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An unpopular essay on transportation
Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
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An unpopular essay on transportation q William R. Black * Department of Geography, Indiana University, Student Building 112, Bloomington, IN 47408-6101, USA
Abstract Several popular notions exist in the transportation and transport geography literature that should more properly be viewed as popular myths. Several of these myths are examined using a combination of existing research, data analysis and certain theoretical constructs. Among the areas addressed are transport and economic development, the likelihood of telecommuting reducing urban travel, the promise of ethanol as an alternative transport fuel, the future demand for public transit by senior citizens, the role of network connectivity in accessibility and economic growth, and the relationship between vehicle speed and motor vehicle accidents. An examination of several of these myths and some others reveals that they clearly need to be researched in further detail, or in other cases they are patently wrong. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Bertrand Russell, the eminent British philosopher for most of the last century, was once taken to task for writing an essay that he described as popular, a critic saying that the essay was far from popular and could be read only by a specialist in the ®eld. Lord Russell entitled his next collection as ``unpopular essays'' (Russell, 1950). In a similar though not identical vein, there are many popular notions or myths believed today about transportation, which are quite simply wrong in the majority of cases to which they are applied and I have decided to give my perspective on these popular views and since the perspective is not the popular one, this is perhaps best described as ``an unpopular essay on transportation''. The popular notions that I will discuss are not obviously myths to many, so I will try to support my arguments with the transport literature or data, as necessary. Nevertheless, some may disagree with what I will say here. They should feel free to do so, but to head o some of this, allow me to qualify what follows by stating that it applies primarily to the United States, only to a lesser extent to Europe, and hardly at all to the rest of the world. Table 1 includes the nine myths that I will ad-
q Fleming lecture in Transportation Geography, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2000. * Tel.: +1-812-855-9414; fax: +1-812-855-1661. E-mail address: [email protected] (W.R. Black).
dress in this paper for those who want some preview of what is coming.
2. The ethanol myth Let me begin with one of the common myths that probably has to be attributed to environmentalists. It is that ethanol should be the fuel of choice for future transport in the US. This belief comes from the fact that ethanol emits low amounts of carbon dioxide, and if we also use this fuel in planting, cultivating, and harvesting the stock from which the ethanol is made, it is sustainable. Ignoring these quali®ers it is carbon dioxide neutral (i.e., the plants will release carbon dioxide when they die anyway) and it is renewable (i.e., we can replant next year). In addition, there are positive security dimensions to this fuel; we could produce ethanol here and not be subject to the whims of a cartel of petroleum exporting nations. All of this is true, there is no myth, to a point. The myth comes about because we are unable to produce sucient ethanol in the US even if we devote substantial agricultural resources to this eort. A recent study by Pearson (2000) at Indiana University found that if we dedicated all barley, edible dry bean, corn, hay, oat, peanut, rice, grain sorghum, soybean, sun¯ower and wheat production to this problem, then we would end up with enough ethanol to power the national ¯eet of highway vehicles for approximately 8.4 days. If we were able to switch over to optimized fuel cell vehicles that could use ethanol to produce hydrogen,
0966-6923/01/$ - see front matter Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 6 6 - 6 9 2 3 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 4 5 - 4
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Table 1 Nine popular transportation myths 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Ethanol as an alternative fuel oers the potential of signi®cantly decreasing carbon dioxide emissions. Transport investment will lead to economic development Telecommuting or teleworking will reduce the amount of travel in cities Globalization of economic activities should result in a decrease in transport Connecting geographically remote places to a national transport network will stimulate their economic growth With the aging of the population we will see signi®cant increases in transit ridership Increases in communication technology will reduce the need to travel and will result in a net reduction in the amount of personal travel Intelligent transport systems will have a demonstrable impact on achieving sustainable transport Investments in transportation are `safe' investments
and in the process emit for the most part only oxygen and water, we could extend the productive life of our fuel to 61.6 days, or put another way it could power about 17% of the national motor vehicle fuel demands for a year. There are very few fuel cell vehicles in the current ¯eet and a ¯eet of fuel cell vehicles is something that remains quite distant. If ethanol does become a major alternative fuel, it will not be able to solve the transport fuel problem alone. A second factor that is often overlooked when it comes to ethanol is its pollution potential. The use of ethanol boosts emissions of chemicals that form smog. Its use also increases emissions of acetaldehyde, a probable carcinogen according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Nevertheless there are some that believe it may very well become one of several alternative fuels in use in the decades to come. Given ethanol's fuel production limitations as well as its pollution potential, it is unlikely to ever be a major fuel. In addition, it is probable that world population growth will place more demands on the use of land for food production than for ethanol production. 3. Transport investment and economic development Investments in transport infrastructure have been critical to the economic growth of most of the world's developed nations. In the United States the railroads of the 19th century and the highways of the 20th century were of primary importance to that economic growth. This historical experience has led most Americans to believe that investments in transport will always result in growth. Perhaps no myth is more pervasive than this notion that investment in transportation infrastructure will lead to the economic development of manufacturing industries. We are told this by chambers of commerce, economic development councils, city and county government, airport authorities, state departments of transportation, and many others. We must build the highway or the airport runway or whatever, because if we do not we will not get that manufacturer we want to attract, or the ®rm(s) we have will not expand here, or
stay here. The argument takes many forms, sometimes the focus is on employment that will result from the investment, or the unemployment that will result without it. Now there is nothing simple about the economic theory in this area, but the theory is not very general either. George Wilson, a transport economist with a true understanding of his ®eld and a deep admiration for geography, seemed to understand the actual situation more than 30 years ago. He noted that transport investment could result in negative economic impacts, neutral economic impacts, or positive economic impacts (Wilson, 1966). In the negative case the investment may take capital away from other sectors (e.g., education) or it may lead to external industries capturing local markets before the area has an opportunity to develop local industries to serve these markets and it may prevent the latter from ever developing. The neutral case is simply a situation where the project's net sum of the positives and negatives cancel each other out. In the positive case there is one over-riding precondition that must be present and it is that there must be some economic activity that is being held back because of a lack of transportation. There are situations in the developing world where the positive case may be observed, but my concern here is with the developed world and it is unlikely that these conditions exist any longer for most of that latter area. Let us look at a very real transportation project in the state of Indiana (see Fig. 1). I am not going to get parochial on you because the project is actually part of what has been called the Mid-America Highway, an interstate quality highway that would go from eastern Canada to Mexico. For the most part the highway is already in place in the United States as Interstate 69, but one piece of it was never built. This is the section from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Evansville, Indiana. The leading proposal has the highway going from Indianapolis to Bloomington over an existing four-lane highway and then going over a new terrain route through southern Indiana to Evansville. Advocates argue that the highway will bring economic growth to this region of Indiana, while the opponents argue that it will only disturb the peace and tranquility of the area. I
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
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are familiar with the idea as well as the practice of telecommuting or teleworking (as it is called in Britain). Teleworking is far more accurate as a phrase since it means working at a distance; we really do not commute at a distance. Teleworking is essentially working in a remote location (one's home or in a telecenter or televillage) and being connected electronically through phone lines or cable to your workplace. Dyson (1997) takes telecommuting a bit more literally than it was probably intended when she states: What it does mean is that you can travel more easily to see customers and stay close to with your of®ce. In my own life I have found that e-mail lets me run the oce from the road, but it does not reduce the amount of time I have to spend away getting to know people, having dinner, having arguments, and just doing the kind of high intensity communication that you cannot do any way other than faceto-face. Fig. 1. Proposed mid-America Highway through Indiana.
suspect that motor carriers moving North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) trac will bene®t to some degree from the facility, but what about this local economic development argument and exactly what is being held back by the lack of this highway? Southern Indiana has one recognizable natural resource in this area and this is construction quality block limestone. It has been moved for more than 100 years by rail and later trucks and nothing is preventing its further development except the existence of some very high quality concrete that can be used in its place. The agriculture that exists here is held back by generally low quality soils and rugged terrain, not an absence of transport. If anything approaching development were to occur from this project it would simply be the addition of highway services to the new corridor (motels, gas stations, and fast food establishments) that in all likelihood would be oset by a similar set of such services in the small towns of Indiana closing down due to a loss of current trac. There may be some new resources discovered in the United States that require the construction of transport facilities for their development and this will lead to economic development for the area. My point is that in most developed parts of this country I see no existing case where this is true today and therefore arguments that any highway or transport facility will bring economic growth are not credible.
