Transport Link

International Study Yields Clues for Controlling Sprawl

A comparison of transportation systems in the metropolitan areas of the world’s financial capitols, London, Paris, New York and Tokyo, found that while all of the urban areas are spreading outward from their historical and economic cores, there are striking differences in their patterns of development and the transport consequences.   The principal determinant of travel demand and mode in the four cities is the extent to which housing and employment are clustered around transit.

It appears that the more that daily trip needs can be met by walking, the more likely that longer trips will be made by transit than by auto. The land use configurations of each region are as much the product of institutional and economic forces as of each city’s history and culture.  Metropolitan areas in the United States face fundamental economic incentives to sprawl.

The Four World Cities Transport Study was authored by four research organizations: the London Research Centre in London; the official Paris regional planning agency; IAURIF; the Tokyo Institute of Metropolitan Research, and the Institute of Public Administration with the firm of Konheim & Ketcham as its consultants.

Zonal Structure of Urban Regions

For the purposes of the study, each of the four cities have been divided into zones of comparable character:  the cultural and financial centers; the remainder of the traditional city served by metro systems; the older suburbs served by regional rail; and the outermost zones of post-World War II development. The New York region comprises the 31 counties in the tri-state area surrounding the Manhattan Central Business District.  In actuality, the area of  the Paris and Tokyo regions are roughly only two-thirds the size of the New York and London regions.  Paris has grouped the second and third zones, described above, into Zone 2, resulting in three zones, rather than the four used to characterize the other three cities. By breaking these areas within regions, we have ensured the transport link is comparable to each area.

Clustering Development Has More Effect than Overall Density on Mode Choice

The powerful effect of land use patterns that make people’s destinations accessible by foot is evident in a comparison of trips in two zones of similar overall density, but very different development configurations.  New York’s suburban commuter shed (1,200 persons/km2) is similar in overall density to Tokyo’s outermost zone (1,750 persons/km2).  However,  the number of motorized trips per person per day in Tokyo’s exurbs are less than a third those in New York’s suburbs and there are more than three times more walking trips per capita in Tokyo’s outer zone than in New York suburbs.

Development is dispersed in New York suburbs with segregated uses.  It is clustered, with mixed uses in Tokyo.  By designating development sites around interconnected rail lines, Tokyo has resettled the equivalent of the entire population of the New York region in its outermost exurbs, in communities where 32% of the local trips are by transit, in contrast to less than 1% by transit in New York’s outer zone.

The importance of clustered development can also be seen in the trips that remain in the outer zones of New York and Paris, which have relatively similar overall population density and number of rail stations, but completely contrasting land use patterns. For the trips that are not headed to the city center, Paris has achieved 10% lower auto use and 10 times more transit use by designing new towns and maintaining villages where residents can walk to shops and transit.

The urban clusters that make a car unnecessary at either end or the trip make light rail or bus linkages economically viable.  As a result, Parisians can criss-cross their region in an hour on high-tech trains through a landscape that remains 82 percent farmland and forests, and connect by orbital light rail or bus to bona fide towns within definite boundaries.

The transit benefits of clustering housing around transit lines and high job density at the core can be seen in the New York region as well.  In the urban neighborhoods of New York, city residents own fewer cars, use them less and use transit more, and make fewer motorized journeys (i.e., more walk trips) than their counterparts in London and Paris.

Walkable cities are the key to intercity rail service as well.  Without multiple destinations that are easily accessible from rail stations, there’s no incentive to take a train.  Although London has maintained rail-oriented towns in its outer zones, the efficiency of its regional rail system demonstrates that building rail lines that penetrate the hinterland can draw people out of the city.

Unless the migration is into clusters of mixed development, rail lines can have the same effect as highways in enticing people out of cities into places where auto use proliferates.  With the arrival of hundreds of large shopping malls that are undermining shopping in traditional market towns, London is catching up to New York in auto travel in its outer zones.  Table 1 shows auto ownership in London and Paris suburbs approaching New York’s.

Effectiveness of Land Use Planning in the Four Cities

The distinctive difference between the three cities and New York is the influence of strategic land use planning.  Land use decisions are essentially made by 780 municipalities in the 31 counties of the New York metro area.  In contrast, very specific, comprehensive land use plans have guided development over the last 30 years in the regions of Paris and Tokyo, and land use/transport planning, albeit by localities rather than on a regional basis, is now taking off with a special fervor in London.  The plans appear to survive shifts in political power, due, at least partly, to the broad based consensus building inherent in the highly visible planning processes in Paris and Tokyo.

Both regions produce explicit explanatory documents for community input, 1,281 communes in Paris and neighborhood groups in Tokyo.  The current equivalent in London is extensive Internet-based planning that can be accessed via http://web.archive.org/web/20060615091752/http://www.detr.uk.gov/.

Long range land use/transport plans in Paris and Tokyo are adopted only after extensive public consultation. Clearly, there had to be a lot of business leader buy-in for Parisian employers to agree to subsidize the transit fare with a 2.4% payroll tax plus pay half their worker’s farecards.  A similar consensus had to be built in Tokyo that employers pay all costs of commutation, including tolls on virtually all roads of approximately 60 cents/mile.   The resulting broad base of support for clearly identified directions, enshrined in interagency contracts, then enables private sector developers to invest with confidence that the adopted plans will survive election swings.  General public support is cultivated by providing abundant parks and good urban schools.

