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The impact of Road widening on the local economy

By Dom Nozzi
For nearly a century, road widening has been touted as a powerful stimulus for the local
economy.
However, by striking contrast, I have learned the opposite.

One of the most important lessons I have learned in my many years as a city planner is
that quality of life is a powerful economic engine, and that the habitat intended to
make cars happy is, conversely, one of the most powerful ways that quality of life in a
community is damaged.

Road widening, as my book Road to Ruin illustrates, is the best invention humans have
come up with (short of aerial carpet bombing) to destroy community quality of life.
Widening a road inevitably creates a For Cars Only ambience. It creates a car habitat
that screams CARS ARE WELCOME. PEOPLE ARE NOT.
The car habitat makes for a world that repels humans. Huge asphalt parking lots. High-

speed highways. Sterile dead zones which

form gap tooth tears in the fabric of a town center. Large amounts of air and noise
pollution. Awful levels of visual Anywhere USA blight. Worsened safety for
pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users, that is.
And worst of all, because a person in a car consumes, on average, about 19 times as
much space as a person sitting in a chair, places designed for cars lose the comfortable,
compact, enclosed, charming, human-scaled, vibrancy-inducing spacing and place-
making that so many people love to experience.

As David Mohney once said, the first task of the urbanist is controlling size.

One consequence of this worsening quality of life that comes from widening a road to
improve conditions for cars: The quality of the public realm worsens to the point where
American society is noted for growing levels of retreating from the public realm and a
flight to the cocooning private realm.

Given this, road widening and the substantial increase in auto dependency that the
widening induces sends the quality of life of a community into a downward spiral. And
that, in my opinion, is toxic to the economic health of a community.
Note that road widening inherently creates increased auto dependency because big,
high-speed, happy car roads create what economists call a barrier effect. That is, big
and high-speed roads make it more difficult to travel by bicycle, walking or transit. So
wider roads recruit new motorists in a vicious, never-ending cycle of widening, more car
dependence, more congestion, more calls for widening, etc.

The end result?

Houston, Jacksonville, Detroit, Newark, Buffalo, Cleveland.

As Richard Florida powerfully argues in The Rise of the Creative Class, the centerpiece
of successful community economic development is recognizing that instead of following
the conventional model of drawing businesses by lowering business costs and relaxing
regulations, quality of life should be enhanced to attract and retain quality creative
class employees. It is not a coincidence that Florida describes this form of quality of life
as one which includes walkable, vibrant, 24/7 vibrancy (where the car is subservient to
the needs of people).

It is also no coincidence that Boulder, Colorado where I now live is ranked, over and
over again, as the city ranked first in a long list of quality of life measures. Therefore,
despite the fact that Boulder assesses relatively high costs on businesses, applies
relatively aggressive regulations on businesses (measures traditionally assumed to be
toxic to economic health), the Boulder economy is consistently quite healthy. Even in
times of national economic woes.

One awful tragedy for the State of Florida is that the 1985 Growth Management law
adopted by that state enshrined Community Design for Happy Cars by requiring that
future development be concurrent with adopted road standards. That is, new
development must not be allowed to degrade adopted community free-flowing
traffic standards. In other words, the state requires, under the rubric of growth
management, that all local governments must be designed to facilitate car travel (too
often doing so by widening a road). The apparent thinking is that free-flowing traffic is
a lynchpin for community quality of life. The be-all and end-all. In my opinion, nothing
can be further from the truth.

It is a law that locks communities into harming its quality of life.

Another telling piece of information about economics: About 100 years ago, households
spent approximately 1-2 percent of their income on transportation. Today, about 20-22
percent of the household budget goes to transportation. Transportation costs have, in
other words, been privatized, to the great detriment of the economics of households.

In sum, widening roads, drains dollars from a community as the purchase of car-based
goods and services (cars, oil, gas, car parts, etc.) largely leave the community, rather
than being recycled within the community. Because the car habitat and the people
habitat clash, quality of life is significantly degraded when the community is designed
to facilitate cars (by widening roads, most infamously). And that, as Richard Florida
clearly shows, undercuts future prospects for community economic health. Finally,
household expenses are severely undermined as the growing (and extremely costly) car
dependency leads to a declining ability to afford other household expenses.

The key is not so much to get rid of cars as to avoid overly pampering them (through
such things as underpriced [untolled] roads, free parking and subsidized gasoline) in the
design of our community. Doing so quickly leads to the car dominating and degrading
our world. Destroying our economic health and quality of life. Cars must be our slaves
rather than our masters. They should feel like intruders, rather than welcomed guests.
Only then will the future of a community be sustainable and high quality.

