Transportation Planning Requires Planning
Randall O’Toole is a relentless advocate for highways and automobile dependency in the United States. Consequently, I don’t agree with him about very much. But the thing I consistently find most bizarre about him, is that the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have both agreed to agree with O’Toole that his support for highways and automobile dependency is a species of libertarianism. For example, O’Toole whines a bunch about how Ray LaHood wants to spend less money on highways and more on transportation alternatives before denouncing this agenda as “central planning.”
Central planning, of course, is the reverse of libertarianism. So if promoting alternative transportation is central planning, then building highways everywhere must be freedom! But of course in the real world building highways is also central planning. The Long Island Expressway is not a free market phenomenon. The Interstate Highway System as a whole reflects, yes, planning. That’s how it works. And beyond the interstates, American cities made a collective decision in the early part of the twentieth century to totally reconfigure their streets so as to become more convenient for car traffic—they’d be paved in an auto-friendly way, and the streets divided into a (larger) cars-only portion and a (smaller) people-only portion. That’s planning. It’s true that proposals to rebalance and make more space for buses and bikes and streetcars and pedestrians is a sort of central planning. But so is the alternative.
It’s just a field that, intrinsically, requires a lot of planning. The question is about what kinds of plans to make.
56 Responses to “Transportation Planning Requires Planning”
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May 29th, 2009 at 8:32 am
I dunno, Matt. Sounds like socialism to me.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:33 am
These people rarely have a problem with the centrally-planned defense industry…
May 29th, 2009 at 8:35 am
I think most libertarians recognize that roads are a government project.
But they take the building of roads to be a coordination problem; the government simply acts as a coordinating agent that reduces transaction. And if you take as a token of faith that roads pay for themselves, it’s not a macro-level distortion of the economy or economic geography. Public transit, in this view, qualifies as a distortion, because it’s paid for from general revenue, which decreases consumption in and investment in non-public transit goods.
Not that I buy this view, but you elide the central issue.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Finally a post here I agree with. Yes, Libertarians are inconsistent here – and yes, keeping the highway system running is every bit as much central planning and preference tweaking as investments in publics transportation and alternative energy, etc. That said, there are plenty of people at Cato who favor road privatization, so you may be mischaracterizing their stance a bit.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Actually, it wasn’t so much a collective decision sui generis as a process driven by ample bribery and muscle from, e.g., General Motors, which actively targeted mass transit and density. And since it’s Cato, it’s A-OK if the boot on your neck is being wielded by a corporation instead of an elected government.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Ironically, regardless of what else he may have thought about individual liberty versus tyranny, I’m pretty sure Cato the Younger would have understood the importance of the central planning of transportation infrastructure.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:49 am
And let’s not forget aqueducts! Cato would have been a huge fan.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:50 am
It’s because cars are manly, and represent freedom, because one could drive anywhere, particularly if it’s a convertible down a warm mid-Western rural highway just before sunset. As opposed to evil socialist collectivist transportation methods which cannot offer such solitary cinematic moments.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:53 am
El Cid: You’re right, whether or not you intended to be. It’s just a deeply-ingrained cultural bias for cars and roads.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:05 am
It is the ideology of the central planning. Progressives favor one-size-fits-all solutions so that all must enjoy their utopian vision of walkable cities & neighborhoods. They would outlaw diversity in lifestyle choice that highway infrastructure spending offers; suburban living is wasteful, immoral, and racist. More importantly though, the funding and upkeep of the highway system is generally holding within a stable political equilibrium. Matt’s New Ideas, will of course, require lots of patriotic tax-raising for high-tech train sets and reconfigured powers of zoning that inevitably increase the size of the government and worsens the problems inherent in central planning.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:07 am
I think it is a matter of who benefits.
O’Toole is a tool who thinks real estate developers and owners of construction companies should be able to plot ..er..”plan” how they can get rich exploiting the public treasury for private gain –
as opposed to civil servants planning efficient systems that will provide valuable benefits and services to the common citizens at low costs.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:10 am
And you thought I was just snarking.
I just have to say, against the ‘libertarian’ asses who think their weird aesthetics must be accepted by everyone as ‘liberty’, twice I lived in metropolitan areas with comprehensive public transportation, and I never felt as free to develop my individual interests and capabilities as any time in which I have been more car-bound.
