilemma situation. Everyone would presumably be better off if children had a safe environment to get themselves to school, but each person is individually worse off if everyone else chooses to drive and their child is the only one stuck breathing the exhaust. Clarke is right in calling this "madness," but it's a particularly insidious form that feeds off of mostly rational individual choices. As frustrated as parents may be with this vicious cycle, especially those who hold to personal principles of environmental stewardship and healthy lifestyles, few will want their own children to be the ones breaking it. So they drive.

I try to remind myself how structural, not necessarily personal, the ethics of transportation and land use are.

Following the gas tax storyline

New buzz about the federal gas tax is in the air.

A USA Today report found that American motorists are now spending the lowest amount of money per mile to maintain infrastructure since the advent of the automobile.

"Americans spent just 46 cents on gas taxes for every $100 of income in the first quarter of 2010. That's the lowest rate since the government began keeping track in 1929. By comparison, Americans spent $1.18 in 1970 on gas taxes out of every $100 earned."

This interesting finding leads the Washington Post editorial board to connect the dots and call for an increase in the federal gas tax rate, which has not been touched since 1993. While almost every group interested in transportation policy supports some sort of levy on driving like this, it still is a tough sell with the general public. A choice comment on the editorial illustrates this well:

"Since when must citizens pay for the "privilege" of driving on OUR roads? Should I thank Obama for allowing me to drive to work today?"

Reading between the lines, I can only assume the gods of asphalt and rebar have gifted this regular American citizen with motoring freedom, and the government should just get out of the way. What he might not realize is that the Highway Trust Fund is almost bankrupt, and the tab is being picked up by general revenues (read deficit) this year - $19.5 billion, as it was last year - $7 billion, and the year before that - $8 billion. So, this gentleman need not thank Obama, but he might want to thank his grandchildren for the privilege of his drive to work.

Where the Highway Trust Fund is headed (in billions) from Congressional Budget Office.

One interesting twist on the public perception front is that new polls have shown that Americans are more receptive to a gas tax if they can be assured the revenues would go toward reducing climate change. It seems that there is a sizable segment of the population that agrees, in theory, that externalities from driving should be paid for, but worries that more funds would just set us back on the course of business-as-usual highway building. Check out the full 19% spread in approval of a simple .10 gas tax and the same gas tax with dedicated environmental goals.

Survey Results from a gas tax poll, June 2010 from Mineta Transportation Institute

To wrap this up, Brookings' Robert Puentes offers an astute reaction to the Washington Post call for higher gas taxes. He's principally concerned with this trend:

Graph compiled from FHWA Traffic Volume Trends 2000 - 2010

Vehicle miles traveled plateaued between 2006 and 2008 and we seem to be dropping off the other end of the curve. With Americans driving less and less every year (and driving more fuel-efficient vehicles when they do), pinning the bulk of infrastructure revenues onto gas taxes alone is boarding a sinking ship - while jabbing more holes in the hull all the way down.

Puentes,

"So while near-term gas tax increases are necessary on the federal and state levels just to stay afloat, we need to be thinking about a range of other options to raise transportation revenue such as pay-as-you-drive charges, tolls, congestion fees and -- most significant -- a carbon tax."

We now know more about the built environment and transportation

According to Reid Ewing and Robert Cervero, the most intensely researched topic in urban planning is "the potential to moderate travel demand by changing the built environment." Just within the last decade there have been dozens of published studies asking this question from many different angles, using different methodologies. So this dynamic academic duo has decided to do the rest of us a favor and consolidate these studies, pull out a common thread of measurement between them, and weigh the variables against each other. They did something like this in 2001 when there were 14 studies to look at. Now they've compiled results from more than 200 and included about 50 of these in their meta-analysis. I think it's fair to say this is the closest we've yet been to answering this complex question.

The study is published in the Summer 2010 Journal of the American Planning Association, and there are already a couple of nice discussions on the internet from Laurence Aurbach and Kaid Benfield. I have to say that one of the things I appreciate about the planning field is the real interaction between the academic world and practitioners. Working professionals and activists really do read this stuff, and most of the journals make every effort to eschew jargon and ask questions that have relevance.

