Proximity Matters: Land Use, Transportation & Policy

A recent Brookings Institution report by Adie Tomer and Caroline George, “Building for Proximity: The Role of Activity Centers in Reducing Total Miles Traveled” (Report), uses Replica data to assess the impact on personal miles traveled (PMT) of locating households in proximity to activity centers. The Report finds that members of households located near multiple activity centers travel significantly less distance annually than members of households located relatively far away from multiple activity centers. The effect of proximity to activity centers reducing PMT occurs across all types of US metros. This dampening of the demand for travel—especially roadway travel—resulting from household proximity to activity centers has beneficial environmental, safety, and equity benefits.?

Regulatory proximity matters too. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) takes steps to bring land use planning into closer proximity to the transportation planning processes conducted by metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). As a result, there is an opening for transportation planning and investment through the MPO process to accelerate the land-use changes necessary bring more households in closer proximity to multiple activity centers via multi-modal connections.

The Importance of Physical Proximity

The Report points to the century-long process of urban disaggregation in the US that has put activity centers—e.g., employment, recreation, job centers—farther away from households:

The result is a multi-decade expansion of the average mileage each person travels per day, or what’s known as PMT: from 19.5 miles in 1969 to 40 miles in 2017. Covering those kinds of distances overwhelmingly favors car usage, so it is little surprise that 92% of American households now have access—often by necessity—to a private vehicle.

Increased PMT per capita has resulted in per capita crash and vehicle emission rates in the US roughly double that of other G7 countries. The cost burden from having to rely upon private vehicles for transport falls most heavily on the disadvantaged in the US: “[I]ronically, an American economy that prides itself on consumer choice offers less transportation choice than our global peers, which is especially impactful among the households that can least afford private vehicles.”

The Report finds that PMT drops when households are located close (e.g, three miles or less) from activity centers. The effect is strongest when households are located close to five activity centers and occurs in both relatively dense cities like those in the Northeast and in sprawling cities in the South and Southwest. The impact of proximity on PMT can be substantial, amounting to reductions of up to thousands of miles of travel each year.

The Report points out that only roughly a third of urban residents in the US today have access to five or more activity centers within three miles of their households. As a result:

Americans simply travel too far, using cars too often. National trip distances easily exceed global economic peers, leading to far higher pollution rates and transportation-related injuries while costing consumers more in transportation expenses and leaving them with little transportation choice. The society-wide math doesn’t add up.

The Report goes on to state:

Transportation practitioners, land use planners, and real estate developers need to give more people the option to live closer to multiple established activity centers. People need greater housing choice to unlock greater transportation choice.?

The Report prescribes (1) clustering households in and around activity centers and (2) putting the brakes on greenfield development by ensuring that the full long-term costs of such development are baked in things like impact fees.

The Report is especially interesting because it finds that the benefits of household proximity to activity centers can be generated in all types of US cities, not just those cities established before the automobile became ascendent. This makes the household proximity to activity measure useful for assessing transportation system performance and guiding transportation investment decisions across a country with varied urban forms and political environments.

The Importance of Regulatory Proximity

The proximate relation between land use and transportation systems is a given. Yet, in my career I heard repeatedly that transportation planning as practiced by MPOs and state DOTs under the then-current regulatory regime must be kept separate from land use planning. There were apocryphal tales of MPO policy boards instructing MPO staff to “stay away” from land use planning. There was an oft-repeated phrase that a big part of the job of transportation planning is to mitigate the impacts of bad land use decisions. Investments in new expressways and big arterials in greenfield areas were recommended by staff with a sigh and a shrug. They were viewed as something planners had to do because land-use policies and antiquated permitting bureaucracies in core communities and build-friendly policies and open land in outlying areas encouraged low-density greenfield development at the urban fringes rather than infill development in and around existing activity centers.

