This is a great piece by Strong Towns (aka Chuck Marohn's
group--APA FL conference keynote speaker) about a Minneapolis project, which
brings together the points about need to integrate land use and transportation
planning, take a corridor approach, look at a grid
system, and how to do mixed-use development so it works. These are all issues that need to be addressed in Lee County's Comp Plan rewrite process, currently underway, and the Lee MPO's upcoming Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP) update. Darla
For a great summary of the key points, check out related
Streetsblog article.
The status quo of planning is that of professional silos. That needs to
change. It’s about time we consider a Department of Transportation
and Land
Use. The two shouldn’t be divorced.
Transportation and land use planning are intricately linked, but the process
is ultimately detached.
The majority of the transportation decisions are made
at the Federal and state levels, whereas land use is left to local governments.
This isolated decision-making has yielded
places like
Hiawatha Avenue.
... It can be
frustratingly slow trekking up Hiawatha Avenue,
a road
with an identity crisis, that is not unlike many other places across the
country: it’s trying to be a highway
and city street.
But everyone is doing their job. That’s the problem. It’s structural.
Otherwise it’d be clear that it’s lunacy to develop a dense, mixed use, transit
and pedestrian oriented corridor and design a multi-lane highway to travel
right through the middle of it. There needs to by some other way.
.....Will making traffic flows better on Hiawatha Avenue improve congestion? It’s
clear that congestion hasn’t acted as a disincentive to over 55,000 cars
traversing it each day. Will induced demand merely bring those taking
alternative routes, such as the employees described above, back onto Hiawatha?
History would indicate so, and I’m skeptical the project will do more than
temporarily improve traffic congestion – especially considering that more
people are slated to move into the neighborhood, and hence, creating more daily
trips.
The Hiawatha corridor will take a long time to develop into the mixed-use
hub many predicted and with expensive signal re-timing projects that only
enhance car traffic, development along the corridor is likely to take longer.
What better way to dis-incentivize people from using a $500 million light rail
investment than to continue to subsidize its competition and create an
environment contradictory to land use plans?.....
It all boils down to having a backwards approach to transportation and land
use planning (and Minnesota isn’t alone). We operate within the same
environment, but these professions work separately – and they shouldn’t. We
spend millions building light rail in hopes that it will create mixed-use urban
development and then we attempt to move cars as fast and conveniently as
possible through an area where we expect increased pedestrian activity.
The reality is that there is a long history showing how these two components
of our urban environment don’t interact well. In the meantime, we’re getting
the worst of both worlds as we try to have our cake and eat it too...
Ultimately, we need to find a way to combine transportation and land use. It
goes beyond zoning and road mismatches, principles of induced demand and the
quixotic nature of subsidizing competing interests. Transportation and land use
planning are intricately linked, and our planning process needs to reflect
accordingly. Otherwise, we’ll likely be experiencing more roads with
personality disorders.
One of the workshops featured the Lee MPO's Bike Ped program, called "Grow Your Money--Leveraging Federal Dollars for Better Walking and Biking Projects", presented by Don Scott, Lee MPO Director, Brade Davis of Alta Planning + Design; and Ned Baier, Jacobs.
