Opining About Urbanism Misses The Point

Let people choose how they want to live

The aftermath of a collision on Coastal Highway in the beach community of Rehoboth, Delaware, with typical traffic congestion | October 20, 2020

The nadir of land use might be Delaware’s stroads, ineffectively combining the destinations of a street with the high throughput of a road. Rehoboth’s Coastal Highway is an abomination, with the worst traffic I have ever encountered at almost all hours.¹ The considerable natural beauty of beaches in Rehoboth and the surrounding towns is undermined by the most heinously sprawling development pattern. You might never know you are near the ocean. The built environment suited to walking or biking or just being outside is limited to a few paltry blocks. Seemingly no attempt was made to maximize the value of waterfront property. Rehoboth has a boardwalk, but I almost shudder to think how hard it must be to drive to. On these thoroughfares, I always ask myself, “Is this really the apex of civilization?”

Cars are amazingly convenient, to be sure. Driving is the only practical way to tour the Mountain West, as I dream of doing one day. And it is a necessity for us parents of three small children. We could have lived next to Metrorail, but our house would cost twice as much. We could ride the bus more, but that would cost us too much time.

On the other hand, cars are fragile. They get stuck in traffic. And in the DC area, where we live, the roads may not be safe to drive on for days after a rare big snowfall. So without knowing anything about urbanism, I chose a family home that is walkable to a grocery store. And years before, without knowing the phrase “car dependency,” as a recent college grad reveling in the freedom of running weekend errands with my own money, I noticed that I was living life in boxes: my apartment, my car, a store, etc.

A Demonstrated Preference for Sprawl?

This is an open letter to the great

Tyler Cowen

and, moreso, cantankerous online commenters (never read the comments) who smugly denigrate urbanists and YIMBYs. I hope to delineate a critical is-ought distinction that is often trampled in discussions of urbanism — the study of the built environment and how people interact with it.

Land use is controversial, from housing policy to transportation infrastructure. The U.S. housing market is extremely regulated yet ultimately defined, as it should be, by market actors, such as profit-driven developers and private consumers.

Transportation debates are messier in some ways, certainly higher stakes, because government builds the roads and largely dictates the relative convenience of different modes of travel. Assuming permissive zoning, building a duplex is a series of transactions. Whereas building a bike lane is a political act, requiring engagement with elected officials and professional bureaucrats. It might entail political sea change.

A common knock on urbanists is that they are a small minority (touché) endeavoring to impose their niche and highly determined ideas on the rest of society. Ironically, someone issuing this critique is liable to make their own declaration or suggestion of some capital T Truth: ‘Cars are inherently better, we should favor them,’ ‘People just prefer suburbs,’ or this recent statement from Tyler, about bikes: “Ultimately, low-speed transport is a poor country thing.” To summarize my argument, the status quo is too distorted to meaningfully represent people’s demonstrated preferences.

I take pains to note that Tyler is an incredibly experienced and adventurous world traveler and ethnic food connoisseur. So he has probably visited and enjoyed poor countries much more than whoever else is reading this. Since I am picking on him a bit for giving voice to a broad perspective I consider dubious, I also want to be clear that Tyler and I agree far more than we disagree. We have the same positions on policy issues I consider central. He has my vote for land use czar.

Parking and Congestion Policies Matter

Tyler has been warmly supportive of my YIMBY organizing, including in Fairfax County, Virginia, where he lives. He is publicly on record supporting significant liberalization of zoning and housing regulations. Notwithstanding his questions about New York’s frozen congestion pricing scheme, which he knows more about than I do, he also generally supports congestion pricing and the abolition of minimum parking requirements. Parking policy matters because it adds significant cost to new housing, and fuels a lot of driving and congestion on the margin.

Congestion pricing might be table stakes for sound transportation policy, because it would make highways as a system much more usable while at least partially internalizing the considerable externalities of driving, such as pollution. It would also incentivize people to carpool and make fuller use of mass transit and active mobility. In other words, they would make better use of resources, boosting economic efficiency.

However, even my shop talk with people who self-identify as housing or transit advocates, whether or not it is their job, seems to take place on the edge of a slippery slope. It is remarkably easy for folks to elide distinctions between what I will inartfully call equal policy treatment of different types of housing or transportation, and their own personal tastes; for example, about ‘the appropriate level of density.’

I would never suggest that I am immune, I certainly have opinions. I do not despise cars the way many urbanists profess to. I think my urbane friends underrate or are in denial about the unbeatable convenience of on demand, point-to-point transportation. And Uber will never be quite as convenient as jumping in your own car. For this reason, I have a soft spot for electric bikes and think they have tremendous potential, even in spread out suburbs. A well-made electric cargo bike is a serious machine.