Here are the land use variables that are traditionally considered in relation to travel behavior:

The D Variables	Summary Description
Density	Concentration of a variable of interest (population, dwelling units, activity centers etc.) per unit of area
Diversity	Number of different land uses in a given area.
Design	Quantifiable characteristics of the street network, such as density of intersections, connectivity, or streetscape features.
Destination Accessibility	Measures the ease of access to common trip destinations, usually in terms of distance
Distance to Transit	Shortest route along the street network to nearest train station or bus stop

The impact that each of these variables has on travel behavior, whether it's vehicle miles traveled or mode choice, is referred to as elasticity. It's "the percent change in the outcome variable [like vehicle miles traveled] when a specified independent variable [like density of dwelling units] increases by 1%."

There are two more D's mentioned that have little to do with the built environment. They are Demand Management and Demographics. Demand Management is mostly parking supply and pricing, but I imagine any economic factor could be considered under this category. Economic triggers factors can be considerable, especially if fuel prices are taken into account, but I understand how this is beyond the scope of what they are doing. Demographics are contolled for in all of the studies in the meta-analysis.

The following chart presents the findings in ranked order from the most significant factor to the least in achieving three outcomes. The variables are color-coded according to the categories defined above.

	Reduction in VMT	Increase in Walking	Increase in Transit Use
1	Distance to downtown	Intersection/street density	Distance to nearest transit
2	Job accessibility by auto	Distance to nearest store	% 4-way intersections
3	Intersection/street density	Jobs-housing balance	Intersection/street density
4	% 4-way Intersections	Land use mix	Land use mix
5	Land use mix	Job within one mile	Household/population density
6	Job accessibility by transit	Distance to nearest transit	Job density
7	Distance to nearest transit	Commercial floor to area ratio
8	Household/population density	Household/population density
9	Jobs-housing balance	Job density
10	Job density (no effect)	% 4-way Intersections (negative)

Some additional points ...

•  None of these variables are gamechangers, so don't be a physical determinist. Even the most significant factor, the effect of street density on walking, has .39 elasticity. This means a 10% increase in connectivity would lead to a 3.9% greater probability that someone will choose to walk. That being said, these figures are cumulative, so adding the effects together can make a notable difference. There are no solutions to anything, only means for incremental improvement.

• The findings seem to show that density itself is not as important as some make it out to be. As they put it, "almost any development in a central location is likely to generate less automobile travel than the best-designed, compact, mixed-use development in a remote location." Absolutely. Although I understand how, in the absence of coherent regional planning, an architect would want to do the best she can with the site she's given. Who knows, maybe in the future it will be the next "central location"? Still, even if it takes cleaning up a brownfield site or working delicately with the neighbors, infill seems to always be more effective.

• One of the limitations of elasticity is that it measures relative change only. You could be on the verge of a tipping point, and a tiny little nudge would lead to big outcomes, but these numbers would not tell you that. Can those tipping points be identified empirically and built into the same model?

• A big win for connectivity, which is great because this is something that can actually be done. Some cities and states are starting to write codes to ensure a robust street network in new developments. Even more important is retrofitting connections into existing networks. Hopefully these results will spur localities to look for those odd scraps of land and consider punching a street or multi-use trail through them. Although cycling was not considered in this analysis, I can attest from personal experience that street connectivity is the single most important factor for enhancing safety and convenience. Cyclists would much rather take an alternative back route than ride along a busy road with bike lanes.

How might rail shape Charlottesville?

When Amtrak introduced new rail service between Washington DC and Lynchburg last fall, they hoped to meet an annual ridership projection of 51,000. Virginia DRPT was ready to start investing in intercity passenger rail, and this was the initial pilot project. Supporters were hopeful, but the less than ideal schedule for the daily train made some nervous. 

Now, actual ridership has blown these projections out of the water. Halfway through the year, the service had already exceeded both revenue and ridership goals for the whole year. As more people become aware of the new transportation option, monthly ridership growth is set to accelerate. March was the best month yet.


This exciting news prompts me to speculate about where this trend may be leading. So I'd like to engage in a little futurism here, some hypothetical storytelling. If I turn out to be right, I can point to this timestamped post and claim prophetic powers, and if I'm wrong this all will just float off into blogging oblivion where it belongs. So here goes ...

