Book Reviews: The Urban
Transport Crisis in Europe and North America and Transit Villages in the 21st Century
Citations: Pucher, John and Christian
Lefevre. The Urban Transport Crisis in Europe and North America. London: MacMillan
Press Ltd., 1996. Pg. xv and 226.
Bernick, Michael and Robert Cervero. Transit Villages in the
21st Century. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. Pg xii and 388.
Reviewed by: Gregory L. Thompson,
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
32306-2280, February, 1999
Published in Transportation Research A, 32:8, pp621-646, 1988.
Posted with permission.
Growing congestion and worsening air quality top political agendas throughout the
developed world. Evoking less universal popular concern, motor vehicle intimidation of
pedestrians and cyclists still arouses popular ire in many urban areas, as well. The two
books reviewed here examine in different ways the nature of these growing
transportation-related problems, public policy responses to them, and the consequences of
those policies.
John Pucher, professor of urban planning at Rutgers University (and by choice,
auto-free), and Christian Lefevre, associate professor of urban studies at the Institut
d'Urbanisme de Paris, have compiled a deeply researched, international comparison of urban
transportation-related trends in democratic, developed societies. The compilation is all
the richer for its inclusion of stable democracies as well as those emerging from years of
dictatorship. Trends include absolute traffic by mode of transportation, transportation
modal share, measures of congestion, safety statistics, air quality descriptions, and
depictions of settlement patterns. The authors also document trends in transportation
investment, subsidies, taxation, control of individual behavior, and control of corporate
behavior. Although they offer some degree of prognosis and prescriptive remedies, they
largely leave it to the reader to make his or her own prognoses from what they have
presented.
Pucher and Lefevre begin their work with their principal finding, corroborating what
many economists have said for years. People use increasing incomes to choose lower density
settlement patterns and ever-greater quantities of mostly automobile transportation. Not
one of the countries that they examine suggests otherwise, with the exception that bicycle
modal share has continued to increase in the Netherlands. A recent article of Pucher's
shows that bicycle modal split also is increasing substantially in former West Germany,
but even in the Netherlands and former West Germany, motorization and decentralization are
proceeding rapidly [footnote 1]. The universality of such experience across a wide
spectrum of cultural and historical traditions suggests that no democratic government can
craft policies to stop or reverse the experience of decentralization and motorization so
long as incomes continue to increase, and the increases are spread across a large spectrum
of society.
There would be no great harm from this finding, if it were not for one other Pucher
and Lefevre's universal findings. This is that in all of the countries examined,
increasing motorization and decentralization produce increasingly severe problems of air
pollution and congestion, and these have become significant political issues in most
democracies. They also found that no government policy, whether it is investment in public
transportation, investment in roads, traffic calming, traffic demand management, or
traffic supply management, makes much difference in reversing adverse trends in air
pollution or congestion. Government regulation of auto manufacturing companies has
resulted in automobiles that are significantly more fuel-efficient, safer, and cleaner
than models of several years ago, but rapid increases in per capita vehicle kilometers
traveled are nullifying efficiency gains in all countries. The only policy that might be
able to reverse the adverse impacts of motorization and decentralization is congestion
pricing, but Pucher and Lefevre find that congestion pricing (which is different from road
tolling) is so universally unpopular that no democratic government can be expected to
embrace it.
While government policy cannot stop motorization or decentralization, Pucher and
Lefevre examine the extent to which policy can make a significant differences in the rate
of trends or in mitigating their consequences. Generally the authors' investigation
disappointed them even here, but they did find some encouraging signs.
One policy that makes a difference is in the area of safety for non-motorized
transport users. Pucher and Lefevre find that in all of the countries that they examined,
safety of transportation users is a significant issue. Some governments have addressed the
issue for motorists through heavy investments to improve road geometry and mandates to
auto manufacturers for safer vehicular design. These policies have been successful in
lowering fatality and injury rates for motorists, but not for pedestrians and bicyclists,
whose safety deteriorates as motorization increases. Fewer governments have addressed
pedestrian and cyclist safety, but those that have done so with better sidewalks, lanes
for cycles, traffic calming, and pedestrian precincts have met with considerable success.
