Q & A with Robert Cervero: UCTC's new director talks about the future of transit-oriented development
| The new director of the University of California Transportation Center discusses how to use market-based forces in undertakings such as transit-oriented land development to undo our enslavement to cars and rescue us from other perils of sprawl. |
Earlier this month, Robert Cervero, a professor of City and Regional Planning, assumed the directorship of the University of California Transportation Center (UCTC), a federally-funded research center established in 1987.
Cervero received master's degrees in civil engineering and city planning from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a PhD in urban planning from UCLA. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1980 where he is also the Director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development. His area of expertise is sustainable transportation policy and planning. For the past five years he has been an instructor of transportation planning courses for the National Transit Institute and the World Bank Institute.
NewsBITS sat down with Cervero to ask him about joint land use and transportation, sustainable transportation, transit-oriented development, public- private partnerships, and the effect of new state legislation.
Q: How would you describe your research?
A:
I focus on the relationship between cities and regions, transportation,
travel behavior, more or less taking the perspective that the design of
cities, where people live, work, shop really sets the stage for where people
travel and how people travel. In many ways, if you want to get to the systemic
nature of a lot of problems, such as congestion, air pollution, it’s centrally tied to how we organize and define our
cities. So if there’s a lack of affordable housing near job centers,
and if people are displaced way out in Livermore, you’re going
to get very long commutes.
So you can simply treat transportation as
a way to respond to the symptoms—such as congestion—and design
and build more roads. But increasingly the evidence appears to me that
in many ways this further spawns sprawl and many other problems.
Q: Where do the solutions lie?
A:
Even though I have a master’s degree in engineering and planning,
over time I have evolved away from focusing on technology and operations
and supply side solutions to more broadly the notion that how do we more
resourcefully and sustainably design cities and regions. I would almost
pitch it as a form of demand management. You can manage demand by pricing
and parking policies and things like that, but you can also put people
closer to jobs and shopping and walking and biking. It’s just another
form of demand management.
Q: Not just sprawl, but energy use, congestion, greenhouse gas emissions,
right?
A: Increasingly we’ve realized there are a lot of broader environmental
benefits. It’s not just reducing congestion and emissions, we have
problems of time pollution. We spend so much time traveling to and fro
that people no longer have quality time to invest in their neighborhoods
or their civic activities. They arrive home exhausted from their long commutes.
Sociologists have tied this to social disaffect, where people sort
of disassociate themselves from neighborhood affairs. So, I would suggest
there are even more deeply-rooted problems associated with transportation
problems.
Q: How does this relate to joint development—or
integrating transportation and land-use planning?
A: I have long been a believer in mass transit simply because it is the
most resourceful means of mobility. Transit, in my view, has always been
a means of mobility we should be promoting and advancing. Of course, anyone
who has spent time in Europe or in many other parts of the world, realizes
what can happen if you carefully coordinate transit investment with urban
planning. You get much more walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods. A
good share of trips can be handled more quickly, more efficiently, more
economically, more resourcefully by transit.
Q: So you’re saying our system doesn’t work?
A: It’s not to say that our system is broken; a lot of people
like the freedom and individualism of the private car. But I think the
difference you find in Europe is that people do own cars, they’re
just not enslaved to them for any and every trip. They’re much more
judicious and selective when they use the car or don’t. So if you
live in a place like Stockholm or Copenhagen, if you go into the central
city, everybody takes transit. Stockbrokers, day workers, school kids,
everyone. But for regional destination trips, shopping, sports events,
or if you’re making a late-night trip or doing big volume shopping
they drive. For a weekend excursion they drive. So they are not anti-car,
but the cities are designed so that transit is a respectable option for
many.
Q: You have done a lot of work in the area of transit oriented development,
or TOD. Can you explain what that is and how it works?
A: The way I envisage TOD is as a compact, mixed use, walking-friendly
development oriented around transit stations, mainly train stations. Ideally,
these transit hubs become a focal point around which community planning
and design is organized. It’s a centerpiece for the community that
often includes a civic square, where people gather for celebrations, public
events and holidays, and these public squares are ringed by day-to-day
services and retail outlets so people can combine their transit trip with
after-work shopping or a daycare center. They play a mobility function,
but they’re also a way to organize community planning and development.
In better-planned TOD settings, these transit hubs are regional. The metaphor might be a string of pearls along a transportation corridor. You’d have a sort of low-density green space interspersed with these walkable, compact communities near transit.
