Posted by Aesth:
You are a most fortunate suburbanite, Aesth. I have lived in suburbs, small towns, and the downtown areas of big, old cities, and I can attest that the last is the only environment I have ever found truly walkable. Wherever you live, your situation is highly unusual. Most suburbanites cannot survive without a car.
The solution to “donut cities” is gentrification – people buying up old houses and commercial structures, rehabilitating them (and adaptively remodeling the commercial structures to uses of today), and then charging an arm and a leg for them.
Would I live in central Raleigh? Definitely. But I’d have problems getting groceries – no supermarkets anywhere near downtown, and the majority of food stores near downtown are specialty shops. And the rent would be astronomical compared to what I have now – which has a huge lawn (property of our landlady, overlooks a pond and a pasture with horses (and two families of Canada geese that have declared it their grazing area too), woods nearby – and is in walking distance of stores that between them sell half of what we might use in a typical week. Granted that we’re an unusual situation, but I trust I’m making a point.
To continue the donut analogy, what seems to happen is that eventually the downtown core gentrifies, and the the inner, older suburbs become run down, while the new, outer suburbs, like the core contain expensive real estate, are safer, etc.
Well, here is a page with some numbers from the Sierra Club on the subsidization of autos expressed in terms of cost per gallon of gas used: http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/transportation/control.asp
If you don’t trust the Sierra Club, you can go back to the original studies. The OTA study [Office of Technology Assessment, Saving Energy in U.S. Transportation, Washington DC, OTA-ETI-589, 1994], which one can download off the web from the government website, seems like a particularly comprehensive and unbiased one. [I’ll admit that I never could figure out where the Sierra Club pulled their numbers out from this study although I’ve never read it in the sort of detail it deserves.]
The thing that’s bogus there is that it doesn’t consider the benefit of autos. Lots of things are ‘subsidized’ if you only consider their cost. School is ‘subsidized’ - until you realize that educated people are more productive and therefore repay society for the cost of educating them.
The same goes for cars. Counting roads and other infrastructure is unfair, because those roads also allow the movement of commercial vehicles and goods. Considering cars by themselves is unfair, unless you consider the loss of economic output that would result by eliminating them, and the additional societal costs that would accrue from having to have public transportation to move them all around. Etc.
You are right, Sam Stone, but a study that calls attention to the public costs of automobiles is still very worthwhile. Mass transit in America faces a curious public-relations problem: People see only the costs of building and maintaining a mass-transit system – because they see it as a “government-run” system. Our automotive transportation system is no less “government-run”: motorists would find their vehicles useless without a vast public infrastructure of paved highways, roads and streets, closely regulated by an extensive system of traffic lights, traffic signs, cops on patrol, specialized traffic courts, and city, state and federal agencies devoted to highway transportation. Yet still Americans conceive of the automobile as a “private” form of transportation because that is what it superficially appears to be, as practically all automobiles are in the hands of private owners who use them at their own discretion and convenience.
Furthermore – the public cost of automotive transportation includes less obvious things. The United States has the most sophisticated and expensive military establishment in the world. It exists for a lot of reasons – but one reason is to keep the sea lanes open, hold down political unrest in oil-producing Middle Eastern countries, and generally make sure nothing happens to interrupt America’s supply of cheap imported oil. If anything ever does happen to interrupt that supply – how long could our national economy keep ticking along?
The Congress for the New Urbanism’s website is back on line! Just click on http://www.cnu.org.
And Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How to Get it Back, also has a website at http://www.janeholtzkay.com/.
Sam, you said:
This is just not true in general. It’s quite obvious by now that a halfway livable urban center will thrive. So we know it can be done, people like it, it is a good thing in many ways. So what’s the problem?
Hey, if the people want to live there, great. I’m all for it. I agree - what’s the problem?
But the fact is, many city centers ARE dying. There are reasons why people leave. The suburbs are attractive to many. There tends to be lower crime, more space, less noise, and lower property prices and taxes in the suburbs.
SS: The suburbs are attractive to many. There tends to be lower crime, more space, less noise, and lower property prices and taxes in the suburbs.
Well, many of those advantages are being subsidized by the cities. E.g., city zoning codes make it more difficult to build urban housing, city budgets bear the costs of expanding utilities to new developments, etc.—and as has been mentioned, cities, states, and the federal government subsidize road development and auto use.
I’ve got no objection at all to people living in suburbs if they like it. I just want suburb-dwellers to pay for more of the actual costs of their sprawl—including utilities expansion, road building and use, pollution, loss of open space and wildlife habitat, environmental degradation, “freeloading” on urban services by commuting workers, and other consequences of a low-density car-intensive residential area.
If developers and new municipalities actually had to include these costs in their price for suburban living, suburban sprawl would be much less of a problem.
That is a tiresome argument, and one that’s often used by people who want to control something they don’t like. EVERYTHING in an interconnected economy gets subsidized in some way. Farmers benefit from rural electrification. Merchants benefit from public roads. Power grids, paid for with public money, are more expensive because they handle heavy industrial loads.
But when something comes along that we don’t like, we become bean counters and start adding up all the little costs, and demanding that the people pay for every nickel of it.
How about if we make bicyclists pay for every bike path in the city? Dog owners should have to pay for every off-leash area. Let’s set up fees for every green space and park in the city, and make the people who use it pay for it. How about it? Are you willing to apply your micromanagement to every aspect of everyone’s lives? Or do suburban dwellers merit special punishment?
Or for that matter, how about the biggest subsidy of all? How about we make the poor pay for the share of society they use, by instituting a flat tax?
For what it’s worth, I pay road taxes. I pay a hefty gasoline tax. I pay $4000 a year in property taxes. I pay large amounts of income tax - My property taxes are used to pay for gentrification projects in the inner city, where I never go. They are used to pay for the extra policing required in the inner city. They are used to maintain half-empty inner-city schools.
At what point am I done paying my ‘fair share’?
Well, yes, Sam Stone, as a matter of fact suburban dwellers do merit special punishment, and the more pointless, abominable cruelty it involves, the better.
SS (page 1): Now, I would heartily agree that we should minimize distortions in the marketplace due to subsidies, to make sure people pay the true cost of their choices. […] I’m willing to pay my own way. I ask for no subsidies.
SS (page 2): That is a tiresome argument, and one that’s often used by people who want to control something they don’t like. EVERYTHING in an interconnected economy gets subsidized in some way. […] But when something comes along that we don’t like, we become bean counters and start adding up all the little costs, and demanding that the people pay for every nickel of it.
Which of these positions are you actually trying to argue, Sam? Or are you actually advocating a middle ground that reconciles the apparent contradiction? If so, could you clarify what it is?