The pre-Copernican fallacy of planning and transport policies

In their research, Lee and Gordon showed that as early as 2000, no major metropolitan area (over 1 million population) in the United States had a monocentric employment pattern. Indeed, they showed that US metropolitan areas were already more polycentric than monocentric. That includes New York, where more than 75 percent of employment was outside the monocentric core (the central business district or CBD) and other major subcenters.

This is one of those facts - and it's no different in the UK - that most urban planners choose to dismiss or ignore. All the geographers brought up on central place theory find it difficult to appreciate that the motor car (and, in a few large cities, intensive urban transit) meant that employment dispersed. This misunderstanding was described as "...analogous to the pre-Copernican fallacy that the earth is the center of the universe, and everything revolves around the earth" by urban geography, William Bogart.

This is the reason why the basic justification for the 'city region' in the UK is almost entirely fictional since nearly everybody (near 90%) doesn't travel to work in the central business district. I know it doesn't feel that way for those who do commute - crowded trains and buses, thousands of purposeful people off to work - but even in a city with a centre as strong as London - most people travel far shorter distances to work much more locally.

Wendell Cox whose quotation heads this article, takes the argument even further by also rejecting polycentric models of urban form saying that "...the real momentum is beyond polycentrism, to dispersal outside of even suburban business centers". And this dispersal results in some beneficial outcomes such as less congestion and shorter travel times (and let's note that consistently the shortest travel times are by car):

Among the largest commuting modes (excluding working at home with its commute time of zero), driving alone takes the least time, averaging 28.2 minutes for urban core residents and 26.6 minutes for suburban and exurban residents. In both cases, car pools travel about three minutes longer. Transit takes much longer, 46.4 minutes for urban core residents and 55.3 minutes for suburban and exurban resident...

The UK's planning policies and, especially, transport planning policies are completely at odds with the actual choices and behaviours of residents. We have plans to connect big centres to big centres by expensive and intrusive heavy rail, most city authorities are bending over backwards to find ways to prevent ride-share systems like Uber from disrupting existing public transport (Uber probably has as much impact on bus patronage as it does on taxis), and policies are developed to make car travel less easy or more expensive. In development terms, even free marketers like the Adam Smith Institute argue for planning relaxation but only around "transport hubs" (essentially rail or urban transit stations). This ignores the inconvenient fact that people who buy into the developments built near these exurban hubs will have cars that they plan to use to get to work nowhere near the CBD that the transport hub serves.

All of this questions the manner in which local plans are drawn up and, in particular, what is meant by sustainable locations - mostly defined through access to urban centres and public transport networks. We should perhaps focus on how to make individual homes more sustainable - microgeneration, grey water and electric charging points - rather than try to force (almost certainly without success) people to shift transport modes by switching to over-capacity urban transit and rail systems. The future direction of transport - self-drive cars, drones, driverless buses and trains - and social changes driven by technology should be determining planning policy but we seem trapped in a world of policy-makers' obsession with trains, urban density and modal shift. None of these things meet emerging needs or go with the grain of consumer behaviour.



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