4. Teleworking and urban travel There is also a belief that telecommuting will reduce the amount of urban travel. To some extent most of us
There was much excitement in the early 1990s that this would be one way of signi®cantly reducing urban trac. A major federal study revealed that by the year 2003 there could be 7.5 (5.5%)±15 (11%) million Americans teleworking (US Department of Transportation, 1993). We would be very disappointed now if we had not read the ®ne print that indicated working remotely one or two days a week would make you a teleworker. So we have to reduce our initial estimates of the impacts of teleworking on trac to perhaps something like 1.65± 3.3% of the workers or work trips (assuming a worker teleworked 1.5 days per week). For a city the size of Pittsburgh with 154,000 employees this would average about 3812 work trips or 3465 vehicle work trips a day assuming a 1.1 level of auto occupancy and no one working at home, using transit or walking to work. This is not very signi®cant. Now I realize that teleworking has sociological dimensions that border on frightening. I also understand the potential impacts it may have on urban sprawl. The concern here is with the urban travel implications of teleworking and I will focus my comments on that aspect of this activity. It has been argued that the teleworker will be tempted to run the kids to school, to drop o or pick up the dry cleaning, to pick up those few things one needs for tonight's dinner; we all know this list is nearly endless. The implications are that without commuting to work, many of the trips we have chained together will still have to be made, perhaps as a chain or perhaps as several separate trips. You may argue that I do not know a priori how much of this driving will occur; that is true. However, if we take the notions of Hagerstrand (1970) regarding space time prisms and activity systems, we get some insight
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into this question. These ideas have also been discussed in the urban transport literature by Hanson (1995) and more recently by Giuliano (1998). The latter constructs three situations for a single worker faced with little ¯exibility due to the use of transit, a little more ¯exibility in meeting a variety of needs due to the availability of an automobile, and a ¯exible job start time with an automobile. As one gains ¯exibility, the potential limits on one's activity space lessen or the area of one's space time prisms increases. A typical illustration of such prisms is where we have a commuter who leaves for work at 7:15 a.m. arriving at 8:15 a.m. followed by some time during the lunch hour to accomplish minor tasks, leaving work at 4:30 p.m. and having to be home for one reason or another by 6 p.m. (see Fig. 2). The two small diamonds at mid-morning and mid-afternoon represent coee breaks. The slight dislocation of the perpendicular and the prisms represents a movement in space to the job location and the need to return to one's home location at the end of the day. The diamond in the center represents an area bounding one's movement over the lunch hour.
Bringing these ideas over to teleworking we essentially end up with a series of space time diamonds that could occur during the sixty minutes one would otherwise be commuting, a ®fteen minute morning break, an hour lunch break, a 15-min afternoon break, and an hour and a half between the end of the work day and 6 p.m., the time when one needs to be at home. The morning and evening breaks are not useable in the commuter situation because one must park the car and moving it for a short time is dicult; the commuter could probably walk a short distance and return during these breaks. In the teleworking case the car is usually just outside the house. In reality there is usually nothing preventing a teleworker from combining morning and evening commute times, the breaks and the lunch hour into one large space time diamond. In eect the teleworker could begin work at 7 a.m. and work straight through until 2:00 p.m. and have the remaining three and one-half to four hours for driving (see Fig. 3). This does not mean that the availability of this large of a space time diamond will generate ¯ows, but I think we should understand that this is very likely. The entire concept of space time prisms rests on the notion that an increase in potential activity space will lead to additional travel and the only conclusion in the teleworking case is that it will lead to more travel.
Fig. 2. A typical space-time prism.
Fig. 3. A space-time prism for a teleworker.
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
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5. Globalization and transport ¯ows
6. Networks, accessibility and economic growth
Allow me to step away from my US focus to brie¯y examine globalization and transport ¯ows. There are some who believe that globalization of economic activity will result in a decrease in the length of transport ¯ows. The logic is that globalization will result in the economic development of currently less developed countries giving them the capability of producing a wide array of goods. This will enable these areas to purchase goods locally that were once imported from the nations of the developed world and this will result in a decrease in transport inputs. A further examination will reveal that what it really means is that industries will move from one area to another usually in response to some economic incentive, such as lower wages. So we may suddenly see television sets being produced in the developing world, but incomes are still too low to allow anyone to purchase these. The major markets remain in the developed parts of the world where incomes are higher. The net eect of globalization would appear to be that manufacturers can move production to the developing world where they can take advantage of low cost labor. One case in 1999 had an electric appliance manufacturer moving from Indiana to Mexico; salaries were US$24 an hour in the former and US$2 an hour in the latter. These ®rms will give up some of their new pro®ts in the form of transport costs that are much greater than they were prior to the move due to the greater distances to the markets involved, however, because most of external (pollution, accident, and other) costs associated with transport are not recovered, it is not at all clear that society bene®ts from such globalization. International trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or the various agreements leading to a uni®ed Europe, encourage the shifting of production from local areas to distant places. Once again, production in the latter areas is made feasible only because we have removed the barriers to such trade. As Gabel (1994) has noted:
One of the key attributes of a uni®ed Europe is the elimination of taris, the construction of some ``missing links'', and the connecting of all places to new European transport networks (see inter alia European Commission, 1993, 1994, 1995). In the midst of all this is the suggestion that areas once poorly served and peripheral to the former networks as well as the economy of Europe will be brought into the fold. It is dicult to say to what extent the various European nations accept the logic implied, but it should be noted that connecting remote places to a new transport network, no matter how good it is, will simply result in remote places being on a good network. Presumably these networks will increase the accessibility of all places (more or less) uniformly and this will result in countries such as Portugal and Norway of Europe still being the most remote places on better transport networks. It is true that transport costs may decrease for these remote places, but this is also true for every place else in Europe, suggesting that the new networks will do little to stimulate the economies of the remote areas. In terms of network analysis, consider a distribution of places that we want to connect by some transport network. We start o with a minimal length graph that connects all nodes of interest. This is the shortest length network and because of this it is dicult to get around and the average length of shortest paths over this network is at a maximum. This minimum length creates what I have called a minimal connectivity barrier. If the network were any shorter places would cease to be connected and therefore any length less than this would be a barrier to movement between all places. We can begin to add more links to this network until we construct a fully connected network containing all possible links. In this case all places can be reached by moving directly from each node to all other nodes. We now reach a geographic distance barrier in which the distances cannot become any smaller between places unless we begin to move places closer to each other. These ideas are illustrated in Fig. 4. What this ®gure illustrates is that as a network's length increases, or as the network becomes more and more dense, there are very few gains in terms of reducing the average lengths of shortest paths and at some point the gains may cease prior to complete connectivity. These relationships hold in the distance or the travel time case. However, I should note that if we construct communication networks over our set of places the connectivity and geographic distance barriers become insigni®cantly small. This may suggest that communication networks may be the most important networks of the future, not transport networks. Such networks do have the ability to make all places equally accessible as we are seeing with e-commerce.
At one extreme, autarkic economies demand little transportation of goods to market. As trade extends in geographical reach, transportation rises as a proportion of international production. And although the world economy is now highly integrated, further liberalization of international trade can be expected to increase transport inputs per unit of international product, ceteris paribus. In general, as the area over which a nation trades increases so do the transport costs recovered and the external costs not recovered.
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7. The aging population and transit ridership
Fig. 4. The relationship between average path length and network length.
Returning to the transport network case, a remote place can bene®t from network construction if it can change its location relative to other places. This can never be accomplished with politically acceptable new transport networks for Europe. The only way to change one's relative location on the network is to change the geographic area covered by the network. In other words the greatest stimulus for Portugal and Norway is to make them central to the network that they serve. This may be viewed as impossible, but if the network of interest is suddenly the trade network of North America and Europe, Portugal could, with proper economic investments, become central to that network and the bene®ts implied would be attainable. Otherwise, new networks will have little eect. If we look at the US case we have some exceptionally good networks. Most of these have done little for major metropolitan areas on the periphery of the country. Portland in Maine is still inaccessible to national markets as are most other cities on the edge of that country. The places that have grown are those that have seen sucient investment to change their relative location on a dierent global transport network, e.g., Seattle±Tacoma and Los Angeles±Long Beach, and the major port centers of the Atlantic coastal area. I do not see anything like this on the horizon in Europe and because of this it is doubtful that the hope some nations have for the proposed new networks will be realized.
That an aging population will result in increases in bus-transit ridership is another myth. It is generally recognized that one of the major empirical observations in the area of bus ridership is that the larger the elderly population the greater the bus ridership. This is true in urban and rural environments and applies primarily in a cross-sectional context (Black, 1990, 1992). It is widely recognized that if current trends continue, the proportion of the population over the age of 65 in 2020 will be 53.2 million or 16.5% of the nation's population. Since the elderly are such a substantial component of current bus-transit ridership, there is a belief that this will signi®cantly increase ridership. This is doubtful. If we look at 1963 we see that roughly 2% of the driving public (those holding a driver's license) consisted of women over age 65. Approximately 6% of this group were men over the age of 65. Overall about 8% of the drivers on the road were over age 65 in 1963. In 1997 the two groups were nearly equal at 7% each or 14% of the driving public. Incidentally, women surpassed men in 1993 and have retained their lead since then (see Fig. 5). At the same time that these trends have been occurring, we have seen an absolute increase in the population and in the number of drivers of each gender. In addition, during this time period, ridership on bus-transit systems has been decreasing. If we look at the 1977 data for men and women in age group 45±64, we see that between 96.2% and 98.6% of the former and between 69.0% and 82.1% of the latter were drivers (see Table 2). These numbers correspond to 1997 values of 97.6% and 99.5% for males and 86.2% to 94.2% for females (see Table 3). Looking at the 1997 group again, these are people who reached driving age between 1948 and 1968 and for the most part have really known only the automobile as their transport mode. The members of this group will also be the dominant
Fig. 5. Proportion of male and female drivers age 65 and over (1963± 1998).
