Love this, need more of it. You leave out two other points that should resonate more with conservatives:
1 - Financial sustainability: Every agency that maintains roadways is going broke. Partly because we built so much new infrastrucure and care so little about our future maintenance obligations, but also because municipal accounting considers all transportation facilities to be asset with depreciating value. In reality they are liabilities that must be paid in the form of future maintenance obligations (the revenues to offset need to be created by either the adjacent economic activity that the road provides access to or collectes from users via a toll or similar).
2 - Federal Government Intervention: The land use pattern that we are saddled with is a product of the 1926 Supreme Court case Euclid v Ambler which established that municipal zoning was a valid use of the police power (to protect public health, safety, and welfare) and subsequently resulted in the profileration of zoning ordinances that restrict what type of use can go where within a municipal boundary. If you wanted to construct a live/work situation with a ground floor business, you could only do so in the designated zoning district, which to my knowledge were extremely limited in area at the time. Follow this up with the federal governments role in the housing marking with Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac only insuring the home loans for single family houses, it became even more challenging to secure financing for what was previously the dominant, traditional development pattern. The interstate system and the federal government funding of highway projects after WWII was just the final nail in the coffin.
I can only assume you've heard of Strong Towns and Chuck Mahron, but I'd you haven't look them up.
Excellent points, thank you for commenting them. It is wild how Amtrack started Borealis line between Chicago and Milwaukee, and despite ridership not being super impressive, it still saved an estimated 32 million in yearly road maintenance. We spend way too much money and still have crappy roads (at least where I live).
Yeah we conflate "more" with "good" constantly when it comes to infrastructure. If the roads we do build cost more to maintain then they generate in revenue we will build ourselves into bankruptcy. Cars aren't bad, car dependency is.
I should say mass bicycling in cities is a modern thing, but beautiful modernity, as opposed to cars. Traditional cities look like remote communities like what Hickman's Hinterlands talks about, or like cities before industrialization. Eco-cities would be what cities used to look like: when tourists could tour Quebec City by horse carriage, that is a reflection of what cities used to look like. In other words, they looked like Elmer Fudd's rooftop or like 15-minute cities.
That being said, Alex Jones whining about banning cars and putting people in hobbit homes is stupid: only the middle class can afford a car or a mortgage (and people can build their own homes), and rightists HATE cars, since they view it as celebrity culture and consumerism.
I'm not familiar with Andres Duany, but I will check him out. Thanks for the recommendation! I was first introduced to the subject of urban design through Not Just Bikes videos.
One more thing to consider about this is the exorbitant cost to create mixed use buildings, believe it or not, due to tight restrictions around elevators that exist only in America and not in Europe. Most new apartment buildings in America are made with 4 stories or less because an elevator is not required for those buildings. Elevators in the US have to be longer, wider, and conform to unnecessary standards that make an elevator in America cost almost 3 or 4 times more than an elevator would in Europe, about 160k for 4 stories, with an additional 30k-ish per story added (This article explores this more -> https://cayimby.org/blog/movin-on-up-the-low-ceiling-of-north-american-elevator-standards/ ). To get around this, builders just make large footprint low rise single use buildings instead of 7-11 story mixed use buildings that can house more people and create more walkability.
Beyond this, I would say I have to agree with everything about the article.
On that last point about cities not being safe because of the people who live there, the suburban phenomenon is a negative perpetual feedback loop created, sadly, by white flight, where cities are associated with danger because dangerous people live there, while suburbs are associated with safety because safe people removed themselves from cities. The idea here is that until safe people move to cities, cities will always be dangerous, but safe people won't move to dangerous areas. This means we need to incentivize safe people living in cities. The raised cost of living in urban areas is, for better or worse, a step in the right direction. Certain cities do a very good job at removing the riff-raff. Downtown Tampa has virtually 0 homeless people walking around; homelessness is relegated to one singular bus stop and a vacant parking lot nobody uses (can't imagine why). Once they leave that area they are returned to it. Contrast that with Seattle where every city block is a homeless neighborhood.
Very true. A lot of people wonder how we move from 70+ car-centric development to a more balanced approach. It is difficult for sure, but the #1 thing is just getting rid of Government regulations that put a prohibitive cost on building that way.
Unfortunately the problem is much harder to fix than it would’ve been to avoid. This would require massive eminent domain of single family homes and dilapidated condo complexes directly outside urban areas, or very rich investors willing and able to buy them outright and redevelop entire neighborhoods.
There was a video I recently watched on city planning with the memorable quote “American cities weren’t built for cars, they were bulldozed for cars”, and at this point showed a picture of downtown Detroit in 1950 vs a more updated 70s shot from the same angle and many 7-13 story buildings had been removed and replaced with parking lots.
