Transportation for livable cities (2000)

Transportation for Livable Cities, Vukan R. Vuchic, New Jersey, Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1999, 352 pp., US$29.95The debate over the role of public transit and the role of automobiles in cities has energised planners for many decades. Authors who take on this controversy usually hold strong positions at one end or the other of the spectrum of policy choices. Vukan R. Vuchic, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation at the University of Pennsylvania, is no exception. In his comprehensive book, Transportation for Livable Cities, he explains the importance of offering true choices in transportation which are appropriate to the size and complexity of an urban region. His goal is to explain the case for more transit, for regionally integrated multi-modal transportation, and for learning from European experience. The basic approach of the book is to enumerate critical decisions about transportation in urban areas-how many expressways to build, whether they go downtown, whether to introduce rail transit and what type, and how to coordinate and fund the transportation system. Vuchic has tried to incorporate all of the experiences and findings of his career into advice on how to tackle these problems. His goal is to improve transportation planning for cities in countries like the USA and the UK where automobile domination is strong. He uses the USA as his primary object of study and recommendations.As Vuchic notes, the USA has often been innovative in urban transportation-having used and developed streetcars and associated ?suburbs', having used passenger railroads to tie exurban towns and villages to the metropolis, and having done key early work in highway and road safety. But since the Second World War the USA has made many wrong turns according to the author. In short, the massive Federal support for the Interstate Highway System made automobile dependency and dominance inevitable. Since it became clear around 1970 that the pendulum had swung too far towards the automobile, there have been halting attempts to support public transit and encourage more environmentally sustainable transportation. But as he notes (p. 16) c... the present differences between the United States and its peers in urban transportation are not as extreme in laws and officially proclaimed policies as they are in implementation'.Vuchic clearly states the case for more transit, and for more coordinated multi-modal transportation systems. He does not really conduct a debate, however. In most cases the proponents of his approach are given due attention, but the opposition is not given much due. For example, he cites the transit side of the auto versus transit debate (Newman and Ken worthy, 1989), but not the auto side (Gordon and Richardson, 1989). This debate has changed over the years into a broader discussion of sprawl which is very important to the transportation choices in urban regions (Gordon and Richardson, 1997; Ewing, 1997). Unfortunately, Vuchic does not make the case as well as he could because he does not take on auto advocates directly.Again he misses an opportunity to take on transit critics directly when he dismisses routine errors; the mistakes made in many cities in the construction of new subways and light rail systems. Detailed critiques of these projects (Pickrell, 1992) are not mentioned nor effectively countered.A key chapter in the heart of the book is his review of what has been done in peer countries (and their cities). His discussion of national policy in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Great Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Finland is clearly organised and includes details on 12 cities. …