It’s not a simple opposition, but the notion that it is somehow inherently more supportive of liberty and personal development to favor car-based and suburb-based development is ridiculous.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Progressives favor one-size-fits-all solutions so that all must enjoy their utopian vision of walkable cities & neighborhoods.
Wrong, Sparky!! Most favor smarter policies. Besides, if you enjoy paying $4/gallon for gas, more power to you. Some of us would like an alternative.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:13 am
It’s just a deeply-ingrained cultural bias for cars and roads.
I’m not sure this is at all true.
This country easily, even passionately, embraced trains back in the day. We still embrace airplanes. Where public land transportation is competitive in terms of price and convenience, we use it.
I think in the end, Americans are actually far more pragmatic about transportation than this cultural bias theory would suggest. Rather, I think this is a rationalization for what would otherwise be a naked transfer of wealth, from higher-density to lower-density population areas. In other words, the culture war, at least in this case, is really just cover for an economic war.
I also think the balance of power in this economic war is shifting, as the United States continues to urbanize. As Nate Silver pointed out in his How Obama Really Won the Election article for Esquire, in 1992 exit polls had Americans identifying themselves as 35% rural, 24% urban. In 2008, it was 30% urban, 21% rural. The “real America” of McCain-Palin was simply out of touch with the real real America, and a shift in transportation funding back to a multi-mode system that fairly serves the real real America is going to be just one of the many consequences of this fact.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:19 am
El Cid,
The distinction between positive and negative actions is useful here. As I stated before, maintenance and upkeep of the highway system is in a stable political equilibrium – costs will not explode, people will not have to radically alter their lifestyles in the near future for its perpetuation. Therefore your “supportive” is the wrong descriptive term to use; the proper one is “permissive”. Meanwhile, the future will not permit to me merely “accept” leftists’ grandoise schemes; I will be forced to pay for chronically bankrupt high-speed rail systems, forced to live in the urban sardine-box of the city, prohibited from enjoying the expanse of a large backyard, if I accept that mistaken characterization.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:19 am
I see writing style of content-free conjecture (a la McArdle) is also ingrained in security-state libertarians.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Actually, it wasn’t so much a collective decision sui generis as a process driven by ample bribery and muscle
“sui generis” = “of a kind of its own” – i.e. unique, in a class by itself. “As a violinist, Itzhak Perlman is sui generis”.
“per se” = “by itself” or “in itself” or “themselves” – “forming the alliance was not an act of war per se, but it made war almost inevitable.”
“sensu stricto” = “in the strict sense” – “Al Gore has not been a politician, sensu stricto, since 2001, but he is none the less a man with considerable political influence”.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Progressives favor one-size-fits-all solutions so that all must enjoy their utopian vision of walkable cities & neighborhoods. They would outlaw diversity in lifestyle choice that highway infrastructure spending offers; suburban living is wasteful, immoral, and racist.
Actually, Matt’s general theme is that we should eliminate most of the regulations that are designed to prohibit denser development, provide subsidies for things like transportation on the basis of sound economics, and then let people develop as they so choose. He does believe that would lead to more dense neighborhoods, but by choice, not coercion. And while Matt has historically been a little weak on the full range of what that could mean, recently he has come to understand a bit better than you can have suburbs that are also relatively dense and walkable, and served by both public transit AND roads/private vehicles.
More importantly though, the funding and upkeep of the highway system is generally holding within a stable political equilibrium.
But as I just pointed out, it is anything but a stable political equilibrium. The general trend of the U.S. population is toward ever-greater urbanization, and in recent years we have passed a tipping point where more voters see themselves as urban than rural.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Billare, May 29th, 2009 at 9:05 am:
And also, we have always been at war against Eastasia.
The car system is founded on one size fits all central planning. Parking set aside requirements, zoning requiring single used separated residences in zoned residential areas, and of course the constant road expansion in the congestion … roadworks … residential development … increased average VMT … congestion cycle, underlaid by cross-subsidies from existing to greenfield utility provision, that the 20th century suburban development cycle fed upon.
And anyone who thinks that the ever-accumulating deficit in maintenance required to keep the auto-uber-alles system running is a “stable equilibrium” is throwing around big words either without knowing or without caring what they mean.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Of course, O’Toole’s masters can maintain the scam only by fudging the analysis.
Like only charging $2.50 per gallon at the pump — and then charging another $38 per gallon on the 1040 tax form. In order to get the money for military operations to protect Big Oil’s aggression overseas. Oh, and that money gets falsely labelled “defending the US Homeland”.
