Comparing Modal Splits - Stuttgart and Minneapolis- Saint Paul

It's extraordinary how much regulation and planning Germans put up with compared to Americans, but evidently it pays off. For instance, I can get everywhere I want to go with clean, fast light rail public transit, and yet the entire metropolitan area has 2.7 million people living in it, which is halfway between metro Portland, OR (2.1 million) and metro area Minneapolis-St Paul (3.3 million).

Travel breakdown

To put this into perspective, on average about 4.6% of the MSP population commutes by public transit and 88.5% by car (of which 10% car pool). Less than 3% bike or walk. According to the Stuttgart Regionalverkehrsplan (regional transportation plan), here 58% commute by car and 12.9% by public transport. About 29% of commuters bike or walk! In other words even though it's a smaller city, its transportation system is extensive, fast and reliable, and new land development is channeled along train lines. In MSP, the opposite is true: there is a lot of unguided sprawl and a sub-par public transit system, mainly composed of bus lines (which get stuck in traffic and make frequent stops).

A radial city

The following map shows the development axes along which most of the Stuttgart Region's new development is directed. Existing towns are shown in pink, and believe it or not, development takes up only 20% of the total acreage of the region (click on the image to enlarge it). The black lines represent the axes along which infrastructure is bundled: train lines, gas pipelines, electricity, water, etc. The region is planned comprehensively based on this basic premise. In order to keep open space for agriculture and nature, they acknowledge the necessity to prevent greenfield development through very heavy handed regulations ranging from restrictive zoning to targeted subsidies. I will elaborate on those methods in later posts.

It is important to note that I am talking about metropolitan areas, which include suburbs. The stats are very different for the cities proper, but the reality is that the population of most cities is increasingly located outside of the city limits, and to leave out their footprint is to ignore a large chunk of the population.