The Highway Era Is Over. When Will Our Institutions Catch Up?

For all the flaws under the post-World War II approach, reducing congestion was a clear governing principle. Now cities and regions need to go back to the drawing board and formalize new objectives. Is it designing denser communities that support shorter distances between places? Is it to improve the amount of regional jobs people can reach in a given timeframe? Is it removing the physical barriers that separate communities? Whatever the objectives might be, each community must define accessibility on its own terms.

Cities and regions will then need new ways to measure progress against those objectives. Decades of refinement led to an elegant system -- formally known as Level of Service (LOS) -- to evaluate roadway capacity and prioritize expansions. Delivering similarly powerful systems will require a whole new round of investments in data and software, plus brainstorming around new performance measures. This process is already underway in California, where the Office of Planning and Research is developing a performance measure based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) to evaluate the environmental impacts from future real estate developments.

Implementing an access-first approach to transportation can be done, but it won’t be easy. Even with theorists pushing the concept for decades, cities and countries face real hurdles to move these ideas into practice. Formal guidebooks must be revised to reflect updated thinking. Political battles must be waged with actors looking to maintain the status quo, including developers who’ve already invested in land on the urban fringe. Urban planners must address persistent challenges around spatial mismatch, especially as it affects low-income households and their accessibility needs. Finally, regions will need to decide how to balance broadly shared economic benefits against fiscal realities, whether that’s upfront capital or long-term maintenance.