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.
Totally disagree, Michael! I'm not sure what you mean by "go back to an imagined past that never existed." I assure you, cities were around before the creation of the automobile. And they were better off for it, designed in a way that made sense for people to interact with each other and their communities. (How many conversations with neighbors have you had waiting in line at the drive-thru?)
Automobile infrastructure has undoubtedly been valuable. But there was a overzealousness to building car infrastructure that came at a cost, many of which were outlined in the post. And you could have gotten much of the benefit of a highway, for example, without it going directly through your city's downtown. There is a time to move fast and a time to move slow.
You clearly believe that city dwellers “were better for it” before cars were invented and “there is a time to move slow.” That is exactly what 19th century Conservatives believed.
That is clearly believing that at least on this characteristic, things were better in the past. I think if you were to compare the overall life of cit dwellers today with 200 years ago, there is no comparison. Life is better now. That is what I mean by “imagined past.”
I never claimed that cities never existed before cars.
And why are you posting your disagreement with me without actually including what I stated?
Feel free to clarify your point--I didn't mean to mischaracterize. I'll clarify mine:
- Too much land in cities (especially dense ones) is dedicated to car infrastructure at the expense of parks, the natural landscape, and mixed-use areas that foster community activities, entertainment, and commerce.
- Social interaction and community engagement is best done face-to-face and outdoors--cars get in the way of this type human-scale engagement.
- Proximity to car infrastructure is not only a loss in terms of the alternative land use it could have been used for, it is also a nuisance to those not directly using it at the moment. Eg pollution, noise.
There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Neither of us likely wants to live next to a highway nor would we encourage children to play near a busy street. There are tradeoffs that need to be considered.
I don’t think I need to clarify my point, and I disagree with all your points for the reasons that I already stated.
I actually do live right next to a highway. It is convenient. And my children have plenty of places to play. That is why the suburbs are better for families with children.
Feel free to not use cars, but don’t try to force others to do the same.
> Too much land in cities (especially dense ones) is dedicated to car infrastructure at the expense of parks, the natural landscape, and mixed-use areas that foster community activities, entertainment, and commerce.
The whole point of cities is to increase the possible interactions among as many people as possible. Cars massively increase the places to get to, in particular thanks to cars its possible for people to go to many more community activities, entertainment, and commerce within a larger radius.
If you want a small tight-knit community, go to a village.
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.
I worry that some of the second part of this is a bit too simplistic and focused on public vs private. I believe much of the metro and rail in Tokyo is private operation, but clearly done with some public regulation and unification from a user perspective. In other words it is just very complicated and does not fit easily to public vs private distinctions.
This makes more sense it’s limited just to land use.
Totally agree. This is directionally correct, but I'd love to spend more time hashing through the public/private distinction. There is a lot of interesting stuff on the topic like transit systems that are designed to capture the positive value they have on the local real estate, for example.
The private sector did build some roads, railroads and canals, but they required immense public subsidies and legislative support. Despite all that, they tended to go bankrupt, so the state had to take over at some point. The simple fact is that transportation services are not profitable in the long run. They don't work with private sector accounting. From even before Roman days, they required government subsidies and their associated taxes.
Despite the rhetoric, our more modern car centered development pattern relied on immense public subsidies and legislative support. Building anything else was simply outlawed. Somerville, MA, a town of 80,000 recently discovered that only a handful of buildings there could be built under modern codes. Building urban freeways relied on eminent domain, so those roads were run through the least politically powerful neighborhoods.
Most anti-car urbanists are not anti-market. They want to legalize non-car reliant development., They want the government to invest in both car and non-car transportation options. They also want the government to think more like the private sector and stop allowing developments that can't pay enough taxes for maintenance. The suburbs are full of aging infrastructure, but modern car centered suburban development is too low density to pay enough to cover long range operating costs.
The post-World War II suburban dream was heavily sold in the media since the 1930s. Since it's almost Christmas, check out the pro-car centered suburbs message in Miracle on 34th Street.
P.S. Now that companies are enforcing RTO, we'll probably see more anti-car and pro 15-minute-cities propaganda than ever. Check out a few of those thousands of Hallmark, and now Netflix, Christmas movies and count how many involve someone getting a shorter, easier commute. (Yeah, yeah, romantic love something, but check out the commute.)
Great points. As an aside, the argument that government solves the externality problem of building roads has to contend with the idea that monopolies under produce. So what’s the net here?
As much as I loathe the road construction through cities, is it true that a monopoly is oversupplying? Maybe we reconcile with: too little roads in all the wrong places.
Large federal efforts are bound to miss the needs of communities at the local scale. The project of federal funds should be to essentially leave it up to a distributed set of county and state level solutions, and then observe which of those ideas end up being the best ones!
What if I don't despair over it though? What if I think highways connecting cities _and_ car-friendly roads within cities are basically non-negotiable (maybe not in an absolute sense) and Europe is bad for not doing this?
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.
Totally disagree, Michael! I'm not sure what you mean by "go back to an imagined past that never existed." I assure you, cities were around before the creation of the automobile. And they were better off for it, designed in a way that made sense for people to interact with each other and their communities. (How many conversations with neighbors have you had waiting in line at the drive-thru?)
