How Sprawl Is Lengthening Our Commutes & Misleading Mobility Measures Makes It Worse

Driven Apart: How Sprawl Is Lengthening Our Commutes and Why Misleading Mobility Measures Are Making Things Worse


Read More: http://www.ceosforcities.org/work/driven-apart

Driven Apart Report: http://www.ceosforcities.org/pagefiles/DrivenApartXSFINAL.pdf

Infographic: http://www.ceosforcities.org/pagefiles/DrivenApartInfoGraphicFINAL.jpg

The report, titled Driven Apart: How sprawl is lengthening our commutes and why misleading mobility measures are making things worse and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation takes a new look at what’s really causing traffic congestion in America. The conclusions are far different than those of the UMR, which has long been used to measure traffic congestion.

“This analysis, once again, shows that many of the assumptions driving big investments of taxpayer dollars that shape our communities are outdated, said CEOs for Cities President and CEO Carol Coletta. Driven Apart adds to the growing body of evidence that shows compact development that puts many destinations close at hand has unexpected benefits — in this case, less time spent in traffic requiring less spending on highways. If we heed its findings, we’ll save time and money.â€

Driven Apart ranks how long residents in the nation’s largest 51 metropolitan areas spend in peak hour traffic, and in some cases the rankings are almost the opposite of those listed in the 2009 Urban Mobility Report.

For instance, the UMR depicts Chicago as having some of the worst travel delays, when it actually has the shortest time spent in peak hour traffic of any major US metro area. In contrast, Nashville jumped from 31st to first on the list of those with the longest peak travel times.

While peak hour travel times average 200 hours a year in large metropolitan areas, Driven Apart proves that some cities have managed to achieve shorter travel times and actually reduce the peak hour travel times. The key is that some metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Portland and Sacramento have land use patterns and transportation systems that enable their residents to take shorter trips and minimize the burden of peak hour travel. If every one of the top 50 metros followed suit with Chicago and other higher performing cities, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use two billion fewer gallons of fuel, for a cost savings of $31 billion annually.




The Urban Mobility Report gives a more favorable travel congestion rating to metropolitan Charlotte, NC, than to metropolitan Chicago, based on the proportion of the trip spend in congested traffic. But as CEOs for Cities points out, the Chicago trip takes only two-thirds as much time, and is nearly one-third shorter in distance. So which place is really better for commuters and for the world's climate?






Urban Mobility Reports from the Texas Transportation Institute have for years focused on traffic congestion. This graph from a new CEOs for Cities analysis reveals, however, that commuters often end up spending more time on the road, traveling miles longer, in sprawling metropolitan areas.

There are an article with images of disconnected streets and unwanted sprawl at this link. Most images are of Florida using Google Earth by boston.com.







Much of the developments are unfinished for lack of buyers because of the recession, and just about all of it within a convenient walk of, well, nothing.

Lis, if I find anything disturbing it's those pictures.


It reminds me of this thing...


Does anyone maybe have another one like this? I saw several variations and this is the poorest one actually, but it is the only one that I can find right now.

I agree that sprawl is bad from a transportation standpoint, but I have to admit that some of those Florida images are pretty cool with the canals, etc.. It's like white-trash Dubai.

I think one of the points lost in Toronto about sprawl is that our job sprawl is likely doing more harm than the housing sprawl. With the oakville to downtown commute at least people can use the GO Train. People commuting from Oakville to highway-oriented office parks in Mississauga have no hope of taking transit.

People will continue to drive because of our cheap gasoline. However, it will not last. When the price starts to really go up, after the recession, the price of gasoline will go up and driving your own car, to get bread or a lottery ticket, will go from expensive to very, very expensive.

From www.steelguru.com is a report that Chinese imports of Saudi oil would have increased 19% by the end of 2010. Increase the demand, the higher the price.

Bloomberg reported that China imports of oil from Saudi Arabia, the world largest crude exporter will increase 19% in 2010 from last year.

The Riyadh based news service citing Mr Yang Honglin China ambassador to Saudi Arabia said Chinese imports will increase to 50 million tonnes compared with 41.95 million tonnes last year.

According to China National Petroleum Corp the country largest energy company, the nation plans to add 31.5 million tons a year of oil refining capacity this year, bringing the total to 515 million tonnes a year or 10.3 million barrels per day.

According to data from the General Administration of Customs in Beijing crude imports from Saudi Arabia totaled 28.3 million tonnes in the first eight months of the year making it the largest supplier. Angola was the second biggest at 27.9 million tonnes.

China signed 27 new industrial projects valued at USD 2.1 billion in Saudi Arabia during the first half of this year. China has 81 such projects under construction in the Arab world largest economy.

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I have often thought that the biggest oversight in GTA planning was the concept that providing jobs in the suburbs will reduce commute times. With people going through so many job changes throughout their career, buying a home close to work is only good for your first job which might last 5 years or less. The best example of this failed ideology is Mississauga, where most people who work there don't even live there.