Or Like building low-mileage, over-priced, oil-leaking pieces of shit for decades — and then saying that the taxes of the common citizen need to be used to bail out the “free market”.
Some of the best gravy, of course, is in real estate. You have your whores on the County Supervisor Board pass zoning that bans farmers in the exurbs from subdividing their land and selling lots to the common citizens.
Then you wait until a farmer is on the verge of bankruptcy from property taxes, go in and buy his farm, get a rezoning to 1/8 acre lots from you buddies, and bingo: 1000 percent profit on you investment just for the paperwork. Minus the cut for the Supervisors, of course.
Then you put up a bunch of cheap shit, flimsy crackerjack houses and bleed the masses for all you can get — helped by your buddies at the local bank who pass out ARM mortgages to the masses that can be reset to loan shark rates later. After your banker buddy skims off the cream, he bails, the bank fails, and the FDIC get stuck with cleaning up the toxic waste.
All this low density urban sprawl, of course, puts enormous strain on the infrastructure. New roads, sewers, water lines and power lines are needed. Which your construction buddies supply –for a price.
Who pays — well, it’s sure as shit is not the real estate developers. Surtaxing that 1000 percent profit would be UnAmerican. The little people get buttfucked with the bill. Which is why Prince William County , VA outside Washington DC has the highest property taxes in Virginia –even though it is a miserable shithole whose roads are in perpetual gridlock.
Speaking of Prince William and Fairfax Counties, I left out the best part. If you get YOUR Senator to bring in a few “Defense” projects from DC, that is better than Viagra. $100 Million from the US Treasury gets whipped into real money when it hits the local multiplier.
Best of all is that no one can challenge these blood-sucking leechs and parasites. It would be UnAmerican to attack the “free enterprise” system. Especially when its back is turned and its nose is buried deep in the public trough, slurping up the tax dollars. Wait until the fat hog comes up for air, so that it squeal loudly when you suggest it go on a diet.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:33 am
The distinction between positive and negative actions is useful here. As I stated before, maintenance and upkeep of the highway system is in a stable political equilibrium – costs will not explode, people will not have to radically alter their lifestyles in the near future for its perpetuation.
Again, this is incorrect: the costs of using the existing road system is perpetually going up. Fuel prices are increasing in real terms. Population growth and concentration is leading to ever-greater congestion. Lifestyles are being changed already.
I will be . . . forced to live in the urban sardine-box of the city, prohibited from enjoying the expanse of a large backyard, if I accept that mistaken characterization.
If you want to argue about the economic merits of various transportation subsidies, fine. But this is nonsense: no one is going to force you to live in urban area or prohibit you from living on a large piece of land. You are just going to have to deal with the fact that by choice, your fellow Americans are continually urbanizing, and public funding priorities are going to start reflecting that fact.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:34 am
BruceMcF,
I don’t know what all those tedious sounding policies mean. I don’t particularly care to, either, since I don’t live in the city for a reason and am not particularly interested in urban affairs. You may crow about your greater technocratic understanding if you like.
All I want is the preservation of the the kind of lifestyle that many Americans enjoy, free from the all the bustle and high prices and crime of the city, to be preserved with as little impugning on my freedoms and pocketbook as possible. I understand that the movement of New Urbanism wants to devolve transportation decisions to the local level so that people who choose to can zone for walkable neighborhoods of their own – I am all for that sort of thing. But it is generally not in your political nature to provide unalloyed freedom for its sake without strings.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Libertarianism is just Conservatism misspelled
The central planning, the govt intervention, that gave us an automobile-friendly nation, happened a couple of generations ago. Today’s generation of the thoughtless grew up in a world in which the autombile friendliness was a given, was part of the state of nature, at least to those thoughtless enough to not question beyond the appearances of what has been presented to them as a given. Now, defending the status quo is not, when put baldly that way, a very attractive ideology. So when you can systematically misunderstand defending the status quo as defending the relationship of the individual to the state of nature, and from the encroachments of central planning, of course you go for the latter rationalization, I mean if you are inclined to the thoughtless defense of your immediate self-interest.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Yeah, I meant that the “collective decision” didn’t just arise from nowhere, independent of any other factors. People didn’t just awaken one morning with an inexplicable desire to destroy functioning streetcar systems and build more highways. As always when confronted by Latin scholastic philosophers in this matter, I will go hide behind Durkheim.
