Transportation Spatial Impact

I'm almost at my edge to feel tired of Jakarta's traffic jam. Jakarta is managed by uncontrolled willing, the willing to create a more lifeable Jakarta.
This a short paper (again), as my exercise, to concern what the problems are, and to see the problem with planning view. A light smile was in my face when the t-shirt message says 'you are not stucked in traffic jam, you are traffic jam'.

Transportation Spatial Impact
A study in America's city history
A Short Paper by Rez.Nurt

Introduction

“I asked my self two questions : “ For what reason does humanity create and maintain cities?” and “What is the role of transport in cities?”. The cities are an invention to maximize exchange (culture, goods, friendship, knowledge)and minimize travel. The role of transport is to help maximize exchange. Although the answers seemed obvious, their implications for transportation were profound. For example, I concluded that an auto-dominated transport system may destroy more exchange opportunities than it opens up. It became clear that this new way of viewing transport provided a significant breakthrough that placed a whole new complexion on the role of movement in cities.” (Transportation, Land Use, and Sustainability, 1996)

In the current stages in the evolution of urban transport system, post-industrial stage, whereas public and private vehicle still separately taking a part of forming urban spatial pattern and urban function, the highways and railways development have been stimulated and accelerated the disintegrated development among urban, suburban and their fringes. The effect has directly forming cities with suburbanization, widespread development, urban functionalization and decentralization. Much to the contrary, at the earlier stage of pre-industrial the transport technology used pedestrian and draught animal as mediums of transportation. The urban form was still compact formed with route, convergence and some radial transportation system.
During the process of those economic development stages the evolving transportation system has connected the various functional elements of the urban fabric and directed the pattern of urban growth. The evolutionary sequence of the western cities urban development in general is closely associated with innovations in transport technology. The transportation system has been recently seen as a tool of land use planning rather than simply as another part (Christian and Harper, 1982).
As early beginnings of the development of highways in the United Stated in 1900s, from parkways to interstate freeway connection, they have tended to stimulate and accelerate development in suburban area. Most importantly to note here is not whether they might have been a catalyst of development surrounding cities, but the have definitely done spatially concentrate growth or expansion. They have even created some lack on separating space inner cities. Nevertheless, there was a little attempt to make land use pattern directly resulting from that highway building. This problem has been tried to be seen with a more comprehensive transportation approach which can direct urban development toward multiple activity centers rather than to sprawling suburb and urban fringe locations.
The suburbia movement in early this century drew industry and people to the margin area of the city, eliminating the viable downtown into an ignored land and converting extensive green landscape into dispersed garden villages. Over that time industrial and employment pattern have further exacerbated the problem of lost space, the leftover unstructured landscape that is usually away from the flow of pedestrian activity in the city (Trancik, Roger, 1986). Major gaps disrupt the overall continuity of the city form along highways, railroad line, and waterfronts.
The strong dependence on the automobile is the one of the most factors that have been contributed to lost space in the city. Mobility and communication have increasingly dominated public space, that furthermore has consequently lost much of its cultural meaning and human purpose (Trancik, Roger, 1986). Many big cities in North America give as much as 75 to 80 percent their land to be devoted to the storage and movement of automobile. Because of this, buildings are segregated, encompassed by huge open areas without activities based on social interaction. The streets is no longer essential urban space for pedestrian use and becoming as the fastest automobile link. For example, the city of old Boston, Massachusetts, since 1950s has experienced the effect which the elevated central artery cut through the city, fracturing the physical and activities connection between the downtown area and its harbor front. Many historic buildings that a long time had been recognized as orientation and space for gathering people in the city by Bostonian had been demolished for the rational function of transportation rather than aesthetic function.

Early Beginnings of Transportation and Development of City

“Today, nearly one-third of the energy consumed in the United Stated is for transportation, and much of it is for America’s 170 million automobiles approximately one car for two people (sic). The American passion for automobiles has spread throughout the world. Since 1950, the number of cars in use worldwide has climbed from 50 million to over 400 million. By the year 2025, it is expected to reach 700 millions….” (Daniel D. Chiras, Lessons from Nature)

