The Lloyd District is a high-density commercial and residential district located a short distance from downtown Portland, Oregon. To address parking and congestion problems, the city of Portland implemented a Lloyd District Partnership Plan in September 1997. This plan consists of a number of elements aimed at curbing single-occupancy vehicle use for the commute to and from the district. This plan included parking pricing in the form of meters (whereas on-street parking had been free), discounted transit passes, and other transportation demand management strategies. The effects of these strategies on travel and parking behavior were assessed, with an emphasis on the relationship between parking pricing and mode choice. A random sample of 1,000 employees in the Lloyd District was surveyed about their travel and parking behavior before and after the installation of the new meters. Research found that, during the 1 year that had elapsed between the implementation of the Lloyd District transportation management programs and the survey information collected, the drive-alone mode for the trip to work by employees in the Lloyd District had decreased by 7 percent. For the district as a whole, the drive-alone commute share is now about 56 percent. The program strategies that have emerged as the most significant in effecting this decrease are the installation of the meters and the discounted transit pass program.
This article departs from the usual discussion of the role of urban transit in effecting spatial change and looks instead at how public policy and the conflicting demands of various constituencies contributed to the demise of the urban mass transit industry.1 Five constituent groups affected urban transit's evolution and eventual decline: transit company employees, business interests, politicians, investors, and, of course, riders. Each of these groups placed its own set of demands upon the transit industry-demands that conflicted and competed with one another. It was this conflict, and not the advent of the private automobile, that resulted in transit's demise.
THE EMERGENCE OF CONSTITUENT DEPENDENCYAmerican cities, like cities elsewhere, were initially "walking cities"-their scope and breadth were a function of the fact that most of the time, most of the people traveled by foot. The first real revolution in mass transit came in the form of the horse-drawn streetcar, which transported dozens of people at a time for just five cents each. In
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.