The automobile has long been an inextricable aspect of American culture, symbolizing freedom and autonomy. Increasingly, more and more of us are seeking transportation options. As our communities, markets, and priorities change, will the country’s transportation system keep up?

Over time, even people who love to drive find their daily commute a daily grind. Rising gas prices, rush hour congestion, environmental concerns, and demographic changes are inspiring many Americans to seek alternatives to driving. Unfortunately, most of us have few choices other than our cars and pickups to get where we need to go.

It’s more than an issue of convenience. To drive economic competitiveness, reduce oil consumption, and meet evolving market demand, America’s metropolitan areas must reinvent themselves with a reduced dependence on the car. It won’t happen overnight and requires a catalyst. The best catalyst for this transition is a transitway system.

Transitways are rail, streetcar, and bus rapid transit lines that provide attractive, fast, and convenient service. A smart transitway system creates a network of transportation options that efficiently serves urban, suburban, and exurban residents. Most importantly, transitways define places, spur redevelopment, and support higher concentrations of activity than otherwise possible.

AN ESSENTIAL LINK: HOW WE MOVE, WHERE WE GO

For the last 60 years, American cities have rapidly grown outward, at a rate far greater than can be explained by population growth alone. This expansion was caused in part by a combination of cheap gas, rapid highway expansion, the American Dream (a large suburban house on a big lot), and crime and struggling schools in the urban core.

This trend is changing. Gas is no longer cheap. It is impossible to expand highways enough to combat congestion. And, critically, the market is evolving. Big suburban houses are no longer preferred by a majority of Americans, mainly because household size is at an all-time low. Adults without children and seniors comprise the fastest growing segments of our population, while there is little growth in the number of families with children. Smaller households demand smaller houses.

Naturally, the housing market is adjusting to meet these changes. Houses on large suburban lots have generally been hit harder by the foreclosure crisis than those in communities closer to urban centers, and apartment development is the brightest part of the market for most regions.

Public policy must adjust as the market evolves. Transportation policy, applied intelligently, can both enable and spur development. Transitways are an integral part of regional planning. Most major regions—from Denver to Salt Lake City to Minneapolis-St. Paul—are expanding their transitway networks because decision makers understand that transitway systems connecting spheres of economic development will attract the best employers and the most talented workers.

Transitway investment can’t succeed in a vacuum. Other policies, including those governing real estate development, zoning, and urban planning, must evolve concurrently. For example, redeveloping existing areas adjacent to transitways in the urban core can be hampered by zoning laws that favor new development on the edge of a region. Developers interested in building new transitway stops can be frustrated by density limits, parking requirements, or superfluous legal hurdles. In addition, most public investment in transportation, sewers, and even parks is currently geared toward the outmoded trend of purely suburban (and auto-dependent) growth.

TRANSIT, DEVELOPMENT, ENERGY

Oil dependence is one of the most well– chronicled challenges facing America today. Nationally, our reliance on foreign oil is a threat to national security as well as the environment. Driving accounts for almost half of all U.S. oil use and 17 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. At the personal level, the typical American family spends more of its household income on transportation than anything other than housing—more than food, more than health care. The distance driven by each of us nearly doubled from 1970 to 2004, largely due to investment in highways and support for sprawling development at the expense of transit and redevelopment.

There are no silver bullet solutions to our oil addiction, but supporting transportation options must be part of the equation. Transit uses energy as well, but it’s more efficient per passenger than driving, even when including energy-intensive transit that provides important basic access for people with disabilities and in rural areas. U.S. transit saves billions of gallons of gas and millions of tons of carbon emissions every year. Most of that savings comes from the connection between transit and development, not simply from people choosing transit over driving. The transit and energy connection is really the transit, development, and energy connection.

The automobile has long been an inextricable aspect of American culture, symbolizing freedom and autonomy. Increasingly, more and more of us are seeking transportation options. As our communities, markets, and priorities change, will the country’s transportation system keep up?