That's my point, sort of. The metrics the study chose will tend to rate places highly if they have low sprawl. Honolulu will come out well because it's confined by geography. I suspect that Inland Empire California doesn't sprawl because there is a large fraction of the workforce that cannot drive.
On a deeper level, I believe that studying one factor or another doesn't get to the root -- the mass transit, roads, housing, and employment are continuously remodelled, and interact via a number of forces. In systems like that, what you see will be the equilibrium based on all the forces. Often the equilibrium will be determined by only a small number of forces, but it's difficult to guess which ones it will be without enumerating and comparing them all.
In re mass transit issues, all studies seem to ignore a force that I see: People place value in living farther away from other people. How intense this effect is and how universal it is, I haven't seen studied, or even discussed. But it seems to have a strong effect on US land use patterns.
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Date: 2011-07-09 02:11 am (UTC)On a deeper level, I believe that studying one factor or another doesn't get to the root -- the mass transit, roads, housing, and employment are continuously remodelled, and interact via a number of forces. In systems like that, what you see will be the equilibrium based on all the forces. Often the equilibrium will be determined by only a small number of forces, but it's difficult to guess which ones it will be without enumerating and comparing them all.
In re mass transit issues, all studies seem to ignore a force that I see: People place value in living farther away from other people. How intense this effect is and how universal it is, I haven't seen studied, or even discussed. But it seems to have a strong effect on US land use patterns.