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December 2004
Access to destinations: rethinking the way we look at transportation
By all accounts, traffic congestion is a growing concern around the country. In 2002 alone, congestion is estimated to have cost motorists roughly $63 billion in 85 metropolitan areas, or $829 per person. And in the Twin Cities metro area, congestion has grown at one of the fastest clips in the nation. But is congestion truly the best measure of how well the transportation system is meeting our needs?
A new approach, which looks at the access people have to a range of destinations, is now gaining ground. Researchers from the University of Minnesota and other organizations presented their findings in this new field of study at a conference held in Minneapolis November 8–9.
"Access to Destinations: Rethinking the Transportation Future of Our Region," was part of University of Minnesota President Robert Bruininks' 21st Century Interdisciplinary Conference Series. The conference, which attracted more than 150 researchers and practitioners, was sponsored by CTS in cooperation with the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, the College of Continuing Education, the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and the Institute of Technology.
Robert Jones, senior vice president for system administration at the University, said the conference was an example of the president's strategic direction to "strengthen our public role and bring our expertise and knowledge to bear on society's challenges."
Robert Johns moderated a working lunch with national experts Lance Neumann, Steve Lockwood, and Alan Pisarski
The event also marked the kick-off of a new University of Minnesota research program studying accessibility in the Twin Cities area, said Robert Johns, CTS director. The study, building on the ideas generated from this conference, will translate this knowledge into new techniques and applications that can improve transportation decisions, he said. Assistant professors David Levinson (Civil Engineering) and Kevin Krizek (Humphrey Institute) are lead researchers in the program, and helped plan and moderate the conference.
In this new way of thinking about transportation, traditional measures of mobility, such as commute length and travel time, are just part of the equation. Accessibility research takes a different tack and looks instead at individuals' ability to conduct activities—or in other words, get to the places they want or need to go. For example, a resident outside Fargo may be able to zip to work with no congestion at all but still be 50 minutes from the closest job. Contrast that to the denser Twin Cities, where thousands of jobs and services are within 15 minutes' reach even on congested roadways.
Calculating accessibility, however, demands a more detailed understanding of traffic and new techniques to measure it, said Robert Bertini, one of six researchers who presented their findings at the public portion of the conference. Even for congestion, there is no agreement on absolute definitions of it or the best way to gauge it. What does seem clear, said Bertini, an associate professor at Portland State University, is that while people are driving more miles, their total daily travel time "budget" has remained constant—at about one hour—over the past 20 years, and some argue, over hundreds of years.
David Levinson, Robert Bertini, Rachel Weinberger, Harvey J. Miller
What's changing is how Americans live and work. With decentralized cities, dual-earner households, and dispersed businesses, the old model of the transportation and land use connection is "quite oversimplified and may even be obsolete," said Rachel Weinberger of the University of Pennsylvania.
Further weakening the connection is the rapid development of information and communications technologies. "There is no clear connection anymore between work and physical place for more and more people," said Harvey J. Miller, a geography professor at the University of Utah. Cell phones, the Internet, and other ubiquitous technologies let us "project our presence virtually and still participate in activities," he explained. This means we need to rethink "place-based" measurements and complement them with "people-based" accessibility measures that are more sensitive to individual activity patterns in space and time.
Still, a key question researchers must understand is this: can land use policy alter transportation behavior? For Geritt Knaap, professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland, tools such as zoning and growth boundaries can work, but they're better at limiting growth than stimulating transit-oriented development. And because local policies can be counterproductive, success at the regional scale will require regional institutions with the capacity to design integrated land use and transportation plans, plus the regulatory power to make them stick. Otherwise, he said, just as "we can't build our way out of congestion, we can't 'land use' our way out of it either."
While higher density, mixed-use development does reduce the length of a typical trip, drivers take shorter trips more often, so vehicle-miles traveled could rise—or fall, said Randall Crane, professor of urban planning at UCLA. Likewise, there are no definitive answers to tell us if such "smart growth" patterns would reduce commutes.
What does seem effective in reducing congestion are travel demand management strategies such as toll lanes, ridesharing, and congestion pricing. These "non-coercive" incentives give people a choice to avoid congestion, said Jonathan Gifford of the George Mason University School of Public Policy. People choose to live in congested areas, so they must believe the benefits outweigh the costs. "Chernobyl has no congestion," he noted.
Kevin Krizek, Jonathan Gifford, Geritt Knaap, Randall Crane
This view of congestion—as a sign of successful, affluent areas—has implications for next steps, said Lance Neumann, president of Cambridge Systematics, one of three national experts who synthesized the morning's discussions. "You can have a lot of investment in transportation and a lot of land use regulation and observe, five years later, similar or worse congestion, and yet be in a much stronger economic competitive position," he said.
Accessibility research could also warn us when the public's view of the system veers from the engineering assessment, said Alan Pisarski, independent consultant. With a real potential for disconnect, we need to find out what level of congestion triggers voters to start "unelecting" public officials.
In the long term, "much of the accessibility issue may dissolve under the impact of information and communication technology," added Steve Lockwood, vice president of PB Consult. "We also need to unleash the market [so that] people understand the true costs of their behavior." And while it is important for researchers to think globally, regions must think locally to find accessibility strategies that work for them.
The conference continued with a day and a half of technical presentations for invited participants. A summary of the conference will be available from CTS next year; call 612-626-1077 or visit www.cts.umn.edu.