I touched on this in my posts about Zermatt and Paris, but I'd like to expand on it here: the problems are that we mandate low-density development, build everything around cars, and separate land uses. In most of our cities, over half of the residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family housing. For example, in Los Angeles, where there is also a massive housing shortage, on 75% of the residential land it is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes. This extremely low-density development forces people to drive if they want to get anywhere, because population density is not high enough to support a robust public transit network, walking is nearly impossible because everything to too far away, and biking is unsafe because fast roads are needed for drivers to get to their destination because it's so far away.
Since suburbanites have to drive everywhere, and zoning laws mandate that commercial areas be separate from residential areas, their destinations also have to provide a ton of parking, which uses even more space. American cities (and Canadian cities, because this is not just an American problem) implemented minimum parking requirements for suburban businesses so that the city wouldn't have to provide street parking, and they also bulldozed homes and businesses to put in highways and parking lots in existing developed areas. But they didn't create those parking requirements based on analyzing the data, they basically just made wild guesses. Have you ever noticed how the parking lots at places like Walmart and Costco never seem to actually be completely full? Yes, it can be hard to find parking sometimes, but there's always a section that has many spaces open, it just might be in a less convenient area of the lot. That's literally just because the minimum parking requirements are too high, so even on Black Friday, the lots usually aren't full. Check out #BlackFridayParking on Twitter to see what I mean. Activists have been using it to share photos of half-empty parking lots on Black Friday for years.
Because of these requirements, our suburban commercial areas use more space for cars than for people, and if you find the closest one to you on Google Maps and switch to satellite view, you'll see exactly what I mean. The parking lots take up more space than the actual businesses. A 2015 study analyzed the developed land in LA County, and found that 14% of it is used for parking. The average car is only used for a little over an hour each day, so it literally just sits there for 95% of its life. Is there anything else that we spend so much money and space on, but use so little?
This type of development also creates a justification for its own existence, because it creates a hostile environment for all other transportation options. For example, I live in one of America's few walkable areas, but I sometimes meet some friends at a Panera Bread in a suburban commercial area that's 1.8 miles away by road, and I always drive there because I literally have no other choice. The spatial requirements of car transportation lowers the density of people and businesses enough that public transit can't be efficient and takes 4 times as long as driving, the walk would be along a road that doesn't have sidewalks for a decent chunk of it because we spend nearly all of our infrastructure money on cars, and biking is unsafe because the cars are going too fast. So my only choice is to drive, which justifies large roads and parking lots, which makes everything very spread-out, which creates a transportation system where the only practical option is to drive. Suburban, car-centric development creates this reinforcing feedback loop that justifies its own existence.
These problems are solvable. There's no reason why nearly all of our cities have to be filled with highways, parking lots, and strip malls. We can pedestrianize streets that have a lot of pedestrian traffic, because banning driving on a popular street raises the number of people who can use it by creating a space where people feel safe to spend a lot of time, and by allowing restaurants to have outdoor dining. We can reduce infrastructure spending for cars, and replace it with infrastructure spending for public transit, biking, and walking. We can build dedicated biking networks that don't force bikers to stop every block, because the best ways to get people to bike places are to stop forcing them to bike next to multi-ton death machines, and to make it easier to bike without have to stop and start again every block. We can eliminate minimum parking requirements and allow businesses to build the amount of parking they think they need, not some arbitrary amount that's pulled out of thin air and creates spaces that are literally always empty, even on the busiest day of the year. We can eliminate arbitrary setback requirements that create space in front of buildings that some people (but definitely not all people) think looks nice, but ultimately serves no practical purpose and wastes an enormous amount of space. Remember that photo I posted of my old house in Oxford? It would be illegal to build it in most of the US because it's not far enough from the road. We can rezone single-family residential areas to allow other types of housing, like duplexes, triplexes, row homes, cottage courts, and even (gasp) small apartment buildings. We can rezone everything within 1-2 miles of a train station to allow dense, mixed-use development so that people who live there can get around on the train/subway network and won't have to own a car. We can make our cities significantly better by not catering exclusively to people who live in single-family housing with large lot sizes like we've been doing for decades.
Since I want to be 100% sure that this post will not be misinterpreted, I’d like to make it very clear what I’m not saying and what I am saying. I’m not saying that single-family housing shouldn’t exist, I’m saying we shouldn’t make everything else illegal. I’m not saying that setbacks shouldn’t exist, I’m saying we shouldn’t mandate them. I’m not saying that highways and parking lots shouldn’t exist, I’m saying we shouldn’t destroy people’s homes and businesses to build infrastructure for the least-efficient mode of transportation.
Some of those proposals are definitely controversial. For example, most people who live in the suburbs will read "rezone single-family residential areas to allow other types of housing" and think "but that will increase traffic." And in individual neighborhoods, it might (but I’ll explain why that’s not guaranteed in the next paragraph), and it's understandable to want less traffic in your neighborhood, especially if you have kids. But it will also decrease traffic overall, because low-density development is the primary reason why we have to drive so much in the first place, and more driving means more traffic. It's an example of the prisoner's dilemma: for each individual neighborhood, lower density housing with lots of cul-de-sacs reduces traffic, but when every neighborhood is like that everyone has to drive farther, which increases the total amount of traffic. There is only one way to solve the prisoner’s dilemma, and that’s for the prisoners (or neighborhoods in this analogy) to work together and pick the option that is best for everyone, not the option that is best for themselves.
