TRANSPORT AND LAND USE

A t the risk of appearing fashionable, 1 decided to stick 'smart growth' in the title of my paper. I confess this is because I find smart growth to be a nice shorthand for 'transport and land-use integration'. Stripped to its essentials, smart growth is mainly about better coordinating and integrating transportation and land development. 'Smart growth' is a two-syllable way of saying this. In the United States, smart growth has gained momentum, fuelled by progressive legislation in states like Maryland and Florida which ties infrastructure dollars to land-use management. No longer just a local issue, smart-growth rhetoric is today even heard on the national campaign trail. In many ways, smart growth is synonymous with sustainable development. As a rapacious consumer of natural resources and emitter of pollutants, the transport sector must be judged on the basis of sustainability maintaining or improving, as opposed to harming, the natural environment. Sustainability argues for resource-efficient forms of mobility, such as metrorail systems that link planned urban centres in the case of big cities and dedicated carpool and bus lanes that reward efficient motor-vehicle use in smaller ones. Congestion pricing, parking restraints, and the development of alternative-fuel vehicles are other strategies that embrace sustainability principles. Smart growth takes on all the more importance in a country like Australia where land is plentiful and, in physical and topographic terms, little stands in the way of American-style, spread-out patterns of growth. South East Queensland is a case in point, where the rapid pace of consumptive land development along coastal areas and the hinterlands threatens natural environments and the future quality of life. Of course, there are no shortages of naysayers who trivialize the importance of transport-and-urbanisation linkages. Uncovering unsuccessful experiences is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel (Guiliano 1995. Brindle 1996). My own research shows that the US rail investments, like BART, have exerted modest influences on urban form (Cervero & Landis, 1996). However this is less an indictment of the transport-land use nexus and more an indictment of both gross mis-pricing of resources and institutional fragmentation. Singapore-like prices and Zurich-like public transport services would have led to radically different results in the case of San Francisco's BART. But let's not fool ourselves. Smart growth doesn't come easily. Something has to give. In Stockholm, middle-class residents give up private living space in return for more public open space and a high-amenity public realm. In Zurich, residents give up private cars in return for wonderfully efficient public transport services. Smart growth is not painless. With smart growth, there must be some degree of private sacrifice, at least in part, for public gains. The public-private conundrum is revealed by the commuting statistics. Suburbanisation has lengthened average commutes, but average driving speeds have gone up even faster. The only two U.S. cities that saw congestion levels fall from the mid-80s to the mid-90s were spread out Houston and Phoenix. America's most traffic-snarled cities are also its densest and most transitintensive. With smart growth, personal time losses incurred when switching from cars to transit are matched by societal gains like cleaner air and fuel savings. Portland shows that containment policies like urban growth boundaries (UGBs) are a necessary pill to curb the sprawl disease. However, supply constraints have inflated land costs (both per square meter and per residence). Portland's experiences show that public gains (i.e. cheaper infrastructure per kilometre, cleaner air) are at the expense of private losses (i.e. higher housing and land costs). What remains unclear is how much cost inflation is due to constrained land-supplies versus Portland being an attractive place to live and do business in in no small part because of successfully linking transportation and land development. This paper raises core issues at the centre of the debate over coordinated transport and land use that is, smart growth. 1 hope to shed light on promising avenues for advancing smart-growth principles and practice as well as to identify major hurdles that need to be overcome.