Source: Commentary
When we think of livability, Switzerland readily comes to mind. We might even recognize that its high standard of living is partially due to its high-quality transport system. But what is less known is how its government reorganized to build the country’s current transport system and plan for its future. A recent trip to Switzerland, convened by Embassy of Switzerland in Washington, D.C., offered an opportunity to observe firsthand how the country has embedded innovative and strategic thinking at the heart of decision-making at the national and local level for the execution of sustainable transport.
A visit to the Federal Ministry of Transport was just the start of our lesson in how the Swiss organize space to reflect social, environmental, and economic priorities. The transport ministry is actually housed with several other government functions—energy, environment, and communication1. The placement of these functions together—both within the government organizational structure and their physical co-location in the same building—alludes to an innate understanding of their interconnectedness and their impact on the organization of space. Like much of the developed world, on-road transport is a major percentage of carbon emissions for Switzerland where combustion of transport fuels accounts for 44 percent of carbon emissions2. Transport emissions across Switzerland are growing, not decreasing. Population growth and the high standard of living create high demands on land uses, rendering the balancing act of natural resources and environmental concerns against mobility needs that much more critical. Climate change and carbon reduction targets drive timeframes for meeting energy, environment, and transport goals.
The need to break down the silos between the government functions and deal with their impact on space is neatly encapsulated by the Swiss Department of Spatial Development, which defines spatial planning as “the specific tackling of all political problems that affect the living space.”3 Though invisible to most people, policies nearly always take on a spatial expression. For example, urban street design in the U.S. is strongly influenced by transportation policy that favors highways that connect regions and cities. One major consequence of this inappropriately applied context is a reliance on a rating system called “level of service” that values the throughput of cars more highly than the movement of people. Though it does not dictate actual design, “level of service” in effect bars street design that would slow down the speed of cars and make an urban street more transit-friendly, walkable, and bikeable, thereby reducing demand for private vehicle use in denser areas.
Having now traveled through several towns and cities of Switzerland, and taken trams, rail, buses, bicycles, and boats to travel from one place to the next, the relationships that transport has to the economy, environment, and energy are clear. They were well illustrated by the design of transport at all different scales—the city streets, the inter-city rail systems, and even the Gotthard Base Tunnel. For example, this is a typical street in the center of Zurich.
IMGXYZ9027IMGZYX
Policies on this little block loom large. The lack of curbs, the wide sidewalks, a sign for bicycles, and well-protected greenery send a clear signal about social priorities. People cross the street freely—even mid-block if their fancy strikes them—as the cars must watch for pedestrians. Sidewalk widths, street trees, parking, the street design guidelines—all of these physical design elements are guided by policy. To dive into these details, the Zurich Department of Planning was guided by a larger policy goal: to reduce private vehicle use in the city. Each design detail dovetails with larger environmental impact and energy consumption concerns. Social and health benefits hover as secondary benefits. Additional policies support the design, including laws against the defacement of trees and littering as well as for injuring pedestrians and cyclists. A network of streets like this winds its way throughout Zurich, reinforcing the message that this single block is the rule, not the exception.
A Swiss-U.S. Comparison
Although Switzerland is a much smaller country in land mass—it’s about half the size of Maine with the population of San Francisco Bay Area region—its federalist structure and strong local canton and commune representation are similar to the governance structure of the United States. Its direct democracy model means that the Swiss vote on new initiatives by referendum, something that nearly half of U.S. states also allow.
Switzerland is demographically more homogenous than the United States in spite of its multilingual culture and has tighter controls on immigration. It also provides a higher standard of living, has a higher median income, has a larger portion of the population qualifying as middle class, and provides a wide social safety net to the vulnerable. Switzerland, like the United States, is a net importer of oil but it has one of the highest taxes on gasoline in the world and also taxes oil imports.
In spite of these differences, there are a few lessons from the Swiss approach to transportation, particularly in its ideological foundation and institutional structure that could find application in the U.S. context, particularly for regions that have comparable populations, transportation needs, and networks of towns and cities such as the San Francisco Bay Area region.
Lesson One: Mobility Problems are Solvable and Not Intractable
It is common to think of the design of a street, and therefore its level of performance, as fixed. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Even on a broader scale, congestion, a lack of transportation funding, population growth and land use demands, and conflict between local and national needs have been experienced by other developed countries, including Switzerland. But there has to be strong political leadership and public support to steer a different course.
The Swiss have a history of voting for long-term projects, as they did for the New Rail Link through the Alps in 1992 and the Public Transportation Fund in 1998, both of which passed with more than 60 percent of the vote. Through that vote, citizens overturned the very projects that created the transportation problems decades earlier. For example, although the canton of Geneva possessed one of the densest tramway networks in Europe in 1925, the entire system was dismantled in the 1950s to make room for automobiles. Today the city has returned to an environment that is less car-dependent and offers a network of buses, trolleys, and motor coaches.
