About John Landis (Edit profile)

John Landis is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley (jlandis@berkeley.edu).

Dispatch from Sydney: Transport in the Land of Oz

John Landis

Australia—or Oz as it is colloquially known—is instantly recognizable to visiting Americans, even those like myself who had never been there before. As in the US, most of Australia’s population lives in metropolitan areas within twenty miles of the coast. A majority of Australians live in suburban communities, and single-family homes are the dominant housing form. Australia’s home ownership rate stands at seventy percent, slightly above the US rate.

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Dispatch from London

John Landis

Upon arriving in London (or any other major English city), the first thing an American notices is how few SUVs, pickup trucks, and full-sized minivans are on the roads. This is partly because of gasoline’s high price, currently about $5.80 per US gallon, and partly because English roads and parking spaces are so narrow. However, things do seem to be changing. Sales of SUVs are rising, particularly among suburbanites with children, as are sales of seven-passenger multi-purpose vehicles, which are slightly smaller versions of American minivans.

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Middle Age Sprawl: BART and Urban Development

John Landis and Robert Cervero

BART was the first American rail rapid transit system to be built in modern times, and its arrival was greeted with worldwide attention. BART is famous. Its fame is attached to its favorable image as the answer to the problems of the modern American metropolis. And the extent to which it has succeeded, or failed, to live up to expectations is an important lesson for other cities wanting to emulate it.

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Simulating Highway and Transit Effects

John Landis

Transportation investments and land developments are opposite sides of the same coin. Urban historians and planners have long recognized the power of highway and transit investments to shape metropolitan development patterns. Likewise, transportation planners have long realized the importance of development densities and patterns in shaping the demand for transportation facilities and services. While these relationships may be clear in hindsight, they’re usually cryptic in foresight.

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The Transportation-Land Use Connection Still Matters

Robert Cervero

and John Landis

In the Spring 1995 issue of ACCESS, Genevieve Giuliano contends there is a weakening connection between' urban land uses and transportation. She therefore finds little justification for public initiatives such as programs to balance jobs and housing and investments in rail transit. She argues that because urban areas in the United States are already so accessible, settlement patterns so well-established, and maintenance of privacy so important, transportation plays an ever-decreasing role in the locational decisions of households and businesses. Her essay infers that the land use-transportation connection is now too weak to matter in terms of public policy.

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A New Tool for Land Use and Transportation Planning

John Landis

Transportation planners have traditionally considered land use policy to be outside their purview and have generally accepted existing (or proposed) land use policies and patterns as a given. That attitude changed, however, with the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. For the first time, the law required planners to explicitly consider the effects of alternative land use policies on local land use patterns and thus on transportation system performance.

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