Transportation and Highways in MontrealBy Ian Lockwood P.Eng. and Joel Mann AICPIntroductionAs Montreal rethinks its 1960s freeway infrastructure, it faces daunting problems: congestion, the continued viability of its transit system, ever-growing demands on revenue streams, impending economic concerns (e.g., fuel prices, manufacturing exportation, etc.), and increasing environmental concerns (e.g., climate change, air quality, etc.) seem insurmountable at times. The patterns of investment, growth, and development that have sustained the City for the past fifty years are showing their age and some are diminishing.  Bold cities, elsewhere, have adopted strategies very different from what Montreal is doing.  Only a new approach to transportation investment will ensure future prosperity for Montreal.  This chapter provides an overview of how today's transportation strategy came to be, how well it has delivered, and the major issues that could and should cause it to change in the future.Context of the Montreal's Transportation Plans In developing transport plans for Montreal, it is important first to understand what problems the city faces and what opportunities it has for moving forward.  Any new projects will represent major investments that should promote civic enhancement and economic growth. Montreal was undeniably one of the success stories of North America, a city that drew on a legacy of ingenuity and culture to develop as a thriving centre of commerce with national and international influence.  How Montreal will adapt its transportation system to catalyze what should be a growing and prosperous city involves understanding the components of urban transport and access.The Role of Transportation The average person would rather not think about or deal with traffic.  When given a choice, people prefer to focus their lives on family, work, and leisure activities. Transport should simply be a means to accomplish these ends efficiently.  When this relationship falls out of balance, however, the quality of people’s lives lowers. To many residents of North American cities, such an imbalance has occurred. The past 30 years have seen a substantial increase in commute times. The cost of transportation as a percentage of income for families has grown too.   Public space devoted to transportation allows people to access their different activities and services, and facilitates trade; it is the binding element in our cities.  In the past half-century, the solution has been to provide ever-larger and faster highways and arterial streets, resulting in ever-longer commutes and sprawling suburban development, transferring value and people out of Montreal.  It is increasingly clear, however, that this model eventually reaches limits beyond which it cannot or should not be sustained.  In Montreal, those limits involve the road congestion that stifles economic growth and community health, and many side effects.  The high costs of such long trips, thehealth impacts of more sedentary lifestyles, and the deteriorating air quality in Montreal all suggest that a reconsideration of the conventional transportation paradigm is timely. 

It is worth considering lessons from other cities that have sustained longer and larger growth. Many of these cities have demonstrated the open-mindedness required to allow economic growth while developing models for well-connected, easy-to-navigate streets, and options for travel.  Montreal is not the first city to need to change course.The time is right for Montreal to pause and reconsider the wisdom of automobile-oriented, conventional highway strategies and to consider improving quality of life and pursuing sustainability.  Rather than seeking to move more cars further and at higher speeds, Montreal should strive to move more people shorter distances.  Instead of believing that Montreal can "solve" congestion, the City should focus on managing its congestion.  Now is Montreal's opportunity to create a better model.Transport as a Place-Making Element Conventional transportation professionals claim that highways and highway widenings are built in response to development needs.  They do not recognize that transportation infrastructure is, rather, the primary determinant of what future growth will occur.  The presence or absence of transportation infrastructure is a key element that allows the extent, location, type, and mix of development.  For example, Montreal's 1960s’ freeway construction program facilitated high speed driving out of town and fueled the suburban growth that continues even today.  Clearly, transportation investments were a primary cause of that development.  Examples of land use responses can be seen in both suburban and urban contexts.  Most newer green-field places that were built with conventional approaches to transportation infrastructure (highways connected to large arterial streets connected to collector streets connected to local streets connected to driveways) fostered development forms such as single story shopping centres with surface parking,disconnected office and industrial parks, tract housing, and largely separated land uses.  However, suburban transportation and development forms represent the communities of "choice" for many, despite the tradeoffs: low density, disconnected, development coupled with wide, fast streets discourages walking, biking, and transit.  Such suburban communities were never meant to sustain very high densities.  Growth in such places is limited by their inability to accommodate more cars.A different model and level of growth can be observed when infrastructure is built into the street network as part of the urban form.  Well-connected networks of streets provide superior access, efficient trip distribution, and multiple routing options.  They are also better suited for walking, cycling, and transit use and so better able to support greater development intensities than the suburban patterns.  A fine-grain street network creates smaller blocks that are better for pedestrians.

