The Transit Metropolis

A Global Inquiry

Robert Cervero

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781597269315
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Around the world, mass transit is struggling to compete with the private automobile, and in many places, its market share is rapidly eroding. Yet a number of metropolitan areas have in recent decades managed to mount cost-effective and resource-conserving transit services that provide respectable alternatives to car travel. What sets these places apart?In this book, noted transportation expert Robert Cervero provides an on-the-ground look at more than a dozen mass transit success stories, introducing the concept of the "transit metropolis"—a region where a workable fit exists between transit services and urban form. The author has spent more than three years studying cities around the world, and he makes a compelling case that metropolitan areas of any size and with any growth pattern—from highly compact to widely dispersed—can develop successful mass transit systems.Following an introductory chapter that frames his argument and outlines the main issues, Cervero describes and examines five different types of transit metropolises, with twelve in-depth case studies of cities that represent each type. He considers the key lessons of the case studies and debunks widely held myths about transit and the city. In addition, he reviews the efforts underway in five North American cities to mount transit programs and discusses the factors working for and against their success. Cities profiled include Stockholm; Singapore; Tokyo; Ottawa; Zurich; Melbourne; Mexico City; Curitiba, Brazil; Portland, Oregon; and Vancouver, British Columbia.The Transit Metropolis provides practical lessons on how North American cities can manage sprawl and haphazard highway development by creating successful mass transit systems. While many books discuss the need for a sustainable transportation system, few are able to present examples of successful systems and provide the methods and tools needed to create such a system. This book is a unique and invaluable resource for transportation planners and professionals, urban planners and designers, policymakers and students of planning and urban design.

PART ONE

THE CASE FOR THE TRANSIT METROPOLIS

A transit metropolis is a region where a workable fit exists between transit services and urban form. In some cases this means compact, mixed-use development well suited to rail services, and in others it means flexible, fleetfooted bus services well suited to spread-out development. What matters is that transit and the city co-exist in harmony.

Part One of this book introduces the transit metropolis as a paradigm for sustainable regional development. Four classes of transit metropolises are identified, as are international case studies in each class. The case is made for the transit metropolis in light of the serious threats posed by increasing worldwide automobile dependence. People prize the mobility and freedom of movement conferred by the car. Because individual choice behavior—the desire to drive when and where one wants—is accompanied by increasingly high social and environmental costs, however, a change in course is more imperative now than ever. The transit metropolis, when complemented by other initiatives, such as the introduction of hefty motoring surcharges and smart technologies for transit, can help contain traffic congestion, reduce pollution, conserve energy, and promote social equity. This proposition is supported by the twelve case studies from around the world presented in this book. Part One’s purpose is to build the case that alternatives to contemporary patterns of urbanization and mobility are very much needed, and that as a model for how to plan and design future cities and transit systems, the transit metropolis holds considerable promise.

Chapter 1

Transit and the Metropolis: Finding Harmony

Public transit systems are struggling to compete with the private automobile the world over. Throughout North America, in much of Europe, and even in most developing countries, the private automobile continues to gain market shares of motorized trips at the expense of public transit systems. In the United States, just 1.8 percent of all person trips were by transit in 1995, down from 2.4 percent in 1977 and 2.2 percent in 1983.¹ Despite the tens of billions of dollars invested in new rail systems and the underwriting of more than 75 percent of operating expenses, ridership figures for transit’s bread-and-butter market—the work trip—remain flat. Nationwide, 4.5 percent of commutes were by transit in 1983; by 1995, this share had fallen to 3.5 percent.

The declining role of transit has been every bit as alarming in Europe, prompting some observers to warn that it is just a matter of time before cities like London and Madrid become as automobile-dominated as Los Angeles and Dallas. England and Wales saw the share of total journeys by transit fall from 33 percent in 1971 to 14 percent in 1991.² Since 1980, transit’s market shares of trips have plummeted in Italy, Poland, Hungary, and former East Germany. Eroding market shares have likewise been reported in such megacities as Buenos Aires, Bangkok, and Manila.

Numerous factors have fueled these trends. Part of the explanation for the decline in Europe has been sharp increases in fares resulting from government deregulation of the transit sector. Public disinvestment has left the physical infrastructure of some transit systems in shambles in Italy and parts of Eastern Europe. However, transit’s decline has been more an outcome of powerful spatial and economic trends that have been unfolding over the past several decades than of overt government actions (or inaction). Factors that have steadily chipped away at transit’s market share worldwide include rising personal incomes and car ownership, declining real-dollar costs for motoring and parking, and the decentralization of cities and regions. Of course, these forces have partly fed off each other. Rising wealth and cheaper motoring, for instance, have prompted firms, retailers, and households to exit cities in favor of less dense environs. Spread-out development has proven to be especially troubling for mass transit. With trip origins and destinations today spread all over the map, mass transit is often no match for the private automobile and its flexible, door-to-door, no-transfer features.

