Urban Mobility Report: Not Even the Title Gets it Right

Posted by Julia Klaiber on June 16, 2011

In a blog post highlighting the debate between Joe Cortright of CEOs for Cities and Tim Lomax of Texas Transportation Institute at the Congress for New Urbanism, Jarrett Walker discusses the flawed methodology found in the Urban Mobility Report. Agreeing with many of the points made in Driven Apart, Walker suggests much-needed updates to the Urban Mobility Report, starting with the name.

"Mobility is in the report title, but [it] is about congestion. ...The journalistic spin that TTI itself recommends is that non-car modes matter only if they reduce congestion, and that congestion remains the primary measure of urban mobility."

Walker specifically discusses a need to quantify the degree of freedom people have in moving about their city at will. This point resonates with Joe Cortright’s emphasis on the need to emphasize the accessibility of destinations when studying America’s traffic congestion.