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
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Table 2 Partial distribution of US drivers by age group ± 1977a
a
Age group
Males number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of male age group
Females number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of female age group
Total drivers (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of total age group
45±49 50±54 55±59 60±64 65+
5533 5500 5112 4278 8128
98.6 96.2 97.0 97.6 84.9
4843 4782 4300 3440 5563
82.1 77.6 74.6 69.0 39.9
10,376 10,282 9412 7718 13,691
90.1 87.1 85.3 82.4 58.2
Source: US Department of Transportation (1997) and US Bureau of the Census (1979).
Table 3 Partial distribution of US drivers by age group ± 1997a
a
Age group
Males number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of male age group
Females number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of female age group
Total drivers (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of total age group
45±49 50±54 55±59 60±64 65+
8854 7311 5618 4632 12,799
97.6 99.0 99.5 97.6 91.4
8852 7238 5563 4578 13,379
94.2 93.0 91.0 86.2 66.7
17,706 14,549 11,181 9210 26,178
95.9 95.9 95.1 91.6 76.8
Source: US Department of Transportation (1998).
component of the over 65 population in 2020 and I suspect getting them out of their cars will be virtually impossible. This is not meant to imply that we won't need public bus transit, we probably will need it as the social service it has become, but the view that the vehicles will be ®lled with the elderly may not be wellfounded. Bus-transit ridership was decreasing in 1977 when 84.9% of the males and 39.9% of the females over age 65 held drivers licenses (see Table 2). As of 1997 we ®nd 91.4% of the males and 66.7% of the females over age 65 holding drivers licenses (Table 4). As one moves from the 65 to 69 age group to the 85+ group we see a drop in the proportion of the age groups holding drivers licenses which is far more dramatic for women than it is for men suggesting that the drop in women drivers is linked to being non-drivers earlier rather than the in®rmities of aging. Assuming that is the case it would suggest further drops in the proportion of the elderly using bus transit. In eect, this transit sector has lost market share at the
same time that motor vehicles (as measured by drivers licenses) have increased their share. This trend is continuing today and while it will not eliminate the need for bus transit, it is suggestive that the mode will never again reach parity it held with motor vehicles prior to the 1950s. Of course none of this is meant to apply to rapid transit systems in cities such as Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Boston. These systems have high levels of ridership and signi®cantly reduce highway congestion in their parent cities, and they will continue to be attractive to a broad range of riders, including the aged. 8. The substitution of communication for transportation It is often assumed that as communication technology increases we will see a reduction in the need for long-distance travel and this will result in a net reduction in the amount of travel or spatial interaction for
Table 4 Distribution of US drivers over age 65a
a
Age group
Males number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of male age group
Females number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of female age group
Total drivers (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of total age group
65+ 65±69 70±74 75±79 80±84 85+
12,799 4215 3654 2650 1486 794
91.4 94.5 96.0 90.9 86.7 71.4
13,379 4236 3831 2835 1608 869
66.7 79.9 77.7 68.4 54.9 31.5
26,178 8451 7485 5485 3094 1663
76.8 86.6 85.7 77.7 66.7 42.9
Source: US Department of Transportation (1998).
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personal reasons. The origin of this idea may date from the brie¯y used Pony Express (1860±1861) in the US, which was replaced by the telegraph, but that was not communication replacing transportation, it was a slow form of communication being replaced by a faster form of communication. The same is true for the use of facsimiles (faxes) replacing air mail. If we examine the 20th century improvements in communication, we see these occurring alongside major transport innovations, e.g., telephones and automobiles spread across the country at about the same time. Therefore it is dicult to say to what extent one in¯uenced the other. It is in the latter part of the century that we see major changes in communication that are available to the individual, e.g., e-mail (with its capability of sending text or graphics), the Internet, voice-mail, conference calls, facsimile machines, cell phones, video conferencing, and probably many others. Have any of these reduced travel or travel demand? Much of what we do electronically today was once done with telephone calls and letters. It took longer usually to set up situations and often the focus of your eort, e.g., organizing anything from a conference to a conference session, collaborating on a research paper, responding to questions, sending in manuscript reviews and so forth, would take longer simply because the mails carrying the ®nal documents took longer. So things move faster now and that may enable some to become involved in far more activities than they once were. Does that imply more travel? Not necessarily. The constraint on travel, particularly long distance travel, is usually money for most of us. If you take away the monetary constraint, then it is more than likely that individuals will travel more, independently of whether they are connected in a communication sense. The role of discretionary income on long distance travel is well known and documented. It is unlikely that short distance travel would be aected very much one way or the other (except in the special case of teleworking noted earlier). There is not much dierence between telephone and e-mail communications over short distances. On the other hand there appear to be signi®cant dierences between the use of telephones and the use of the Internet for e-commerce. The ability of shoppers to look at all the varieties of goods on a computer or TV monitor, selecting some for their cart, and having these delivered to their house, will not result in an absence of transportation, but it may make that latter task more ecient as trips are chained together. It should be noted that it was common to telephone a grocery store with a list of grocery needs 60 years ago and have these delivered to one's home that same day. In eect, even this nascent activity is a variation on the earlier practice. One's travel is fairly well re¯ected by one's travel activity space; an increase in the size of the activity space is indicative of greater travel distances. One's commu-
nication could also be described by one's communication activity space (that area over which one communicates electronically on a typical day). An increase in the size of the latter implies an increase in the length of communication distances. We also know that spatial interaction is the greatest among individuals who know one another and therefore it is likely that increases in communication activity space may actually increase the size of one's travel activity space, ceteris paribus. Therefore developments in communication will likely result in increases in personal travel, not decreases. Some additional support for this conclusion comes from the area of spatial interaction and migration literature. It is understood that . . . ``the eect of distance as a barrier to migration changes over time, primarily with improvements in transportation and communication.'' And that . . . ``frequently people move to an area to which their friends and relatives had recently moved'' (Morrill, 1965). If communication and contacts are this important in a migration context, they certainly must exercise some in¯uence on lower levels of spatial interaction. 9. Intelligent transport systems and sustainable transport There is a belief in the US that much of what is called ``sustainable transport'' can be achieved by some of the programs we have seen over the past decade in intelligent transport systems or ITS. De®nitions are important whenever sustainable transport comes up so let me say that our current transport systems are non-sustainable because they use a fuel that is ®nite and forecasted not to last through the next 100 years; they create global pollution problems; they create urban air quality problems; they are congested; they result in excessive injuries and fatalities; and, they consume large amounts of land (see Black, 1996, 1998). Some researchers believe that sustainable transport applies only to the ®rst two of these, ®nite petroleum and global warming types of concerns, and in that case ITS for the most part has nothing to oer. There is a possibility that highway signing could inform motorists that there is no place to park, or an in-car navigation system could keep drivers from getting more lost than they already are, but that is about the extent of it on the fuel use and global pollution front. ITS has the capability of doing something about congestion, but growth here and in Europe will probably make these eects unnoticeable. It will contribute in a rather insigni®cant way to improvements in urban air quality. ITS will probably result in the consumption of more land for highways, not less. This is not meant to imply additional roads, but the need to widen right of ways for the installation of automated guideway technology, which will control vehicle movement. The large
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amounts of highway land now in use is unlikely to be ``banked'' for future use as we have done for rail rightof-way in some cases. However, ITS holds the promise of signi®cantly improving the safety picture. Some countries are very optimistic about the potential of ITS to reduce accidents, e.g., Sweden intends to eliminate motor vehicle fatalities and serious injuries with its ``Vision Zero'' program enacted as part of its 1997 Road Trac Safety Bill. The type of ITS we are talking about here will include automated guideways to keep vehicles on the road (noted above), smart vehicles that control your vehicle speed in dangerous situations (intelligent cruise control), and the entire array of interior safety equipment. Much of the rest of ITS concerns things such as automated fare collection, transponders that will replace toll collectors (faster than they will relieve congestion), and similar improvements that miss the big picture. However, even the potential safety side of ITS has some major barriers. First, these new systems will be extremely expensive both for government and the highway user and it is unknown how fast these innovations will diuse through the motor vehicle ¯eet (Black, 2000). Second, it is technology and it will have bugs as we have seen with air bags and child restraint systems. Third, we are currently in the process of creating a tri-modal ¯eet that must operate on a single network. By this I am referring to the growth of sports utility vehicles (SUV), to add to our current automobile-large truck system. Of course SUVs are practically the same as trucks, but trucks have never had a 50% share of the consumer market. Passengers in a motor vehicle involved in a crash with an SUV are 15 times more likely to be a fatality, than someone in the SUV. Finally, ITS innovations will become part of our transport systems at the very time that this system has the largest over 65 years of age component that it has ever had. This group is second only to young men in terms of crash rates. These factors will in¯uence the impacts of ITS and while ITS has some potential, it will not bring overnight success even in the safety area under these conditions. One could argue that the growth of trac, vehicle expense, technology ¯aws, the growth of SUVs and the increasing aged population are independent variables that have nothing to do with the impact of ITS, but I have a dicult time with that argument since these will in¯uence its acceptance and distribution, and the impact it could have. ITS will not be of much use if it functions only in a laboratory setting. 10. Transportation as a safe investment For most of the 20th century we have heard the statement that ``transportation is a safe investment'' and this will be the ®nal myth we examine here. This ``safe
