America’s love affair with the automobile isn't running out of gas, it's just sputtering out on its own fumes. While the automobile arguably has done more to shape the 20th century American way of life than any other single phenomenon, its diminishment will make the 21st century in the United States as different from the 20th as this century was from the 19th.

Forget the fact that there are more cars on our roads than ever before and that you still see new road construction everywhere you look. Changes in U.S. transportation policy, so unthinkable just a few years ago when our government was willing to wage the Gulf War to ensure the steady flow of petroleum products for a nation of car owners, are now taking form in legislative bodies from Washington to town halls. This is the beginning of the end for transportation as know it.

Federal transportation administrators are scrambling to find ways to reduce and redistribute costs in response to Congress’ demand to tame the deficit. For one thing, they are reviewing our 5-8 percent sales taxes on new cars compared to European sales taxes that run as high as 180 percent. Road taxes in European nations range from $1,100 to $1,500 per vehicle per year, while in the United States we are now paying only about $200, mostly in fuel tax at the pump.

Most of us have come to accept the fuel tax. We never even see it on the pump meter, and when Congress and the President teamed up recently to cut some 4 cents in the federal gasoline tax, we could hardly feel the decrease due to market pressures on retailers to keep the prevailing prices in line. It now appears that in the years ahead the cost of transportation in the United States will no longer be drawn from a fuel tax, but will be rationed on a pay-as-you-go basis, leading to a more efficient but a less flexible transportation system than we have become accustomed to during the Interstate Era.

Instead of the old 90-10 percent federal/local matching ratio, transportation funding is moving toward a 50-50 proposition, a change that will force local and state agencies to find revenue streams through toll roads like the Kansas Turnpike, increased vehicle license fees, benefit districts, property and sales taxes, and other local voter initiatives to make up for Uncle Sam's new-found restraint in banding out transportation dollars.

Citizen Initiative

While these transportation policy changes may sound new, public opinion has been turning against the policies and procedures of the Interstate Era for a number of years. Due to lawsuits filed by citizens unwilling to stand by as the state moved to bulldoze its way through their neighborhoods, it took the Missouri Highway & Transportation Department (MHTD) over 20 years to get underway with Kansas City's Watkins Roadway. As a result of this public pressure, the project is now a hybrid design, utilizing landscaping, preservation of existing trees, and a light rail right-of-way. More recently, landowners in the corridor of the proposed Twenty-First Century Parkway have succeeded in convincing the Johnson County Commission to back off the Kansas Department of Transportation's ambitious plan.

With the proposed slashes in federal funding for transportation, citizen participation in transportation planning will become even more critical to state and local governments as they search for the dollars to replace the lost federal funding, Like it or not, state and local governments will have to work directly with the local citizenry and local business and industry to get them to foot half the bill for transportation projects. The 50-50 match will be a tough nut to crack, and it will cause some dramatic fallout in not only our transportation habits but our living modes as well.

Creative Approaches

Meanwhile urban-design professionals have been looking for ways to build a more efficient, user-friendly city, where not only transportation is changed but the pattern of our communities is changed to work better with public transit and to produce a higher quality of life for citizens at all levels of the socio-economic scale. Since these innovators have been aware of the inefficiency of an auto-oriented transportation system for some time, their ideas may be useful in this new federal-funding era.

One of the most widely publicized of these approaches, including a cover story in Newsweek, has come to be known as "neo-traditional town planning." Central to this approach is the intention to create communities in which stores and offices are interspersed with houses and apartments in a conscious effort to reduce dependence on the automobile.

These planners propose that within a 1/4-mile radius (five minute walk), residents will have access to shops and office accommodation, day care, local government services and transit connections to the urban core. They propose a hierarchy of urban relationships, from neighborhood center to regional center to urban core, a hierarchy that does not exist in the typical, single-use suburban residential subdivision where the car is the only viable connection to the strip, the mall, the office complex; the school, the library or the core. This pattern of multiple auto trips is a major source of "red alert" days, when pollution in urban areas reaches a level injurious to our health, a concern that is only recently becoming an issue with which Kansas City must deal.

Architectural sensitivity is a major element in this thinking: over time the uses of a community’s buildings might vary in relation to market demand, but their architectural relationships continue to fulfill an urban design role in physically defining the "public space," creating the unique character of a particular community. Pedestrian amenity is established by providing sidewalks and street trees, and by allowing buildings to terminate street vistas, giving focal points or destinations to modulate the walk from home to office, shop, church or transit stop.

Neo-traditionalists often cite Kansas City's Country Club Plaza as a primary example of inspired urban design. There commercial, office and residential uses are combined; the ground level of its garages is reserved for shops, contributing to pedestrian amenity and the general ambiance of the place. And the architecture of the Plaza plays a central role in creating a high level of public identification with this successful center.

Because they want to reach community consensus in the planning process, neo-traditionalists hold public workshops that include the use of three-dimensional documents. Often these participants have difficulty understanding the implications of planning issues if only two-dimensional maps are used, but the use of three dimensional sketches, photo animation and small models helps them to understand and to define a community in which they want to live.

