The declining role of the automobile and the re‐emergence of place in urban transportation: The past will be prologue

Abstract

The dominant view among transportation scholars is that transportation history flows from older to newer travel modes, with each mode being superior to and, for the most part, displacing the earlier modes. America, an early adopter of widespread automobility, was in this view a harbinger of trends that would follow elsewhere, and hence the US experience of passenger travel based almost completely on car travel was a signal of things to come. Yet this paper argues that interpreting from the US experience with the interstate highway era misses key points. The interstate system, and the planning that surrounded it, was developed during a brief period of time when transportation policy was centralized, standardized, and largely divorced from questions of local impacts and place‐based political pressures. That made the years immediately after the 1956 Interstate Highway Act unusual in the broader context of transportation planning. The US has recently witnessed a return of pre‐interstate urban transportation planning realities, and transportation in large US cities is now multi‐modal, contextualized by ties to land use and neighbourhoods, and fraught with the politics and incrementalism of the pre‐interstate era. Regional science research, grounded in the era of national highway construction, can adapt to the realities of modern urban transportation planning by focusing more on collaboration and financing in ill‐defined institutional settings, environmental externalities and non‐market impacts, and retrospective project evaluation.

When local access matters: A detailed analysis of place, neighbourhood amenities and travel choice

“…Seeking sustainable urban development, many Western cities have shifted the emphasis of transport policy and investment away from the car. Instead, walking and cycling, together with public transport, have grown in both importance and mode share (Boarnet, 2013). There is virtual consensus that in a sustainable city, walking and cycling should be integrated components of the overall, multimodal urban transport system (Kenworthy, 2006;Southworth, 2005).…”

Reaction to the paper Tempest in a Teapot: The exaggerated problem of transport-related residential self-selection as a source of error in empirical studies

“…In general, we believe such multi-modality will be desirable in the face of possibly (and likely) increasing fossil fuel costs, but we note that persons could reasonably conjecture that a broad range of technological advances could allow similar adaptations without a land use response. Having said that, we note that in the U.S. and Europe there is much evidence that segments of urban populations prefer multi-modal neighborhoods, based on the increased popularity of walking and cycling in large cities in those countries (e.g., Boarnet 2013).…”

A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data

“…This threatens planetary and human health, quality of life, and wellbeing (Okeke et al, 2020;Flannery, 2006;Giles-Corti et al, 2016). A growing body of research has investigated these issues and advocated for mitigation through pedestrian-friendly urban design and transit-oriented development (Boarnet, 2013;Badami, 2009;Ding and Gebel, 2012). Designing pedestrian-friendly cities that promote active lifestyles will produce co-benefits for health and the environment.…”