I am very glad this sort of thinking is becoming more common on the right.
I live in Salt Lake City, we have a good light rail system (Trax) and a regional rail system as well (Frontrunner). It is well used and popular in our city and is in the process of being expanded.
I recently moved to a place within walking distance of the light rail. My son does not drive, and us living here has given him much more freedom and independence.
We are able to get to most of the important places in the city by hopping on a train. It's much nicer to go downtown to a hockey game or concert and not have to fight traffic, deal with parking, etc.
I still need a car to get to work and I enjoy road trips, but city driving and city traffic are not enjoyable at all, It's great to have a better option.
One objection many have brought up is the people you may have to deal with while riding public transit. In our case, it's not much of an issue. There are shady people from time to time, but the majority of people who ride our system seem reasonably normal.
However. It seems to me that dismissing the idea of public transport altogether because there could be (or are) bad people on it would be like dismissing sidewalks, public parks, or public libraries for the same reason.
I'd prefer to keep all of those things and work on getting rid of the bad people instead.
Things like trains and public transit work when crime is low and culture homogenous (ahem, Japan, Denmark). An additional point of cars in the US is to allow us to avoid the insane and the violent and the violently insane. So, nobody is giving them up so long as they have to put their kids on a bus with rotting tranq-outed madmen.
But even with our crime levels and heterogenous culture, public transit is still much, much safer. And if you could magically wave a wand and transform America back to 1940s-style infrastructure, not only would it work, it would be a net safety gain. Granted, having your neck broken in a car accident won't even make the local newspaper, whereas a Guatemalan migrant setting a woman on fire makes national news. Which is probably why you discount the harm of cars and have an exaggerated view of the harms of public transit. All things equal, I would rather have my neck broken, but given the odds of these things happening, I'll take my chances with public transit. And when I lived in an area where it was feasible, I used it frequently with no issues.
The crime and culture issues need to be addressed, no argument there. But if we continue to just build car-centric infrastructure, traffic will get many times worse, even more people will die (already, more Americans have died from car accidents than Americans in all its wars combined), and a lot more freeways will look like the Katy Freeway. Ugh.
That being said, I am not asking you or anyone else to give up your cars. I am just asking for options. Build with the option for people to walk, bike, or use public transit. You can keep living in the suburbs if you want to.
Safer is in the eye of the beholder. Looking at average rates shows nothing because nobody's circumstances are average. Within a parent's car there is basically zero chance of thousands of crime types that happen on public transport not to mention chemical and disease exposures. Plus, sure one has a greater chance of getting killed in a crash but everyone at least prefers those odds being at least partly in their own control. Sure, except for biking, build walkable cities. But trying to accommodate everything has led to the absurdity of Seattle, creating worse routes in hilly areas where there will never be substantial biking. The need for walkable extends beyond cities, I live in a rural area that gets substantial through traffic and our roads have nearly no shoulder for walking or even for pulling over.
I have no issue with rural life and I don't think that needs to change. As I said in the article, cars make perfect sense in rural environments. They are clearly the best transportation option in that case.
This article is a critique of suburban & urban car-centric development.
Sure, but as I started with there is no fixing the city infrastructure without fixing the harder part of culture. That's the problem that must be addressed first.
For the first 8 years of my adult life, I lived without a car in the most walkable and transit heavy areas of Brooklyn and Philadelphia. I biked to work for most of the summer, and took the subway or el the rest of the time. I took regional rail between the two cities hundreds of times. And I don't mean comfy, expensive Amtrak, I mean 3 hours on NJT and SEPTA with a switch at Trenton. I walked to the grocery store, and carried everything back on foot. I lived exactly what you are advocating for, and I did it naturally, long before I had read Strong Towns or seen Not Just Bikes. And I have seen all the statistical arguments, heard all the discussion around Jane Jacobs, and all that jazz. My line of work is tangentially related to planning and I am not unfamiliar with the subject and the discourse around it.
But then, after the chaos of 2020, I bought a car and I am never going back. I now live in a car dependent city in the Southwest. It's the exact opposite of my previous mode, and frankly, my quality of life has enormously improved. There are things beyond the simple material circumstance of the infrastructure that influence people's feelings about a place. Maybe the statistics say I'm safer on the subway, but I haven't been screamed at by a drug abusing bum in my car, nor given free commentary on how people of my race are poisoning Brooklyn (things which happen regularly on the MTA, btw). There is an atmosphere, a sort of oppressive feeling to the city. Some people feel it, others don't. Having a car insulates you from it, even if you aren't driving it everywhere you go. I spent two years owning a car, but still living in the city, still walking and biking and taking the train. Simply owning it is access to an enormous amount of freedom.
