Rosella Picado
To help workers avoid the peak-hour commute, employers have been adopting flextime work schedules. Some workers’ jobs already permit flexible work hours, so a lot of employees should be commuting during off-peak hours. But, alas, the survey I’ve just completed finds it ain’t necessarily so. Given the opportunity to avoid heavy traffic, I had to ask: why does anyone still commute during the peak hours?
Susan Shaheen
Worldwide growth in automobile ownership has triggered many ideas for reducing car use. Most popular of course are plans to expand and improve public transit. The array of alternatives is far wider, however. One that I find potentially plausible and promising is the idea of pooling cars.
Patricia Mokhtarian and
Ilan Salomon
A seeming truism, repeated countless times in university transportation courses, holds that “travel is a derived demand.” That is, travel occurs because someone wants to do something somewhere else. This basic proposition underlies most policies designed to reduce motorized travel and thereby reduce congestion, increase safety, improve air quality, or reduce consumption of nonrenewable energy resources.
Jonathan Levine
A long tradition in urban planning seeks land use arrangements that reduce the need for travel, especially drive-alone travel. Current variations on this idea in the United States include jobs-housing balancing (locating jobs and housing nearby one another), transit villages (dense, mixed-use urban development with medium to high-rise housing concentrated near transit stops), and New Urbanism (a less dense, neighborhood form focusing on pedestrianism, transit, and mixed land uses).
Donald Shoup
Chances are you drive to work alone and park free when you get there. Ninety-one percent of commuters in the United States travel to work by automobile, 92 percent of commuters’ automobiles have only one occupant, and 94 percent of automobile commuters park free at work. Employers provide 85 million free parking spaces for commuters. The resulting tax-exempt parking subsidies are worth $31.5 billion a year.
Brian D. Taylor and
William S. McCullough
During the early years of the Great Depression, public transit ridership plummeted by one-third, marking the 20th century trend toward private automobile travel. Sixty years later, transit riding again dropped during the economic recession between 1989 and 1993 , particularly on the nation’s largest transit systems. Although the economy recovered during the mid-1990s and transit patronage stabilized nationally, ridership has not returned to pre-recession levels.
Ruth L. Steiner
The New Urbanist goal to create pedestrian-friendly transit villages is hard to criticize. Transit villages promise reduced traffic congestion and heightened quality of life. Their formula is simple: Create clusters of houses, shops, jobs, and social services amidst neighborhoods where transit riders and pedestrians outnumber drivers.
Katherine M. O'Regan and
John Quigley
Between 1970 and 1990 the percentage of white workers with central city jobs declined by more than half, from 50 to 20 percent, and the percentage of black workers with central city jobs declined from 61 to 37 percent. The decentralization of residences was even more dramatic. The proportion of white workers living in the central cities of US metropolitan areas declined by 29 percentage points, while the proportion of black workers declined by 42 percentage points. By 1990, only about one out of eight white urban workers was living in a central city.
Jane Gould and
Thomas F. Golob
Home shopping is not a novelty. Our parents may have received milk at the front door, or invited the Avon lady or an encyclopedia salesman to step inside. Nowadays we pick up the phone to order pizza or to buy clothing from catalogs, or we receive weekly deliveries of organic produce. Today’s home shopping orders are usually transmitted by mail or telephone.
Evelyn Blumenberg and
Paul Ong
In 1995, 13.6 million people nationwide received welfare benefits totaling $22 billion. Critics have considered this sum unnecessary and the welfare program inefficient. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, welfare reformers established time limits for receiving benefits, hoping to speed the transition from public assistance to employment.