After the three-year pilot project is complete, DRPT decides to implement another daily trip leaving Charlottesville around 8:30 in the morning, as the Piedmont Rail Coalition is now recommending. Fares can be lowered on both services, because the high ridership levels easily offset the fixed fuel and labor costs of operation. With the help of expanded federal funding in the next Transportation Reauthorization bill, rail alignments are updated throughout the corridor, allowing for increased speed and reliability. All of these improvements together kick off a virtuous cycle of substantial growth in ridership and more options.

Charlottesville is able to tap into new economic possibilities just pushed over the tipping point. AMTRAK installs Wi-Fi on all services, allowing workers to be productive during the trip back and forth. Firms from DC decide to open a smaller office in downtown Charlottesville, where they can tap into the labor market and establish a connection with the University. Some consulting firms base themselves out of Charlottesville completely.  Many employees work remotely from Charlottesville, traveling to the main offices in DC a couple times a week, and businesses like OpenSpace thrive by catering to them. Tourism grows, as urban residents in DC realize they can get away to Charlottesville for a weekend without needing a car. The Landmark hotel gets built. At the same time, stronger connections are made between the downtowns of Charlottesville and Lynchburg.

A major debate arises over what to do with the existing train station. One side says the old station on West Main is no longer large enough to meet demand for parking, and a new station needs to be built in Albemarle County north of town. This would serve as a park-and-ride for automobile commuters throughout the region. The other side insists on expanding the facilities in place. They advocate building a parking garage and greatly bolstering local transit options to grant more access to the station without a car. This goes on for many years, and in the meantime the market responds by spurring a large amount of building activity right around the station. City planners carefully zone the area to encourage attractive transit-oriented development. Before long, many people start walking to the station anyway, and AMTRAK decides to keep it in the center of town.

The Charlottesville metro area, which had started as a rail town and then became a highway town, is gradually transformed into a rail-highway hybrid town. New tracks a laid between Richmond and Staunton, allowing additional east-west connections. Motorcars are still used to access much of the existing uses outside of urban areas and concentrated corridors, but a robust regional network of transit is also built that spreads out from the core train station. Walkable hubs are grown around stations throughout the US-29 corridor up to Hollymead/Airport and Ruckersville, and westward to Crozet. All of the new compact development relieves pressure on growth in the rural areas, thus the primary political challenge shifts from stopping sprawl to maintaining adequate affordable housing in the growth areas.

The future does need to be paid for

This month's Atlantic is a special Future of the City edition with a number of thought-provoking features and essays. Before getting into the actual material, I just have to say ... it's interesting how cities have always been associated with the future, and countryside the past. We picture the gleaming skyscraper and the quaint red barn, when, in reality, today's farms are as tricked out in chemicals and high-tech machinery as a heavy pharmaceutical plant and cities are a repository for layers and layers of cultural artifacts. Still there's something about cities that stoke the imagination, and countryside a nostalgic sense of comfort. This seems appropriate to me.

Anyway,  Chris Leinberger writes a follow-up to his landmark The Next Slums? piece from 2008. As a real estate developer, he knows that the old model of building housing as quickly and cheaply as possible on the metropolitan fringe is no longer viable. On the other hand, building the kinds of walkable urban neighborhoods that are in demand (and in short supply) is difficult to do given the infrastructure and local regulatory systems currently in place. To roll with this paradigm shift, rail lines have to be built and zoning has to be reformed to open up the ensuing development potential.

His solution for doing this is simple,

"Transportation drives development, so development can and should help pay for transportation"

To me, Leinberger's argument has echos from 19th century economic reformer Henry George, only told in reverse. George noticed an injustice in the way the benefits from public improvements were distributed throughout society. Selected landowners, because they possess a natural monopoly over a particular geographical space, are able to capture much of the value of new infrastructure, parks, and other public amenities, when they have not put in the labor to produce this value. Essentially, they are just lucky or well-connected. George advocated a land value tax to redistribute the benefits back to the community, and Leinberger is saying the "landowners" should be the ones paying for the improvements in the first place.

Financing transit with private capital will certainly be complicated. In the days when a streetcar line could be extended out into fresh greenfields, it made sense of the fields owner to foot the bill for the transportation in order to bring people to his land. But retrofitting a rail system on top of existing development requires a much more complex financial calculation and enough buy-in from numerous property owners, some of whom are more interested in redeveloping than others.

