The Shape of the Future

E M Risse


 

No Context

 

The Washington Post could reforest the Amazon with the paper it's wasted on transportation issues. Without illuminating the underlying causes of gridlock, the stories are worse than useless.


 

On 13 January 2003, The Shape of the Future explored the perspective of The Washington Post as a source of information on mobility, access and human settlement patterns. Our 19 January 2004 column ("Clueless") addressed the editorial treatment of transport since January 2003. This column, examines The Post's news coverage. 

 

As in prior years, The Washington Post news coverage and columns provide useful perspectives. However, in order to apply these perspectives, the reader must understand the overall context. The news coverage of transportation continues to be extensive but focuses on specific situations lacking context that could help readers understand the dynamics of regional mobility. 

 

To add to the confusion, there is a trend to focus on supposed short-term "fixes" without providing the larger context of these improvements. If citizens understood the larger picture, they would also understand that short-term and long-term "fixes" that ignore the land-use/transport system link fail.

 

Plethora of Transport and Mobility Stories

 

Transportation and traffic congestion is a compelling story and receives a lot of news coverage. The news side of The Washington Post continues to provide interesting stories and columns, but these materials do not provide the overarching context which would empower citizens to understand the events and conditions. In private communications, many reporters and columnists say they have an understanding of  the big picture, but what they say in private does not become part of the stories.

 

The typical story starts like this: Z is suffering from traffic congestion, Y says she and her agency are committed to solving the problem, but their hands are tied by U, V, W and X. (You fill in the names/agencies/

causes.) Then the story moves to the details and the experts. A says this; B says that. C suggests this, but D says it will not work because of ___.  The story often ends with something like: "... agree that more roads and capacity are needed."

 

In a typical story's survey of the experts, there is an array of "answers" like:

  • Those who favor Business As Usual can get away with saying "build more roads" because the citizens have no understanding of the basic elements necessary for creating mobility and access.

  • The "smart growthers" who oppose Business As Usual often shoot themselves in the foot by suggesting simplistic ideas like "town centers," clustering at the dooryard-scale and "transit-oriented development" as solutions.

The problem here, as noted in "The Myths That Blind Us", is when citizens do not understand the basics, the traditional practice of journalism makes matters worse, not better.

Solving mobility dysfunctions is not simple. It is next to impossible if the readers do not understand the context. Perhaps the most straight-forward statement of a solution is found in Blueprint for a Better Region: "Put development in the right places."

 

As a starter, every story about increasing mobility needs to include reference to this basic reality:

Just building more transport facilities without a fundamental change in human settlement patterns makes congestion worse in almost all cases.

Plans for and construction of new transportation facilities are now embargoed region-wide by both a lack of funds and a lack of a consensus on what facilities are needed. This is, in large, part the result of a strategic stalemate engineered by those concerned with the course of development over the past two decades. The stalemate is reinforced by the rising costs of transport projects, shrinking resource streams and the diversion of transport funding to meet other needs. Transportation funding is a major ingredient of every "tax reform" scheme.

 

The forces of Business As Usual would like to break the strategic stalemate and create a "multi-jurisdictional transportation authority with a stable, reliable source of revenue" to build more transport projects, some of which have been on "six-year plans" for three decades. 

 

All this makes great fodder for news coverage. What the press does not point out is that without fundamental change in human settlement patterns, any new money, new agencies and the revived projects would make congestion worse, not better.

 

It is also important to repeat over and over that:

First, there is already more land in urban use and committed to urban development than can be provided with efficient public and private services -- including transport - in the foreseeable future.

 

Second, there is far more land planned and/or zoned for urban uses than there will be a need in the foreseeable future.

Two Examples

 

The stories on transport issues are legion. Two examples illustrate the need for the stories to reference the realities noted above:

 

On 23 November in The Post, Michelle Boorstein ("GMU Professor Urges Commuters to Do the Math") outlines interesting work in the five-county Fredericksburg, Virginia, Subregion. The headline tells it all. For a somewhat lower salary, workers could save a lot of time and money they now spend commuting. A similar study was done by UVA for the five-county subregion centered on Culpeper and Warrenton-Fauquier. There are a substantial number of long distance travelers who commute to the core of the National Capital Subregion from outside the Clear Edge around the urbanized area of this Subregion who say they would consider a job relocation. 

 

If these citizens understood that there was no feasible mobility solution based on building more transport facilities, they might start looking in earnest for ways they could contribute to the creation of Balanced Communities in Greater Fredericksburg, Greater Culpeper and in Warrenton-Fauquier. Stories such as this one do not provide the background or articulate the futility of hoping for a fix.

 

The failure to address the issue of context infects not just regional coverage but national stories as well. On 21 December, a major Post feature on page A3 addressed mobility in the Boston New Urban Region. The story titled "Boston Heralds Smoother Commute" focused on the Big Dig, a project that replaced an elevated section of I-93 in the core of the Boston New Urban Region with new trenches, tunnels and bridges. The $14.6 billion Big Dig is claimed to be the largest public works project ever by the United States, surpassing the Panama Canal and the Alaska Pipeline. 