Another difficult issue is the financing and relevancy of public transportation. In
every country studied escalating public transit deficits (in part induced by motorization)
coupled with the failure of transit systems to increase accessibility to suburban places
that people want to go are significant political issues. Governments everywhere find it
difficult to fund increasing transit deficits and capital improvement plans put forth by
transit bureaucracies. The only policies that indicate some ability for containing
deficits or improving productivity are various approaches to privatization, but complete
bus privatization as adopted in Great Britain resulted in approximately a 30 percent loss
in bus ridership because of substantial fare increases and loss of coordinated services.
Privatization in Great Britain also failed to bring investment into the country's bus
systems at a rate sufficient to maintain, let alone expand, capital assets. A model of
privatization used in Scandinavia (which is not elaborated upon) involving government
agencies specifying route structures, fare levels, and coordinated schedules but
contracting out everything else offers more promise, according to Pucher and Lefevre.
The countries in their study include Germany (including the former West and East
Germany), France, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (before the
break-up), Canada, and the United States. These countries embrace a wide range of
historical and cultural tradition as well as government policy. Governments in all of the
countries examined except Canada and the United States have levied high gasoline taxes for
years, generally much higher than expenditures for roadways. In other areas, though, even
the countries with high gas taxes differ in their investment, taxation, and subsidization
policies. At one extreme Germany and the Netherlands have extremely high rural and urban
population densities and cultures that value urban heritages. Since the 1970s both
countries also have developed strong environmental movements. Consequently governments in
both countries have resisted most transportation policies involving heavy urban
destruction, while they have invested heavily in their tram, bus, metro, and suburban
transit systems as well as traffic calming and non-motorized transportation
infrastructure. More recently, both countries' governments also have accommodated
decentralization by coordinating public transportation investments with planned suburban
developments of high population density, contained by large tracts of agricultural and
forest land. At the same time though, both countries are wealthy, and a wide spectrum of
the population embraces the automobile wholeheartedly, resulting in among Europe's highest
auto ownership rate (in Germany's case, 471 cars per 1,000 population in 1992) and highest
level of auto usage. In Germany, while public transport travel doubled between 1950 and
1992, auto usage increased 20-fold. Currently autos account for about 53 percent of travel
in former West Germany, transit accounts for about 11 percent, while bicycles account for
10 percent and walking for 27 percent. Modal shares for all of the non-auto modes (except
bicycles) are declining, albeit slowly. Bicycle use increased from about 7 percent of
total travel to 10 percent between 1970 and 1990. Auto use is lower in former East
Germany, but it is rising very fast, while transit use and walking are plummeting
relatively and absolutely.
At the other extreme of the spectrum is the United States, with low population and
employment densities, high average incomes, little popular regard for its urban heritage,
weak government (particularly in regard to land use control), strong racial divisions and
economic inequities, and the longest legacy of mass motorization of any of the world's
societies. The United States is the only country in the world that has attempted to adapt
its metropolitan regions to rely almost wholly on highway transportation through the
construction of massive motorways designed for local travel, while it almost universally
provided subsidized parking and before 1970 allowed its public transportation systems to
decay. Public policy also taxed highway use far lower than its social costs and provided
subsidies for low-density living. Around 1970 new policies were added to the old that
attempted to revitalize old central cities and public transportation systems. The latter
have received surprisingly large proportions of total transportation expenditures since
the mid-1970s, but to little avail. Transit ridership has remained stagnant at very low
levels, transit modal share has continued to decline, while highway use has continued to
escalate at alarming rates, accompanied by rising congestion and declining air quality.
The contrast between Germany and the Netherlands on the one hand and the United States
on the other suggests that while general motorization and decentralization trends are
similar, their different manifestations can make a difference in social welfare. One might
attribute the two extreme outcomes to population density, but the experience of Canada,
which has lower density than the United States but development and travel behavior trends
closer to those in Germany, suggests otherwise. Pucher and Lefevre believe that policies
such as full social costing (including parking) of motor vehicles, cessation (or never
doing so) of efforts to build urban motorways, construction of pedestrian precincts and
bicycle facilities, the accommodation of decentralization trends into denser residential
and employment nodules centered around transit systems that are themselves reoriented to
serving the suburb-to-suburb market, all can make a positive difference in the quality of
life. Pucher and Lefevre also are equally pessimistic about democratic societies
implementing packages of such policies where they do not already exist.
