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The goal of transit-friendly planning is to create compact, pedestrian and bicycle-friendly places where people can get to school, recreation, shops, jobs, and the train station without driving. There are numerous environmental, equity, and economic advantages of this planning technique, including:
- Improvement in air quality. Less driving means cleaner air and less resource consumption. In this country, cars produce about a quarter of the pollution that causes global warming, as well as a significant portion of the pollutants that cause acid rain, increase children's asthma rates, and cause or exacerbate a host of other ailments including chronic bronchitis, emphysema and lung damage.
- Less traffic congestion. Traffic, in terms of driver frustration, air pollution created, and time wasted, is an ever-worsening problem in our society. In places where there are few transportation choices, most people are essentially trapped by congested conditions. In places with more choices, more people can choose whether to fight through congestion in their cars or avoid it by using less stressful ways to get around.
- Less need to develop open spaces. Compact development around the rail station and more transit riders means less sprawling development and fewer roads built. As a result, the demand to pave New Jersey's farmlands, wetlands, forests, and other natural spaces is diminished.
- Transportation choice and equity. Not everybody can afford a car, and others might be too young, too old, or too infirm to drive themselves around. Communities that are transit-, pedestrian-, and bicycle-friendly offer transportation equity and affordability for all residents.
- Cost-savings. Compact development costs less in terms of government services and infrastructure investment.
- Community revitalization. Compact development around transit hubs is often a catalyst for economic revitalization in the community. Placing mixed uses (housing, offices, retail, public buildings, etc.) within walking distance of a transit hub ensures a steady stream of foot traffic for the businesses as people walk to and from the transit station.
- Sense of Place. By establishing a transit facility as a focal point in the community, transit-friendly planning creates the opportunity for greater interaction among members of the community, especially if public places like parks, plazas, libraries, and post offices are located within walking distance of the station area.
Dispersed Employment = Increased Traffic
High employment density makes transit more viable, because concentrating jobs in a relatively small area means many people are working in essentially the same place and can thus ride the same vehicle (i.e., a vanpool, bus, train, or ferry) to work. The critical factor is the ability to walk the final leg of the trip, between the endpoint of the transit trip and the actual employment site. Conversely, dispersed employment sites decrease the likelihood that any two workers are going to the same place for work, eliminating the economies of scale upon which successful transit relies and resulting in more individual trips in private automobiles.
New Jersey has some significant employment concentrations - the areas in dark blue on the map at left. But unfortunately, jobs are migrating to areas of lesser employment density that are more difficult to serve with transit. High employment density areas, with transit service already in place, tend to be actually losing jobs (areas in red on the map at right), with the exception of Jersey City. Movement of jobs from more- to less transit-accessible areas means more people will have to drive to work, increasing pressure on already-overloaded highways.