The IIJA, however, has begun to bring transportation planning in closer proximity to land use planning. It provides MPOs with the tools to plan for increased clustering of households in and around activity centers to realize the many benefits of such clustering as outlined in the Report. The IIJA amended the MPO planning provisions of the US Code to, among other things:

• Make it a national policy to “better connect housing and employment” [49 USC 5303(a)(1)]
• In their planning, MPOs “may address the integration of housing, transportation, and economic development strategies, based on a cooperatively developed and implemented strategy, of new and existing transportation facilities eligible for funding” [49 USC 5303(k)(4)(A)]
• MPOs may develop housing coordination plans to increase the proximity of households to destinations by:

(I) develop[ing] regional goals for the integration of housing, transportation, and economic development strategies to-

(aa) better connect housing and employment while mitigating commuting times;

…

(cc) align planning for housing and transportation to address needs in relationship to household incomes within the metropolitan planning area;

(dd) expand housing and economic development within the catchment areas of existing transportation facilities and public transportation services when appropriate, including higher-density development, as locally determined;

(ee) manage effects of growth of vehicle miles traveled experienced in the metropolitan planning area related to housing development and economic development;

(ff) increase share of households with sufficient and affordable access to the transportation networks of the metropolitan planning area. [49 USC 5301(k)(4)(C)(ii)(I)]

• A MPO may critically engage with land use plans in their region by making “a comparison of transportation plans to land use management plans, including zoning plans, that may affect road use, public transportation ridership and housing development.” [42 USC 5303(k)(4)(C)(ii)(III)]?

While the IIJA opens the door for MPOs to incorporate household/activity center proximity planning, many MPOs and others involved in the transportation planning process will need a nudge to better integrate land use and transportation planning. There are settled political and professional incentives protecting the status quo separation of regional transportation planning from highly localized land use planning. Local authorities don’t want to cede their land-use prerogatives. Transportation planners with their congestion blob maps and focus on vehicle flow performance measures are discomfited by taking a broader view of transportation planning to encompass consideration of things like the accessibility of housing to activity centers and policy issues like zoning and parking minimums.?

USDOT has levers it can pull to incentivize better integrated transportation and land use planning, even without there being a statutory mandate for such integrated planning. For example, to help ensure that its discretionary dollars are delivering safety, climate, equity, and other benefits most cost-effectively, USDOT could build into the scoring criteria for its discretionary grants incentives that favor regions (i) whose MPOs have developed housing coordination plans, (ii) that have taken meaningful substantive steps such as abolishment of parking minimums to help cluster households in and around activity centers, and (iii) have made measurable progress in bringing more households closer to more activity centers.

USDOT could also explicitly prioritize grants for projects that better link households to activity centers, facilitate infill development, or provide improved multi-modal connections between households and activity centers and between activity centers themselves. These steps by USDOT would provide MPO staff with the opportunity to inform their policy boards that their regions could be forfeiting federal grant money unless they got serious about facilitating household clustering around activity centers.

USDOT must regularly review and certify that MPOs are in compliance with legal requirements. [49 USC 5301(k)(6)] In its compliance assessment reports, USDOT could praise MPOs that are proactively integrating land use and transportation planning via housing coordination planning and call out those who have failed to take advantage of the IIJA’s authorization of housing coordination planning. Clear USDOT statements in compliance reviews and elsewhere that USDOT favors integrated planning would help spur MPO adoption of more deeply integrated land use/transportation planning practices. USDOT could also help by propagating best practices resources for housing coordination planning that brings more households closer to more activity centers. An example of a USDOT best practices guide in an emerging area is its Model Long-Range Transportation Plans: A Guide for Incorporating Performance-Based Planning.

Professional associations, most notably the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations, could do much to make housing coordination plans and, more generally, better integrated land use and transportation planning a part of the MPO best practices tool kit. While MPO staff serves at the direction of MPO policy boards, they can play an active role in updating MPO planning and project selection criteria and related policy goals through engagement with their policy boards. In these discussions, reference to well-documented industry best practices via professional organizations such as AMPO can be helpful.

Conclusion

The IIJA has put land use planning in closer proximity to transportation planning. Transportation planners should take full advantage of this opportunity to help facilitate transportation planning and investment decisions that put more households in closer proximity with activity centers. Doing so will yield the transportation, environmental, safety, and equity benefits outlined in the Brookings Report.