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Research Council. The council estimates, based upon their population forecast, that between 1957 and 1970, Los Angeles County will have to make a $10.1 billion investment in new and supplemental public facilities; $7.5 billion of this, or 74 percent is for streets, roads, and highways; the next largest item is schools, $1.4 billion. When the population forecast is converted to numbers of families the council finds that each family newly established in Los Angeles County in the 1957-70 period will require an additional public capital investment per family of $13,290. Of this $10,200 is for streets, roads, and highways. The remaining $3,090 per family is spread among water supply, flood control and sewerage systems, schools, hospitals, and parks and recreation facilities.

(c) Reorientation of Federal-aid highway program.-The great demand for additional vehicle capacity in the metropolitan areas has finally brought about a radical reorientation in the Federal-aid highway program. From 1916, when the Federal-aid highway program was initiated, and until 1934, practically no money could be spent within city limits. The statutory standard permitted no expenditures on roads where the average separation of houses in a mile was under 1,000 feet. This restriction was removed in 1934 and some funds were used in urban areas. A stronger recognition of urban needs was made by Congress in 1944 when the Federal-aid urban program was adopted, a program similar to the Federal-aid primary and secondary programs. During recent years an increasingly large amount of primary funds have gone into urban areas and small amounts out of secondary funds. The new Interstate and Defense Highway program will spend large amounts in urban areas, about 40 percent at present rates.

TABLE 8.-Urban use of Federal-aid highway funds—Authorized for period of July 1, 1956, to Dec. 31, 1959

Source: Letter from Bureau of Public Roads to John P. Doyle, staff director, Senate Interstate and For eign Commerce Committee, Transportation Study Group, dated April 1960.

Table 8 indicates that 38.6 percent of all Federal highway funds have been spent in urban areas during the past few years. If the programs are maintained at the same average dollar levels and the same rural-urban distribution for the next 20 years $19.5 billion will be spent as the Federal contribution to urban highway improvements. This amount will have an abviously great impact upon city transportation, probably the strongest of any single local or Federal program. The fact that the interstate portion of the funds are provided on a 90-10 matching basis further magnifies their importance.

72 Southern California Research Council, Coordinator of Research, "Cost of Metropolitan Growth," Occidental College, Pomona, Calif.

(d) Highway expenditures reflect public desire.-The committee clearly recognizes that the principal reason for these great expenditures is the strong public desire to use autos for urban transportation and willingness to make substantial payments for facilities. There is no question that, up to the point where congestion becomes acute or auxiliary costs for tolls and parking too high, the public will, and rightly so, use private auto transportation. However, the great public cost of furnishing enough lane and parking capacity for private autos in central business districts is now imposing a clear limitation on their use during home-to-work rush hours and it is this critical peak movement with which this report is principally concerned. There is no question but what there will be major additions to freeway and expressway systems in most of our major cities and that these are and will be needed to meet the requirements for auto movement outside of the home-to-work movement. These needs should be fulfilled as expeditiously as possible and it is recognized that private autos are and will be for the next decade or two the dominant form of urban transport except to and from the major employment centers in rush hours. The freedom and convenience provided by private autos is one of the most important attractions of present-day life in the United States.

It is clear from this review of the public investment portion of total motor transport costs that auto-dominant urban transport systems are so expensive that the alternatives leading to a more balanced system must be given high priority consideration. The planners and engineers in Washington, Philadelphia, New York City, and Los Angeles recommended a greater development of public rapid transit and this recommendation is supported by experts working in most of the other top dozen metropolitan areas. Yet no new major systems or improvements are yet off the planners' desks and regardless of recommendations public spending is entirely for highways with rather minor exceptions.

The wise use of these public funds, whether for highways or transit, will put a premium on sound planning for land use and transportation because these investments will shape the city's transport system, and thence its land use, for many years into the future. Since the people who use the highways do not recognize city, town, county, and State boundaries metropolitan areawide planning is a must. The remainder of this paper will not deal with which of the modes should be used in a city but will suggest how we should organize to make this decision and what the characteristics of satisfactory urban transport systems ought to be.

6. Metropolitan passenger transportation must be planned and operated as a balanced, areawide system

A principal function of cities is to assemble people in a manner providing cheap and ready communication with each other. The function of urban transport is to provide this communication, that is to move people where they need and want to go quickly, cheaply, and comfortably. The use of private autos for the mass home-to-work movement results in congestion which has reduced rush-hour speeds to horsecar rates. Alternative public transport systems have suffered major losses of nonrush hour riders but transit still carries over half the rush-hour traffic entering central business districts. The concentration of this traffic in 20 peak hours per week is very inefficient and

expensive. Fare levels are controlled by alternative auto use to the extent that costs are not recovered by many carriers. Urban transport is provided by a heterogenous lot of highway segments, bridges, tunnels, parking lots, private rail and bus lines and terminals, and public rail and bus lines and terminals. The financing and controlling political jurisdictions number in the hundreds in large metros and frequently include two or more States. The planning and financing are as fractured and varied as the physical elements of the system. Public ownership and operation is not required but overall public planning is required. Such planning should produce a better balanced and integrated multimode, public-private system where the most appropriate vehicle will be used for each trip. Private autos will still be used for a majority of the trips. This system must provide fast, comfortable, and convenient service at prices that will provide the most efficient use of central urban facilities. Eventually the system should be operationally self-supporting.