I think that a big reason why the GTA has the worst commute times in the world is because it's also one of the most decentralized urban areas in the world - by policy! Providing an equal number of jobs as residents is entrenched in the planning policies of each and every region in the GTA.It's impossible to serve such a high volume of random trips by transit, let alone even highways.

I worked in the suburbs only once in my life. The office was in Markham, and I actually only knew of one person out of the 10 or so I worked regularly with that lived in Markham. About half lived in Toronto, a quarter in Peel, and a quarter in northern York Region. Epic fail!

^^ If done correctly though, the decentralized model could provide a much better high density region than with a centralized downtown around Toronto. If you have jobs and people going everywhere, it gives opportunity to put transit everywhere, rather than just funnelling it all downtown. It may require a greater investment, but it would also make transit a far better option for people within the region. The concept it's based on may be flawed, but it's definitely still salvageable.

A lot of people seem to work a fair distance from their home. It maybe either that they think the job is temporary, or the home they are in is temporary.

The other reason maybe that they have lived in a home or worked at an establishment for several years, and they were close to each other. Then the company moves. Rather than move to a new home, they stay at the same home and workplace, and put up with the long commute.

In either case, they ignore the economics and continue instead with the habit.

Chuck said:

I think that a big reason why the GTA has the worst commute times in the world is because it's also one of the most decentralized urban areas in the world - by policy! Providing an equal number of jobs as residents is entrenched in the planning policies of each and every region in the GTA.

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Decentralization has nothing to do with commute time. If anything, decentralization could mean lower commute times. Imagine a city where every lived within walking distance of where they worked. That's maximum decentralization but minimum commute times. That's the way cities were like before post-war suburbanization, before single-use zoning and development. Centralization is a post-war feature only. Truly urban cities are decentralized. Truly urban areas don't huge swaths of purely residential neighbourhoods and segregated land uses.

You complain about the person in Oakville who works in Mississauga... you seriously think that person in Oakville will have a shorter commute if he/she worked in Toronto instead of Mississauga? What a joke.

Even if you wanted centralize employment, how possible would that be? For example, centralization of retail and manufacturing employment is not possible.

As for transit, Toronto is the second most transit-dependent metropolitan area in the US and Canada, so your concerns are misplaced.

I feel like I'm responding to a MikeToronto post on SSP.

doady said:

Decentralization has nothing to do with commute time. If anything, decentralization could mean lower commute times. Imagine a city where every lived within walking distance of where they worked. That's maximum decentralization but minimum commute times. That's the way cities were like before post-war suburbanization, before single-use zoning and development. Centralization is a post-war feature only. Truly urban cities are decentralized. Truly urban areas don't huge swaths of purely residential neighbourhoods and segregated land uses.

You complain about the person in Oakville who works in Mississauga... you seriously think that person in Oakville will have a shorter commute if he/she worked in Toronto instead of Mississauga? What a joke.
.

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Put it this way

He lives in Oakville, but gets laid off. His new job is in Pickering. Now what? If it was centralized in ~4sq km downtown, he loses his job downtown and finds another one downtown. In an era when staying with an employer for 5 years is a long time, this is not an inconsequential consideration.

Or, you have a couple, again in Oakville. One works in Mississauga, the other in Markham. Both are necessarily in cars as transit is simply not feasible for those commutes. Alternatively, they both work downtown and can either carpool or take the GO train and get there in a reasonable time.

Further, by centralizing employment you allow the construction of devoted, high capacity high speed transportation infrastructure. There's a reason why the subway lines and GO lines all converge on downtown while suburb-to-suburb transit is ponderous and difficult if it's possible at all.

Radial commuting patterns are far more efficient than diffuse patterns. Diffuse patterns only work when people take advantage of it and only work within essentially walking distance of home. This was common in the past but is rather rare today.

(and by the way, retail is one of those few cases where the diffuse commuting pattern actually does work, for the simple reason that nobody is going to commute from Oakville to Markham to work at Walmart. They'll work at the walmart in their own community. This sort of commuting does not put undue stress on local transportation networks as average trip length is short).

Acknowledging that the centralization works is one of the reasons why living downtown is so desireable. You can reverse-commute to Mississauga or Pickering and it really doesn't make a difference in commute time. Take a folding bike on the GO train - again, the sort of infrastructure only possible with centralization - and you don't even need to drive.

I will leave Toronto before I do a suburb-to-suburb commute. It's not worth it...

doady said:

Decentralization has nothing to do with commute time. If anything, decentralization could mean lower commute times. Imagine a city where every lived within walking distance of where they worked. That's maximum decentralization but minimum commute times. That's the way cities were like before post-war suburbanization, before single-use zoning and development. Centralization is a post-war feature only. Truly urban cities are decentralized. Truly urban areas don't huge swaths of purely residential neighbourhoods and segregated land uses.

You complain about the person in Oakville who works in Mississauga... you seriously think that person in Oakville will have a shorter commute if he/she worked in Toronto instead of Mississauga? What a joke.