Still there's lots of smart people thinking about this financing strategy. Here's a 2008 report from Reconnecting America, Capturing the Value of Transit. Another from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in 2009, The Value Capture Approach To Stimulating Transit Oriented Development And Financing Transit Station Area Improvements. Finally, a 2009 report to the Minnesota Legislature from a group including David Levinson, Value Capture for Transportation Finance.

LaHood announces a "sea change" at the DOT

DOT Secretary Ray LaHood stood on top of a table to address the National Bicycle Summit last week, but he waited until a few days later to reveal on his blog a new federal approach in transportation priorities:

"Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians. And we are encouraging investments that go beyond the minimum requirements and provide facilities for bicyclists and pedestrians of all ages and abilities."

League of American Bicyclists says,

"It is simply the strongest statement of support for prioritizing bicycling and walking ever to come from a sitting secretary of transportation."

I imagine that LaHood enjoyed a little reprieve from press conferences on spontaneously accelerating vehicles. This announcement comes a few days after new numbers were released showing another drop in highway traffic fatalities for 2009, partially attributed to Americans' decisions to drive less. Transitions seem to be happening on a number of levels.

The new policy is available on the FHWA website, and they encourage state and local agencies to adopt a similar statement.

Google adds bicycle directions to maps

Cycling blogs are all over this already, but Google has released a "Grab Your Bike and Go" feature to give cycling directions for all maps. Google's Shannon Guymon is the opening plenary speaker at the National Bike Summit and she's expected to announce the new feature this morning and give a demonstration.

Screenshot: from Jefferson's Rotunda to the Charlottesville Downtown Mall in 8 minutes

The feature

• Identifies cycling facilities (for now in "hundreds of US cities")
• Shows which routes are considered safer than others, including paths that have limited or no driving
  
• Uses elevation grades to estimate times and recommend routes

It shouldn't be too long before many localities and non-profit organizations are able to feed their information to Google. Unlike transit routes, there's nothing proprietary about safety recommendations. Right now Google lists the Charlottesville pedestrian mall as a recommended route, although its actually prohibited to cyclists. Google accepts feedback on all of these recommendations, so we can all take part in building the most accurate and useful mapping tool.

This addition from Google coincides nicely with U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) introduction of H.R. 4722, the Active Community Transportation Act of 2010 in the U.S. House of Representatives last week.

Pedestrian Survival Techniques

For the last few months, I've left my bike at home and made my way throughout town mostly on my own two feet. During this time, I've observed a clever strategy, used by countless walkers, for crossing two or three-lane streets. It's especially common among the regulars - the truckers of the pedestrian world - who have optimized their safety and efficiency by repeating the same trip over and over again. It's quite possibly the perfectly rational cross.

The way it works is simple: As you're walking toward your destination, you remain constantly aware of the vehicular traffic coming from either direction. Once a clear break appears, you cross at that moment. There's no wait time, because you continue walking while you watch for the opening. It's highly safe, or at least you have maximum control over your own safety. Before "jaywalking" was stigmatized and banned through a campaign by automobile lobbyists, this was a perfectly acceptable way to approach a typical dilemma.

Walkers are now supposed to wait until they reach the intersection before crossing, but for obvious reasons they do not want to do this.

1. Vehicles could be approaching from a number of directions and its impossible to simultaneously monitor all of these possibilities.
   
2. Turning lanes increase the total distance that must be crossed.
3. Stoplights encourage a certain number of drivers to speed to try and beat the red light. The severity of a hit would be much higher.

The only three times I felt my safety compromised over this period was while legally crossing. On one occasion, watching the walk signal I almost stepped out in front of a truck careening through the red light. On two other occasions, right-turning cars were not paying attention to the crosswalk and had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting me. None of these were near-death experiences, but they underscore the tension pedestrians feel between trusting in official protection and using their own safety intuition.

When walkers must cross at intersections, pedestrian buttons can make things more problematic. In Charlottesville and many other towns, a walk signal will not be displayed unless the button is pressed. This means that if you push the button one second after your cycle begins, you will need to wait for another entire cycle before your signal is given. Research shows that only half of pedestrians press buttons at all, and most folks who do press will not wait unnecessarily. They attempt to cross anyway, only deprived of information about how much time remains in the cycle. Unless the button is "hot" and adjusts signal timing or activates lighting, there's no reason to have it at all.

