The Minister of Transportation, Kevin Falcon, and our new mayor might want to check out some recent reports on a fascinating trend:
People in the U.S. drive slightly less each year than they did a decade ago, according to a Brookings Institution report to be published today. The rate stopped growing in 2000 and started declining in 2005, three years before gas prices started climbing.
In Portland, the average motorist drove 4,403 miles in 2006, the latest figures available. That compares with more than 9,000 for the rest of the nation.
“The American driver has hit a wall,” says Robert Puentes, co-author of the report and a fellow at the Washington, D.C., think tank.
The numbers are important in an expanding debate about where to spend expected billions of dollars from the Obama administration for economic stimulus projects: Should the bulk go to expanding highway infrastructure or to mass transit?
Brookings and others, including many Portland-area elected officials, contend that less driving signals a need for mass transit and for fixing crumbling bridges and highways in urban areas — and less need for highway widening.
And then this in the New York Times on Saturday, Dec 13:
New York City Grew, but Traffic Didn’t
As the city’s economy soared and its population grew from 2003 through 2007, something unusual was happening on the streets and in the subway tunnels. … the volume of traffic on the streets and highways remained largely unchanged, in fact declining slightly…. Virtually the entire increase in New Yorkers’ means of transportation during those robust years occurred in mass transit, with a surge in subway, bus and commuter rail riders.
The city’s sprawling public transportation system was able to handle such a surge because of vast improvements in service in recent years, Mr. Schaller said, as well as the advent of the MetroCard, which made using the system more efficient. A steep drop in crime made people more willing to use the system, and the construction of housing in areas well served by subways also brought in many more riders….
The difference is even greater when the focus is on the core commercial district of Manhattan, south of 60th Street. From 2003 to 2007, the study found, traffic entering that area fell by 3 percent. During the same period, transit ridership into the same zone rose 12 percent.
Vancouver has seen declining traffic in its core since the mid-1990s. Another drop can be anticipated with the opening of the Canada Line. Question: will the new council cash in the dividend and reallocate space for other modes, particularly given the opportunity to do so immediately after the Olympics, when the public will be used to using transit, closed-off streets for pedestrian use, and new though temporary public squares and spaces?