Automobile infrastructure has undoubtedly been valuable. But there was a overzealousness to building car infrastructure that came at a cost, many of which were outlined in the post. And you could have gotten much of the benefit of a highway, for example, without it going directly through your city's downtown. There is a time to move fast and a time to move slow.
Your reply makes my point.
You clearly believe that city dwellers “were better for it” before cars were invented and “there is a time to move slow.” That is exactly what 19th century Conservatives believed.
That is clearly believing that at least on this characteristic, things were better in the past. I think if you were to compare the overall life of cit dwellers today with 200 years ago, there is no comparison. Life is better now. That is what I mean by “imagined past.”
I never claimed that cities never existed before cars.
And why are you posting your disagreement with me without actually including what I stated?
Feel free to clarify your point--I didn't mean to mischaracterize. I'll clarify mine:
- Too much land in cities (especially dense ones) is dedicated to car infrastructure at the expense of parks, the natural landscape, and mixed-use areas that foster community activities, entertainment, and commerce.
- Social interaction and community engagement is best done face-to-face and outdoors--cars get in the way of this type human-scale engagement.
- Proximity to car infrastructure is not only a loss in terms of the alternative land use it could have been used for, it is also a nuisance to those not directly using it at the moment. Eg pollution, noise.
There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Neither of us likely wants to live next to a highway nor would we encourage children to play near a busy street. There are tradeoffs that need to be considered.
I don’t think I need to clarify my point, and I disagree with all your points for the reasons that I already stated.
I actually do live right next to a highway. It is convenient. And my children have plenty of places to play. That is why the suburbs are better for families with children.
Feel free to not use cars, but don’t try to force others to do the same.
Will you agree to that?
> Too much land in cities (especially dense ones) is dedicated to car infrastructure at the expense of parks, the natural landscape, and mixed-use areas that foster community activities, entertainment, and commerce.
The whole point of cities is to increase the possible interactions among as many people as possible. Cars massively increase the places to get to, in particular thanks to cars its possible for people to go to many more community activities, entertainment, and commerce within a larger radius.
If you want a small tight-knit community, go to a village.
Agreed. Also it wasn't the car that destroyed cities like Indianapolis.
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.
I worry that some of the second part of this is a bit too simplistic and focused on public vs private. I believe much of the metro and rail in Tokyo is private operation, but clearly done with some public regulation and unification from a user perspective. In other words it is just very complicated and does not fit easily to public vs private distinctions.
This makes more sense it’s limited just to land use.
The general thrust is 100% correct though!
Totally agree. This is directionally correct, but I'd love to spend more time hashing through the public/private distinction. There is a lot of interesting stuff on the topic like transit systems that are designed to capture the positive value they have on the local real estate, for example.
The private sector did build some roads, railroads and canals, but they required immense public subsidies and legislative support. Despite all that, they tended to go bankrupt, so the state had to take over at some point. The simple fact is that transportation services are not profitable in the long run. They don't work with private sector accounting. From even before Roman days, they required government subsidies and their associated taxes.
Despite the rhetoric, our more modern car centered development pattern relied on immense public subsidies and legislative support. Building anything else was simply outlawed. Somerville, MA, a town of 80,000 recently discovered that only a handful of buildings there could be built under modern codes. Building urban freeways relied on eminent domain, so those roads were run through the least politically powerful neighborhoods.
Most anti-car urbanists are not anti-market. They want to legalize non-car reliant development., They want the government to invest in both car and non-car transportation options. They also want the government to think more like the private sector and stop allowing developments that can't pay enough taxes for maintenance. The suburbs are full of aging infrastructure, but modern car centered suburban development is too low density to pay enough to cover long range operating costs.
The post-World War II suburban dream was heavily sold in the media since the 1930s. Since it's almost Christmas, check out the pro-car centered suburbs message in Miracle on 34th Street.
P.S. Now that companies are enforcing RTO, we'll probably see more anti-car and pro 15-minute-cities propaganda than ever. Check out a few of those thousands of Hallmark, and now Netflix, Christmas movies and count how many involve someone getting a shorter, easier commute. (Yeah, yeah, romantic love something, but check out the commute.)
Anti-car urbanist is an oxymoron.
Everyone should be more pro-market. :)
Great points. As an aside, the argument that government solves the externality problem of building roads has to contend with the idea that monopolies under produce. So what’s the net here?
As much as I loathe the road construction through cities, is it true that a monopoly is oversupplying? Maybe we reconcile with: too little roads in all the wrong places.
Thanks for writing,
Greg Barbieri
The world would be so much better if we had put the interstates that go through cities in tunnels.
Large federal efforts are bound to miss the needs of communities at the local scale. The project of federal funds should be to essentially leave it up to a distributed set of county and state level solutions, and then observe which of those ideas end up being the best ones!
Great analysis and research here, thanks.
What if I don't despair over it though? What if I think highways connecting cities _and_ car-friendly roads within cities are basically non-negotiable (maybe not in an absolute sense) and Europe is bad for not doing this?