Frank Francois

“The reality is roads”

At least one national transp veteran is not being carried away by trendy anti-roads/smart growth talk. Frank Francois, retiring director of AASHTO (the state DOTs Washington lobby) said recently: “I think you have to stand back and take a look at modern America. We’ve got 260 million people living here and they are scattered across the metropolitan areas and beyond. We have to recognize that millions of people are living in single family houses, in subdivisions. You are not going to tear those houses down and move people into dense housing settlements in the central cities. The American people will not stand for that. The real question is, how do we deal with the lifestyle that Americans have chosen...

“Many years ago most employment centers were located in downtown areas... That is no longer true. Today employment centers are dispersed throughout the metropolitan areas. We now have more workers per household than in the 1950s, specifically more women. Almost every household now has two or three workers going to different jobs... We have done the same thing with shopping... the downtown shopping center now serves only daytime workers. It doesn’t meet the needs of those working in the suburbs. We have not built a transp system to deal with the mobility needs of the 1990s. The highway system that was designed in the 1930s through the 1950s could not take into account the huge explosion in mobility requirements that we now have. That leads to the congestion problems we have today. Some say, let’s use transit to solve this problem. I don’t believe this is possible in most metropolitan areas. Yes there are some circumstances in which transit can clearly help (Portland)... But the reality is in most areas you are talking about roads.” (TQ Interview, Eno Transportation Quarterly Spring 1999 Vol 53 No 2 p 83)