Pucher's and Lefevre's examination of public policy and travel
behavior is largely macro in scope. In contrast, Michael Bernick and Robert Cervero offer
a micro-scale analysis of how one type of public policy affects travel behavior. Bernick
is an attorney, member of the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District,
and Co-Director of the University of California at Berkeley National Transit Access
Center. Cervero is professor of City and Regional Planning at University of California at
Berkeley and Co-Director of the U.C. Berkeley National Transit Access Center. The policy
that Bernick and Cervero advocate is government promotion of dense concentrations of
housing and jobs around transit stations in the United States, which they call transit
villages. Although such a policy has not been widely adopted in the United States, Bernick
and Cervero argue that if it were, it would alter travel behavior significantly. They
promote transit villages as the most effective policy for lessening congestion and
improving air quality that is politically acceptable. Congestion pricing, they concede
(along with Pucher and Lefevre), would be more effective but is not politically
acceptable. Transit villages are a second-best alternative.
Bernick and Cervero lay out their argument in three parts. Their
evidence includes results of numerous funded research projects on relationships between
urban form and travel behavior. Included are the authors' surveys of residents and
employers near rail stations in a wide variety of areas. Some of the research has been
conducted under the auspices of the Transit Cooperative Research Program, an on-going
research program of the Transportation Research Board and the American Public Transit
Association. Their evidence also includes descriptions of many of the efforts at
integrating residential and commercial development with rail transit stations in the
United States.
Part One, including two chapters, introduces the concept of the
transit village for application in contemporary United States. Borrowing concepts from the
new urbanists Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck, Bernick and
Cervero define a transit village as a mixed-use cluster of housing within walking distance
(about 0.4 kilometers) of a plaza defined by a rail transit station and a commercial and
civic core. The walking distance constraint limits transit villages to encompassing about
65 hectares. Such areas could house upwards of 4,000 households if developed mostly for
residences and perhaps 2,000 households and 5,000 jobs if developed for both residences
and regional employment. Either orientation would contain community-serving shops and
offices, as well, all in an attractive setting that would appeal to middle class
suburbanites. Unlike Calthorpe, who outlines a system of transit-oriented development
blanketing an urban area, built around bus lines as well as rail lines, Bernick and
Cervero consider transit villages only in the context of rail transit stations. Also,
unlike Calthorpe, who describes some transit villages as having high levels of regional
employment, Bernick and Cervero's work focuses on the blend of transit villages with
mostly residences and little regional employment, though some of their case studies from
Washington, D.C. are in fact large-scale employment centers [footnote 2].
Bernick and Cervero argue that transit villages retrofitted into
low density sprawl environments would lessen traffic congestion and air pollution by
enticing residents out of automobiles. Transit villages also would break down class and
race barriers of the post-World War II auto-oriented suburb. "Today's auto-oriented
suburbs have isolated people by age, class, and race---the young from the old, the rich
from the poor, whites from blacks. [In transit villages] people are more likely to feel a
sense of belonging and an attachment to community (page 6)." Chapter 2 summarizes
several historical precedents to transit villages from the period before 1920, when
streetcar lines and commuter train stations influenced urban form.
Part Two presents what the authors call a theory of transit
villages. Chapter 3 summarizes the rise, fall, and what the authors claim as the
renaissance of rail transit in the United States. While their description of the rise and
fall is based on transit demand, their definition of the renaissance is based on transit
supply; namely, the huge infusion of public funds into the U.S. transit industry since
1970. Their argument is that rail transit has been politically popular since the 1970s,
rail station areas, particularly those with parking lots, present a great opportunity for
redevelopment, and if redeveloped as transit villages, the previous parking lots could
greatly increase transit patronage. Chapters 4 and 5 present arguments that transit
villages would in fact increase transit patronage. Chapter 6 is an analysis of demand for
transit villages based on several different types of analysis. These include visual
preference tests of simulated transit villages, and analysis of impacts that BART has had
on rents and development. The latter are from the original BART impact studies and the
BART-at-20 studies, the latter conducted by the authors and others.
