I wanted to try something a little different, so I'm just going to link a quote from the articles I'm posting today.
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DC: "Some residents of the District cling to a suburban mentality."
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National: "Americans travel by car twice as much per year as Germans and use transit only a sixth as much."
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Texas: "This isn’t a transportation funding crisis," said Keener, whose Austin group promotes low taxes and small government. "It’s a funding priority crisis."
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Las Vegas: "The zoning provides incentives, such as bonus density, for developers who build projects that combine residential, professional and commercial space and encourage residents to use the mass transit line."
3 comments:
The Brookings paper about the US vs. Germany comes off as a political rant. The authors decided they support smart growth policies, and then looked for a country with policies and results they liked. Consider the following problems with the paper:
1. Few German policies are given with historical context. The gas taxes of 1998 are a positive exception, but elsewhere the paper just asserts Germany does something, without explaining why or how.
2. There's no disaggregation of data. When it comes to transit, the US is broadly divided into three categories: New York, New York's suburbs, and the rest. A better paper would check that the one region in the US that does have high transit use does planning the German way and not the American way. I haven't seen any disaggregation in Germany, but other countries exhibit similar trends - e.g. Japan is only as transit-heavy as you think in Tokyo, Osaka, and their nearby suburbs.
3. Some of the arguments given in the paper seem distracting. The paper glosses over single-use versus mixed-use zoning, but talks about the fact that in some German cities (which?), residential zoning allows doctors' offices.
4. Some arguments can be made both ways. Most US suburbs use winding street networks with many cul-de-sacs in order to discourage through traffic. Many others use chicanes and speed bumps. This is very effective at funneling most traffic to arterial roads. Conversely, it's the transit-oriented urban areas that use uninterrupted grids. Why does the German dead-end get credit for encouraging walking and taking transit when the American dead-end has been widely attacked for encouraging driving?
5. Why focus on Germany? The world's center of both car production and rail usage is Japan. The world's leaders in encouraging walking and biking are the Netherlands and Switzerland. France is a mixture of all of the above, with a large car industry, cutting-edge rail transit, and fuel economy that would shame the Prius. Why not do a three- or four-way comparison?
4. Some arguments can be made both ways. Most US suburbs use winding street networks with many cul-de-sacs in order to discourage through traffic. Many others use chicanes and speed bumps. This is very effective at funneling most traffic to arterial roads. Conversely, it's the transit-oriented urban areas that use uninterrupted grids. Why does the German dead-end get credit for encouraging walking and taking transit when the American dead-end has been widely attacked for encouraging driving?The problem with the way of building dead ends and culs-de-sac in the US is that you can't cross the dead ends on foot, so you have to walk all the way to the artery with the cars to get to transit.
Okay... but the paper doesn't mention that. Also, I've heard that in Canada, which is almost as car-oriented as the US, you can cross the dead-ends on foot.
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