Assessing the experience of mandated collaborative inter-jurisdictional transport planning in the United States

This paper explores collaborative transport planning among governmental authorities where jurisdictions overlap and the lines of authority are ambiguous or unclear–an increasingly common situation in this era of waning trade and travel restrictions. We do this by examining the experience of mandated collaborative transportation planning among state departments of transportation (DOTs) and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in the USA following a significant change to national surface transportation policy in the early 1990s. To understand how state transport planning and plans changed following the inter-jurisdictional collaboration mandated by passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA), we examine recent statewide transport planning in 14 of the largest US states and conducted interviews with 66 state and regional planners. We find that, despite the myriad topics that state DOTs tried to include within their comprehensive statewide plans, these plans have had, at best, a limited influence on metropolitan transport planning and activities. Despite this, we find that the mandated collaborative planning did help to increase inter-agency coordination on issues (1) where network or environmental externalities transcend regional boundaries, (2) that require the political clout of a higher-level governmental authority to enforce locally unpopular decisions, or (3) that take advantage of institutional economies of scale.     

Are we keeping up? Accessibility,equity and air quality in regional planning

Many US metropolitan areas have undergone dramatic shifts in socioeconomic organization.. As urban areas gentrify, many low-income residents and communities of color have transitioned towards the exurban periphery. These suburban neighborhoods tend to have fewer employment opportunities and are fairly disconnected from public transportation networks serving the urban core. Using regional transportation plans (RTPs) for three California MPOs, we show that the transportation accessibility and environmental health issues affecting these exurban communities are unique and inadequately captured by the MPOs' current equity metrics. MPOs performance evaluation is regional and achieving equity within the urban core communities will not address emerging equity, accessibility and air quality concerns for exurban communities. With a brief history and a focused case study of RTPs for the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Fresno, we examine how air pollution, equity, and transportation interact in three different types of 21st century cities. We find that when allocating limited transportation funds, California metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) prioritize the improvement of existing public transportation in urban core areas over expansion of transit networks towards disconnected exurbs. This approach is an effective way to reduce vehicle miles traveled (and thus, air pollution) at the regional level due to high population concentrations in urban cores. However, this approach also concentrates the air quality benefits of VMT reduction in these same urban core areas. Exurban residents' on-road and near-road exposure to Traffic-Related Air Pollution (TRAP) will not be reduced by improving public transit within the urban core. We argue that although these suburban and exurban communities are a small percentage of the regional population, they have a right to share in the benefits of transportation investments, particularly given the historical and ongoing patterns of displacement and economic exclusion from urban core areas.     

Verkehrsverbund: The evolution and spread of fully integrated regional public transport in Germany,Austria, and Switzerland

Throughout the world, urban areas have been rapidly expanding, exacerbating the problem of many public transport (PT) operators providing service over different governmental jurisdictions. Over the past five decades, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have successfully implemented regional PT associations (called Verkehrsverbund or VV), which integrate services, fares, and ticketing while coordinating public transport planning, marketing, and customer information throughout metropolitan areas, and in some cases, entire states. A key difference between VVs and other forms of regional PT coordination is the collaboration and mutual consultation of government jurisdictions and PT providers in all decision-making. This article examines the origins of VVs, their spread to 13 German, Austrian, and Swiss metropolitan areas from 1967 to 1990, and their subsequent spread to 58 additional metropolitan areas from 1991 to 2017, now serving 85% of Germany's and 100% of Austria's population. The VV model has spread quickly because it is adaptable to the different degrees and types of integration needed in different situations. Most of the article focuses on six case studies of the largest VVs: Hamburg (opened in 1967), Munich (1971), Rhine-Ruhr (1980), Vienna (1984), Zurich (1990), and Berlin-Brandenburg (1999). Since 1990, all six of those VVs have increased the quality and quantity of service, attracted more passengers, and reduced the percentage of costs covered by subsidies. By improving PT throughout metropolitan areas, VVs provide an attractive alternative to the private car, helping to explain why the car mode share of trips has fallen since 1990 in all of the case studies.     

Airport partial and full privatization in a multi-airport region: Focus on pricing and capacity

This paper studies the capacity and pricing choice of two congestible airports in a multi-airport metropolitan region, under transition from a pure public, centralized airport system to partial or full privatization. We develop analytical models to investigate three privatization scenarios: public–private duopoly, private–private duopoly, and private monopoly. We find that, airports follow the same capacity investment rule as prior to privatization when capacity and pricing decisions are made simultaneously. Pricing rule after privatization becomes more complicated, with additional factors having an upward effect on the privatized airport(s) and a downward effect on the remaining public airport.     

