There
is a lot of talk about extending commuter rail
and METRO, widening existing roadways, building
new roadway corridors and building/improving
other transport facilities to “solve” the
problems of “commuters.” There is no doubt
that commuters would like a solution, and their
plight will be widely cited and lamented in the
coming weeks in Richmond and in the months
between now and the November elections. The
problems commuters face have already been cited
by Gov. Mark R. Warner, Speaker William J.
Howell, Senate Finance Chair John H. Chichester
and others. (1)
Let’s
start with bottom-line advice for commuters:
Unless
there is something simple you and your
neighbors can do--such as building a gate in
your back fence or going to a hearing to help
your employer expand its business down the
street--there are three current “solutions”
to “commuting” problems:
Move
your home close to your job;
Move
your job close to your home;
Move
your home and your job.
No
“solution” being put forward by any elected
official or transport facility lobby groups is
in fact a “solution.” That is because none
of the ideas put on the table by Business As
Usual or Government As Usual involve Fundamental
Change in human settlement patterns. Other than
the solutions by individual commuters above, the
change in the location of land uses and thus
change in the pattern of travel demand is the only
realistic cure to the problems of commuting.
Discussion of possible “solutions” (which
are not solutions at all) only encourages
citizens to hope that “someone” will make
commuting easier.
A
core problem is that the prospect of an easier
commute will encourage citizens to make bad
location decisions than can be accommodated by
any facility improvement.
The
validity of this statement can be demonstrated
by careful examination of:
-
Improving
an intersection or widen a bridge that is now a
bottleneck
-
Coordination
of a corridor’s traffic signal system
-
Adding
new lanes including HOV and/or HOT lanes on
existing roadways
-
Creating
new roadway corridors
-
Extending
an existing commuter rail line into the
Countryside
-
Extending
METRO beyond the Clear Edge
-
Building
“telework” centers
-
Any
other idea that has surfaced to date
including “Skycars” (See “The
Skycar Myth,” Nov 15, 2004.
The
reality is that there is no facility
solution for commuters. That will not change
until discussions, plans and construction of all
transport facilities are directly and
inextricable linked to Fundamental Changes in
human settlement pattern, period.
Commuter
Rail
Perhaps
“commuter rail” offers the best example of
the futility of building facilities for
commuters. Here is a specific example.
First,
recall two key facts about the Virginia portion
of the National Capital Subregion laid out in
“Five
Critical Realities that Shape the Future”
(Dec 15, 2003):
Within
1/4 mile of existing METRO stations, there is
more than enough space for all jobs, housing,
services and other urban development projected
for next 20 years if the station-area land is
developed and redeveloped at Rosslyn/Ballston
Corridor station-area densities.
In
addition, and even without any METRO
station-area development, if vacant and
underutilized land were developed and
redeveloped at minimum urban densities (10
persons per acre at community scale which
includes 40 percent community-scale open space) and
there were 50 percent subregional-scale open
space, then all the jobs, housing and services
projected for the next two decades could be
accommodated in Balanced Communities within 20
miles of the National Capital Subregion’s
centroid.
In
other words, there is no need, based on the
myth of “space demand” often stated as “all
the closer-in places are built out”, to put any
jobs or housing outside Radius=20 miles in
Virginia. In fact, there is more than twice as
much land necessary for new land uses to
accommodate projected job, housing and service
growth without “development” of a single
acre of Countryside.
That
means there is no imperative based on demand for
space to accommodate any new jobs or housing in
eastern Loudoun or Prince William Counties, much
less in western Loudoun, Stafford, Fauquier,
Spotsylvania Counties and beyond. If you are not
conversant with the facts behind these
realities, please review “Five
Critical Realities that Shape the Future.”
Also
recall where jobs are now located in the
Virginia portion of the National Capital
Subregion and where the vast majority of jobs
are projected to be in 20 years. To reduce the
demand for commutes, jobs need to be close to
housing. This is the first step in creating a
jobs/housing balance on the community scale and
a core strategy to create Balanced Communities.
