“Automobiles tend to be ignored in [sustainability] planning efforts,” says a new study. Yet “automobiles are important to achieving many elements of the sustainability agenda because they are associated with improved access to high-opportunity and more livable neighborhoods,” especially for low-income families.
This isn’t really news. Back in 1997, researchers at UCLA wrote, “Car ownership is a significant factor in improving the employment status of welfare recipients.” In 1998, Yale economist Katherine O’Regan and UC Berkeley economist John Quigley wrote that helping the poor means “promoting the mass transit system that works so well for the nonpoor–the private auto” (see pp. 20-25). In 2003, a Harvard researcher found that, for low-income people, owning a car was more important to gaining a steady income than having a high school diploma.
What is significant about the new study is that several of its co-authors are from the National Center for Smart Growth. Both of these groups have traditionally supported smart-growth plans. When smart-growth researchers tell planners that ignoring (or worse, disincentivizing) automobiles in their plans is bad for low-income people, we can only hope the planners will listen. They certainly didn’t listen to the other researchers listed above.
It seems order viagra generic every website is run by criminals who produce fakes made out of chalk, take your money, and disappear into the wild blue yonder. If you’re living in a city like Milton, Florida, then help is within levitra low cost your reach. In fact they have performed buy cialis respitecaresa.org well in bed from the day one they started taking it. This unending torment must be overseen through muscle and joint activities that generic levitra online respitecaresa.org alleviate the solidness. As the studies lead (or at least first-named author) told the Washington Post, “the dominant ideas have been about improving and investing in transit. . . But I think we have to be able to talk about cars, too. It’s puzzling to me that we can’t.”
It’s not really puzzling to the Antiplanner. Planners are middle-class, and while they support the idea of helping low-income and working-class families in theory, in practice they don’t really like such people. Too many of them are tea partiers, and even the ones that aren’t don’t fit into middle-class neighborhoods: they drive big trucks, eat red meat, and wouldn’t be caught dead at a Whole Foods.
Urban planning today is about rebuilding cities to look the way the upper-middle class wants them to look, and that means pretending the lower classes don’t exist or will happily adopt high-density lifestyles that minimize auto use. The idea that reducing congestion and increasing auto ownership will help people out of poverty just does not fit in to that point of view.
I once calculated that giving every carless low-income family in the Denver area a new Toyota Prius would be both cheaper and more likely to reduce poverty than building one light-rail line. When I pointed this out at a light-rail debate, the head of Denver’s transit agency responded, “We can’t give poor people cars. It would cause too much congestion.”
In short, for too many planners, reducing auto driving is more important than reducing poverty. The Antiplanner suggests that their priorities are mixed up, if only because reducing auto driving will increase poverty which in turn will reduce public support for urban planning.
This whole “issue” really begs the question: how and why have the alternatives to driving become so bad that saddling the poor with the high cost of automobiles is considered a “solution” by some “serious” if woolly-headed “liberals?”
The “solution” to poverty suggested here is just a tautology.
This whole “issue” really begs the question: how and why have the alternatives to driving become so bad that saddling the poor with the high cost of automobiles is considered a “solution” by some “serious” if woolly-headed “liberals?”
Speaking of tautologies…
The reality is that in the vast majority of urban areas automobiles provide a superior level of accessibility. Even the poor are capable of making this determination, regardless of what their social betters might prescribe for them. This is why so many are willing to ‘saddle’ (interesting choice of words — tautology?) themselves with the ‘high’ cost.
The reality is that in the vast majority of urban areas automobiles provide a superior level of accessibility.
In the first place, because they’re almost completely dependent on the automobile, which was the choice made by this society decades ago for better or worse.
TAUTOLOGY, which goes like this: “our urban areas are completely dependent on the automobile, so the only solution to mobility problems is the automobile.”
Moronic, but also very American. And those of us who demand alternatives get attacked, and falsely accused of being elite snobs by those who dishonestly use the poor as pawns in their arguments, because we refuse to believe such addled bullshit. I’ll take Einstein to almost any poster here, anytime, to paraphrase: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
The fact is that in most cases no alternate mode can provide anywhere near the mobility that private automobiles do. Any mass transit system that could compete with automobiles would be so expensive it would bankrupt the country that constructed it. That is why individuals have chosen cars for their transport. Irrational transit advocates can deny this forever, but it will continue to be true.
Builder, you’re full of it.
Walkability–proven over many thousands of years of human urbanism, as opposed to less than a century of the increasingly failed experiment of automobility–in concert with transit, disproves your point. You seem to believe the Wendell Cox big lie that rail transit would have to be built within a quarter mile of every point in an urban area to be “competitive.”
