NY Times Magazine: “The Autonomist Manifesto (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road)”

Dense urban living works for some people, but not for many others. Planners need to balance their visions with a respect for the core wants and needs of today’s families.

It is true that cars can lead to pollution and other problems. Many Smart Growth planners have tried to discourage driving by making it hard to park and drive. In Portland, for example, one of the strategies being employed is “‘traffic calming’ — the reduction of road capacities on major arterials throughout the Portland area. Auxiliary right-turn lanes are to be removed, left-turn lanes are to be filled with concrete barriers, and other lanes of traffic are to be designated as bike lanes. Metro has targeted several of the area’s most heavily trafficked roads for such treatment.” (Randal O’Toole, ‘The Folly of “Smart Growth’, PDF)

There are other alternatives to consider. John Tierney takes us on a tour for The New York Times Magazine (9/26/04):

I’ve been converted by a renegade school of thinkers you might call the autonomists, because they extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles… They call smart growth a dumb idea, the result not of rational planning but of class snobbery and intellectual arrogance. They prefer to promote smart driving, which means more tolls, more roads and, yes, more cars…

Smart-growth advocates say that suburbs have flourished at the expense of cities because of government policies promoting cheap gasoline, Interstate highways and new-home construction. What if the government, instead of devastating urban neighborhoods by running expressways through them, instead lavished money on mass transit and imposed high gasoline taxes to discourage driving?

As it happens, that experiment has already been conducted in Europe with surprisingly little effect. To American tourists who ride the subways in the carefully preserved old cities, the policies seem to have worked. But it turns out that the people who live there aren’t so different from Americans. Even with $5-per-gallon gasoline, the number of cars per capita in Europe has been growing faster than in America in recent decades, while the percentage of commuters using mass transit has been falling. As the suburbs expand, Europe’s cities have been losing people, too. Paris is a great place to visit, but in the past half-century it has lost one-quarter of its population…

Commuter trains and subways make sense in New York, Chicago and a few other cities, and there are other forms of transit, like express buses, that can make a difference elsewhere. (Vans offering door-to-door service are a boon to the elderly and people without cars.) But for most Americans, mass transit is impractical and irrelevant. Since 1970, transit systems have received more than $500 billion in subsidies (in today’s dollars), but people have kept voting with their wheels. Transit has been losing market share to the car and now carries just 3 percent of urban commuters outside New York City. It’s easy to see why from one statistic: the average commute by public transportation takes twice as long as the average commute by car…

If you add up the costs of driving — the car owner’s costs as well as the public cost of building and maintaining highways and local streets, the salaries of police patrolling the roads — it works out to about 20 cents per passenger mile, and drivers pay more than 19 of those cents, according to Cox. A trip on a local bus or commuter train costs nearly four times as much, and taxpayers subsidize three-quarters of that cost…

…when you take population growth into account, traffic congestion has been increasing more rapidly in the cities that haven’t been building roads…

Intellectuals’ distaste for the car and suburbia, and their fondness for rail travel and cities, are an odd inverse of the old aristocratic attitudes. The suburbs were quite fashionable when only the upper classes could afford to live there…

Some…especially the young and the childless, are moving back to cities, and once again there are private developers ready to meet their desires, which now run toward lofts and historic town houses with modern kitchens. But for most middle-class families, the ideal of city life conflicts with the reality of their own lives. Even if they’re willing to do without a yard, how can they afford to live in a decent neighborhood within easy commute of their jobs? How will they go shopping on a rainy day with a child in tow?

See also:

Sustainable Northampton Plan (PDF)
[Page 50:] “Traffic congestion problems should generally be addressed by providing and enhancing alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles, rather than by adding roads or road lanes. The long-term effect on ‘induced traffic’ (individuals’ decision to drive on a particular road or route encouraged by perceived low congestion) should be carefully considered whenever roadways are reconfigured or widened in an attempt to relieve congestion.”