Contribution of transportation investments to county output

The impact of highway investments on economic development is investigated. Spatial and temporal aspects of transportation investments are studied by analyzing lagged and spillover effects, and the contribution of past output levels to the current output using a dynamic model. County level data from 1990–2000, in New York/New Jersey metropolitan area is used. Results show that the spillover effects decrease with distance from the investment location, that there is a positive time lag effect between the time the investment is made and its impact on output, and that the current level of output depends heavily on past levels.     

Challenges in land use planning around Australian airports

The privatization of major Australian airports in the late 1990s unleashed an unprecedented development wave as corporate lessees implemented ambitious business plans. While planning and environmental regulations governing on-airport development were significantly enhanced, there has been national disquiet about a governance regime that remains under the auspices of the federal government and is not effectively integrated into state and local decision-making machinery. Tensions in major airport regions have been exacerbated by the building of highly conspicuous non-aeronautical developments approved with no determining input by local decision-makers as well as the growing pressures on off-airport locations for aviation-related development. This paper canvasses this context and overviews the evolving structure of planning controls for Australia’s privatized federal airports. A range of issues surfacing through the National Aviation Policy Review process in 2008–2009 is described.     

Job accessibility and the modal mismatch in Detroit

Transportation scholars are challenging traditional formulations of the spatial mismatch hypothesis because previous studies have disregarded the considerable difference between travel modes. This case study of the Detroit metropolitan region uses 2000 census data and a gravity-based model of transportation accessibility to test differences in access to jobs among places and people, and provides support for recent calls for reconceptualizing spatial mismatch. It shows that even though Detroit experiences the greatest distance between African Americans and jobs of any region in the country, most central city neighborhoods offer an advantage in accessibility to jobs compared to most other places in the metropolitan region – as long as a resident has a car. Policies aimed at helping carless people gain access to automobiles may be an effective means of improving the employment outcomes of inner-city residents.     

A GIS-based spatial statistical approach to modeling job accessibility by transportation mode: case study of Columbus,Ohio

Improving job accessibility based on transport connectivity helps to address equity issues. Spatial autocorrelation (SA) is also a focus of interest in transportation planning, but has been neglected in analyzing job accessibility in metropolitan areas. In this study, GIS-based job accessibilities by walking, transit, and car are computed for the metropolitan area of Columbus, Ohio, and three transport-based spatial autoregressive (SAR) models are estimated to account for the SA of job accessibility among neighboring block groups, while controlling for built-environment and socioeconomic factors. SA intensities and extents are compared in order to better understand local spatial clusters of job accessibility across the region. Direct and indirect spillover effects due to an investment change in transportation facilities are estimated and provide important transportation planning information. The results also show that walking-accessed jobs are primarily related to physical settings (e.g., land uses) at the local level. Locations with a higher share of zero-vehicle housing units have better job accessibility by transit. There is a spatial mismatch between Asian population clusters and transit-accessed jobs, possibly because of the car-oriented residential clusters around Honda of America Manufacturing in suburban areas. More importantly, locations with a higher share of single-parent households are at a disadvantage in overall job accessibility. Due to its complex transportation needs, a society friendly to single parents should spatially integrate accessible jobs with other needed activities via land-use and transportation planning. Alternatively, car-ownership programs and non-spatial social supports also might be effective to help secure job opportunities and perform daily life activities.     

Citizen participation for sustainable transport: the case of “Living City” in Santiago,Chile (1997–2012)

Twentieth century citizen “revolts” against urban highway projects have influenced thinking about public transport (Toronto, Vancouver, New York), governance (Portland), and cycling (The Netherlands) to this day. Less is known, however, about how these emerge in developing countries, and what they can tell us about citizens’ role in innovation to achieve more sustainable transport systems. This case study examines a social movement that emerged in opposition to the country’s first major highway concession, in Santiago, Chile (1997), challenging and changing urban planning paradigms. In 2000, the anti-highway campaign founded a citizen institution, Living City (Ciudad Viva). Twelve years later, it has become a prize-winning, citizen-led planning institution.Although the role of citizen participation in improving transport systems has become increasingly recognized in recent years, it still tends to be rather ritualistic. This experience offers insight into how strategic approaches to participation can reinforce the role of self-organizing civil society organizations in introducing innovation into existing systems. Findings suggest that traditional large movements, which are mainly useful for one-way communication of information, require support from small groups able to deliberate in a transformative sense, with more attention paid to how new consensuses can be transmitted through the relational networks of those involved. Moreover, this experience suggests that thinking about citizens as planners in their own right, rather than as mere participants at specific points in a planning process, opens the way to more effective strategies for innovating in transport, to address the social, environmental, and other challenges humanity faces today.     