Modern suburb phenomenon had been covered for almost half of the nineteenth century. It was largely a response to accessibility changes produced by advances in street rail transit technology. In the first stage of urban transport system, Pre-Industrial Stage, before 1850s, a city was tightly compacted with rounded pedestrian that connected among other land uses in the city. (Herbert and Thomas, 1997). The compact city made people and activities be clustered within easy walking distance of one another. Wealthier residents did have access to horse-and-carriage transport that provided a privacy life just beyond the edge of built up area. After 1830s the decentralization was reinforced as a trend which spread out suburb rail corridor that made considerable cost and time for upper-income settlements’ daily commuting. The urban pattern changed rapidly as new street rail transit systems increasingly allowed lower income settler to reside outside the older pedestrian city. The horsecar suburbs were constructed surround pedestrian city for a distance more than three miles out from downtown and considered as a band of middle-income housing. After 1890 circular pattern was broken by the appearance of the invented electric streetcar that was capable of speeds more than 15 m.p.h., compare with the only 5 m.p.h.’s horsecar. As a result, vast growth of new areas in the urban countryside created a star-shape pattern as traction corridors were extended in every direction several miles from center of the city. These new streetcar suburb simultaneously emerging urban middle class to gain access to suburb and take advantages of its improved residential opportunities. Much open space was largely available, land prices were cheaper, mortgage money was plentiful, and builders highly built desired single-family house in a garden. The latter as many large manufactures decentralized their factories along radial river and railroad corridors to take the same advantages of suburb area. As far, the suburban middle and working classes inhabited geographically separate social environments, a residential lot still in old suburban rail corridors whereas the life-styles and housing conditions were really different with those in surrounding suburb.
1900s through 1920s was a transitional period in the evolution of suburb. The decline of mass transit and the incline of private transportation in the form of automobiles were the trends that enforced relationship between transportation and intrametropolitan growth. Since the mass product of auto car begun, a new spatial revolution has been formed that shortly begin to create the sociogeographical fabric of contemporary suburbia (Christian and Harper, 1982). The automobile with its sense of independence, individuality, and privacy was a preferable form of transportation.
This huge suburban growth in 1920’s had impacts to overall urban form: the star-shaped metropolis of the prewar period was transformed into a much expanded version of the earlier circular city as the newly accessible interstices between trolley corridors were filled in and as new axial highways in every outlying sector fostered the considerable outward enlargement of suburbia by mid century. Those practices, opening wide new highways between older, crowded streetcar corridors and profitable large residential development, encouraged the congregation of social groups that were widely spaced in the low-density and automobile-controlled landscape.
The centrifugal development of the city after World War II has been still a rise of continuing outing people and activities from the central of the cities. The next episode of automobile suburbanization was made possible by the large construction of highways. The intraurban freeway network has grown up at the same time central of the city has lost its centrality advantages.

Early Beginnings of Street to Superhighways

“The simple answer to why there is growing congestion is that there are more people, with most doing a lot of traveling, and road capacity hasn’t been keeping up. But the simple solution of building more roads isn’t a very good one. Car availability has been growing faster than the population. We have gone from the family car to personal car.” (Bob Walter, Lois Arkin, and Richard Crenshaw, Sustainable Cities - Concepts and Strategies for Eco-City Development)

The relationship between the automobile and the road was not always so direct or symbiotic (Rowe, Peter G., 1991). Private cars seem to have been produced and operated rapidly more than roads. Early automobile and roadway improvements appear to have followed a two-stage model of development (Rowe, Peter G., 1991. During the first stage there was a relative independence between cars and roadway improvements. Most roads were very bad, but many cars could operate with reliability. In the contrary of that, during the second stage, as the number of vehicle and demands for good roads increased, the relationship between both approached the symbiotic qualities customarily presumed today (Flink, 1970).
The prominence of automobile transportation here has two major physical contributions to the American metropolitan landscape: the modern highway and the street forms that serve immediate transportation needs of local suburban sub development (Rowe, Peter G., 1991). The local scale serves the immediate transportation needs of various pieces of the metropolitan spatial mosaic whereas the regional highways hold them together.
A beginning and strong influence on the development of metropolitan road was the parkway. Parkway is defined as a limited-access highway which located through a park, combining recreational areas with the movement of passenger vehicles. Planners created parkways as a good way of giving orderly form to emerging metropolitan areas. Parkways was believed becoming the framework for a new town-and-country community by providing a practical means for a better distribution of population (Nolen and Hubbard, 1937). This formula putting together recreational and circulation were taken further. They might reduce the strain of driving through good highway design and there were evidence of a general long-run increase in land values accruing to neighborhood properties. The right-of-way of parkway originally designed in Boston, the first effort in America toward the end of the nineteenth century, was varied in width from 116 feet to 200 feet. Roadbed widths were reasonable generous at 40 feet, remaining a standard for parkways well into the 1930s. Relatively smooth curves with a minimum radius of 700 to 800 feet were built to enhance the aesthetic experience of moving gently through a large public park. Roadways varied from two to four lanes. Traffic moved in both directions along each carriageway which is a system of one-way roads and loops. Generally a parkway was simply a roadway that was wider and more richly furnished (Newton, 1971).
Highway construction was highly built in the United States spans between 1945 to 1970. 1944 Federal-Aid Highway Act effectively directed a limited system of national highway and then metropolitan expressways as an integral part of that system. An expanding miles of freeway was recommended because of consideration of population centers, rates of metropolitan growth, motor vehicle density, the location of military establishment, farms, and so on. Expressways were clearly seen as a practical means of rationalizing and dealing with traffic problems and city congestion. On that time, in its inference, the government needed bigger and better metropolitan highways so that people could easily partake of suburban life. Outer circumferential loop roads and beltways were crossing the urban sections of interstate highways moving from city center to city center.
In a design framework that closely paralleled with earlier German’s Autobahn principles of internal and external harmony, the principles of highway design had to rest upon landscape principles as well as engineering principles. Flowing gradient and alignment as well as spiral curves were preferred over linked configurations of straight and tangential roadway geometry. Roadside planting was regarded simultaneously as a matter of practically for controlling snow drift or ease of maintenance, for example, and as a matter of enhancing aesthetic values. With postwar advancement in basic highway design, designer, landscaper and engineer continued the parkway traditional into the construction of interstates and urban expressways. After through debating for social and community values, because of economic dictates of rising construction costs and higher land prices tipped the balance away from landscape principles in favor of basic engineering, by the early 1970s the prolific era of new highway expansion was over.

