I entered this essay into a contest held by , which is currently diving into housing policy, work you should definitely check out. My entry did not make the cut and expands on themes from this piece, but I like how it turned out and so offer it to you as post-Thanksgiving gravy. I hope my American (and Canadian) readers enjoyed the holiday, which is my favorite. It celebrates gratitude, family, good food, and, I recently realized, abundance!

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Parking reform is the most credible answer to the question of what single pro-housing reform is most effective and worthy of pursuing before others. That may seem unoriginal, but the change’s transformative potential is easy to underestimate. It will reenable traditional American land use and urban form by not only unlocking far more dense housing but also reducing car dependency.

Aggressively prioritizing parking reform can also be a political innovation, a bridge that housing supply advocates can use to win over growth-skeptical, negative-sum mindset environmentalists who despise cars and pavement. Ending the housing shortage will require shifting some housing production from economically inefficient, fiscally shaky sprawl to denser and infill development (the Sunbelt is running out of land). Parking reform can unite an overwhelmingly diverse coalition and direct it toward this tangible, credible vision of housing abundance.

Eliminating minimum parking requirements has the virtue of being unassuming. Parking does break people’s brains, no question. Yet somehow, parking rules remain mostly obscure, even to hardened NIMBYs. Ending single-family zoning draws far more vitriol. And when minimum parking requirements do gain attention, they are self-evidently absurd and easy to shrug off.

A YIMBY can casually tell a normie asking about parking rules, ‘Oh, well, local government forces businesses and apartments and all kinds of buildings to have way more parking spots than people actually want or need. It makes housing more expensive and wastes land. That’s why supermarkets and big box stores have those giant, half-empty parking lots. Weird, right?’

Parking reform’s real-world tractability is almost boring. The Parking Reform Network reports that 113 jurisdictions in eight countries have eliminated all minimum parking requirements. They range widely from large Toronto to fractious San Francisco to Minneapolis and St. Paul, twin success stories that we will discuss below. This embarrassment of victories should not be taken as evidence that ending parking mandates is an incremental change. It is more like a glitch in the matrix. Can you keep a secret? Parking reform is radical.

Parking mandates are a binding constraint on housing. They make residential developments much smaller or entirely infeasible. Deregulating parking is by itself sufficient to meaningfully increase home construction and reduce housing costs. That is true of few other discrete land use regulations. Minimum lot sizes come to mind, but even incrementally relaxing them will be a much taller order politically. Parking reform has an outstanding juice-to-squeeze ratio.

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and every type of housing development is particularly burdened by minimum parking requirements. They impose huge costs on large developments with many units (or bedrooms, which is how many suburbs tally parking ratios, disproportionately harming families with kids). They often cripple the financial case for missing middle housing, such as multiplexes and small apartment buildings (up to about two dozen units). They can kneecap ADUs too. Getting rid of parking rules has broad benefits.

A recent University of Denver study (using a UC Berkeley Terner Center model) estimated that parking reform would increase housing production by an average of almost 8% across various scenarios. That champagne-worthy effect size is backed up by real-world development activity.

Economist Zakary Yudhishthu found that after Minneapolis eliminated parking requirements, average parking spaces per unit in new apartment buildings dropped from about 1 to about 0.7. If we conservatively assume that each spot in a parking structure costs $30,000 to build, that alters the financial contours of a residential project. After the reform, the ratio between new developments’ parking spaces and residential units varied much more, showing that developers took advantage of it. Lower construction cost has translated directly into residential projects including many additional units. And recent years have seen rents in Minneapolis fall.

Parking reform is also existentially necessary. Residential density is integral to making efficient use of expensive urban land and thus letting regular people afford to live in opportunity-rich metro areas. Heavy dependence on cars does not fit this economic reality because personal vehicles take up lots of space — what urbanists call “the geometry problem.” There is no silver bullet for growing beyond car dependency in America, but parking policy might be the most powerful driver of VMT (vehicle miles traveled), more than density or transit access.

“Does TOD Need the T?” asked a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Planning Association. (That is, does intense transit-oriented development need transit to succeed?) Author Daniel Chatman concluded: not really. “Auto ownership, commuting, and grocery trip frequency were substantially lower among households living in new housing near rail stations … but rail access does little to explain this fact,” stated Chatman. “Housing type and tenure, local and subregional density, bus service, and particularly … parking availability, play a much more important role.” Parking mattered more for driving than living near a train station!

UC Berkeley scholar Robert Cervero’s well-known “5 Ds” of VMT framework tells a similar story. His analysis of several U.S. studies shows that job accessibility by car alters driving much more (by a coefficient of -0.20) than distance to transit (-0.05) or even household and population density (-0.04). Job accessibility by car is, in plain English: How easily can I park at work?

Driving is not evil. It is incredibly convenient and reflects our country’s wealth. I am a suburban dad of multiple young kids. I have zero desire to try to live without a car. If people want to drive to work and park, that is fine; I stopped commuting on my city’s subway in the depths of its unreliability. The problem is when driving becomes the only way to complete basic tasks like buying groceries or reaching a place where you can go for a safe, pleasant walk outside, like a regular human being. Parking mandates subsidize sprawl, traffic, and paving the earth.

People concerned about those issues often view development and new housing as inherently destructive. Housing advocates can use parking reform to find common ground with them, assembling a coalition that is expansive even by the YIMBY movement’s big tent standards.

The core YIMBY coalition of dedicated housing advocates, social and racial justice advocates, and pro-growth environmentalists has proven effective. On paper, parking reform adds in growth-skeptical environmentalists, people who just plain hate cars, transit advocates, cycling advocates, street safety advocates, and crusaders against air pollution and water runoff. Some of these folks may already be allies, but this issue gives them all skin in the game. Activists with an oppositional agenda might, in collaborating with positive-sum housing advocates, realize that building dense housing and using land more efficiently is the key to advancing their own goals, and that growth is an affirmative good. Such partnership might help traditional smart growth advocates see that rural ADUs and multiplexes away from train stations and even high-rises without robust transit access actually promote sustainability.

There are three ways to defeat an adversary: Destroy, overpower, or convert. Though many have forgotten, destroying political opponents is incompatible with a free, stable society. We will inevitably have to overpower some NIMBYs. Parking reform has rare potential to convert. Disciplined leaders can use it to win allies and secure their support for other housing reforms.

My argument’s final virtue is that extreme versions of it are still entirely reasonable. The optimal minimum parking requirement is zero. There is no golden parking ratio. Donald Shoup, the godfather of parking reform, passed away in 2025. He often said, “I’m a bottom feeder, but there’s a lot of food down there.” The good professor was too modest. He knew that he had found gold. In his spirit, for he was persistent, I will ask a second time … can you keep a secret?

