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153 E Transportation Linking Land Use and Mobility Jeff Levine ngineers have traditionally conducted transportation planning. However, like many types of specialty planning, transportation planning is difficult to separate from other planning. Land use, environmental protection, economic development, and even housing issues interrelate with planning for the movement of goods and services. Yet at the same time, transportation planning is so technical that it is very difficult to incorporate these other disciplines. The challenge in transportation planning is to remember these links while still simplifying the complex web of interrelationship enough to make good recommendations to the powers that be. The challenge to the community is to make sure that transportation planners get it right. Context Transportation is most closely linked with land use, the environment and public health, the economy, public safety, public finance, and social equity. Looking at each of these in turn helps create a context for transportation planning: Transportation and Land Use Transportation and land use are like the snake eating its own tail. Land use creates the need for transportation, but it is also often created by the development of transportation infrastructure. This connection became most evident after the creation of ring highways around major metropolitan centers. Roadways that were designed to help people avoid driving through the dense land use of the urban center ended up becoming relatively densely developed themselves, this time with a focus on the ring road itself rather than on downtown. That development resulted in new traffic congestion in the ring road, leading sometimes to the development of a second ring road, which in turn brought new office parks and housing, and so forth. 11 154 Enhancing Community Strengths At some point transportation planners noticed a pattern . Whenever they built new roads, people started driving more and longer, and the new roads filled up much faster than projections had indicated. The big investments in new highways did not solve congestion; they just moved people and jobs to the new highways and created more driving. Some chose to ignore this. Others chose to use it as a rationale for not improving transportation infrastructure at all. “Why build new roads?” they ask. “They just fill up with more cars.” While that argument is not made as often with transit or pedestrian improvements, it could be just as valid for them. The solution is not to ignore the issue or to use it as a reason to throw up your hands, but to be aware of the relationship and make your transportation improvements where you want your development to occur, keeping them away from places you don’t want to develop. However, the mechanisms that approve and fund transportation projects often ignore this relationship. Under federal programs for transportation funding you must first demonstrate that current land-use trends or existing travel patterns justify the need for a new road, transit line, or other improvement. In other words, the federal government will fund only transportation improvements that serve the current land-use patterns, not ones that will change those patterns. This is a major challenge to transportation planners who believe roads and rails should be built where it makes sense for people to live, rather than where current patterns show people will live. For example, the current trend may be for a metropolitan area to continue to grow in the direction of a wetland that contributes to the water quality of the region, on which the economy of the area depends. Existing transportation funds would be more likely to pay for a new road into the wetland than one that avoids it and may therefore encourage growth in areas that are less sensitive. This is as true for transit as it is for highways. The federal “New Starts” program, which is designed to pay for new transit systems in cities that don’t have good transit, requires that you demonstrate that the growth that would occur without the new transit line justifies creation of the transit line, entirely ignoring the land-use impacts of constructing the new line. This problem is most likely not due to any conscious policy of the federal government. That’s good news because it is really a perspective that should change. Until it does, transportation planners have to make land-use projections that justify transportation decisions. Transportation and the Environment Traveling produces pollution, whether by automobile, train, boat, or even foot. However, some transportation pollutes more than others (see Figure 11.1). While pollution from walking is primarily...

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