If you are unfamiliar with job location reality,
please review that issue in “Five
Critical Realities that Shape the Future” and “Where
the Jobs Are,” May 24, 2004. To date, no
one has disputed the facts upon which these
location realities are based.
Next,
look at a map of the northern part of Virginia.
Existing commuter rail (Virginia Railway Express
or VRE) lines extend to Fredericksburg and to
Manassas Airport. At or near the end of these
lines, VRE serves the urban areas of
Fredericksburg-Stafford-Spotsylvania (aka, Greater Fredericksburg) and Manassas-West
Prince William (aka, Greater Manassas). There is
discussion of extending the Greater Manassas VRE
line 15 +/- miles to Bealton in Fauquier County.
To understand the impact of this extension and
the futility of trying to solve the commuting
problem by facility extension, one must come to
grips with the issue of scale.
Within
15 miles of the end of the proposed VRE
extension to Bealton, there are 500,000 +/-
acres. In this area, there are now several urban
enclaves (e.g. Warrenton, Remington, Culpeper),
as well as many hamlets, crossroads and
scattered urban dwellings in addition to the
nonurban land uses that are characteristic of
the Virginia Countryside.
An
area of 500,000 acres is a lot of land. Let’s
look at the prospect of only 10 percent of this
area being developed at minimum urban
densities (10 persons per acre at the community
scale) and the rest of the land being devoted to
uses that preserve the character of the
Countryside. Maximum nonurban densities are one
person per 30 acres +/- with the household
economic activity primarily devoted to nonurban
land uses. Under these conditions, 500,000 acres
would accommodate 185,000 households and 270,000
workers within 15 miles of the terminal station.
The
current VRE lines each carry between 7,500 and
8,000 commuters per day. There is a need for
more rail cars to relieve existing and projected
crowding from traffic growth at the existing
stations. If the capacity of the extended VRE
line were doubled to serve the new extension,
there would be room for 8,000 more commuters,
and there would be 270,000 new workers under the
conditions outlined above. The vast majority of
these workers would commute based on development
in this subregion since 1992. This means that at
the same time under the same conditions, there
also would be 250,000 +/- additional automobile
commuters, most of them driving alone. These
capacity calculations provide a context for
consideration of what might happen if there were
a commuter rail extension.
These
calculations are not unrealistic based on the
approval rate of development proposals, the
amount of land in this area held for urban
land-uses and the refusal of core jurisdictions
to change their land-use controls to facilitate
creation of Balanced Communities.
To
calibrate these numbers, S/PI examined the urban
dwellings developed over the past 12 ½ years
within 15 miles of the three end-of-the-line
stations on the two existing VRE lines.
In
round numbers, for every current rider of VRE
boarding at these six stations, there are 12
to 15 workers who live in houses built over
the past 12 ½ years within 15 miles of these
stations that were advertised and sold at
least in part because of the existence of VRE.
(2)
Commuter
rail is a good idea to connect substantial urban
enclaves (e.g. Greater Fredericksburg and
Greater Manassas) with select activity nodes
(directly or via METRO) within the contiguously
urbanized area of the National Capital Subregion.
It makes no sense at all to extend
commuter rail into the Countryside and surround
the station platform with parking lots. These
extensions and parking lots would serve only a
small fraction of the new workers that they
would induce. The existence of the commuter rail
station will result in more bad location
decisions and subsidize the small percentage of
new home owners that use the service. Some who
now drive 25 miles to get to a station will
drive 10 miles, but with all the others on the
road, it may take them as long to get to the new
station.
Same
Story, Second and Third Verses
Although
it may be easier to see the futility of
transport facility extension with commuter rail,
the same metric applies to expansion of the
METRO in the Dulles Corridor. The pluses and
minuses of extending METRO to Tysons
Corner-Fairfax (aka, Greater Tysons Corner),
Reston-Fairfax (aka, Greater Reston), Washington
Dulles International Airport and especially
beyond Dulles into eastern Loudoun County were
discussed in “Rail-to-Dulles
Realities,” Jan. 5, 2004. (3)
The
extension of METRO to Dulles and beyond has
the same impact as the extension of VRE: It
will induce more “potential commuters” to
buy homes within 15 miles of the stations than
the system can support especially in the peak
hour/peak direction. This underscores the
absolute necessity of creating as much balance
in the stations areas as possible and in
creating Balanced Communities at
Reston-Fairfax and Tysons Corner-Fairfax.