Pedestrians should be empowered by engineering solutions to follow their own safety intuitions. They have a huge incentive to protect their life, and the truly reckless (or inebriated) will ignore signals or legalities anyway. FHWA sponsored major studies of various pedestrian safety devices in high-crash intersections and last year released a treasure trove of information about what techniques proved effective. In many cases, focusing on modifying driving yield behavior and speeds was more effective than attempting to herd pedestrians.

Engineering is incredibly important, but the best engineers will tell you that they offer sets of trade-offs not absolute solutions. The relative values between pedestrians' right to life, motorists' right to convenience, and costs of implementation cannot be calculated but must be provided subjectively by the ones who make the final decision. Hopefully in a democracy, that's you and me.

From a mobility to an accessibility orientation

Over at the Planetizen Interchange blog, a fascinating debate has been brewing over the fundamental purpose of transportation. Todd Litman, Sam Staley, Michael Lewyn and a handful of commenters are involved. When debating transportation, we often jump right to the question of automobile vs. transit, but the more interesting dividing line lies beneath whatever technological tool we prefer. The tool of choice will arise inevitably out of what we intend to do with the system.

A mobility-oriented analysis, the conventional approach taken by transportation planners throughout the 20th century, is represented by Sam Staley. In his aptly titled book Mobility First, he defines this simply as:

"The ability to travel where you want when you want"

Working toward higher levels of mobility, for Staley, is a necessary condition for economic development and the maintenance of a high quality of life for Americans. This requires a combination of building sufficient capacity to meet travel demand and the efficient use of the capacity. For capacity, Staley calls for an aggressive government road-building regime, with thousands of miles of tunnels and multi-level expressways. For efficiency, he proposes a pricing system based on peak usage and levels of congestion.

In a mobility-oriented analysis, success is measured in terms of vehicle miles traveled - the more movement, the better. This position naturally leads Staley to hold the private automobile up as the ultimate mode of travel:

"Cars provide the automobility people want, fusing speed, flexibility, and adaptability into one travel technology. In a service-based economy faced with global competition, cars provide the most efficient, effective, and productive transportation alternative."

An accessibility-oriented analysis shifts the primary goal up one level. Instead of simply attempting to maximize the total amount of movement, this approach places primacy on the ability to reach a chosen destination. Todd Litman represented this side of the debate, and he has covered it more thoroughly here. His definition of accessibility:

"The ease of reaching goods, services, activities and destinations (together called opportunities). It can be defined as the potential for interaction and exchange."

It's a subtle difference with major implications. I've assembled a simplified flow chart to represent what I take to be the essential contours of an accessibility approach:
(In reality, there are overlaps and feedback loops between these categories. This just shows a hierarchy of goals.)

In this approach, mobility is not an end itself but a means to the end of improving access to destinations. Granted there are a few exceptions, such as joyriding, walking the dog around the block and other recreational activities, but, for the most part, users of the transportation system are concerned with reaching their destination. This interaction is also what truly drives economic and social health. Mobility no longer holds the trump card in an accessibility paradigm, but it must compete with land use arrangements and other alternatives to movement in a cost-benefit analysis. Litman again:

"Just as automobiles are machines that provide mobility, urban environments - villages, towns and cities - can be thought of as machines that provide accessibility by minimizing the distance among people and their desired goods, service and activities (shops, schools, jobs, neighbors, etc.)."

When mobility was considered the only game in town, the costs, however large, had to be shrugged off as a necessary evil. On top of all of the money poured into car-based infrastructure already, Staley claims "we probably need to spend at least a trillion dollars more on transportation over the next decade than we expect in revenues if we want to keep up with growth in travel and goods movement." (my italics). This is a significant chunk of the U.S. GDP, and it doesn't even count the costs of manufacturing and fueling the vehicles. He would like to slowly shift this immense burden from government to private citizens, which will surely add to the growing expense American households are already pouring into transportation.

Of course, there are the environmental costs, social equity costs and the costs in human lives. Roadway fatalities per capita have remained remarkably steady since 1960, even as medical care and general quality of life have improved significantly. Even in the most efficient system, there are the costs in the time it takes to move over longer distances. All of this needs to be figured into the equation.