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Thanks to my 1,448 subscribers, especially my 17 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I founded the grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and live in Alexandria near DC.

I have a guest post in my friend ’s new blog called Factory Seconds, link below. Andrew is a housing policy analyst and car maintenance enthusiast born and raised in Michigan. He previously worked as a land use attorney and automotive journalist. I am genuinely excited to see what he writes about next, you should subscribe!

Factory Seconds

Some New Cars Are Still Bad

Hello, I am Andrew’s friend Luca Gattoni-Celli, founder emeritus of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, a grassroots housing advocacy organization. I want to tell a story about my experience with cars that seemed fitting…

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9 months ago · 2 likes · Luca Gattoni-Celli

The topic is bad cars, specifically minivans, including three Chrysler vehicles that raised increasingly dire questions about the company. One van made me seasick and another had lurching, unnerving acceleration:

The Voyager’s big problem was its drivetrain calibration. Depress the gas pedal a little: nothing. Depress it a little more, and the engine would surge into action. Let off the accelerator, and the car would continue to surge forward, almost seeming to accelerate. This behavior went beyond the sometimes quirky differences between cars that the average driver can reasonably adjust to. The combined effect was faint concern of accidentally lurching into another vehicle. However theoretical that fear was, I would not have been surprised at all if it had happened.

Thanks to my new paid subscriber! I have a couple of vivid essay ideas. I am not sure when I will have a good opportunity to write again, but please know that I want to publish a new piece here on Cornerstone soon. Reader suggestions always welcome!

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Today is my eighth wedding anniversary, so best wishes to all of my married readers!

Thanks to my 1,343 subscribers, especially my 18 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I founded the grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and live in Alexandria near DC.

A fraught topic among urbanists is when to separate cars and pedestrians. Obviously cars should not drive on the sidewalk and kids should not play on the side of a highway, but there is plenty of gray area to argue about. I have found that strident U.S. urbanists, with a mindset carefully eschewing normie assumptions, aggressively argue for aggressively separating vehicles from pedestrians. As in my piece on the merits of front-facing townhouse garages, I wish to challenge that orthodoxy, inspired by my children and a parade our family got to participate in through Old Town, Alexandria.

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My oldest kids just turned 6 and 4 years old. They are avid bike riders and need at least one, ideally two sessions of intense outdoor play for their behavior to be manageable, especially at bedtime. A blessing of living in a townhouse community is having many neighbors with kids. Our street is isolated from car traffic, so kids tend to funnel there, plus a little playground draws families from a surprisingly large radius.

In the past couple of months our kids and their friends began using sidewalk chalk to turn the street near our house into “Game Central” — a kaleidoscope of elaborate variations on hopscotch with discrete sections that only one kid might understand. They also have a strong current interest in Stomp Rockets, launching foam darts into the street, ballistically asserting even greater dominion over the physical space.

This development has had a subtle but powerful effect on our street. Traffic was already quite slow but is even more careful now, especially when there is a critical mass of kids. The chalk drawings last a few days, signaling children’s late afternoon congregations. Kids are like an excited gas, filling any space available to them. Relaxing our standard rule against our kids playing in the street on foot has been totally natural. Our third child just started walking and we even let her venture into the street, monitoring her closely. There are many adults around watching for cars, and the laid back atmosphere means the kids are happier and we are freer to engage each other in real conversation. Everyone smiles, talks, and laughs more than usual.

The green figure in the first photo wearing a scarf is our ‘caution, kids playing’ sign which we call Nick. Every time I see a Nick or similar cautionary marker while driving around, warning of children at play in a place where cars pose a threat, I get a feeling that the sign could use some backup, or safer street design.

The lesson I take away from “Game Central” is that we can shift the balance of power in public spaces toward children and pedestrians with something as simple as chalk drawings. (Art on crosswalks is supposed to prevent drivers from hitting pedestrians.) It is pretty clear to me that everyone from the children to the drivers are better off from sharing space and being made conscious of each other’s presence. The mingling has a humanizing effect on everyone. Not to mention the extra land that would be paved for alleys to serve rear-facing garages, or the fact that we would see our neighbors so much less if we drove from and to our homes in isolation.

A street is a destination; it should be for the people who live, work, or otherwise spend time there. Many places should be car-free, obviously, but because cars are essential to modern life and take up so much space, if you try to separate them completely from pedestrians you are likely to end up limiting the places where, for example, children can safely play. Shared spaces that cue drivers to be careful are simply more scalable and practical, while feeding into a culture of safety.

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The streets in Tokyo and Dutch suburbs operate on these principles of cars as guests. Cars move slowly and extremely deliberately while people walk freely without having to watch out for speeding drivers. It is all very safe and rather pleasant.

Parading Through the Streetscape

A few weeks after our third child was born we walked in our city’s Christmas parade at the invitation of the Alexandria Library Foundation. While waiting for the parade to start, we spotted old streetcar tracks, peeking out like a ghost of Christmas past.

My wife and kids visit our local library often and are friendly with the children’s librarian, who asked her about the parade. I relished this opportunity after hearing so many times during zoning fights that YIMBYs are not real community members.

As we marched through our city’s colonial-era downtown, called Old Town, the architecture of the historical buildings seemed to take on new life as I enjoyed them from the middle of the street. Facades somehow made more sense, and the structures with more intricate detail stuck out even more. NIMBYs think they are defending this traditional form of development, not threatening it with stagnation and decay.

Many of the buildings were constructed when people navigated streets by foot or horse-drawn carriage. The streetscape was meant to be looked at and enjoyed. If you are driving it almost feels like a distraction. The streets were for people.

I hope we will find ways to make streets more for people, and that doing so restores our sense of connection to the places where we spend our lives, and to each other. More desire for timeless beauty, more friendships … maybe even more chalk drawings.

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Thanks to my 995 subscribers, especially my 15 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I founded the grassroots pro-housing organization YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and live in Alexandria near DC.

750 subscribers! Wow, thank you so much for your readership.

An urbanist YouTuber friend alerted me to this video by Steffen Berr, an American traffic engineer living and working in the Netherlands. He notes elsewhere that he does not consider himself an urbanist, which does not stop him from questioning common street design practices. He argues that if intersections are close together, such as in an urban street network, those intersections’ capacity is inherently limited and they cannot service more than one lane of car traffic in each direction. If true, that carries significant implications. When I first watched it, I immediately wondered, should we have roundabouts and road diets everywhere except for highways?

I asked Steffen about my theory, and he responded: “I already made a video about roundabouts,” which I embed at the end of this post. “Roundabouts are a good way to safely handle the intersection of two lane flow roads, but they don’t make much sense for low traffic street-to-street intersections since speed nor intensity of traffic is high, which is where a roundabout excels.” Side streets aside, we are most interested in the large share of urban roads that, as his video up top persuasively argues, are overbuilt.