The convergence of this community-based planning process and the practices now being adopted in transportation planning are representative of the same motivation on the part of citizens: "Don't come into my neighborhood with your big ideas without talking to me first." When transportation funding is drawn from sources on which the citizen will vote, you can bet that this attitude will spread rapidly.

Planning for cars or planning for pedestrians

New generation transportation planners maintain that cities which rely on public transportation develop pedestrian-friendly environments with sidewalks which are consistent and connected, narrow and easy street crossings, and architectural detail which can be appreciated at walking speed. Cities which rely on the automobile tend to widen intersections, delete sidewalks and street trees and develop an architecture that omits levels of detail that cannot be appreciated at 35 to 65 miles per hour. Wal-Mart produces this kind of building: big on freeway impact, short on character.

Kansas Citians who have experienced the pedestrian accommodation at the new Main-Brookside connection east of the Country Club Plaza will understand the contrast in these approaches. Using multiple-turn lanes to free the intersection for more convenient automobile use, the city has made pedestrian crossing a life-and-death adventure.

Transportation policy and land use

Public policies which control pricing of gasoline and parking, toll roads and bridges, and restrictions on single occupancy auto lanes are now used in many congested cities to reduce automobile usage, mostly in response to the rising problem of air pollution.

But it is a city's dominant transportation system which has the most pronounced influence (along with price) on how people decide where to buy and develop land. A city like Munich, Germany, has a dense and mixed land-use pattern due to the very high price of gasoline and automobile ownership, together with an extensive public transit system; and Munich is a place with the kind of ambiance people want in a city environment. Density in Houston, by contrast, is very low due to a relatively low cost of cars and gas, and minimal public transit service. Who do you know who goes to Houston for its ambiance? And what will happen to those auto-oriented cities when the Saudi Arabian regime has its next falling-out with Washington?

You can see this phenomenon in Kansas City by comparing the Ward Parkway and Brookside corridors: where commercial centers were developed together with residential (Crestwood, Brookside, Waldo), transit retains a continuing high ridership (4,700 riders per day on the Country Club bus route). By comparison, in the Ward Parkway corridor (formerly the Sunset Hill streetcar line) where no commercial centers were developed, transit ridership is considerably lower at 1,500 per day. As transportation policy changes, as the cost of automobile ownership and operation rises to a level at which it will affect land use decisions, property in the Ward Parkway corridor will be less accessible, the shops in Crestwood will return to more community based uses, and improved public transportation will make the Brookside corridor a more attractive real-estate investment.

So the fear of change in transportation policy is well founded. Nearly 50 years of development has accepted one mode as a given, and most of us don't know what kinds of life changes we will have to make in response. An optimistic scenario can be seen, however, in the research which has been going on for many years in the urban-design community, developing realistic and cost-effective ways to plan for a healthy, attractive, efficient, accessible and humanly scaled community with less reliance on the automobile.

Is everything up to date in Kansas City?

Most Kansas Citians see light rail (new generation streetcars) as unlikely in our low density context, but early studies indicate that anticipated ridership along the proposed routes is comparable and in some instances considerably stronger than many cities in which studies are further advanced or are already built. Kansas City's system awaits funding of the next design phase, preliminary engineering, after having completed alignment studies which have proposed a "starter phase" from River Market to the Plaza, and subsequent phases along Brush Creek, Bruce Watkins Roadway, and the old Country Club (Brookside and beyond) carline right-of-way.

To some observers the shutdown of the Twenty-First Century Parkway represents a major shift in a regional transportation policy that has generated a more extensive freeway network than any other major metropolitan center in the nation. Speculation continues as to whether the project may be restarted when the political mix in Olathe is different, whether this change will impede growth in the outlying parts of Johnson County or whether pressure for incremental improve-ments will result over the next decade in a less efficient and more expensive network of arterial street improvements struggling to serve a growing demand.

Kansas City's FOCUS Comprehensive Planning Process is now in its fourth year, heading toward City Council adoption of a new Comprehensive Plan by the fall of 1997. The first such plan since 1947, this highly citizen-oriented process is intended to set an agenda for the central city of our metropolitan area, a building block upon which a more comprehensive and integrated metropolitan plan can be forged. Since transportation decisions are crucial to the structure and pattern of the city's growth, they are at the heart of the FOCUS process.

It's a new ballgame

There are those who believe the expansion of business and suburban housing in Johnson County will continue for the foreseeable future as it has for the past 50 years. But the proposed changes in federal transportation funding policy make such a scenario less likely. It is critical to the future of the Kansas City metropolitan area that citizens and planning agencies begin the steps now to position our community to take maximum advantage of these new policies. And unlike the past fifty years, to successfully compete with other metropolitan areas for smaller and smaller federal transportation outlays, it will take active, even aggressive citizen involvement and support to put in place the transportation investments that this community wants.

Much of the content of this article was taken from presentations at the Metropolitan Development Forum, June 7 1996, sponsored by the Mid America Regional Council and Kansas City Power and Light Company, and featuring John Platt of the Ohio Department of Transportation, Michal Wert of the Oregon Department of Transportation. Peter Katz of Congress of the New Urbanism and Samuel Seskin of Parsons Brinckerhoff, Quade and Douglass.