The Antiplanner

Americans moved to the suburbs because of interstate highways. Or they moved to the suburbs because of federal housing policies. Or they moved to the suburbs because of federal subsidies to sewer and water lines.

Opponents of suburban lifestyles rely on the myth that outside forces caused Americans to move to the suburbs. This myth, in turn, relies on the further myth that only Americans live in suburbs. As every American tourist who has traveled the London subway and Chunnel trains knows, everyone in Europe lives in high-density cities.

Bollocks, says Paul Barker, a London researcher who wrote this 2009 book. In reality, despite decades of anti-suburban campaigns similar to those in the U.S.,
“84 percent of people in Britain live in a form of suburbia” (p. 15).

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Guest post by Charles Marohn

There is no question that the greatest force that shapes the form of American cities is transportation. And, since the National Defense and Highways Act of 1956, the federal government has dictated that the country’s transportation system would be based almost exclusively on the automobile. While we won’t overlook the improved standard of living and prosperity this has created, we do argue that we have long since crossed the threshold of diminishing returns on this approach. If America is to have true prosperity going forward, we need to reexamine our transportation investments and the land use pattern they induce and choose approaches that pay a higher rate of return.

America’s cities of the industrial era are sometimes romanticized by the ill-informed. While “efficient” from a pure land-use standpoint, these were not places of prosperity for the masses. Living conditions were horrid by today’s standards, with poor sanitation and environmental quality leading to rampant disease and high mortality rates. No American today would desire to live in such a place.

There were two groups of people, however, that avoided the urban suffering of the industrial era. The first was the wealthy, who could live on larger properties in and on the outskirts of town and, during the most suffocating times for one’s health, could escape entirely to the countryside. The second were farmers. While a tough life, farmers avoided what Thomas Jefferson called the “pestilence to the health” found in the city.

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Note: This is the first of what may become a series of interblog debates between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn of the Strong Towns Blog.

Many opponents of low-density suburbs — areas they derisively call “sprawl” — argue that Americans would not have chosen to live in such areas unless they were subsidized or forced to do so. One of the most important such subsidies, they claim, is the Interstate Highway System.

“For more than a generation,” argues former Milwaukee Mayor and current head of the Congress for the New Urbanism John Norquest, “urban sprawl sprung up with federal assistance [such as] excessive road building . . . that interfered with the free market.” He adds that, “urban superhighways should be relegated to the scrap heap of history.”

Would our cities look a lot different if the federal government had not built the urban interstates (which were the first major urban highways built with federal assistance)? I argue that the differences would be minor.

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The 2001 National Household Transportation Survey (NHTS) found that the average motor vehicle contains about 1.6 people (see table 16). But a report from the Department of Energy observes that “intercity trips [have] higher-than-average vehicle occupancy rates” (see appendix C-3, page C-3.4).

How much higher? The answer, curiously, comes from the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which commissioned a study that found the average occupancy of autos in intercity trips is 2.4. Any fuel-efficiency comparisons of autos and intercity rail should use this number, not 1.6.

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In a trip sponsored by the Kansas Chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Antiplanner is speaking tonight at the Bank of America Center in Wichita, a city that is just discovering the wonders and costs of modern urban planning. I’ll be speaking to some groups there Friday as well.

Flickr photo by Brent Danley.

If you are in the area, you can find more information here. I look forward to seeing you there.

At last, a new reason why high-speed rail won’t work: bad architecture. According to this Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Chicago’s Union Station once had a beautiful, skylit concourse between the waiting room and trains, but it was replaced by a couple of skyscrapers. Now travelers have to walk through low-ceilinged tunnels that are confusing, apparently because you can’t see the sun. This means high-speed rail is doomed to failure — unless, of course, we spend a few more billions on beautiful new stations.

Actually, I’ve been to Union Station many times and never got confused in the tunnels (there are really only two directions to go). But leave it to an architect (or architecture critic) to say that we can make high-speed rail work by spending more money on building design.

Chicago used to have six trains stations — Central, Grand Central, LaSalle, Northwestern, Dearborn, and Union — and now it is down to one (though remnants of some of the others still exist). But I suspect that, even if we spend a trillion or so on high-speed rail, that one will still be adequate to handle the traffic.

The White House released its proposed 2011 federal budget today, including the transportation budget. For the most part, this budget is an extension of past budgets, but it includes a few new programs.

First, the budget includes $4 billion for a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, also known as an “infrastructure bank.” The Antiplanner has a couple of problems with this idea. First, infrastructure should be paid for out of user fees, not tax dollars. Second, unlike many other transportation funds, which are distributed based on specific formulas, this fund will be an “open bucket.” This will give states incentives to come up with the wackiest, most expensive transportation projects.

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A day after proposing a spending freeze (that everyone from Glenn Beck to Paul Krugman thinks is stupid), Obama gleefully announced $8 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail. But Obama knows full well that the final cost will be much, much more than $8 billion.

How much more? The Antiplanner once estimated $550 billion in capital costs (not counting cost overruns). BNSF CEO Mark Rose guesses $1 trillion (he must have included cost overruns). Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio compromises at $700 billion.

“The thing is unimaginably expensive,” admits DeFazio. But, he adds, $700 billion is “the same amount of money that Congress gave in one day to Wall Street!” In trying to make high-speed rail sound cheap, he is hoping you won’t remember that Congress didn’t give Wall Street anything; it was almost all loans and most, if not all, will be repaid. That won’t happen with high-speed rail.

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As the Antiplanner noted in an earlier post, transit planners of the 1960s claimed — and may even have believed — that fares collected for new rail transit projects would cover all of their operating costs and most of their capital costs. Such claims are commonly made today for high-speed rail, but most transit advocates admit that transit will never cover its costs and argue that it shouldn’t have to.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has even thrown out cost-efficiency tests imposed by his predecessor, Mary Peters, that the FTA used for judging whether it should fund a rail transit project. Instead, he wants to judge projects for their impact on livability, whatever that means.

Can your rail line top this?

But there must be some test that a reasonable transit advocate (such as many of the Antiplanner’s readers) would accept for judging whether a rail transit system is successful. For those who don’t believe transit should be profitable, I propose the Cable-Car Test.

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President Obama’s state of the union speech yesterday focused on creating jobs (a word he used at least 25 times). On the same day, Steve Jobs presented Apple’s revolutionary and magical iPad. Which will have a more positive effect on people’s lives?

Let’s look at their track records. When President Bush was inaugurated as president, 130 million Americans had jobs. By the time he left office, it was 134 million, not a big increase, but not a decline either.

The first thing President Obama did was to persuade Congress to pass a $787 billion stimulus package in order to “save jobs.” As of December, only 130.9 million workers still had jobs, 3.4 million less than when Obama took office. You can blame that on Bush, you can blame it on whatever you want, but the fact is that Obama promised to create jobs and instead we lost millions of them. At least some people would argue that one reason the economy hasn’t recovered more quickly is that businesses are unwilling to make investments in an unpredictable political environment.

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