Walkable streets are better for more intense development and are a basic requirement for frequent and reliable public transport service.  Walkable, bikeable, and public transport-oriented places have much higher "people-moving" capacities than places that rely primarily on single-occupant automobiles.  Thus, connected, multimodal transportation strategies are critical to accommodate dense development.  Montreal has many examples of these successful strategies in its older areas with robust networksof streets and land uses characterized by taller structures and buildings with doors that address the streets, such as Downtown and Old Montreal.  The city needs to employ such urban strategies today.Streets are also the primary public spaces in the city. Unlike their European and Latin American counterparts, North American cities largely abandoned their historic legacy of place-making through networks, squares, and plazas after World War II.  The post-war function of streets became to move people and goods from place to place as quickly as possible. Consequently, streets do not fulfill the fundamental role of place-making, leaving a void of arenas for public life.   Our cities need to reassert their role in bringing people together and fostering civic life.  The character and the care given to a community through the provision of contributing streets are evident to any visitor immediately, although this may not be readily apparent to residents.  It is a simple matter of looking at and experiencing the transportation infrastructure of the city and comparing it to other places.  Naturally, land uses respond to such care over time as well.

Michigan Avenue (Chicago), Newbury Street (Boston) and Broadway (New York) are important transportation thoroughfares, but they also accommodate and foster a balance of civic and economic functions that generally reflect the character of their cities through these signature streets.  Likewise, Montreal's investments indicate its character and care for its community.Fiscal Importance: Transportation as an InvestmentWhile the role of transport as an element of place-making is important, its role as an economic investment should not be underestimated.  Even in 1998, before the steady rise in fuel prices, the average household spent about a fifth of its income on transportation-related expenses, an amount equal to the combined total amount spent on health care and food.

While people may accept these as the cost of living in a modern society, Montreal should strive to do better.  If Montreal were to invest differently, could it reduce these costs?  Could it generate greater tax revenues from development?  Could it reduce air pollution and provide more opportunities for physical activity?  Could it lower its carbon footprint and dependence on oil? Could it make the city more attractive and valuable?For much of the 20th century, conventional transportation theories assumed that new highway infrastructure was the key to fostering economic growth.  The working premise was that congestion, created by these highways and resulting sprawl, could be remedied by adding more car-capacity (i.e., more lanes and more highways).

Following this paradigm fueled the rapid growth of the suburbs in the Montreal region at the expense of the city.  Like cities and regions across North America, Montreal found that its newly added car-carrying capacity was soon exhausted, leading to a long-term commitment to construct more and more highway infrastructure, a vicious circle.  In addition to the high capital costs, maintenance was expensive; something that has been done badly in Montreal over the last several decades.  Consequently, Montreal should think twice before accepting even more highway infrastructure.Older Cities and ChangeRefurbishing of old city centres is a recent phenomenon that is occurring across North America, spurred by different approaches to transportation and development in those cities and also peoples' changing attitudes and values.  People increasingly want to be part of the action, living where they do not have to ‘drive to town’ for a great quality of life.  This is in keeping with the fundamental purpose of cities which has not changed since cities were invented: cities exist primarily for the purpose of maximizing exchange (i.e., to bring people together for the efficient exchange of goods, services, knowledge, ideas, labor, capital, entertainment, resources, etc.)Cities and metro areas also exist to minimize transportation.  The less people have to move themselves or their goods, the better and more efficient the system is.  The roleof transportation in cities is about access, not speed or mobility.  Good access translates into everything from a good block structure, to an interconnected street system, to on-street parking, to walkability, to proximity of complementary land uses, to being able to use multiple modes of transport. Conventional transportation theories ignore the structural aspects of access and its relationship to land use becausethey consider transportation on its own, as if the city's structure and land uses were unrelated.