9
investment'' phrase has its origin primarily in the highway sector as near as I can determine. The existence of plenty of unused and incomplete canals and abandoned railroads even before the growth of highways would make them an unlikely source of this wisdom. It also did not originate in the urban transit area, where for-pro®t private operators have been replaced completely by subsidized public sector operators, or in commercial aviation, where Eastern Airlines and Brani Airlines have ceased to exist and where the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 resulted in the closure of 106 airports (US Civil Aeronautics Board, 1984). So apparently it is highway transportation investment that is supposed to be safe. We will set aside all the highway controversies of the 1960s and 1970s, e.g., Interstate 95 in Boston, Interstate 10 through New Orleans, and the Embarcadero Highway in San Francisco. It is likely the expression predates this era. The origin of the phrase appears to rest on the premise that if you build a highway, people will use it. That sage wisdom was probably true when the network was thin and motor vehicle ownership was growing at phenomenal rates. By the end of the Interstate Highway construction era we were adding some roads that probably were not necessary for the same reasons argued earlier regarding changes in path length as network density increases. There are sections of the Interstate Highway System that have unbelievably low volumes of trac. We have one of these in Indiana between Louisville and Evansville. Sections of the highway have an average ¯ow volume per hour of 500 vehicles in comparison to a design capacity 8000 vehicles per hour. So people will not always use the highway. In addition, we now have suggestions coming out of Washington, DC, that the construction of additional highways may simply stimulate more air pollution. Let us therefore dispense with the safe investment talk regarding any portion of the transport sector and implore transport planners to consider need rather than just assume that ``if they build it, drivers will come.'' 11. Some concluding thoughts There are a host of other transport-related myths out there that I opted not to look at here. Among these are the beliefs that airline hubbing is bene®cial (only if we disregard the environment and the time costs of travelers), or that additional highways will eliminate congestion, or that bicycles are a sustainable transport mode. I will leave these to others. It was noted at the outset that the concern here was primarily the US and not the nations of the less developed world. What happens when these myths are examined in the latter context? First, large enough
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countries in the tropical world may be able to produce enough ethanol to satisfy their needs. Brazil demonstrated this quite eectively until the world price of sugar began to rise. Second, the notions related to transport investment and manufacturing development also apply in the less developed world. Third, the globalization and transport ¯ows case apply more to underdeveloped countries as noted above. The other myths related to teleworking, network accessibility, aging and bus transit use, ITS and transport as a safe investment, are applicable to more advanced transport systems and do not apply in the less developed world. On the other hand the less developed world may very well ®nd it advantageous to substitute communication for much transportation and travel because capital projects in transport are likely to be far more expensive than the capital investments necessary in communication that would allow such a substitution. As for the myths discussed here, I doubt that some of these will go away soon. In this regard I believe the most resilient of these will be the one that posits investment in transport, speci®cally highways, will result in the economic growth and development of new manufacturing ®rms. I see no merit in the argument in most cases for advanced economies, but with nearly everyone proclaiming positive development impacts, confusion results. This confusion is exacerbated by those agencies and individuals who must justify such projects. If a billion dollar project does not yield a billion dollars in development impacts, it is hard to justify the investment. So planners look at what they suspect will occur and what they suspect it will cost, but not too closely at the former and not to accurately at the latter. They place boundaries around project sites and do not look at the probable negative impacts beyond this area, and they certainly do not look at opportunity costs. If things do not look good, they speak of the value of millions of drivers saving a few minutes on average during their morning commutes and note the productivity gains resulting from the investment, apparently unaware that saving a few minutes will only result in a person sleeping a few more minutes. Never mind the fact that work and work related trips (including the trip home) only represent one in ®ve of our daily trips in the US today. Analysts in facing a 3 min savings in travel time will note that this is saved in the morning and evening, and assuming the driver's time is worth twenty dollars an hour, this is a savings of 2 dollars per driver. For 200,000 drivers this is a savings of four hundred thousand dollars a day or 100 million dollars for a 250 workday year, and if the project has a life of 20 years, this will result in bene®ts of $2 billion dollars. This is without any compounding or changes in the value of time over the life of the project. This is impressive, and we can clearly justify an expenditure of $2 billion on the project, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the origin of
this value was a savings of three minutes per trip. Considering this latter point makes the project ludicrous. Also, arriving sooner does not say anything about energy costs or emissions as these may often be lower at lower speeds (less than 65 mph). It is theoretically true that the cost of getting products to market will decrease, but I have never seen these savings passed on to consumers. Where are the bene®ts of such projects? I do not see them, but as we shift from a heavy manufacturing economy to a service/information economy, we are ®nding it dicult to give up the big projects and the big stories we are told to justify them. They are just so popular.
Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation to Douglas K. Fleming and the Department of Geography at the University of Washington for the opportunity to present this essay. I would also like to thank Richard Morrill of that department for his comments on the paper as its discussant and the transportation geographers who offered comments at the session where the paper was presented in Pittsburgh. John Hollingsworth prepared the graphics and I oer him my thanks. Observations by two anonymous referees were also helpful. All of the comments received have enriched the paper and any ¯aws remaining are those of the author. References Black, W.R., 1990. Development of an ideal model for the identi®cation of rural public transit needs. Transportation Research Record 1402, 107±109. Black, W.R., 1992. Identi®cation of Public Transit Needs in Indiana, Part 1: Urban Public Transit. Transportation Research Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Black, W.R., 1996. Sustainable transport: a US perspective. Journal of Transport Geography 4 (3), 151±159. Black, W.R., 1998. Sustainable transportation. In: Hoyle, B.S., Knowles, R.D. (Eds.), Modern Transport Geography, second ed. Wiley, New York, pp. 337±351. Black, W.R., 2000. Socio-economic barriers to sustainable transport. Journal of Transport Geography 8 (2), 141±147. Dyson, E., 1997. Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. Broadway Books, New York. European Commission, 1993. Trans-European Networks ± Toward a Master Plan for the Road Network and Road Trac. Oce for Ocial Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. European Commission, 1994. The Trans-European Transport Network. Oce for Ocial Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. European Commission, 1995. The Trans-European Transport Network ± Transforming a Pathwork into a Network. Oce for Ocial Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. Gabel, H.L., 1994. The environmental eects of trade in the transport sector. In: The Environmental Eects of Trade. Organization for
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11 Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Paris, pp. 153± 173. Giuliano, G., 1998. Urban travel patterns. In: Hoyle, B., Knowles, R. (Eds.), Modern Transport Geography, second ed. Wiley, New York, pp. 115±134. Hagerstrand, T., 1970. What about people in regional science?. Papers, Regional Science Association 24, 7±21. Hanson, S., 1995. Getting there: urban transportation in context. In: Hanson, S. (Ed.), The Geography of Urban Transportation, second ed. Guilford, New York. Morrill, R.L., 1965. Migration and the Spread and Growth of Urban Settlement, vol. 26. Lund Series in Geography, Series B. Human Geography. Pearson, B., 2000. An estimation of potential production of agri-based ethanol and its contribution to transportation emissions. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Russell, B., 1950. Unpopular Essays. Simon and Schuster, New York. US Bureau of the Census, 1979. Population estimates and projections. Current Population Reports. US Civil Aeronautics Board, 1984. Report on Airline Service Fares, Load Factors and Market Shares, vol. 29. Service Status on 1 December 1983, Washington, DC. US Department of Transportation, 1993. Transportation Implications of Telecommuting. Washington, DC. US Department of Transportation, 1998. Highway Statistics '97. Federal Highway Administration, Washington, DC. US Department of Transportation, 1997. Highway Statistics Summary to 1995. Federal Highway Administration, Washington, DC. Wilson, G.W., 1966. Introduction. In: Wilson, G.W., Bergmann, B.R., Hirsch, L.V., Klein, M.S. (Eds.), The Impact of Highway Investment on Development. The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, pp. 1±16.
