Toward a New Way of Thinking about Transportation by Susan Handy (2024)

Posted 2024-03-16

Book Notes by John December

In this book, Susan Handy shows how we can re-examine long-held core ideas about transportation and reconceptualize them to build a better transportation system. Using her translational work (p. 5) to synthesize literature, history, and practices,the author shines a light on the shifts in thinking about nine core ideas intransportation: Freedom, Speed, Mobility, Vehicles, Capacity, Hierarchy, Separation, Control, and Technology. Through this examination, she reveals how we can untangle the often-polarizing conflicts favoring rationalist or urbanist transportation approaches. The critical insight is that outdated assumptions hold us back from what she identifies in her conclusion as "a transportation system that works better for everyone in all respects" (p. 237).

Because of the author's synthesis skill to outline shifts in fundamental ideas of transportation, this book serves as a handy guide to the past century of transportation assumptions and how they are changing in the United States. She examines the foundations and flaws of traditionalassumptions and documents the shift toward approaches rooted more in human experience rather than rationalism and technological determinism. Everyone involved in planning, building, operating, or using transportation should read this book--from professionals, students, citizens, decision-makers, and transit riders. A large audience can gain insight into how these core transportation ideas affects us today through existing and proposed infrastructure, engineering, vehicles, modes, and practices.Handy shows how we can gain power by realizing that we can chart a different course for transportation.

In my reading of Handy's book, I can better understand these mainpoints about the nine core ideas:

1. FreedomHandy describes a shift away from the core assumption driving transportationfor nearly a century: the assumption that the automobile is the best means of providing transportation freedom. While cars offer freedom for some people, this assumption is insufficient for "ensuring equitable freedom of movement for everyone." (p. 43). There are many people who do not drive (Handy cites the figure of nondrivers at 30% (p. 42)). Moreover, those who do drive face steep car ownership costs, a heavy driving burden in terms of time and lost productivity, deaths and injuries,health deterioration, and unmet possibilities for alternative transportation choices.Most importantly, automobile use has dominated city planningand development for a century, resulting in a landscape warped byaccommodating the car (see multiple readings).

   As an illustration of the difficulties to overturn the cars = freedom (automobility) paradigm, Handy cites the 1973 Rehabilitation Act that sought to provideequal access for people with disabilities to public transit.This Act faced significant resistance, setbacks, and eventually the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 (p. 44).

   The automobility paradigm has led to the oversubsidization of car use and the starvation of public transit and other modes of mobility. It often uses the circular reasoning that "everyone drives"; therefore, other modes are irrelevant—only car use should be supported. While car use can benefit many people, it is a false premise that only cars guarantee freedom and that other means of mobility do not provide freedom and are, therefore, unimportant. The "cars = freedom" assumption thus should be understood in its Orwellian tone: a rejection of empirical human experience by using a slogan about freedom that is ironically authoritarian in its intent. Handy does not mention how automobile drivers, who are so used to absolute dominance in mobility, may find any shift away from car dominance to be a "war on cars" (Walker, 2023).

   Peter Norton examined the core idea of car use equated to freedom as a contributor to the rise of motordom in his book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (2008).

   Research into the underpinnings of automobility (car orientation) also have revealed the underlying hazards arising from equating automobiles with freedom.Car dependency as a policy goal has warped cities torevolve around cars ()endangering a healthy mix of transportation options.

   Car bias presents risk to public health, safety, and the environment. In their article, "Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard,"researchers Walker, Tapp, and Davis (2022)showed how automobile bias works as an unexamined force that introduces environmental and health hazards. Orientation towards cars as the only means of transport closes our eyes to the harm they inflict, as Miner et al. (2024) examined in "Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment."

2. SpeedWhile speed has traditionally been definedas the chief aim for automobile travel, Handy shows how a re-examination of the safety problems with speed has brought about a shift in thinking: rather than encouraging automobile drivers to speed because they perceive a safety margin in the roadway, drivers need to be made aware of safety issues and take responsibility for the safe operation of their vehicles.

   Higher speeds kill more people by making crashes more severe, particularly for pedestrians and bicyclists. While not widely known or understood, the speed limit signs have been set not by engineers according to the roadway geometry but by drivers themselves: engineers take a survey of free-flowing traffic to determine the 85% percentile speeds being used, and that, in general, is what gets posted on the sign (p. 59; Marohn, 2021). Thus, the level of roadway deaths is the result of deliberate design decisions to place the risk of more severe injury on all people involved--drivers as well as pedestrians and bicyclists. Using this method, the USA's roadway safety problem has achieved the highest rate ofdeaths due to motor-vehicles in the world among high-income countries. The mitigation of injury to automobile drivers in crashes by hardening the automobile's structure makes death and injury to people other than car drivers even more possible.

   The method to turn the assumption about speed around requires engineering roadways to reveal the safety issues directly to drivers to motivate them to drive at a credible speed (p. 67), that is, at a speed that is not set by drivers enjoying themselves but is set by members of their community and elected representatives, in consultation with engineers.This comports with Marohn's evaluation of traffic in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (2021).