Street Pattern and Urban Spatial Pattern

Street pattern in earlier development of city was a logical extension of irregular form of rural and farm-to-market roads and the survey system grid. The first layout of street followed older pattern, reaching the undeveloped areas of land. The grid system was used to subdivide rectilinear residential and commercial areas. In later layouts, street became specific and more objective, following the need of function, society, topography and the process of design thinking. Functional distinction were made to various kinds of traffic where pedestrian and vehicular were separated. The pattern became often closely to local topography. The width was predicted to anticipate the travel capacities and speeds. Roadway network were shifted from for organizing land to providing transportation service for specific sites and buildings.
The survey system layout theoretically was a regular rectangular established with the fundamental unit of measurement 1 mile on side for the ease of observing the land. Practically then the section line became rural and town-roads. Subdivision was further being made into half and quarter sections, defining more gridwork of roads and streets. This pattern of land parcels was still further subdivided into regular array of rectangular blocks, roughly from 500 to 750 feet in length and 200 to 250 feet in width.
The uniformity of this system sometimes was criticized because its pattern tended to facilitate a vast suburban expansion and provide a crude functional hierarchy for automobile movement. The resulting roadway network and scheme of land parcels produced a four level of hierarchy: expressway, section-line arterial road, quarter-section collector, and subdivision plots of local residential street. Since post World War II, this scheme can be found throughout most of the metropolitan in the United States.
Because of the uniform and monotonous pattern, by the mid 1930s, this system began changing in layouts. Different types of vehicular movement began to be distinguished. Landscape principles were being explored. Wide thoroughfares and boulevards became distinct from small-scale residential side streets and cul-de-sacs. Unsecured grid system in residential area was changed by eliminating through streets almost entirely and replacing them by loop roads. For example, in Radburn Communities, New Jersey, pedestrian movement was completely separated from the roadway network and largely confined to the park areas. The concept of superblock was also developed here which arose earlier in the urban context of garden apartment. Beside its inventing of more new green communities life, in later consideration, difficulties were encountered in providing adequate fire protection with long dead-end street, higher costs per dwelling unit of service delivery and maintenance of common park areas.

Hampstead Garden Suburb, London,1906, culminates the movement towards the establishment of a vocabulary of spatial and architectural elements unusual at the suburban scale. Street were designed to sort out the traffic, to minimize hazards for pedestrians, and to work in combination with its landscape and architecture…the shops that flank the entrance to the garden suburb at Finchley Road, modeled on German medieval town building such as at Rothenburg, provide an urban character to the road and act as monumental gateway to the suburb.

Sunnyside Gardens might be an example that it as a uniquely successful demonstration of how the garden suburb idea can be adapted to the grid typical of most American cities. The site of development was an undeveloped area which had been used by the Long Island Railroad as a train yard for Pennsylvania Station and was a convenient 15-minute subway ride from Time Square New York. (Stern, Anglo-American Suburb)