You can quote all the traffic fatalities statistics, economic arguments, and appeals to Peter Hitchens you want, but it can't change the way people feel about these things at a subconscious level. There are elements to this discussion that go beyond things that can be influenced by city planners, and some acknowledgement of this fact and some humility about it would be more constructive than any traffic statistic could ever hope to be.
Tolkein may not have liked the car, but I get the impression that he also didn't like London much either. A lot of these principles would be perfectly acceptable to most people when applied to villages or smaller towns. Many vacation towns in the US, especially on the eastern coast, already basically work this way, and I am under the impression that many places in Europe do as well. I visited Bath on a trip to England and it seemed like a very pleasant place to live that was walkable, bikeable, and served by Transit.
But, the Northeastern cities are the template for many people in this discussion. They have enormous problems, and have had them for decades. The discourse around this topic is, for some, a thin veil over a complete contempt for White people for having fled the cities in the mid-twentieth century. There are plenty of urbanism advocates that would gladly take people's cars by force, and would be happy to dump the contents of suburbia into tenement slums for political and social reasons far beyond urbanism. Don't pretend they aren't out there, and they are not friends in the political sense at all.
Thanks for taking the time to write this response. It makes sense to me that your quality of life is much better in the Southwest than Brooklyn. Sure Brooklyn is more walkable and has more public transit, but in no way was I trying to argue that those two things guarantee happiness. New York is not my template for this at all, I didn't even mention in my article. I don't think New York (a city of 8.5 million) could really be considered all that "traditional", despite its relative walkability. Personally, I don't think cities that large should even exist. My template is the traditional American Main Street, which is why I'm glad you mentioned villages and smaller towns, because that is really what I have in mind here. All across my state, there are a lot of smaller cities that are growing fast and building giant sprawling suburbs, mostly due to bad policies (zoning laws). I think it would be better for these cities to not build suburbs, but to do urban areas and rural areas. For all the reasons I mention in the article.
Of course, and thank you for responding as well. I think there is a great amount of value in thinking about these sorts of local topics that often get overlooked, especially by the political enthusiasts. I guess my main point of contention is that there definitely are plenty on the far left who would use urbanism as an excuse to expropriate cars, and that the freedom offered by private transportation is certainly no illusion.
I am glad this is catching on. I thought I was alone in stumbling upon channels like “not just bikes” that promote walk ability. It just intuitively makes sense that members of tight knit, small communities would be within walking distance of each other.
The system has, in my opinion from observation, done great damage to Southern Culture and the whole rural lifestyle. When the “concrete comes a-creeping” as Lynyrd Skynyrd once put it, traditional ways of life suffer.
Also, for the lolberts(libertarians, of whom I used to be), the system is very Big Government friendly.
I want to return to the old-school European Village that contributed to the success of Europe and her children
The Upper South comprised little farmsteads of habitants (sic), surrounding the plantations, since the Cavaliers turned Virginia and New Sverige into a clone of rural southern England (except London), the Highlands, and the Pale. The Deep South comprised poverty-stricken farmers surrounding the plantations, since the London, Estuary, and Norfolk, merchants, who settled the Caribbean wanted to create the dog-eat-dog world of said slave ports in England and in the West Indies, London and these other ports in England helping pave the way for classical liberalism. The Upland South comprised yeoman farmers with a few plantations, and thus the people were free until Big Coal took over, backed by Big Steel. Before cars came along, the Upper and Deep South were pigs with lipstick.
After cars came along, they were pigs without lipstick. Only the Upland South (which was the part of Alabama "Sweet Home Alabama" was talking about), was decent, and even then that was only before Big Coal took over when the North began industrializing. Thus the Upland South was only free before 1830, and afterwards it became a pig with lipstick.
European villages were only Merrie England before feudalism: during feudalism, the decline of feudalism, and industrialization, they were hellholes, being worked by overseers, subject to warfare (crime decreased with feudalism), and having dangerous child labour even before industrialization. In proto-feudalism like Anglo-Saxon England, there was no fear of crime, because most people did not leave their hometowns except on important business, and remember there was traffic on the roads, which would have protected each other from criminals.
Industrialization led to the European miracle, and Chinese technology led to the Age of Discovery.
Correct it is very difficult to do. It has been done in some European cities that were rebuilt after WWII car-centrically, and then later rebuilt traditionally. So it is possible, but Americans are much different than Europeans, and convincing them that having everybody drive cars is a bad idea and it would be better to have a mix of cars, trains, busses, biking, and walking is difficult. It doesn't help that apparently our current regulatory environment makes it impossible to build high-speed rail (see California).