Building
Bus Rapid Transit in the Dulles corridor instead
of extending METRO has been championed by those
who have land and project investments that are
in the corridor tax district but not within the
METRO station-areas. Bus Rapid Transit would be
cheaper than METRO and thus the burden on the
tax district would be less.
On
Jan. 10, 2005, one of the “do not tax me
because METRO will not help me” developers
floated the idea of High Occupancy Toll (HOT)
lanes in the Dulles corridor as a substitute for
METRO in a letter to VDOT and in a
widely-circulated press release.
Our
old friend Chris Walker who is leading this
effort is right that extending METRO is a waste
of money–unless there is Fundamental Change in
station-area settlement patterns. His proposal
for HOT lanes will not waste public
money, but it will cause public inconvenience
and will not improve mobility and access in the
Dulles Corridor. No facility construction can do
that. The HOT lane proposal has attracted
support from true believers who support the “miracle
solution” for better mobility–private
investment in public transport facilities.
S/PI
has previously addressed the problem of
distorting the responsibility of the public to
provide mobility and access by skewing projects
to create attractive private investments in the
context of I-81 “improvements” and the
extension of METRO. (See “The
Perfect Storm,” July 12, 2004.) We
consider the impact of belief that “new money”
(public or private) will help below.
The
commuter rail and METRO expansion scenario can
be retold with respect to the expansion of any
limited-access radial roadway corridor,
including the addition of HOV or HOT lanes.
Unless there is a lack of space in the region’s
core, any of these radial expansions turn out to
do more harm than good. (See “Five
Critical Realities that Shape the Future”,
Dec. 15, 2003.) A useful case study is I-270 in
Maryland or I-66 in the northern part of
Virginia. In fact, the same dynamics apply to
all the possible non-solutions to the problems
of “commuting.”
“Living
here and working there” does not work when
more than a small percentage in any community
commute. A very good indicator of imbalance in
a community is the number of workers who
commute.
Fighting
Over Money
Money
will not solve commuters’ problems. Public (or
private) money dumped on the existing system
will not improve commuting without a Fundamental
Change in human settlement pattern. Throwing
money on the table, especially private money,
will only make matters worse. Who, then, does
dumping money onto the existing system help?
Dumping money onto the existing system helps
Business As Usual: The speculator who wants to
sell land, the developer who wants to sell lots,
the builder who wants to sell houses to “commuters”
and, of course, it helps road builders,
engineers, Realtors and related development
interests. Most of all, it helps politicians so
long as the citizens do not understand the
dynamics of the impact of the Private-Vehicle
Mobility Myth (aka, autonomobility). (See “From
Myth to Law,” Nov. 29, 2004.)
If
citizens, including commuters, understood the
futility of spending to help commuters, New
Urban Regions would be different and much more
pleasant places. There are several realms of
debilitating conflict that would disappear.
This
is a partial list of the money conflicts:
Come
Heres vs. Been Heres. Everyone
has seen examples of this conflict within
unbalanced communities. New folks move in and
find it hard to commute so they say everyone
should pay to upgrade the mobility system. The
Old Timers (including those who moved in last
year before traffic got really bad) ask
why they should be pay for the new residents’
bad location decisions. This conflict is toxic
to building community. But it can get worse.
When
there are more “come heres” than “been
heres,” the “come heres” toss out the old
politicians and replace them with new ones who
will listen to their complaints and promise
solutions. This can deepen the conflict. The “come
heres” must be very careful because if they
vote in a new slate to solve commuters problems
these new politicians may open the floodgates
for their speculator/developer/builder sponsors. This is what happened in Loudoun
County in 1999. Then there is a whole new
generation of “come heres” and a settlement
pattern that is even more dysfunctional, more
degraded and more costly to service.
