Will Bikes Eliminate the Need for Big-Ticket Highway & Transit Projects?

I like innovation. Creative thinking to me reflects intellectual vigor. When we become afraid of change, we age all too quickly.

Miami, a beacon of youthful vigor in a state with the opposite reputation, is the site of an idea that takes poorly-used space and makes room for one of the most sustainable transportation modes available: bikes. The proposal, which unsurprisingly comes from consultants from the Dutch Cycling Embassy, is to build a linear park and bike path under Metrorail elevated transit in the southwest corner of town. This Metrorail line already has a pockmarked, bumpy, sorry excuse for a path underneath it called the M-Path. However, like so many similar asphalt afterthoughts built by DOTs in the latter part of the 20^th century, it’s hardly used. The new path, entitled the Underline, would seek to recreate the same allure and excitement that the High Line created in Manhattan in these early years of the 21^st century, except the addition of a proper bike route makes it far more useful.

A usable, attractive corridor is bound to attract economic growth. Witness the sustained boom taking place in the intown areas of Atlanta, particularly near the still-unfinished Beltline. The Beltline may seem to be a bit grandiose, with its promise of light rail transit, redeveloped neighborhoods, and multiuser paths. Expensive light rail projects are getting harder to fund as infrastructure spending throughout the US withers under conservative pressure.  For example, Arlington, Virginia, surrendered to such antipathy when it chose to kill a streetcar project in a low-income corridor after strenuous objections from right-leaning county board members, Libby Garvey and John Vihstadt.  Luckily for Atlanta, the economic benefits of the Beltline are already coming in with only multiuser paths in place in some areas.

That raises a rather unsettling question for transportation and city planners: is the key to neighborhood vigor and economic growth a combination of low-impact, low-cost transportation infrastructure and parks? If the High Line, Underline, and Beltline are all successful in injecting vitality into close-in neighborhoods, with the latter two offering new connectivity, should we re-task funding away from elaborate road and transit projects designed to expensively move people between outlying areas and the central cores of metropolitan areas? If a rail transit system is too much for Arlington to stomach, for instance, should the county look to a long corridor of bike paths and parks paralleling the route of the defunct streetcar as a replacement?

Some signs of a new trend in this direction are starting to appear. In the early 1990s, the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) finally realized its collective dream of building an expressway through the heart of north Atlanta after years of opposition during Atlanta’s Freeway Revolt. Georgia 400 was initially built as a toll road with an expensive MARTA heavy rail line in the center. The road recently lost its tolls (cue massive backups).

In a glaring oversight, GDOT chose not to include a bike path alongside the new road, as Virginia’s DOT had done years earlier along I-66 inside the Beltway (the Custis Trail).  GDOT is now going a little way towards rectifying that error by donating right-of-way along part of GA 400 to Atlanta’s PATH organization. PATH is part of a consortium constructing a multiuser path through north Atlanta’s Buckhead community that will connect to the Atlanta Beltline. The beginnings of a citywide bike network are starting to form.

That this is occurring in Georgia is positively earthshaking. This is the same state that gives no money at all to Atlanta’s MARTA transit system. That’s not to say that the Republican governor, Nathan Deal, has turned his back on that most traditional of congestion relief measures, the widening of urban expressways. Years of repeated failures of such projects to alleviate congestion have yet to have an impact on the governor’s transportation policy. However, big changes often have small beginnings.

In this era of diminishing budgets, more regions should look to these innovative ideas from Miami and Atlanta. It’s better to build something cheap that will keep its full functionality many years after completion than waste time on projects that will never get off the ground (Arlington Streetcar) or will ultimately fail to relieve congestion (any given urban highway expansion). If the Underline and Beltline can be completed and grow in popularity, as well as economic impact, the consultants at the Dutch Cycling Embassy will get a lot busier.