It is time to return to the tradition of designing our communities to make people happy,
not cars.

https://domz60.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/the-impact-of-road-widening-on-the-local-
economy/

Philippine transportation in the early years of 1900 is depending largely on trails,

waterways, earth roads, rail roads and partially gravelled roads. Proper roads or
highways in those times were merely a dream for Filipinos. The development of
roadways in our country was merely initiated by the time that the Americans stayed in
our mother land. The popular Macadam road type which originated from England was
merely introduced. Later-on gained wide acceptance because of the abundant supply of
stones and gravel. After World War II, the rehabilitation, construction and beautification
of roads and bridges were continued by the new independent Philippine government.
They money paid the Japanese government for the war damages and as well as
reparations. Other were grants from the government of the United States of America.

After almost five decades, highways and expressways were constructed through the
help of foreign banks, who approved loans and financial assistance. As a result of
improvement in the roadways the vehicles of different types started to flood the
roadways. The LTO reviled that there are about eighty thousand (80000) new vehicles
were added in their list every year. By this tremendous rising of vehicle occupying and
using the roadways, the government along side with other agencies, decided to make
an improvement started to name the national road as the Pan-Philippines Road or
some call it National Road of the Philippines and now ist name is Daang Maharlika
Road. It connects Laoag City in Luzon with Zamboanga City in Mindanao. It has a total
length of 3,517 km (2,185mi).

https://blablawriting.com/road-widening-of-daang-maharlika-essay
a b s t r a c t

This paper develops earlier conceptual frameworks and methods for analyzing the
indirect development effects of improved road accessibility. The creation of
economic opportunity and response to economic opportunity are the two
concepts used in the theoretical framework, while time-series data, a road acces-
sibility inventory, and a multi-criteria analysis were the methods used to
analyse the indirect effects among households and household rms. A
weakness of many impact studies is that they merely chartaggregate
economic development. The method employed here includes access to
resources by variousgroups and therefore enables the focus to shift from
mere aggregate economic development to also encompass equitable and
sustainable social development. The study focused on a rural Philippine shing
community, previously characterized by poor transport conditions and poor accessibility
to major mar-kets. It found that the benets of the road improvement were considerable
and beneted a great majority of the population in the shing community. In
addition to the extensive direct effects of the improved road, a number of
complementary factors led to substantial indirect effects. These included: abundance of
harvested resource in the community; a potential for technical innovations that
increased production and productivity; available investment to support this increased
production; abundant demand for this
increased production in the market region (the market
w i d e n e d i n s p a t i a l t e r m s a n d p r i c e s w e r e maintained).

2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

How additional transport capacity and transport improvementsinuence

the economies of societies
with both underdevelopeda n d d e v e l o p e d r o a d n e t w o r k s h a s l o n g b e e n d
e b a t e d ( Owen,1959), but recent research has brought additional knowledge con-
cerning the indirect development effects, both theoretical andempirical
(Lakshmanan and Chatterjee, 2005; Olsson, 2006; Riggand Wittayapak, 2007;
MacKinnon et al., 2008). Others have calledfor the consideration to include wider,
indirect, economic effects of road projects going beyond the effects captured by
costbeneta n a l y s i s ( C B A ) ( Linneker and Spence, 1996; Transport
Policy,2000; Vickerman, 2000; SOU, 2003; Banister and Berechman,2003;
Olsson, 2006). As argued by Linneker and Spence, while allmajor road projects are
subject to CBA, such analysis has a purelypre-
project focus. The wider development implications and notonly a projects
direct effects should be included in post-project evaluation on a more regular
basis.Inadequate transport infrastructure does restrict socioeco-nomic
development. This is especially the case in developing coun-tries where network
accessibility is low, roads connecting
localn e t w o r k s a r e o f t e n m i s s i n g o r i n p o o r c o n d i t i o n , v e h i c l e l o a d capa
city is low, and there are often severe trafc bottlenecks(Olsson, 2006; WBCSD,
2007). Under these circumstances (and incontrast with the
situation in countries with more developedtransport networks), transport costs
remain a substantial part of production
costs. Reducing transport costs therefore remains apriority issue (Limo and
Venables, 2001). Efciency gains in termsof time are particularly signicant in the case
of perishable goodss u c h
a s s h ( C h a n d r a a n d T h o m p s o n , 2 0 0 0 ; U N C TA D , 2 0 0 7 ).Furthermore,
under such conditions production is often inefcientand expensive, resources (physical
and human) are locked in, andcompetition is low. As a result, the catchment areas of
local marketare small and individual local markets are unlikely to merge intolarger
entities.To gain a better understanding of how road investments inu-
ence indirect development effects, the operational denition of accessibility
must be given local relevance (Olsson, 2006). Alteredaccessibility
between a resource region and its major marketregion may have substantial
implications for production, especiallyif the former is linked only by a single road and the
difference thatthe improved link makes to the transport costs, travel time
andseasonality is considerable. Likewise, the demand situation forthe
resource regions resource and how readily available the trans-port service is between
the resource region and the market region

0966-6923/$ - see front matter

Journal of Transport Geo

need to be accounted for, as they affect the response to these eco-nomic opportunities.