A vital larger point gets lost in the sauce: We do not really know what people want in terms of housing or transportation because their options are incredibly limited. Choice and preference implies options and alternatives. Given better options, people with all kinds of preferences would make new choices and benefit enormously.

Housing Is Extremely Regulated

The status quo of housing policy is so regulated and so politically and bureaucratically mediated that any suggestion of the public’s sweeping general preferences deserves a lot of skepticism. Urbanists, or at least YIMBYs, are betting that if housing policy were liberalized, more and denser housing would be built such that it becomes more affordable, a hugely desirable outcome. The other benefits of density that I and my fellow travelers value, such as environmental sustainability and a more active lifestyle, would be natural byproducts of allowing market forces to push property owners to make more efficient use of scarce land.

I suspect the median rakish blog commenter would be surprised by how many people would choose, and enjoy, a denser lifestyle with less driving. Part of the confusion is the huge range between the sparse densities of American suburbia; American cities, obviously denser yet not especially so by international standards; European cities that most American urbanists hope to emulate; and astronomically dense East Asian cities that may or may not be oppressive to the human spirit and a recipe for demographic collapse. After you glance at the numbers, it is laughable to hear a suburban NIMBY bay about “Manhattanization.” Manhattan itself is almost sui generis in the entire United States. It is a red herring in most American land use debates. And about 40% of its buildings did not comply with subsequent zoning.

Many Car Trips Are Only A Few Miles

Cleanly articulating the same core point about transportation is much tricker. A good place to start is the short distance of most car trips in the United States. More than half of them are five miles or less, according to 2022 data. About 93% are 30 miles or less (so if your second car is electric, how much range does it need?). Five miles is not nothing, but about 27% of car trips are two miles or less, 15 to 20 minutes on foot. That suggests many more Americans would regularly walk or bike, if they felt safe and comfortable doing so. Fewer cars on the road would mean less traffic for other drivers. Are we sure people’s behavior is not being distorted by government policy?

Link to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14kQ9-4ca96r3Pb_YDCqdWwOFKl7ZjSaP0XzJTlYJQnQ/edit?usp=sharing

Let me try to appeal to common sense. Is walking outside not an essential feature of being a human being? Does it make sense that if you wish to walk outside in many or most American neighborhoods, you have to keep your head on a swivel to avoid being hit by a car? Does it make sense that sidewalks are often dismissed as a frivolity? That in many American neighborhoods, foot traffic is considered a nuisance? Does it make sense to have drivers going 40 MPH right next to a sidewalk? What if a driver makes a mistake?

Why should kids learn how to ride a bike then be told that most adults who bike are poor or eccentric? Is it so strange to think that riding a bike is a useful skill? To suggest that a ~50-pound e-bike that gets you outside and moving and happy might be a better tool for running an errand a couple of miles away than a car that weighs more than one and a half tons?

Active Mobility Has Big Advantages

Electric bikes in particular are shockingly practical. After buying our first one I quickly realized that I needed to add a basket to carry things like groceries. And a mirror to keep an eye out for cars. And lights so I could safely run a quick errand at dusk. Because I could go so far, so quickly, without breaking a sweat.

Our other e-bike is a nice secondhand cargo model (a first-generation Tern GSD), a stiff, lightweight engineering marvel, decidedly not a poor country thing. My preschooler and kindergartener absolutely love riding on the back. I find that cycling exalts the human spirit. Cycling advocates are correct that riding a bike is a fabulous mood booster. It is fun! As we have seen, so many car trips are an easily bikeable distance. If the weather is half-decent and driving is only a few minutes faster, I would rather bike.

Being able to choose to bike or walk instead of scheduling exercise that feels like a chore would be a huge benefit to Americans. The top causes of death in the U.S. are chronic conditions such as heart disease and cancer that are significantly mediated by how sedentary or active your lifestyle is.

Cars are supposed to be all about speed and convenience, but one cannot unsee how monumentally bad highways are at moving commuters. A highway that predictably grinds to a crawl strikes me as a flawed, fragile system. I recently commuted to and from the office for a couple of days, the first time I have had to do so in a few years. I had forgotten the level of vigilance required to safely pilot a car in rush hour traffic. And I think Northern Virginia’s drivers are competent and not aggressive. We might have fewer super commuters if zoning allowed denser housing near job centers. Does anyone actually think commuting two or three hours each way is a revealed preference?

The interstate highway system is correctly celebrated for how it connected American cities to each other. What about internally connecting American cities? What about choice? Driving is probably the least efficient way to travel a few city blocks. Walking or cycling should be better but infrastructure is spotty.

