“How can Washington State’s transportation department be so precise about the growth of congestion? Because it buries electronic sensors in highways to measure speed and volume. This is, DOT officials told the Seattle Times, a far better way of measuring congestion than studies that guess what it’s like based on traffic volume and highway mileage.”

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The Emerging Downtown Advantage
Posted November 27, 2006

Since the 1970s, people have been aware of the major geographic changes in metropolitan areas, not just the movement of families to the suburbs (people have been aware of that since the 1920s), but the commercial reordering as well. In the early 1990s, we finally got a name for the clustering of work in the suburbs, “edge cities,” and with that name, a firm understanding that we live and work in regions with multiple business districts. Turns out, though, that some of these places work better than others.

Background: What we learned from the book “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,” published in 1991, was that unlike residential growth, commercial development (work and retail) doesn’t spread evenly across the landscape; it clusters, mainly around major highway intersections. Hence, Washington, D.C.’s Tysons Corner, Atlanta’s Perimeter Center, Tampa’s Westshore area. These suburban districts were creations of the post-World War II highway construction boom, but they were accidental creations. Nobody set out to create business districts at these intersections; they just happened.

Now, consider what happened with traditional downtowns at the same time. Even as some businesses were leaving, downtowns improved their positions as true transportation hubs. The interstate highway system (for better or worse) sliced through neighborhoods to bring in people from all over the region. Transit systems were started or upgraded to haul people downtown. Where intercity rail was important, the big train station was almost always located downtown. Result: Today, it’s easier in many metro areas to get to downtown than to one of the edge cities. And as congestion worsens, that could be a huge competitive advantage.

You can see the advantage starting to tilt things in the Seattle area, where a new, sophisticated study of commuting times shows that, if you live in Everett on the northern end of the metro area, it takes longer to drive to the edge city of Bellevue than to downtown Seattle, even though the mileage is the same. And downtown’s advantage is growing. That is, congestion is increasing everywhere, but it’s getting worse faster in the suburbs. (You can find the study of Seattle congestion by clicking here.)

Well, if downtowns have such advantages (they were designed as hubs and offer choices for getting to work, including transit), why haven’t they competed more effectively in the past? Because congestion wasn’t as great a problem in the 1980s and 1990s. As the study makes clear, the daily commute has escalated since the 1990s from annoyance to full-blown crisis. (Snapshot: If you set out at 7:40 a.m. on a weekday to drive from suburban Auburn to Renton along Highway 167, a trip of less than 10 miles, it will take more than two and a half hours. In 2003, the same trip would have taken a little more than an hour.) How long will businesses and their workers endure such agony? Not long, we suspect.

Footnote: How can Washington State’s transportation department be so precise about the growth of congestion? Because it buries electronic sensors in highways to measure speed and volume. This is, DOT officials told the Seattle Times, a far better way of measuring congestion than studies that guess what it’s like based on traffic volume and highway mileage.