1.1. Aim and structure

This paper develops earlier conceptual frameworks and meth-ods for analyzing
the indirect development effects of improvedroad accessibility. The road project,
which is 63 km in length andforms a link in the Philippine arterial network, connects the
studyvillage (and the local municipal network in which it is located) with its
major markets. Direct effects in the form of improved roadaccessibilitywere gauged by
measuring changes in traveltime,
fueland maintenance costs, vehicle load capacity, seasonality anddelivery
delays. The indirect effects considered were changes
ininvestment, production system and productivity, employment,market area,
transport service supply, and competition, and howthese inuenced incomes. The rest
of the paper is structured as fol-lows. Section 2 outlines a basic theory about the
relationship be-
t w e e n t r a n s p o r t i n f r a s t r u c t u r e i n v e s t m e n t a n d e c o n o m i c develop
ment, and between the direct and indirect effects of suchinvestments. Furthermore, to
enhance our understanding of theserelationships, the theoretical framework used
here and the conceptof accessibility (i.e., how it is assessed and what implications
areattached to it) are outlined and discussed; in Section 4, the result-ing theoretically
informed understanding is confronted with thendings of an empirical study of rural
Philippine households andhousehold rms. Before this, Section 3 introduces
the methodsused and the data collected. The nal section offers some conclud-ing
remarks.

2. Transport infrastructure and development effects

2.1. The relationship between the direct and indirect effects of roadinvestment

The theory is that a road improvement will lead to

direct effects

in the form of reduced journey time, reduced costs and improvedreliability.

The benets from these effects will in particular bepassed on to previous road
users, passengers and companies. Theanticipation is further that these will lead to
benecial effects forthe communities affected by the road. The extent to which differ-ent
households and companies benet, relocate and/or are estab-
l i s h e d f r o m a n y g i v e n r o a d i m p r o v e m e n t w i l l d e p e n d o n a numbe
r of indirect effects which are in turn determined by con- text. In this study,
analysis of this context is framed in terms of cre-
a t i o n o f e c o n o m i c o p p o r t u n i t y a n d r e s p o n s e t o e c o n o m i c opportu
nity (see Section 2.2). Accordingly, the

indirect development effects

are changes that are stimulated by the direct effects; such

asc h a n g e s i n i n v e s t m e n t , p r o d u c t i o n a n d p r o d u c t i o n s y s t e m , employme
nt, transport service supply and demand, competition,etc. As to the relationship between
the direct and indirect effects;the direct effects enable the reorganization of
production, inu-ence land use and market area, allow improvement
to productivityand can stimulate investment and employment. Furthermore, in-creased
productivity through reduced trade costs enables econo-mies of scale, and as
interaction costs between regions decrease,trade can increase so that each region
can make better use of
itsadvantages and allocate resources more efciently. Eventually,overall
average productivity increases in all regions and rms caninvest in and adapt new
technology to larger production
capacities.A s t o t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n d i r e c t a n d i n d i r e c t e ff e c t s view
ed from a slightly different perspective, Garrison and Souley-rette (1996) theorize that
transport improvement stimulates andenables, rather than creates, innovations
(companion innovations)outside the transport sector, as it allows old things to
be done innew ways and new things to emerge. In turn, these
companioninnovations drive social and economic advances. That old
thingscan be done in new ways and new things can emerge implies, as pointed
out by Lakshmanan and Chatterjee (2005), that long-termchanges in scale,
composition, and location of economic activitiesinduced by transport investments are
more like development ef-fects than growth effects. Development implies a structural
shift,where a new social and technical environment or a new set of eco-nomic
opportunities emerges, and the pattern of relationships be-
t w e e n t h e e n v i r o n m e n t a n d s o c i a l a c t o r s c h a n g e s . L i k e w i s e , increased
competition among producers arising through reducedtransport costs will theoretically
benet the entire society throughlower trade costs and consumer prices, as well
as improved pro-
ductivity, technology transfer, and information ow. These arekey to the wider
(indirect) economic benets stemming from im-proved transport infrastructure (Peters,
2003). From an urbanrur-al/peripheral perspective, improved accessibility may benet
therural/peripheral through improving access to capital, know-how,and urban goods
and labour markets (Owen, 1987; Nijkamp andBlaas, 1994; Leinbach, 1995; Hoyle
and Knowles, 1998). However,notwithstanding the qualities associated with transport
infrastruc-ture, for economic development to occur, a change in the transports y s t e m
alone is not
s u f c i e n t ( Hirschman, 1958; Garrison andSouleyrette, 1996; Banister and B
erechman, 2003; MacKinnonet al., 2008). While an investment may have a
catalytic
function,facilitatingexpansionandinnovationinothersectorsbyconnectingtechnol
ogies andenablinginteractivities,the necessarynaturalandhuman resources must
be available. In an early attempt to formu-
l a t e a t h e o r y o f t r a n s p o r t a n d d e v e l o p m e n t ( s e e S e c t i o n 2.2),Wilson(1973) pointe
d out that the probability of success of a transporta-tion investment is dependent on the
existence of prior dynamismin the region. More recently Banister and Berechman
(2003) hastheorized that if there are no allocative externalities present in the
local economy, then all the benets resulting from an invest-ment project are conned to
travel or accessibility benets.

