Forced to Drive?
8th March 2015
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.
Crustian mythology accepted as fact by our ruling class are at the root of much of the bad policy that finds its way into our lives.
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.”
Indeed. For somebody who wants to work for a living, a car is right behind some place to live in the priority of needs.
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.
The problem with ‘urban planners’ is that they think it appropriate to force other people to live in the way the planners thing appropriate — something that those very same planners would denounce as fascism if it were applied to themselves.