Where are 682,000 new residents going to live? Where are 519,000 new employees going to work? More critically, how are all of these new people—forecast to join the Atlanta region in just the next 10 years—going to travel between home and work, between work and the store or between the store and the movie theater?
If you live in one of Atlanta’s 13 rapidly growing counties, this is a question that might cross your mind as your car idles in the afternoon peak period on I-285, in the midst of just one of the 67 hours each year the average Atlanta traveler spends in travel delays, according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s (TTI) 2005 Urban Mobility Report.
Thinking about where new residents and workers will live, work and play—and how they will get around—is certainly a question that crosses the mind of Tad Leithead, senior vice president for Cousins Properties and chairman of the Cumberland Community Improvement District’s (CID) board of directors. New people and new employees can mean new residential and office development, and a boon to communities and real estate developers alike, but only if transportation systems can support the growth.
“One thing that I’ve been saying for years is that, in our business, it used to be that ‘location, location, location’ were the three most important things in terms of evaluation of real estate, but it’s not ‘location, location, location’ anymore, it’s ‘access, access, access,’” said Leithead.
“When building new projects today,” Leithead added, “the first thing people ask us is, ‘How are you going to get to it and away from it?’ In the old days, we would have shown them all the roads, but today, we also talk about transit connections, we talk about van pools and car pools and about building our decks with preferential parking. We talk about the residential component of the project, the retail components and the streetscape improvements that are going in around it. We’ve always talked about these things, but now they’re starting to be real.”
These balanced, multimodal strategies for strengthening “access, access, access” considerations in real estate deals also apply to large, regional activity centers like the Cumberland-Galleria area, where a collection of 186 commercial property owners fund the Cumberland CID, a self-taxing improvement district at the interchange of I-285 and I-75 in northwest Atlanta. The ability to accommodate new residential, employment and retail growth—and to move people efficiently to, from and within the Cumberland-Galleria area—is central to the balanced approach taken by the Cumberland CID to address the considerable impacts of growing traffic congestion.
Transportation bills
Traffic congestion is slowing America down. In cities large and small, from the east coast to the west coast, traffic congestion is steadily getting worse each year. A larger percentage of the nation’s roadway network is congested, more severely and for longer portions of each day, than ever before. In 1982, the average person living in one of the country’s 85 largest cities faced 16 hours of travel delay per year. By 2003, that figure had shot to 47 hours of delay per year, and the most severely congested periods of the day—once known as the “rush hour”—stretched to cover over seven hours of each day. Sixty-seven percent of peak-period travel was congested in 2003, compared to just 32% in 1982 (TTI, 2005).
For most American households, transportation costs now account for 18% of total household expenditures. Only shelter represents a larger portion of expenditures, at 19%.
The impacts on lower-income families are even more severe. For households earning between $12,000 and $23,000 per year, transportation expenses consume one in every four dollars spent.
Recognizing the growing burden of traffic congestion and the importance of efficient access and mobility, community leaders and transportation planners are actively working on transportation improvements to alleviate traffic congestion.
Much-needed roadway, bridge and transit infrastructure projects—transportation “supply” enhancements—are under way across the country to help mitigate travel delays and accommodate future growth.
As urban areas mature, however, opportunities for further investments in transportation infrastructure can be limited. Urban transportation corridors increasingly lack the physical space to accommodate more lanes. In some areas, communities voice concerns that effects on private rights-of-way or sensitive environments outweigh the potential benefits of expanding facilities. Many areas simply lack the funds needed to pay for major roadway or transit projects. Competition for limited federal and state funds is intense, and even where needed infrastructure projects are in the planning or construction stages, project completion can still be years away.
As TTI researchers David Schrank and Tim Lomax noted, “Major projects, programs and funding efforts take 10 to 15 years to develop. In that time, congestion endured by travelers and businesses grow to those of the next largest (urban) population group.
“So in 10 years, medium-sized regions will have the traffic problems that large areas have now, if trends do not change.”
Changing trends suggest that effectively tackling traffic congestion will increasingly mean employing all available strategies. New infrastructure projects—roads, bridges and transit facilities—remain a critical element of any comprehensive transportation improvement program. Supplementing these “supply-side” investments, however, are a broad array of “demand-side” strategies intended to make existing transportation facilities work more efficiently.
Demand-side strategies are designed to better balance people’s need to travel a particular route at a particular time with the capacity of available facilities to efficiently handle this demand. Many people have attended a sporting event or a concert where everyone tries to leave the same place at the same time. While in the extreme, this is a perfect example of where travel demand exceeds available supply, and severe traffic congestion often results. The focus of demand-side strategies is to provide people with enhanced travel choices, such as choices in travel mode (driving, using transit or bicycling) or choices in travel route and trip departure time, and to provide incentives and information for people to make informed travel choices.