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I use the term urban to refer to everything from city centers to suburbs, and am assuming single-lane roundabouts. I am not a traffic engineer. I might be flat-out wrong here; if so, I hope someone will correct me. But the implications struck me like lightning. We should start by breaking down Steffen’s argument.

He asserts that a single traffic lane can move up to 1,800 cars per hour. This figure might be a bit conservative: 2,000 seems to be a common estimate for arterial roads, and I can even find 2,500 from Googling, but that starts shifting into the context of highways, not urban surface streets. Even if that figure is too low, Steffen and his team did some observational research finding that large intersections on a busy arterial road, with a dedicated right turn lane and one or two left turn lanes, had a peak hourly throughput of around 1,800 vehicles.

As it happens, this U.S. DOT guide I found says a single-lane roundabout can handle 1,800 vehicles per hour! The validation is nice, but roundabouts came to my mind for a few reasons: They are pretty well known to have a higher capacity than traditional four-way intersections. They also have fewer conflict points …

… which contributes to them being much safer than a four-way signalized intersection, causing fewer collisions and dramatically fewer injuries and deaths. Roundabouts seem like a case of safety through danger, because they require drivers to pay close attention, navigate uncertainty (‘Which way is that other car going?’), and make decisions on the move.

Key to Steffen’s argument is that urban traffic is stop-and-go. Cars spend lots of time waiting at signalized intersections, which means a lot of idling and extra air pollution, a big urbanist pet peeve of mine. Turn lanes help move things along, but each intersection’s throughput is highly limited, so a second or third travel lane does not add capacity to the system. Instead, it seems to me that any additional lane ends up serving as very short-term private vehicle storage. What do we naturally compare gridlock to? A parking lot. And in a sense, it is, especially in an urban setting where lines of cars are intentionally brought to a stop, at signalized intersections.

Roundabouts have the virtue of flow. Cars stop only as needed to avoid a collision. Pedestrians can cross without waiting for a signal, one slow-moving lane at a time. For drivers, yielding to a pedestrian is hopefully as natural as yielding to a car.

The main disadvantage of roundabouts is that they take up more space than a compact four-way intersection with one lane in each direction. To me, the rub is that many urban intersections in these United States are clearly large enough to fit a roundabout. As Steffen notes, and anyone can see, many urban streets and intersections have two or three travel lanes each way, some expanding to four or more with turn lanes. If Steffen is right about intersection throughput, unless I am missing something, all of that can be replaced by roundabouts serving one lane in each direction. A neighborhood street might not need any signage, much less a roundabout, but they are not a problem. It is fine if an intersection is so space-restricted that stop signs are the only option (or, as Not Just Bikes’ Jason Slaughter argues, yield signs, because he thinks stop signs are dangerous and inefficient). Or maybe an intersection of quiet neighborhood streets does not need any signage or extra stuff. With that said, many intersections are big enough for a roundabout!

What about car travel lanes? I see two issues to address: lane number and street design. As discussed, the usable number of travel lanes in each direction in an urban setting seems (euphorically?) straightforward: One. So, what is to be done with any additional lanes?

The Congress for a New Urbanism (which yes, as the name implies, was created by architects) documents that Carmel, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis that has achieved niche Internet fame for embracing roundabouts, has been able to reduce travel lanes, cutting down one road from five to two lanes with virtually the same travel time as before.

(I forgot how corny network TV news can be. I like a good pun, but that was painful.)

Road diet is the common term for such changes, which is unfortunate due to the word’s connotation of sacrifice (and ineffectiveness). I live near Seminary Road which was converted a few years ago from four bleak car lanes with sidewalks no normal person would want to use to one lane each way with semi-protected bike lanes, shrubbery, and sometimes a middle left turn lane (that seems like a good feature to consider on a road with many driveways). It is all rather nice. The road is safer for drivers and everyone else, without any discernible added traffic congestion. To be completely clear, traffic is simply not a problem there, even at rush hour.

The Seminary Road diet was extraordinarily controversial. The public debate literally traumatized some members of my city’s planning staff. I am glad it predated my involvement in local civic life. This unfortunately suggests a potential flaw in my grand plan, a foe I know all too well: NIMBYs. (My wife wanted a colon here to be appropriately dramatic. “You’re being dramatic! A foe! You’re calling them a foe!”)

One strategy would be for a city to implement roundabouts first. Reduce two lanes down to one at the intersections with some paint or whatever, it does not have to cost much. Then perform a traffic study to assess impact and discover that, well, would you look at that, we can go down to one travel lane each way because congestion has fallen so much. Also, do not make these changes a bigger deal than they have to be. Seeking out public input can become a self-imposed wild goose chase, except there is more than one goose, the geese are angry, and they are chasing you.

Another issue is that many cities’ roads are controlled by state DOTs — about as urbanist as the aliens from Independence Day. Fighter jets might be a solution here too, but that would require a separate essay.

DOTs’ ethos of level of service (vehicular throughput) über alles brings us to our final consideration, street design. I can only generalize, but if you execute a successful airstrike convince your state DOT by cultivating a new generation of engineers to infiltrate its staff through moral suasion to build roundabouts and diet the roads, extra travel lanes become a playground for urbanist goodies. Bike lanes! Street trees!

A final thought is that because roundabouts actually move cars more efficiently, they can have the effect of increasing traffic, including in a city. Do not take my word for it:

So the details of street design become even more important to ensuring safe vehicle travel speeds. Landscaping or simply taking the opportunity to make travel lanes narrower than highway lanes might be critical to making it all work.

If urban streets are systemically overbuilt, we have a chance to leave drivers and everyone else in our cities better off. Policy is all about trade-offs. But that assumes there is not a nice crisp dollar bill in the middle of the street, waiting to be picked up.

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I will give Steffen the last word, on roundabouts. He notes a crucial distinction between local destinations, local travel, and longer distance travel — in short, streets, roads, and highways — and how to design the intersections between them.

Thanks to my 750 subscribers, especially my 12 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

My business partner prefers phone calls. He lives in Manhattan and I fully believe him because almost every time we speak, the background noise from cars and trucks is incredible. The baseline roar is punctuated by blaring horns that deafeningly echo through the high-rise canyons.

I am part of the problem. On at least two occasions I have driven into Manhattan. My wife finds it extremely stressful, though part of me enjoys the challenge of constantly tracking and responding to bogeys in all directions. Most recently, about 2 years ago, my family plunged into gridlock on a Sunday to secure a free curbside parking spot near Madison Square Gardens. I paid for this sin by enduring the protestations of our then-infant son, which were so dramatic that I resolved it would be the last time we drove into Manhattan. Around this time I was learning about air pollution. I could practically feel and see the particles of all sizes swirling around us.