Since the rise of North American suburban development in the second half of the 20th century, suburbs have appeared more attractive than central cities due to their newer infrastructure, seemingly lower costs, new schools and freedom from crowding, crime,and health concerns.  Post-war policies, infrastructure design and funding mechanisms supported these perceptions. Yet the realities of suburban expansion suggest that they are not sustainable on many levels.  Now that they are aging, the suburbs are undergoing the same challenges as the cities. Moreover, they face additional problems due to their inefficient infrastructure patterns that are both expensive and hard to change.  These problems are compounded by declining property values, changing of demographic patterns, health challenges, energy issues, and an increased demand for public services.In addition, the notion of the suburbs providing freedom from traffic congestion has largely been discredited.  To a great extent, these problems can be traced to the layout: their ‘dendritic’ street systems: disconnected street patterns, large blocks, and limited points of neighborhood access were implemented by land developers to discourage non-local traffic and to provide a sense of tranquility and enclosure based on notions of space, quiet, and privacy.  This was fine from the point of any single development but, when added up, the sum was unsuccessful.  At some point, a relatively long trip from the neighborhood to everywhere else was necessary, and disconnected street networks funneled the traffic loads onto overburdened arterial streets and highways.  In turn, the arterial and suburban interchanges attracted concentrations of shopping and businesses that required access and further hampered the model.  Hence, many of the most congested corridors became those serving relatively low density suburban communities.The 'New' Importance of PlaceRecent studies, particularly those by Richard Florida, suggest that cities that will succeed in the future will be those that can retain professionals who work in innovative fields.  These cities will not only have stronger economic foundations, but they will also have greater social diversity and higher levels of quality of place.  Montreal could be enjoying high levels of re-population and renewed investment if it were to provide thebasic physical and civic infrastructure to support it.  This includes a balanced transportation system, that offers modal and routing options and allows the streets and transit to support and celebrate an urban environment.  Highway building does the opposite.The city's streets are the vantage point from which most people experience the city.  Streets contribute greatly to the perception and image of the city as a place where people choose to be.

Streets, combined with parks and squares to fill all the spaces between the buildings, create the "public realm." They provide access and support to the land uses as well as connections between those land uses.  All of these factors combine to attract and retain good people. 

Examples of Practices from Other North American Cities Montreal is not alone in contemplating a future that looks very different from its past.  North American cities have witnessed broad demographic and attitudinal changes in the last two generations. This trend shows no signs of abating and the cities that embrace these changes will have competitive advantages over other cities.  Montreal's current highway building, steeped in the values of thirty years ago, will not help the city compete.This section describes the experience of four other North American cities that are hailed for combining land use and transportation planning.  Each has encountered issues similar to those facing Montreal, and each has addressed these issues in its own way.They provide Montreal with guidance in its transportation strategy.Charlotte, North Carolina Charlotte, North Carolina, is a city with a bright future.  It is a major financial and distribution centre of the Southeastern United States.  The city has prospered through the strength of its business community and by pro-development attitudes and policies.  Charlotte's unified approach to planning for growth and new infrastructure is a key to its success.  The City has aligned its different departments and responsibilities and, in doing so, has streamlined planning and development.  The alignment is a simple yet powerful concept that Charlotte calls its Centres, Corridors and Wedges Growth Strategy.  The idea is that development intensity be tied to the areas where the city's infrastructure can support it.  Charlotte has created this link by focusing the investment of public resources along corridors with centres of compact development and a broad palette of land uses, while reserving the remaining 'wedge' areas for open space and less intense development.Unlike other cities with a strong legislative framework for growth management, Charlotte does not have a comprehensive plan tying together the missions of its different departments.  In the absence of such a unifying element, the growth framework organized around centres, corridors and wedges is crucial.  The framework facilitates the alignment of departmental interests so that growth is guided to areas that could support it and steered away from areas that could not.  This also allows planning to respond to changing community values as each department's needs and understanding of community concerns are reiterated through joint planning processes.Charlotte has identified five primary growth corridors, linear districts with concentrations of high-capacity transportation facilities that include street networks and transit infrastructure.  The City began operating its first rail transit service in the first of five corridors in November 2007 and is planning similar changes for the remaining four.  The land use envisioned for these corridors is a mix of moderate to high-density residential, office, retail, industrial, and warehouse/distribution uses.  This conforms to Charlotte's current and growing role as a transportation and distribution centre in the Southeast while acknowledging its strong economic growth and demand for housing.Transportation planning supports the need for connectivity and walkability within the growth areas.  The city concentrates transportation funding for street and network projects in the centre and corridor growth areas.  It also identifies key walking, cycling, and urban livability components associated with larger transit projects.Vancouver, British ColumbiaVancouver’s planning policies promote a high quality of urban livability.  It has broadened its transportation system to promote non-automobile modes of transportation, responding to increasingly scarce resources that could never support the auto-dominated alternative.  As a result, Vancouver has become a world leader in sustainability, forward-thinking urban development, and general quality of life.  The Economist and the World Health Organization have proclaimed Vancouver as a model of high urban livability.Yet perhaps even more notable has been its coordination of regional interests and the development of a well-integrated policy framework to guide development and growth and to link land use and transportation.  A unified transportation authority, the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority (locally referred to as TransLink), is responsible for road construction and maintenance and transit infrastructure and operations.

