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October 2007
Second Access to Destinations conference mixes research with practice
David Levinson
Kevin Krizek
Kay Axhausen
Like its predecessor, the second Access to Destinations Conference held this past August featured research findings from around the world. This time, however, speakers also shared examples of how accessibility measures are being put into practice.
This CTS-sponsored conference came nearly three years after the inaugural gathering, explained Robert Johns, CTS director, in his opening remarks. That event helped launch the Access to Destinations Study, an interdisciplinary research and outreach effort led by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek to measure accessibility for the Twin Cities region. Levinson is an associate professor and Braun/CTS Chair of Transportation Engineering at the University of Minnesota; Krizek is an associate professor at the University of Colorado (previously with the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs). CTS is coordinating the study with support from sponsors including the Minnesota Department of Transportation, Hennepin County, the Metropolitan Council, and the McKnight Foundation. (For more, see www.cts.umn.edu/access-study.)
The public portion of this year’s conference began with international perspectives on accessibility, moderated by John Adams, associate dean of the Humphrey Institute. Adams was a key researcher in the Transportation and Regional Growth Study, an earlier CTS-led effort.
The first presenter was Kay Axhausen, professor with the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Throughout recorded history, he said, societies have sought to improve accessibility in order to capture the lower costs and greater prosperity it generally brings. The story of the last 50 years in Switzerland is no different, as it rebalanced its investments toward suburbs and Alpine areas. This policy has started to run its course, however, as marginal gains are decreasing as the country reaches accessibility “saturation,” he said. “Shrinking Switzerland further is becoming an increasingly costly way of supporting economic growth.”
As space “shrinks,” Axhausen continued, the reach of individuals expands. His recent research looked at the distances between the homes of “social network members.” The distribution shows a large portion of people close by, he said, but with a “very long tail” of others. Leisure— including travel for maintaining social networks—is the fastest growing market in transportation and now makes up 40 percent of total travel in the United States and other industrialized nations.
“We have globalized our social life and we are acting on it to meet our friends,” Axhausen said.
Hong K. Lo
The second speaker was Hong K. Lo, professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Transit attracts more than 90 percent of the 11 million daily trips in Hong Kong. All transit services are operated by private companies according to commercial principles and without direct government subsidies. “This is a very important fact and key result,” he said.
Ninety percent of daily trips in high–density Hong Kong are made by public transit.
What government does, however, is regulate a hierarchy of public transit services, control land use, and discourage auto ownership. Growth is directed to high-density neighborhoods, typically around stations along major rail or subway lines. New private cars are subject to a first registration tax from 35 to 100 percent of the vehicle cost. And the fuel tax for unleaded gas in 2002 was almost eight times higher than in the United States.
Robert Bruegmann
The third speaker, Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, took a historical tack on sprawl and accessibility.
Sprawl is as old as cities themselves, he began, and for good reason. From the earliest times until very recently, living at the center of most cities meant congestion, pollution, and highly unsanitary living conditions for most residents. “As every new group could afford to move out, [it] did so,” Bruegmann said, whether in ancient Rome or 18th century Paris.
The advent of the railroad—and public transportation—made it possible to vastly increase the outward migration. “For the working class, it was heaven,” Bruegmann said. “For a smaller amount of money they had something like the choice of affluent urban dwellers.”
Every city in the world with political freedom and any kind of land market follows this pattern, Bruegmann continued, regardless of transportation mode. What’s more, there is a strong and growing convergence within and among countries: cities are becoming more like suburbs, Europe more like the United States, and developing countries more like developed ones.
To Bruegmann, changing the built environment for the transportation system is the “tail wagging the dog”—land patterns remain for 100 years but transportation technology is likely to change in a decade. “We can’t see that these urban landscapes are the middle-class settlement of the world because we put this denigrating name [sprawl] to it,” he concluded.
Sam Seskin
Anne Canby
The three researchers then participated in a panel discussion of the implications for research and practice, moderated by Johns. They were joined by Levinson and Krizek, co-organizers of the conference, and two national experts: Sam Seskin, transportation planning director with consultant CH2M Hill, and Anne Canby, president of the Surface Transportation Policy Project.
Levinson shared some early accessibility findings from his analysis of traffic patterns since the August 1 collapse of the I-35W bridge. With the loss of just this one key link, regional accessibility is dropping by one to two percent, although much will depend on how well drivers adapt over time. “The accessibility and economic potential of the region are severely affected,” he said.
Krizek said many planning initiatives increase mobility at the expense of accessibility. His research will provide a detailed analysis of transit, bicycling, and walking, in particular regarding origins and destinations. For example, 95 percent of shoppers bypass the closest grocery store for another, but details are limited about the reasons why. “Travel time is not the be-all and end-all,” he said.
Seskin said the challenge for planners is to communicate the significant and changing nature of accessibility to policymakers and the public. “We are often caught up in mistaken emotional debates, such as transit versus highway or bus versus rail, which distract us from the real issues regarding accessibility,” he said. The debate shouldn’t be about individual projects, he said, but about balancing a series of interests: new projects versus maintenance, real access versus virtual, regional and local access versus global and national, and benefits to the individual versus the costs to society as a whole, such as pollution.
Canby encouraged expanding our thinking beyond the work trip to include other travel, such as shopping on Saturdays or freight shipments at night. External issues such as energy consumption, greenhouse gases, health care costs, and economic impacts are also important. And the nation’s changing demographics, with increasing numbers of immigrants and older households needing access to a variety of activities, will have “huge implications,” she said.
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 later this year . Selected conference papers will be published in the Journal for Transport and Land Use, a new journal under development by Levinson and Krizek with assistance from CTS.