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Speaking to me midday Monday from his apartment’s home office, traffic and horns constantly intruding, my business partner bemoaned New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent decision to unilaterally cancel implementation of a hard-won congestion pricing system for Manhattan. He has a pet theory that car horns cause at least one excess heart attack in Manhattan each year (which seems obviously correct). He mentioned laws against excessive honking, which are clearly not working. My friend posited that two groups abuse their horns the most: drivers of heavy duty commercial trucks, like 18 wheelers and refrigerated box trucks, and yellow cabs.

As I told him, speaking on the phone with my business partner is a categorically different experience from my telephonic conversations with anyone else because of the noise. Like him, I am sensitive to sound and know for sure that it dramatically shapes our experience of daily life. Noise was actually a big disadvantage of commuting by Metrorail, which I eventually abandoned before the pandemic because service had gotten unreliable. New York’s Subway is even louder.

So transit faces its own questions about noise, and the particles swirling in stations underground. But those problems are mostly confined to transit users, whereas drivers in Manhattan impose huge negative externalities on millions of people. A cleaner, quieter Subway seems way more achievable than a cleaner, quieter taxi. Cars are inherently loud, dirty, and, more than anything else, waste space. If I ever drive into Manhattan again, it will be because I happily paid for the privilege.

What do the data say about driving in Manhattan? How many households in the borough have a car? Or commute into or out of the great American metropolis by car? Special thanks to Twitter data wizard for supplying the figures.

I requested commuter mode share data for people who live in Manhattan and work outside of it, or work in it and live elsewhere. I did not ask about commuters who live and work in Manhattan because it seems obvious they overwhelmingly take transit or, like my partner, walk to the office. This was a safe assumption, as the vast majority of Manhattanites turn out not to have a car.

Only 19.2% of people who work in Manhattan and live elsewhere commute by car. Not a small minority, to be generous, but not a large minority either. This basic fact makes the decision to stall congestion pricing even more dubious. Yes, some people would, on the margin, be forced to change jobs. But I have to guess many others would shift to transit or move closer to work or transit or otherwise adjust. Yes, of course, the New York metro area has a horrific housing crisis. But just as other problems cannot justify inaction on housing, the housing crisis is a rotten basis for tolerating congestion. New York’s housing market should be fixed regardless of transportation policy! Now we turn to Manhattanites commuting outside of the borough.

This figure favors the urbanist position a bit less lopsidedly. Less than 30% of Manhattan residents with a reverse commute drive a car. (About half take some kind of rail.) But again, most Manhattanites do not even have a car. Without knowing the details of the congestion pricing scheme … maybe these drivers could be exempted? Exceptions for small interest groups makes the world go ‘round, friends. Whether or not that proved politically prudent, the practical obstacles to congestion pricing, in terms of people negatively impacted, appear to be surprisingly limited. To the point that technical solutions and workarounds should be possible, right?

Finally, how many cars does the typical Manhattan household have? As of 2022 …

I did a little math to estimate the average. Note this does not account for the confidence interval around each value, and is an underestimate because the final category is four or more vehicles per household, whereas I multiplied 2,007 by four.

Still, a computed average of 0.25 vehicles per household is low. Only about 0.2% of Manhattan households have four or more vehicles. I assume some are wealthy automotive collectors with multiple vehicles in storage. Almost 80% of Manhattan households have no car. And 19% have only one. Maybe the carless residents occasionally rent a car, hail a cab, or Uber, but many or most just walk or take the subway. The New Yorker without a driver’s license is a fairly well-established trope. My partner explained that based on the data he has seen, Manhattan households’ car ownership is bimodal with respect to income. That is, households typically have a car either because they are too poor to live near transit or too rich to care about splurging.

The Potential of Pilots

Reflecting on Governor Hochul’s dramatic eleventh hour cancelation of congestion pricing, I suspect that limited pilots hold a lot of potential for enacting the kinds of reforms that most excite American urbanists. The big question is whether our ideas would be as popular in practice as we believe, a theory we should be happy to test.

A limited pilot might pedestrianize a few streets in Manhattan, or restrict them to local traffic, deliveries, buses, and cyclists. I know basically nothing about the state of New York land use reform, so I do not assume any of these ideas are new to local advocates. My growing suspicion is that incrementalism can open the door to radical change. Compared with conventional step-change reform, pilot programs:

• Attract less attention, especially before implementation, lowering political stakes.

• Allow a change to be made (huzzah!) with a much lower burden of proof in terms of “community input” and formal analysis.

• Shift the status quo to a more desirable state (‘Do we really want to undo this?’).

• Shift debate from, “Should we do something?” to, “What should we do?”

• Call the bluff of people who warn that change will be catastrophic or dangerous.

• Require fewer resources and encourage bureaucratic entities to be creative.

• Are easier to adjust and refine after initial implementation.

• Provide concrete evidence for otherwise speculative discussions about reform.

• Are less politically costly if they fail.

• Make permanent change much easier. Slippery slope? Yes indeed!

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I bet there are thousands of people living on the same street as my business partner who sometimes work from home, or just try to sleep at night. If a pilot program turned down the volume of street traffic two days a week, one can only imagine the clamor from local residents to make the change permanent and cede less space to cars.

Maybe, as a compromise, Manhattan could try congestion pricing a couple of days a week and see how it goes. The decision to delay was political, not economic: worrying about sunk cost is reasonable. It would be nice to have something to show for decades of bureaucratic wrangling and hundreds of millions of dollars spent. One wonders if opponents’ biggest fear about congestion pricing is that people would actually like it.

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Thanks to my 433 subscribers, especially my 12 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, especially on my concept for a real estate financing platform, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

Urbanists including myself dislike that cars take up so much space and that their heavy weight and high speed make them dangerous to people anywhere nearby: walking on the sidewalk, in another car, or even inside a building at ground level. Yet it is hard to find any new car, never mind a good one, smaller than a roughly 3,000-pound Toyota Corolla in the U.S. The ~2,600-pound Nissan Versa is the only subcompact non-premium sedan on sale in America today, with the discontinuation of the sedan and hatch versions of the Mitsubishi Mirage, which barely weighed 2,000 pounds. That evocative name was wasted on the cheapest, worst new car you could buy here. The Versa I drove as a loaner was a piece of junk. Heavy rain sounded like it would damage the roof, and braking downhill in wet conditions was nerve-wracking.

