Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

A road creates the greatest value by providing the fastest connection between two places that people want to be. This is done by limiting things that slow down traffic along the road. For a railroad, that means reducing the number of stops, the amount of merging traffic, and congestion along the route. For automobile roads, the concept is the same. The higher the sustained speed, the lower the travel time and the greater the value provided by the road. While roads connect places, streets are the framework for building a place. Streets provide the greatest value when they create places that people want to be. When people choose to buy land, build something on it, and then maintain and improve what is built over time, they are building measurable wealth within the community. The most accurate measurement for the value of a street is the financial productivity of the land adjacent to it — how much value is created per acre of land that abuts the street? The tension between achieving mobility and providing access in the current model is rightly replaced with the tension of either building a productive place or connecting productive places. This is a financial constraint more than anything else because the wealth created on the community's framework of streets is what must be tapped to pay for building and maintaining both the streets and the roads. A railroad, again, is the easiest way to think of this system. During westward expansion, major railroad companies established cit...