www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo
An unpopular essay on transportation q William R. Black * Department of Geography, Indiana University, Student Building 112, Bloomington, IN 47408-6101, USA
Abstract Several popular notions exist in the transportation and transport geography literature that should more properly be viewed as popular myths. Several of these myths are examined using a combination of existing research, data analysis and certain theoretical constructs. Among the areas addressed are transport and economic development, the likelihood of telecommuting reducing urban travel, the promise of ethanol as an alternative transport fuel, the future demand for public transit by senior citizens, the role of network connectivity in accessibility and economic growth, and the relationship between vehicle speed and motor vehicle accidents. An examination of several of these myths and some others reveals that they clearly need to be researched in further detail, or in other cases they are patently wrong. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Bertrand Russell, the eminent British philosopher for most of the last century, was once taken to task for writing an essay that he described as popular, a critic saying that the essay was far from popular and could be read only by a specialist in the ®eld. Lord Russell entitled his next collection as ``unpopular essays'' (Russell, 1950). In a similar though not identical vein, there are many popular notions or myths believed today about transportation, which are quite simply wrong in the majority of cases to which they are applied and I have decided to give my perspective on these popular views and since the perspective is not the popular one, this is perhaps best described as ``an unpopular essay on transportation''. The popular notions that I will discuss are not obviously myths to many, so I will try to support my arguments with the transport literature or data, as necessary. Nevertheless, some may disagree with what I will say here. They should feel free to do so, but to head o some of this, allow me to qualify what follows by stating that it applies primarily to the United States, only to a lesser extent to Europe, and hardly at all to the rest of the world. Table 1 includes the nine myths that I will ad-
q Fleming lecture in Transportation Geography, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2000. * Tel.: +1-812-855-9414; fax: +1-812-855-1661. E-mail address: [email protected] (W.R. Black).
dress in this paper for those who want some preview of what is coming.
2. The ethanol myth Let me begin with one of the common myths that probably has to be attributed to environmentalists. It is that ethanol should be the fuel of choice for future transport in the US. This belief comes from the fact that ethanol emits low amounts of carbon dioxide, and if we also use this fuel in planting, cultivating, and harvesting the stock from which the ethanol is made, it is sustainable. Ignoring these quali®ers it is carbon dioxide neutral (i.e., the plants will release carbon dioxide when they die anyway) and it is renewable (i.e., we can replant next year). In addition, there are positive security dimensions to this fuel; we could produce ethanol here and not be subject to the whims of a cartel of petroleum exporting nations. All of this is true, there is no myth, to a point. The myth comes about because we are unable to produce sucient ethanol in the US even if we devote substantial agricultural resources to this eort. A recent study by Pearson (2000) at Indiana University found that if we dedicated all barley, edible dry bean, corn, hay, oat, peanut, rice, grain sorghum, soybean, sun¯ower and wheat production to this problem, then we would end up with enough ethanol to power the national ¯eet of highway vehicles for approximately 8.4 days. If we were able to switch over to optimized fuel cell vehicles that could use ethanol to produce hydrogen,
0966-6923/01/$ - see front matter Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 9 6 6 - 6 9 2 3 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 4 5 - 4
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Table 1 Nine popular transportation myths 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Ethanol as an alternative fuel oers the potential of signi®cantly decreasing carbon dioxide emissions. Transport investment will lead to economic development Telecommuting or teleworking will reduce the amount of travel in cities Globalization of economic activities should result in a decrease in transport Connecting geographically remote places to a national transport network will stimulate their economic growth With the aging of the population we will see signi®cant increases in transit ridership Increases in communication technology will reduce the need to travel and will result in a net reduction in the amount of personal travel Intelligent transport systems will have a demonstrable impact on achieving sustainable transport Investments in transportation are `safe' investments
and in the process emit for the most part only oxygen and water, we could extend the productive life of our fuel to 61.6 days, or put another way it could power about 17% of the national motor vehicle fuel demands for a year. There are very few fuel cell vehicles in the current ¯eet and a ¯eet of fuel cell vehicles is something that remains quite distant. If ethanol does become a major alternative fuel, it will not be able to solve the transport fuel problem alone. A second factor that is often overlooked when it comes to ethanol is its pollution potential. The use of ethanol boosts emissions of chemicals that form smog. Its use also increases emissions of acetaldehyde, a probable carcinogen according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Nevertheless there are some that believe it may very well become one of several alternative fuels in use in the decades to come. Given ethanol's fuel production limitations as well as its pollution potential, it is unlikely to ever be a major fuel. In addition, it is probable that world population growth will place more demands on the use of land for food production than for ethanol production. 3. Transport investment and economic development Investments in transport infrastructure have been critical to the economic growth of most of the world's developed nations. In the United States the railroads of the 19th century and the highways of the 20th century were of primary importance to that economic growth. This historical experience has led most Americans to believe that investments in transport will always result in growth. Perhaps no myth is more pervasive than this notion that investment in transportation infrastructure will lead to the economic development of manufacturing industries. We are told this by chambers of commerce, economic development councils, city and county government, airport authorities, state departments of transportation, and many others. We must build the highway or the airport runway or whatever, because if we do not we will not get that manufacturer we want to attract, or the ®rm(s) we have will not expand here, or
stay here. The argument takes many forms, sometimes the focus is on employment that will result from the investment, or the unemployment that will result without it. Now there is nothing simple about the economic theory in this area, but the theory is not very general either. George Wilson, a transport economist with a true understanding of his ®eld and a deep admiration for geography, seemed to understand the actual situation more than 30 years ago. He noted that transport investment could result in negative economic impacts, neutral economic impacts, or positive economic impacts (Wilson, 1966). In the negative case the investment may take capital away from other sectors (e.g., education) or it may lead to external industries capturing local markets before the area has an opportunity to develop local industries to serve these markets and it may prevent the latter from ever developing. The neutral case is simply a situation where the project's net sum of the positives and negatives cancel each other out. In the positive case there is one over-riding precondition that must be present and it is that there must be some economic activity that is being held back because of a lack of transportation. There are situations in the developing world where the positive case may be observed, but my concern here is with the developed world and it is unlikely that these conditions exist any longer for most of that latter area. Let us look at a very real transportation project in the state of Indiana (see Fig. 1). I am not going to get parochial on you because the project is actually part of what has been called the Mid-America Highway, an interstate quality highway that would go from eastern Canada to Mexico. For the most part the highway is already in place in the United States as Interstate 69, but one piece of it was never built. This is the section from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Evansville, Indiana. The leading proposal has the highway going from Indianapolis to Bloomington over an existing four-lane highway and then going over a new terrain route through southern Indiana to Evansville. Advocates argue that the highway will bring economic growth to this region of Indiana, while the opponents argue that it will only disturb the peace and tranquility of the area. I
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
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are familiar with the idea as well as the practice of telecommuting or teleworking (as it is called in Britain). Teleworking is far more accurate as a phrase since it means working at a distance; we really do not commute at a distance. Teleworking is essentially working in a remote location (one's home or in a telecenter or televillage) and being connected electronically through phone lines or cable to your workplace. Dyson (1997) takes telecommuting a bit more literally than it was probably intended when she states: What it does mean is that you can travel more easily to see customers and stay close to with your of®ce. In my own life I have found that e-mail lets me run the oce from the road, but it does not reduce the amount of time I have to spend away getting to know people, having dinner, having arguments, and just doing the kind of high intensity communication that you cannot do any way other than faceto-face. Fig. 1. Proposed mid-America Highway through Indiana.
suspect that motor carriers moving North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) trac will bene®t to some degree from the facility, but what about this local economic development argument and exactly what is being held back by the lack of this highway? Southern Indiana has one recognizable natural resource in this area and this is construction quality block limestone. It has been moved for more than 100 years by rail and later trucks and nothing is preventing its further development except the existence of some very high quality concrete that can be used in its place. The agriculture that exists here is held back by generally low quality soils and rugged terrain, not an absence of transport. If anything approaching development were to occur from this project it would simply be the addition of highway services to the new corridor (motels, gas stations, and fast food establishments) that in all likelihood would be oset by a similar set of such services in the small towns of Indiana closing down due to a loss of current trac. There may be some new resources discovered in the United States that require the construction of transport facilities for their development and this will lead to economic development for the area. My point is that in most developed parts of this country I see no existing case where this is true today and therefore arguments that any highway or transport facility will bring economic growth are not credible.