Core
vs. Fringe .
The next conflict is based on location within
the New Urban Region. Those who live in
communities near the core of New Urban Regions
have different priorities for spending transport
resources than those who camp out in unbalanced
communities on the fringe. This conflict is
sometimes framed in terms of “central city”
vs. “sub”urban interests. With the failure
to understand or define “sub”urban and the
growth in the number of so called “sub”urban
voters as a percentage of population, this
conflict has come to play a central role in both
state and federal politics and negatively
impacts every citizen of large urban systems.
Metropolitans
vs. Countryside Denizens.
It is impossible to conserve and enhance the
Countryside and also build facilities in
outlining locations for commuters. This conflict
is often framed in terms of “Northern Virginia”
vs. Horse Country or “Northern Virginia” vs.
The Valley/Southside/Far Southwest, etc. There
is also Urbanside vs. Countryside conflict in
the Tidewater and Richmond New Urban Regions.
With respect to Greater Richmond, a growing
number of citizens now realize that too many
roadways are their problem, not their “solution.”
(See “The
Shape of Richmond’s Future,” Feb. 16,
2004.)
No
More Taxes vs. Public Obligation to Provide for
Mobility and Access. Providing
mobility and access is expensive. Citizens who
believe there is no personal benefit from
spending their tax dollars jump on the
no-new-taxes bandwagon. This position is in
conflict with those who believe there is a
fundamental government responsibility to provide
access and mobility. This conflict opens the
door to those who see a way to make money by
investing private money in the construction of
transport facilities that turn out not to serve the public
interest. (See “The
Perfect Storm,” July 21, 2004.)
The
smoke and fog caused by the rhetorical storms
emanating from all these conflicts provide a
convenient place to hide for governance
practitioners because they do not have to step
up and address the need for Fundamental Change.
These
conflicts over money would go away, or be
dramatically diminished, if the majority of citizens
realized that more money is not the
solution to commuters’ problems or to
achieving mobility and access in New Urban
Regions.
More
importantly, if there were broad citizen
recognition of this reality, then more citizens
would voluntarily make locational decisions that
were in their enlightened self interest, which
would go a long way toward creating
Balanced Communities in sustainable New Urban
Regions.
Before
we leave the money issue, it must to be made
very clear: There are major transport needs:
Deferred maintenance, replacement, repair, new
facilities, etc. These needs must be addressed
if prosperity and quality of life are to be
preserved in the New Urban Regions and the Urban
Support Regions where all the citizens of
Virginia live and work.
Transport
improvements will cost a lot of money. It is a
fact that building a First World urban society
is a very expensive undertaking. Efficient and
effective transportation and other
infrastructure does not come cheap. This is
especially true since much of what has been
built in the past 50 years is the wrong
infrastructure in the wrong location as
documented in The Shape of the Future.
However,
as long as citizens believe that more money alone
is a “solution,” the citizens and governance
practitioners will never get to the question of
what pattern of settlement is desired by
citizens and what transport system is needed to
provide mobility and access within that pattern
of land use.
There
are tactics that can have immediate beneficial
impact such as the four laid out by Jim Bacon in
“The Road to
Righteousness” (January 4, 2005). There
are long-term strategies that can be effective
such as Property Dynamics outlined by Professor
Joseph Freeman in “Rain
Dance” (Jan. 5, 2005). It is clear that no
one will bother to listen to short-term tactics
or to long-term strategies as long as they
believe they can persuade someone else to hand
them a free lunch.
The
Whale on the Beach
As
clear and simple as the path to functional
settlements and mobility is, no one in public
office, no one who is paid by public agencies to
study, plan, design or build transport
facilities and no one in the Business As Usual
crowd who benefits from belief in the
Private-Vehicle Mobility Myth will breath a word
of the truth. (See “Self
Delusion and Fraud,” June 7, 2004, “The
Perfect Storm,” July 12, 2004, “Spinning
Data, Spinning Wheels,” September 20,
2004.”