 

The story suggests that the old roadways were projected to be clogged up to 16 hours a day by 2010.  The headline and story focuses on the needs of  "commuters." Most agree that building the original elevated expressway through the core of the region was a mistake. But if all that is done is to construct a better roadway system, then these new roads will also be clogged soon. At this very moment, there are developers, builders and home buyers scouring the landscape for 50 miles north and south of downtown Boston looking for places to develop, build and live to take advantage of the new roadway capacity for commuters. The focus should be on building communities and eliminating the need for most to commute.

Without a commitment to build Balanced Communities throughout the Boston New Urban Region, the Big Dig is just a $14.6 billion band-aid.

By creating functional human settlement patterns Balanced Communities reduce the demand for:

  • The use of any vehicle to achieve access and mobility

  • Long trips 

  • Single-occupancy vehicle trips

Every one of the 68 largest urban agglomerations in the United States could use a project similar to the Big Dig to offset imprudent expenditures of Interstate funds from 1956 to 2003. It will all be wasted without a balance on land use and transportation in each New Urban Region.

 

Did The Washington Post story explore these issues?  No, the story focused on canceled concerts, ribbon cutting and relief for commuters. No where did it say that without a move to create Balanced Communities, there would be no relief for commuters.

 

Short-Term Fixes

 

There is a recent trend in The Washington Post coverage to focus on stories that feature short-term improvements. Noting that there is no money for major projects, these stories examine "small fixes." No one disagrees that there need for immediate, short-term fixes, as well as long-term strategies. Most understand that short-term fixes are useful and will improve capacity by from 5 percent to 15 percent over five or ten years. However, hours of delay and other measures of congestion are increasing at a faster rate. For this reason, even if capacity is expanded by small fixes, such as turn lanes, signal synchronization, telework, ride-sharing, flexible work hours, HOT lanes, sidewalks, bus signs and all the other good ideas, congestion still gets worse year after year.

 

There must be a simultaneous commitment to both long-term and short-term solutions in the context of regional strategies to balance travel demand with transport-system capacity.  Without a commitment to create Balanced Communities with functional transport systems, just talking about short-term fixes engenders the false hope that improvement is on the way.  This allows citizens and governance practitioners to continue Business As Usuall without a commitment to long-term, fundamental change.

In other words, without changes in the pattern and density of land use, both short-term and long-term projects contribute to the growth of congestion.

Another problem with short-term fixes is that some of them make matters worse in that they make long-term solutions more expensive. 

 

Where to From Here?

 

Stories concerning mobility would benefit citizens if they were presented and reinforced by contextual understanding. In addition to embracing the Five Critical Realities, there are three themes that would strengthen every mobility and access story:

 

Unused Transport System Capacity: It is important to state and restate that there is a substantial amount of unused transport-system capacity in the National Capital Subregion. Because of an irrational human settlement pattern, the existing system is overloaded with unbalanced (peak-hour) demand. The heart of the system is expected to beat a complete cycle only once a day. METRO and the major radials overflow toward the core in the A.M. and out in the P.M.. Try to design the circulatory system of any organic structure with a heart that beat only once a day and observe the result -- death. 

 

Vacant and Underutilized Land Already Served by METRO: Another theme is that there is a plethora of vacant and underutilized land within one-half mile of the existing METRO platforms. The Virginia Subregion would not need megaprojects like a METRO extension to Dulles if the land use pattern were rationalized by fairly allocating the full cost of urban services to those who directly benefit from the services. These costs are now borne by the public. This could be done if municipal and state agencies would stop subsidizing current land-use practice. (See "Wild Abandonment" and "Scatteration.") Citizens must understand the cumulative result of their land-use and transportation decisions.

 

Real Regional Plans. Yet another theme is the absolute need for adopted, enforceable regional, subregional and community plans -- not "state" or "municipal" blob plans. There must be detailed, comprehensive plans that articulate the evolution of Balanced Communities. These plans can provide for a transport system that will support a rational distribution of origins and destinations of trips. The National Capital Subregion must create a balance of land use and transportation. Again, almost no one disagrees with this in theory, but it is not spelled out so citizens have a basis for abandoning business-as-usual practices and endorsing fundamental change solutions.

  

There are the parallels between the 21st century market economy and contemporary human settlement patterns/transport systems. Both impact the future of civilization as we know it; both are driven by consumer decisions. While the media provides a plethora of information on the economy to help citizens make more intelligent votes, investments and purchases, it provides almost none that could help citizens evolve functional patterns and densities of land use. Perhaps The Washington Post needs a Settlement Pattern section with resources similar to the Business section and the imagination of the Style section.    

 

The silver bullet is citizen education and citizen understanding. The media in general, and not just The Washington Post, continues to fire blanks.

 

The traditional practice of journalism deprives citizens of information they need to reach rational location decisions impacting land use and transportation.  Being uniformed about the dynamics of mobility and access results in citizens continuously taking actions that cause mobility and access to deteriorate.

-- February 2, 2004


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ed Risse, and his wife Linda live inside the "Clear Edge" of the "urban enclave" known as Warrenton, a municipality in the Countryside near the edge of the Washington-Baltimore "New Urban Region."

 

Mr. Risse, the principal of

SYNERGY/Planning, Inc., can be contacted at spirisse@aol.com.

 

See profile.