4. Teleworking and urban travel There is also a belief that telecommuting will reduce the amount of urban travel. To some extent most of us
There was much excitement in the early 1990s that this would be one way of signi®cantly reducing urban trac. A major federal study revealed that by the year 2003 there could be 7.5 (5.5%)±15 (11%) million Americans teleworking (US Department of Transportation, 1993). We would be very disappointed now if we had not read the ®ne print that indicated working remotely one or two days a week would make you a teleworker. So we have to reduce our initial estimates of the impacts of teleworking on trac to perhaps something like 1.65± 3.3% of the workers or work trips (assuming a worker teleworked 1.5 days per week). For a city the size of Pittsburgh with 154,000 employees this would average about 3812 work trips or 3465 vehicle work trips a day assuming a 1.1 level of auto occupancy and no one working at home, using transit or walking to work. This is not very signi®cant. Now I realize that teleworking has sociological dimensions that border on frightening. I also understand the potential impacts it may have on urban sprawl. The concern here is with the urban travel implications of teleworking and I will focus my comments on that aspect of this activity. It has been argued that the teleworker will be tempted to run the kids to school, to drop o or pick up the dry cleaning, to pick up those few things one needs for tonight's dinner; we all know this list is nearly endless. The implications are that without commuting to work, many of the trips we have chained together will still have to be made, perhaps as a chain or perhaps as several separate trips. You may argue that I do not know a priori how much of this driving will occur; that is true. However, if we take the notions of Hagerstrand (1970) regarding space time prisms and activity systems, we get some insight
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into this question. These ideas have also been discussed in the urban transport literature by Hanson (1995) and more recently by Giuliano (1998). The latter constructs three situations for a single worker faced with little ¯exibility due to the use of transit, a little more ¯exibility in meeting a variety of needs due to the availability of an automobile, and a ¯exible job start time with an automobile. As one gains ¯exibility, the potential limits on one's activity space lessen or the area of one's space time prisms increases. A typical illustration of such prisms is where we have a commuter who leaves for work at 7:15 a.m. arriving at 8:15 a.m. followed by some time during the lunch hour to accomplish minor tasks, leaving work at 4:30 p.m. and having to be home for one reason or another by 6 p.m. (see Fig. 2). The two small diamonds at mid-morning and mid-afternoon represent coee breaks. The slight dislocation of the perpendicular and the prisms represents a movement in space to the job location and the need to return to one's home location at the end of the day. The diamond in the center represents an area bounding one's movement over the lunch hour.
Bringing these ideas over to teleworking we essentially end up with a series of space time diamonds that could occur during the sixty minutes one would otherwise be commuting, a ®fteen minute morning break, an hour lunch break, a 15-min afternoon break, and an hour and a half between the end of the work day and 6 p.m., the time when one needs to be at home. The morning and evening breaks are not useable in the commuter situation because one must park the car and moving it for a short time is dicult; the commuter could probably walk a short distance and return during these breaks. In the teleworking case the car is usually just outside the house. In reality there is usually nothing preventing a teleworker from combining morning and evening commute times, the breaks and the lunch hour into one large space time diamond. In eect the teleworker could begin work at 7 a.m. and work straight through until 2:00 p.m. and have the remaining three and one-half to four hours for driving (see Fig. 3). This does not mean that the availability of this large of a space time diamond will generate ¯ows, but I think we should understand that this is very likely. The entire concept of space time prisms rests on the notion that an increase in potential activity space will lead to additional travel and the only conclusion in the teleworking case is that it will lead to more travel.
Fig. 2. A typical space-time prism.
Fig. 3. A space-time prism for a teleworker.
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5. Globalization and transport ¯ows
6. Networks, accessibility and economic growth
Allow me to step away from my US focus to brie¯y examine globalization and transport ¯ows. There are some who believe that globalization of economic activity will result in a decrease in the length of transport ¯ows. The logic is that globalization will result in the economic development of currently less developed countries giving them the capability of producing a wide array of goods. This will enable these areas to purchase goods locally that were once imported from the nations of the developed world and this will result in a decrease in transport inputs. A further examination will reveal that what it really means is that industries will move from one area to another usually in response to some economic incentive, such as lower wages. So we may suddenly see television sets being produced in the developing world, but incomes are still too low to allow anyone to purchase these. The major markets remain in the developed parts of the world where incomes are higher. The net eect of globalization would appear to be that manufacturers can move production to the developing world where they can take advantage of low cost labor. One case in 1999 had an electric appliance manufacturer moving from Indiana to Mexico; salaries were US$24 an hour in the former and US$2 an hour in the latter. These ®rms will give up some of their new pro®ts in the form of transport costs that are much greater than they were prior to the move due to the greater distances to the markets involved, however, because most of external (pollution, accident, and other) costs associated with transport are not recovered, it is not at all clear that society bene®ts from such globalization. International trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or the various agreements leading to a uni®ed Europe, encourage the shifting of production from local areas to distant places. Once again, production in the latter areas is made feasible only because we have removed the barriers to such trade. As Gabel (1994) has noted:
One of the key attributes of a uni®ed Europe is the elimination of taris, the construction of some ``missing links'', and the connecting of all places to new European transport networks (see inter alia European Commission, 1993, 1994, 1995). In the midst of all this is the suggestion that areas once poorly served and peripheral to the former networks as well as the economy of Europe will be brought into the fold. It is dicult to say to what extent the various European nations accept the logic implied, but it should be noted that connecting remote places to a new transport network, no matter how good it is, will simply result in remote places being on a good network. Presumably these networks will increase the accessibility of all places (more or less) uniformly and this will result in countries such as Portugal and Norway of Europe still being the most remote places on better transport networks. It is true that transport costs may decrease for these remote places, but this is also true for every place else in Europe, suggesting that the new networks will do little to stimulate the economies of the remote areas. In terms of network analysis, consider a distribution of places that we want to connect by some transport network. We start o with a minimal length graph that connects all nodes of interest. This is the shortest length network and because of this it is dicult to get around and the average length of shortest paths over this network is at a maximum. This minimum length creates what I have called a minimal connectivity barrier. If the network were any shorter places would cease to be connected and therefore any length less than this would be a barrier to movement between all places. We can begin to add more links to this network until we construct a fully connected network containing all possible links. In this case all places can be reached by moving directly from each node to all other nodes. We now reach a geographic distance barrier in which the distances cannot become any smaller between places unless we begin to move places closer to each other. These ideas are illustrated in Fig. 4. What this ®gure illustrates is that as a network's length increases, or as the network becomes more and more dense, there are very few gains in terms of reducing the average lengths of shortest paths and at some point the gains may cease prior to complete connectivity. These relationships hold in the distance or the travel time case. However, I should note that if we construct communication networks over our set of places the connectivity and geographic distance barriers become insigni®cantly small. This may suggest that communication networks may be the most important networks of the future, not transport networks. Such networks do have the ability to make all places equally accessible as we are seeing with e-commerce.
At one extreme, autarkic economies demand little transportation of goods to market. As trade extends in geographical reach, transportation rises as a proportion of international production. And although the world economy is now highly integrated, further liberalization of international trade can be expected to increase transport inputs per unit of international product, ceteris paribus. In general, as the area over which a nation trades increases so do the transport costs recovered and the external costs not recovered.
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7. The aging population and transit ridership
Fig. 4. The relationship between average path length and network length.
Returning to the transport network case, a remote place can bene®t from network construction if it can change its location relative to other places. This can never be accomplished with politically acceptable new transport networks for Europe. The only way to change one's relative location on the network is to change the geographic area covered by the network. In other words the greatest stimulus for Portugal and Norway is to make them central to the network that they serve. This may be viewed as impossible, but if the network of interest is suddenly the trade network of North America and Europe, Portugal could, with proper economic investments, become central to that network and the bene®ts implied would be attainable. Otherwise, new networks will have little eect. If we look at the US case we have some exceptionally good networks. Most of these have done little for major metropolitan areas on the periphery of the country. Portland in Maine is still inaccessible to national markets as are most other cities on the edge of that country. The places that have grown are those that have seen sucient investment to change their relative location on a dierent global transport network, e.g., Seattle±Tacoma and Los Angeles±Long Beach, and the major port centers of the Atlantic coastal area. I do not see anything like this on the horizon in Europe and because of this it is doubtful that the hope some nations have for the proposed new networks will be realized.
That an aging population will result in increases in bus-transit ridership is another myth. It is generally recognized that one of the major empirical observations in the area of bus ridership is that the larger the elderly population the greater the bus ridership. This is true in urban and rural environments and applies primarily in a cross-sectional context (Black, 1990, 1992). It is widely recognized that if current trends continue, the proportion of the population over the age of 65 in 2020 will be 53.2 million or 16.5% of the nation's population. Since the elderly are such a substantial component of current bus-transit ridership, there is a belief that this will signi®cantly increase ridership. This is doubtful. If we look at 1963 we see that roughly 2% of the driving public (those holding a driver's license) consisted of women over age 65. Approximately 6% of this group were men over the age of 65. Overall about 8% of the drivers on the road were over age 65 in 1963. In 1997 the two groups were nearly equal at 7% each or 14% of the driving public. Incidentally, women surpassed men in 1993 and have retained their lead since then (see Fig. 5). At the same time that these trends have been occurring, we have seen an absolute increase in the population and in the number of drivers of each gender. In addition, during this time period, ridership on bus-transit systems has been decreasing. If we look at the 1977 data for men and women in age group 45±64, we see that between 96.2% and 98.6% of the former and between 69.0% and 82.1% of the latter were drivers (see Table 2). These numbers correspond to 1997 values of 97.6% and 99.5% for males and 86.2% to 94.2% for females (see Table 3). Looking at the 1997 group again, these are people who reached driving age between 1948 and 1968 and for the most part have really known only the automobile as their transport mode. The members of this group will also be the dominant
Fig. 5. Proportion of male and female drivers age 65 and over (1963± 1998).
