Travel Demand and Urban Form

Miller and Soberman describe transportation and land use as a "two-way, chicken-and-egg relationship": competitive, high-quality transit can be provided cost-effectively only where land use patterns support such services, but transit-supportive built forms can be built only if transit service is provided. They examine recent transportation trends in the Central Ontario Zone, including increased dependence on the automobile, and recommend a series of "smart growth building blocks," including road pricing to alter travel behaviour and the choice of vehicles, as well as altering transit subsidy programs to reward performance rather than costs, and providing municipalities and transit agencies with new sources of predictable revenue other than property taxes. Finally, they identify the barriers to implementing these recommendations and suggest several short-term measures to deal with congestion, support transit, and slow down urban sprawl.