The Institute of Public Administration participated in a study of transportation systems in four cities: New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. IPA Senior Associates John Keith and Bill Shore, along with the consulting firm Konheim & Ketcham, undertook the New York portion of the study and worked closely with colleagues from the London Research Centre, the Paris regional planning organization IAURIF, and the Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research on the preparation of the report which has been published as The Four World Cities Transport Study.
On January 20, 1999 the study was presented and discussed at a meeting of policy makers from throughout the tri-state New York region convened by the Council on Transportation. The following remarks were made by David Mammen, President of IPA.
Our study is a comparison of four "world cities" - centers of the global economy. In all four cities, the global economy is centered in their respective central business districts (CBDs). Here in the Tri-State region we have seen over the past 15 years, in economic sickness and in health, that the Region’s economy is heavily based on the 8-1/2 square miles of the Region’s CBD. Further, the economy of all three states depends heavily on this Tri-State region’s economy.
High-level global business decisions are still made face to face, and the complexity of those decisions means that they often are made in shifting groups of different experts. The central transportation problems of the four World Cities, therefore, focus on getting these important people together: getting them around within the CBD and getting them to it.
With respect to moving people within the CBD, New York is ahead of its competitors in two ways: It has the highest job density of the four, so people who want to meet start closer together. And unlike Tokyo and London, almost every office building is within an easy walk of a subway station.
But in some ways, it doesn’t do as well:
(a) It has fewer cruising taxis than Paris and London.
(b) Some subway lines have longer waiting times than London’s.
(c) London and Tokyo are installing electronic signs at bus stops to tell waiting passengers when the next bus will arrive, and London has centralized electronic controls to help buses arrive on time. New York Transit, a subsidiary of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, plans to do the same. London has also initiated a program of "red routes," clearing away parked cars and giving buses priority at stop lights.
Getting to the CBD is primarily a transit problem, because the CBDs are too dense to allow many cars. New York’s CBD has twice the residents of Tokyo’s, three times that of London’s and higher population density than Paris. This allows many people to walk to work or shortens the distance that transit has to carry them. But otherwise, the other cities are moving far ahead. All three of New York’s competitors are building new rail lines—all automated, some with comfortable stations glass-walled off from the trains until they stop. New York has not added transit capacity into the CBD for several decades, though jobs here have been increasing and are projected to increase substantially over the coming years.
As an urban planner, I think the most important lesson of our study is that the settlement pattern is at least as important as transportation quality in determining how well the system works and how people choose to travel. To illustrate, in Tokyo there has been tremendous investment to increase transit capacity into the center. But centralization of jobs—pushing out residents and piling up employment—has almost kept up with growing transit capacity and hundreds of thousands of commuters still remain in what they call "commuter hell"—packed so everyone must sway together when the trains start and stop. Planned decentralization has thus become Tokyo’s prime development -- and transportation -- strategy.
New York’s commuter railroads provide commuter heaven (compared to Tokyo): a comfortable seat for almost every rider on nearly every line, and speeds that compete door-to-door with the auto from many parts of the region --- IF you can get door-to-door by train. Few people live within walking distance of commuter rail stations in this region; nor do they live close enough together, on the whole, for efficient bus pick-up. We haven’t built that kind of settlement pattern. Furthermore, few railroad stations allow everybody to park at the station.
The result of these settlement patterns -- this land use/transportation connection (or disconnect) -- is that 37 of every 100 New York suburban commuters enter the CBD during rush hours by car (despite "heavenly" transit conditions), compared to 4 out of 100 of Tokyo’s suburban commuters (despite "hellish" conditions). Outside of rush hours, the contrast is greater—more than half the 700,000 New York suburbanites entering the CBD come by car compared to only 8% of the 1.6 million suburban Tokyo residents entering their CBD daily. Settlement pattern is the main determinant.
To keep CBD congestion as low as possible while allowing those who do meet frequently to remain there close together, the other three cities have planned subcenters. The British started with new towns around a greenbelt. La Defense was the first Paris subcenter, near the CBD and well connected to it by rail. Paris has added others. Tokyo is building close-in rail-based subcenters and connecting them with a new subway line. London has Docklands, where a subway line is being added to the earlier light-rail connection to the CBD.
New York has mainly relied on free enterprise to promote decentralization. Manhattan rents separate the businesses that need to be in the center from those that can (or must) escape the high rents, which resulted in Jersey City’s waterfront. Downtown Brooklyn’s MetroTech is an exception in that this effective subcenter resulted from extensive city planning and government intervention.