In the long run, it will be cheaper to abandon the more spread-out portions of “exurbia” and revert the roads to gravel or dirt than maintain the grossly-overextended automobile infrastructure that currently exists. In fact, this is already happening in some parts of California and Arizona (see here). No one I know of is saying “the suburbs” will disappear (though some people will make the claim in bogus arguments), but some over-extended places are still shriveling, even after the most recent housing “recovery.”
TAUTOLOGY, which goes like this: “our urban areas are completely dependent on the automobile, so the only solution to mobility problems is the automobile.”
Tautology? More like straw man. I never claimed that we should be forcing the poor to buy cars. I just suggested that they provide a superior level of accessibility, which helps explain why the poor choose to ‘saddle’ themselves with the ‘high’ cost associated with them, even when your preferred alternative is available. Given them the resources to make their own decisions, and let the chips fall where they may.
Moronic, but also very American.
No, not really. There is nothing peculiarly American (see Table 3.2) about it. We were just ahead of the global curve.
And those of us who demand alternatives get attacked, and falsely accused of being elite snobs by those who dishonestly use the poor as pawns in their arguments…
You can demand anything you want, but until you put your own money where your mouth is, it won’t materialize. And very hypocritical of you to accuse others of ‘dishonestly’ using the poor. Just last week Randal posted a story about that Bay Area environmental advocacy group who suggested that the poor should be concentrated in higher density housing near train stations in order to reduce ‘our’ carbon footprint. It wasn’t Randal who proposed that. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Frank. The poor are pawns in the social planners’ chess game, pure and simple.
I’ll take Einstein to almost any poster here, anytime, to paraphrase: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Very ironic choice of quotes. Compare with the above:
In the long run, it will be cheaper to abandon the more spread-out portions of “exurbia” and revert the roads to gravel or dirt than maintain the grossly-overextended automobile infrastructure that currently exists.
Huh? I must have missed where this was proven.
In fact, this is already happening in some parts of California and Arizona (see here).
This is the ‘evidence’ ? Someone’s anecdotal account of a single town that was particularly hard hit during the financial crisis. At a single point in time. With no follow-up reporting.
As Lionel Hutz would say “Now that’s what I call believable testimony!”
I bought an old auto in the 70’s and drove it for nearly 30 years and rarely put in more than $300.00 in repairs in any year. Often only feeding it gas, oil and a tune up.
I was a full time bike commuter and transit slave, before I gained my freedom with this Auto.
that saddling the poor with the high cost of automobiles is considered a “solution” by some “serious” if woolly-headed “liberals?”
Yes, because saddling society with the bone-crushing, economy bankrupting costs of his preferred rail transit would be the much better solution. Where do YOU live again, msetty?
Oh, that’s right! You’re like the LA smart growth councilman who said he would like to live in the smart growth he promotes, but his wife “prefers a house with a backyard”. It’s never your fault that you’re being a hypocrite and not living what you espouse! How about just blame the dog for living on a nice big ranch in the country?
If the Antiplanner is really serious about helping poor people, why not just a grant of $20,000 cash to each carless poor person every few years, no strings attached? Some will use their grant for cars, of course, but others might choose to spend their money on shelter, clothes, paying off debt, etc.
After all, why stipulate that the money must go to purchase cars? I’m sure the Antiplanner is not one of the elitist types who thinks he knows how other people should best spend their own money.
Although, speaking of the Tea Party, I’m not sure how well this plan will go over among them – remember how upset they were about “Obamaphones”, where poor people were supposedly given free mobil phones? (background here)
It seems like the best way to ensure Tea Party, or more generally, Republican support for such a plan would be to make sure that the grants only go to rural poor people. You know – the kind who drive big trucks and eat red meat, but not the “inner-city” a.k.a. “urban” poor people. I don’t think we need to go into details about why the latter group is less deserving in Tea Partier’s eyes, do we?
@Msetty – the “abandonded” exurbs in AZ fell due to the collapse of the housing bubble. When times were good and housing was scarce, far out exurbs were selling. Then things collapsed. Now, they are selling again.
In other words, useless data point for your argument.
AP writes: “too many of them are tea partiers, ”
You really need to get outside of Portlandia more often. There are lots of middle class tea partiers and red meat eaters – except in Portland.
The whole point of raising property values is going to force the poor out and away from transit. It’s a no-brainer that they’re going to be the people most dependent on fixed addresses, automobiles, and bank accounts. The things keeping the near-poor above the poverty line just aren’t going to be convenient.
Okay, maybe not the “point” of transit, but certainly the ‘result’ or ‘unintended consequence’ of it.
gilfoil,
If the Antiplanner is really serious about helping poor people, why not just a grant of $20,000 cash to each carless poor person every few years, no strings attached?
