4 Facts (Excerpted from Transportation For Livable Cities, by Vukan Vuchic)

 

·Friday, September 1, 2017 

·Reading time: 3 minutes

 

(Excerpted from Transportation For Livable Cities, by Vukan Vuchic)

 

Several basic facts concerning the importance of urbanized areas, and the role transportation plays in their vitality or in their problems are outlined here.

Fact 1

In developed, industrialized countries, metropolitan areas house more than two-thirds of the population. Thus, urban problems - be they economic, environmental, safety, welfare, social, or cultural - affect a vast majority of each country’s population, either directly or indirectly. Healthy metropolitan areas are therefore clearly of great importance for the country’s vitality, prosperity, and economic competitiveness. The excessive separation of different economic and ethnic groups of the population, between central cities and suburbs, or among different areas, represents an obstacle to solving economic and social problems. The present transportation system contributes to the problem in two ways.

First, car travel fosters the spatial separation of activities and the segregation of residential areas.

High-quality public transportation usually contributes to mixed land uses, stimulating the creation of major activity centers and more diversified residential developments (apartment buildings, town houses, and single-family units). The strong bias toward cars over all other modes leads to separated rather than diversified, integrated land uses (Weyrich and Lind 1996).

Second, the present gross underpricing and ubiquitous subsidies of car travel, found in the United States far more than in its peer countries, leads to its overuse. Cheap mobility leads to the trade-off of longer travel for land values. It is often less expensive for individuals to abandon buildings and entire areas in central cities and move to remote locations than to renovate old infrastructure. This is one of the main reasons for the existence of extensive areas with skeletons of abandoned factories and houses in most U.S. metropolitan areas. Further, the people who remain in these areas have a greatly diminished chance of finding employment and maintaining a reasonable quality of life. The downward spiral of social and economic decline is thus accelerated.

Fact 2

Certain activities - such as some industries, recreation, and housing for a large portion of the population - are performed more efficiently or preferably in low-density settings. Others - for example, many governmental functions, services, consulting, banking, and educational activities - are optimally performed in high-density areas. Various social and cultural activities - such as concerts, conventions, sports events, and parades - also require high concentrations. To permit easy functioning of all these diverse activities, the urban transportation system must be capable of serving efficiently a variety of densities and travel volumes. Only a multimodal system, consisting of private and public transportation modes, is capable of meeting this need.

Fact 3

The increasing car dependence is not sustainable. If the present trends in urbanized areas are allowed to continue and worsen, the United States will increasingly suffer from the lack of diverse densities and of efficient activity centers - the strong economies of agglomeration that cities inherently provide. This places the U.S. metropolitan areas, and the entire country, in a very unfavorable situation vis-á-vis its peer countries.

Fact 4

Regardless of the degree of car ownership, there will always be a significant segment of the population who cannot use a private car. It is an advantage of urbanized areas that they can offer high-quality public transportation and many developments based on walking access. These prevent the creation of second-class citizens - those not owning cars and those who cannot or do not want to drive.

In conclusion, metropolitan areas are centers of every country’s activities, of its economy, social life, and residential living. Their prosperity depends greatly on healthy central cities, and their form and vitality are closely tied with the type of transportation system; that is, they depend on the composition of the utilized modes.