Megacity Mobility

Integrated Urban Transportation Development and Management

Zongzhi Li, Adrian T. Moore, Samuel R. Staley

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000518207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Transport et navigation

World population growth and economic prosperity have given rise to ever-increasing demands on cities, transportation planning, and goods movement. This growth, coupled with a slower pace of transportation capacity expansion and deteriorated facility restoration, has led to rapid changes in the transportation planning and policy environment. These stresses are particularly acute for megacities where degradation of mobility and facility performance have reached alarming rates. Addressing these transportation challenges requires innovative solutions.

Megacity Mobility grapples with these challenges by addressing transportation policy, planning, and facilities in a multimodal context. It discusses innovative short- and long-term solutions for meeting current and future mobility needs for the world's most dynamic cities by addressing the influence of urban land use on mobility, 3D spiderweb transportation planning, travel demand management, multimodal transportation with flexible capacity, efficient capacity utilization driven by new technologies, innovative transportation funding and financing, and performance-based budget allocation using asset management principles. It discusses emerging issues, highlights potential challenges affecting proposed solutions, and provides policymakers, planners, and transportation professionals a road map to achieving sustainable mobility in the 21 st century.

Zongzhi Li is a professor and the director of the Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure Research (STAIR) Center at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).

Adrian T. Moore is vice president of policy at Reason Foundation in Washington, D.C., with focuses on privatization, transportation and urban growth, and more.

Samuel R. Staley is the director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center in the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Florida State University.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.1201/9780429345432-1

1.1 Urban mobility in a post-COVID pandemic world

As the world recovers from the far-reaching impacts of COVID-19, the most widespread pandemic in 70 years, nations and their cities will be grappling with an untold number of new realities and adjustments. These changes are likely to fundamentally reshape transportation policy in terms of the technologies used to move from place to place, the ways transportation systems are managed, and evaluations of benefits of long-term investments in transportation infrastructure.

While the full range and depth of these impacts are unknown, some broader parameters are emerging. In high-income nations with freedom of mobility, wealthier households will use their earnings and savings to move to safer locations. Businesses and their managers will take advantage of technology to allow and even encourage more remote work. Schools and education will adopt teaching models to allow more versatility and student-centered learning approaches. Managers in the global economy, and to some extent their leaders and policymakers, will likely adopt more policies that encourage adaptability and use technologies that allow teams to work in more decentralized and physically fragmented locations.

Forrester, a research and business advisory firm, noted in Forbes magazine on October 30, 2020, that “most companies will employ what Forrester calls an ‘anywhere-plus-the-office hybrid’ model” where employees split their time between a remote location, such as a home office, and their company’s main office. They estimate that remote work will be at least three times more prevalent than before the pandemic. A survey of 800 executives by McKinsey and Company in 2020 found that 45% of companies had “significantly accelerated” the “digitization” of “employee interaction and collaboration,” nearly half had significantly or somewhat accelerated the digitization of customer channels, and more than one-third had accelerated the digitization of their supply chains. Upwork, an online job and freelancing platform, estimates that 41.2% of jobs were fully remote during the height of the pandemic and a quarter of the workforce will be fully remote by 2025.

These forecasts, if accurate, would imply 26.2 million workers in the United States alone will be working fully remote. This number (and percentage) is twice as large as those working remotely prior to the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders issued to manage COVID-19. The virus and subsequent pandemic, McKinsey’s analysts note in a separate report, “has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people.”

While few analysts believe that all work will be remote, the technology enabling these shifts to take place has existed for decades. Indeed, doubling the number of fully remote workers was possible only because the technology already existed in many places to accommodate such a dramatic and significant shift in the workplace. Old management practices and path dependence helped keep them at bay. This is no longer the case in an increasing number of urban areas.

Cities and transportation planners ignore these long-term shifts at their peril. Urban areas, particularly large urban areas, will be expected to accommodate more than just remote work. Their transportation systems and infrastructure will also be asked to adjust to more varied workdays, leisure travel, and recreation. These shifts suggest urban transportation systems will have to be more dynamic, more adaptable, and nimbler than ever before. Fortunately, transportation engineers, planners, and policymakers have a wide range of tools and strategies available for addressing the mobility needs of a post-pandemic 21st century. This book explores how these systems can change to meet these demands in a post-pandemic world where technology provides an unprecedented level of freedom and flexibility to workers and households.

