Expanded public transit encourages beneficial growth

Local city planners can have a limited effect on the way a place grows and changes, but the real power in land use planning is actually in transportation. The best laid plans are useless without a way to get there.

Highways, transit, even local connectors, are the arteries that deliver the lifeblood of people, and without them, no new subdivisions, no new big-box stores and no new businesses would happen.

Many people believe that a new or expanded highway will relieve congestion, making their commute easier. That's only true for a very short time. What really happens is that new or expanded highways encourage new subdivisions and new commercial growth farther and farther away from central areas.

When new people move in, they add to the freeway traffic, and the congestion level once again rises, usually even higher than before. It's a simple mechanism that has been demonstrated all over the world. We can see it here: Traffic delays in the Wasatch region actually rose significantly after I-15 was completed.

If new highways are not about reducing congestion, then why do we bother?

Transportation decisions dictate the ultimate shape of our community, enabling more and more growth. Building a new highway — like the Mountain View Corridor — is the same thing as saying that we want a lot of new development on the valley's west side. Building Legacy Highway north to Davis County will support more sprawl there, but it won't reduce congestion for long. When we build a highway, we are dictating where, when and how growth will occur.

A public transit system also shapes growth, but in a different way. Public transit encourages compact development located in more concentrated nodes, unlike the sprawling development created by highways. Compact doesn't have to mean apartments and high-rises.

The Avenues and other parts of Salt Lake City are examples of compact development, where the basic land use generated by old streetcar networks tended to favor a mix of houses, schools and businesses. It was easier to use the streetcar then (or the TRAX today) if you lived and worked close to a stop. Then, and now, an extensive public transit system encouraged people to live, shop and recreate close by — and it builds a sense of neighborhood, too.