And let me expound on that: I believe we have massively overbuilt our infrastructure and that we will have fewer lane miles two decades from now than we do currently. And I do believe that the same brutal math applies to our transit systems. We don’t have the money to maintain what we’ve built and, since most of what we’ve built is financially unproductive (it’s a losing investment), a good portion of it will not be maintained.

All this puts me at odds with what I’ve found to be the dominant theory among transit advocates: that transit investments – specifically, large transit investments – are necessary to spur growth of the walkable (dare I say: dense) development patterns that planners salivate over. To be kind, I think that mindset is a derivation of the incoherent and destructive way we fund all transportation. If I were being unkind, I would call it intellectually lazy.

The Wrong Terminology

Where I seem to have crossed paths – and lost credibility – with transit advocates is my use of the term “transit-oriented development” and my juxtaposing it with “development-oriented transit.” As Jarrett Walker of Human Transit stated:

So what is “development-oriented transit”? To be frank, I’m sure I’m not the only transit planner who finds the term insulting. What exactly do you think we do all day? Transit planning is a response to transit markets, which arise from the built form, i.e. “development”. If development determines where people are and where they need to go, then all transit is development-oriented, and it always has been.

While I didn’t mean to insult with the term, I’m not sure I fully understand how I did. Towards the end of the piece, Walker (of whom I’m a big fan) provides some clarity on his use of the term:

All transport is development-oriented, and all development is oriented toward some transport mode. If you want that mode to be public transit, then you need to plan development — not just its layout but also its location – with transit in mind, just as all urban planning did before 1945. That’s all that the term “transit-oriented development” says, and all that it should mean.

This might be the place where I slightly part ways with transit advocates. While we seem to agree that the style of development has a relationship to how people get around, it’s not a high priority to me that the mode be public transit. I’m not against that, but if I were to list my top concerns for this continent’s neighborhoods, financial strength and solvency would be at the top, while the ability to accommodate my preferred mode of transit would rank pretty low.

For me, transit is a means to an end – that end being the financial strength and resiliency of a place – not an end unto itself. That can sometimes feel threatening to the transit advocate that puts providing transit at the center of their universe. I would always start with scaling transit to the place, not the other way around.

And as a side note, the urban planning done in my city prior to 1945 was impressive, but I seriously doubt it was predicated on the future accommodation of transit. In fact, I’m confident it didn't, and that is pretty universal among pre-War cities. The role of the urban planner in designing future developments to accommodate public transit seems to my reading of history to be a fairly modern one.

Build it and They Will Come

I was reminded many times last week of the engineering profession’s obsessions both with projections and a code of efficiency as a mechanism for justifying overbuilding.