Growth Management and Sustainable Transport: Do Growth Management Policies Promote Transit Use?

Advocates of sustainable development typically consider mass transit to be more sustainable than their automobile-dependent alternatives and desire policies that can achieve higher use of urban mass transit. In this paper, we hypothesize that statelevel growth management policies should increase transit use in two ways: first, by limiting core abandonment while accommodating potential increases in population, reducing development elsewhere; and second, by directing new development where transit systems are already well established. We tested this by analyzing 95 metropolitan areas across the United States, 16 with growth-management policies and 79 without. We found that the first set showed a statistically significant improvement in the percentage transit users. The empirical analysis on causality, however, suggests that the improvement is more likely due to an increase in occupancy rates within core areas, by limiting abandonment, rather than in shifting the location of new development to transit areas. Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2009 22 Introduction The realization that our current ways of living are implicating our quality of life and even our personal human rights have lead to an understanding of the need for alternatives to our current urban development approaches (Daly 1996, Hawken et al.1999). In the realm of urban policy and planning literature, these alternative development modes go by names such as sustainable development, smart growth, new urbanism, and low-impact development. Although somewhat disparate in their approaches, they all advocate a continual improvement in the quality of life of our communities. To date, they generally have focused more on questions of land use than on transport. Some have suggested, however, that a higher priority needs to be placed on sustainable urban transportation systems, because urban transport systems represent the largest and greatest environmental and social opportunity to improving community quality of life (May et al. 2003, Holden et al. 2005) Progress toward more sustainable transport faces many barriers and challenges (Black 2000, TRB 1997, Hull 2008). According to decennial census data and the American Community Survey of 2005, auto-based travel remains the norm, while the percentages of commuters using transit, biking, and walking have declined steadily from 1990 to 2005. Assuming a continued increase in travel demand and a lack of infrastructure improvements in transit and other alternatives modes, these trends are likely to continue without policy interventions. Many different approaches and policies to counteract unsustainable transport trends have been proposed in the recent literature (TRB 1997, Hull 2008, Richardson 1999, Richardson 2005, Deakin 2002, May et al. 2007, Banister 2008). The approach to sustainable transport depends on the definition of the concept. Although the definition of the term sustainability may differ depending on the context, there are certain social, economic, and environmental factors shared among different transport sustainability concepts (May et al. 2007, Jabareen 2006, Litman et al. 2006). From these perspectives, transit is viewed favorably and considered more sustainable than automobiles (Litman 2007), even though modern automobiles pollute much less than their predecessors and transit vehicles often run while relatively empty. The central question for advocates of sustainable transport is how to encourage the use of mass transit. This paper examines the effects of macro-level land use planning policies on transit mode choice and use (Figure 1). We analyze a specific policy approach—growth management—and examine its potential efficacy by measuring its impact on commuter transit use.