Yet even Japanese Kei trucks and cars that have become a charming fad in the U.S. weigh about 1,500 pounds. The original two-passenger Smart car weighed about 1,600 pounds. So why are cars so heavy? And why do most of them end up being so big?

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My answer is a combination of physics and economics. I will assume consumers have some desire to not be killed or injured in a crash and to save money on fuel, but I will set aside regulations, including fuel economy standards that let multi-ton pickup trucks off the hook. A vehicle able to convey at least two adults in reasonable comfort and safety has certain basic engineering requirements that pile on the pounds. And car buyers make decisions on a margin that pushes them toward four wheels, four passengers, and some cargo space, even a single person living alone who only needs a car to commute. This is really just my take as a car enthusiast, but I do feel confident in my reasoning (and I hope it will help urbanists understand cars a bit better).

The two car alternatives that come to mind are a golf cart and something like the Elio pictured above: A three-wheeled commuting vehicle which has most of the comfort and safety of a traditional car, but is much more efficient and affordable. Elio targeted a 1,350-pound curb weight for its original internal-combustion three-wheeler. The company may or may not be a scam, but the concept still is compelling, so we will give it a fair shake. We should start with the cheapest option: A golf cart.

This is a Club Car Onward 4-passenger model. As shown with a gasoline engine, side mirrors, a roof, and a DOT-approved windshield it costs $13,817 before taxes. It weighs about 800 pounds. Finally, a light vehicle, right? Why should a car weigh an order of magnitude more than one adult? It is easy to imagine four 200-pound adults comfortably tooling around on a cart that weighs about as much as they do.

Yet the Onward has some glaring limitations. Even a cart with seatbelts and doors (and AC) would not offer any crash protection from other cars. The lowly Mitsubishi Mirage or a little Japanese Kei truck would devastate the cart in a crash. And extra features like doors, which are hardly frivolous, would add weight and cost.

So for primary transportation, we have probably graduated to something like a Japanese Kei car. These little marvels receive special tax treatment for having a small engine size and footprint, though Wiki says the Japanese government greatly curbed their tax advantages in 2014. The Honda N-Box is a popular and well-regarded model. Aesthetics are subjective and I am easy to please, but I think it looks fantastic.

I do need to mention that a big reason Americans prefer larger cars is that we can afford them. We easily forget how much wealthier we are than most of the global population. Small cars are popular in developing markets with low median incomes. However, I would attribute Kei cars to Japan’s need to use scarce land efficiently.

The N-Box weighs in the realm of 2,000 to 2,300 pounds. It is a respectable, up to date car, just tiny: HVAC, seatbelts, airbags, etc. Kei cars are the smallest vehicles allowed on Japanese highways. You can buy one new in Japan for about $11,000 USD, which honestly seems like a good value. A growing number of Kei cars are being imported to the U.S. under special rules for foreign vehicles that are 25 years old. The most popular models for import seem to be cab-forward trucks with little passenger comfort and even less crash protection, but we can use the winsome N-Box as our point of comparison. The truth is, it would be a viable replacement for something like a Honda Fit subcompact, a hatchback no longer sold in the U.S. which is somehow 25.5 inches longer. My friends who have a Fit might love an N-Box, which would be even easier to park where they live in DC. A new Kei car is a surprisingly compelling package, but returning to our original question, the N-Box weighs about a ton. So it would not solve the physics problem of a car that can ‘more safely’ hit a pedestrian.

And to reiterate, the Fit was discontinued in the U.S., and the N-Box would never be greenlit for sale here, even if it complied with all of our regulations, because the American car buyer would rather pay about twice as much for something new with more space for people and cargo and, by the nature of physics, more safety. Or they could snag a deal on the used market. The Mirage’s biggest competition was used Corollas and Honda Civics, which are better in every way. Before the pandemic, you could buy a CPO subcompact hatchback for about $10,000. Used cars are now heinously expensive, though there are still many new subcompact models for sale in the U.S., mostly crossover “SUVs” pretending not to be hatchbacks, like the Kia Soul.

Designing and, more to the point, marketing subcompacts as SUVs allows automakers to charge more. Small cars also have a thinner profit margin, making the business case even harder as U.S. car buyers turn away from the smallest, cheapest new models.

A major relevant physics problem is fuel or energy efficiency, and aerodynamics. To grossly overgeneralize, one way to make a car more efficient is to elongate its body, so air flows more smoothly along exterior surfaces. Drag increases with the square of speed, so this is especially important for, say, maximizing an EV’s highway range.

In terms of design, the N-Box is a short box stacked on top of another short box. It is only a shade more than 11 feet long! A new Civic hatchback is almost 15 feet long. A new Corolla hatch is about 7 inches shorter than the Civic. The N-Box really is tiny. Despite some rounded edges, the N-Box’s shape and proportions are near optimal for maximizing aerodynamic drag. It punches air in the face then abruptly dumps it off of the back, roiling the atmosphere coming and going. I cannot stress enough how complicated and inscrutable aerodynamics is. Fluid dynamics is an area of physics where theory is still incomplete, and myriad variables mean computer simulations and real-world testing can deliver radically different results. But to oversimplify again, a teardrop is essentially the most aerodynamic shape, and the N-Box is close to the opposite, partially because of its stubby length.

Still, you might be thinking, a Smart ForTwo, the classic Smart car with seating for two and that pretentious name, must be way more fuel-efficient than something like a contemporary Corolla, right? Not really. We can get some hints from carsized.com.

Comparing a hatchback to a sedan is a little unfair, but I want to highlight how much more easily engineers can reduce the drag a car’s body produces if they have more length to work with. Based on the information I could find, the Smart has a much worse drag coefficient (0.38) than the Corolla (0.29), though apparently the prior-gen ForTwo was a bit slipperier. Total drag factor is drag coefficient multiplied by frontal area, and the news from that angle is not great for the Smart car either:

The visuals compare EU-market models but to finish the story we should look at EPA fuel economy ratings of U.S.-spec models, which are more realistic than European ratings. Keep in mind that the Smart has a much smaller engine. The 2017 Smart ForTwo Coupe with an automatic transmission achieves 35 MPG combined, 33 city, 39 highway, on premium gasoline. The 2017 Toyota Corolla sedan with an automatic transmission gets up to up to 32 MPG combined: 28 city, 36 highway. A new 2024 Corolla sedan gets up to 35 MPG combined, 32 city, 41 highway. (The hybrid sedan gets up to 50 MPG combined, 53 city, 46 highway!) So in terms of fuel economy, the contemporary Corolla was not far off from the last Smart city car sold in the U.S. And the push in recent years to maximize fuel efficiency has closed that gap.