3. MobilityHandy charts the shift in the assumptions behind why people travel in the first place.Using the assumption that the ability to traverse distances to reach destinations quickly is key,mobility (speed) is the focus.In contrast, a focus on the ability of people to access their needs within near destinations represents a focus on accessibility.

   While mobility and accessibility have been perceived as competing goals, the focus on mobility hasbeen the primary emphasis of rationalist approaches of transportation planners (p. 73).However, the shift has been toward accessibility (p. 79).Handy's Ph.D. dissertation focused on accessibility, and she unwinds the conflict between mobility and accessby explaining how neighborhoods work.A neighborhood works by people being able to meet their needsby traveling a certain amount of time.If people cantravel by foot or bicycle (or a combination) for up to five or fifteen minutes to meet their needs, thisdefines a "five-minute" or "fifteen-minute" neighborhood (p. 86). This time-defined neighborhood ideally places key destinations (grocery, work, medical, education, recreation, entertainment, civic, parks, and other essentials) within these distances defined by time using a travel mode. Handy notes that many transportation planners do not study land use or pay attention to access; hence, this accessibility work is often a blind spot in the transportation field.

   Handy does not mention public transit, although it is a crucial travel mode for the many people who cannot use or do not wish to use a bicycle. The 20-minute city concept has been developed by adding transit (see "Accessibility in Practice: 20-Minute City as a Sustainability Planning Goal," Capasso Da Silva et al., 2020).Public transit is often ignored in many conceptions of urbanism today,but Todd Litman writes in defense of public transit ("Responding to Public Transit Criticism" (2024))and extolls its benefits (Evaluating public transit benefits and costs: best practices guidebook (2023)).

   Handy asked (perhaps rhetorically) if anyone lives in such a 5, 15, or 20-minute city: "What share of US residents can say that?" (p. 87). I live in such a city. For four consecutive years, I used only walking, our local streetcar,and buses to meet all of my needs, and many ofmy travel times met the 15 or 20-minute measure.So, such cities are perhaps not as rare as Handy seems to imply, andmany car-free people in a variety of cities--even away from metropolitan coastal cities--may live in 15 to 20-minute neighborhoods, accessing life's needs.

   As a measure of mobility, I find it surprising that an over-emphasis on Level of Service (LOS) (p. 77) so stubbornly ignores basic physics equations such as distance = speed * time. Traditionally, LOS considers speed as the main aim of transportation. However, the speed of travel varies by distance and time spent, which can be expressed as speed = distance/time or time = distance/speed. If one reduces the distances involved in travel, the shorter distances can be traversed in a shorter amount of time, even while simultaneously reducing travel speed. This analysis is Physics 101, yet it eludes the LOS approach to transportation planning. Handy does not expound on this irony, but I am puzzled why transportation planners would resist the simple idea that distance matters and is a variable, along with speed, that determines the time required for someone to use a mobility mode to reach a destination. Of course, not all land use patterns are the same. Different densities exist amongurban and suburban areas, for example, and people might prefer either oneand therefore have different distances to traverse. The key would be to provide a wide range of densities, land use patterns for people to choose from, and a wide range of transit modes. Rather than a LOS approach to maximize speed, reducing the distances needed to travel can instead provide people withbetter transit times.Handy's access-based emphasis seems an essential breakthrough in assumptions aboutmobility, considering the simple equation that ties time, distance, and speed together.

4. VehiclesHandy describes the shift from a transportation focus on vehicles (p. 94) to one where people are considered part of the transportationsystem (p. 98).Traditionally, according to a car-centric and engineering-rationalist view of transportation, the fundamental player in transportation and the focus of accommodation is the vehicle—the automobile. While people are considered drivers, their vulnerability as pedestrians and their role in transportation has only recently been acknowledged. Reforms such as complete streets (p. 110), road diets (p. 112), or parking reform (p. 114) have come about only after a significant struggle and documentation of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths (p. 95). The shift away from focusing only on ensuring the rapid movement of the automobile and its storage (Shoup, 2005, 2011; Shoup, 2018; Knowles, 2023)as the focus of our transportation system has been surprisingly harrowing.
5. CapacityClosely related to the idea of transportation's rationalist goal as ensuring the rapid speed of automobiles is the pursuit of widening roadways and highways in a (futile) effort to increase the speed of automobiles, and the shift in this thinking has come about in a similar historical arcfrom rationalism to actual real-life observations.

   The recognition of induced travel (p. 127) as an outgrowth of roadway widening is a crucial shift toward understanding the futility of widening roadways. Handy highlights the shift now is "away from the prioritization of vehicle movement toward the prioritization of people and their need for accessibility" (p. 135).

