I liked this article’s take (someone else originally posted it here):
As mentioned, it’s a set of goals that doesn’t specify how we have to get there. Possibly naive, but leaving out the “how” keeps flexibility for any emergent technologies and makes it harder for the right to immediately shut it down over a specific scare (like nuclear).
Maybe, but everything I’ve read in recent years suggests that increasing capacity doesn’t reduce commute times; it increases traffic so that commute times remain largely unchanged. Commute times drive people to alternatives, and increasing capacity reduces the number of people who choose alternatives, so that the result is more traffic and the same commute times.
I don’t know what this means. Adding capacity encourages more traffic which encourages more sprawl. Not adding capacity ought to therefore do what?
Coming back to this question, the US spends some $26b per year in subsidizing fossil fuel production and use. This surely contributes incentives for sprawl (which with current practices demands cheap fossil fuels to sustain) and should be counted as an incentive for sprawl. Should we end these subsidies?
And there are any number of arguments about and estimates for the size of the effective federal government subsidy of suburban single family home ownership. This one is typical:
While adding capacity sometimes makes traffic worse, I certainly don’t believe it always gets worse. Despite the misleading headline, that’s not even what the researchers found. They found that adding capacity didn’t have much effect. The amount of traffic stayed constant.
But there is an obvious correllary. Most places have concurrently built up public transportation in order to relieve congestion. But if you believe this paper, then that is equally futile. Public transportation is just another way to add transportation capacity.
If you build a new road, new drivers will fill it. But if you move a driver to public transportation, another driver will take his place.
Yes, but not because of sprawl. Cities burn oil too after all.
Another example of something the government could do, but shouldn’t. This simply changes the ratio of ownership to rental. It would stop people from owning homes in the city, and encourage people who want to live in the suburbs to rent.
Um, no. They found that increasing miles of road increased total driver miles by the same proportion. Which means a) more miles driven by the same drivers, or b) new drivers joining existing ones, or c) both. All of those amount to more traffic, though not necessarily more congestion.
Again, um no. The researchers found that adding public transport didn’t reduce congestion. It diverted some high driving to public transport, which had the effect of adding people to the roads. In other words, it increased transit capacity without increasing the number of drivers on the road or the number of miles driven.
In both cases you’re conflating traffic with congestion.
Is this a serious argument you’re offering? Rural and suburban dwellers use more energy of all kinds (transport, power, etc) than do urban dwellers. Thus subsidies for fossil fuels subsidize rural and suburban living to a much greater extent. Cities burn oil too after all doesn’t really address that.
Why? Besides you wouldn’t like it, I mean?
Decreasing transit times is a nice thing for anyone who commutes, but less driving time also means less emission of greenhouse gases, which, while not the driving force in climate change, does have a noticeable contribution, particularly with gas powered cars. Electric cars would help too, but any power generation that comes from combustion causes greenhouse emissions.
It would take some pretty significant incentives to outweigh the land cost differences between the city center and the outskirts of town, as far as home/apartment/arcology construction goes, which would not exactly be market driven capitalism, and thus would incur much gnashing of freedom loving teeth.
Fine. We seem to agree that sprawl doesn’t increase commute times. If so, I don’t care much about sprawl per se.
Yes, and people living in Illinois use more fossil fuels than those living in Texas. And I support widespread reductions in the use of fossil fuels. But I don’t support it as a way to get people to move to Texas.
I already told you why. All it would do is make a homeowner into a renter. It wouldn’t make someone use less energy or move out of the suburbs.
If you want someone to move from the suburbs to the city, do something that actually improves the city.
Ah. You didn’t read the article. Ok.
My bad, I grabbed them from where you quoted them and discourse didn’t attribute them to the original poster. I’ll try to edit it.
Edit: And fixed.
I did read the article. Somehow it assumes that if we got rid of the mortgage interest deduction, the money saved would be spent by the government on improving urban housing. Which is laughable.
It also makes the same mistake I mentioned above. People don’t decide whether to rent, and then decide where to live. They first decide where to live, and then decide whether to rent.
It does not assume that. It proposes that.
If we are going to spend all this money on the housing sector — a dubious proposition in the first place — it ought to go on helping those in need and generating the biggest return on our investment. That would mean investing in affordable housing near job opportunities, or mass transit to take you there, and filling in cities that could support more density.
But it’s a false choice. It’s like saying, “If we are going to help the poor, we should eliminate food stamps and spend it on affordable housing instead.”
You can support more than one thing at a time.
No worries, I just didn’t want to have to defend that sentiment downstream!
No, it isn’t. It’s saying urban density is more sustainable, and if we’re going to subsidize something, it should be that, rather than the opposite of that.
In any event, I don’t get the feeling that you’re amenable to the argument, so I’m more or less done.
Spending money on cities is not the opposite of spending money on suburbs. You can do both at the same time.
And I don’t oppose spending money on cities. The article claims that cities need money more than suburbs do, and maybe that’s true. But we don’t funnel resources to the most needy and exclude everyone else.
People in disaster areas need support even more than people in cities do, but we don’t shut off city funds when disaster strikes. Poor elderly people in the city need help more than young city hipsters, but cities don’t exclusively spend on the most impoverished.
The money that cities spend on arts, festivals, parks, and recreation could have gone to food and clothing for the needy, you know. Should we thus eliminate all funding for urban culture?
I am reasonably sure that Scott’s point is that, from an environmental standpoint, doing things that encourage people to continue building sprawling suburbs and the car-choked highways to connect them to actually useful places (read: cities) is a terrible use of your money.
That’s not to say that people living in suburbs don’t need aid (they have healthcare costs and children and crime and fires just like the rest of us), but that allocating subsidies in such a way as to promote suburban living over urban living is a bad policy if the goal is to minimize resource usage by centralizing.
Yes, precisely.
If you want to minimize resource usage, then your incentives should target resource usage. For example carbon taxes or congestion pricing.
This might lead to decreased sprawl. But it might not. It might be easier and more efficient to keep the same geography but focus on telecommuting, improved logistics, etc. It’s not necessarily as simple as “Cities good, suburbs bad”.
Oh good, the Democrats will shoot ourselves in the foot by going after mortgage deductions? We don’t even need opposition. We’ll just choke ourselves with carbon neutral rope.