[This article reprinted with the kind permission of the American Planning Association. Thanks also to Michael Kodransky.
See the article Completing NYC streets for the next century for more on complete streets, and these others for thoughts on reprioritizing the use of streets. -Ed.]

By Michael Kodransky

Dirt paths, dominated by pedestrians and horse-and-wagon users, once made up the road network in the United States. By the 1890s, the rise in bicycling had led to the formation of bicycle leagues that were disappointed with the condition of the roads and lobbied for them to be paved. Decades later, automobiles began to compete with bicyclists, streetcars, and pedestrians for paved road space. Eventually, roads in the U.S. were designed primarily to accommodate the mobility and accessibility needs of cars and trucks.

Today, the tradition of building roads simply for the sake of moving automobiles continues, yet the stakes are much higher than they have ever been. Global warming, energy uncertainty, air pollution, and obesity are among the undesirable results of traditional transportation policies, warranting a reassessment of national priorities regarding investment in roads.

Investment Choices

Federal transportation policies in the U.S. have favored road building over mass transit projects for more than 80 years. The Highway Trust Fund, established in 1956, was created to secure a steady source of support for road construction, spurring the development of a vast national road network that today extends more than 4 million miles. In 1983, Congress decided that a portion of the money would go to transit. The pie is unequally split, however, with the portion of funds funneled to highway projects far exceeding what transit agencies receive. Support for other transportation modes, such as walking and biking, hasn't even been given serious consideration. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters has repeatedly said that money from the gas tax is squandered on projects such as bike paths that have no relation to transportation.

In spite of this, the response on the state and city levels has been to embrace biking as a viable commuting option. Bicycling — a clean and cheap nonmotorized mode for commuting long popular in many developing nations — has recently been gaining momentum in post-industrial cities in the U.S. and elsewhere. Paris rolled out an ambitious bicycle sharing program, called vélib (a neologism derived from the French words for "bike" and "liberty"), with 20,000 rentable bikes easily accessible at street locations around the city. Portland, Oregon, installed an extensive bike network and racks on buses for daily commuters. Cities are improving bicycle and walking environments as a way to counter some of the negative impacts of automobile reliance.

The Cost of Traffic

The former head of the New York City Department of Transportation, Iris Weinshall, once noted that traffic is an indicator of a robust economy. Yet a study conducted by the Partnership for New York City, an organization that represents the interests of the business community in the city, found that congestion actually causes the greater New York area to lose more than $13 billion and thousands of jobs annually. As commute times have increased nationally, people spend more of the day inside a car and less time being productive at work or at home with their families.

Streets in many American communities lack sidewalks, and where sidewalks do exist, conditions are often unsafe, unattractive, and uncomfortable for walking. More focus is placed on moving traffic, which results in an unsuitable environment for pedestrians. The long periods of inactivity while driving, along with other patterns in land-use and urban design, contribute to obesity rates. Dependence on the automobile has also affected neighborhood cohesion. There is no social interaction between people inside cars. Randy Kennedy, a reporter for the New York Times notes, "Most people go places inside the upholstered cocoons of their cars, catching glimpses of their fellow citizens through safety glass at 70 miles an hour."¹ Furthermore, people who live on streets with high traffic volumes are less likely to make friends with their neighbors, according to studies conducted by the late Donald Appleyard, a professor of urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, who was killed by a speeding car. Possible explanations for lower sociability on these streets may involve perception of safety issues, high noise levels, and poor air quality.

Roads have also been found to harm the health and well-being of humans and animals. Studies on "road-effect zones," the area over which significant ecological effects radiate from the road, have shown that bird and frog colonies near higher road densities have lower breeding rates, mostly as a result of noise levels. Similarly, asthma is more prevalent in human populations in areas flanking high-volume roads, such as the South Bronx in New York City and the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, which have air quality issues. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the largest contribution to carbon dioxide levels in the U.S. comes from "mobile sources" originating along the road network; nearly 58 percent of carbon dioxide is emitted by transportation sources. For this reason, the implications of traditional road building programs for animal and human habitats have reached a point of urgency.

