Moving People: Traffic Congestion, Road Building, and Sustainable Transportation Solutions in Urban Areas, страница 2

Bibliography................................................................................................................... 48

 Lists of Multimedia Objects

Figure 1. Congestion delay increases in billion hours (TTI, 2005)................................................ 8

Figure 2. Customers board a Metro train at a downtown station (Metro website, 2006)............. 10

Figure 3. Transportation modes and increasing income (Sperling, 2002).................................... 14

Figure 4. Greenhouse gas emissions by transportation mode (Pew Center, 2000)....................... 16

Figure 5. Curitiba in the State of Paraná, Brazil (Expedia, 2006)................................................ 25

Figure 6. A pedestrian-only street in Curitiba (Curitiba Municipal website, 2006)..................... 26

Figure 7. A bus bay in Curitiba (Wikipedia, 2006). ..................................................................... 27

Figure 8. Amsterdam and highlighted highways and main arterials (Google Earth, 2006). ........ 28

Figure 9. Bicycles in Amsterdam (Author’s own)........................................................................ 29

Figure 10. Washington, DC borders and highlighted Metro lines (Google Earth, 2006)............. 31

Figure 11. Bicycle rack in Arlington (Bike Arlington website, 2006). ........................................ 34 Figure 12. Portland streetcar (Downtown Trolley, 2006)............................................................. 35

Table 1. City comparisons. ........................................................................................................... 24

1.  Introduction

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) identified reducing traffic congestion as a “vital” priority area; reducing congestion is one of the ways the agency will define its success (FHWA,

2006).  Yet the United States continues to build new roads and highways; estimates show that the United States builds 10,000 miles of new roads annually (Elvidge, 2004).  It is a never-ending cycle: building more roads leads to the need for even more roads to accommodate expanding transportation networks.  This cycle brings more congestion.

By design, expanded transportation networks that are formed mainly by highways encourage private vehicle use primarily.  Numerous empirical studies show that vehicles on major, congested roads cause pollution and impact ecosystems both near to and far from urban areas.  Partly in response to these and related dilemmas, the discipline of urban ecology emerged recently as the study of ecological issues and interactions specifically in urban or urbanizing settings.  Moreover, urban transportation is embroiled in issues over suburbanization, which is described as “a lifestyle involving a daily commute to jobs in the center” of a city (Jackson, 1987).

Urban areas in developing nations, in particularly, face an enormous challenge in the 21^st century: these rapidly growing urban areas must manage natural resources, move people and goods, and provide infrastructure to populations that own unprecedented numbers of personal vehicles.  To accomplish these goals, sustainably is yet another challenge.  Developing nations must consider past models, strategies, and systems of moving people and goods; these nations should also consider the present outcomes, both positive and negative, from those models while developing their own unique solutions.  While international, interstate, and regional transportation systems for commercial transportation are vital to economic development in both developed and developing nations, this paper focuses on moving people within urban areas.

Due to the ecological impacts introduced by road building and traffic congestion, it is essential to address sustainability in the field of transportation on local, regional, and global levels.  To reach sustainability in innovative and inspiring ways is an even loftier goal.  Do sustainable solutions to traffic congestion exist? Are there examples that we can learn from and lessons that we can apply to other places? A shift from road building as a singular solution to a framework of better, long term, and multipurpose solutions is needed.