   Handy's evaluation comports with other findings. Jake Blumgart (2022)describes how expanding highways tends to invite still more traffic (called induced traffic)and that decision-makers regularly ignore this phenomenondespite decades of research on the topic(Litman, "Generated Traffic and Induced Travel").By failing to address induced demand, widening highways creates more traffic, which leads to further highway capacity problems (Transportation for America, 2020 "The Congestion Con: How more lanes and more money equals more congestion").Widened highways also have subsequent costs of automobile crashes.The cost of these crashes exceed any savings from any temporary congestion reduction,states Robert Steutevillewriting in the CNU Journal(Steuteville, 2022).Widening highways to reduce congestion therefore is an unsustainable and expensive cycle and suggests circular (Singer, 2013)or invalid (Jacobs, 2004)reasoning. The result is that highway departments spend large amounts of money to make congestion problems worse, cause deaths, and increase costs.

6. HierarchyHierarchy is the system of roadway sizes, shapes, and connections that form a system for people to travel on to access land. Handy describes the shift in thinking about the hierarchy that has gone back and forth among various geometric patterns used to design roadways.

   The historical development of street patterns such as gridiron, fragmented parallel, warped parallel, loops and lollipops, and lollipops on a stick (p. 147) have all shown a variety of emphases and uses. While each pattern has a specific aim, the drawbacks of non-grid street patterns have become apparent throughout suburban superblock developments--where the convoluted lines create chokepoints for traffic and cut off direct access from one point to another (p. 148). The shift has been from an emphasis on vehicular travel only to seeking ways to provide connectivity and a resurgent interest in grid patterns for streets (p. 158).

7. SeparationSeparating roadway traffic by mode goes back more than 100 years (p. 181, 183), and it has only been in the past decades that ideas about this separationhave shifted from the goals of increasing the throughput and speeds of automobilesto one in which people and other modes of travel play a rolein transportation planning.Separation on roadways by prioritizing automobiles has wreaked havoc on other modes of travel, particularly vulnerable human pedestrians and bicyclists. Although engineers have come up with ideas to place the physical roadway under or over other traffic or roadways, and wild-eyed ideas such as Elon Musk's fantasy of a never-proven "hyperloop" have been proposed, the thinking presently is a call for integration of many modes--for example "complete streets." (p. 186).
8. ControlHandy traces the varying approaches to control alonga transportation corridor through the shifts in thinking from loose control, to strict control, and a contemporary approach to control that can be described as cooperative.

   Traffic in the US was initially a jumble of all kinds of modes—horses, streetcars, pedestrians, bicyclists, and early motor cars—jostled in a kind of ballet.This quickly transformed once automobile flow became a priority, along with traffic control devices that attempted to make cars flow well. The shift now is to self-control, where automobile drivers must recognize competition for space and must take responsibility for cooperating to move through it.The fundamentals of control are: space is limited, and control devices, roadway structures, and self-control all play a role in traffic cooperating in a way that enables everyone to travel.

9. TechnologyHandy observes that new technologies promising transportation improvements have varying success--some have dramatically improved human mobility, and others have proven to be overhyped failures.While Handy outlines electric vehicles, segway scooters, electric bikes, light rail, micro mobility, ridesharing, and other modes, she concludes the chapter with the healthy skepticism that Peter Norton showed in evaluating the overpromise-undeliver-fail profile of many hyped technologies in Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving, (2021).While Handy does not go into the depth that Norton does, she nonetheless outlines a viewpoint that, while being open-minded to the promise of electric vehicles or micromobility, she cautions that "Technological innovation is not enough" (p. 224).The ultimate test of innovations is their effect: do they make life better for people or worse?

Handy's final chapter, "Up Ahead," summarizes her book and asks, "Could we be at a tipping point toward a new way of thinking?" (p. 227).The total of all the shifts in transportation ideas may be like "turning an ocean liner" (p. 226), but Handy's guide helps us navigate these changes.

The shift in thinking about transportation has moved away from a superficial understanding of speed, vehicles, capacity, separation, hierarchy, separation, control, and technologyto a rethinking ofthe basic assumptions about freedom and mobility (pp. 227-229). These dramatic shifts have emerged from a gradual recognition of the folly of "improving efficiency narrowly defined" to a rethinking of the relationship among peopletheir destinations, and transportation, so that "congestion [is] less relevant to people's lives." (p. 229). Handy claims that "focusing on accessibility--in place of rather than in conjunction with mobility--is a way to solve our congestion problem" (p. 229).Handy states that "we do not need to completely abandon the old ideas of freedom, speed, mobility, vehicles, and capacity," but we do "need to consider which ideas are relevant in what situations and how best to apply them" (p. 229).

Eventually, all shifts in ideas about transportation must gain public acceptance (p. 234) and show a "new conception of freedom" that is not based on cars only but on freedom of choice within a more resilient and locally sensitive community (p. 235).Handy concludes that with this "fully dimensional definition of freedom ... we could end up with a reconfigured transportation system... that works better for everyone in all respects." (p. 237).

Related Links

• Author Site at UC Davis
• Author publications
• The Innovative Cities Lecture Series--Shifting Gears, Presentation for The School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP), The University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, December 6, 2023.
• Goodreads page

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