Suburbanization has not crippled transit systems everywhere, however. Some cities and regions have managed to buck the trend, offering transit services that are holding their own against the automobile’s ever-increasing presence, and in some cases even grabbing larger market shares of urban travel. These are places, I contend, that have been superbly adaptive, almost in a Darwinian sense. Notably, they have found a harmonious fit between mass transit services and their cityscapes. Some, like Singapore and Copenhagen, have adapted their settlement patterns so that they are more conducive to transit riding, mainly by rail transit, whether for reasons of land scarcity, open space preservation, or encouraging what are viewed as more sustainable patterns of growth and travel. This has often involved concentrating offices, homes, and shops around rail nodes in attractive, well-designed, pedestrian-friendly communities. Other places have opted for an entirely different approach, accepting their low-density, often market-driven lay of the land, and in response adapting mass transit services and technologies to better serve these spread-out environs. These are places, such as Karlsruhe in Germany and Adelaide, Australia, that have introduced flexible forms of mass transit that begin to emulate the speedy, door-to-door service features of the car. Still other places, like Ottawa, Canada, and Curitiba, Brazil, have struck a middle ground, adapting their urban landscapes so as to become more transit-supportive while at the same time adapting their transit services so as to deliver customers closer to their destinations, minimize waits, and expedite transfers. It is because these places have found a workable nexus between their mass transit services and urban settlement patterns that they either are or are on the road to becoming great transit metropolises.

What these areas have in common—adaptability—is first and fundamentally a calculated process of making change by investing, reinvesting, organizing, reorganizing, inventing, and reinventing. Adaptability is about self-survival in a world of limited resources, tightly stretched budgets, and ever-changing cultural norms, lifestyles, technologies, and personal values. In the private sector, any business that resists adapting to changing consumer wants and preferences is a short-lived business. More and more, the public sector is being held to similar standards. There is no longer the public largesse or patience to allow business as usual. Transit authorities must adapt to change, as must city and regional governments. Trends like suburbanization, advances in telecommunications, and chained trip-making require that transit agencies refashion how they configure and deliver services and that builders and planners adjust their designs of communities and places. In the best of worlds, these efforts are closely coordinated. This will most likely occur when and where there is the motivation and the means to break out of traditional, entrenched practices, which, of course, is no small feat in the public realm. Yet even transit’s most ardent defenders now concede that steadily eroding shares of metropolitan travel are a telltale sign that fresh, new approaches are needed. Places that appropriately adapt to changing times, finding harmony between their transit services and urban landscapes, I contend, are places where transit stands the best chance of competing with the car well into the next millennium.

This book tells the story of how twelve metropolitan areas across five continents have become, or are well on their way to becoming, successful transit metropolises. Each case study tells a story of the struggles, strides, and successes of making transit work in the modern era. Together, the cases offer insights and policy lessons into how more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable transit services can be designed and implemented.

It bears noting that a functional and sustainable transit metropolis is not equated with a region whereby transit largely replaces the private automobile or even captures the majority of motorized trips. Rather, the transit metropolis represents a built form and a mobility environment where transit is a far more respectable alternative to traveling than currently is the case in much of the industrialized world. It is an environment where transit and the built environment harmoniously co-exist, reinforcing and enhancing each other in the process. Thus, while automobile travel might still predominate, a transit metropolis is one where enough travelers opt for transit riding, by virtue of the workable transit–land use nexus, to place a region on a sustainable course.

It is also important to emphasize that this book focuses on the connections between transit and urbanization at the regional scale versus the local one. While considerable attention has been given to transit-oriented development (TOD) and the New Urbanism movement in recent years, both by scholars and the popular press, much of this focus has been at the neighborhood and community levels. Micro-scale designs that encourage walking and promote community cohesion have captivated the attention of many proponents of TODs and New Urbanism. While good quality designs are without question absolutely essential to creating places that are physically conducive to transit riding, they are clearly not sufficient in and of themselves. Islands of TOD in a sea of freeway-oriented suburbs will do little to change fundamental travel behavior or the sum quality of regional living. The key to making TOD work is to make sure that it is well coordinated across a metropolis. While land use planning and urban design are local prerogatives, their impacts on travel are felt regionally. In part, this book aims to focus attention on the importance of coordinating transit-supportive development at a metropolitan scale. However, it also seeks to give balance to the equation, examining legitimate approaches to forming sustainable yet low-density transit metropolises, namely through the design of more flexible forms of mass transit.

Types of Transit Metropolises

The cases reviewed in this book illustrate cities that have successfully meshed their transit services and cityscapes in a contemporary urban context, namely one of post-World War II decentralization. There are cities—New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Toronto, for example—that certainly qualify as great transit metropolises but that are not included in this book, either because their principal transit investments date from a much earlier period (e.g., London), or their experiences are viewed as either extreme (e.g., unusually dense Hong Kong) or well chronicled (Toronto).³ Since the book focuses on cases from free-market economies, examples from China and other communist or socialist countries, either current or former, are not included. What are presented, then, are the best cases of contemporary transit metropolises—ones whose co-planning and co-development of transit systems and cityscapes occurred under largely free-market conditions during the past half-century of rapid automobile growth and ascendancy.

The twelve cases examined in this book sort into four classes of transit metropolises:

• Adaptive cities. These are transit-oriented metropolises that have invested in rail systems to guide urban growth for purposes of achieving larger societal objectives, such as preserving open space and producing affordable housing in rail-served communities. All feature compact, mixed-use suburban communities and new towns concentrated around rail nodes. The book’s case examples are Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and Singapore.
• Adaptive transit. These are places that hav...