I’ve devoted a lot of my research life studying all the benefits of TODs when they’re done well. Benefits from both the public side include a reduction in congestion, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as from the private side, the benefits that accrue to investors and households. You get premiums and healthier real estate markets, lower vacancy rates, higher occupancy rates and rent premiums. There’s a finite, limited supply of real estate like that and people will bid up the price for the privilege of living or running a business or having and office there. So it’s a good way to quantify the benefits of that.
Now, good planning around transit stations does not mean simply a good physical design. You have to deal with the social aspects of the community--recreational outlets, cultural attractions. In a sense, it’s community building, not just architecture. But if you use a transit station and do good quality community planning and design, you get significant land value returns.
Q:How does this relate to joint development?
A: I’ve long felt it is a mistake to let the private sector reap
all the benefits of these land value gains that are created by public investment.
These are, after all, taxpayer-financed, publicly-invested transit systems.
The private sector should share, and by doing so could help fund all the
community enhancements—libraries, city squares, and streetscape enhancements.
So transit joint development is a way of capturing the value of the land
around transit stations. It’s a way to return some of the benefits
that are inferred by the public investments back to the public sector to
help partly retire the bonds and costs of building the transit networks.
It’s very expensive to build transit. Heavy rail systems in the U.S. are easily $50 to $100 million a mile. But you can also generate funds to improve the public realm, the streetscape, all the civic attractions that make a fun and viable community.
Q: Some people say this is social engineering. How do you answer them?A: It’s really not social engineering. I would almost submit that most people who live in the suburbs are socially engineered: they have no choice but to drive. Their lifestyles are shaped by that one technology instead of choices. In a sense, we’ve engineered walking and biking out of day-to-day life. You go to many parts of Europe and you’ll find 30 to 35 percent of trips are by bicycle. And we’re nowhere near that.
For people who want more choices—and often these are young professionals without kids or empty nesters---they don’t exist in many of our suburbs. What TODs can do is create more variety, diversity and choices, particularly in suburban environments where people can select and sort themselves into this type of neighborhood. They’re going to pay more for housing, more per square foot, and they’re going to give up some size, but they get a lot in return: better quality civic areas, nice walkable communities, and they don’t have to fight traffic.
So anyway, it’s not social engineering—it’s market-based. I would say we have failed to deliver housing choices and neighborhood choices in many suburban environments. Most research suggests that 30 to 35 percent of newly emerging households in metropolitan areas would be receptive to TOD types of environments if given the choice. The problem is, they don’t have the choice. In the suburbs you find transit stations surrounded by parking lots. These areas are unplanned, ugly, essentially dead. You can find housing near transit stations in Oakland, but they’re not great environments either; there’s crime, and people don’t want to live there.
Q: So are there any good examples of TODs?
A: Yes, Washington, D.C., which gets us to the subject of public-private
partnerships. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority began
with a system of air right development and land leases. They acquired
so much land at the time they began building their system—extra
land, more than they needed—that they banked the land, and once
the prices of land increased, they started leasing it. So they have a
very active portfolio. They get roughly $250 million annually in lease
revenues from private development around their transit stations. It’s
not a huge share of their total budget, only about 2.5 percent, but then
again it’s not inconsequential.
They have things like station connection
fees, where at some stations there is a passageway going to a retail
store. Here the retail will help pay for the passageway, but the retailers
also share some of their gross revenues with the agency. The logic being
you’ve got tens of thousands of transit riders walking through
these retail outlets who otherwise wouldn’t be buying purses and
other things. So they managed to carve out revenue-sharing deals with
the retailers.
Q: Have other transit systems tried this approach?
A: The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has been far more
proactive than BART or any other transit system in this country, in good
part because early on they set up a real estate development division
within their agency and hired seasoned real estate professionals, paid
them high salaries to go out and work deals. So they have been far more
entrepreneurial.
If you look at a lot of transit agencies, I’d
say BART is somewhat the same, their view of the world, their mission,
so to speak, is, we’re not here to mess around with real estate,
we’re here to run trains and buses on time. So they see real estate
development as a distraction. To me that’s wrong-headed. If you
want to be a successful transit agency, running trains and buses on time
is partly shaped by where the market demand is, and you can shape that
market. You can work with the private development community to really
steer lots of riders through your own transit stations and reap some
large rewards.
