It is a challenge to speak to you this morning about the role of transportation in the future of downtown Baltimore, and your downtown's relationship with the rest of the region. The most important principle of energizing any downtown, or any whole city, for that matter, is to build on your greatest existing strengths. That is my major theme for this morning.

So what are downtown Baltimore's greatest strengths?

You have recently developed major regional recreational, cultural, and tourist attractions. The broader Inner Harbor area has become a key destination marked by the aquarium, Camden Yards ball park, up-scale shopping, the marina, fine restaurants, major hotels, nearby cultural facilities like the music center, and a lot of housing.

As a result, downtown is becoming more and more of an exciting place to live. Old warehouses are being converted into homes, and new structures are being built too. Downtowns are attractive places to live for people who do not have school aged children, or who work downtown. These groups include young professionals, young marrieds without children, senior citizens, empty nesters, and the gay community.

Downtown is still a major employment center for office workers, government workers, and health care workers, and the retailers and service workers who serve the former. The largest office complex in Maryland is located here, as well as government activities and major health education and care facilities. A lot of people who work here do not want to commute from a distance; so they form a market for downtown housing. Such housing is growing in many major U.S. cities.

Downtown has the greatest aggregation of business services in the Baltimore region; hence it can provide a better setting for many types of business than any suburban location, even though many suburban locations are getting larger and more urbanized, with many more major retail and office complexes competitive with downtown.

Downtown Baltimore has extensive waterfront property that once was industrial but could be converted to housing and recreational uses. You are already doing this, but its potential is even greater than what you have achieved. The Inner Harbor area was its foundation, and it is extending eastward too. Many older cities have discovered that their blighted waterfront areas can become major attractions for the new type of downtown living and recreation they are capable of developing.

But this requires public investments in infrastructure. London's Docklands and New York City's Battery Park only became major centers after the government built new dikes, cleaned up polluted sites, and built new streets.

In May 2001, I made a speech in Baltimore on the future of your region. I thought that you should try to make a virtue out of something some people might think was a weakness – your region's relatively slow growth. Slower growth can create a more relaxed, less frenetic, more healthful pace of life than fast growth. So I recommended that you play up the advantages of slow growth as another regional strength.

One such advantage consists of lower housing prices and costs of living than in fast-growth areas. There will also be smaller increases in traffic congestion and commuting times here than in areas with faster growth, such as Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Your region has excellent access to recreation and cultural activities. And you have strong health care and medical research industries. This area is likely to have more ample supply of good workers in periods of intense prosperity such as that in the late 1990s.

Your downtown can be another regional advantage, especially if you maximize the future development of your extensive waterfront land.

Now I would like to discuss some basic realities about transportation relevant to downtown.

First, trying to develop a large-scale, comprehensive off-road transit system in Baltimore like those in New York or Washington is not feasible. New York's system was developed over many decades, and exists in a city with a density three times as great as Baltimore's (26,000 vs. 8,000 persons per square mile) and an area almost four times larger (303 square miles vs. 80). Washington's system was almost totally financed by federal taxes, which you cannot do as much as the nation's capital.

Second, traffic congestion is rising in intensity all over the world, and is likely to keep on doing so. This trend is caused partly by increasing population and prosperity, which enable more households to own more vehicles. From 1980 to 2000, for every one human being added to the U.S. population, we added 1.2 more cars, trucks, and buses to the registered vehicle population. In addition, people have been more intensively using those vehicles each year. In the U.S. from 1980 to 2000, population rose about 24% but annual vehicle miles traveled rose over 80%.

In the Baltimore region, according to the Texas Transportation Institute, the main congestion measure was 6% higher in 2000 than 1990, compared to a gain of 9% in the Washington region. The worst intensity in 2000 was in Los Angeles, and it was 47% higher than in Baltimore. Among 75 big U.S. regions, Baltimore ranked 23rd in 2000. Washington ranked 4th; its level was 13% worse than Baltimore's. So traffic congestion here is not nearly as bad as in many other regions.

In 2001, all the public transit systems in the Baltimore region provided about 350,000 unlinked trips per weekday, 77% of which were on buses, 12% on heavy rail, 6% on light rail, and 5% on commuter rail. If 60% of these trips were by commuters, each making two trips per day, that would be 105,000 transit commuters per day. But the 2000 Census reported only 76,000 commuters used transit in the entire region, which was 6% of all workers. Among workers living in the city, 19.5% commuted on transit.

By any reckoning, most commuters use private vehicles – 87% in the entire region, 70% within the city, and 90% who live outside of the city. In the whole region, over one million workers commuted by private vehicle daily.

There is a widespread belief that a bigger off-road transit system will surely reduce traffic congestion because it will take all its passengers off the highways during peak periods. But that is not necessarily the case. Your present light rail system has 25,000 unlinked passenger trips on a typical weekday. Even if all are commuter trips, then 12,500 commuters are using the light rail system daily. That is only 1.25% of all the region's commuters. But that does not mean the light rail system has reduced peak-hour highway commuters by 12,500 people each morning.