Traffic Is Water, and Other Bad Assumptions in Transportation Planning

Here’s a question for you to consider: if a road is congested, should it be widened? If you answered yes, can you name a major urban highway widening project that didn’t revert within five years to the same average traffic speed as before the expansion?

Widening a road to alleviate congestion is an intuitively obvious solution to most Americans.  Generations of planners reinforced this thinking when they told Americans that traffic is like water: if you have too much flowing in a channel, you need to widen it. 

You can see this attitude in play all over the US. Whenever a road gets busy, planners and commuters look for ways to widen it, no matter what the effect may be on communities abutting the road. Arlington, Virginia homeowners along Interstate 66 near Washington are constantly under threat of a major widening because commuters further out think a wider road will speed up their drive times.

Too bad it wouldn’t work. Atlanta widened the Downtown Connector (I-75/85 from just north of downtown to just north of Atlanta Airport) from six lanes to twelve lanes in the 1980s. HOV lanes were added in the 1990s. Guess how much faster traffic goes today versus the 1980s? If you answered “no faster”, pat yourself on the back and send your resume to your nearest DOT. 

The ever-expanding Downtown Connector in Atlanta, GA. Look, in the distance you can see it growing AGAIN! Photo courtesy of Connor Carey/Wikipedia.

Need another example? Try this: a project infamous for its $15 billion cost is The Big Dig, or Central Artery Project, in Boston. The Big Dig’s main source of fame is the removal of an ugly elevated highway that divided the city, but it’s also supposed to provide some congestion relief. However, the Boston Globe reports that commutes are actually worse than ever with travel times actually doubling several years after completion. Removing one traffic bottleneck, as in this case, does no good for the bottlenecks that remain and may exacerbate the problem by tempting more drivers onto the roads. 

One of the tunnels built for the Big Dig in Boston, MA. Photo courtesy of Rene Schwietzke/Wikipedia

This demonstrates the basic fallacy with the traffic-as-water theory: water is not a rational actor. Water can’t be tempted. Likewise, if water’s flow is too great, it can’t opt to move its source closer to its destination. Nor, for that matter, can it move its destination closer to its source. 

Human beings do this all the time. That’s why home prices in close-in, walkable neighborhoods around large urban centers throughout the US held steady or increased in recent years, while prices in far-flung neighborhoods melted down faster than a Japanese nuclear power plant. 

In the Washington, DC area, home foreclosures in the suburbs form what some real estate experts describe as a “ring of fire”. The center is nice and cool---at least, the fires of foreclosure don’t rage there. But in the outer counties such as Loudoun in northern Virginia, empty McMansions abound. Derelict subdivisions are seldom viewed by young buyers as great places to bring up families. 

The inner suburbs and downtown areas were already enjoying resurgence thanks to their vastly shorter commute times, so their vibrancy was a natural lure to these new homeowners. Why live in a depressed area a long drive from work when you can live in a fun place that allows you a multitude of commuting options?

So, the debate is settled: there’s no more need to expand transportation options to the suburbs because they are emptying out, right? Well, not everyone agrees with that assessment. Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, thinks that the migration into the cities could reverse once the economy recovers. The flight to the suburbs that outweighed central city growth in every decade since the 1920s would restart once mortgages became obtainable.

As a result, some planners think we should expend resources expanding suburban commuter options just as we did in the past, even if the assumptions behind that decision appear uncertain. But is it smart to spend billions of dollars on a scenario that, while once was almost a certainty, seems to be fading into history?

If we look to other developed nations, such as those in the European Union or Japan, where do we see the most expensive real estate? Inevitably, it’s in the urban core where transport links are the most robust. The low-income residential areas are located on the distant periphery. 

Perhaps that’s the hidden story here: America’s urban development isn’t taking a pause from its normal pattern of urban rot and suburban boom. It’s resetting to what is the normal global pattern: popular cores with declining demand further out. If so, America’s planning meme is in need of a reboot, or else a lot of money will be wasted.