TransLink asserts a large role in regional coordination between transportation and land use.  It has promoted public transit as a primary travel mode, mainly as a result of policies that do not base project decisions on added capacity for automobiles: it has tied investment in new transit infrastructure to regional land use planning and development.  As a result, it has more control over project prioritization between transit, roadway, andbicycle/pedestrian projects and greater flexibility to use funding among all of them.  This single transportation entity supports the region's policy of prioritizing transit investment.  This has allowed the region and municipalities to plan transportation infrastructure in a uniform and coordinated manner.One of TransLink's main strategies in developing a balanced transportation system has been the concept of legible transit (i.e., a transit system that the public understands and trusts).  In moving to establish a sense of permanence and legibility, TransLink has found that transit should be seen as public infrastructure and not merely a service.  Montreal could learn a great deal from Vancouver.  Interestingly, there are no highways in the City of Vancouver.Chicago, IllinoisThough size and historical growth are different, Chicago and Montreal are similar.  They are the economic and cultural centres of their regions and have broad, diverse economic bases rooted in transportation and industry.  They rose to prominence through transportation infrastructure and continue to play an important distribution function within national and international economies.  Chicago has a particularly strong focus on rail transport, being served by all of the North American Class I railroads.  It has an additional 14 small railroads with 2,800 track-miles of rail (excluding rail yards), 500 freight and 700 passenger trains per day and 37,000 freight car and 20,000 intermodal movements per day.

At the same time, Chicago has become a leader, in recent years, in promoting and adopting environmentally-conscious and sustainable growth and development.  Ithas earned attention for the green roof on its City Hall, new bicycle lanes, and improved sidewalks. Chicago sees the enhancement and maintenance of public infrastructure for the safety and convenience of all users as fundamental to a city whose citizens can enjoy a high quality of life without depleting natural resources.

Nearly 23 per cent of its land area is public right-of-way and Chicago believes the land should do more than just move traffic around – it should also contribute to Chicago's sense of place. Chicago has adopted a Complete Streets Policy recognizing the right of the public to making transportation and project decisions.  Chicago also seeks to utilize right-of-way to achieve the greatest community benefit possible.  This, in turn, has led to several programs such as the Streetscape Program, which has built beautiful streetscapes, bicycle lanes, trails, improved crossings, and sidewalks.These programs have been augmented by revisions of a Landscape Ordinance that defines standards for planting and landscaping. The Green Alley program modernized the city's 1,900 miles of service alleys with permeable surfaces that facilitate drainage, allow natural percolation to lessen the impact on the city's storm sewers, and reduce heat islands through the use of lighter surface materials.  Detroit, Michigan

During the first 50 years of the last century, Detroit's population rose from 286,000 to 1,850,000, the fourth largest city in the USA.  During the second 50 years, the population shrank to 951,000 and is even lower today.  Poor transportation planning was one factor that encouraged and enabled the depopulation, and included the construction of several highways, the resulting loss of street connectivity, the over-widening of several city streets, the elimination public transportation, and the abandonment of public rights-of-way to create superblocks.  The result is a disconnected, barrier-ridden, pedestrian-hostile, and empty city fraught with problems of disinvestment and abandonment.  Several "silver bullet" attempts to enliven the City through large office complexes and stadiums investments have failed.

Detroit was far better off before it was retrofitted with highways designed to take both people and investment away from the city. Discussion of removing highways, or parts thereof, has started but it means a shift in thinking that is difficult for transportation officials in “Motor City” to make.

It is interesting that, 50 years ago, Detroit was a wealthy and highly educated city on the cutting edge of transportation thinking.  Detroit did a far more thorough job of embracing the highway vision than any other city.  With 20/20 hindsight we can now compare how well that did, compared with Vancouver's strategy. Interestingly, many of the arguments that are being used today to increase highway construction in Montreal are the same as the ones in Detroit years ago, which have since been rejected by an increasing number of cities. 

Related Practices and North American TrendsHighway Patterns

Many North American cities added highways in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with similar patterns of decay and disinvestment as Montreal and Detroit.  Several cities recognized the destructive patterns and abandoned subsequent highway projects, including South Pasadena, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Toronto.  The areas where the highways were supposed to go were "saved" and are still nice places today.  More recently, cities are beginning to remove their highways and, without exception,the social and economic effects have been very positive, as in New York City, Chattanooga, Portland, San Francisco, and Milwaukee.  More cities are working to remove their downtown highways as part of their revitalization and sustainability efforts, as is occurring in Trenton, Syracuse, Toronto, Hartford, and Seattle.