My plan: I have found a small city in Wisconsin with virtually no crime, it is closer to my family and our friends from college. If I get a house there we could walk or bike to the grocery store, Catholic Church, library, and main street. We'd only need one car, and if we got some of our friends to move there as well (and they have expressed interest), our children could play together. From there I would advocate for the city to expand dedicating walking/bike paths, and making most new developments mixed-use instead of suburb-style. It is a small enough city that few organized people could have a large effect on policy.
As an Australian American I really loved this article! When I visit America (which I love), I can’t wrap my mind around the fact you have to get in your car to do anything, even to pick up milk, and even when you live in a major city! I live in a large city in Australia, and I take my car out of the garage once a fortnight. I walk most places. People walk with granny carts to the grocery store (mine has an insulated spot for milk!). Our public transit is safe, reliable, affordable, and becoming better connected all the time. My car is great for driving to a further-away national park for a hike (but I’ve always lived near hikes walking distance from my home). I wish Americans could experience a city like mine and how much it improves your quality of life to spend less time in traffic!
As an Australian American I really loved this article! When I visit America (which I love), I can’t wrap my mind around the fact you have to get in your car to do anything, even to pick up milk, and even when you live in a major city! I live in a large city in Australia, and I take my car out of the garage once a fortnight. I walk most places. People walk with granny carts to the grocery store (mine has an insulated spot for milk!). Our public transit is safe, reliable, affordable, and becoming better connected all the time. My car is great for driving to a further-away national park for a hike (but I’ve always lived near hikes walking distance from my home). I wish Americans could experience a city like mine and how much it improves your quality of life to spend less time in traffic!
Car culture is an aspect and extension of Suburban culture, which is not Right or Left, but Elitist. Cars separate the people with the cars from the people who don’t, which protects them from crime, discomfort, and the rest of the lower class. It’s a paradox driven by self-interest: why would I walk or use public transport, when I could get a car to avoid crime and poor people? Over time, the only people left without a car will be the extreme poor in a self-fulfilling cycle. The car-brained mindset is the classic boomer mindset: My life improves as I retreat away from society, therefore society is improving, so long as I continue to increase my wealth.
I love my cars and driving them and I support this message.
The biggest hiccups for traditional urbanism in my opinion would be making a functional and appealing transit system and stamping out the crime, drug, and homeless problems within cities.
I live in southwestern British Columbia and we have a pretty extensive transit network but it suffers from: buses being late, early and having the dregs of society on board (whether that be Stinkians, urban youth, or crackheads trying to light up underneath my seat).
Our Skytrain system is a bit better passenger wise but the trains will sometimes stop for unexplained reasons whilst over a bridge.
And I don't need to explain the predicament that cities are in considering they all suffer from similar problems (at least I assume they do, given cities where I live and what I hear about elsewhere)
I support traditional urbanism but it has some large obstacles ahead of it that this article didn't really cover.
Cars are tools, ultimately. They serve a purpose. But the purpose of the car should not be to occupy the primary space in a city. Do live for the cars or does the car exist for us?
On a wider issue, American urban planning suffers from a zoning issue, which I believe the author is familiar. It feeds into the car problem, making the whole a negative feedback loop.
Great article, but "induced demand" sounds too stupid to be true because it is. The problem is that they aren't adding new lanes at the speed which would be needed with regard to how quickly the suburbs are growing. Now obviously, I don't think that 26 lane highways are the solution, and the suburbs shouldn't have to grow because it's an unnatural way to build a city/town/metropolis.
The Daily Rake has an excellent series on this problem called "Deboonking the Traffic Soyboys", where he also goes into how most people who discuss this problem are too afraid to actually discuss why people don't want to use the buses and trains that are available.
Thanks. I like public transit, and I live in a city, but I don't use it because it just doesn't work in our car-centric developments (most of the amenities have moved out of the city to strip malls along major roads). It would take me 3x or 4x as long to get where I need to go if I used the bus. Now the last city I lived in, taking the bus was faster and more convenient than driving, so I used it frequently.
But that aside, this piece wasn't an ode to public transit. I'm arguing that instead of building a shiny new suburban development, perhaps we should a new urban development with a traditional design. So maybe instead of building two identical suburban houses on a lot, you build a mixed-use building. It sure would help increase the supply of housing. It doesn't need to have any public transit unless you need the throughput of those modes of transportation. Personally being able to walk and bike safely to things is far more important to me than public transit.
Making American cities beautiful again means making American cities human again. Great piece.
