Don Cayo: In my opinion
Paradox: Planners concentrate on mobility, but access to places you need to be is the real test
You’d think more and cheaper- to- use roads would mean enhanced productivity, but a new study suggests you’d be wrong.
More roads or cheaper-to-use roads — ones without tolls, for example — lead to less productivity, not more, a recent study concludes.
If you think this sounds paradoxical, so does the study’s author, Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Institute. But he also offers several reasons why it’s so.
For one thing, decisions to build roads or subsidize them by not charging users tends to come at the expense of other access options — things like densification so people need not travel so far, or transit that provides more bang for the buck.
These kinds of decisions are often based on politics, thus defying efficient market principles and undermining productivity.
As well, car travel is expensive. This means it increases costs borne by industry, and also sucks a lot of money from household budgets. Much of this money goes to car manufacturers outside the region or the country.
Litman concedes motor vehicle travel is economically important.
“It delivers raw materials to producers, goods to markets, employees to work, students to schools, and customers to markets. All else being equal, an increase in transport system efficiency should increase productivity.”
But cars and trucks aren’t the only aspects of transport systems, only the most visible and costly.
And, “a significant portion of vehicle travel is economically inefficient: vehicle travel that consumers would forgo if they had better options and more efficient pricing. ... In such circumstances, policies that reduce vehicle travel can increase productivity and support economic development.”
Conventional planners focus on things like average travel speeds and delays, he notes. But mobility isn’t the real need — access is, and it is affected by things like the quality of other transportation modes, connectivity between modes and accessibility based on factors like density and land- use mix.
“Planning decisions often involve trade- offs between these,” he says. “For example, expanding urban roadways tends to improve automobile access, but creates a barrier that reduces pedestrian and bicycle access, and therefore public transit access since most transit trips include walking and cycling links.
“Similarly, urban fringe locations that are easy to access by automobile tend to be difficult to access by other modes. As a result, the benefits of increased mobility are often partly offset by declines in other forms of access, reducing net efficiency gains. ” To add to the paradoxes, he cites research demonstrating that:
• People in compact neighbourhoods experience less congestion than those in sprawling suburban ones.
• Increasing density increases the number of services and jobs available within 10 minutes travel time about 10 times more than proportional changes in traffic speed.
• Roadway expansions that stimulate sprawl increase travel times.
• U. S. cities with the most congestion have the best vehicle access “because their lower traffic speeds are more than offset by higher employment densities which reduce commute distances.”
The nutshell conclusion is that future transportation investments should be tested against two principles — that the net result is a choice for consumers, and that it’s priced efficiently “so society does not spend $ 2 on a good ( such as roads and parking facilities) that users only value at $ 1.”
It’s interesting to speculate how these considerations would have played out in some recent road- related decisions in Metro Vancouver — the Golden Ears Bridge, which apparently many people value less than its costs, and the Port Mann Bridge, which may or may not just foster sprawl.
But it’s even more interesting to contemplate how it could affect future decisions — and not just when it comes to road building.
Litman pointed out in an interview that his research has major consequences for issues such as urban infill housing versus breaking new ground in the suburbs.
When you just count cars — or just listen to city residents going on about traffic concerns, as they are in my neighbourhood where a 22- storey rental building is nearing completion — infill doesn’t look so good.
Especially when you consider that up to a quarter of the cost of a new building can be for underground parking.
“But when you look at what really matters, at the access that people have to the things they need, it makes much more sense,” he said.
The good news from his research, he said, is that neighbourhood debates, which usually focus on conflicting short- term priorities, need not be zero- sum. Solutions can be found that result over time in stronger, betteroff communities.