Another outgrowth revisions to subdivision planning practices during the early automobile era of the 1920s and 1930s was the curvilinear layout of streets. It was made as a response to the perceived uniformity and monotony of rectilinear plans and to a detailed functional consideration of suburban streets. The concept of long block to attain privacy and avoidance of four-way intersection to reduce traffic conflict led to a more organic layout, roughly back to the earlier pattern of the street in early stages of pre-industrial. The conforming route and convergence pattern of animal and pedestrian in early stage of pre-industrial had been changing to the advantageous and marketable reason of curving street vistas and visual interests.
By the mid of 1950s, after the development of greenbelt communities, loop road combined with housing cluster group were applied into larger area which made communities with a recreational focus such as golf courses. One clear advantage of this type, in a low density residential environment, was preservation of huge open space. This had made one developer need larger space to build one community and tend to explore the other natural landscape.
During 1960s when the concept of PUDs (Planned Unit Developments) emerged, single-family housing was changed into a preferable the form of townhouses or apartments. The PUD concept rose and allowed many older suburban areas to be redeveloped. Higher density achieved 50 percent savings in service costs. Length and width of road were reduced by off-street parking layout under its loop and cluster road arrangement.
Further development of street pattern, an effort to refer traditional neighborhood development and pedestrian pocket, can be found at Seaside Project, Florida. The project proposed highly particularized motor courts, off-parking areas, and meandering loop roads as a multipurpose nonhierarchical street grid. According to the planner, generalized network was not only more conducive to a mixture adjacent land uses than the specialized systems of the functionalist tradition but also furthered their social agenda of encouraging social interaction.

Recent Urban Transportation Issues

There’s a deep cleft between what’s taking place in cities and what architects and urban designers would like to see occur there. During the 1960s, we architects felt we could make a difference. We could influence the character of urban development, revitalize downtown, stabilize suburban sprawl. (Safdie, Moshe, The City After Automobile)

Mass Transit System. As more and more people try to live within the same economic event-horizon, something odd happens. In an auto-centric city, the area covered by the road system increases without limit once the population reaches around 10 million. Highway and street rights-of-way must expand to cover all available ground in order to carry the volume of traffic required to keep the entire population within the economic event-horizon. This situation is being approached in the auto-centric cities of the American West and South, where up to 70% of downtown land is devoted to the automobile. Unless computerized highways can increase the traffic density and average speeds, auto-centric cities cannot grow larger than 10 million. Above this size, metro systems become essential.
Sustainable Community. In spite of its new paradigms of designing cities that because of city using more private vehicular, as an effort of making more sustainable communities, New Urbanism movement is still being criticized. A most vocal critic is that New Urbanism can still not impede urban sprawling. The designed communities that by its pioneers laid on suburban areas, can not eliminate amount of travels effectively, although seemingly they are compacted to transit system network.
Free-car City. The industrialized nations made a terrible mistake when they turned to the automobile as an instrument of improved urban mobility. The car brought with it major unanticipated consequences for urban life and has become a serious cause of environmental, social, and aesthetic problems in cities. The urban automobile: kills street life, damages the social fabric of communities, isolates people, fosters suburban sprawl, endangers other street users , mars the city's beauty, disturbs people with its noise , causes air pollution, wastes energy and natural resources, impoverishes nations. The challenge is to remove cars and trucks from cities while at the same time improving mobility and reducing its total costs.

Conclusion:
Better Way to View Transportation and Its Spatial Implication to the City

There is a number of issues in transportation network resulting in urban spatial problems. The development of street pattern, from curve to grid system, and highways connection, from parkways to super expressways, has created many artifacts of the modern era. Its development has influenced the quality of urban spatial. In all cities the close interactive relationship between transportation network, spatial pattern of urban functions, and urban morphology has been long time recognized as a fundamental factor of cities development. They are inextricably linked to each other and to the ultimate form of any human settlement. In that term, the changes in transportation policy and technology imply and effect changes in the way land is used.
The recent Trancik’s lost space problem that we now found in cities is mostly contributed by the automobile factor. Since it is so deeply ingrained in the American way of life, the dependence on the automobile is the most difficult to deal with. Since the automobile has been chosen as a symbol of individual freedom and the city has been built as capital matter, we are never quickly free from the urban spatial problems that is connected with other dimensions of community life. Historically the street built to mainly fulfill vehicle needs, has influenced the development of the city. The streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious. Transportation should not be made an issue by itself. It should be connected to the problems of the city, of the social division of labor, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life.
At enormous expense, it would be possible to bury the automobile infrastructure, reclaiming the city surface for people. The cost of putting a public transport system underground is also large but still a tiny fraction of the cost of burying the entire street and highway network of an auto-centric city.
The current rules of the game of urban living may cause the population at least begin to evaluate travel budget seriously. There is no longer the same standards of living, population growth, rising real incomes and unlimited energy supply in the earlier of development of vehicle and highways. Now there are scarce resources, rising demands of environmental and neighborhood quality, inflation, and limited economic and social growth. It will be better if we look at transportation system management rather than freeway building, rapid rail mass transit rather than automobile, commuter-caused congestion rather than appetite of comfort driving in highways, and some comprehensive planning rather than myopic unimodal approach. It is very likely that the combination of a dispersed distribution of population and employment and the dominance of automobile will continue to be a major force in shaping most urban spatial, if we will not lay on travel pattern and transportation development reasons rather than mobility considerations.