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One might argue, quite reasonably, that the Smart still has less environmental impact, requiring fewer resources to manufacture, probably throwing off less particulate matter from its tires and brakes, and so on. But any such edge is probably quite modest. To find a practical, attractive car alternative that is significantly smaller than a Corolla or Civic, we will have to look beyond four wheels. What about three?

Once again we find ourselves staring at the Elio, or something like it, an odd but intriguing contraption with two wheels up front, one in the back. It can use many of the same off-the-shelf components as a regular car: wheels and tires, seats, controls, brakes, windshield wiper, lights, engine, etc. The doors could conceivably come off of a regular car, which is a good sign for side-impact protection.

The three-wheeler is arguably much more mechanically similar to a Corolla than the Smart ForTwo, which had a somewhat exotic body structure to offer crash protection comparable to cars with large crumble zones. The three-wheeler can have the same low-drag side profile as a regular car, but its frontal area is obviously much less. It weighs a lot less too. That all adds up to stellar theoretical efficiency. In principle, three wheels are less safe than four, because one rear tire means less rear mechanical grip, and the inherently narrow wheelbase creates rollover risk. But I am willing to accept for the sake of argument that it would be about as safe as a small sedan or hatchback. The crumble zones could be similar to those of a normal car.

So what is not to like? Well, the three-wheeler can carry only two people, one seated in front of the other. And cargo space is at a premium. The three-wheeler is basically a bit more than half of a car. And the wheelbase has to be almost as wide, to provide stability, so it does not end up saving that much space. The empty area extending behind the front wheels is not given back to nature. This vehicle only makes sense as a pure commuter or maybe a car for a childless couple. Target demos beyond that require a lot of imagination. You cannot give more than one co-worker a ride home after work. Unless maybe you are a single parent with only one child, you need something with four seats if you have kids. Most people would rather buy a whole car.

A compact car with decent fuel economy and room for four or five people, especially a hatchback, is an incredibly versatile machine, whether we urbanists want to admit it or not. Yes, car ownership is expensive; yes, cars and driving impose huge negative externalities that appear to be mostly not internalized (costs on other people not borne by drivers); and yes, cars take up vast amounts of space. But outside of metro New York and parts of the DC area and Chicagoland, the U.S. is largely a transit desert. We know that too many people — most people — are truly dependent on driving. So we should keep that in mind and avoid demonizing drivers.

I had a Subaru Impreza five-door and it was great. I helped friends move from one apartment to another. I safely drove in all kinds of conditions. I commuted. I wish the fuel economy were better, but I could have bought a Civic or Corolla. We sold the Impreza when work from home became permanent, and kept our Subaru Forester compact crossover. It was an older design, but it had the room we needed for our young family. Now we have three kids and a Toyota Sienna hybrid that is a living room on wheels and can waft around at 40 MPG under the right circumstances. Especially if you have kids or honestly if you just have places to be, driving is usually most convenient — largely because of unsafe non-car infrastructure.

The most important, attractive alternative to a regular car is not a three-wheeler or a Kei car or an electric car, it is a bicycle, electric or acoustic, and a way to use it safely for daily transportation. Most car trips are a bikeable distance:

This 2022 DOT data shows that more than half of U.S. car trips are five miles or less. And only 6.9% of trips are 31 miles or more! Notoriously few pickup truck owners tow, haul, or drive off-road. How often is an EV driven more than 100 miles in a day?

Especially in a suburban context, where distances can be sizable but roadways are wide and theoretically easy to add bike lanes to, and secure private vehicle storage space is fairly common, I am confident that many people would use a network of cycling infrastructure. My family recently visited the Seattle area: Hilly terrain, wet and dreary weather, and cyclists all over the place. Two key factors seem to be a strong cycling culture and basic investment in cycling infrastructure. Car-lite living is not a fantasy, it is not extreme. You can drive if it rains, I certainly do. Urbanists should be inviting and cheerfully share our tangible vision of convenient alternatives to driving.

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Thanks to my 323 subscribers, especially my 9 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, especially on my concept for a real estate financing startup, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a reader-suggested topic. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.

P.S. If you liked this post, check out my piece on minivans and automotive safety:

Next week USA Today should be publishing an op-ed I wrote via Young Voices about why the housing shortage is a literal shortage. And I will be at YIMBYtown early next week in Austin, speaking on a panel about housing advocacy and organizing in the suburbs. Please email lucagattonicelli@substack.com if you are attending. I am excited to meet so many folks in person! Since next week I will be busy …

I have wanted to write about why exactly minivans are great, from sliding doors to the cargo well behind the rear axle, for at least a year. I joke they are like sharks, incredibly well-evolved for their niche. But I had a more interesting realization about design features that make them admirably safe for all parties, which led me to reflections on zero-sum thinking about automotive safety.

Minivans offer a great compromise of safety for occupants of the van, occupants of other cars, and pedestrians and cyclists. The front is low enough to be safer for pedestrians than a pickup truck, truck-based SUV, or even some traditional car-based crossover SUVs [EDIT: IIHS reached this conclusion in a formal study]. It is high enough to protect van occupants in a collision with a tall vehicle. A minivan’s beltline — the side windows’ bottom edge — is also high enough to protect the precious cargo inside. And the rear is obviously tall and well-reinforced.

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The green 2023 Toyota Sienna minivan pictured above is ours. Right off the bat you can see how much taller the hood of the adjacent Chevy Silverado is. The pickup might have had a modest suspension lift or slightly bigger wheels than stock, but that would not make much of a difference. A pedestrian hit by the Sienna would be much more likely to bounce onto the hood, not under the vehicle to be crushed.

Our van’s external visibility is not great, much worse than the Subaru Forester it replaced, but still better than the “forward blind spot” (yikes!) of big car and truck-based SUVs. Even as a large vehicle in its own right, our Sienna is dwarfed by a Ford F-150, the best-selling vehicle in America. I am a little shorter than the Sienna (and loving it, convenient for buckling kids in); the F-150 is almost as tall as Michael Jordan.

Check out the site to compare cars for yourself. My un-scientific analysis is that the Sienna looks close enough in size to the F-150 to stand a chance in a collision. The van weighs about 4,600 pounds to the roughly 6,500-pound truck. Not a fair fight by boxing standards, but reasonably close. Our old Forester weighed maybe 3,500 pounds, almost half as much as the F-150! Now compare the Sienna and Forester:

Pretty close up front, setting aside the vehicles’ weight difference. The Sienna admittedly poses substantially more risk to pedestrians than a Honda Civic, however:

Which brings us to the troubling arms race of vehicle size in recent years. The smallest car I can comfortably imagine my kids driving around in is something like a Toyota Corolla Cross, a subcompact crossover SUV. Here is a final comparison:

An F-150 driver could almost see over a Corolla Cross’s roof. But I would still feel fine watching my kids drive off in one, I think. Minivans’ weight and size — they stopped being mini long ago — is honestly the biggest reason I see them as a viable safety compromise. These days a car must be expected to protect its occupants from trucks that weigh as much as a female Asian elephant.

