Slate posted an article yesterday by someone named Charles Montgomery who has fallen, hook, line, and sinker to the design fallacy–the idea that urban planners can shape human behavior by shaping urban design. The title of the article says it all: “Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health.”
Montgomery’s thesis–expressed at length in his book, Happy City–is that people who live on cul-de-sacs drive more and walk less, so therefore cul-de-sacs must be at fault. Gee, could it be the other way around? Perhaps people who don’t want to walk to go shopping choose to live on cul-de-sacs because they offer the best combination of privacy and security they can find. After all, numerous studies have shown that neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs have significantly less crime than neighborhoods with the gridded streets favored by planning advocates like Montgomery.
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Studies have also shown that plenty of people who live in the suburbs get exercise doing things other than walking to shops or cycling to work. Who are urban planners like Montgomery to tell them they are doing it wrong? Meanwhile, while urban planners continue to have faith in the design fallacy, most economists believe that the trends planners think they see (such as people walking more in dense, mixed-use communities) are the result of self-selection, not urban design.
The irony is that I had to view an advertisement for Cadillac for 15 second before accessing the Slate article.
You gotta love the picture at Slate of Atlantic Station in Atlanta which happens to be in walking distance to big box retail stores!
If you think people want to live like that, then by all means build walkable developments and let people decide whether or not to live there. But if you try to use government to coerce people to walk more by forcing building designs on the public, you could just as well end up with a thousand people using Segways to get to their cars.
People ( and children) who live on cul-de-sacs probably walk and get more exercise than others.
We live at the end of a cul-de-sac and our children learned to ride bikes, play with others etc without the threat of getting run over.
I’ve seen basketball, wiffle ball and soccer games played in our cul-de-sac. I think that’s healthy?
We have a walking trail that starts at the end of our cul-de-sac so many people walk down to get on the trail.
Maybe I should be quiet or the Slate guy and his friends will make all this illegal or require a government permit.
This passage from the Brownstone paper The Antiplanner cites:
There are also a number of studies which deal with self-selection by trying to directly measure preferences through attitude surveys (Kitamura et. al., 1997 and Bagley and Moktarian, 2002, and Frank et. al., 2007). These studies typically find that attitudes explain most of the variation in VMT across households, and the regression model fits (as measured by R2) improve significantly relative to models without attitude measures. The most likely reason for the greatly improved fit is that the attitudes are jointly determined by the outcome variables. People who live in dense urban areas tend to express positive attitudes about urban characteristics, and people who commute long distances are likely to express positive attitudes about large lots and open spaces. If this is the case then these attitudes cannot be treated as exogenous and stable, and their inclusion in models will bias all of the results. It is also possible that the measured attitudes will change with the built environment, and this would invalidate the results from these models.
And anti-urban, anti-transit intellectuals such as The Antiplanner pull out selected studies that support their biases, ignoring the literal stacks of contrary evidence. Let’s say the evidence for “self selection” overwhelming the impacts of urban form and density on travel is much weaker than the reams of empirical studies that do prove a strong connection…not that most of the responses to this, if any, will be worth answering as experience shows.
msetty does not appear to be a fan of freedom. Sure, people might think they know how they want to live, but msetty knows better. If they could only be forced to live as msetty chooses, his brilliance would become apparent.
Now, with “Builder” we’re getting the 21st Century equivalent of the famous “Eliza” program…I didn’t know there were web-bots designed to go trolling on sites like this.
Cul-de-sacs aren’t bad for your health, they’re bad for arterials and highways. They’re bad for forgiveness in a street system. They’re great for roller hockey.
Oh, I forgot. Freedom has been made obsolete and irrelevant by our glorious urgan planners. How silly of me.
The ‘Builder’ trollbot speweth forth:
Oh, I forgot. Freedom has been made obsolete and irrelevant by our glorious urgan planners. How silly of me.
I guess the principles of programming an Eliza-like trollbot isn’t much different than a spambot. Whoever programmed the Builder trollbot must have gotten bored with spambots.
The misspelling of “urban”–urgan (sic)–is a nice touch…an illiterate, can’t spell trollbot, no less! Just like the real living, breathing thing!
You know, your time would be better spent programming new smart phones apps than this b.s.
And anti-urban, anti-transit intellectuals such as The Antiplanner pull out selected studies that support their biases, ignoring the literal stacks of contrary evidence. Let’s say the evidence for “self selection” overwhelming the impacts of urban form and density on travel is much weaker than the reams of empirical studies that do prove a strong connection…
If you think the evidence is “weaker” than Brownstone claims, the burden of proof is on you to provide the evidence. His review is perhaps the most thorough available, because it takes seriously the notion of research design and points out that most of the “reams” of empirical studies are useless because their approach is inadequate to answer the questions posed about the influence of the built environment on behavior. Only a few of the studies had rigorous enough designs and their answers all generally pointed in the same direction. That is what the “science” says at this point.
By the way, while we’re talking about science, here is some that Montgomery should have looked into while working on his book. I wonder why he didn’t? Is he just a denier?
Cul-de-sacs aren’t bad for your health, they’re bad for arterials and highways. They’re bad for forgiveness in a street system. They’re great for roller hockey.
IOW: they’re bad for traffic health.
IMHO they are bad for public health if there is something nearby to walk to, as culs-de-sac make you walk farther distances to get to a destination, unless someone put in a cut-through to obviate the distance issue.
DS
msetty, ‘G’ is up-left of ‘B’ on a standard qwerty keyboard, and it’s an easy typo to make. Only an arsehole calls a typo evidence of illiteracy. Shall we all make a project of reviewing your many posts looking for typos?
Fred_Z: Shall we all make a project of reviewing your many posts looking for typos?
Challenge accepted!
Challenged failed!
After going through just four of the 417 posts msetty has commented on, I just couldn’t stomach any more unnecessary quotation marks or misuse of sic erat scriptum. But I did find that this “ignoramus” thrice on one post “spaketh” in improper typos:
Six years of this shit.
/end needless ridicule
Yes and no. There is undoubtedly some self-selection going on, but on a national or regional level, it is clear that urban design influences the average behavior of the populace. The US was the first society to adopt the car on a massive scale, and it is far ahead of other developed countries in terms of childhood obesity, heart disease, and other health problems. Not sure what sort of self-selection could have caused that! I highly doubt that immigrants to the US are thinking, “gee, I really don’t like having to walk or take transit to work, I’m going to move to the US so I can drive everywhere.”