Alan Altshuler

THE GOALS OF COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING

Abstract Comprehensive planning requires of planners that they understand the overall goals of their communities. Truly comprehensive goals tend, however, to be too general to provide a basis for evaluating concrete alternatives. Consequently, it is difficult to stir political interest in them, and politicians are rarely willing to commit themselves to let general and long-range goal statements guide their considerations of lower-level alternatives. Many planners have themselves abandoned the comprehensive planning ideal in favor of the ideal of middle-range planning. Middle-range planners pursue operational, though still relatively general, goals. The middle-range planning ideal has much to recommend it. It provides no basis, however, for planners to claim to understand overall community goals. With it as a guide, therefore, the fundamental distinction between planning and other specialities is lively to become progressively more blurred.

Transit Subsidies: By Whom, for Whom?

Abstract Urban transit subsidies are needed to enhance the mobility of the poor and the physically handicapped whose relative mobility has been steadily decreasing. Analysis of the overall transit situation suggests that such subsidies should be specifically tailored to needy individuals rather than to transit companies. Transportation user charges, including highway user tax payments, offer one logical source for subsidies.

Vienna's path to sustainable transport

ABSTRACT Vienna, Austria reduced the car share of trips by a third between 1993 and 2014: from 40% to 27%. The key to Viennas success has been a coordinated package of mutually reinforcing transport and land-use policies that have made car use slower, less convenient, and more costly, while improving conditions for walking, cycling, and public transport. During 32 in-person interviews in Vienna in May 2015, a wide range of politicians, transport planners, and academics almost unanimously identified the expansion of the U-Bahn (metro) and parking management as the most important policies accounting for the reduction in car mode share since 1993. Implementation of sustainable transport policies in Vienna has been a long-term, multi-staged process requiring compromises, political deals, and coalition-building among political parties and groups of stakeholders. This consensual approach to policy development has been time-consuming. Vienna has not been the first city to introduce any particular policy, but it has masterfully adopted successful policies from other cities. The continuity of social democratic governments in Vienna since 1945 has provided a crucial political basis for long-term implementation. The Greens have vigorously pushed for accelerating implementation of sustainable transport policies since becoming part of the ruling coalition government in 2010. The progressive political environment in Vienna has been essential to its increasingly sustainable transport system. Other major cities in Western Europe have also reduced the share of trips by car since 1990. Together with Vienna, they provide useful lessons for other cities throughout the world on how to reduce car dependence.

The Urban Transportation System: Politics and Policy Innovation

This book is presented in three parts: part 1, The Politics, reviews the postwar history of urban transport policy and advances some propositions for ranking potential innovations according to their political feasibility. Part 2, The Problems, examines the criteria for evaluating the transport system in terms of problems such as energy, air pollution, safety, equity, congestion and urban sprawl. Part 3, The Options, discusses eight broad policy categories in terms of political feasibility and cost effectiveness. The options examined include: highway capacity expansion, the extension of fixed-route services, demand responsive transport, car pooling, traffic priorities for high occupancy vehicles, performance standard regulation for car manufacturers, direct consumer regulation, and price disincentives intended to curtail car travel and/or fuel consumption. (TRRL)