I shouldn’t have to say, though perhaps I do, that I’ve never proposed giving low-income people brand-new Toyota Priuses. Instead, I use this as an example to show how absurd is the emphasis on transit in so many transportation plans. Autos work better at helping people out of poverty than transit, and for this reason I do support ways to work programs that provide modest assistance to low-income people to buy or repair used cars.
I’m really getting tired of proponents of central planning, smart growth, and transit oriented development, like msetty, marginalizing findings that seem to directly align with my life experience. Just like this study does. As traffic congestion increases, markets shrink along with economic opportunity. What’s so hard to understand? Public transit is a “poor” substitute for the convenience of managing your personal schedule to directly benefit yourself.
“Autos work better at helping people out of poverty than transit, and for this reason I do support ways to work programs that provide modest assistance to low-income people to buy or repair used cars.”
I see, you favor giving money to poor people, but you’d stipulate that it be spent on transportation modes that you deem best for them, rather than letting them choose how to spend it, is that right?
From the Urban Institute study (p 30):
Odd that we’d require that poor people spend a monetary grant on an automobile – perhaps some poor people, given the choice, would elect to spend the same money toward housing and transit within the center of cities, where, as the study says, school districts are improving and crime rates are falling. Even stranger is the idea that lower-income people are “finding it necessary” to move away from the central city – the Antiplanner assured us it was a voluntary choice, because they like red meat and hate Whole Foods.
Quoting the Urban Institute? Not exactly an unbiased source for saying how wonderful it is to be in cities–but listen to what they actually say:
The poor are being forced out. By the central planners who spend money on obscenely overpriced light trains (basically robbing $ from the poor to line the pockets of a few well-connected oligarchs) and to attempt to re-create a city to be lived in only by the very well-off.
You can’t blame the Antiplanner for that.
“You can’t blame the Antiplanner for that.”
Not blaming him. Wondering why he wants to tell them how to spend their own money – the money he’s suggesting we give to them to buy cars, with the stipulation that they MUST buy cars, because they apparently aren’t wise enough to make their own decisions.
“Quoting the Urban Institute? Not exactly an unbiased source”
Yes, I’m wondering why the Antiplanner puts stock in their findings, given that they’re not unbiased, as you say.
gilfoil – OBVIOUSLY you support interfering with economic opportunity, and limiting market expansion to the detriment of those earning below or at the median income level, by imposing living and traveling restrictions upon them like Smart Growth, Light Rail, Transit Oriented Development, Urban Renewal, and Urban Growth Boundaries? Traffic Congestion is the enemy, not the automobile, and those who seek to interfere do so at the expense of economic prosperity! Who cares what the Anti-Planner believes “WE” should do we are so far away from that – his feelings are immaterial! We simply need more road capacity, and the economic expansion that would follow would pay for it, you just are afraid to admit that it could happen, and the “poor” are capable of spear heading the economic prosperity that would follow.
I am in favor of giving poor people money (preferably by taxing rich people more) and letting the poor people spend their money in the way they see fit. Might be cars, might be housing, might be red meat bought at Whole Foods. It’s their call.
gilfoil – For those of us, of modest means, people like you are among the most infuriating “advocates” speaking of things of which you are so very ignorant. I don’t want a hand out I want a a place on the road, and the opportunity to compete, so I can make my own way, but you and your condescending point of view continue to get in the way. Roads level the playing field – individuals start with public transportation, SAVE, move up to owning a car – along with better employment, and you are off and running and making your life and the world better. Your position, and your advocacy, do much more harm than good, so sit down shut up, and get out of the way!
I support gilfoil giving his money to the poor to spend any way they prefer.
It is also unfortunate that this president paid good money to crush cars, that the poor could have bought and used for reasonable prices or parts for their cars.
Thanks sprawl, I’m glad you agree that I (and everyone else) have a responsiblity to help the less fortunate! Too bad the Antiplanner is not serious about the idea. As a libertarian, he has no intention of making society more egalitarian.
Translation: making society “egalitarian, to gilfoil, involves transferring huge sums of money from middle class taxpayers to build useless rail boondoggles that almost no one uses, and then further enriching the corrupt developers involved by throwing more money at subsidies to make the boondoggle look a little better.
gilfoil – you are among the most disrespectful people on this earth. People like me don’t want you pity, we want opportunity – the opportunity we get with roads, and our personal transportation. You want to pay people to not actively contribute, while people like you direct their behavior. Idle hands are the devils workshop, and the elitists are among the first to lose their place at the table – permanently, when the idle become frustrated, that their masters never quite live up to expectations.
Well said tombdragon, well said. Can’t wait for budgets to shrink and evildoers like gilfoil to quietly expire. Bush was wrong, the axis of evil is found in the local planning offices, not in far away countries that couldn’t fling a booger our way, much less a missile.