It is no coincidence that in 1950, at the height of Detroit's success, the City had a well-connected, complete, and highway-free street network.  The ensuing road widenings and highways, which were rammed through the heart of the City, became conduits for people and investment to leave.  Unless many of these mistakes are corrected Detroit will never recover.  A similar future awaits Montreal; it needs to embrace place, people, and access, not highways, automobiles, and speed.

Key Highway Principles:

1.  Context-sensitive street designs in cities, and especially in downtowns, should foster social and economic exchange.2.  Downtown streets that share traffic loads tend to succeed; dendritic road hierarchies that include highways try to concentrate traffic loads and fail.3.  Barriers in downtowns should be removed, not buried. Cities are about being connected and this should be reflected in the street network.  4.  Transportation systems, serving downtowns, should be multimodal and encourage greener modes of transportation.5.  Visitors should feel that they are "connected" to the "place".  Roads designed for highway speeds detract from "place".  Streets in cities should be "complete" and enforce safe speeds through design.

Limiting Factors:

For decades, highway critics have hoped that some limiting factor would slow, stop, or reverse highway building in cities.  Energy, pollution, climate change, health, quality of life, disinvestment, population flight, and automobile dependence were all candidates but failed to change the paradigm.  Ministries of Transportation seem interested in sustainable practices, working with stakeholders, and cooperating with municipal jurisdictions only when they are compelled to by a more important limiting factor or, in rare situations (e.g., San Francisco and Toronto), by extraordinary leadership or community pressure.  The New Jersey and Pennsylvania Departments of Transportation would still be battling congestion with expensive road widenings and highways had they not run out of money. Money has become the important limiting factor.  When transportation money is plentiful, then conventional, highway-oriented, interests are good at getting the money and spending it.

Just because there is highway money for Montreal, does not mean that highways aregood for Montreal.

Hierarchy of Roads

For the last 50 years, the transportation industry has had an unfortunate preoccupation with the hierarchy of roads (local, collector, arterial, and highway), in a dendritic form, even though it is abundantly clear that cities and metro areas are better off with interconnected street networks that provide parallel and redundant routing choices, inform land use patterns to a human scale, and spread the transportation loads.

The conventional, dendritic, practices result in i) poorly connected streets which disadvantage all modes except the automobile, ii) super blocks scaled to accommodate automobiles, and iii) the concentration of transportation on a few routes (making those streets too big and dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit).

VMT and Fuel Use

Conventional transportation practices reward increases in vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) and fuel consumption with federal and provincial money to fund road widening projects, exacerbating the problems.  However, the solution is not to throw away such measures upon which to base such rewards.  The solution is to change the practice 180 degrees.  Places that have projects and programs that reduce their VMT and fuel use should get funding and those that increase these measures should get nothing.  In this way, efficiency is rewarded.  Both VMT per person and fuel use per person needs to be considered along with total VMT and fuel use.  This is absolutely crucial to the future of cities and the future of Montreal.

Speed and Cities It is a very modern and ill-conceived idea that big roads must be fast roads.  Yet speed on big roads has spread cities out, increasing trip lengths, reducing density, and reducing exchange.

Speed, by definition, is anti-city, anti-metro area, inefficient, and automobile-oriented.  However, the issue remains unaddressed and misunderstood in Montreal.   Complete streets, catering to all modes require slow, safer, speeds which allow proper block structures, access, and exchange to occur.   Networks work better with slower traffic.  Slower speeds, by design, are good for cities.

The argument for faster roads relies on the idea of time "savings" and related measures of effectiveness including, among others, delay, travel time and average speed.  The reasoning is that saving travel time is good in cities, faster roads save time, and therefore faster roads are good. 

However, they are only good if all else remains equal.  Unfortunately, the behavior and land use responses to faster roads more than undoes any benefit derived from changes to make the road faster.  In city after city, including Montreal, congestion worsened after vast sums were spent in an attempt to speed up the roads through highways, widenings, smoothing curves, and so forth.  The conventional paradigm neverfully considered speed's effects on promoting use of the automobile and discouraging walking, cycling, and transit. 

Speed and CapacityThere is a difference between speed and capacity (for motor vehicles). Some of the best addresses in European cities are on high capacity streets. There is noreason why all city streets cannot be walkable, bicycle-friendly, business-friendly and transit-oriented as well.  If they are fast, they only benefit the automobile. 