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Love this, need more of it. You leave out two other points that should resonate more with conservatives:
1 - Financial sustainability: Every agency that maintains roadways is going broke. Partly because we built so much new infrastrucure and care so little about our future maintenance obligations, but also because municipal accounting considers all transportation facilities to be asset with depreciating value. In reality they are liabilities that must be paid in the form of future maintenance obligations (the revenues to offset need to be created by either the adjacent economic activity that the road provides access to or collectes from users via a toll or similar).
2 - Federal Government Intervention: The land use pattern that we are saddled with is a product of the 1926 Supreme Court case Euclid v Ambler which established that municipal zoning was a valid use of the police power (to protect public health, safety, and welfare) and subsequently resulted in the profileration of zoning ordinances that restrict what type of use can go where within a municipal boundary. If you wanted to construct a live/work situation with a ground floor business, you could only do so in the designated zoning district, which to my knowledge were extremely limited in area at the time. Follow this up with the federal governments role in the housing marking with Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac only insuring the home loans for single family houses, it became even more challenging to secure financing for what was previously the dominant, traditional development pattern. The interstate system and the federal government funding of highway projects after WWII was just the final nail in the coffin.
I can only assume you've heard of Strong Towns and Chuck Mahron, but I'd you haven't look them up.
Excellent points, thank you for commenting them. It is wild how Amtrack started Borealis line between Chicago and Milwaukee, and despite ridership not being super impressive, it still saved an estimated 32 million in yearly road maintenance. We spend way too much money and still have crappy roads (at least where I live).
Yeah we conflate "more" with "good" constantly when it comes to infrastructure. If the roads we do build cost more to maintain then they generate in revenue we will build ourselves into bankruptcy. Cars aren't bad, car dependency is.
I should say mass bicycling in cities is a modern thing, but beautiful modernity, as opposed to cars. Traditional cities look like remote communities like what Hickman's Hinterlands talks about, or like cities before industrialization. Eco-cities would be what cities used to look like: when tourists could tour Quebec City by horse carriage, that is a reflection of what cities used to look like. In other words, they looked like Elmer Fudd's rooftop or like 15-minute cities.
That being said, Alex Jones whining about banning cars and putting people in hobbit homes is stupid: only the middle class can afford a car or a mortgage (and people can build their own homes), and rightists HATE cars, since they view it as celebrity culture and consumerism.
Not Just Bikes on YouTube and Andres Duany are great to learn more on this subject.
I'm not familiar with Andres Duany, but I will check him out. Thanks for the recommendation! I was first introduced to the subject of urban design through Not Just Bikes videos.
https://youtu.be/NMvwHDFVpCE
One more thing to consider about this is the exorbitant cost to create mixed use buildings, believe it or not, due to tight restrictions around elevators that exist only in America and not in Europe. Most new apartment buildings in America are made with 4 stories or less because an elevator is not required for those buildings. Elevators in the US have to be longer, wider, and conform to unnecessary standards that make an elevator in America cost almost 3 or 4 times more than an elevator would in Europe, about 160k for 4 stories, with an additional 30k-ish per story added (This article explores this more -> https://cayimby.org/blog/movin-on-up-the-low-ceiling-of-north-american-elevator-standards/ ). To get around this, builders just make large footprint low rise single use buildings instead of 7-11 story mixed use buildings that can house more people and create more walkability.
Beyond this, I would say I have to agree with everything about the article.
On that last point about cities not being safe because of the people who live there, the suburban phenomenon is a negative perpetual feedback loop created, sadly, by white flight, where cities are associated with danger because dangerous people live there, while suburbs are associated with safety because safe people removed themselves from cities. The idea here is that until safe people move to cities, cities will always be dangerous, but safe people won't move to dangerous areas. This means we need to incentivize safe people living in cities. The raised cost of living in urban areas is, for better or worse, a step in the right direction. Certain cities do a very good job at removing the riff-raff. Downtown Tampa has virtually 0 homeless people walking around; homelessness is relegated to one singular bus stop and a vacant parking lot nobody uses (can't imagine why). Once they leave that area they are returned to it. Contrast that with Seattle where every city block is a homeless neighborhood.
Very true. A lot of people wonder how we move from 70+ car-centric development to a more balanced approach. It is difficult for sure, but the #1 thing is just getting rid of Government regulations that put a prohibitive cost on building that way.
Unfortunately the problem is much harder to fix than it would’ve been to avoid. This would require massive eminent domain of single family homes and dilapidated condo complexes directly outside urban areas, or very rich investors willing and able to buy them outright and redevelop entire neighborhoods.
There was a video I recently watched on city planning with the memorable quote “American cities weren’t built for cars, they were bulldozed for cars”, and at this point showed a picture of downtown Detroit in 1950 vs a more updated 70s shot from the same angle and many 7-13 story buildings had been removed and replaced with parking lots.