“Sprawl and Smart Growth” (PDF) by Jane S. Shaw
Senior Associate, Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, MT
…the net result of adding roads is less congestion. Studies show that metropolitan areas that have built more streets have seen less increase in congestion than cities that haven’t added as many…

Smart Growth: When Polls and Reality Diverge
[Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren at the Cato Institute:] Consider the survey results published by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Wisconsinites were asked where they would like to live. Only six percent said in a major city. The largest group, 44 percent, said in rural areas; the second largest group, 27 percent, preferred the suburbs. At first glance, one might think the Clinton/Gore campaign to promote “livable communities” (densely developed communities) would be resisted by a majority.

But the survey went on to ask, “where would you prefer development to occur?” The most popular response (34 percent) was “in a major city.” Another question: “Do you favor zoning laws that would encourage communities to have smaller houses on smaller lots within walking distance of shopping and work?” Yes, said 76 percent. But when asked, “Would you be interested in living in such a development?” 65 percent said no…

Conduct a poll on whether the government should promote mass transit, and 70 percent or so will respond yes. Ask those same people whether they regularly use mass transit or would if it were more available, and the same number (or even larger) respond no…

[2002 survey sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors:] “When it comes to individual behavior, the responses about the homes they have purchased and their desires about their next home indicate that individual consumers want a larger home on a larger lot,” Garczynski said. “They express far less concern about the time and distance of the commute to work, proximity to the city or the availability of public transportation.”

…In Oregon, a bastion of smart growth planning, durable consumer demand for conventional homes with yards is evident, despite planners’ best efforts to encourage high-density development near mass transit and within Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary. The unfortunate result of these mismatched desires has been increased suburbanization, as families seek affordable homes in areas outside Metro Portland’s authority. Traffic congestion has surged as Metro Portland emphasized investment in mass transit over road-building, even as cars remained a popular mode of travel. Despite the establishment of a light rail line, the 2000 Census shows that transit’s work trip market share remains 20 percent below the 1980 Census rate.

“Sprawl and Smart Growth” (PDF) by Jane S. Shaw
Senior Associate, Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, MT
Randal O’Toole, head of the Thoreau Institute, points out that according to Census Bureau surveys, 90 percent of commuters typically drive to work. Only when densities reach 5,000 per square mile (in cities such as Seattle, Chicago, and Boston) does the percentage of drivers start to go down from this high level…

Seeing Like a State: Planning Gone Awry in the 20th Century
[Scott] argues that centrally managed social plans derail when they impose schematic visions that do violence to compl
ex interdependencies that are not–and cannot be–fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends on the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge…

New York Times: “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children” (3/24/05)
After interviewing 300 parents who had left the city, researchers at Portland State found that high housing costs and a desire for space were the top reasons…

Wendell Cox: “METROPOLITAN DENVER AT RISK: How Densification Will Intensify Traffic Congestion, Air Pollution and the Housing Affordability Crisis”
What is in vogue is not always correct…

Planners and architects in the 1950s thought that 20-story public housing projects were the answer — the same projects that are being imploded around the country today…

Energy Intensity Less in Single-Family Homes Than High-Rises
An implicit assumption in many of the briefs for Smart Growth is that multi-unit dwellings are more resource-efficient than single-family homes. However, Department of Energy Tables show that this is not true, at least not on the basis of energy per square foot of living space.

Our Column in Today’s Gazette: The Hidden Risks of ‘Smart Growth’
Besides hoping that people will stop driving, another critical assumption of smart growth advocates is that it’s cheaper to add density to existing urban infrastructure than to add infrastructure to new areas. Harvard researchers Alan Altshuler and Jose Gómez-Ibáñez find that the reverse is true…

Taking the long view, we are concerned that smart growth could gradually transform Northampton into a community that’s inhospitable to families with young children. It’s easy to see how they might pack up for Easthampton, Hadley, or other surrounding towns. Children do cost Northampton money, particularly when it comes to public education, but young families infuse the city with energy and variety, and children with fond memories and deep local roots grow up to be adults who will care for Northampton in the future. That, to us, is true sustainability.