Forced to Drive?

Although the Antiplanner likes to keep up with the latest technologies, I’ve hesitated to use Twitter. As someone who finds it easier to write a 5,000-word policy paper than a 500-word op ed, the 140-character limit for tweets is painful to think about. But, in case you haven’t heard, I started tweeting last week under the name, of course, of @antiplanner.

So I received a tweet yesterday from the Antiplanner’s loyal opponent, Michael Setty, saying, “We improve the lives of Americans the less we force them to drive.” (Followed by, “And robocars won’t save us,” but I’ll focus on his first tweet here.)

Setty is paraphrasing Minnesota planner Charles Marohn who argues that transportation planners need to change the emphasis from increasing people’s mobility to reducing the amount we “force them to drive.” This is hardly new: the notion that some mysterious conspiracy has forced Americans to drive has underlain a lot of urban planning for the past several decades. It is pure baloney.

No one forced automobiles on Americans. Instead, automobiles liberated Americans. Not counting the war years, transit ridership peaked in 1926 at an average of just 147 trips per year. Close to half of all Americans lacked any access to transit, and even many who lived near transit lines couldn’t afford to use them very often. Most of those who couldn’t ride transit were limited to foot travel. At an average trip length of 5 miles, transit travel was less than 750 miles a year.

Today, the average American travels twenty times that many miles by car. That increase in travel has produced enormous benefits, including higher incomes, more affordable and better housing, lower-cost consumer goods, and access to almost unlimited recreational and social opportunities.

Americans in the 1920s could see the huge advantages provided by cars. When an Indiana woman was asked why her family bought a car when their home still lacked indoor plumbing, she answered, “you can’t go to town in a bathtub.”
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In 2013, the average American rode transit just 33 times. That’s not because they were forced off of transit by poor service. In fact, according to APTA, transit service in vehicle miles has more than doubled since 1926 (the earliest year for which data are available). The nation’s population also more than doubled in that time, but anyone who wants excellent transit service can have it by living in any of dozens of major cities that heavily subsidize their transit systems.

Despite the doubling of transit service, total transit ridership declined from 17.3 billion trips in 1926 to 10.4 billion in 2013. It didn’t decline because transit service was bad. Indeed, not only has service doubled, it is faster, safer, and reaches more destinations than ever before. Nor did it decline because people don’t have access to transit; nearly 80 percent of Americans have access to some form of transit, up from around 50 percent in the 1920s.

Instead, transit ridership declined because cars are so much better: faster, cheaper (especially when carrying more than one person), and capable of reaching far more destinations with door-to-door service. For example, though Chicago has one of the most extensive transit systems in the nation, its 2,700 route miles of bus and rail are dwarfed by the more than 30,000 road miles in the urban area.

When Marohn says we should stop forcing Americans to drive, he means we should design urban areas to allow people to use transit, walk, or bicycle more: in other words, higher densities, mixed uses. But there’s a good reason why urban areas are designed the way they are: people prefer the privacy and lack of noise (not to mention lower land prices) that come with low densities and separated uses. Certainly, there may be a limited market for high-density, mixed-use developments, but if there is, let developers build for the market. Don’t try to impose it based on the idea that doing so will lead people to drive less.

Marohn could also mean we should step up transit service, build more bike paths, and widen sidewalks. But transit will forever remain inferior to driving, and there is no evidence that doing these things will significantly reduce that driving. People’s desire for mobility simply outweighs the ability of urban planners to make things more accessible through creative design.

Cars aren’t perfect. They use energy, pollute, and accidents kill about 33,000 people a year. But all these things are declining. Decades of experience have proven that we can best solve the problems with cars by improving the vehicles, not by reducing people’s mobility.