Part Three is a survey of transit village initiatives in various
parts of the United States, while Part Four is a description of land use and
transportation relationships in three urban regions with high transit usage: Stockholm,
Tokyo, and Singapore. Both Parts Three and Four focus on forces that have either brought
transit villages into existence or have stymied their development. Both also further
examine the impact of transit villages on travel behavior. Finally, Part Five is the
conclusion.
A major problem with this work is that messages imparted by its
text are not supported by its evidence. The heart of Bernick's and Cervero's argument that
transit villages can reduce auto use is based on their surveys showing that residents of
dwellings within walking distance of rail stations use transit much more than those who
must drive to rail stations. In the San Francisco bay area, for example, about 47 percent
of working residents of apartments and townhomes within easy pedestrian access of the Bay
Area Rapid Transit District's suburban Pleasant Hill station use BART to go to work
compared to only about 16 percent of the larger community of Pleasant Hill, and five
percent for the suburban Bay Area. Bernick and Cervero found similar relationships in the
Washington, D.C. metro area, and in other California regions with rail transit (though
lower percentages in some of the other California systems). From this evidence, Bernick
and Cervero conclude that once a suburbanite moves into a transit village, he or she will
drive less and use transit more.
There are several problems with this reasoning. First, their
premise overlooks another likely explanation for the higher transit modal split of transit
village-like development. This is that transit villages attract already-committed transit
users, not only from suburban areas, but also from central cities. The authors' survey of
one of the most successful of the emerging transit villages, Pleasant Hill, supports the
latter possibility. It shows that most of the village's residents previously lived in
central San Francisco and Oakland rather than auto-oriented suburban areas (pp. 192-193).
Similarly, their discussion of transit-oriented development in the Washington, D.C. area
quotes a developer of an as-of-yet unbuilt project who said he was pitching the
development to three groups. The first group is high-income singles living in central
Washington but wanting to move to a more crime-free environment that retains some urban
amenities (p. 233). If future transit villages lure people away from central cities rather
than from sprawling suburbs, the transit village concept could further induce regional
decentralization and lower transit use. (A person living in a central city generally could
reach many more important destinations using transit than a resident of a suburban transit
village.)
Another implication that the authors draw from their surveys is
that the conversion of rail transit park-and-ride lots to residential transit villages
would increase transit patronage. Again, their data do not support this point. The
authors' figures (pp. 80-81) show that a suburban BART station serves an area of about 90
square miles. The average density is about 3,000 people per square mile, and the work trip
transit mode split is about five percent. These figures should produce 6,750 transit work
trip passengers per day for the station. [footnote 3]. The authors imply that if the
parking lot were redeveloped into a transit village patronage would rise , but their data
indicates that if would fall substantially. If the parking lot were redeveloped into a
residential transit village, about 4,000 households would be within walking distance of
the station. With a rail transit work trip mode split of 47 percent, the 4,000 households
would produce only about 1,880 daily transit work trips. [footnote 4]. This is not to say
that transit villages are bad for transit, but they should not replace park-and-ride lots
that serve residential areas.
The principle problem is that even at high densities, a
relatively small number of households can be located within walking distance of rail
stations. Because Bernick and Cervero fail to address this problem, much of their argument
loses force. This point comes into focus when Bernick and Cervero refer to Anthony Downs'
criticism of transit oriented residential units in Stuck in Traffic. Downs, an economist
at the Brookings Institution, dismisses the ability of the residential-oriented transit
village concept to reduce traffic congestion or reduce air pollution in the United States
by more than a few percent. His reasoning is that the total area within a quarter mile of
rail transit stations is such a small percentage of total built urban areas in almost all
large U.S. metropolitan regions that no matter how the station areas are developed, their
cumulative impact would make no noticeable difference in metropolitan travel behavior.
[footnote 5]. Rather than defuse this argument, Bernick and Cervero at the end of Chapter
5 agree with it, after presenting their own calculations showing its truth when applied to
the San Francisco Bay Area. The authors then further weaken their case by stating that
transit villages need to work in conjunction with other public policies, such as assessing
motorist the full social costs of driving. This unfortunate admission undercuts the very
purpose of their book, which is offering a second-best alternative to the social pricing
of auto travel.