Any major expressway that is heavily congested during peak hours – like I-95 into downtown Baltimore – is subject to the Principle of Triple Convergence. If the capacity of such a road were magically doubled overnight, traffic would move much faster the next day. But word would soon spread, and many commuters who were previously using other routes, or going at earlier or later times, or using the subway, to avoid the expressway's congestion, would shift onto the now-faster road. Traffic on that road would therefore rise, and keep rising, until congestion got worse. Eventually it would be moving just as slowly as before the road was expanded. This would happen so as to restore travel-time equilibrium between that now-expanded road and the other routes and modes available to commuters – which had not been expanded.

Once a major expressway has become congested in peak hours, its congestion cannot be eliminated by expanding its capacity. Then more travelers would converge on it from other routes, other times, and other modes, causing the level of congestion to return to its original intensity – though perhaps a shorter period.

This same principle applies to expanding the capacity of transit systems serving the same routes as a congested expressway. If parallel transit systems expand, they might initially divert traffic from the road. But that will simply cause other auto-driving commuters to move onto the road to replace those moving to transit. That is why expanding light rail systems has not significantly reduced peak-hour traffic congestion in any of the U.S. cities where it has been tried.

Portland doubled the size of its light rail system in the 1990s, and its congestion got much worse. Most of the added traffic on light rail came from its buses, not from cars. Dallas added a new system and also had rising traffic congestion. Most regions that add new transit systems are also growing rapidly in population,, and that growth swamps any improvements from the new rail systems.

There may be good reasons to build more transit capacity, such as improving mobility for people without access to cars. But expanding transit capacity will not significantly reduce peak-hour traffic congestion on any major roads that are already congested. It is no accident that most of the U.S. cities with the biggest transit systems also have very intensive traffic congestion. Both transit usage and congestion intensity are highly correlated with city and regional population density – the greater the density, the worse the congestion.

I am NOT saying that your desire to spend a lot of money on more transit is a waste of time, or should be scrapped. But I think it needs to be considered within a larger framework of thinking about transportation downtown and beyond.

The most important thing you can do to improve downtown transportation is marshal those resources you have to make the flows of all vehicular traffic in and around the downtown work better. Land-use patterns are changing. More housing is being built along the waterfront and new office spaces are being built east of downtown. Baltimore's original streets are not configured to the new traffic flows needed to sustain redevelopment. You need to invest in improving your streets, even if it means tearing down a few historic buildings to do so.

I believe any city that refuses to tear down any old buildings – including some historic landmarks – gradually sinks into wasteful deterioration. Keeping all old structures, no matter what, is an unwise policy I call slum preservation.

No doubt my suggested approach will encounter resistance from traditionalists, who rightly want to protect your city's glorious past. But if you have sound plans tied to clearly desirable economic progress, you should be able to persuade them or the courts to make such changes possible.

So your highest priority should be better transportation planning for the downtown. The single most important policy you could undertake to improve transportation's impact on downtown is to think more systematically, with a long-range perspective. Develop a long-range transportation plan that integrates all your modes of movement and coordinates them with emerging land-use patterns.

In most American metropolitan areas, the biggest obstacle to rational planning is the separation of control over transportation from land-use management. The state government and the regional metropolitan planning organization (MPO) control transportation improvements. But local governments control land use decisions and zoning. And these two sets of governments do not integrate their decisions in rational long-range plans; each group guards its own powers jealously. But in Baltimore, the city government has authority over both of these functions. That is your great advantage – but you are not capitalizing on it as much as you could.

I have been told that there is not even one transportation planner in the Baltimore city government. Where is your overall strategy for maximizing the effectiveness of your streets, your transit systems, your highways, and your subway? Innovative transportation improvements cannot be done on a purely one-off basis because a community's streets form a single network of interrelated traffic flows.

You cannot decide whether to make Charles Street, or any other street, a one-way street or a two-way street without developing a plan for all the other streets in the vicinity, because transportation movements form an integrated network all over the community. What happens on one element affects all the others – that is why the Principle of Triple Convergence operates the way it does.

I cannot give you specific guidance about whether expanding transit serving downtown is the best use of your scarce transportation resources. However, I do not believe it will be an effective antidote future traffic congestion. But I strongly advise you to focus your thinking on just how your transportation tactics could best maximize the intrinsic strengths of your downtown that I enumerated at the beginning of this talk.

After all, it is a sound general principle in all aspects of life to count your blessings, and then do the best with what you've got. You in Baltimore should be yourselves. Your downtown cannot be New York, or Washington, or San Francisco. But Baltimore has many virtues that you can take advantage of and make Charm City a wonderful place in which to work, live, and visit.