Land Use and Transportation Interactions

摘要

In starting with the "You can't pave your way out of congestion" notion, I was asked to talk about the interface between land use and transportation. Alan Pisarski started by talking about transportation. Gregg Logan then talked about land use. I'm talking about the two together and the way they interact, which makes it very hard to build roads fast enough to keep up with demand. The first time I heard a department of transportation secretary say that was in 1991—it was an admission of defeat. That was in Florida, where the growth of vehicle miles of travel (VMT) was much faster than the growth of lane miles of highway. Even though Florida had passed a couple of gasoline tax increases, we were falling further and further behind, and the secretary made that bold statement. The Texas Transportation Institute publishes congestion data every year. One measure is called the travel time index, the ratio of travel time during the peak period to travel time under free-flowing or off-peak conditions. For all 75 areas in their database, congestion was worse in 2000 than it was in 1982.