Lesson Two: Governmental Policies and Structures Can Be Reorganized to Reflect a Nation’s Changing Transportation Needs
Swiss policy frameworks—such as the integration of transport, energy, environment, and communications—were not always conceived out of foresight. For example, Swiss regional policy was finally articulated as national legislation after years of attempted coordination and conflict between communes and cantons. Today, Switzerland’s spatial planning policy coordinates land use, transportation, environment, and energy across communes, cantons, regions, and agglomerations, all of which must also abide by federal benchmarks. Recognizing the varied local needs and then forging a policy that legitimizes those local needs is a form of ingenuity. Though practical results can vary across the region, the ideological foundation for coordination is strong.
Lesson Three: Value Ingenuity and Apply It
Invention and innovation are hallmarks of American culture and history and it is time for the country to return to that tradition in transportation. In fact, the United States was originally ahead of the Swiss in the deployment of public transport in many ways. The United States had the first national rail system and the first subways nearly one hundred years ahead of the Swiss. Although street cars are rarely used today, the United States deployed this system thirty years before the Swiss. Even the cog rail, widely used in the Alps and a critical link for the tourism industry, was first built in New Hampshire, and based on their experiences in the United States, Swiss officials adopted it for the Alps. Though there might be a visceral reaction to some transportation solutions by castigating it as “not American,” this ignores America’s traditional strengths.
Continued Challenges, Many Strategies
It is easy to point to Zurich, and Switzerland more widely, as a perfect model of sustainable transport. But to be fair, the Swiss picture is not always as rosy as it might appear. At a national level, the Swiss fell short of meeting its 2010 target to reduce transport emissions by 8 percent compared to 1990 baselines,4 even with its many voluntary climate mitigation strategies.5 Part of this might be due to the autonomy of the cantons, strong local planning policies, and the variations in regional geography, demographics, cross border challenges, and distribution of power. For example, it has been difficult to export the highly successful sustainable transport planning model of Zurich, Bern, and other German-Swiss metropolitan regions to Geneva and other Franco-Swiss regions.6 However, in order to successfully mitigate climate change, normative action is required and as a nation, the Swiss are in the lead in transport-related carbon reductions. As such, Switzerland’s national targets enabled actors at all levels to carry out multiple planning and market strategies to meet sustainable transport goals. Even though transport carbon has increased slightly, carbon emission per capita has decreased slightly.7 This suggests that greater progress has to be made on all strategies across the board—and the United States needs to catch up fast.
Conclusion
In the United States, there is a significant opportunity to transform the transportation system with a new federal program and it is likely that there will be greater devolution of federal oversight to states and localities. New governance models and revenue mechanisms to implement low-carbon transport will be needed. There are proposals from the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate on the table. While March 31, 2012 marks the deadline for the current transportation bill, passage of any transportation bill is not anticipated to take place until 2013, and a truly transformative bill will require a restructuring of the state-oriented structure and new revenue. Until then, politicians will need public support to truly transform outdated polices to ones that can serve the needs of the twenty-first century. With the disconnect between U.S. climate policy, energy policy, and now the delay of a transformative transportation bill, the United States should consider lessons from Switzerland and elsewhere to chart a different course for the nation’s transportation future. Tomorrow’s cities and streets must reflect the interconnectedness of the economy, energy, and environment to propel progress that is already taking place on the ground.
1. The Communications Department’s role in this ministry is to regulate television and radio.
2. Swiss Agency for Environment, Forest, and Landscape, accessed December 7, 2011: http://www.bafu.admin.ch/umwelt/indikatoren/08557/08561/index.html?lang=en
3. Federal Department for Spatial Development (ARE)
4. Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forest, and Landscape (SAFEL) accessed December 7, 2011: http://www.bafu.admin.ch/umwelt/indikatoren/08557/08561/index.html?lang=en. Interestingly, Switzerland has been able to more than meet its targets in terms of reducing carbon from oil for heating and industry.
5. Examples include the Climate Penny Fund which placed a .1 cent tax on every one-liter import of oil with the revenue going toward sustainable transport projects and carbon trading; fuel economy standards and agreements with automobile manufacturers; the creation of integrated land-use and transportation planning authorities; and a carbon tax. The Swiss carbon tax does not apply to transport fuels, wood, or biomass and its revenues are recycled back to consumers and businesses. Switzerland is currently in discussions with the EU to integrate their respective schemes. Sources: OECD International Energy Agency and Switzerland’s Federal Office of the Environment (OFEV).
6. Gallez, Caroline, Vincent Kaufmann, Hanja Maksim, Mariane Thebert, and Christophe Guerrinha, “Coordinating transport and urban planning: from ideologies to local realities,” forthcoming 2012 article in European Planning Review.
7. United Nations Millenium Development Goals Indicators based on United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change data, http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx accessed December 13, 2011.