Like many other bike skeptics online, Tyler questions why cyclists run red lights. The answer is simple, at least speaking for myself. I find it safer to continue through a red light when I am confident no other cars are coming than to stop and hope that cars arriving behind will see me or not hit the car next to me. Then I would have to slowly get back up to speed when the light turns green. Especially on a bike without a motor, accelerating from a stop is slow and precarious. I bike with the assumption that drivers cannot see me. Yes, running red lights saves time, yet by keeping moving, I can avoid cars and stay safe. My argument becomes weaker when cyclists have a safe place to wait for a light to turn green.

Cars Are Inherently Dangerous

Does it make sense for cars to kill more than 40,000 people in the U.S. each year? To be a leading killer of American children? Is that really an acceptable price to pay for a transportation system, for government-mandated sprawl? Sprawl would still exist in a totally free market for land use, but not to the degree that kills so many people today.

Roughly half as many Americans are murdered than killed by a car. Crime’s social cost goes beyond the numbers and the odds of being victimized yourself, because you feel unsafe in a bad neighborhood. You cannot let yourself relax. Cars are about twice as dangerous as criminals, and if street design is unsafe, they create a similar social dynamic. You cannot let yourself relax. If you are pushing a stroller on a sidewalk next to a fast road, you keep an eye on the cars near you, knowing that you might not have enough time to get your baby out of the way if a driver jumps the curb.

About 32% of U.S. traffic deaths involve alcohol and about half of people killed in a car are not wearing a seatbelt, per 2022 NHTSA data. So there may be low-hanging fruit, but cars are still inherently dangerous. Someone in a small sedan in my neighborhood apparently hit the gas instead of the brake, charging over a parking block, across a sidewalk, and through an iron fence, the front of the car coming to rest about six feet below in a parkette.

Cars pose a huge danger to people outside of them, a worsening problem in the U.S.²

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/23/pedestrian-deaths-cars-suvs-roads-unsafe

Pedestrian deaths appears to be worst in the car-dependent sunbelt. (Hi again, Delaware.) Oregon struggles even though about half of the state’s residents live in metro Portland, famous for its crunchy commitment to bike infrastructure.

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/27/pedestrians-deadliest-states

In the grand scheme of things, 8,000 Americans being run down by cars is not a huge number, I suppose. Yet it is a bit unsettling to notice how few people are walking around many American cities, like Detroit or Indianapolis or Omaha. Choosing not to navigate narrow sidewalks and tolerate the noise and fumes of traffic is not a demonstrated preference for driving. American city planners have made walking outside a burden, through neglect and unsafe street design.

Back to common sense: Is it weird to think that kids should be able to safely play outside? Especially near home? That was actually one of the assertions the Supreme Court made in upholding local zoning authority, though the opinion specified children in “more favored localities.” Why not just … children? Why is safely playing outside a luxury amenity? Is that a good policy outcome? What are we doing here?

Give People Options to Choose From

Against this backdrop, it seems rather reasonable to expect that a few feet of the width of most roads should be set aside for bike lanes, protected by curbing or parked cars. Many roads have lanes as wide as you would find on an interstate, despite a 25 or 35 MPH speed limit, leaving plenty of additional space for people outside of cars. Yes, bike infrastructure and sidewalks can be surprisingly expensive, but that is true of literally all transportation infrastructure, at least in the U.S. Sidewalks are not a poor country thing or a rich country thing, just something people should take for granted.

Without lapsing into utopianism, I do honestly think that wide-ranging networks of safe cycling infrastructure would be heavily used and much beloved. Kids biking to the park or school. Grandpa biking to the store. Local deliveries by cargo bike.

Giving people places to safely walk outside or cross the street in the middle of a long block between intersections or safely bike is not loopy pie in the sky, and certainly not a waste of taxpayer money. How are children supposed to be independent before they can drive? How are adults who lose the ability to drive, or never have it, supposed to get around? The American mentality seems to be that driving is a prerequisite for full participation in society. That does not strike me as a rich country thing. I think of loved ones disabled by temporary injury or life-changing illness. Where they could walk from home became a defining factor of their lives.

Yes, cars have their place, but that place is not everywhere. Some parts of the built environment should not prioritize cars. Government should drop parking mandates. It should price costly congestion. It should let property owners build whatever they think makes the most sense, as long as it does not endanger anyone.

Opinions about opinions probably cannot tell us what people want. We would have to see what they choose. I hazard to guess that Americans would make a wider variety of choices for themselves and their families, if finally given the opportunity.

Thanks to my 513 subscribers, especially my 11 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.

1. My tolerance for traffic is high. That road typically entails ten or fifteen minutes of delay.

2. I could not find a nice graph of per capita data.