Urban Recalibration

Beyond Mobility is about reordering priorities. In the planning and design of cities, far more attention must go toward serving the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places as opposed to expediting movement. Historically it has been the opposite. In the United States and increasingly elsewhere, investments in motorways and underground rail systems have been first and foremost about moving people between point A and point B as quickly and safely as possible. On the surface, of course, this is desirable. However, the cumulative consequences of this nearly singular focus on expeditious movement have revealed themselves with passage of time, measured in smoggy air basins, sprawling suburbs, and — despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investments — a failure to stem traffic congestion, to name a few. An urban recalibration is in order, we argue, one that follows a more people- and place-focused approach to city building.

Recalibration is a term found in handbooks for precision instruments and flight manuals. It has resonance in city planning circles as well. The roads, subdivisions, and utility corridors that give shape to cities were calibrated from engineering and design manuals with noble aims, such as minimizing accident risks and accommodating the turning radii of eight-wheel fire trucks, but with little attention to unintended consequences. Mobility and public safety are important, but so are clean air and walkable streets. Moreover, traffic engineers have long gauged performance in terms of throughputs of motorized vehicles, not people. The consequence: a vicious cycle of road expansions to accommodate car traffic rather than channeling more resources into modes that are efficient users of road space, such as public transit and cycling. Over the twentieth century, street widths and parking standards continually increased, taking up the majority of public space to accommodate cars. In some cities, parking lots alone account for more than a third of the metropolitan footprint. The approaches, metrics, and standards used to design cities, we believe, are in serious need of recalibration — not necessarily a seismic shift but rather a rebalancing of priorities that gives at least as much urban planning and community design attention to serving people and places as to mobility. Beyond Mobility charts a pathway for doing so.

The call for urban recalibration and reframing the role of mobility in cities finds its roots in the derived nature of most travel. People drive cars and take trains to go places. It is the makeup and quality of these places and the social and economic interactions they spawn that we value most, more so than the physical act of getting there. As Amory Lovins has said of the energy sector, people don't care about kilowatts; they care about hot showers, cold beer, and lit rooms. Similarly, people travel to reach jobs, friends, sports arenas, and the like. They seek social and economic interaction, not movement. To the degree that distance is a barrier to interaction, time spent moving over space is time that can often be better spent doing other things (socializing with friends, reading a magazine at the local café, or even logging in more hours — and presumably making more money — at the workplace). Transportation, then, is a means to an end, a vehicle for achieving something else. It is mostly secondary to a larger purpose.

An apt analogy on getting the priorities right is the design of a house. Think of "place" as the house and "transportation" as its utilities. In conceptualizing and planning a house, prospective homeowners dwell on what matters most to them: the layout, floor-plan, architectural styles, kitchen designs, views, and so on. They don't initially focus on the utilities of a house — the plumbing, wiring, conduits, and pipes — and then design the house around them. The same should hold when scaling up to a neighborhood or city. Recalibrating the planning and design of cities, then, is about lifting the priority given to place vis-à-vis mobility.

In emphasizing mobility, twentieth-century transportation infrastructure has often had harmful effects on people and places. Dangerous and difficult-to-cross intersections and multilane roads have hindered people's ability to move freely and children's opportunities to play. Although transportation investments have connected people on a regional level, they have also uprooted communities and lowered home values, epitomized by highways cutting through American neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1953, local residents fiercely protested Robert Moses's planned six-lane Cross Bronx Expressway, calling it the "Heartbreak Highway," but to no avail. Moses's plan was approved and built quickly, bulldozing homes in densely populated neighborhoods in the Bronx, lowering property values, and severing neighborhoods. The Cross Bronx Expressway was but one of the many destructive urban highways built over the ensuing two decades, often with the federal government footing 90 percent of the bill.

Giving stronger priority to place is another way of saying cities should be highly accessible. Accessibility is about the ease of reaching places where people want to go. Cities can become more accessible by increasing mobility (the speed of getting between point A and B), proximity (bringing point A and B closer together), or some combination thereof. Focusing on accessibility and, relatedly, places leads to an entirely different framework for planning and designing cities and their transportation infrastructure. Rather than laying more and more asphalt to connect people with places, activities (e.g., homes, businesses, and shops) might instead be sited closer to each other. A vast body of research shows that the resulting mixed land use patterns can shorten distances and invite more leisurely paced, pollution-free travel. It's been said that planning for the automobile city focuses on saving time. Planning for the accessible city focuses on time well spent.

As discussed in this book's second chapter, walkable, mixeduse neighborhoods also build social capital and instill a sense of safety through natural surveillance. For more and more urban dwellers, such neighborhood attributes are every bit as, if not more, important than travel speeds. A principal aim of Beyond Mobility, then, is to provide a framework for designing cities and siting activities so that urban places become more accessible and, as a result, allow more interaction of all types. Such transformative places include regenerated former industrial sites (chapter 5), business parks converted to mixed-use activity centers (chapter 6), walkable neighborhoods huddled around...