2.2. The creation of and response to economic opportunity

The real value of transport impact studies is to help identify thecircumstances under
which various social and economic changesoccur. Wilson (1973) has outlined a basic
framework (it has sincebeen developed by others, see Banister and Berechman, 2003),
thatassists in the identication of important aspects that might allow,or inhibit, social and
economic changes following from a particulartransport investment. Wilson states that
The variation of resultsin studies of transport and development may be explained by
dif-ferences in two main factors: the creation of economic opportunityand the response
to economic opportunity (Wilson, 1973, p. 208).The creation of economic
opportunity is dependent on: whetherthe resource in the resource region is in
actual, or clearly potential,demand in the market region; the magnitude of the difference
thatthe improved transport link makes to the transport costs, travel time,
seasonality, and vehicle load capacity of the connection be-tween the
resource region and the market region; how readilyavailable to the
resource producers is the transport service be-tween the resource region and
the market region? As to the re-
s p o n s e t o t h e e c o n o m i c o p p o r t u n i t y, s e v e r a l a s p e c t s m u s t b e taken
into consideration. First of all, is the local community in the resource region (or
outside investors) interested in harvestingthe resource? The direct effects and the
presence of allocativeexternalities may result in spatial relocation of activities.
Further,is the local community in the resource region (or outside
investors)c a p a b l e o f h a r v e s t i n g t h e r e s o u r c e ? T h e l e v e l o f c a p a b i l i t y i s
dependent on level of access to the resource, livelihood time bud-gets, available
technical knowledge and capital, and existing lawsand regulations.Finally, is harvesting
the resource likely to be prof-itable and are those prots likely to be greater than the
prot that

J. Olsson/Journal of Transport Geography 17 (2009) 476483

477

could be obtained from alternative sources of livelihood in the re-source region? As also
demonstrated in earlier studies (see Olsson,2006), by identifying access to resources by
various groups withinthe resource region, the framework allows focus to shift
fromaggregate economic development to equitable and sustainablesocial dev
elopment. The creation of economic opportunity andthe response to economic
opportunity are therefore the two con-
c e p t u a l f o u n d a t i o n s f o r a n a l y z i n g t h e i n d i r e c t e ff e c t s o f r o a d improvem
ent in the study.

2.3. Assessing accessibility

In the present study, accessibility is dened as the ease withwhich goods can
reach other places, measured in terms of time,cost, seasonality, and transport
services provided (cf., van de Walle,2002; Halden, 2003; Reneland, 2004). This
denition can be usedas an analytical tool to analyse the effects of improved
accessibil-ity. Seasonality refers to the periods during the year when
themovement of certain (optimum mode) or all vehicles on a road, or section
thereof, is hindered or even prevented entirely. The opti-mum mode varies according
to the type of load it carries. Move-
m e n t s c a n b e s e v e r e l y d i s r u p t e d b y w e a t h e r c o n d i t i o n s , especiall
y in environments characterized by severe weather condi-tions (e.g., monsoons).
As to transport services, the ease withwhich a place can be reached is low where
transport services arepoor in terms of departure choice, number of operators,
modalchoice, regularity, and affordability. Traditionally, reference hasbeen made to
physical infrastructure, while the transport servicesthat affect the mobility of users have
been largely ignored (IFRTD,2003). As noted by Moseley (1979), however, the rural
problem isnot primarily related to fare costs or time budget, but essentially towhether a
trip is possible to perform at all. My inclusion of trans-port services is also justied
by the opinion that a major accessibil-ity problem in peripheral areas is lack of choice,
with reference todestination, mode, route, frequency, reliability and access to differ-
ent levels of roads (e.g., village, municipal, provincial, national,trunk
roads). Vickerman (1997, 1998) argues that a measure of accessibility emphasizing
aspects of choice is more likely to repre-sent a genuine measure of economic welfare,
especially when ap-
plied to individual economic actors and/or regional economies,than will
simple measures of accessibility to a region. When the needs of different
economic sectors are considered, very differentaccessibility landscapes emerge
depending on these specic needs.

http://www.academia.edu/5449715/Improved_road_accessibility_and_indirect_develop
ment_effects_evidence_from_rural_Philippines