DOT’s Livability Plan Ignores Real Life

The Antiplanner hasn’t yet read all of the Department of Transportation’s strategic plan yet, but I’ve read the livable communities chapter. Though heavily footnoted, it is based on numerous minor and two major fallacies.

Among the many minor fallacies, the plan blames obesity on the lack of sidewalks forcing parents to give their children rides to work instead of letting them walk. This unquestioned assumption is not supported by reality.

Childhood obesity started becoming a problem in the 1990s. In the late 1980s, cheap sugary drinks sweetened by high fructose corn syrup started to become available, which is more likely to be a major factor behind obesity. At the same time, parenting styles changed so that parents now no longer let their children outdoors unsupervised, thanks probably to the “missing children” campaign that also started in the 1980s. Meanwhile, America began building suburbs without sidewalks in the 1940s, long before obesity became a concern.

Another minor fallacy is that the authors of the strategic plan seem to view driving as solely a cost, and ignore the benefits of mobility. “The United States’ heavy reliance on car-dependent, dispersed development is not without costs,” asserts the plan. “For example, the average American adult between the ages of 25 and 54 drives over 12,700 miles per year, and the average American household has to spend $7,658 annually to buy, maintain, and operate personal automobiles.” Yet the mobility provided by automobiles also produces enormous benefits, and costs only about a quarter as much, per passenger mile, as urban transit or intercity rail.

The plan supports many of these claims with cities from anti-auto groups such as Reconnecting America, which wants to put a train in everyone’s neighborhood no matter what the cost. While the Antiplanner would probably be pleased if the DOT cited some Cato reports, I would be even more pleased if the DOT actually took the time to review the bases and source data for those reports. If it had done so for many of the reports it cites, it would have discovered they are more based in ideology than fact.

The real fallacy of the plan is the belief that low-density development “forces” people to drive when in fact it liberates people with automobiles to have access to jobs, low-cost housing, and other consumer goods that they couldn’t have if they didn’t have cars. We can’t simply rebuild cities to early twentieth-century standards and expect people to stop driving.

This leads to the second major fallacy of the plan, which is an assumption that urban redesign would allow people to do everything they do today with less driving. Many urban planners fervently believe this myth, yet it was disproven by certain other urban planning researchers as early as 1995. Many, if not most, economists who have studied this issue agree that urban design has little impact on driving.”

One of the things these researchers found is that people want to put some distance between home and work. People don’t spend 50 minutes a day in their cars commuting because they have to; they do it because they want to use that time to adjust to their day. Locating jobs closer to homes won’t work; it will just lead people to move further away from their jobs.

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At the time this photo was taken, every “shop” on the ground floor of this so-called mixed-use development was vacant. Today they are being converted to apartments.”

The same is true for shopping. Case in point: Beaver Creek, a four-story “transit-oriented development” located on Portland’s westside light-rail line. (The light-rail station is to the immediately right of the photo.) The top three stories are apartments and the bottom is supposed to be retail. But no retailer can survive on the business of the handful of people living in the apartments, and planners provided no parking for retail customers. As a result, nearly all of the ground-floor space has been vacant for more than a decade.

As the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, John Charles, informed me recently, the building’s owners are currently converting the ground floor into twelve studio apartments. So much for walking downstairs to go shopping.

Trying to limit people to shop only at stores within walking distance of their homes is a waste of effort. Except perhaps at Manhattan-like densities, you can’t pack enough people within walking distance of a shopping area to give that shopping area the market it needs to offer a wide variety of products. Further, if people are limited to just one store, competition dies and prices rise.

The plan’s recommendations are not as bad as they could be; at least, they don’t require cities and metropolitan planning organization to adopt smart-growth plans. But the DOT will “encourage” them to do so by providing “livability” and “sustainability” grants to planning agencies. The plan also calls for more investments in high-speed rail and urban rail transit.

Military planners are often said to “always fight the last war.” In the same way, urban planners and DOT strategists are planning cities from a century ago, ignoring the tremendous changes that have happened since then and are going to happen in this century.

As the Antiplanner has frequently noted, one of those changes is driverless cars. By coincidence, just a few days after the DOT released its strategic plan, Nissan announced that it would have affordable driverless cars for sale by 2020. This will undo everything in the DOT’s strategic plan.

First, it will lead to a renewed growth in driving as people who can’t drive today will gain automobility and people who can drive will discover that they can be more productive (or better entertained) while traveling if they let the car do the driving for them. Second, driverless cars will render urban rail transit, intercity rail, and other forms of collective transportation even more obsolete than they are today.

For longer trips, air travel will be the only form of collective transport competitive with driverless cars; the infrastructure needs of rails simply makes passenger trains too expensive. For medium-length trips, intercity buses on the Megabus model (but no doubt with driverless capabilities) may provide an option. Bicycles can work over very short distances, but for most urban trips cars will remain ideal.

Rather than continue to plan for cities from a century ago, the DOT should think about how driverless cars will affect future demands for travel and what kind of infrastructure they will need. It’s probably too much to expect this from federal transportation planners, much less those in the thrall of the irrational auto haters.