Those
who directly benefit from citizens' faith in
facility solutions are not the only ones who are
mum. So are, for the most part, the media
especially the “regional” and “national”
media.
There
may be light at the end of the tunnel. The Fauquier
Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that
serves Warrenton-Fauquier, last week concluded a
six-part series on “living here-working there.”
The publisher and staff examined the history of
traffic congestion in the community and the
causes of the growing woes of commuter. They
pointed out that some believe there are two
basic causes of the current commuter crisis:
citizens making bad location decisions and
governance practitioners failing to balance land
use and transportation.
Through
in-depth interviews, they documented the impact
of commutation on the lives of commuters, their
families and on community institutions and
economics. Last week, in the final installment
titled “Seeking ‘Balance,’” they laid it
on the line:
There
is no solution to the commuting problem so
long as citizens in large numbers believe that
“living here and working there” is a
rational choice. (4)
It
is hard to believe that many of the citizens who
were interviewed and had commuted for decades
still thought that a decision to "live here
and work there" was an intelligent one.
There was one question which was not asked: “Would
you have made the same decision if you had known
that year by year and decade by decade the
conditions would get worse?”
It
is not clear what citizens would do if they
knew that there is no alternative to the
conditions getting worse as long as so many
others make location decisions like theirs?
Would they make better choices without further
incentive, or must there also be a fair
allocation of the full costs of the current
settlement patterns before there is movement
toward Fundamental Change?
If
those citizens who have chosen to live in
functional settlement pattern come to fully
realize that they are subsidizing, through what
they pay for goods and services, those who have
made the decision to locate in
expensive-to-service locations, it may speed up
the process.
Additional
efforts are needed to follow this important
first step. Citizens will need to be told over
and over in many ways and from many perspectives
that commuter rail, wider roads, more money, or
any other "solution" will only make
matters worse unless citizens make different
location decisions. More intelligent location
decisions will shift the market and the public
policy. Developers, builders and governance
practitioners will be forced to provide
functional development components that can
become Balanced Communities.
The
challenge for the media is to get through to
thoughtful citizens who are not already
committed to bad thinking and bad practice and
can see beyond the big house and sleek car
advertising and other forces that drive location
decisions not in their own best
interest.
That
will not be easy. The battle lines are drawn in
the Warrenton-Fauquier community. Letters to the
editor that were written in response to the
first five weeks of coverage on commuting
illustrated elements of the money conflicts
spelled out above.
The
root causes of commuter dysfunction are
exacerbated by failure to understand The
Physics of Gridlock (S/PI, April 2003).
Citizens take even the discussion of a new
facility "fix" as a sign that things
will get better. Thus, individually they
continue to make decisions that are not in their
own longer-term best interest. If citizens do
not understand The Physics of Gridlock, they
will not put pressure on governance
practitioners for Fundamental Change. The
collective response to the need for mobility and
access will be the continuing Business As Usual
failure to balance land use and transportation.
Governance As Usual practitioners will continue
to follow the least-common-denominator
approaches of Business As Usual and Government
As Usual.
Where
to From Here
The
facts about widespread commuting do not support
a position that there should never be any
commuters. There have been commuters since the
second urban enclave was established 10,000 +/-
years ago. There will always be commuters, and
if there are only a few, there would be no
problem. The idea of “commuting” (“living
here, working there”), however, is a perfect
example of the fallacy of composition. What is
good for some is definitely not good for all.
The
threshold problem is that even “talk of
helping commuters” increases bad location
decisions, and it ends up with many more
commuters than can be served by new facilities.
Even if the facility is never built, the
scatteration of urban land uses is already a
reality. This is an example of the power of the
first of the five Natural Laws of Human
Settlement Patterns outlined in The Shape of
the Future: A=PR2.
The
creation of Balanced Communities in
sustainable New Urban Regions is an
imperative. Citizens must start by recognizing
the need to live and work in places that have
a balance of jobs/housing/services/recreation/
amenities.
