Mobility and Affluence, pt. 2

I also read the article Branden posted and I'm going to pull out parts I found interesting with some discussions.

First off, just let my biases out, I am pro-public transportation. I've lived in both societies, and I prefer a well laid out public transportation much more than a well laid out highway network.

(pg. 10) "In the United States, the average work trip travel time by public transport was 70 percent more than that of the automobile in 2000.25 In 2005, the average public transport work trip travel time was 80 percent higher in Canada than the average automobile commute.26 Public transport work trip travel times in the Paris area are approximately double the automobile commute time (Gerondeau, 1997)."

The argument of this paper goes that more mobility leads to more economic freedom (choice to work) and wealth. Because public transportations are slower at moving people, it's inferior to personal transportation. Two issues with this:

1. It considers time in public transportation equal to time in private transportation. Anyone who rides Caltrain or a subway in Tokyo realizes that many people in public transportation are reading or texting or working. The fact that public transportations are slower, yet people still use them may mean that the mode of transportation is what people desire.

2. The above statistical reference is very very above the clouds. Just because work travel times in Paris is double for public transportation than private transportation doesn't mean that's the case for all work travel. Most likely, the auto commutes are in the less dense areas of
Paris while the public transportation commutes are in the core city.

(pg. 16) "Public Transport’s Important Niche Markets: Nonetheless, public transport serves important market niches. In some applications, public transport can be faster than the automobile, especially to the most congested and large urban cores, such as the Manhattan (New York) central business district, inner London, central Paris, inside the Osaka Loop or inside the Yamanote Loop in Tokyo. However, for the most part, public transport travel times are considerably greater than automobile travel times for trips throughout the balance of the urban area. Public transport also serves important welfare markets, by providing service to households without automobiles and physically disabled people who are not able to drive automobiles."

Interesting point here that seems to be missing from the rest of the paper: the debate is not public transportation vs private transportation, but where one makes more sense than the other. Most of the paper puts the two in comparison with one or two value metrics and I get the feeling that misses a lot of what really matters.

The most interesting part of the paper I thought was the discussion on "Natural Cities" vs "Compact Cities," how things happen vs how we want things to happen.

(pg. 19) "The Natural City: The dominant historical urban area might be called the “natural city” --- an urban area in which development was generally permitted, with a minimum of regulation. As environmental concerns emerged, greater regulation was applied, but large high-income urban areas continued to develop liberally, while observing stronger environmental and public health standards. The unprecedented wealth creation that has occurred since World War II has generally occurred in this “natural city” environment, in which suburban development and the automobile have emerged as dominant."

(pg. 19) "The Compact City: The prevailing view in urban planning generally opposes the automobile and the land use policies of the “natural city”. A principal justification is the view that the “natural city” creates negative environmental externalities that must be corrected."

(pg. 20) "The alternative to the natural city is the compact city, the object of policies referred to as “smart growth,” “growth management,” or “urban consolidation.” Generally, these policies seek to reduce the expansion of the urban footprint, by increasing population densities and to substitute public transport use for automobile use (above), out of concern that the natural city is not sustainable."

The paper goes onto discuss the benefits/downfall of each in different categories (i.e. environment, footprint), and I sense that it's slightly biased against compact cities, but it's an interesting comparison of how many of the current policies want to see the cities and how cities have become the way they are.

One of the contributors of this paper, Wendell Cox runs the demographia which I covered here. He seems to be a very big proponent of market driven urban development and less government interference and his primary interest seems to be housing affordability which he manages to squeeze into the paper (about transportation).