Yes, taking existing major roads built and maintained for decades at public expense, already pay-per-use in what’s meant to be at cost to optimize the free flow of commerce, and turning them over to private profit-making entities is the free market in action. After all, Hoosiers are free to build another Interstate 80/90 if they don’t like how foreign investors are running the current one. Bonus if they use eminent domain to do it, since Cato is a big fan of that. What is the sound of one invisible hand wanking?
May 29th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Let’s be very clear about one thing: The commercial class which runs the Republican Party — the real estate developers, the construction company owners, the defense corporations, Big Oil, etc — are not really businessmen. That is one of the myths created by their propaganda whores.
Dick Cheney was not installed as CEO at Halliburton because he knew a lot about finding oil or running a corporation — he was installed because he was a Long Time POLITICAL FIXER for Big Oil.
Similarly, most Republican donors don’t hate government — a parasite doesn’t hate the host on which it feeds. They EXPLOIT government for their private profit. They are the LAST people to be entrepreneurs or to create something new. To provide value vice extort a cut. To compete vice rig a bid.
Look at Newt Gingrich’s deeply deceitful “get government off the backs of the people” campaign. He didn’t move power back to the States — pigs will fly before any Republican Congressman ever gives up the right to rig the rules of business in order to extort money from K Street.
Rather, Newt Gingrich dumped responsibility of caring for the poor, the sick and the young onto the states –because there’s no campaign dollars in those groups. But when it came to “regulating interstate commerce” the Republican Party was open for business.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:53 am
I understand that the movement of New Urbanism wants to devolve transportation decisions to the local level so that people who choose to can zone for walkable neighborhoods of their own – I am all for that sort of thing. But it is generally not in your political nature to provide unalloyed freedom for its sake without strings.
As opposed to “the political nature” of the people who created all those restrictions on what other people could do with their land in the first place?
Libertatian-minded people are a small minority in the United States. That is true in the cities, in the suburbs, and in rural areas. So the idea that somehow the suburbs and libertarianism go hand-in-hand is purely a byproduct of where most American libertarians happen to come from.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:00 am
One of the biggest lies in the News today is that the “Real Estate Bubble” was an accident. A natural disaster, like a hurricane.
Which is bullshit. It was PLANNED. In the late 1990s. Why spend money to elect a fool like George Bush is you ain’t going to get that money back ten-fold?
LOOK at who profited. Real Estate. Bankers. Southern construction suppliers like Georgia Pacific and Home Depot. Big Oil. Big Defense –insofar as it grabbed oil deposits for Big Oil.
Who do you think contributed to the Republicans?
Who lost? Well, whoever gets stuck with paying off that $6 TRILLION bar tab dry drunk George W ran up. I’ll give you a hint: He Stole $3 Trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund and let an IOU in your account.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:01 am
And ‘libertarians’ are free to keep convincing themselves that this sort of pseudo-philosophical argument is based on anything other than weird libertarian aesthetics, and you can keep demanding that people who don’t accept your horse shit will please re-define “supportive” as “permissive”, since you shit liberty and piss whiskey.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Randall is a huge O’Toole.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:18 am
It is moronic to suggest that a technologically advanced, deeply complex civilization of 300+ Million people can survive without planning.
It is about time CATO and the liberatarians were challenged on this deceitful intellectual scam they have been running for decades.
This is always planning. Anyone who’s been in Washington knows that there is little damm difference between the US Congress and the old Soviet Union Politburo.
The issue is WHO plans –and for WHOSE benefit.
Do whores for the plutocrats plot in back rooms for private gain — at the cost of the common citizen.
Or do we plan in the public forum –for the common good?
May 29th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Re Don Williams
One of the more delightful things on this blog is reading the diatribes of the blogs resident Bolshevik. Mr. Williams is one of the great providers of comic relief around. A true free spirit.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:39 am
SLC: Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be back flirting with you too soon. Don’t get jealous. Hama Rulez!
May 29th, 2009 at 10:41 am
mds makes an excellent point: the decision to scrap public transit in favor of automobiles wasn’t consensual or democratic at all–it was the result of a massive coordinated campaign by automobile manufacturers. Which just goes to show the need to build an independent Left in this country that isn’t in the pocket of big business like the Democrats are.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Check it out, physicists are exploring the price of anarchy.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:00 am
> think in the end, Americans are actually far more pragmatic
> about transportation than this cultural bias theory would
> suggest. Rather, I think this is a rationalization for what
> would otherwise be a naked transfer of wealth, from higher-
> density to lower-density population areas. In other words,
> the culture war, at least in this case, is really just cover
> for an economic war.
