As the Arizona economy begins to heat up, Governor Brewer hosts a 3-day closed-door retreat with experts from various realms of planning and policy to brainstorm future long-term growth scenarios. From this meeting, it is hoped that spending bills, ballot initiatives for a transportation-dedicated tax or other concrete policy scenarios can be created for public review and debate. You are brought in as the expert on transportation. You are allowed some time to address the group and present your view of sustainable transportation and to argue whether Arizona should continue following a mobility planning approach, or steer towards an accessibility planning approach. You also give some summary thoughts about how your preferred planning approach is enacted in terms of policies and planning interventions.
Present your thoughts in 8 pages paper (not including endnotes or citations). Please cite at least 10 papers from the class and 6 lectures from the class. Feel free to cite sources from outside the class if you want (in addition to those required), Do full and complete citations (in-text Author-Date and reference section).
To start, summarize a definition of sustainable transportation from Black’s paper, to begin to think about mobility versus accessibility, read the piece from Cervero.

Your ensuing debate about planning approaches must rely on evidence from the readings. For example, to argue for a continued mobility approach, you could use Gordon and Richardson’s arguments about sprawl, trends which show continued VMT growth, better pricing policies to control demand, or data from the first piece on commuting which showed declining transit use, etc. You could also perhaps build on Guilliano’s piece on the weakening link between land use and transportation and claim that mobility is a more realistic way to go. You could argue that technology will reduce pollution, etc and so we don’t need to significantly change our planning approaches. We have not covered technology in this class, so feel free to do some research on this. A good author to look at is Dan Sperling.
On the other hand, arguments for accessibility approaches must also have evidence – such as:
Ewing’s arguments, land-use trends showing densification,
Levin’s work on housing preferences from our sprawl discussion,.
Cervero articles on land-use/transportation synergies,
the slides showing the effect of TOD on mode choice, or other issues such as walkability and health, etc.
Feel free to be radical or conservative – as long as you have an argument backed up with research. Be creative here, but support your arguments.