To be clear, I am not especially critical of truck owners. I do think choosing a pickup as your daily driver, especially if you rarely have more than one passenger, is ethically questionable for safety and environmental reasons, assuming you do not regularly haul loads, tow, or tackle rough terrain. A point I somehow left out of my previous meditation on car culture is that if you need a truck, you should drive one. I actually have huge respect for people who need a truck. Many of them have jobs that keeps society going, like farming, maintaining the roads or, indeed, building homes.

Many pixels have been illuminated by the discourse around the safety rationale for driving large vehicles, especially light trucks (the official term) and truck-based SUVs. The local lead in Falls Church City for my YIMBY group spawned at least two chains of parodies with his rather funny response to a viral post on Twitter:

My discourse contribution is that pickup trucks are not inherently safe vehicles. The generation of F-150 I grew up with folds like an accordion in crash testing. It weighed between ~4,000 and ~5,000 pounds, still pretty hefty by today’s standards. So weight does not equate to safety. Cars have gotten significantly safer in the past two decades principally because of how they are designed and engineered, not because they are heavier and more likely to crush another vehicle. Driving a big truck probably reduces the safety of people around you far more than it increases your own safety.

Today’s F-150s and Ram 1500s have good crash test ratings, though IIHS testing identified two safety weaknesses in the Chevy Silverado we started with.

Minivans are not perfect either. “Minivans don’t make the grade when it comes to rear-seat safety,” IIHS reported in September 2023. Older children sitting in the second row with a regular seatbelt — no booster or safety seat — do not fare very well based on the group’s new moderate overlap test. It, of course, felt weird as a parent to learn that our car is significantly flawed in its defining purpose: transporting children.

The big lesson here might be that even in the realm of automotive safety, where we can conceivably always add more crash structure, more technology, more everything, limitations and trade-offs are unavoidable. Hopefully automotive safety will matter much less in the future because people have better alternatives.

I decided not to delve into the stigma around minivans, but want to note that car enthusiasts including myself are enthusiastic about them too, because they do their job extremely well, better than any SUV could. Car nuts also enjoy being contrarian.

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I wish to close by thanking my 178 subscribers, especially my three paid subs. 2024 really is the year I will be writing more consistently. This blog is my best shot at figuring out a career in urbanism and housing, so I deeply appreciate your readership.

If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the all-volunteer grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.

I made the mistake of tweeting my belief that front-facing garages are actually better for townhouses than rear-facing garages. Front-facing consumes less land, funnels people into one shared space, and allows for a private backyard or, I daydream, a semi-private shared greenspace. Sneering Twitterers declared I was condemning children to being hit and run over by drivers, exacerbated by parked cars blocking sidewalks and multiple conflict points. The narcissism of small differences came to mind. It reminded me, as a recent convert to urbanism, to be thoughtful about how we come across. Urbanists and YIMBYs are perceived as arrogant, self-absorbed, and combative. Bad news, there is some truth to that critique! Twitter is not real life, but Twitter mobs are certainly a PR problem for the YIMBY movement. And regularly upsetting oneself and picking fights online is not good for anyone.

This piece is, admittedly, an extended rebuttal, describing how front-facing garages work quite well for my townhouse neighborhood. Crucially, no one parks their car blocking the sidewalk, in part because of implicit social pressure, but also because, as far as I know, that is an HOA violation. Our streets are somewhat wide, but most drivers are slow and careful, especially if they live here. They know there are lots of kids around, particularly in the afternoons, with a sprinkling of nannies and moms pushing little ones in strollers throughout the day.

The biggest benefit I see from front-facing garages is that everyone facing a street must use it to enter or exit their home. This leads to more serendipitous interactions between neighbors coming and going or just hanging out. It is a blessing for us as parents of young children. Retirees and dog walkers enjoy chatting with each other and crossing paths with the kids. Garages are a focal point of our neighborhood’s social life: Water tables for toddlers, driveway birthday parties, even tailgating. Our garages seem to be a crude but serviceable substitute for porches.

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All of these interactions help us humanize and connect with each other. We actually feel like neighbors. That is extremely important in an era of alienation, social isolation, and weak community ties. And it makes us much less likely to drive quickly or carelessly. ‘I should slow down a bit, I just passed little Timmy’s house.’ I would almost argue that cars are guests on our neighborhood’s streets. Most delivery drivers seem aware of the need to be careful. And our mail carrier and trash and recycling pickup crews are well aware of their celebrity/hero status among the kids. The most danger to kids I have perceived is from a handful of non-residents driving too quickly.

Urbanists also underrate private garages as general and bike storage. And as car storage! I would rather extend my car’s useful life out of the elements, and not get rained on as I strap in our kids. I work from home so we sold our second car. Our two-car garage is narrow but gives us plenty of room for one car and two e-bikes, two big strollers, etc. If we had a one-car garage, our car would probably lose out to the other stuff. Indeed, secure storage is a sticking point for some folks trying to join the e-bike revolution and rationally worried about thieves (and weathering). Apartment dwellers in dense areas, who would especially benefit from e-bikes and cargo bikes, have the hardest time figuring out where to store them. I am grateful for our garage.

As a good urbanist I like grids and connected street networks. Living on a grid would mean dealing with through traffic, which would be pretty fast given our streets’ width. If our development were simply larger, drivers might go faster. I would hope for narrower streets and safer design in either scenario. Instead we have one road entrance, which is fine for walkability. Our development abuts a wide, fast, hilly road but is compact enough that we can easily walk to Aldi, CVS, a frugal and friendly pizza place, and a big park. The highway-like design of our main road is a much bigger constraint on livability than not being on a grid, and hopefully easier to change.

The critique that front-facing garages are ugly seems valid but is not weighty enough to change my mind. I will set aside aesthetic subjectivity and take the claim at face value. Garages are not attractive. Our neighborhood admittedly looks sterile, even with trees that are, according to longtime HOAers, too large for the space alloted to them. I accept that trade-off. Paved, featureless rear-facing alleys are even less attractive and consume more land. Beautiful, ennobling neighborhoods are a lost art in the U.S., well beyond private garage placement. Arguments largely comprising taste and “feel” do arouse my suspicion. Our neighborhood feels fine, because of how the people living here relate to each other.

