Urban Transportation Impacts of Tall Buildings

Abstract

Large cities in all parts of the United States are experiencing large development and redevelopment projects in their downtown areas. Regardless of the land‐use activities involved, the maintenance of basic levels of mobility for travel to, from, and within the central business district is crucial to the development's success. Strangely, a systematic advance evaluation of the ability of the transportation system to serve (or survive) the new activity was not common practice until recently. Given the enormous investments involved in these commercial projects, a coherent procedure to determine how well the transportation system will support the venture seems a prudent step. Given the variety of useful tools with which to build this procedure, investors and public officials alike should be able to analyze the situation within a wide range of precision and cost. This paper cites a number of techniques that are “on the shelf,” and illustrates how each component of the downtown transportation system is closely linked with the others. A hypothetical example at an actual location demonstrates several of these points.