ABSTRACT
Any discussion of how urban transport investments shape, both economically and spatially, cities and regions of the US must initially be framed in terms of the overwhelming dominance of the private automobile. In 1990, 84.6% of journeys-to-work in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US were by private automobile (Pisarski, 1992; Cervero, 1994a). A host of well-documented historical, cultural, and contextual factors account for America’s high degree of automobiledependency (estimated to be 2-3 times higher than comparable settings in Europe), though according to some observers (Pucher, 1988; Newman and Kenworthy, 1989) deliberate public policies, such as artificially cheap fuel prices, have had a direct and traceable hand in this outcome.
