Smart growth and sustainable transportation: can we get there from here?

• Author: Pollard, Oliver A., III

INTRODUCTION

As the U.S. Supreme Court has observed, "[D]riving an automobile [is] a virtual necessity for most Americans." (1) Transportation and land use laws and policies have played a primary role in creating this dependence on motor vehicles; they have spurred scattered suburban development and promoted driving. At the same time these laws and policies have made other transportation options--such as public transit, bicycling, and walking--less practical, desirable, and safe. (2) As a result, driving is often a necessity rather than a choice.

The dominant transportation and development approaches of the past fifty years have offered significant benefits, including job creation, economic growth, and increased mobility. However, the adverse consequences of these approaches are substantial. These consequences include severe air and water pollution; accelerating land consumption; worsening traffic congestion; record expenditures of public funds for road projects and far-flung development; isolation of senior citizens and others who cannot drive; lack of access to jobs for low income individuals; deteriorating older suburban and urban areas; and threats to national security due to dependence on imported oil. (3)

New paradigms are emerging to address these shortcomings. Changes to transportation policies have begun to move to a more sustainable (4) approach that reduces subsidies for driving, offers a broader range of transportation choices, and addresses the links between transportation, land use development, environmental quality, and community livability. (5) In addition, a flurry of state and local initiatives have begun to provide alternatives to scattered development and excessive motor vehicle use. (6) These initiatives, often lumped together under the label "smart growth," (7) vary widely. (8) They include efforts to develop a more balanced transportation system; revitalize existing communities; preserve open space and farmland; and promote development that offers a variety of land uses in close proximity and that can support public transit, bicycling, and walking. Public opinion polls and ballot box returns indicate strong public support for these steps. (9)

Smart growth is not anti-growth, and sustainable transportation is not necessarily anti-automobile. Rather, these paradigms seek to reduce the adverse impacts of current land use and transportation patterns and practices, while preserving their benefits. Central to these efforts is a focus on reorienting current public policies that promote costly and destructive transportation and land use development patterns towards more economically efficient, equitable, and environmentally sound outcomes that strengthen communities and enhance the quality of life.

Sustainable transportation and smart growth are linked. Smarter growth patterns will be difficult to achieve without more sustainable transportation approaches; significant transportation improvements will be difficult to achieve without more sensible development practices.

The first Part of this Article provides an overview of current transportation policies, as well as their inconsistency with the smart growth approach. Part II examines steps that can be taken to create a more efficient and less destructive transportation system, as well as some of the hurdles to transportation reform. Part III concludes the Article by considering recent events in Atlanta--the country's most sprawling metropolitan area--that highlight both opportunities and hurdles for smart growth and sustainable transportation.

1. HOW DID WE GET HERE? ROADS, DRIVING, AND SPRAWL

   Rapidly rising motor vehicle use and exploding suburban development have transformed the United States since World War II. (10) These trends are integrally linked and mutually reinforcing: building more roads leads to more sprawl; more sprawl leads to more driving. (11)

   1. Public Policies Promoting Motor Vehicle Use

      Current transportation and development patterns are the result of many factors. (12) They are not, however, solely the result of individual preferences and market forces. (13) Smart growth recognizes that public investments, regulatory policies, and tax policies shape the pace, scale, and location of development. (14) Public policies also influence the mode, frequency, and distance of travel.

      Federal, state, and local transportation policies have fueled auto-dependence and sprawl. For decades, these policies focused on building new roads to serve motor vehicles. (15) Highway building was a major state and local expense by the 1920s. The defining transportation policy of the past century, however, was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. (16) This act launched an unprecedented effort to construct a 41,000-mile interstate highway system. (17) As a recent survey of urban specialists concluded, "More than any other single measure, the 1956 act created the decentralized, automobile dependent metropolis we know today." (18) The federal government paid 90% of construction costs, states paid 10%, and localities paid nothing. During this period of unprecedented road-building, public transit received comparatively meager federal funding. This further skewed transportation decision making in favor of highway construction. Even today, federal spending on roads is almost five times as large as transit spending, and the disparity is often far greater at the state level. (19)

      Highway funding is not the only public policy that influences travel behavior. Federal, state, and local government subsidies that encourage automobile use total hundreds of billions of dollars a year, including spending on maintaining roads, traffic control, and law and parking enforcement. (20) These subsidies make it cheaper for people to live further from where they work, shop, and engage in other activities, which spurs development on the fringes of existing communities and necessitates increased driving distances and frequency. In addition, subsidies for new roads have served as can openers to the countryside, opening previously inaccessible areas to development. As two conservative analysts concluded, the current dominance of motor vehicles as a transportation mode "reflects massive and sustained government intervention on behalf of automobiles." (21)

      Governmental regulatory policies also encourage auto-dependence and suburban sprawl. For example, local governments often adopt minimum parking requirements that mandate substantial free parking, encouraging people to drive more and further. (22) By making driving cheaper and more convenient, these policies also discourage the use of other transportation modes. Parking policies also influence travel choices by making stores and office buildings less accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists. Increased distances between buildings, huge expanses of asphalt, and an increased likelihood of injury from motor vehicles make walking and bicycling less attractive.

      Another type of regulatory policy that shapes transportation and land use are street design standards. These standards often focus exclusively on increasing the flow of automobile traffic, and mandate the construction of unnecessarily wide roads with high speed limits. (23) Such standards increase noise and pollution, reduce pedestrian safety, and harm neighborhood attractiveness. (24) They encourage people to drive by making alternative transportation modes less practical and safe, and they also contribute to accelerating land consumption.

      Land use policies also shape travel behavior. Local zoning ordinances typically require land uses to be segregated, preventing homes from being located near offices, stores, or schools. (25) Designed to prevent incompatible land uses from adversely affecting one another, single-use zoning effectively dictates sprawling development patterns, requiring people to drive virtually everywhere for everything. (26) Substantial evidence suggests that residents of sprawling areas make more vehicle trips and drive longer distances than people living in more compact areas, and that they also use mass transit less and walk less. (27) As Robert Cervero has noted, "sprawl creates near total dependence on the private car." (28)

   2. Consequences and Limitations of Current Approaches

      Transportation policies centered on road-building and motor vehicle use have produced phenomenal mobility. Americans drove over 2.6 trillion miles on highways in 1998, double the rate in 1975. (29) This is an average of over 7.2 billion miles each day, the equivalent of eighty trips to the sun. The growing rate of automobile use has outpaced increases in population and the number of drivers. Between 1980 and 1997, the number of miles driven increased by sixty-three percent--over three times the rate of the population increase during that time. (30) The average trip length and the number of vehicle trips per person have risen, as has the amount of single occupancy motor vehicle use. (31)

      There is increasing evidence of the limitations of a road-centered transportation approach. Mobility has begun to decline in many areas, as traffic congestion has worsened. A study of sixty-eight U.S. metropolitan areas found that in 1999 drivers wasted approximately 4.5 billion hours stuck in traffic. (32) The average number of hours of delay per person per year more than tripled between 1982 and 1999, rising from eleven to thirty-six hours. (33) A recent report by the U.S. Department of Transportation acknowledged that despite record levels of funding, it is not possible to "build enough lanes or roads" to address congestion. (34)

      New and wider highways can generate significant new traffic without providing long-term congestion relief. Although new and expanded roads may temporarily alleviate congestion, they can rapidly fill up as commuters change their routes, time of travel, and mode of travel to take advantage of the new capacity. (35) New road capacity also spurs further development...