The overhaul of the governance of transport and land use that is occurring in the United Kingdom is aimed at holding vehicle miles of travel in 2010 to 1998 levels to meet global warming and other environmental obligations.  The specificity of the plans and the intended generation of revenues from transport pricing are geared toward relying on the private sector for financing all elements of the transport system.  The importance of reliability of long-range public plans in attracting private funds is evident in Tokyo, where designated new towns are built by the same private companies that build and operate the regional rail lines.

A Transport Green Paper developed in 1998 by the integrated British Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions and a broad advisory group lays out a vision of  reducing vehicle mileage and enhancing town centers by rigorously challenging applications for all out-of-center retail larger than 20,000 square feet, building 60% of new homes in brownfield sites, and instituting pricing policies, including a 6% per year increase in gasoline prices, to internalize the full costs of driving. Traffic reduction strategies encourage reallocating road space from autos to buses, bikes and sidewalks, and streetscapes to promote walking.  The revenues from locally designed and administered road and parking pricing programs would be the first in Britain to be earmarked for a specific purpose, in this case, reinvestment to further locally adopted transport plans.  The how-tos for municipalities are found on the agency’s web site in a string of Policy Planning Guidance documents.   In submitting their plans for start-up funds, localities are to demonstrate progress toward forming Regional Development Associations.

On the other hand, if land use/transport plans are essentially broad policy statements, as they tend to be in the U.S., rather than designating very specific locations for activities, there’s little to capture public imagination–and few benchmarks against which to evaluate development proposals.  The Regional Transport Plans that are emerging from the Metropolitan Planning Organizations in the 31-county New York region say the right things, but they are not specific enough, nor widely understood, to constitute the kind of public commitment that encourages the private sector to take on significant development risk.  And private investment, financed by user fees, represents the remaining large untapped revenue source for transport in the New York region.

A common feature of land use/transport strategies in the overseas cities is to counteract the outward development pressures by concerted efforts to shift growth from the outer to the inner zones, particularly to regional rail hubs in the ring around the core.  Each city has created a critical mass of attractive housing, along with shops, schools, parks and offices at transit nodes, both to bring jobs to where they are most needed and to appeal to suburban families and employers to relocate or to expand close to the center.  A similar direction for New York would be of major importance to offset the increase of a million jobs that is forecast by 2020 for the auto-dependent outer zone of the region, an area where nearly all plans for roadway expansion face stiff political opposition.   Such close-in job centers are greatly needed in the New York region to accomplish national welfare-to-work goals and to overcome the job deficit that is forecast for non-white and foreign-born inner city residents who will constitute more than 80 percent of New York City’s population in 2020.

Shifting growth to areas where transit infrastructure can be upgraded would be far more cost effective than expanding New York’s highway infrastructure, which is larger than that of the other three cities combined.  The other cities have recognized the competitive advantage in avoiding the burden of maintaining this investment.

Economic Incentives to Sprawl in the New York Region

While the New York region can learn a great deal from these overseas land use/transport models, the lessons are not so easily transferable. Although suburban Americans may be increasingly against sprawl in the voting booth, in the real estate office, economic realities force household choices that foster more subdivisions on former farmland and forests.  Even if the fundamental economics of sprawl in the U.S. that differ from the practices abroad were broadly recognized, society is not about to topple three pillars of the American economy:

* unlimited home mortgage tax deduction the bigger the house, the greater the tax break.  (In contrast, in London, Paris and Tokyo, mortgage tax credits are limited).

* cheap energy (gasoline and electricity are 1/3-1/2 those costs in the other cities).

* gas taxes dedicated to transport (in the other three cities, gas taxes and vehicle fees enrich the general fund, forcing transport to compete with better schools, rent subsidies, aid to small businesses, and attractive parks, all of which can reduce travel demand by making city life more appealing).

Unless planners account for these sacrosanct features of the U.S. economy, the New York region is just tinkering at the margin as sprawl and its icon, a megastore parking lot overflowing with sport utility vehicles, will continue to destroy the region’s few remaining town centers and fast disappearing open space.   Some strategic steps that deserve immediate attention are:

1. Remove zoning barriers to higher densities and mixed uses, especially around transit nodes.

2. Promote development of critical mass of attractive neighborhoods and good schools  in the city to attract a significant shift of population and job growth from the exhurbs.

3. Update accounting of full transportation costs (direct and hidden), internalize externalities, and inform the public of the true cost of transport choices they make.

4. In New Jersey, support the State development plan with specific transportation measures; in New York, make policies of the Regional Transport Plan location and project-specific.

5. Follow U.K.-model of a Regional Development Association for the 31-county area.

6. Start-up value pricing on roads (first, by eliminating congestion discounts, i.e., selling EZ-Pass at a discount) and by designing value pricing for parking (residential, commercial and shopping malls).

7. Train municipal planning boards in the long range adverse consequences of  allowing development that is not located close to transit or in town centers.

8. Promote walkable neighborhoods through traffic-calming and elimination of all incentives for out-of-center development.

9. Earmark a gradually increasing tax on the carbon content of fuels to retire the national debt. The long-term price signals would affect household choices about where to live and how to travel. Elimination of the national debt would free-up the 30 percent of federal tax revenues that now go to pay off interest on the debt. A commensurate cut in income taxes would boost consumer spending and offset any slowing of the economy attributable to other fiscal methods that might be enacted to reduce global warming-carbon dioxide emissions.

10. Broaden the applicability of the Transportation Trust Fund to all transportation demand management measures, including land use strategies.