From 1920-1960 there was a _massive_ transfer of wealth from central cities to roadbuilder and real estate magnates as city dwellers were heavily taxed to pay for building the roads, water lines, and sewers which would be used as weapons to destroy those same cities. Yeah, a lot of people were ready to move to Leavittown by 1948, but a lot still liked their city neighborhoods and given the choice would not have voted to tax themselves to build city-killing roads. They were not given that choice.
> The car system is founded on one size fits all central
> planning. Parking set aside requirements, zoning requiring
> single used separated residences in zoned residential
> areas, and of course the constant road expansion in the
> congestion … roadworks … residential development …
> increased average VMT … congestion cycle, underlaid by
> cross-subsidies from existing to greenfield utility
> provision, that the 20th century suburban development cycle
> fed upon.
From 1980 forward, sure (maybe 1970). But I can show you city neighborhoods built in the 1920s/30s specifically designed to accommodate streetcars, commuter rail, walkable grocery stores, detached homes with backyards AND a reasonable number of automobiles per household. There are plenty of city dwellers to love to have an automobile available – they just don’t want to be joined to it at the hip for life.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Nice link, Chris. Matthew and the basketball fans here should be fascinated by the Ewing Paradox to which your cite links:
(i.e, that a basketball team does best when its best player is on the bench with injuries,etc.)
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/braesss-paradox-and-the-ewing-theory/
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/010509a
May 29th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Billare, May 29th, 2009 at 9:34 am:
Those are the suburban policies that lay underneath the free ride that suburban development takes on economy as a whole. The problem is, the free ride encourage every greater suburbanization, forcing people to live in suburban sprawl whether they want to or not, because that is the development that state and local government subsidized and local restrictions enforce.
It deprives people of choice.
In other words, you want the free ride to continue, and depriving people of the choice for alternatives to continue. But it can’t … when suburbs become the majority of settlement, there is less and less “rest of the economy” to such blood from.
The result is the overshoot of suburban sprawl development, then as oil prices spike, from the moderately cheap $4/gallon to the moderately expensive $10/gallon, or even the expensive $20/gallon, that will then lead to some outer suburbs have property values less than replacement values.
That leads, inevitably, to slums, with the crime and all that goes with it.
So fighting against the establishment of dedicated transport corridors and suburban village centers providing a central transport springboard point for suburban areas is, in the end, fighting against the maintenance of your property values and ensuring that forty years from now, it is outer suburbs that we associated with squalor and crime, just as the outer suburbs are associated with squalor and crime in most Latin American cities.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:43 am
The article complains that gas taxes, meant for roads are used for other purposes.
Yet another example of accounting fraud used by CAP and Yglesias.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
I have to throw my lot in here with BruceMcF, Don Williams, and Not Really – suburbanism was not a natural outgrowth of the free market; it was an invention of government, prodded by particular interests.
Some more fuel for the fire – check out Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge, which lays out in her first two chapters how suburbanization was explicit U.S government policy in the crucial Truman administration. Dispersal of industry from the cities to the suburbs was thought to protect America’s manufacturing base from nuclear attacks on key cities; as a result, the U.S government used its powers of military procurement during the build Truman-era buildup to emphasize building new plants rather than retooling old plants (hence, shifting from the cities to undeveloped areas to the tune of $6.5 billion in 1951), changed the tax code to allow defense-critical firms to write off 100% of the costs of purchasing new capital equipment based on certificates of defense-critical status that put dispersal as a top criteria (to the tune of over $4 billion in 1950), and so on.
Another great source is Robert Caro’s the Power Broker. Whatever you might call Bob Moses, he was the acme of the central planner, and probably one of the most powerful central planners in American history, at least on a local level. And he made a planning decision to push money towards building roads and bridges and away from mass transit, and he hooked up with a massive coalition of realtors, developers, contractors, building trades unions, auto manufacturers, materials manufacturers to make it happen. You can’t understand the move to suburbanization when you understand the enormous development being shoveled into the suburbs – at the same time that this same coalition is actively destroying huge amounts of housing within the cities through freeway/highway/expressway construction (the best example being what happened to the Bronx after the Bronx Expressway), or through Urban Renewal (what happened to Manhattan after the creation of Columbus Circle and the Lincoln Center and similar institutions on top of what used to be working class neighborhoods).