Montreal should reject high speed highways and arterials. The related effects are so highly damaging that high speed roadways should be replaced with city-friendly designs or removed entirely.  Ironically, when highways in cities are being used the most, during peak hours, motorists suffer the slowest and most frustrating travel experiences.  Cities are about access and highways are about speed; they are like oil and water. 

Montreal needs to keep in mind that high speed highways in cities are a very recent idea. Now we know that they simply violate the context of the city. Where they have been introduced, they have done harm; where they have come out, good things happen; where they were halted, good things continued.  The pattern is clear.

Distribution of GoodsGoods movement and freight are very important in metro areas.  Jonathan Barnett's research found that "The de facto land use plan of the United States has been the interstate system".  Urban sprawl followed the highways out of cities because cheap land was developed in automobile-dependant ways and the system consistently clogged up. Retailers opened ‘big box’ stores to exploit this "free" resource.  Their trucks delivered huge quantities of produce and, due to their purchasing power and low distribution costs, they sold it for less than their smaller competitors who internalized the distribution costs.  The rub here is that shoppers drove long distances along the same highways to buy cheap goods.  So we see that society underwrites big stores with the most expensive sort of infrastructure and the worst transportation mode available. 

This model is wrong from every perspective of city-making. We must consider the benefits of shorter trips for both goods and local production; growing or making products for the city and metro markets in closer proximity.  As long as we build costly highways to keep costs down (for the truckers and the foreign producers who benefit the most),we should not be surprised that one of the biggest North American exports is jobs to places with cheap labor and/or tax structures.

Though buying cheap foreign products may seem appealing, North Americans are subsidizing some else's distribution costs with our transportation money.  By placing our industries at a disadvantage, we have fewer jobs and less money to buy things.  We have developed a system that harms our domestic industries and workers.

Leveraging Transit for Development.  Some American cities have begun using high-frequency (premium) transit to encourage development that increases transit riders and adds value to cities through increased population and tax base, as in Charlotte and Vancouver.  Improved transit infrastructure reduces the need to accommodate automobiles in new development.  This frees land and lowers development costs that can be applied to increasing a development's yield. Consider St. Louis' 25-year transit modernization plan which is expected to generate a $2.3 billion return in business sales.Facilitating Healthy and Active LifestylesMany cities have invested in projects that improve lifestyles. Austin, Texas has a plan that assures “that the development of the urban environment is compatible with the unique natural and constructed features of the Austin area."  This has allowed Austin to realize high population and job growth in recent years. The successful cities will be those that create engaging open space and pedestrian environments.  In most North American cities, streets account for 20% to 25% of the total land area and many cities are taking initiatives to shape this space into forms thatprovide greater benefits to the public than moving cars.  Denver's 2007 Downtown Area Plan calls for boulevards to be a backbone of downtown economic development.  Chicago has taken similar steps to construct streets that improve drainage, reduce heat and lessen the need for street lighting.Land Use Options Some people believe that the best transportation policy is a good land use policy that recognizes the need for a broad range of housing options.  This refers to levels of affordability, size of dwelling units, proximity to grocery stores and recreational centres, employment, and other daily activities.  The idea is to support the shorter trip and provide travel mode options.  After decades of building big houses and dwelling units, cities recognize a need for smaller homes. Public transit and sidewalks are especially important as people age. There is a recognized pattern of people moving to the suburbs in search of single-use zoning, recreational complexes, large grocery stores, and "good" schools, though all in a very resource-hungry and automobile-dependant way.  Public incentives and policies promoted the migration of people as well as investment.  The sprawling growth was developer-driven and they were not required to provide a street network.  The focus was on building and selling "product" (developer-speak for homes, strip malls, etc.) and constructing as little infrastructure as feasible in order to maximize profits.  This meant designing for automobiles and exploiting the old farm-to-market roads as well as the later installed highways (e.g., Highway 25 in Montreal).

Similarly, there is the disinvestment and less than efficient use of land in many of the deserted inner city areas and downtowns, especially where highways are planned (e.g., along the Notre Dame corridor).  But, ironically it is these places that have theinfrastructure and network structure potential to be efficient and to foster exchange.  So, instead of disadvantaging these areas with highways (or a near-highway in the case of Notre Dame) and subsidizing suburban houses with wider, faster, roads, why not spend that money on older areas and refurbish inner city streets, schools, parks, grocery stores, and housing? 

Leverage the cultural institutions, the history, the main streets, and the inherent locational advantages of these areas.  Catering to suburban commuters is both costly and ineffective. Cities must, instead, discourage undesirable trends and support the structure and the places with the most potential.