Thank you for this post. Very well said.
I am very glad this sort of thinking is becoming more common on the right.
I live in Salt Lake City, we have a good light rail system (Trax) and a regional rail system as well (Frontrunner). It is well used and popular in our city and is in the process of being expanded.
I recently moved to a place within walking distance of the light rail. My son does not drive, and us living here has given him much more freedom and independence.
We are able to get to most of the important places in the city by hopping on a train. It's much nicer to go downtown to a hockey game or concert and not have to fight traffic, deal with parking, etc.
I still need a car to get to work and I enjoy road trips, but city driving and city traffic are not enjoyable at all, It's great to have a better option.
One objection many have brought up is the people you may have to deal with while riding public transit. In our case, it's not much of an issue. There are shady people from time to time, but the majority of people who ride our system seem reasonably normal.
However. It seems to me that dismissing the idea of public transport altogether because there could be (or are) bad people on it would be like dismissing sidewalks, public parks, or public libraries for the same reason.
I'd prefer to keep all of those things and work on getting rid of the bad people instead.
Things like trains and public transit work when crime is low and culture homogenous (ahem, Japan, Denmark). An additional point of cars in the US is to allow us to avoid the insane and the violent and the violently insane. So, nobody is giving them up so long as they have to put their kids on a bus with rotting tranq-outed madmen.
But even with our crime levels and heterogenous culture, public transit is still much, much safer. And if you could magically wave a wand and transform America back to 1940s-style infrastructure, not only would it work, it would be a net safety gain. Granted, having your neck broken in a car accident won't even make the local newspaper, whereas a Guatemalan migrant setting a woman on fire makes national news. Which is probably why you discount the harm of cars and have an exaggerated view of the harms of public transit. All things equal, I would rather have my neck broken, but given the odds of these things happening, I'll take my chances with public transit. And when I lived in an area where it was feasible, I used it frequently with no issues.
The crime and culture issues need to be addressed, no argument there. But if we continue to just build car-centric infrastructure, traffic will get many times worse, even more people will die (already, more Americans have died from car accidents than Americans in all its wars combined), and a lot more freeways will look like the Katy Freeway. Ugh.
That being said, I am not asking you or anyone else to give up your cars. I am just asking for options. Build with the option for people to walk, bike, or use public transit. You can keep living in the suburbs if you want to.
Safer is in the eye of the beholder. Looking at average rates shows nothing because nobody's circumstances are average. Within a parent's car there is basically zero chance of thousands of crime types that happen on public transport not to mention chemical and disease exposures. Plus, sure one has a greater chance of getting killed in a crash but everyone at least prefers those odds being at least partly in their own control. Sure, except for biking, build walkable cities. But trying to accommodate everything has led to the absurdity of Seattle, creating worse routes in hilly areas where there will never be substantial biking. The need for walkable extends beyond cities, I live in a rural area that gets substantial through traffic and our roads have nearly no shoulder for walking or even for pulling over.
I have no issue with rural life and I don't think that needs to change. As I said in the article, cars make perfect sense in rural environments. They are clearly the best transportation option in that case.
This article is a critique of suburban & urban car-centric development.
Sure, but as I started with there is no fixing the city infrastructure without fixing the harder part of culture. That's the problem that must be addressed first.
For the first 8 years of my adult life, I lived without a car in the most walkable and transit heavy areas of Brooklyn and Philadelphia. I biked to work for most of the summer, and took the subway or el the rest of the time. I took regional rail between the two cities hundreds of times. And I don't mean comfy, expensive Amtrak, I mean 3 hours on NJT and SEPTA with a switch at Trenton. I walked to the grocery store, and carried everything back on foot. I lived exactly what you are advocating for, and I did it naturally, long before I had read Strong Towns or seen Not Just Bikes. And I have seen all the statistical arguments, heard all the discussion around Jane Jacobs, and all that jazz. My line of work is tangentially related to planning and I am not unfamiliar with the subject and the discourse around it.
But then, after the chaos of 2020, I bought a car and I am never going back. I now live in a car dependent city in the Southwest. It's the exact opposite of my previous mode, and frankly, my quality of life has enormously improved. There are things beyond the simple material circumstance of the infrastructure that influence people's feelings about a place. Maybe the statistics say I'm safer on the subway, but I haven't been screamed at by a drug abusing bum in my car, nor given free commentary on how people of my race are poisoning Brooklyn (things which happen regularly on the MTA, btw). There is an atmosphere, a sort of oppressive feeling to the city. Some people feel it, others don't. Having a car insulates you from it, even if you aren't driving it everywhere you go. I spent two years owning a car, but still living in the city, still walking and biking and taking the train. Simply owning it is access to an enormous amount of freedom.