Bernick's and Cervero's presentation of case studies of transit
village implementation also presents discord between text and data. Their Chapter 6
examines the impact of transit stations on land markets, purporting to show that transit
stations strongly impact housing and employment markets, particularly in the Bay Area.
Underlying statistics do not support the claims. Table 6.1, for example, purports to show
that transit oriented housing has fewer autos than housing distant from stations, but the
results are statistically insignificant, and in any event, the households farther from the
station have fewer autos per household member. Figure 6.10 shows rent premiums for housing
near BART stations compared to that farther away, and again the results are insignificant.
The discussion of a hedonic model of rent premiums concludes with, "The finding that
both proximity to transit and project compactness get capitalized into higher rents bodes
well for future of transit-oriented developments in the Bay Area and potentially
elsewhere," (p. 160), but the note 46 supporting this statement reveals that neither
of the parameters of variables measuring distance to BART stations and project compactness
are statistically significant. At the end of the chapters, the authors finally admit that
BART has had little impact on land markets except in downtown San Francisco, and that if
transit villages are to blossom, planners have got to intervene.
The reader then turns the page to Part Three to examine case
studies of planner intervention. Many of these are proposals that have not been
implemented. Some are actual developments that look very unlike the models that the
authors presented. There is not one transit village presented situated on a working
transit route. According to Bernick and Cervero, Pleasant Hill has come closest in the Bay
Area to becoming a transit village, but the authors conclude that Pleasant Hill lacks a
village atmosphere. In Pleasant Hill politics have defeated proposals for a more complete
development, and elsewhere in the United States politics have defeated ambitious as well
as relatively minor proposals for redevelopment of existing rail transit station areas.
NIMBYism and political opposition from those with vested interests in already-existing
commercial and residential development seem to be the main culprits. Poor real estate
markets in high-crime areas also appear to have brought other proposals to naught.
Projects that have come to partial fruition have done so because of local government or
transit agency leadership (sometimes prodded by community advocates) in assembling land
and making it available to developers at below-market prices. There is one proposal
(Fruitvale on BART) where community support is helping implementation in a depressed inner
city area, but most successful projects have been built in areas where there already were
active real estate markets and where citizen opposition to development was low. The
results of Part Three also suggest that the size of the transit network and the number of
destinations that can be reached by it have some bearing on transit oriented developments
coming to fruition, though Bernick and Cervero only hinted at this point several times.
Overall, Bernick and Cervero go well beyond their evidence in
overselling a concept, that may none-the-less have some merit. The evidence in Transit
Villages suggests that local government policy (and subsidies) can make a difference in
stimulating denser residential and commercial development with pedestrian orientation, and
that some consumers are willing to buy into such developments in safe areas with active
real estate markets. Transit systems are not necessary for such developments, but the
larger and more complex the transit system is, the more likely it is that developers will
be interested in cooperating with transit agencies in transit village construction. Land
that transit agencies have assembled around stations may offer attractive sites for
transit villages if it is situated in safe areas with active real estate markets, but
ridership gains may be less than anticipated, particularly if villages displace parking
lots. In a more promising vein, the evidence also hints that a network of villages, some
developed as regional employment centers linked by a network of bus as well as rail
routes, such as Calthorpe suggests, could have a synergistic effect on transit patronage.
Unless congestion pricing is adopted, however, transit villages in the United States offer
no promise for reduction in regional traffic congestion or air pollution, thus
corroborating Pucher's and Lefever's work.
Footnotes:
1. Pucher, John. "Bicycling Boom in Germany: A Revival Engineered by Public
Policy." Transportation Quarterly. Vol. 51 (Fall 1997): 31-46.
2. Peter Calthorpe. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American
Dream. New York. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.
3. 90 square miles times 3,0000 people per square mile yields a population of 270,000.
At two people per worker, we have 135,000 workers, and at a modal split of five percent,
we get 6,750 morning work trip BART riders.
4. 4,000 households would yield about 4,000 workers at two residents per worker, and a
modal share of 47 percent would yield 1,880 morning work trip BART riders.
5. Anthony Downs. Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion
(Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992): Appendix D.
Last modified: March 18, 1999