There are immense benefits to mobility too, in all of its forms. None of this suggests that we can grind the world to a halt and still maintain the economic vitality we enjoy. It, however, does suggest a more holistic strategy - a full toolbox to respond to a broader challenge.

Cities weighing electric vehicles carefully

Many cities have been looking carefully at introducing electric cars lately. The cars may be private, but they do exert some unique pressures on public infrastructure. Seattle and others have been investing in a set of charging stations with enough voltage to power the cars. Paris set up an electric car sharing system, and London is thinking of following. Today, New York City released a report on how electric cars may be adopted there and how to meet their needs.

Charging station outside of Portland. Flickr: Todd Mecklem

Much of the discussion about electric vehicles centers around energy usage, yet the efficiency question is a tricky one. Ultimately, moving an object of X mass through space at Y velocity will always take Z energy. Strictly speaking, electric cars are not a means of energy conservation but of energy centralization. It's a switch from many fuel-based combustion engines to a few power plants, based on a mix coal and alternative sources depending on the region. Right now in most places in the U.S., concentrating the pollution into smokestacks is typically more efficient than distributing it to tailpipes, even when accounting for the transaction costs, but this is hardly a foregone conclusion.

The picture of an electric car that you probably have in your mind is that of a small vehicle, a "city car," but there is no intrinsic connection between size and energy source. Electric cars can be as large as combustion engine vehicles, and as technology improves the market will likely push electric models toward size equilibrium with other cars.

According to architect Christopher Alexander:

"The fact that cars are large is, in the end, the most serious aspect of a transportation system based on the use of cars, since it is inherent to the very nature of cars."

Size is important because larger cars hurt more when they hit you, fill more roadway and parking capacity, and generally spread things out. It is incorrect to assume that support for electric cars will necessarily lead to smaller or slower vehicles.

But Noah Kazis of Streetsblog gets straight to the most important consideration:

“As a sustainability initiative, the merit of the proposal depends on whether trips in these new electric cars will replace trips powered by internal combustion or trips by foot, bicycle, and transit.”

It seems that the easiest way get around the dilemma is to place any incentives for electric cars on the production side rather than the consumption side. The stronger vehicle emissions standards announced by Obama last May will inevitably encourage more electric and hybrid production. Likewise, the $2.4 billion of federal support for EV battery research from the Department of Energy can help producers improve performance and efficiency of their vehicles. On the other hand, consumer incentives such as this year’s $7,500 per vehicle tax credit is a less effective approach. This goes for the myriad of state and local tax credits as well. Producer incentives make cars that would have been built anyway better; consumer incentives may actually lead to a net increase in the total number of cars on the roadways.

The New York study opted to pass on the more expensive subsidies in favor of education and some recognition of early adopters. This makes sense. A change that might to a little bit of good probably deserves some quiet cheerleading.

Toyota's vision "beyond cars"

This month's Atlantic has some fine articles, including one about the Orange County Walmart I posted on a few months ago, but I'd like to bring up the advertisement on the back cover: "Toyota, We See Beyond Cars."

From Toyota, Beyond Cars

This is part of an ongoing campaign Toyota has initiated with television commercials, print ads, and a user-created web site, all geared toward imagining a world "beyond cars." I have to say this entire concept is intriguing. It reminds me of those Abercrombie and Fitch billboards filled with attractive, half-naked young people. Why would seeing a guy without a shirt on make me want to buy a shirt? You'd think I would want less clothing. But I'm sure some high-level marketing executives have a good answer to that question.

Toyota is using the same strategy here. The town depicted in this ad is probably as close as it gets to the idyllic American small town, the kind of place survey respondents have in mind when they constantly mark "small town" as an ideal living preference. There is a sharp boundary between the town and countryside, with three-story buildings running directly up to open forests and plains. The scale is small enough to be easily walkable, allowing each of the residents to have access to all town services as well as natural amenities on foot. The development is nestled right up to the hills with no mountaintop private estates (overlooking their fiefdom), and lush street trees blanket the town. All of this is symbolically envisioned through the lack of a Toyota Highlander smack in the middle of picture. Interesting.

Incidentally, I'm not sure where this picture is taken. The ad mentions Princeton, Indiana, where a Toyota factory is located (3 miles outside of), but the topography in the picture does not match Princeton. I would guess somewhere in Vermont or New Hampshire.