You can quote all the traffic fatalities statistics, economic arguments, and appeals to Peter Hitchens you want, but it can't change the way people feel about these things at a subconscious level. There are elements to this discussion that go beyond things that can be influenced by city planners, and some acknowledgement of this fact and some humility about it would be more constructive than any traffic statistic could ever hope to be.
Tolkein may not have liked the car, but I get the impression that he also didn't like London much either. A lot of these principles would be perfectly acceptable to most people when applied to villages or smaller towns. Many vacation towns in the US, especially on the eastern coast, already basically work this way, and I am under the impression that many places in Europe do as well. I visited Bath on a trip to England and it seemed like a very pleasant place to live that was walkable, bikeable, and served by Transit.
But, the Northeastern cities are the template for many people in this discussion. They have enormous problems, and have had them for decades. The discourse around this topic is, for some, a thin veil over a complete contempt for White people for having fled the cities in the mid-twentieth century. There are plenty of urbanism advocates that would gladly take people's cars by force, and would be happy to dump the contents of suburbia into tenement slums for political and social reasons far beyond urbanism. Don't pretend they aren't out there, and they are not friends in the political sense at all.
Thanks for taking the time to write this response. It makes sense to me that your quality of life is much better in the Southwest than Brooklyn. Sure Brooklyn is more walkable and has more public transit, but in no way was I trying to argue that those two things guarantee happiness. New York is not my template for this at all, I didn't even mention in my article. I don't think New York (a city of 8.5 million) could really be considered all that "traditional", despite its relative walkability. Personally, I don't think cities that large should even exist. My template is the traditional American Main Street, which is why I'm glad you mentioned villages and smaller towns, because that is really what I have in mind here. All across my state, there are a lot of smaller cities that are growing fast and building giant sprawling suburbs, mostly due to bad policies (zoning laws). I think it would be better for these cities to not build suburbs, but to do urban areas and rural areas. For all the reasons I mention in the article.
Of course, and thank you for responding as well. I think there is a great amount of value in thinking about these sorts of local topics that often get overlooked, especially by the political enthusiasts. I guess my main point of contention is that there definitely are plenty on the far left who would use urbanism as an excuse to expropriate cars, and that the freedom offered by private transportation is certainly no illusion.
I am glad this is catching on. I thought I was alone in stumbling upon channels like “not just bikes” that promote walk ability. It just intuitively makes sense that members of tight knit, small communities would be within walking distance of each other.
The system has, in my opinion from observation, done great damage to Southern Culture and the whole rural lifestyle. When the “concrete comes a-creeping” as Lynyrd Skynyrd once put it, traditional ways of life suffer.
Also, for the lolberts(libertarians, of whom I used to be), the system is very Big Government friendly.
I want to return to the old-school European Village that contributed to the success of Europe and her children
The Upper South comprised little farmsteads of habitants (sic), surrounding the plantations, since the Cavaliers turned Virginia and New Sverige into a clone of rural southern England (except London), the Highlands, and the Pale. The Deep South comprised poverty-stricken farmers surrounding the plantations, since the London, Estuary, and Norfolk, merchants, who settled the Caribbean wanted to create the dog-eat-dog world of said slave ports in England and in the West Indies, London and these other ports in England helping pave the way for classical liberalism. The Upland South comprised yeoman farmers with a few plantations, and thus the people were free until Big Coal took over, backed by Big Steel. Before cars came along, the Upper and Deep South were pigs with lipstick.
After cars came along, they were pigs without lipstick. Only the Upland South (which was the part of Alabama "Sweet Home Alabama" was talking about), was decent, and even then that was only before Big Coal took over when the North began industrializing. Thus the Upland South was only free before 1830, and afterwards it became a pig with lipstick.
European villages were only Merrie England before feudalism: during feudalism, the decline of feudalism, and industrialization, they were hellholes, being worked by overseers, subject to warfare (crime decreased with feudalism), and having dangerous child labour even before industrialization. In proto-feudalism like Anglo-Saxon England, there was no fear of crime, because most people did not leave their hometowns except on important business, and remember there was traffic on the roads, which would have protected each other from criminals.
Industrialization led to the European miracle, and Chinese technology led to the Age of Discovery.
This is definitely a tough sell as it would be hard to implement in the current urban environment. It would work more in a newly built city
Correct it is very difficult to do. It has been done in some European cities that were rebuilt after WWII car-centrically, and then later rebuilt traditionally. So it is possible, but Americans are much different than Europeans, and convincing them that having everybody drive cars is a bad idea and it would be better to have a mix of cars, trains, busses, biking, and walking is difficult. It doesn't help that apparently our current regulatory environment makes it impossible to build high-speed rail (see California).