Another reason that proposal is controversial is because of the perceived safety of kids. We assume that increasing housing density in suburban neighborhoods will bring more cars and make them less safe, right? It might seem counter-intuitive, but increasing density can actually makes kids more safe by making other transportation options more available. According to a 2018 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, car crashes are the number one killer of kids in the US, accounting for 20% of all deaths. Driving is by far the most dangerous method of transportation (aside from riding motorcycles, but unlike driving, we don't pretend that riding a motorcycle is safe), so switching to any other method will make kids (and adults) safer. One of the best ways to increase safety for kids is to make it easier to take the bus, walk, or ride a bike, but that’s virtually impossible in low-density suburban development for the reasons mentioned previously. Another way is to implement traffic calming measures so that drivers will slow down, which might sound easy, but is actually remarkably difficult in most places due to city mandates like minimum widths for roads.
Remember when Trump was saying that America has too many regulations, and needs to get rid of a bunch of them? He was just pushing a typical right-wing talking point, but even a stuck clock is right twice a day, and we do legitimately have too many regulations about development (although it was ironic that he also threw a hissy-fit when Minneapolis allowed duplexes and triplexes in their single-family zoning, because that's effectively removing one of those regulations). For centuries we built cities and towns around people, allowing them to develop property based on their needs, but then from roughly 1900 - 1950 we implemented a bunch of rules to mandate low-density, car-dependent development. You know how people say that American cities are built around cars, but European cities aren't, because European cities were built before cars? That's not actually true, because many American cities also existed long before cars. Our cities used to be human-centric, but then we literally bulldozed them so that people could leave them and then drive back in. Check out http://iqc.ou.edu/urbanchange to see what I mean. It’s a website put together by the University of Oklahoma that compares aerial photos of what our cities used to look like to what they currently look like, and it makes it very clear how we bulldozed homes and businesses (primarily black and hispanic ones) to put in highways and parking lots. Even our most car-dependent cities like Houston, Atlanta, and San Diego used to be people-centric, but then we destroyed people’s homes and businesses for highways. American cities weren't just built around cars, they were bulldozed for cars.
The same exact thing could have happened to European cities, but most of them managed to stop it. In the 1970's, for example, the Dutch government hired a bunch of American planners to design a plan to "improve" Amsterdam with highways. They called the plan "Give The City A Chance," and they even started implementing it, but the residents were furious so they fought back hard and managed to save their city. Some American cities managed to stop the highways as well, most notably San Francisco (think about how walkable San Francisco is compared to Los Angeles), but the highway planners mostly won, and they destroyed our cities in the process.
So why don't many cities make any changes that reduce car-dependency and low-density development? This won't be popular to say, but the truth is that the biggest hindrance to doing so is suburbanites. Any time you try to make any changes to increase density or reduce car dependency, a bunch of suburbanites will show up at the next planning meeting furious about bunch of problems that they made-up. We're seeing this play-out right now in Atlanta and London (yes, European cities are dealing with many of these problems as well).
In Atlanta, the city is trying to solve the housing shortage by upzoning to allow more housing, and suburbanites are PISSED. You can find the comments about it online, and a bunch of them are worried about developers building skyscrapers in their suburban neighborhoods. The problem is that America's stupid zoning laws create only two types of housing in most areas: single-family housing and high-rise apartment buildings. Many people have no concept that missing middle housing could exist because they've basically never seen it. So when you suggest upzoning, they immediately assume you mean the only other kind of housing they've seen, high-rise apartment buildings, even if the upzoning would not actually allow them. There are also people mad about two contradictory things: 1) The city wants to allow dense, mixed-use development within a 1/2 mile of every metro station, and 2) The city is increasing population without also improving transportation infrastructure. They don't realize that increasing density around metro stations to increase ridership is the method the city is trying to use to improve transportation infrastructure, because most of them live far from a station, and it's easy to drive downtown and find parking, so they've literally never taken the metro and would never consider it as an option. London is dealing with a similar issue. The city wants to tear up some parking lots near suburban rail stations to build dense, mixed-use development there, and a bunch of people are angry that they won't be able to park at the stations, because they don't understand that the entire point is to allow people to live close enough to the stations that they won't have to drive there.
There are so many problems with the low-density, car-dependent development that American cities have prioritized for the past century, and I didn't even mention most of them here because this post is already absurdly long and I didn’t want to make it even longer. I completely skipped over the way it increases poverty by decreasing access to jobs, makes cities louder by increasing the amount of driving, was created by white racists and a tool of segregation, destroys an enormous amount of farmland and forests by taking up significantly more space per person, creates a situation where suburban living is less environmentally friendly than both urban and rural living because suburban living requires the most driving, creates roads that attempt to be good at both moving cars quickly and helping businesses along it even though those are competing goals, bankrupts cities through high infrastructure requirements and small tax bases, transfers money from poor urban neighborhoods to wealthy suburban neighborhoods through taxes, harms small businesses by increasing their costs, and makes us less healthy by reducing walkability. But all of these problems, and the ones I mentioned earlier, are perfectly solvable. We just have to build our cities for people who live in all types of housing and use all methods of transportation, not just those who live in single-family homes and drive everywhere.
Rant over. And if anyone would like a source for any of my claims, please ask and I will happily provide one.
