[B’ Spokes: Excellent article, I hope the following highlights encourage you to read the whole thing.]
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by Gary Toth
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As a result, construction costs for adding new traffic capacity have been escalating sharply, at exactly the same time that our aging transportation infrastructure demands more attention. States are facing steep financial difficulties, exacerbated by the recent recession, and state legislators are loath to speak of raising taxes. Meanwhile, many roads and bridges built in the highway boom years between the 1940s and 1960s have aged to the point of needing major repairs or replacement, creating a towering backlog of fix-it-first projects. All of these factors make it far less likely that even the most determined state departments of transportation can build their way out of congestion.
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1. Target the “right” capital improvement projects. The first step is to recognize that transportation decisions have a huge impact on community and land-use planning — and vice versa. Major investments in roads should be pursued only in communities and regions with effective land-use plans in place,
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2. Make place-making and far-sighted land use planning central to transportation decisions. Traffic planners and public officials need to foster land-use planning at the community level, which supports a state’s transportation network rather than overloading it.
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3. Shift away from single-use zoning. We must begin to phase out planning regulations that treat schools, affordable housing, grocery stores, and shops as undesirable neighbors.
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4. Get more mileage out of our roads. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century practice of creating connected road networks, still found in many beloved older neighborhoods, can help us beat twenty-first century congestion. Mile for mile, a finely-woven, dense grid of connected streets has much more carrying capacity than a sparse, curvilinear tangle of unconnected cul-de-sacs, which forces all traffic out to the major highways. Unconnected street networks, endemic to post-World War II suburbs, do almost nothing to promote mobility.
5. View streets themselves as places. Streets take up a high percentage of a community’s land — nearly a third of the area of parts of some cities. Yet, under planning policies of the past seventy years, people have given up their rights to this public property.
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6. Spread transportation investment money around. If we continue with the practice of chasing big engineering projects as our first choice in solving congestion, … In contrast, investments in transportation and land use that support choices on travel and shape development to keep our roads congestion-free will focus our limited funding on better uses.
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https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/place-conscious-transportation-policyoldId.20110812182349869
Biking in Baltimore