My plan: I have found a small city in Wisconsin with virtually no crime, it is closer to my family and our friends from college. If I get a house there we could walk or bike to the grocery store, Catholic Church, library, and main street. We'd only need one car, and if we got some of our friends to move there as well (and they have expressed interest), our children could play together. From there I would advocate for the city to expand dedicating walking/bike paths, and making most new developments mixed-use instead of suburb-style. It is a small enough city that few organized people could have a large effect on policy.
As an Australian American I really loved this article! When I visit America (which I love), I can’t wrap my mind around the fact you have to get in your car to do anything, even to pick up milk, and even when you live in a major city! I live in a large city in Australia, and I take my car out of the garage once a fortnight. I walk most places. People walk with granny carts to the grocery store (mine has an insulated spot for milk!). Our public transit is safe, reliable, affordable, and becoming better connected all the time. My car is great for driving to a further-away national park for a hike (but I’ve always lived near hikes walking distance from my home). I wish Americans could experience a city like mine and how much it improves your quality of life to spend less time in traffic!
As an Australian American I really loved this article! When I visit America (which I love), I can’t wrap my mind around the fact you have to get in your car to do anything, even to pick up milk, and even when you live in a major city! I live in a large city in Australia, and I take my car out of the garage once a fortnight. I walk most places. People walk with granny carts to the grocery store (mine has an insulated spot for milk!). Our public transit is safe, reliable, affordable, and becoming better connected all the time. My car is great for driving to a further-away national park for a hike (but I’ve always lived near hikes walking distance from my home). I wish Americans could experience a city like mine and how much it improves your quality of life to spend less time in traffic!
Car culture is an aspect and extension of Suburban culture, which is not Right or Left, but Elitist. Cars separate the people with the cars from the people who don’t, which protects them from crime, discomfort, and the rest of the lower class. It’s a paradox driven by self-interest: why would I walk or use public transport, when I could get a car to avoid crime and poor people? Over time, the only people left without a car will be the extreme poor in a self-fulfilling cycle. The car-brained mindset is the classic boomer mindset: My life improves as I retreat away from society, therefore society is improving, so long as I continue to increase my wealth.
I love my cars and driving them and I support this message.
The biggest hiccups for traditional urbanism in my opinion would be making a functional and appealing transit system and stamping out the crime, drug, and homeless problems within cities.
I live in southwestern British Columbia and we have a pretty extensive transit network but it suffers from: buses being late, early and having the dregs of society on board (whether that be Stinkians, urban youth, or crackheads trying to light up underneath my seat).
Our Skytrain system is a bit better passenger wise but the trains will sometimes stop for unexplained reasons whilst over a bridge.
And I don't need to explain the predicament that cities are in considering they all suffer from similar problems (at least I assume they do, given cities where I live and what I hear about elsewhere)
I support traditional urbanism but it has some large obstacles ahead of it that this article didn't really cover.
Cars are tools, ultimately. They serve a purpose. But the purpose of the car should not be to occupy the primary space in a city. Do live for the cars or does the car exist for us?
On a wider issue, American urban planning suffers from a zoning issue, which I believe the author is familiar. It feeds into the car problem, making the whole a negative feedback loop.
Great article, but "induced demand" sounds too stupid to be true because it is. The problem is that they aren't adding new lanes at the speed which would be needed with regard to how quickly the suburbs are growing. Now obviously, I don't think that 26 lane highways are the solution, and the suburbs shouldn't have to grow because it's an unnatural way to build a city/town/metropolis.
The Daily Rake has an excellent series on this problem called "Deboonking the Traffic Soyboys", where he also goes into how most people who discuss this problem are too afraid to actually discuss why people don't want to use the buses and trains that are available.
Thanks. I like public transit, and I live in a city, but I don't use it because it just doesn't work in our car-centric developments (most of the amenities have moved out of the city to strip malls along major roads). It would take me 3x or 4x as long to get where I need to go if I used the bus. Now the last city I lived in, taking the bus was faster and more convenient than driving, so I used it frequently.
But that aside, this piece wasn't an ode to public transit. I'm arguing that instead of building a shiny new suburban development, perhaps we should a new urban development with a traditional design. So maybe instead of building two identical suburban houses on a lot, you build a mixed-use building. It sure would help increase the supply of housing. It doesn't need to have any public transit unless you need the throughput of those modes of transportation. Personally being able to walk and bike safely to things is far more important to me than public transit.