Here's a television commercial in the same campaign:



It also portrays the conspicuous absence of a vehicle set in an attractive American place. This downtown, like the previous place, was undoubtedly built during a time when "Ford" was what you did when you reached a river and didn't have a boat. Toyota would have been completely foreign to you. These kinds of places have slowly been withered away by businesses and homes that require ample parking ... in other words, in part at least, by Toyota. Yet Toyota knows its audience still wants this to be the kind of America we live in.

It's hard to tell what Toyota is doing with this. Are they signaling a wish, or at least an openness, to move beyond manufacturing cars to other forms of transportation? Or do they realize that most of us have no choice but to own a car, and they want to position themselves as the least-like-a-car car company on the market? The Mrs. and I do happen to own a Corolla, and until Toyota's vision of a nation beyond cars comes into being, we'll probably replace this one with another Corolla once we've driven it into the ground..

The Detroit transportation industry

flickr credit (via infrastructurist)

Amidst all of the media hype and congressional soundbites surrounding the Detroit Auto Show, Robert Reich, a regular commenter on NPR's Marketplace, drops a heavy dose of reality:

"The world auto industry -- including GM, Ford, and Chrysler -- will have to rationalize, consolidate, reduce capacity. Bailing out GM and Chrysler, bailing out GM's finance division, giving cash for clunkers, hoping the American auto industry will bounce back, throwing another big auto show in Detroit. All this is irrelevant to the real challenge.

And that challenge is getting new, good-paying jobs for all the auto and auto-parts workers who will continue to be laid off, even when the U.S. economy is fully recovered. And helping Detroit and other auto communities create new industries that move people from place to place at minimum cost, with minimum carbon.

This is what the Detroit Auto Show ought to be about. Not more cars."

And if current market conditions are not enough to compel the Detroit transportation industry to diversify its portfolio, today's announcement by Ray Lahood about new criteria for federal transit funding may strengthen the case. Insiders are hailing this as a big shift in federal priorities. Cost effectiveness for transit projects will no longer be determined only on the basis of speed, but other "livability" factors will be considered as well - spurring development, limiting congestion, reducing carbon output, and in Lahood's words "how it makes our communities better places to live." If we're going to be buying more streetcars and rail equipment, it would be nice if Americans could make it.

The Infrastructurist has been beating the drum for a revived American train industry for a little while now, with an interview with Michael Dukakis, an interesting series on global train manufacturers, and an announcement from Michigan's governor over the summer.

Where is the front door?

Albemarle County Office Building, formerly Lane High School. flickr credit

If you were to approach this building for the first time, where would you suppose the entrance is? If you guessed the large, prominent doors at the center of the axis of symmetry for both the building and formal gardens in front, you'd be wrong. Those doors are locked. The only public entrance is from the parking lot in the back.

At some point a decision was made to convert the Albemarle County office building from a pedestrian-serving building to a motorist-serving building. Given the changing context over the last century, one can hardly blame them. The adjacent roads have been widened, and the entire neighborhood to the south was destroyed in the 70's and replaced mostly with parking lots. The highly attractive facade of this building is an historic accident reminding passersby of a different kind of city.

Architects I've spoken with describe the front door problem as one of the most challenging design dilemmas they face. Most commercial and civic establishments can only have one public entrance, whether for security reasons or quality control (one information desk, for example). Automobiles, by virtue of their size, require an amount of space that deters pedestrians from passing through. This forces a stark either/or dichotomy over transportation systems: cars or people, but not both. The new design of another Albemarle County building, the Crozet library, was recently

flickr credit

approved with a parking lot main entrance. Some elected officials were frustrated with this decision, considering the placement of the building was intended to enliven the town center of Crozet. But it was eventually conceded that, at least in the short term, most visitors would arrive by car.

Even studied attempts at a balance between cars and people have reverted to the dominant system in time. The well-known planned suburb of Radburn, New Jersey had each home designed with two faces, one facing the cul-de-sac and the other facing a network of walking paths. In time, residents have mostly closed up the walking entrance in favor of the driving entrance.

I know that bloggers are supposed to have an answer for everything, but I don't for this one. There's only so much influence a single building can have on the travel patterns of its users, so form should follow function. Yet the face of a building does convey a powerful symbolic gesture to the public realm, especially when you consider them all together. Are there any creative ways to address this that have worked well?