Even if you wanted centralize employment, how possible would that be? For example, centralization of retail and manufacturing employment is not possible.

As for transit, Toronto is the second most transit-dependent metropolitan area in the US and Canada, so your concerns are misplaced.

I feel like I'm responding to a MikeToronto post on SSP.

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Centralization is not a post war phenomenon. It started with the inception of business districts in the 1800s, and hit its peak during the age of streetcar suburbs decades before the 1950s. Centralization does not at all mean segregated land uses, it just means keeping office type jobs in the inner part of the city so that it's easier to provide transit to the greatest number of people. The downtown area itself should be as mixed use as possible, as should remaining parts of the region with respect to retail and neighbourhood amenities.

As I said, decentralization's ability to reduce commute times is theoretical at best. In the real world, people who live in a suburb don't work in that suburb because it just doesn't make sense to pick up and relocated every 5 years when your job changes. I'll reiterate my personal example: less than 10% of the people who worked at my previous job in Markham lived in Markham. Jobs in the suburbs do not reduce commute distances for people living in the suburbs.

Nice. Not only did you mis-understand my point, you bit my head off for it. Also you compared me to someone I've never heard of, which is weird.

My point is that when we think of bad sprawl we focus on the image of endless residential subdivisions. Right now in the GTA the worst kind of sprawl is in the employment districts. Think of Beaver Creek, the Royal Bank mega-plex on the 401, etc. People have no choice but to drive to these places. Building more of these places is making commute times worse for everyone, not better.

You can't win, you know.

Post-war suburbs were designed, at least in part, to discourage through traffic on residential streets. Since most of them led nowhere except to specific homes, effectively, no one else had much need to be on them. The idea was that it would make for safer play environments for the kids, and quieter neighbourhoods.

I grew up in a suburb like that and I don't find it alien or foreign. Nevertheless I can say that in times I've had to be in similar neighbourhoods with which I'm not familiar, I've found myself extremely prone to becoming lost and quickly losing track of the cardinal directions. I'm constantly amazed to arrive, say, 'eastbound' at major thoroughfares I believed were north of me. It's easy to find yourself in praise of the grid pattern at such times.

But it's the hypocrisy that kills me. The grid pattern is held up as a return to sanity and breaking up congestion and facilitating commutes. Fine; in the abstract, I'd have to agree. But what do I see when I happen through any neighbourhood established before Johnny came marching home again? SPEED BUMPS. And why are they there? Well, to discourage through traffic, make a safer play environment for the kids, and a quieter neighbourhood.

Hmm.

valkoholic said:

My point is that when we think of bad sprawl we focus on the image of endless residential subdivisions. Right now in the GTA the worst kind of sprawl is in the employment districts. Think of Beaver Creek, the Royal Bank mega-plex on the 401, etc. People have no choice but to drive to these places. Building more of these places is making commute times worse for everyone, not better.

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As far as East Beaver Creek goes, I worked in that vicinity for ten years, and I can assert that Hwy 7 is crawling with VIVA buses. As I've said elsewhere, there was a TTC line that ran virtually from my front door to my office building. But I never took it because it would have cost over ten dollars a day thanks to the arbitrary double fare at Steeles; considerably more than I was paying in gas. It was largely an option for people already living in York Region. But I knew a lot of people who didn't drive to work in Markham; some of them surprisingly well-off, too. There is transit in and around our industrial parks, and lots of people make use of it. Lots of people drive, too, for various reasons (have to drop the kids off on the way, spouses live half way between different jobs, things to do at lunch time, etc.).

lafard said:

Further, by centralizing employment you allow the construction of devoted, high capacity high speed transportation infrastructure. There's a reason why the subway lines and GO lines all converge on downtown while suburb-to-suburb transit is ponderous and difficult if it's possible at all.

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It's too simplistic a solution. The first obvious question is, by what means do you compel employers to build only within a certain area? Sure, the voters of Toronto might go for it. How many MPPs from 905, or other regions of southern Ontario, are going to agree never to have another job open up in their ridings?

What we have is arguably a better solution. We have what the province planned for in the 1960s, nodes ("planned for" is probably overly generous; this was probably going to happen whether or not the province took a blind bit of notice of it). Different places formed natual cores for settlement, which provided pools of employment and the infrastructure, and businesses located there. Not everything has to be in one place; given the spot-pressures that would put on the infrastructure, it's almost certainly better that it isn't.

And so we do have these problems. My parents worked in two cities sixty miles apart, and so we lived in between. At the time, there really weren't any good transit alternatives; by now there might be. When they were much younger and their jobs were in the same city, they could go together, or take transit. There are the realities people live with, and I don't imagine that's going to change. Instead of looking for these one-size-fits-all solutions, what we need to do is really what we have been doing: looking for ways to facilitate the realities that people are faced with, but encourage them to consider alternatives wherever feasible.

There are jobs in Oakville. There are jobs in Toronto. Jobs in Pickering, Ajax, Oshawa, King City, Markham, Brampton. People live where it makes sense, and they do their best to work it out. That's just how it is.