Conscious Choice: Gridlocked: Saving Ourselves from Sprawl

February 2000

Gridlocked: Saving Ourselves from Sprawl

by James B. Goodno

Spend enough time in any San Francisco Bay Area workplace and you’re sure to hear tales from commuter hell. School teachers in Silicon Valley leave their homes in subdivisions eighty miles away before dawn — and make it to work just on time. Office workers spend hours inching through traffic to jobs in fast-growing edge cities. Even construction workers — famous for their early hours — find themselves struggling with traffic to make it to the job site on time.

"I had to give up," says one office worker of a brief stint working forty miles from her home. "I hated the roads, I hated the commute." Her comments are common, but her ability to escape the congestion is rare. Despite an efficient and comfortable commuter rail service, which serves four of the nine Bay Area counties, most residents are victimized by a poor combination of land-use and transportation planning.

The bulk of the Bay Area’s population — and most U.S. suburbanites — live in detached single-family homes in new subdivisions. Built on inexpensive former agricultural land, these subdivisions are sited beyond walking distance of transit stations. Automobile-focused suburban design discourages transit use by forcing residents to begin their commute by car. This creates a slew of environmental and social problems, including increased air pollution and the disappearance of open space — not to mention traffic-related stress.

Social and architectural critics attribute a broader set of problems to the same development patterns. Houses in sprawling suburbs are often situated far from schools, parks, shopping districts, churches and other traditional centers of community. Homes are designed to face inward with massive three-car garages, hidden front doors and fenced-in back yards. As a result, building and subdivision design inhibits the development of community sensibilities. In addition, a rapid increase in residential development puts stress on the municipal tax base, leading to insufficient funding for schools and other public services.

The separation between land-use and transportation planning hits city dwellers as well. As jobs have migrated out of the central city into suburban and edge-city locations, it has become increasingly more difficult for urbanites to get to work. This is a big problem in cities nationwide such as Cleveland, where 90 percent of new entry-level jobs are located outside of the city. And in Atlanta, "the public transit system is only operating in two counties, Fulton County and DeKalb County, where the majority of people are people of color," observes Robert Bullard, director of Clark Atlanta University’s Environmental Justice Resource Center. "The jobs are in the surrounding counties. So most of the money has gone into building roads and into supporting the infrastructure for people who have cars." The result is that the gap between transportation and land-use practices, besides being harmful to the environment and quality of life, fosters racial and class conflict as well.

A myriad of policy and market factors explains the disconnection between transportation and land use in the United States. On the local level, state and regional agencies dominate transportation planning while municipal and county authorities control land use. More broadly, traditional federal transportation funding, tax deductions and home-lending policies, coupled with discriminatory banking practices, inexpensive gasoline and cheap land on the metropolitan fringe, have encouraged developers to build and home buyers to live in outer suburbs. These communities discourage transit-oriented development through zoning laws that limit density, ban mixed-use development, and promote shopping mall construction.

Planners long have understood the link between land-use and public transportation. The more residences and jobs within walking distance of public transportation (and the more pedestrian-friendly the built environment), the more likely commuters are to make use of it. This is apparent in dense, older cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, where city dwellers walk and ride imperfect bus, light rail, and subway systems to a variety of destinations.

But planners say developments do not have to reach traditional urban levels of residential density to support public transit. Peter Calthorpe, a Berkeley architect and planner, says moderate densities of roughly 18 dwelling units to the acre will suffice. By comparison, densities in many successful urban neighborhoods range from 80 to 250 units per acre, while contemporary suburbs might have five or fewer units per acre.

Calthorpe believes other land-use and design changes would encourage better use of public transportation. "The metropolitan circulation framework should be layered, providing an arterial grid for through auto traffic, neighborhood streets for pedestrians and slow cars, a transit system reinforced by intensified stations and a pedestrian-dominated urban center," Calthorpe writes in his book The Next American Metropolis. "Pockets of mixed-use development with moderate densities and streets designed for both pedestrians and cars would support transit, even in the suburbs."

Developments similar to those proposed by Calthorpe are being built in cities and towns in various U.S. metropolitan areas. In the Bay Area, several municipalities have either changed zoning laws or allowed exceptions for the construction of higher-density housing near transit hubs. San Jose has taken the lead within Silicon Valley in promoting transit-oriented development. Although with 850,000 residents it is Northern California’s largest city, San Jose’s layout follows a low-density, suburban pattern. Buses and a single light-rail line serve the city and Santa Clara County, but transit connections to surrounding counties are poor and the transportation and land-use pattern is really designed for motorists. Identifying economic reasons to support transit-centered development is helping to move municipal policy forward, however. "When we compared subdivisions with single-family homes to housing around light rail, our findings showed that suburban development would strain the city’s fiscal resources," says Laurel Prevetti, principal planner for the city. "So, there is a strong fiscal incentive to developing denser, transit-centered housing."

