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Seminar Series on Transportation Research, Education, and Evolving Technology Seminar Series on Transportation Research, Education, and Evolving Technology Title: Transportation Planning in an Era of Expensive Mobility Speaker: Marlon G. Boarnet Sponsored by: Center for Integrated Transportation Systems Management & National Center for Smart Growth
Problem: Infill development, requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and traffic congestion will increase mobility costs in inner ring suburbs and transforming edge cities. How can traditional auto-oriented suburbs plan in an era of increasingly costly car travel? Purpose: In this paper, we used a detailed land use – travel behavior study to shed light on characteristics of the built environment that are associated with alternatives to car travel. The goal is to illuminate specific approaches that local governments can take to transform auto-oriented neighborhoods into places that support a broader range of travel modes. Methods: The analysis uses survey responses from 2,125 residents of the South Bay area of Los Angeles County. The survey, which included a travel diary in addition to a battery of questions about demographics and attitudes, was administered in eight small neighborhoods, four of which are classic auto-oriented corridors and four of which have centered and more pedestrian friendly land use patterns. Results and Conclusions: Trips are shorter and more likely to be via walking in centers. A key to the centers’ increased walking travel is the concentration of local shopping and service destinations in a commercial core. Where businesses are concentrated along corridors, similar shifts from driving to walking travel are found, with magnitudes that imply as much as a four-fold increase in per-person daily walking trips and as much as a 25 percent reduction in per-person daily driving trips. Yet the scale of business concentration that is associated with highly pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods is from three to four times as large as what can be supported by the local resident base, suggesting that pedestrian oriented neighborhoods necessarily import shopping trips, and hence driving trips, from larger surrounding catchment areas. Takeaway for Practice: Transforming auto-oriented neighborhoods into walkable centers will require focusing and concentrating commercial activity. The concentration needed is likely substantially larger than can be supported by existing resident demand. Planners need to link pedestrian centers to their surrounding consumer base in ways consistent with limited street infrastructure and looming regulatory constraints. We suggest that local experimentation will be key, and describe how transportation planning should shift from a top-down “forecast and allocate” to a bottom-up “experiment and verify” paradigm.
Marlon Boarnet is Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design and Economics at UC Irvine, and from 2003 through 2006 he chaired UC Irvine’s Department of Planning, Policy, and Design. He has studied land use – travel behavior interactions, urban growth patterns, the economic impacts of transportation infrastructure, and economic development. Boarnet is co-author of Travel by Design: The Influence of Urban Form on Travel (Oxford University Press, 2001). That book is a comprehensive assessment of the modeling and policy challenges inherent in linking urban design to transportation planning and is positioned as the reference monograph on the topic. Boarnet is ranked among the top ten most published planning scholars in North America for the years 1998 through 2002. Boarnet edits the Journal of Regional Science, he serves as an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Planning Literature and the Papers in Regional Science. Boarnet won the Fannie Mae Foundation Prize for best paper on housing and community development at the 2000 meetings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Best of ACSP Award for one of three outstanding papers at the 1997 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning meetings.
Boarnet currently is a member of the National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council Committee on “Relationships Among Development Patterns, Vehicle Miles Traveled, and Energy Consumption.” Boarnet has served as a member of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Transportation and Economic Development. He has been principal investigator on over a million dollars of funded research, supported by agencies that include the U.S. and California Departments of Transportation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Policy Research Center, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Boarnet has provided consulting services to the World Bank, the Bay Area Economic Forum, the Orange County Business Council, and the Urban Land Institute, among others.
Reception to immediately follow. This Event is For: Public • Campus • Clark School • All Students • Faculty • Post-Docs • Press
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