The
inability to improve commuting and the
importance of Balanced Communities is not just
an interesting issue: It is critical, and it
impacts every aspect of a citizen’s life. Just
last week, the current administration floated a
proposal to help offset tax cuts, pay for the
war in Iraq and reduce the ballooning federal
deficit. It proposed to eliminate many of the
Department of Housing and Urban Development’s
“community” programs.
Changing
the current “community” programs is a fine
idea since they now primarily provide
walking-around-money for large urban
jurisdictions. They do little to create
settlement patterns composed of Balanced
Communities in sustainable New Urban Regions and
do nothing to conserve the Countryside. That
said, there must be strategies at all levels of
government to create Balanced Communities where
commuting is vastly reduced, not the accepted
way to get to work.
--
January 18, 2005
End
Notes
1.
The
dictionary defines a “commuter” as one who
travels back in forth between two places on a
regular basis. It is not limited to a person who
drives back and forth to work alone in a car
over a considerable distance. The discussion in
this column, while focusing on the latter, is
equally applicable to anyone who must resort to
an automobile to get from where they are to
where they want or need to be regardless of
whether the commute is to work or elsewhere.
In
common parlance, the meaning of “commuter”
has morphed over the past 60 years. In the '40s
and '50s, it was one who rode to his office in
Manhattan or The Loop from his leafy urban
enclave in a plush rail car. Then it was the “suburbanite”
stuck in a Los Angeles “Freeway” traffic
jam. Now it is a voter who is in need of money
to improve his journey to work or services.
The
image of mass commuting being a perfectly
rational decision is perpetuated by those who
benefit from citizens deciding to be commuters.
It started after WW I with the auto, oil and
rubber interests. After WWII, road builders,
land developers and house builders became
advocates of commuting. In the last 30 years,
land speculators and municipal officials have
played a key role.
2.
These numbers are approximate, but they pass
the sniff test of relevance. Prince William,
Stafford, Fauquier and Spotsylvania Counties
have grown by 60,000 +/- households and 85,000
+/- workers in the past 12 years. Most of the
new units in these jurisdictions are within 15
miles of an existing VRE station. Most of the
new workers in these jurisdictions commute
outside the jurisdiction to work. Almost all
advertising for new dwellings and image
advertising by the jurisdictions notes the
existence of VRE.
VRE
data and testimony by those favoring VRE
extension indicate that many riders now travel
by car even farther than 15 miles to ride VRE.
The station impact areas fall in eight counties
not counting Fairfax County that has five
stations to serve its residents. The impact
areas also fall in three “regional” council
(nee, planning district commission)
jurisdictions. No public agency has been
interested in a comprehensive study of the VRE
impact.
3.
Since
the “Rail-to-Dulles
Realities” column (Jan.5, 2005) was
published, the proposal for a tax district that
had been killed in late 2003 by the Town of
Herndon has been revived. A truncated proposal
for METRO extension in the Dulles Corridor to an
interim terminal station at Wiehle Avenue in the
eastern part of Reston has been created. The new
proposal still has the downsides of the original
one that are noted in the column and especially
in the column’s End Notes.
4.
The trend of better human settlement pattern
reporting by community newspapers is worth
noting. This column has often noted the
irresponsibility of the major regional media
outlets in reporting on human settlement pattern
and mobility issues. (“Smoke
and Shadows,” Jan. 13, 2003, “Clueless,”
Jan. 19, 2004, and “No
Context,” Feb 2, 2004.
In
mid-December, two reporters–one from a chain
of community weekly newspapers and one from the
dominate regional daily–called S/PI about the
plan amendment for Fairlee in the Vienna-Fairfax
METRO station-area of Fairfax County. Both had
access to the same information.
The
Post story was more of the same “he said, she
said” with no depth or context. S/PI now
refers to this as the “Media-as-Usual”
approach. However, in material dated 15 December
2004 on the web and carried in various editions
of The Connection that week, an article and
sidebar by reporter David Harrison started to
put station-area development in historical
perspective. He did not portray the big picture,
but he started in that direction.
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