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
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Table 2 Partial distribution of US drivers by age group ± 1977a
a
Age group
Males number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of male age group
Females number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of female age group
Total drivers (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of total age group
45±49 50±54 55±59 60±64 65+
5533 5500 5112 4278 8128
98.6 96.2 97.0 97.6 84.9
4843 4782 4300 3440 5563
82.1 77.6 74.6 69.0 39.9
10,376 10,282 9412 7718 13,691
90.1 87.1 85.3 82.4 58.2
Source: US Department of Transportation (1997) and US Bureau of the Census (1979).
Table 3 Partial distribution of US drivers by age group ± 1997a
a
Age group
Males number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of male age group
Females number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of female age group
Total drivers (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of total age group
45±49 50±54 55±59 60±64 65+
8854 7311 5618 4632 12,799
97.6 99.0 99.5 97.6 91.4
8852 7238 5563 4578 13,379
94.2 93.0 91.0 86.2 66.7
17,706 14,549 11,181 9210 26,178
95.9 95.9 95.1 91.6 76.8
Source: US Department of Transportation (1998).
component of the over 65 population in 2020 and I suspect getting them out of their cars will be virtually impossible. This is not meant to imply that we won't need public bus transit, we probably will need it as the social service it has become, but the view that the vehicles will be ®lled with the elderly may not be wellfounded. Bus-transit ridership was decreasing in 1977 when 84.9% of the males and 39.9% of the females over age 65 held drivers licenses (see Table 2). As of 1997 we ®nd 91.4% of the males and 66.7% of the females over age 65 holding drivers licenses (Table 4). As one moves from the 65 to 69 age group to the 85+ group we see a drop in the proportion of the age groups holding drivers licenses which is far more dramatic for women than it is for men suggesting that the drop in women drivers is linked to being non-drivers earlier rather than the in®rmities of aging. Assuming that is the case it would suggest further drops in the proportion of the elderly using bus transit. In eect, this transit sector has lost market share at the
same time that motor vehicles (as measured by drivers licenses) have increased their share. This trend is continuing today and while it will not eliminate the need for bus transit, it is suggestive that the mode will never again reach parity it held with motor vehicles prior to the 1950s. Of course none of this is meant to apply to rapid transit systems in cities such as Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Boston. These systems have high levels of ridership and signi®cantly reduce highway congestion in their parent cities, and they will continue to be attractive to a broad range of riders, including the aged. 8. The substitution of communication for transportation It is often assumed that as communication technology increases we will see a reduction in the need for long-distance travel and this will result in a net reduction in the amount of travel or spatial interaction for
Table 4 Distribution of US drivers over age 65a
a
Age group
Males number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of male age group
Females number (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of female age group
Total drivers (in 1000s)
Drivers as % of total age group
65+ 65±69 70±74 75±79 80±84 85+
12,799 4215 3654 2650 1486 794
91.4 94.5 96.0 90.9 86.7 71.4
13,379 4236 3831 2835 1608 869
66.7 79.9 77.7 68.4 54.9 31.5
26,178 8451 7485 5485 3094 1663
76.8 86.6 85.7 77.7 66.7 42.9
Source: US Department of Transportation (1998).
8
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
personal reasons. The origin of this idea may date from the brie¯y used Pony Express (1860±1861) in the US, which was replaced by the telegraph, but that was not communication replacing transportation, it was a slow form of communication being replaced by a faster form of communication. The same is true for the use of facsimiles (faxes) replacing air mail. If we examine the 20th century improvements in communication, we see these occurring alongside major transport innovations, e.g., telephones and automobiles spread across the country at about the same time. Therefore it is dicult to say to what extent one in¯uenced the other. It is in the latter part of the century that we see major changes in communication that are available to the individual, e.g., e-mail (with its capability of sending text or graphics), the Internet, voice-mail, conference calls, facsimile machines, cell phones, video conferencing, and probably many others. Have any of these reduced travel or travel demand? Much of what we do electronically today was once done with telephone calls and letters. It took longer usually to set up situations and often the focus of your eort, e.g., organizing anything from a conference to a conference session, collaborating on a research paper, responding to questions, sending in manuscript reviews and so forth, would take longer simply because the mails carrying the ®nal documents took longer. So things move faster now and that may enable some to become involved in far more activities than they once were. Does that imply more travel? Not necessarily. The constraint on travel, particularly long distance travel, is usually money for most of us. If you take away the monetary constraint, then it is more than likely that individuals will travel more, independently of whether they are connected in a communication sense. The role of discretionary income on long distance travel is well known and documented. It is unlikely that short distance travel would be aected very much one way or the other (except in the special case of teleworking noted earlier). There is not much dierence between telephone and e-mail communications over short distances. On the other hand there appear to be signi®cant dierences between the use of telephones and the use of the Internet for e-commerce. The ability of shoppers to look at all the varieties of goods on a computer or TV monitor, selecting some for their cart, and having these delivered to their house, will not result in an absence of transportation, but it may make that latter task more ecient as trips are chained together. It should be noted that it was common to telephone a grocery store with a list of grocery needs 60 years ago and have these delivered to one's home that same day. In eect, even this nascent activity is a variation on the earlier practice. One's travel is fairly well re¯ected by one's travel activity space; an increase in the size of the activity space is indicative of greater travel distances. One's commu-
nication could also be described by one's communication activity space (that area over which one communicates electronically on a typical day). An increase in the size of the latter implies an increase in the length of communication distances. We also know that spatial interaction is the greatest among individuals who know one another and therefore it is likely that increases in communication activity space may actually increase the size of one's travel activity space, ceteris paribus. Therefore developments in communication will likely result in increases in personal travel, not decreases. Some additional support for this conclusion comes from the area of spatial interaction and migration literature. It is understood that . . . ``the eect of distance as a barrier to migration changes over time, primarily with improvements in transportation and communication.'' And that . . . ``frequently people move to an area to which their friends and relatives had recently moved'' (Morrill, 1965). If communication and contacts are this important in a migration context, they certainly must exercise some in¯uence on lower levels of spatial interaction. 9. Intelligent transport systems and sustainable transport There is a belief in the US that much of what is called ``sustainable transport'' can be achieved by some of the programs we have seen over the past decade in intelligent transport systems or ITS. De®nitions are important whenever sustainable transport comes up so let me say that our current transport systems are non-sustainable because they use a fuel that is ®nite and forecasted not to last through the next 100 years; they create global pollution problems; they create urban air quality problems; they are congested; they result in excessive injuries and fatalities; and, they consume large amounts of land (see Black, 1996, 1998). Some researchers believe that sustainable transport applies only to the ®rst two of these, ®nite petroleum and global warming types of concerns, and in that case ITS for the most part has nothing to oer. There is a possibility that highway signing could inform motorists that there is no place to park, or an in-car navigation system could keep drivers from getting more lost than they already are, but that is about the extent of it on the fuel use and global pollution front. ITS has the capability of doing something about congestion, but growth here and in Europe will probably make these eects unnoticeable. It will contribute in a rather insigni®cant way to improvements in urban air quality. ITS will probably result in the consumption of more land for highways, not less. This is not meant to imply additional roads, but the need to widen right of ways for the installation of automated guideway technology, which will control vehicle movement. The large
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
amounts of highway land now in use is unlikely to be ``banked'' for future use as we have done for rail rightof-way in some cases. However, ITS holds the promise of signi®cantly improving the safety picture. Some countries are very optimistic about the potential of ITS to reduce accidents, e.g., Sweden intends to eliminate motor vehicle fatalities and serious injuries with its ``Vision Zero'' program enacted as part of its 1997 Road Trac Safety Bill. The type of ITS we are talking about here will include automated guideways to keep vehicles on the road (noted above), smart vehicles that control your vehicle speed in dangerous situations (intelligent cruise control), and the entire array of interior safety equipment. Much of the rest of ITS concerns things such as automated fare collection, transponders that will replace toll collectors (faster than they will relieve congestion), and similar improvements that miss the big picture. However, even the potential safety side of ITS has some major barriers. First, these new systems will be extremely expensive both for government and the highway user and it is unknown how fast these innovations will diuse through the motor vehicle ¯eet (Black, 2000). Second, it is technology and it will have bugs as we have seen with air bags and child restraint systems. Third, we are currently in the process of creating a tri-modal ¯eet that must operate on a single network. By this I am referring to the growth of sports utility vehicles (SUV), to add to our current automobile-large truck system. Of course SUVs are practically the same as trucks, but trucks have never had a 50% share of the consumer market. Passengers in a motor vehicle involved in a crash with an SUV are 15 times more likely to be a fatality, than someone in the SUV. Finally, ITS innovations will become part of our transport systems at the very time that this system has the largest over 65 years of age component that it has ever had. This group is second only to young men in terms of crash rates. These factors will in¯uence the impacts of ITS and while ITS has some potential, it will not bring overnight success even in the safety area under these conditions. One could argue that the growth of trac, vehicle expense, technology ¯aws, the growth of SUVs and the increasing aged population are independent variables that have nothing to do with the impact of ITS, but I have a dicult time with that argument since these will in¯uence its acceptance and distribution, and the impact it could have. ITS will not be of much use if it functions only in a laboratory setting. 10. Transportation as a safe investment For most of the 20th century we have heard the statement that ``transportation is a safe investment'' and this will be the ®nal myth we examine here. This ``safe
