Anti-car Urbanists Should Be More Pro-Market
Simply deferring to market incentives would improve urban infrastructure and design.
Anti-car urbanism is a pretty common view, especially among younger people and YIMBYs.
Usual positions include hating on highways through cities, urban renewal, suburban living, the carbon emissions and traffic deaths it causes, wanting more walkable and bikeable cities, and liking Barcelona’s super blocks.
It’s common wisdom in architecture and urban planning circles that the car centric design choices of American cities are mistakes, but economic research also supports the anti-car urbanist claims. A 2022 paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia finds that freeways through central cities have negative amenity effects which outweigh their transportation benefits. They predict that highway construction in Chicago decreased the population of the city by 8%, as the highways pushed people away from louder, more polluted, and disconnected urban neighborhoods and simultaneously subsidized suburban living.
In another spatial economics paper by Treb Allen and Costas Arkolakis, they estimate that around half of US highway links and half of the local transport links within Seattle have a negative return on investment (though many others, especially inter-city links, have positive returns and the average returns across all roads are positive). This return on investment measure is calculated somewhat narrowly, accounting for transportation costs, labor market access, and traffic congestion, but not the negative amenity effects studied above. Even so, a large fraction of road infrastructure investments had negative return.
Road construction in the United States, especially sending large highways through cities, has had large net negative effects on the economies and amenities of urban areas.
Roads and the interstate highway system in particular are the classic examples of state provided goods. It’s difficult for the market to handle all the externalities of transportation infrastructure and to coordinate all of the property rights, so they don’t build as many roads, especially not through big city downtowns.
Therefore, the cause of America’s car centric design is almost entirely a top-down imposition from government infrastructure spending. It is interesting, then, that so many of the people with these anti-car views are left leaning. This is one of the few big infrastructure projects that lots of leftists agree was a huge mistake.
The interstate highway system, bulldozing cities, minimum parking requirements, subsidizing cars and suburban living, prioritizing cars and car infrastructure over mass transit are all decisions from various levels of government that would not be emulated by market incentives.
But that’s a good thing! As the anti-car urbanist arguments show, highways are very often negative externalities, not positive ones! So road construction should plausibly be taxed, but instead it is massively subsidized by governments.
Market would still be able to provide for the inter-city transportation links that actually are big benefits. There were already privately built and maintained cross-country road networks in Britain and the United States. Private market activity also built the majority of rail connections in the US and Britain, and much of rail’s languor is due to partial or complete nationalization and strict construction regulations that make building new rail impossible.
There are externalities to these projects and property rights challenges and other things that make the market provision of transportation infrastructure sub-optimal. But the available alternative is not optimal provision, it’s government provision. In this case that means massively over-constructed and over-subsidized roads that bulldoze and separate communities, promote dangerous, unhealthy, and environmentally damaging suburban living, and sully the spirit and aesthetic of American cities.
Next time you despair at the car-centric design of American urban areas, remember who is to blame
I don’t think that anti-car urbanism is something that the Progress movement should be associated with. It is actually a Reactionary ideology that wants to go back to an imagined past that never existed.
Automobiles, roads, and highways are vital technologies that enable transportation and long-term economic growth. I have no problem if people want to live in densely populated cities with no cars, but I think the anti-car urbanist movement is really about using government policy to force people to live in those type of neighborhoods. And they will spend enormous amounts of government resources to achieve a goal that only a small number of affluent voters want.
I have not read the studies that you refer to, but my guess is that they do not include the massive positive externalities of long-term economic growth since the 1950s when the American highway system was built. Auto-based transportation obviously played a big role in that growth.
My guess is that those positive externalities would dwarf the negative externalities of amenities mentioned in the study. If one uses the concept of externalities, one must include both the negative and the positive.
It seems like there are two sorts of urbanists. The “pro-transit” groups are pushing for building new things that work very well with a no-car lifestyle. And the “anti-car” groups push to stop building things or to destroy things that are used by the car lifestyle.
Some of the “anti-car” groups seem more like degrowthers than like progress people. Like that new city in California, many groups opposed it because it would be car centric. That frustrated me - groups calling themselves “yimby”, but opposed to new developments.
My personal hope is that the “true yimby” groups win, both pro-transit and pro-car, and that we can build more of both things so that everyone can have areas they like.