May 29th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
O’Toole is rather tiresome at times. He often compares apples to oranges to fit his preferred conclusion. One argument he makes is that emphasizing public transit does not always accomplish higher densities. He notes that the LA area is denser as a whole than the New York metropolitan area, as if one could refer the latter as a monolithic entity. Given that it stretches across half of New Jersey and Connecticut, encompassing very low density suburbs, it is really absurd to compare the two.
Being from California, I am used to many conservatives complaining about the government while forgetting how reliant they are on the government (farm subsidies, water, road building). To be a truly consistent free-marketer, I think you would have to eliminate government in all those areas. That would mean selling off the state aqueduct system, ending crop insurance, halting all public road and utility construction, and converting all highways (and streets!) to toll roads. That’s an absurd proposition of course, so, in the meantime, it’s best to try to rely on something in between (i.e. toll roads and congestion pricing). I suspect actually that Cato and Matt may have common ground in that regard.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I don’t know what all those tedious sounding policies mean. I don’t particularly care to, either, since I don’t live in the city for a reason and am not particularly interested in urban affairs. You may crow about your greater technocratic understanding if you like.
Shorter Billare:
It’s like I’m proud of my ignorance!
May 29th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
He notes that the LA area is denser as a whole than the New York metropolitan area, as if one could refer the latter as a monolithic entity. Given that it stretches across half of New Jersey and Connecticut, encompassing very low density suburbs, it is really absurd to compare the two.
Although even this is an oversimplification, weighted densities provide a much better measure for this purpose. Here is one such calculation for urbanized areas of major U.S. cities (by using urbanized areas, this is excluding the typically large in size but low in percentage of population rural parts of metropolitan areas):
Weighted Densities of U.S. Urbanized Areas
New York soars to the top of the list by a wide margin, which is undoubtedly correct.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
An error in my e-mail address blows away a 6-paragraph comment? Nice blog platform they got here.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Oh, and here is a followup post from the same source about the relationship between standard density, weighted density, the ratio between the two, and commuting modes:
The association between density and mode of commute
The upshot:
And here is an overview of these three different measures:
Interesting stuff. As the discussion in the main post and comments goes on to point out, the causation behind the correlation could go either way or both, and public policy may help explain why the correlation is far from perfect, particularly outside New York.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
But this is nonsense: no one is going to force you to live in urban area or prohibit you from living on a large piece of land.
Of course not– it just means it will cost more to do so. Efficient lifestyles should cost less than wasteful ones, at least in a functional free market, and for a long time inefficiency has been heavily subsidized.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
It’s funny because I feel most self-reliantly free and libertarian when I’m zipping past clogged up urban traffic on my bicycle.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Comment 3
A toke of faith is well phrased. Few highways pay for themselves. I think MattY linked to a recent TX study that showed that some new portion of freeway in Houston will only be funded about 10% by gas tax revenues.
I don’t doubt that that is the case in many instances.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Re Steven at 37: “Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge, which lays out in her first two chapters how suburbanization was explicit U.S government policy in the crucial Truman administration. Dispersal of industry from the cities to the suburbs was thought to protect America’s manufacturing base from nuclear attacks on key cities;”
————
Yep. Of course, nuclear fireballs are spheres and so follow the diminishing R cubed rule. A 10 Megaton nuke does not reach out much farther than TWICE the distance of a 1 Megaton nuke ( 17 miles vice 8 miles).
Unfortunately, dispersal was countered a decade or so later by MIRV weapons — instead of one big nuke, drop 4 or so smaller dispersed nukes so that their pressure fields would overlap. Plus the relatively higher thermal pulse from the smaller nukes start widespread fires that form a firestorm with hurricane force winds –and which incinderates even buried structures.
Plus suburban development greatly increased our need for oil and we quickly depleted the Texas deposits. Which really let the fucking Commies grab us by the short hairs when they took over Cuba early in the 1960s.
Houston is our major refinery area, huge pipelines fan out from Houston acress the USA and the big ass,highly vulnerable oil tankers have to thread a narrow path through the Caribbean reefs past..you guessed it..Cuba.
But once the US government starts doing something , it still keeps on doing it 70 years later –after its original (and obsolete ) purpose has been long forgotten.
There are similar effects on a more micro scale. If you want to know why Tysons Corner, VA developed so rapidly outside Washington DC, it was because businesses and the Mall scurried there to serve the well-paid employees of defense Contractors.
