Transportation Trends and Smart Growth

摘要

I am happy to be here in Baltimore to talk about transportation trends and smart growth. I will start with the need to talk about transportation broadly. We often say we are going to talk about transportation, and we forget about freight and start talking about passengers. If we say we are going to talk about passengers, we talk about commuting instead of other passenger travel, and then we get into a fight about transit versus highways and think we are talking about transportation. My point is there is a whole array of activities and things to think about and how they fit into the context of the discussion. Figure 1 elucidates the first point about the share of total travel that belongs to commuting. Trip growth [these data are from the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS)] has occurred in all of the different trip purposes. Work trip commuting has grown, of course, through the baby boomers. But other areas of activity have grown even more substantially.