Urban Planning and Transportation

Cities in the United States were once centralized and dense locations that were supporting of a pedestrian environment. But beginning in the 1920s public transit began to decline. America's intercity rail transportation was beginning to face competition from privately owned automobiles and the new road developments made available to them. Moving forward a few decades, the United States was experiencing increased prosperity in the years following World War 2. Real personal income increased for families nationwide as did the ideal of the American Dream. This led to a surge in automobile ownership, totaling 25 million in 1945. Cities were becoming less centralized and suburbanization began to occur. Since then land-use development has continued on the same course and has further decentralized cities, leading to an increased need for automobile ownership as the primary method of transportation. While owning an automobile has offered Americans a sense of freedom and self-reliance in transportation, it has not come without its share of negative consequences including pollution, traffic and parking congestion, reliance on fossil fuels, and decentralized cities. Recent efforts have been made to improve land-use planning as well as to make public transportation more efficient and prevalent in today's society to mitigate the consequences of automobile use. Analyzing the cost and benefits of public transportation with individual driving (automobiles) brings forth many relevant reasons as to how and why public transportation can be more beneficial for a growing society within the next century. Still, the process of changing our current way of life proves to be difficult and costly. The question that is posed for us as Americans is not do we need to change our primary method of transportation and city planning, but rather, how can we accomplish this goal.

In order to attempt to answer this question, we must first assess the pros and cons of both methods of transportation and...