As federal policies continue to support traditional transportation planning practices (i.e., road building to increase capacity for automobile flow), local municipalities have been taking the lead in developing strategies that better reflect the needs of communities. Quality-of-life issues and environmental preservation have been recognized as legitimate causes for reform.

Complete Streets

Communities from Seattle to Charlotte are realizing that allocating road space primarily for moving automobiles has not achieved desired outcomes such as quick travel times to work, economic advantages, or easy access to open spaces. In fact, many municipalities recognize that high-speed freeways and severely congested local roads are resulting in the opposite effect. Expanding road space has not only been an ineffective tool for reducing traffic congestion but has led to a multitude of other unwanted results.

"Complete street" ordinances, as they are known, have been adopted by dozens of cities, towns, and villages to encourage development of road networks that support all street users — automobiles, pedestrians, bus riders, and bicyclists. The objective is to reverse and enhance decades of road design standards that have pushed pedestrians and bicyclists to the peripheries of streets.

Complete street policies rally traffic engineers to be "mode-agnostic" when determining the highest and best use for a road. Safe and accessible bicycle- and pedestrian-ways are critical to the success of any shared street program. These spaces are "car-lite," meaning they still accommodate automobile traffic but include alternative transport modes in the road share.

Reducing Demand

There are places in the United States, such as Houston, where adding road lanes to alleviate traffic congestion is the modus operandi. While short-term gains include improvements in vehicle speeds and miles travelled, eventually congestion returns to initial levels. As some in the transportation field have said, "widening roads to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity." One explanation may be that added road capacity is outpaced by the development that it stimulates along the route. Without alternative transportation modes provided for in the mix, new drivers eventually clog the flow of traffic. More cars fill up the road space and idle in gridlock while neighborhoods closest to these roads absorb the negative impacts, such as concentrations of noxious exhaust particles.

Federal dollars are spent on these types of congestion mitigation road projects, but the desired result — i.e., traffic relief — is hardly attained. The most promising solutions are those that aim to curb road building and instead encourage drivers to get out of their cars and try other forms of transportation such as biking, walking, and mass transit. These other modes can only be possible where there are compact land uses. Capital investments in mass transit, for example, only make sense when there is a critical mass of potential riders. For this reason, transportation professionals should be working more closely with land use planners.

Cities that are fully built out can't accommodate more roads anyway, as proposals in recent decades have shown. In Boston, the Big Dig project — an attempt to add capacity and redirect local traffic to underground tunnels — came to an end in 2007 after a troubled history that included safety problems and a $14.8 billion price tag. Philadelphia considered building another deck on the Schuylkill Expressway, but the idea was eventually dropped. In New York City and San Francisco, proposals to build new expressways that would obliterate entire communities were halted. An expressway proposed in the early 1960s for Lower Manhattan would have cut through what is now trendy SoHo. In San Francisco, plans were turned down to build an extensive freeway system through the city center in 1948, although small segments were completed. Both cities are still thriving without the large roadway projects. After London, Stockholm, and other places instituted a fee for using congested roads during peak use time, cities around the world have been realizing that pricing is one potentially effective way to reduce demand for road space.

Shifting some percentage of commutes to non-auto modes is now more widely embraced, especially given the health and environmental benefits, but there are many more traffic engineers, land-use planners, and politicians who need convincing. The challenge is to curb sprawl and increase density around multimodal transportation nodes. In many ways, it's an approach to building green communities that was practiced in the U.S. a century ago.

Michael Kodransky is an urban planning graduate student in his final semester at the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. His concentration is in transportation, infrastructure, and environmental sustainability.

NOTES

^1. Randy Kennedy, Subwayland, St. Martin's Press, 2004, page 4.

Images: Top — 1948 San Francisco Planning Department Freeway Plan. Middle — A complete street in High Springs, Florida, with a sidewalk for pedestrians, colored bicycle path, and lanes for automobiles. Credit: Dan Burden. Bottom — A vélib rental station. This self-service bicycle sharing program in Paris is transforming the street experience with numerous, easily accessible rental stations around the city. Credit: Antoine Belaieff.

Copyright 2008 by American Planning Association. All rights reserved.