9
investment'' phrase has its origin primarily in the highway sector as near as I can determine. The existence of plenty of unused and incomplete canals and abandoned railroads even before the growth of highways would make them an unlikely source of this wisdom. It also did not originate in the urban transit area, where for-pro®t private operators have been replaced completely by subsidized public sector operators, or in commercial aviation, where Eastern Airlines and Brani Airlines have ceased to exist and where the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 resulted in the closure of 106 airports (US Civil Aeronautics Board, 1984). So apparently it is highway transportation investment that is supposed to be safe. We will set aside all the highway controversies of the 1960s and 1970s, e.g., Interstate 95 in Boston, Interstate 10 through New Orleans, and the Embarcadero Highway in San Francisco. It is likely the expression predates this era. The origin of the phrase appears to rest on the premise that if you build a highway, people will use it. That sage wisdom was probably true when the network was thin and motor vehicle ownership was growing at phenomenal rates. By the end of the Interstate Highway construction era we were adding some roads that probably were not necessary for the same reasons argued earlier regarding changes in path length as network density increases. There are sections of the Interstate Highway System that have unbelievably low volumes of trac. We have one of these in Indiana between Louisville and Evansville. Sections of the highway have an average ¯ow volume per hour of 500 vehicles in comparison to a design capacity 8000 vehicles per hour. So people will not always use the highway. In addition, we now have suggestions coming out of Washington, DC, that the construction of additional highways may simply stimulate more air pollution. Let us therefore dispense with the safe investment talk regarding any portion of the transport sector and implore transport planners to consider need rather than just assume that ``if they build it, drivers will come.'' 11. Some concluding thoughts There are a host of other transport-related myths out there that I opted not to look at here. Among these are the beliefs that airline hubbing is bene®cial (only if we disregard the environment and the time costs of travelers), or that additional highways will eliminate congestion, or that bicycles are a sustainable transport mode. I will leave these to others. It was noted at the outset that the concern here was primarily the US and not the nations of the less developed world. What happens when these myths are examined in the latter context? First, large enough
10
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11
countries in the tropical world may be able to produce enough ethanol to satisfy their needs. Brazil demonstrated this quite eectively until the world price of sugar began to rise. Second, the notions related to transport investment and manufacturing development also apply in the less developed world. Third, the globalization and transport ¯ows case apply more to underdeveloped countries as noted above. The other myths related to teleworking, network accessibility, aging and bus transit use, ITS and transport as a safe investment, are applicable to more advanced transport systems and do not apply in the less developed world. On the other hand the less developed world may very well ®nd it advantageous to substitute communication for much transportation and travel because capital projects in transport are likely to be far more expensive than the capital investments necessary in communication that would allow such a substitution. As for the myths discussed here, I doubt that some of these will go away soon. In this regard I believe the most resilient of these will be the one that posits investment in transport, speci®cally highways, will result in the economic growth and development of new manufacturing ®rms. I see no merit in the argument in most cases for advanced economies, but with nearly everyone proclaiming positive development impacts, confusion results. This confusion is exacerbated by those agencies and individuals who must justify such projects. If a billion dollar project does not yield a billion dollars in development impacts, it is hard to justify the investment. So planners look at what they suspect will occur and what they suspect it will cost, but not too closely at the former and not to accurately at the latter. They place boundaries around project sites and do not look at the probable negative impacts beyond this area, and they certainly do not look at opportunity costs. If things do not look good, they speak of the value of millions of drivers saving a few minutes on average during their morning commutes and note the productivity gains resulting from the investment, apparently unaware that saving a few minutes will only result in a person sleeping a few more minutes. Never mind the fact that work and work related trips (including the trip home) only represent one in ®ve of our daily trips in the US today. Analysts in facing a 3 min savings in travel time will note that this is saved in the morning and evening, and assuming the driver's time is worth twenty dollars an hour, this is a savings of 2 dollars per driver. For 200,000 drivers this is a savings of four hundred thousand dollars a day or 100 million dollars for a 250 workday year, and if the project has a life of 20 years, this will result in bene®ts of $2 billion dollars. This is without any compounding or changes in the value of time over the life of the project. This is impressive, and we can clearly justify an expenditure of $2 billion on the project, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the origin of
this value was a savings of three minutes per trip. Considering this latter point makes the project ludicrous. Also, arriving sooner does not say anything about energy costs or emissions as these may often be lower at lower speeds (less than 65 mph). It is theoretically true that the cost of getting products to market will decrease, but I have never seen these savings passed on to consumers. Where are the bene®ts of such projects? I do not see them, but as we shift from a heavy manufacturing economy to a service/information economy, we are ®nding it dicult to give up the big projects and the big stories we are told to justify them. They are just so popular.
Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation to Douglas K. Fleming and the Department of Geography at the University of Washington for the opportunity to present this essay. I would also like to thank Richard Morrill of that department for his comments on the paper as its discussant and the transportation geographers who offered comments at the session where the paper was presented in Pittsburgh. John Hollingsworth prepared the graphics and I oer him my thanks. Observations by two anonymous referees were also helpful. All of the comments received have enriched the paper and any ¯aws remaining are those of the author. References Black, W.R., 1990. Development of an ideal model for the identi®cation of rural public transit needs. Transportation Research Record 1402, 107±109. Black, W.R., 1992. Identi®cation of Public Transit Needs in Indiana, Part 1: Urban Public Transit. Transportation Research Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Black, W.R., 1996. Sustainable transport: a US perspective. Journal of Transport Geography 4 (3), 151±159. Black, W.R., 1998. Sustainable transportation. In: Hoyle, B.S., Knowles, R.D. (Eds.), Modern Transport Geography, second ed. Wiley, New York, pp. 337±351. Black, W.R., 2000. Socio-economic barriers to sustainable transport. Journal of Transport Geography 8 (2), 141±147. Dyson, E., 1997. Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. Broadway Books, New York. European Commission, 1993. Trans-European Networks ± Toward a Master Plan for the Road Network and Road Trac. Oce for Ocial Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. European Commission, 1994. The Trans-European Transport Network. Oce for Ocial Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. European Commission, 1995. The Trans-European Transport Network ± Transforming a Pathwork into a Network. Oce for Ocial Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. Gabel, H.L., 1994. The environmental eects of trade in the transport sector. In: The Environmental Eects of Trade. Organization for
W.R. Black / Journal of Transport Geography 9 (2001) 1±11 Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Paris, pp. 153± 173. Giuliano, G., 1998. Urban travel patterns. In: Hoyle, B., Knowles, R. (Eds.), Modern Transport Geography, second ed. Wiley, New York, pp. 115±134. Hagerstrand, T., 1970. What about people in regional science?. Papers, Regional Science Association 24, 7±21. Hanson, S., 1995. Getting there: urban transportation in context. In: Hanson, S. (Ed.), The Geography of Urban Transportation, second ed. Guilford, New York. Morrill, R.L., 1965. Migration and the Spread and Growth of Urban Settlement, vol. 26. Lund Series in Geography, Series B. Human Geography. Pearson, B., 2000. An estimation of potential production of agri-based ethanol and its contribution to transportation emissions. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Russell, B., 1950. Unpopular Essays. Simon and Schuster, New York. US Bureau of the Census, 1979. Population estimates and projections. Current Population Reports. US Civil Aeronautics Board, 1984. Report on Airline Service Fares, Load Factors and Market Shares, vol. 29. Service Status on 1 December 1983, Washington, DC. US Department of Transportation, 1993. Transportation Implications of Telecommuting. Washington, DC. US Department of Transportation, 1998. Highway Statistics '97. Federal Highway Administration, Washington, DC. US Department of Transportation, 1997. Highway Statistics Summary to 1995. Federal Highway Administration, Washington, DC. Wilson, G.W., 1966. Introduction. In: Wilson, G.W., Bergmann, B.R., Hirsch, L.V., Klein, M.S. (Eds.), The Impact of Highway Investment on Development. The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, pp. 1±16.