To Thundermutt’s comment that “In my experience, most of the people clamoring for extensive investment in transit could be categorized as ‘white, above median income creative-class people,’” I can say that our experience in the Transportation Equity Network — 350+ organizations in 41 states and DC — is quite different.

Hundreds of our members in every corner of the country are low-income people of color who are taking their fight to their MPOs, state DOTs, and Capitol Hill because inadequate transit or service cuts are jeopardizing their jobs, their health, and their families. There’s nothing academic about highway-transit funding ratios for them — in fact few things hit closer to home.

http://www.transportationequity.org

Philadelphia and New York, whose growth followed rail lines, have “transit cultures”. But even there, (speaking from personal experience with the Philadelphia Main Line area), suburban garages have two, three, or four cars and most people drive everywhere; there are huge exurban employment clusters well off the urban transit grid.

It’s possible to favor transit without romanticizing or fantasizing TOD, and certainly without saying “no more roads–ever”. Anywhere that 80-95% of workers commute by car (and that is almost everywhere), managing growth will require some new roads and increased freeway capacity.

Wow. Well, if the people in those areas are simply car fanatics, then of course you’re right.

In most of the country this simply isn’t the case, and I seriously doubt it’s really true even in the home of the Indy 500. The car lovers of suburban Los Angeles, the distant outskirts of New York City and Philadelphia, and the distant exurbs of Chicago — all are happy to take commuter rail to their jobs, even if they use their cars for typical pleasure trips. Car-loving Atlanta is quite happy with MARTA.

The real question is what the nature of all those trips on the highway actually is. If it’s suburban traffic heading downtown, then commuter rail with park-and-rides is suitable.

If it’s suburban traffic heading to a widely dispersed number of different suburbs, then you should build *different* roads in order to separate different sorts of trips onto different roads, rather than widening the existing highways.

Quite right, but you are using highways for the wrong purpose.

Once an expressway has filled up two lanes in each direction, additional lanes simply provide terrible return on investment. You have so much volume at this point that you will do much better putting mass transit in on the corridor.

Highway widening is rarely useful. New expressways to *different places* do provide a decent return on investment, but the NIMBYs will give you trouble there.

For suburb to suburb travel, small cities don’t really need highways – urban arterials and boulevards have enough capacity. And for travel to the urban core, public transit is a good substitute, as long as it’s done well. Small new metro areas even without dense cores regularly achieve transit shares of 15% or higher outside the US.

By the way: Los Angeles and Portland have the same metro area transit mode shares…

For those of us so inclined, I believe that if we focus on making urban living more attractive for the 50-70% of every metro area’s residents that DON’T choose the city, we’ll get there faster.

We can’t force people to live the way we choose to, but we can make it look good enough for them to want to try.