A multi-level spatial-temporal model for freight movement: The case of manufactured goods flows on the U.S. highway networks

The spatial production, attraction, and movement of manufactured goods are vital to the economy of a region and country. The U.S. department of transportation also mandates to incorporate continuing and efficient freight movement and infrastructure into statewide and local long range planning. Studies on supply, demand, and transport of manufactured goods by firm, industry, mode, or commodity are vast in the logistics and supply chain literature. However, relatively sparse research is available on aggregated movement or freight on national, state, or local transportation networks. Better understanding and modeling freight movement on highway networks to facilitate local transportation, land use, economic development, and comprehensive planning is at the heart of freight research. Therefore, the major endeavors and novel contributions of this research include a conceptual framework proposed for freight movement research, a multi-level spatial-temporal freight model based upon the social optimum assignment for optimal “from”, “to”, “within”, and “through” freight flows of manufactured goods on the U.S. highway networks, and a set of performance measures designed to reveal states in terms of their competitive advantages in production, attraction, self-sufficiency, or cross-road. The freight flows were first visualized and highlighted by state at the U.S. level, then by county at the state level for Oklahoma, and finally by traffic analysis zone for the Tulsa metropolitan area. The spatial split of freight flows was accomplished through using freight, network, and demographic-economic databases at state, county, and zone scales.     

Improving the efficiency of metropolitan area transit by joint analysis of its multiple providers

Public transportation in a metropolitan area often is supplied by multiple types of transit. This paper develops and illustrates a DEA-based procedure for estimating: overall efficiency of an area’s public transportation; technical efficiencies of the individual transit types; effect of each type on overall efficiency; and efficiency of the allocation of resources among types and an algorithm for improving it. The paper concludes that the overall efficiency of an urban area’s public transportation can be validly estimated only if the technical efficiency of each major transport type and the efficiency in allocating resources among them are taken into consideration.     

Commuting and energy consumption: toward an equitable transportation policy

Like other major metropolitan areas, the urban complex that extends from Los Angeles to Orange County faces numerous transportation challenges. Daily traffic congestion, reduced productivity and loss of income, air pollution, environmental degradation and significant energy consumption are only a few outcomes of the millions of miles travelled every day on the region’s highways and streets. An important response to this significant urban challenge has been the desire for further expansion of an efficient public transportation network and increasing densities in particular areas within the larger metropolitan region. In this paper, we estimate the current energy consumption patterns in various communities, arguing that policy attempts to achieve higher density and better jobs-housing balance should fully consider the social geography of our metropolitan areas and their close relationship with energy consumption patterns.     

Lessons from railway reforms in Brazil and Mexico

This paper describes the rail restructuring processes in Brazil and Mexico during the 1990s. It first reviews the way in which the transfer of public railroads to private concessionaires was accomplished in these countries, and then focus on the major challenges faced by them just after the privatization. From this analysis, at least three core lessons are drawn: concessioning can be a viable mechanism for rail privatization in some developing countries; regulatory problems inevitably emerge during and after the concessioning process; and, therefore, to minimize them, contract design should be carefully addressed in previous stages of the process.     

Measuring cycling accessibility in metropolitan areas

Different measures of cycling accessibility have been widely introduced in transportation planning. However, those measurements are mainly restricted by the availability of travel behavior data. In addition, there has been limited comprehensive research on the importance of cycling accessibility to destinations based on the travel time or distance. In this paper, a new index for measuring bikeability in metropolitan areas is introduced. A Cycling Accessibility Index (CAI) is developed for quantifying cycling accessibility within local areas in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. CAI is defined according to gravity-based measures of accessibility. This index measures cycling accessibility levels in terms of diversity of different land uses, number of activities in statistical areas, and the travel impedance between origins and destinations. The Victorian Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity (VISTA) dataset was used to evaluate the index and investigate the association between the cycling accessibility levels and the number of bicycle trips in local areas. The index is assessed by investigating the association between levels of cycling accessibility and the number of bicycle trips in statistical areas. Key findings indicate that there is a significant positive association between bike trips and the CAI.     

