Editor's Note: Walkable neighborhoods and bike-friendly streets are all the rage but its road rage and the legacy of decades of auto-oriented bias slowing the creation of complete communities. The impact of the automobile bias of traffic engineering is the topic of today's excerpt from Are We There Yet?
Visit the Are We There Yet? home The shift away from auto-oriented neighborhoods to a design that is more friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists is difficult because the tools used on a daily basis by traffic engineers have a built-in bias toward the interests of drivers. Travel models, for example, predict the future need for roads based on the need in the past, instead of recognizing that the priorities of Americans are changing. Studies have shown that people who live or work near transit are more likely to use it. This may seem like a no-brainer but conventional transportation models that are used to determine how…

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Editor's Note: This week's Are We There Yet? excerpt discusses the success of urban freeway teardowns, something unthinkable not long ago, and the need for today's transportation investments to be made in the context of multiple considerations that were previously thought to be unrelated, ranging from the impact on public health to the impact on real estate development and investment to the impact on the prosperity of all people.
Visit the Are We There Yet? home [C]hanges in the value of walkable real estate have prompted many cities to consider something that they never would have considered a decade ago — tearing down their innercity freeways. Developers and investors are keenly interested in building in downtowns, but there’s typically very little land that hasn’t already been developed. Freeway teardowns, however, can open up vast swaths of prime downtown real estate for development. To date, four cities have…

Editor's Note: In this excerpt from Are We There Yet? we return to the Moving section and address automobile use and the critical need to provide alternatives for the aging Baby Boomers, who represent 20 percent of the nation's population. (Read the Moving chapter introduction: Getting Out Of Gear)  
Visit the Are We There Yet? home The situation of older Americans is more difficult since most want to “age in place,” according to AARP, which means they want to live independently in their homes and communities for as long as possible. The problem is that many of the communities in which they live do not provide alternatives to the car: three AARP surveys of older adults in 2010 found that almost 40 percent of the respondents did not have adequate sidewalks near their homes; 60 percent do not live within a 10-minute walk of public transportation; and 38 percent…

Editor's Note: Saving on transportation costs can be critical to household budgets staying in the black. This has never been more true than today, when many people are struggling to make ends meet. To that end, this excerpt from Are We There Yet? discusses both the importance of providing more housing choices near public transit and in walkable and bike-friendly communities, and the need to ensure that public transit actually connects people to the places they need to go such as jobs and educational opportunities.
Visit the Are We There Yet? home Housing costs have grown far faster than income over the past 50 years, and the share of households that struggle to pay their rent or mortgage has increased dramatically over the past decade, according to a recent study by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The 2012 study found that well over one-third of U.S. households paid more than 30 percent of their income for…

Visit the Are We There Yet? home Trends underway in the housing and jobs market portend a need for more transportation choices to help people get where they need to go as well as to enhance this country’s economic competitiveness. Market trends confirm the shift in demand away from single-use, single-family neighborhoods, corporate campuses and shopping centers connected by highways, and toward compact mixed-use neighborhoods where streets are not the sole province of fast-moving cars but are shared with pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users. Providing more transportation choices is critical to supporting this 21st century lifestyle and it seems to be what both younger and older generations want. For the younger generation, traffic congestion, $5 a gallon gas prices, and the popularity of smartphones and social media have made driving far less appealing than it was to their parents. According to the U.S. department…

The combined costs of housing and transportation in the nation's largest 25 metro areas have swelled by 44 percent since 2000 while incomes have failed to keep pace, according to a new report. "Losing Ground: The Struggle of Moderate-Income Households to Afford the Rising Costs of Housing and Transportation" details the challenges that American households face as the combined costs of housing and transportation consume an ever-larger share of household incomes.

Today's Quote of the Day from Jeff Wood's newsletter "The Other Side of the Tracks" comes from a Mineta Transportation Institute research paper: