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Transportation planning is a region's destiny. The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission must change its focus
Wednesday, October 11, 2000
By Court Gould
Over the years, transportation and land-use professionals locally and outside have urged the board of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission - our regional transportation planning agency - to adjust its approach to planning our region's future. SPC has traditionally planned road construction in reaction to development that occurs on the easiest sites to develop. It has not taken the more beneficial approach of planning roads that encourage building on the most suitable land - in step with a regional plan.
With SPC searching for new leadership, following the death of its executive director in August, the time is now for its board to shift focus. It must acknowledge that its expanded leadership is required to address issues of human development, community and economic development and the natural environment - with transportation as one key means to a vision for the future.
Established in 1962, SPC was started as a planning agency working primarily in transportation. Over the years it has gained influence in this area, culminating in 1992 when it was named "metropolitan planning organization" for the region. SPC, however, has focused its attention on apportioning limited transportation funding instead of taking leadership and building genuine community consensus on major planning and land use issues.
This is putting our region in a competitive disadvantage in two ways. First, transportation planning not tied to a regional plan creates sprawl, diminishing our attractive landscape and our remarkable urban neighborhoods - perhaps our region's most important competitive assets. Second, it is very difficult to attract new businesses and support the expansion of existing ones without a workable transportation system.
SPC's "transportation plan" approach promotes the dispersion of jobs and housing at low densities, which weakens existing towns and cities and requires even more auto use and chews up open space - altogether a good definition of sprawl - and is wasteful public spending. Good public investment and planning should target resources to locations most likely to support productive growth. This requires the leadership to view transportation and other infrastructure investments not as an end in themselves but as a means to support sensible, not just any, growth.
We can no longer afford continued erosion of our urban cores at the expense of our surrounding natural assets. Planning must be a balance between promoting private development and discouraging sprawl.
Good transportation planning follows good land-use planning. There should be a consensus among all the local agencies involved in land-use planning that the citizens of this region cannot carry the costs of providing sanitary sewers or waterlines or roads or mass transit to every parcel of land. Yet this is what the present zoning regulations encourage.
An organization in a leadership position, such as SPC, should be initiating the discussion by ordinary citizens as well as municipal representatives of how to coordinate regional transportation planning with local land-use issues.
It should be leading the discussion to determine which land is best for development and which land requires too much expenditure for public services for too little return in quality of development and tax revenue. This includes, for example, the efficiencies of steering our tax dollars to areas where infrastructure already exists, our cities or population centers, ahead of laying road and service lines into fields and open lands.
There are many progressive regions around the nation whose diverse and growing economies are attributed to smart-growth management. Places like Seattle and Portland, Ore., are well-known for facilitating growth toward the urban core while conserving farms and open space. And cities like Austin, Texas, are known for assessing public investments against criteria that define long-term commitment to development that maximizes social, economic and environmental benefits.
Over the years, SPC has maintained there are barely sufficient funds allocated by the state and federal governments to maintain and make significant improvements to our crumbling transportation system. And, SPC has emphasized that there is no point in preparing new visions of the region since there would be no funds to construct it.
However, construction of long-ago conceived projects, such as the Mon-Fayette Expressway and now the Southern Beltway, shows resources can be amassed for big projects. With so much going for our region, we must now ditch old-economy delusions of pavement as the only road to prosperity.
SPC must now look at the big picture and plan for the 21st century. It is time to catch up with the rest of the country and plan a completely integrated road and transit system to support a regional land-use plan. This needs to be funded through organized state and federal support and, perhaps, a regional bond issue. The SPC board is in the position to provide this leadership that southwestern Pennsylvania so desperately needs.
Sustainable Pittsburgh invites SPC, other organizations and the community to join in further discussion about the role of regional planning in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Court Gould is director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, a nonpartisan civic forum (www.sustainablepittsburgh.org).