Earthquake-induced transportation disruption and economic performance: The experience of Christchurch,New Zealand

The 2010–2011 Christchurch (Canterbury) Earthquakes in New Zealand caused considerable harm, damage and disruption to the lives and livelihoods of residents. Our study examines the role earthquake-related failures in the transportation network played in post-earthquake economic performance, including during the immediate recovery phase. We use detailed (neighbourhood-level) spatial data on both transportation disruptions and economic activity, and how they have spatially and temporally varied across the city in the years prior to and following the earthquakes. We find that the impacts of transportation breakdowns on economic activity was observable and significant and has likely gone beyond areas that experienced direct damage due to the network nature of transport and the locational nature of business.     

铁路与公路运输在现代物流中的协调性研究

为研究铁路与公路运输在现代物流中的协调性，运用数据包络分析方法，以1990-2004年间中国公路、铁路运输的相关数据作为输入和输出指标，并将数据进行标准化和综合化处理，利用DEA模型，用LINGGO编制线性规划求解程序，计算协调发展程度。计算结果表明，公路运输与铁路运输之间协调性随着年份的推移有良好的发展趋势，但在此期间内也有少量波动，反映出国家公路与铁路运输的发展程度及趋势。     

Concentration and decentralization: The new geography of freight distribution in US metropolitan areas

This paper examines the suburbanization of warehousing and trucking activity within US metropolitan areas between the 1980s and the present using Gini indices as a measure of concentration. While historical work exists on the relocation of transportation and warehousing activity to suburban locations, there has been little to document the most recent shifts in warehousing and logistics. This research does so via spatial analysis of Economic Census data, finding that while most US metropolitan areas have experienced decentralization in the spatial distribution of freight-related activity, there is also some growth in core counties, indicating that a more complex process is going on than simple suburbanization.     

Commodification and Adventure in New Zealand Tourism

This paper discusses the ways in which the commodification of adventure in tourism has increasingly become implicated in the production and consumption of tourist places. It examines the notion of adventure in tourism and the changing nature of commodification in postmodern and 'post-tourist' times. The rise of adventure tourism in New Zealand is used as an example of how adventure has been commodified. A survey of tourist brochures for adventure tourism attractions in New Zealand reveals some of the particular characteristics of adventure which are being incorporated into commodity form for tourists. These characteristics include place, spectacle, embodied experience and memory. Although aware of the limitations of using textual evidence from brochures, the paper concludes that Best's (1989) society of the commodity and the society of the spectacle are clearly significant in New Zealand. Sign exchange is also important in the commodification of adventure although it is concluded that places and practices are as yet rarely eclipsed by adventure signification.     

The development of a benchmarking tool for monitoring progress towards sustainable transportation in New Zealand

Creating and maintaining a safe and sustainable transport system is a common challenge for road authorities around the world. The New Zealand government has taken this challenge one step further by incorporating it into country’s legislation. As a consequence all road land transport authorities are committed to implementing initiatives to respond to both the challenge and the legislation. A benchmarking process for the transport sector is one of these initiatives on a national level. Benchmarking is a well known and utilised technology for the measuring of performance for infrastructure, for example within the water provision sector in England. This paper presents the development of a national benchmarking process for the transport sector of New Zealand. This development is part of a strategy to encourage road land transport authorities to improve the performance of transport in achieving sustainability and environmental targets. The development involved a literature review, proof of concept and the full implementation stage. A total of nine key performance indicators were developed to indicate the status of transport sector performance. The project and its outcomes are considered to be of benefit to road land transport authorities across the world who wish to develop a benchmark process of their own.     

International airports: financing methods in Japan

Capacity shortages at international airports in Japan are the most serious impediment to liberalization and free competition in international aviation. Here, we deal with the causes of this shortage, Japanese institutional systems of airport improvement and new financing methods for international airport capacity expansion in metropolitan areas. We emphasize the effectiveness of the joint-stock corporation system as a financial device. The introduction of the joint-stock corporation is one kind of airport privatization, but its characteristics completely differ from those of privatized airports in some European countries and in New Zealand.