(a) The function of cities. An understanding of the basic function of cities is important to clear comprehension of the need for metropolitan transportation. If people and goods could be transported instantly-magically-there would be no need for cities as we know them. People and goods could be located anywhere because all locations would be equally convenient. Cities exist because we don't have instant free transportation. Cities have provided the cheapest, most convenient means of bringing together large numbers of workers and jobs, buyers and sellers, students and schools. Providing a ready "togetherness" for people and things and the widest choices of "togetherness" is a basic function of cities. Our past success in perfecting several modes of city transportation has made possible the development of today's great urban complexes based upon mobility of people and a continuous flow of goods.

The basic function of urban transportation systems is to move people, the basic function of cities is to provide a place for people to live and work with comfort and convenience. We have tended to lose sight of these fundamentals in the auto age and have concentrated on moving and storing vehicles to the exclusion of analysing the functional transportation problem and taking appropriate action.

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(b) The growth of congestion.-As we have progressed from foot transportation through horsecars to autos in our metros their diameters have increased from 4 to as much as 60 miles. Traffic congestion has been a recurring concern since the 1890's and a Boston report speaks of 50 years of crisis. New modes supplanted old and through such steps as replacing horse-drawn drays with motor trucks suffocation of the circulatory system has been delayed. During the past 20 years however we have been again reduced to almost horsecar speeds. Exhibit 6 shows that average rush-hour speeds of transit vehicles have fallen to 6 to 10 miles per hour.

73 See app. I herein, reference 3, p. 629.

NOTE.-Numbers in parentheses are references listed in app. I, p. 629.

8-10 12-14

1 10-13

1958

K

1957

1958

7-13

10-14

1958

12

23

1957

10

Our investments in additional facilities, great though they are, have not afforded anything beyond temporary relief. Norman Kennedy

comments:

Attempts made during the past decade to relieve traffic congestion by bringing street and highway capacity abreast of increasing auto use have sometimes ended in disappointment and frustration. Additional highway capacity has been taken up almost as soon as provided because of the shift from public to private transportation. Traffic congestion downtown seems to get worse instead of better. San Francisco's central traffic district, about 3 square miles in the heart of the city, provides one example: A comparison of data for the years 1947 and 1957 shows an increase of 40 percent in the number of autos and trucks entering and leaving the area. Yet the number of people entering and leaving decreased slightly because of the decline in the use of mass transportation. (Municipal railway system patronage decreased about 37 percent in that decade.) ** Wilfred Owen lists the following items on this subject:

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The Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles, opened in 1954, was designed to carry an ultimate future volume of 100,000 vehicles per day. It took only 1 year for traffic to reach the rate of 168,000 vehicle per day. In New York, the George Washington Bridge carries a daily average of 85,000 cars, and this number soars to as many as 134,000 per day on a holiday weekend. The Port of New York Authority now plans to doubledeck the bridge. In the Nation's Capital the five bridges spanning the Potomac carry over 200,000 vehicles per day, and prolonged argument over the location of one or two new structures has diverted attention from the fact that many new crossings are urgently needed to accommodate the urbanization of northern Virginia."

(c) The decline of public transportation. For this essential job of moving people within our metropolitan areas we presently have two basic modes, rail and highway, each having several vehicle systems with the ability to provide a variety of combinations of coordination or integrated service. The several services can accommodate a wide range of personal desires, convenience, and levels of cost. The public (use, not ownership) transportation using both of these ways (there is no private rail transportation) has suffered a continuing decline.

74 Kennedy, op. cit., p. 3. 7 Owen, op. cit., p. 35.

This is in part due to lack of modernization and extension, and in part to an expectable displacement caused the increased use of private autos for mass movement of people. Surface transit and suburban rail services have been declining in traffic and earning since the 1920's with a reversal of trend only during World War II. Since that war the downward trend of this traffic has been sharper, shown in exhibit 7 and even rapid transit ridership has declined in cities having that service.

(1) The decline has been largely off-peak: A most important aspect of this decline is that the peak-hour, home-to-work traffic has held up well, even increasing in some cases, while the major decline has been in the off-peak hours and on formerly active weekends and holidays. The differing trends in on-peak and off-peak traffic are shown in exhibit 8. One result of these trends is that the public carriers still move over half of the people entering the central business districts of our larger cities during the peak hours. Exhibit 9 shows the distribution of people by mode of transport used in entering city centers during the rush hours. The great traffic capacity of the public carriers is clearly preventing a complete breakdown of the metropolitan transportation system at the peak-hour movements between home and work.

EXHIBIT 7

Annual traffic trends of public carriers in major metropolitan areas, 1925-58 [Passengers in thousands]

1 Does not include 1-way and round-trip ticketholders on suburban trains. For a breakdown of suburban passengers see app. F.

* Includes rail, trolley coach, and motorbus.

Sources: Class I Railroads Railroad Transportation 1921-58 of Association of American Railroads Transit. Rapid and Surface Transit-American Transit Association, statement dated July 2, 1959.