Access, not mobility
It’s not about how fast you can go
Charlottesville, Virginia | UrbanizeHub
“Location, location, location.” It’s a real-estate mantra for very good reason. WHERE you are in a city is much more important than how fast you can move. Being at or close to the things you need is the first rule of real estate. And the second rule. And the third!
Mobility?
For most of the last century, transportation and urban planning discussions have focused not on location, but on speed. The planning keyword has been mobility: helping people get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Live anywhere you want, and planners will build ways to quickly move you to where you need to be.
Here’s the fundamental flaw in mobility-focused planning: it is based on the fantastical idea that points A and B are forever fixed. But cities are not fixed. Cities evolve, people’s lives change, and travel patterns adjust. As travel speeds increase, people take jobs further away. Grocery stores relocate. A family’s circle of daily errands expands. Points A and B (not to mention C, D, and E) get ever farther apart. And as they get farther apart, “good” mobility (high speed) starts to look like this:
Singapore | Singapore Land Transport Authority
In the United States, the focus on mobility has funneled billions of dollars of investment into transportation infrastructure designed to get people moving further and further distances at higher and higher speeds. Predictably, rather than making things easier to get to, this investment has mostly pushed these destinations out over a wider area.
In evaluating proposals, U.S. transportation planners focus on “level of service” (LOS) traffic flow standards; in most places, this method is mandated by environmental review laws. LOS measures the amount of delay experienced by motor vehicles and therefore only grades streets based on their ability to process motor vehicles. LOS evaluation completely ignores those who are not in a motor vehicle or whose mobility is impaired. It does not measure the economic value of a street, nor does it bring destinations closer.
No, access
Mobility - speed - is merely a means to an end. The purpose of mobility is to get somewhere, to points B, C, D, and E, wherever they may be. It’s the “getting somewhere” — the access to services and jobs — that matters [1]. Strong Towns contributor Daniel Herriges defines the distinction like this: “Mobility is how far you can go in a given amount of time. Accessibility is how much you can get to in that time.” Good access comes from having a diversity of services intermingled within your own neighborhood, so you don’t have to go all the way across town — or outside of town — to get to what you need. Here’s what good access looks like:
Maastricht, The Netherlands | Gali Freund
Fortunately, the policy landscape is slowly beginning to acknowledge this. There is growing awareness among decision makers as well as advocates that access, not mobility, should guide planning. Signs of hope include the California Environmental Quality Act, which was updated in 2019 to shift the focus from LOS to “Vehicle Miles Traveled” (VMT). This still does not measure access or economic value, but it’s a step in the right direction. At the national level, the new Future of Transportation Caucus, a group of 12 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, has introduced legislation to refocus transportation planning on improving access to services and jobs, and to create service standards for planners reviewing and implementing transportation projects. Organizations such as Transportation for America have made connecting people to jobs and services a key plank of their advocacy platform.
Most promisingly, the full U.S. House of Representatives recently passed an overarching spending bill called the Moving Forward Act. The transportation section of this bill requires recipients of federal transportation funding to measure how well their system connects people to the things they need, regardless of how they travel. (Here is Transportation for America’s analysis of this bill. Smart Growth America lauds the bill for remaking transportation policy in a more equitable way.) The bill is considered “dead on arrival” in the U.S. Senate, but even if this particular bill doesn’t become law, the House’s passage of it confirms that access is on its way to becoming the new yardstick in measuring transportation investments. The Moving Forward Act will die — at least in its current form — but access is here to stay.
Access and the 15-minute city
This policy evolution is great news for the development of 15-minute cities. A focus on access puts people’s needs — not their speed of travel — at the forefront of planning decisions. This will result in a much more equitable planning decision, and over time it is likely to make transportation investments less costly, as pedestrians and cyclists are much cheaper to provide infrastructure for. As key services and jobs become closer and more accessible, the overall demand for travel will decline. And as urban land is used in a more efficient and compact way, municipal budgets will improve as tax receipts per acre go up [2].
That, ultimately, is mobility done right.
[1] Ideally the journey itself should be pleasurable, and at a minimum must feel safe. These both need much more consideration and are topics for future blog posts.
[2] The fiscal impacts of urban land use will also be the subject of deeper attention in a future blog post, but Joseph Minicozzi of Urban3 has written a great primer on this topic, and Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns book focuses on this.