Q: What about transit systems in other countries?
A: By far, the most progressive system has been Hong Kong’s. Virtually
two-thirds of the revenue which is generated by the transit system for
Hong Kong comes from real estate development. The administrative region
of Hong Kong provides the development rights at a cost prior to rail investment.
Once the agency has these development rights, they tell the real estate
development community, “We’re going to extend the line and
build a station here, and we want to lease or sell off this land around
the station. You tell us what you’ll pay.” So they sell the
development right to a real estate developer at the “with rail” price.
That is, they purchase it pre-rail, then they say we’ll build a station
here and you tell us what you want to pay, and they take the incremental
difference to pay for the rail.
So roughly two-thirds of the cost of these railway extensions is being covered. They’re making profits—they’re one of the few places in the world where the transit agency is actually making big profits.
In fact, they are not a public transit agency in the pure sense, they’re sort of a quasi transit agency. The Hong Kong government owns two-thirds of the agency, and the other one-third is owned by private investors. They sell shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange, so they’re accountable to investors for a return on investment and have to be much more entrepreneurial.
Q: You’ve been active in developing recent legislation, AB32
and SB 375, which would seem to open the doors wider to TOD and joint
development, wouldn’t it?
A: AB32 says that California is going to reduce by 2020 carbon dioxide
levels to the 1990 levels, and Senate Bill 375 says that as part of the
metropolitan planning process, cities, regions and counties have to develop
regional transportation plans, which include sustainable community
strategies, which will help achieve these targets.
Among the strategies
that you find in this initial legislation—and will see all the regions
embracing—is more strategic development around transit stations and investment
in transit. And the current estimates suggest you might be able to achieve
roughly 10 percent of your target, just from land use and transit integration.
I think if it’s done well, and particularly if it is coupled with
things like parking management, car sharing, and other demand management
strategies you will get synergistic benefits. Instead of roughly a 10 percent
contribution to cutting greenhouse gases, you might be able to see upwards
of a 15 or maybe 18 percent rate. And that’s an area of research
I have been working on and am still working on.
Q: Are you applying the Hong Kong or Washington, D.C. model elsewhere?
A: We’ve done a lot of research, including a big report available
on the Volvo Center website, and we’re applying the Hong
Kong model to China. As you know, China’s cities are just growing
incredibly fast, and they’re building more rail miles than any place
in the world—high-speed rail all over the country. So there are tremendous
opportunities to use this model to help not only finance this rail, but
to enhance the quality of urban development.
It’s important because,
unfortunately, the Chinese are committing all the mistakes and sins that
we have—which lead to congestion and pollution. So I, and many others,
have been trying to advance this idea of joint development and TOD in China
because in truth, regardless of what Europe and the U.S. do to reduce
greenhouse gases, those efforts will be swamped by what’s happening
in China.
Q: In your new position as director of UCTC, what type of projects
will students be working on?
A: Faculty-led research proposals define the actual projects our students
will work on, although there are also dissertation grants where students
define the projects. Former directors, Betty Deakin, Marty Wachs (former
ITS director), and the late Mel Webber have all held a broad notion of
transportation, and I think what we’re finding is that people who
succeed in this field of transportation don’t look at their role
through a single disciplinary lens. They certainly focus on a field, but
they’re broadening their horizon. They’re taking more planning
and policy courses. They’re taking courses that address sustainability
and environmental issues. So they’re a bit more generalist in nature,
and they understand you have to tackle problems from multiple perspectives.
And I think that’s enriched our field. I think it’s led to
better thinking and better responses. So it’s an exciting area.
Q: And relevant, especially now, yes?
Everything we face out there in our world, everything
from how do we stimulate the economy by building bridges and roads to greenhouse
gas and climate change policies and energy policies, sprawl, congestion
and all of these
dilemmas we’re facing in our society are so tied to our field in
transportation as well as to city and regional planning.
So it’s an exciting time and a growth field. We need more and better and more energetic students. Our challenge from UCTC and pedagogically as a research center is to really nurture this.
For more information about Cervero’s projects:
R. Cervero The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry, Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998; translated into Chinese, China Architecture and Building Press, 2007.
R. Cervero, Transit Oriented Development's Ridership Bonus: A Product of Self Selection and Public Policies, Environment and Planning A, Vol. 39, pp. 2068-2085, 2007.