To reduce commuting time and crowding, business subcenters farther from the CBD have been organized. They are also on rail lines into the center, and Tokyo and Paris are developing circumferential rail and highway routes to connect them. New York has some of these subcenters, too: Jamaica, Queens, which has two major federal establishments plus York College and is getting private development now; Newark, with a large office complex at the railroad station; Stamford, CT, and White Plains, NY. In all these places, employees getting off trains or highways leave seats or lane space for people starting off there.
On the whole, however, New York’s decentralization has NOT been orderly. The vast majority of office jobs locating in the Tri-State region since 1960 has not gone into rail-based centers but along highways, separate from other offices and difficult to reach by any mode but auto. And that is the projection for the future. If current policies and trends continue, nearly all the added jobs that don’t locate in the CBD are expected to locate through the outer suburbs and beyond, and scatter in a way that will keep their employees and visitors travelling by car.
If this Region continues to locate jobs on the urban fringe, where homes and services are spread and scattered, already crowded highways will become more congested. Compare that with the far more compact pattern in both Paris and Tokyo, where jobs, housing and services are organized in business subcenters and new or enlarged towns around rail stations. They have the basis for relying on transit and walking or bicycling as those options become faster and more pleasant than driving. And the growing number of people too old or too young to drive safely will remain mobile.
Comparison of commuter railroad use in the four cities suggests that we are under-using our railroad system here in the Tri-State region. In the suburbs and exurbs, this is primarily due to lack of parking at stations only accessible by car. But in the outer boroughs of New York City and inner New Jersey (counties adjacent to New York City), there is plenty of population within walking distance of commuter rail. Adjustments in schedules, fares and pedestrian routes to stations could increase use of commuter rail there—as would new housing near stations. Certainly commuter rail service from the outer edges of the City would make those neighborhoods more attractive to Manhattan workers than the slow, crowded subways they rely on today. Improving living conditions closer to the CBD to attract commuters would improve transportation efficiency, as opposed to continuing the outward migration of commuters.
We are under-using the outer boroughs and inner New Jersey for jobs, as well. Comparable parts of the other three metropolitan areas have much higher job numbers and a higher ratio of jobs to population. This part of our region is an efficient place to locate jobs. The transit system is in place and a large current and potential work force exists, near bus-stops and subway stations. We are struggling to get City residents out to suburban jobs that need them; why not bring jobs to them?
The study also shows that our capital investment processes compare poorly with those in the other cities. In Paris and Tokyo, land-use and transportation are planned together: the plan produces a capital budget, subscribed to by national and regional governments, and their budgets are implemented. Since in our Region land-use remains the province of 780 separate municipal governments while transportation planning is basically in the hands of state transportation departments, the coordination achieved in Paris and Tokyo is all but impossible here. In Tokyo, private corporations are building new rail lines together with job and housing developments that will use them—a process that stimulated New York growth and has since been abandoned here.
To conclude, I worry that the other three cities are better prepared for economic growth than we are, because of the ways they are connecting transport and land use, and their infrastructure budgeting processes -- as revealed and illustrated in our transport study. But I also worry about all four cities because even though Tokyo, Paris and—to some degree—London have maintained a settlement pattern that can be based on public transit, auto use continues to increase -- and with it, the negative effects of the automobile.
All three of the other countries in this study have declared firm policies to reduce auto use. So has the European Union. But in all four cities, there appears to be the same inner conflict—people are buying cars and driving them more, while they deplore the effects of increased traffic and car-dependent jobs and services.
Is the United States too wedded to the car to change? Residents of New York City and Hudson County, New Jersey own fewer cars and drive them less than residents in comparable parts of London and Paris. London’s exurban Zone 4 has little more than one car per household, unlike our Zone 4 which has nearly 2 per household — clustering in villages makes one car viable.
Comparative study of settlement patterns and transportation quality is essential to understanding what works and how to keep New York competitive. We have a great deal to learn from other large cities about achieving orderly decentralization, preventing urban sprawl, capital budgeting and investment, and linking land use and transportation planning.
Websites of Four World Cities Transport Study Partners:
IAURIFhttp://www.iaurif.org
London Research Centrehttp://www.london-research.gov.uk
Konheim & Ketchamhttp://www.transport-link.com
To order a copy of The Four World Cities Transport Study: London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, please contact Bernan, 4611-F Assembly Drive Lanham, MD 20706. Call (800) 865-3457 or fax (800) 865-3450 from locations within the U.S. or email order@bernan.com.
From IPA Report, Spring 1999