1.1.1 Definition of mobility

Mobility, for the purposes of this book, is defined and measured in a straightforward, common sense way: the ability for goods and people to move from Point A to Point B and to be able to reach more Point B’s in a reasonable time. Another overarching theme of this book is that, for all practical purposes, improved mobility is good for society and the economy. The faster goods and people can move to their destinations, the more efficient and productive the economy is and the more choices individuals have for work and personal and social life (Balaker and Staley, 2006; Staley and Moore, 2009). This is particularly true for megacities—cities with populations of about 10 million inhabitants or more, and those likely to reach that population in the next decade or so—on which this book focuses.

While in some circles, particularly in some segments of the professional urban planning community, question the value of improved mobility, the bulk of the empirical evidence suggests that improved mobility enhances community welfare. Criticisms of mobility center around quality-of-life considerations, such as promoting walkable neighborhoods and encouraging social activities. Thus, critics have focused on accessibility—proximity to goods and services—rather than the speed at which these services or goods can be obtained, or the breadth of choices people can enjoy. But accessibility and mobility are not necessarily substitutes for each other. Indeed, mobility improves accessibility.

More problematic is the question of travel mode. Many critics of mobility argue that a policy emphasis on mobility encourages auto travel rather than alternative modes of travel such as walking, bicycles, and transit. Yet, as subsequent chapters will show, the transportation policy question centers on the efficient choice of modes, not the promotion of one to the exclusion of others. The size and growth rates of global megacities, the habits and tastes of urban immigrants, and emerging technologies combine to make various transit modes increasingly important part of good mobility. The key is to ensure travelers and other transportation system users make decisions about travel mode with sufficient information to make individually and socially beneficial choices. Thus, much of the analysis in the following chapters focuses on improving system performance by optimizing the balance of modes and travel choice (Staley, 2012). Moreover, as COVID-19 clearly suggests, future transportation systems need to use technology and planners need to invest in infrastructure with a focus on adaptability and nimbleness unheard of in previous generations.

1.1.2 People versus freight

Ironically, mobility as a transportation system management goal is less controversial with respect to freight. The ability to transport goods and services within and between urban areas is widely recognized as beneficial to the economy and growing communities. Products and goods are produced with the pretext that a market exists in which they can be sold.

Thus, creating a system or network that allows producers to deliver their goods to market is intuitive and obvious. Not surprisingly, the economic benefits are significant. In the United States, for example, the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System (IHS), a limited access highway network connecting metropolitan areas, lowered transportation costs and generated a 15% rate of return on the investment (Shirley and Winston, 2004). Faster shipment of goods meant that inventories could be lower—reducing overhead—even as manufacturing increased to meet rising demand. The U.S. Interstate highways were inspired by Germany’s autobahn and initially justified as a military improvement. The primary benefits, however, have been economics with regional and national impacts. Moreover, these benefits inspired interurban highway investments elsewhere, including China, as its urban areas grew dramatically as a result of international trade from its major port cities of Shanghai, Shenzhen, Ningbo-Zhoushan, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Qingdao, and others. In fact, China has surpassed the U.S. limited access highway system in total mileage in half the time.

But the benefits do not just accrue to manufacturers, freight, and logistics companies. Commuters and people also benefit from improved transportation systems. Transportation planners David Hartgen and Gregory Fields (2009) found significant output and income benefits in U.S. metropolitan areas due to greater accessibility to universities, shopping malls, downtowns, outlying suburbs, and airports from reduced congestion (improved mobility). Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest impacts were for the largest urban areas. Thus, goods movement is not the only beneficiary of faster travel. As business and commerce becomes more and more labor-intensive, the need to move people faster and more efficiently also increases.

Thus, when considering mobility in megacities, freight, commuters (workers), and non- commuting travelers must be considered as part of the same network. Producers need access to markets, but so do consumers. While at times the needs of each traveling segment are specific, the transportation investments, which are necessarily long term, imply impact on the other segments. The megacity of Los Angeles, for example, is a principal transshipment hub for North America, accounting for more than one-third of the imported goods from Asia. Moving goods out of the port onto trucks or on rail requires substantial infrastructure, all of which must be planned and coordinated within an urbanized area of nearly 18 million people and a workforce of over 7 million. However, Los Angeles has unique challenges by North American standards (Feigenbaum, 2015). Without a single economic center, the region is sprawling but also one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the United States.