The bottom section of this site plan is an example of compromise, with streets running perpendicular to rows of townhomes. This is a great way to fit clusters of townhomes onto lots in neighborhoods of detached, single-family homes. Most front doors, the nominal main entrance, open onto a shared greenspace rather than the street. Garages open onto a narrow alley. I see how this could work well. Kids can safely learn to bike in the alleys. The shared greenspaces have great potential for intimate community and block parties. The potential downside is folks not interacting much because they drive in and out of the alleys and rarely use their front door. I am more than happy that we ended up in a neighborhood of front-facing garages.

My family’s thoroughly pleasant experience suggests to me that urbanist ideals like minimizing conflict points and connecting the street network are directionally correct but interact in complex ways and are mediated by small details. The folks who got so upset with me on Twitter seemed to simply despise garages, as an extension of our shared resentment of car dependency. But car dependency is our reality. Making the best of it requires trade-offs, and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

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If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, do reach out at lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested to me by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.

Before diving into this week’s post on traffic, I need to share a couple of exciting media hits for YIMBYs of NoVA. Please check them out!

• Margaret Barthel from WAMU/DCist interviewed Jane, Aaron, Peter, and myself in Arlington, Fairfax, and Alexandria about YIMBYs of NoVA and our ambitions for political influence. Hear and read the coverage on WAMU or read it on DCist.

• That story links to an op-ed I wrote in Greater Greater Washington titled Let Fairfax County grow. The map by my YIMBY compatriot Jason Schwartz shows in pink areas of the county that permit no more than twelve residential units per acre. Fairfax County is the slowest-growing DMV locality. It needs more housing!

I stumbled on an unfortunate segue from Fairfax’s sprawl to the definitional insanity of trying to tame traffic by adding more car lanes. County government has a $100 million proposal to add a partial ring road around the notorious Seven Corners intersection. The yellow section would wipe out Hong Kong Pearl Seafood Restaurant, probably the best dim sum in NoVA, and a swath of garden apartments, the kind of market affordable housing folks eagerly romanticize. Eden Center, the east coast’s largest concentration of Vietnamese businesses, sits north of the yellow section, presumably untouched by the plan. That may be because Eden sits within Falls Church City. I would join the harsh backlash against any attempt to raze Eden.

Maybe the ring road is a step toward a street grid that helps the area redevelop to be less car-centric. If that is the true goal, the county should be open about it. If the garden apartment residents had to move today, they would basically have nowhere to go, due to the simple lack of housing supply and of affordable housing. Committed affordable buildings have long waiting lists. Market rate affordable housing is cheap due to its low quality. Older garden apartments and, indeed, massive complexes like Southern Towers will eventually have to redevelop, and we currently do not have a credible answer. I do know that my family treasures Hong Kong Pearl. It is one of a few places that to me embody Northern Virginia’s greatness. The business seems successful. Its current space is huge. I hope it can find a new one, if it has to.

Seven Corners really is dysfunctional and needs to be redesigned, that much seems clear. But congestion is the underlying reason the county is proposing to spend nine figures to pave over homes and businesses. On the other, other hand, I doubt any informed observer believes the plan will solve local traffic. The problem will persist no matter how much we add lanes, so I think we should examine our resignation to it.

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Thanks to urbanism, I can no longer sit in heavy traffic without feeling ridiculous. There the kids and I were Saturday afternoon, crawling south along the highway into the District. The dysfunction of the scene struck me. I once again asked myself, is this a practical transportation system? Is this the best we can do? Then I noticed we were passing Minnesota Avenue Metro station. I voice to texted my frustration to a confidant involved with WMATA. She lamented expensive housing near the Metro.

Before I get sucked into that issue, take a step back with me and appreciate the absurdity of our primary transportation system. Everyone fully expects it to be crippled twice daily by commuters, sometimes late at night, and semi-randomly on the weekend. That sometimes describes Metro, but always describes the DMV’s roads.

You might think of our highway system as built to accommodate peak volume, but it demonstrably does not. Peak volume overwhelms it! And each additional car in the system exponentially increases travel times. Because the only price on congestion is time wasted, most of us regularly plunge into the stream of cars knowing it will be a bad experience. This is the essential nature of car dependency: often driving is by rights the worst option and we have no feasible alternative.

In our interview, Barthel asked me what NIMBY arguments if any I find reasonable. I responded that I have my own skepticism of transit in the U.S. We do not have a track record of efficiently managing capital projects or operating train systems. My friend Peter, a transportation expert, interjected that the U.S. does not fund transit adequately, which I assume is true, but that underlines my point: U.S. transit is subpar.

I then noted, however, that cars kill about 40,000 people in America annually, which Barthel seemed to know well. ‘Could you imagine if transit killed 1,000 people in a year?’ I noted. ‘There would be mass outrage and congressional hearings.’ Put that all together and I see a straightforward case for political leaders to make driving safer and less wasteful while also doing the hard institutional work of creating world-class transit and protected cycling infrastructure, which e-bikes have given way more value.

Questioning automotive dependency is not a demand for scarcity or poverty, it is a demand for something affirmatively better. The classic chart below shows cars really are far more dangerous than transit. They also fuel a sedentary lifestyle that feeds directly into leading causes of death in our country. Topping the current list are heart attacks, cancer, COVID-19 (which has significant comorbidities), and accidents, which obviously include car crashes. Forcing people to do something more dangerous than anything else they would ordinarily do is a very strange state of affairs, yet here we are.

We actually do have a remarkably elegant policy solution to congestion: Pricing it. This is the rare policy supported by economists of all stripes, internalizing the massive externality of time wasted in traffic. Low-income people cannot afford the charge? Pay them the difference! Implementation would be expensive? Privacy concerns? Singapore implemented a congestion charge in 1975 with literal slips of paper displayed on dashboards. Please do not tell me that with all of our country’s wealth and godlike technological prowess, we cannot figure something out. The answer can surely be less invasive than current surveillance of smartphone users.

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The primary impediment to congestion pricing seems to be political, not technical. The average American believes, sitting in their car, in traffic, that their use of the road is free, and moreover that although they have to drive, driving is a form of freedom.

Certainly, there are different dimensions of freedom. And land use is a major factor. “Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink,” observed [*checks notes*] Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich. “They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few.” Mandated sprawl spreads people out such that many can only connect with each other by car. Congestion pricing still has value in that setting, ensuring people who must drive are able to do so. As noted, the policy can be means tested, so everyone can still get to work, the emergency room, or just across town to see a friend. Still, driving is not inherently prosperous and often squarely a cost. Want to buy a house? Drive until you qualify!

Time and land are our scarcest resources. A car sitting in traffic is arguably the ultimate waste of both. Manhattan leading the way for our country, as it should, on congestion pricing is encouraging. More people are starting to see a better way to live, as I have over the last couple of years, which gives me hope for the future.

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If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, do reach out at lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested to me by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.