In 1991, San Jose identified seventy sites along existing transit corridors where it would encourage the construction of up to 13,700 units of higher-density housing. Significantly, these developments would contain housing for a mix of income groups, providing much needed affordable housing in settings that seem unlikely to fall into the squalor caused by concentrated poverty. To encourage development in these sites, the city offered a number of incentives, including zoning changes and in some cases public financing. At the same time, it enforced an urban services boundary, which withheld public services from would-be developments on the city’s fringe. Nevertheless, progress has been slow. By 1998, just 2,400 units had been built.

Other steps are being taken to encourage more transit-oriented development in the United States. The Department of Transportation (DOT), for example, is making more money and support available under the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), and has launched an initiative to help communities improve their transportation decision-making. In addition, several environmental groups and some mortgage lenders have developed location-efficient mortgages, which offer low- and moderate-income borrowers less costly loans to buy in transit-friendly neighborhoods.

DOT efforts fit into a broader federal effort closely identified with Vice-President Al Gore. Gore’s efforts and mounting grassroots pressure have led the administration to initiate a "livability" program. The initiative includes $700 million in new tax credits for Better America Bonds, which are designed to help communities leverage nearly $10 billion over five years to improve water quality, protect green spaces and clean up brownfields. The initiative also proposes $6.1 billion for public transit and $1.6 billion to support state and local projects that reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality. The $6.1 billion for public transit would be a record, but it still pales in comparison with highway spending: The same DOT budget contains $28.5 billion for the Federal Highway Administration.

Gore’s advocacy of smart growth has given a localized movement national stature. It also has provided a lightning rod for dissent. Over the past year, the army of critics expanded from a base in libertarian and property-development circles to include mainstream pundits writing for daily newspapers and national magazines such as The New Republic. Within smart growth circles, some question the vice-president’s commitment to making the major changes in the federal budget and tax codes that they believe are necessary to really change development patterns. (For example, would Gore be willing to even tinker with the popular home mortgage tax deductions to discourage development on the suburban fringe?) But many more are simply pleased to have someone as prominent as Gore in their camp. "I have no criticism of the vice-president," says Minnesota state legislator Myron Orfield, echoing a sentiment expressed by other smart-growth advocates.

Regardless of what happens on the federal level, bringing transportation and land use together on a wider scale requires more effective regional planning. Combining well-planned mass transit with such smart growth practices as urban growth boundaries, metropolitan revenue sharing and a reformed regulatory structure can best be coordinated at the regional level. Without regional coordination, low-density, low-quality development will continue to take place in the outer burbs, where cheap land abounds.

Regional land-use planning does happen in some parts of the United States, notably Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. While this hasn’t created a panacea, it has made planners’ work easier by making the overlay of jurisdictions less complicated. In most of the country, however, the divide between transportation and land-use planning remains craggy and great. In the Bay Area, for example, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) coordinates planning efforts with county transportation providers and congestion management authorities. Its real clout comes in controlling access to TEA-21 and other state and federal financing. But the MTC avoids involvement in land-use planning, leaving that to municipal and county authorities, some of whom are driven by fiscal imperatives to approve poorly conceived residential and commercial development.

The first step toward repairing this problem in our planning structure is building the political coalitions that will support and fight for appropriate reforms. Orfield, the Minnesota legislator, says coalitions of inner-city and suburban constituencies provide the key: "Getting the various types of suburbs to understand what their interests are is the biggest challenge."

Atlanta’s Bullard adds that transportation and land-use concerns can bring together disparate constituencies. "We’re all stuck in traffic, whether you are low-income or high-income, if you have a car and you’re out there on the freeway, you’re stuck on the freeway," he says. "What this means is that gridlock and lack of a coherent transportation system really may be the only thing that ties a lot of folks together."

James B. Goodno is the editor of Urban Ecology, a magazine covering planning and metropolitan affairs. Living in the Bay Area, he spends far too many hours stuck in traffic. This article originally appeared in In These Times.

Resources

As the Chicago area continues to expand, several local and regional advocacy organizations are leading the fight to encourage development practices that benefit the entire region and improve quality of life. Check out these web sites to learn more about transit oriented development, open space protection, transportation alternatives, and other smart growth practices.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology

The Metropolitan Planning Council and The Campaign for Sensible Growth

The Environmental Law and Policy Center of the Midwest

Chicago Wilderness

Openlands Project

Business and Professional People for the Public Interest

Sustain: The Environmental Information Group

For a national perspective on sprawl, go to the Surface Transportation Policy Project’s web site.

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