Why were the defense contractors there –well, to serve the CIA during the Cold War. To feed from the huge COVERT shitpot of money.
Why was CIA there? Well, it was just outside the range of a 10 MT nuke dropped on center Washington — and plus it had a big ass Microwave tower than was AT&T’s way of carrying high-bandwidth traffic back in the days before fiber optic was invented. I remember that Tower being there when the Beltway was still being built.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
But let’s just say Til Hazel got filthy rich developing Tyson’s COrner through the magic of the free market. It was an accident, really. Senator John Warner will tell you so.
Just like Senator Warner was shocked..SHOCKED .. to discover that big ass office building suddenly appear in Westfields back in 1994. Founded by government funds whose Appropriations no one could quite figure out.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
It’s not just in the area of transportation that libertarians are willfully blind to the role of the state in promoting what they want. For example, in the eight years that Reason Online has had a blog, they have run zero (0) articles about suburban sprawl zoning (lot sizes, bans on multi-family housing, residential-only zoning), while frequently running scathing critiques of New Urbanist/Smart Growth proposals which would eliminate much of that regulation.
They seem to have decided that the isolated, car-dependent sprawl lifestyle is maximally “individualistic,” and they certainly don’t let any principles about government interfere with their quest to impose their vision of freedom on everyone else.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Your homework, Billare, is to go down to your local or country planning office, find a zoning map, and ask someone there the following questions:
Where would I be allowed to built a single-family home on an acre of land?
Where would I be allowed to build a two-family home on 5000 square feet?
Where would I be allowed to build a ten-unit apartment building?
Where would I be allowed to build a commercial building with apartments above a storefront?
Once you’ve done that, come back here and we can discuss who, exactly, is imposing a one-size-fits-all solution and outlawing a diversity of lifestyle choices.
May 29th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Matt, in this planning the roads/bikeways/sidewalks area, I suggest you look at Beijing, Shanghai, Xian. All have pretty much equal rights for bikes and pedestrians, plus lots of great landscaping along city roads. Really great for jogging. I just got back from a trip there, during which we ran for 6-9 miles each AM. Quite noticeable that the bikeways and sidewalks were given much more equal importance – when there was a need to cross an expressway, the sidewalk would include an overpass or underpass. Would be great to see that more in the US. A bit of a chicken/egg problem – China has millions of bikers and walkers, US does not. But US likely would if there were the well-landscaped and swept bikeways and sidewalks that China has. The China approach makes it easier for China to have a fit population, and to be able to withstand oil price shocks.
May 29th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
This is what I was saying early on. There’s a substitution of peculiar ‘libertarian’ aesthetics for any sane discussion of anything justifiably connected to human liberty in any plausible sense.
‘Libertarians’ simply demand that something that they tend to prefer is more liberatory or individualistic than that which they don’t like, and make up ad hoc rationalizations and make demands about terminology so as to support their aesthetics.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
There are plenty of libertarians that recognize that government subsidation of highways has led to white flight, and plenty of libertarians that want to see highways privatized, even within Cato.
El Cid, I don’t understand your characterization of libertarians as car-fetishizers, when libertarians almost universally opposed the auto bailout. Also, libertarians have no problem with trains, busses or other forms of ‘public’ transportation, so long as they’re not funded through taxpayer’s money. I don’t see libertarians (or anyone else) railing against private corporations like DeCamp.
Also, there are plenty of libertarians that make exceptions to their philosophy when it comes to localally controlled transportation when it is funded entirely by the municipality or sometimes state. It’s part of that live-and-let-live thing: I don’t care if blah blah blah state hs a publically financed subway system if that’s what they want, but I’ll do everything I can to prevent my own state from doing similarly.
Personally I think there are bigger issues out there than public transporation for libertarians to be tackling, but when it costs me $50+ to use Amtrack to get to Massacusetts even after I’m forced to bail it out year after year (something I no longer do anymore since the price is now well over the cost of driving there and back), I can’t help but conclude that Amtrak needs to get the boot. Of course, there’s another option: pump even more money into the failed business!
May 31st, 2009 at 11:37 am
El Cid,
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the uber-”individualist” vacation resort Howard Roarke designed in “The Fountainhead” is an exact description of a post-WW2 cul-de-sac subdivision.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:41 am
Until their backup plan is to eliminate public funding for them, as they advocate for more efficient modes of transport, that and 50 cents will get them a cup of coffee.
Holy nonsequiter, Batman!