For example, many sports and concert venues provide incentives for people to arrive a little early or stay a little late, essentially spreading the peak of the demand to travel to and from the building, reducing traffic congestion and improving the visitor’s overall experience.
“The problem has grown too rapidly and is too complex for only one technology or service to be ‘the solution,’” suggested Schrank and Lomax.
“So we recommend a balanced approach,” he continued. “Begin to plan and design major capacity increasing projects, plans or policy changes while immediately relieving critical bottlenecks or chokepoints, and aggressively pursuing operations improvements and demand management options that are available.”
They summarize the four fundamental options available to planners and policy makers in terms of addressing traffic congestion:
- More capacity (roadways, transit, bicycle/pedestrian);
- Greater efficiency;
- Manage demand; and
- Development patterns.
A city with an edge
Atlanta’s Cumberland-Galleria area, perched at the crossroads of two major interstates, is in the midst of a suburban-to-urban transition familiar to many peer activity centers also once featured in Joel Garreau’s Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.
Now transitioning from an edge city to a true regional center point, the area is becoming a live-work-play environment and supporting this new multi-use dynamic with comprehensive transportation strategies.
Formed with a primary target of prompting construction of a new interchange off of I-75 back in 1987, the Cumberland CID now works on all four pillars of TTI’s recommended solutions:
- More capacity—In partnership with Cobb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation, completed several new interchanges and the construction of an entirely new arterial ring road connecting all four quadrants of the I-285/I-75 interchange;
- Manage demand—Led the formation of the first Transportation Management Association in Georgia, Commuter Club, in 1996. Formed over 40 van pools to area employers and led implementation of cutting-edge demand-side strategies tailored for the area. Designated as the second “Best Workplaces for Commuters” district in the country by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2003;
- Greater efficiency—Led effort to invest in new adaptive traffic-control system which utilizes real-time information to adjust traffic signal timing; and
- Development patterns—The Commuter Club TMA led the Blueprint Cumberland planning process to foster a mixed-use, live-work-play environment within the area and to invest in streetscape improvements designed to improve pedestrian and bicycle travel.
The Cumberland CID is pursuing this balanced approach, including innovative demand-side strategies, in recognition that capacity improvements will no longer handle the growth in residential, employment and retail uses forecast for the activity center.
“Looking to the future, there’s really only one more major road project left to build in Cumberland. Beyond that, it’s all services,” said Malaika Rivers, Commuter Club executive director and Cumberland CID deputy director.
“In reality, we have a lot more to do,” she added, “but it’s not in the road-building arena.
A strategy in demand
The contemporary application of demand-side strategies implemented by the Cumberland CID, as part of a balanced set of “access, access, access” solutions, is broader in scope than prior, more traditional views of transportation demand management.
To some, the realm of demand-management applications is limited primarily to encouraging alternatives to single-occupant vehicle travel for the commute to work. In practice, however, this narrow view is no longer consistent with the broad applications of demand-side strategies currently under way across the country.
Today’s applications are not limited to facilitating shifts in travel mode; they also address shifts in travel routes and travel departure times (for all travelers, including single-occupant vehicle drivers). Today’s applications also extend beyond a focus on commute trips.
At national parks, sports stadiums, university campuses and other diverse destinations, transportation and facility managers are implementing demand-side strategies as part of coordinated efforts to reduce congestion.
On bridges and along corridors undergoing roadway reconstruction programs, demand-side strategies are helping travelers avoid congestion by utilizing alternative travel routes, travel times or travel modes or by reducing the need for some trips altogether by facilitating work from home options a few days a month.
A full understanding of demand-side strategies must recognize the reasonable limits of these applications. Demand-side strategies should not be considered total solutions to regional traffic congestion problems. Rather, they should more often be implemented as part of an integrated set of solutions that balance supply-side infrastructure investments and demand-side strategies.
Demand-side strategies can be relatively easy to implement in a shorter time frame, within a more constrained budget, than capital improvements. As such, supply-side and demand-side approaches can prove complementary, with demand-side efforts taking on an asset-management role by maximizing the performance and extending the life of existing roadways.
Demand-side strategies are ultimately about choice and balance. Expanding the array of mode, route and departure-time choices available—supported by robust real-time traveler information, incentives and other resources—allows each person to choose the options that work best for them regarding when they travel, the mode and route they use to get there or whether they travel at all.
For Leithead, however, now is no time to rest, and no solutions will permanently solve traffic congestion challenges. He noted, “Your success creates more challenges, because when you make an area twice as accessible, as we think we’ve done, you’ve got twice as many people and now you’ve got to do it all again.”
Like Atlanta and the Cumberland-Galleria area, finding room for more and more people is simply a constant reality. To ensure this reality produces benefits for all, addressing “access, access, access” through balanced transportation solutions is simply the new “first rule” of real estate. TME
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