While planners strive to enhance the transportation-land use configuration to minimize travel and transportation infrastructure, the seemingly unrelenting movement toward larger-scale businesses and services may be counteracting these initiatives.
In this week's PLANetizen Op-Ed, Steven Polzin, Ph.D., describes the tension between transportation-land use decisions, and the economic efficiency objectives of large-scale businesses. "The competitive business environment that governs the economically-viable size of a given facility for many land uses has changed over time. It is not clear that the body of research on transportation and land use fully appreciates the economics of many land use decisions as they relate to the scale of the facility. While Wal-Mart Supercenter controversies have brought attention to this issue, it is not clear that the transportation implications of activity scale are fully understood in terms of the tradeoffs between business operating efficiency and travel demand."
Thanks to Erin Clark
FULL STORY: Transportation, Land Use and Economies of Scale
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