Los Angeles is not unique in this regard. While megacities are often known to the public by their iconic skylines, buildings, or promenades, such as Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Radio and TV Tower along the Bund, large cities are in fact sprawling urban areas with multiple economic and residential centers (Bertaud, 2018). Neighborhoods are not distributed evenly in density or economic function. These subregions need to be serviced by the transportation system. They require a more decentralized and dynamic view of transportation demand and supply.

1.1.3 Economics of mobility

Transportation planners, engineers, specialists, and policymakers often confront difficulties in explaining the importance of mobility in the growth and development of cities. On one level, the case for mobility is intuitive—if we can move from Point A to Point B faster, we can achieve our goals and objectives more efficiently. And more people can do so simultaneously. However, this intuition is not always born out in the empirical literature or supported by theory in other disciplines. For example, the discipline of urban planning has a significant number of professionals who argue that mobility can be detrimental to healthy urban growth. Most often these arguments focus on what they consider to be the side effects of a mobility-focused policy strategy, such as encouraging the use of automobiles, discouraging the use of public transit, or encouraging less physical activity. Instead, urban planners often focus on accessibility rather than mobility (Prud’homme and Lee, 1999).

However, even in this case, accessibility without mobility leads to a degradation of efficiency, productivity, and quality of life. For example, an emphasis on accessibility presumes that people and businesses can access the range of goods and services they need in a physical and temporal way. In other words, people will not have to walk 45 minutes to get to their jobs, or the products businesses sell can be delivered reliably to avoid shortages. Moreover, many urban planners would also agree that policies that lengthen commuting or destabilize delivery timetables—whether at the manufacturing or distribution level—undermine economic growth.

Why, then, does the empirical literature on mobility, and more specifically traffic congestion, fail to consistently show economic and social benefits? While theoretically the benefits of mobility are intuitive, measuring its economic impacts in urban areas is difficult in practice. For one, most measures of traffic and congestion are regional in scope. Benefits at the subregional level are difficult to identify. Moreover, these benefits may be measured on the local or neighborhood level, but they are rarely aggregated or balanced with changes in transportation network performance. For example, the downtown Yuzhong district (about 0.75 million population) in the main city of Chongqing of about 7 million people (and 32 million people within the municipality’s jurisdiction) struggles with managing commercial and commuter traffic because of its hilly terrain. One solution was to widen a road leading up from a major entry point from a limited access highway that skirted the district, which is a peninsula at the confluence of the Changjiang and Jialing Rivers, and then allow for reverse flow in the middle lane at key commute times. This change significantly increased traffic flow, improving commute reliability and speeding up the delivery of goods and services, but would not have shown up in the regional traffic data.

In addition, cities are dynamic social systems. Some have analogized them to organisms. As they grow, they shift and change, creating both positive and negative impacts. If the net impact of benefits versus costs is positive, the city grows. If the net impact is negative, the city stagnates or declines. An example of a positive externality is captured in the term “agglomeration economies,” which recognizes the economic benefits of companies physically locating near each other (Graham, 2007; Broersma and Van Dijk, 2008). The clustering of businesses and industries has several potential advantages, from drawing from a common labor pool to increasing the likelihood of network impacts from creatives and executives sharing ideas or strategies. Workers also benefit when they are in cities with “thick” labor markets. These labor markets have multiple job opportunities for a wide range of skills, aptitudes, and talents, allowing workers to move from employer to employer in search of better opportunities (and higher pay). These advantages are particularly evident in places such as the tech center of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area or financial centers such as Shanghai, London, or New York City.

Similarly, well-functioning transportation networks provide critical benefits that improve economic efficiency and productivity. London’s rail transit system, the Tube, is crucial to managing passenger travel in the United Kingdom’s central economic hub. Hong Kong’s rail transit system allows the city to manage very high residential and commercial densities.

In contrast, urban areas with poorly functioning transportation networks lessen urban economic growth and productivity. Most economists and planners recognize that traffic c...