I live in downtown Portland, OR and have done so for the last eight years without ever owning a car. I can walk or bike to literally everything in the city, or alternatively take a streetcar, light rail train, or technologically advanced bus system. There's a reason people move here – there's value in Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs) that make more livable, walkable, awesome places to live your life.
And because of the UGB, it's even faster to escape the city's limits and find yourself in real green space. On Tuesday after work, I drove 45 minutes (using a car-sharing program) out of the city to a national wilderness where I slept under the stars, caught a few trout, and still made it back into the city for work the next morning. Something like that might be difficult in LA or in a large suburb.
As you can see, I really really disagree with you. :)
The idea that people have that we have to live like sardines in some anime-inspired megalopolis is simply inaccurate.
If everyone lived in cities as dense as portland, the current human population would only be living on about 2.7% of the world's land mass. Obviously, in terms of resources, it's more complicated than that, but it's clear that sprawling out is terrible for the environment, and that for true nature-lovers, it's much more advantageous to live in a city that has no suburbs, where the world of people truly ends at the city limits.
What is the human population's current footprint? Wikipedia says humans' average population density worldwide (excluding Antarctica and oceans) is about 50 people/km^2.
I've lived in some of the densest cities in Europe, and families still had a hard time getting around without a car. At one point, I did get a car, and not having to deal with the scheduling hassles of public transportation made my life instantly easier.
You have to have an enormous population density for public transportation to be a break-even affair. Your Portland public transportation isn't self-sufficient, it's a net loss, and it's subsidized by taxes. Sure, it's more efficient than cars, but it still doesn't solve all the problems that cars do, as noted above (primarily for families). By the time you get the density required for public transportation to be self-sustaining, you're looking at a cost of living that is unacceptable for most families (eg, NYC).
Sure, public transportation is great for young single people. Try going to the grocery store with young kids on the bus. It's virtually impossible.
Sure, public transportation is great for young single people. Try going to the grocery store with young kids on the bus. It's virtually impossible.
I see it literally every day:) It hardly seems impossible.
This in a city and country which is pro-mass transit, pro-bicycles and pro-high fuel tax. The turning point is often, as you say, when children are born. People do take their babies, in strollers, on the trams and busses, but it's much easier if you can leave spare diapers and such in the car and not lug them with you all day.
(Your comment about taking the bus with young kids to get groceries is specious. If density is high enough then it's easy to walk to a grocery store. In town there's three grocery stores within a few blocks of me, and a corner store .. on the corner. Surely that was the same in the dense European city you lived in?)
On the other hand, kids and people up to 20 ride free or at reduced price. This means greatly increased mobility for anyone over about 8 or so. I've read autobiographies of people raised in New York City during the 1950s or so, who describe the sense of freedom of being able to go to Coney Island, or Central Park. That's not possible without a car in the standard suburbia we're talking about.
That said, I really don't understand why a public transportation system needs "to be a break-even affair." The road system definitely is not. Gas taxes even in Sweden isn't enough to pay for the road network, snow cleaning, and so on. Public transit should properly be seen, like the roads, as having a multiplier effect. It means you can have areas of town with higher density, which support those people and families you are talking about, which have higher numbers of clubs and restaurants and shops, and have areas for families with cars.
But, it's still not easy handling small children with groceries, whether walking nearby or taking the bus. I know because I've done it. Driving is much, much easier.
Fair point about roads not being break-even, but elsewhere in the thread I did argue for higher taxes on gas and automobiles, to internalize the costs more. I don't know what break-even would look like in America, but the idealist in me says both roads and public transportation should be break-even, if not profitable.
But my experience is that the bigger shock is the lack of expected items, like lack of Crisco for making pie crust, or vanilla extract, or chocolate chips, or American-style bratwurst, or August when corn goes for 8 cobs for a dollar. Not the lack of diversity.
By counter-example, I don't know what to do with all of the types of flours and sugars sold in most Swedish stores, and am only slowly beginning to understand the differences in herring sauces.
Regarding break-even, the problem is in where you define the boundaries. If roads cost 1% of the GDP to develop and maintain, but raise the economy so the overall tax revenue increases by enough to pay for the roads, then it's likely a good choice. Is it cost efficient to only charge those who use the roads directly (perhaps with some sort of GPS system)? Would that include, say, bicyclists and horse-drawn wagons? I think the current system, being a mix of gas tax and public revenue, is reasonable.
Of course revenue growth is not the only factor in deciding what happens. For example, good public transport may mean that people can visit with friends and drink a couple of glasses of wine, expecting to take the bus home instead of risking possible impaired driving. Or a scenic walking path next to a river may not be revenue generating but does serve as a place for people to interact and enjoy the city.
Suburbs were born from families. Not industry.
But containerized shipping has replaced stevedores, and other industries have moved as well to their own areas of town. I think this move has partially been enabled by people moving to the suburbs, so that a commute into the city or a commute to somewhere else doesn't make a large difference.
The problem is that the playing field isn't level: as Edward Glaeser points out in his book, The Triumph of the City (highly recommended; http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...), there are numerous institutional barriers to urban living, including, in no particular order:
1) Mortgage interest tax deduction; since urban life favors multi-unit dwellings but condos have externalities single-family houses don't (it's hard to deal with a noisy upstairs neighbor when you both own), this favors suburbs.
2) Substantial car-based infrastructure investment that means car owners pay around half of the "total" or social cost of their driving.
3) Barriers to entry in urban areas, especially in the form of zoning height limits.
4) Tying education and education funding to geographic location.
I believe there are a couple others I've forgotten.
It's pretty obvious that a lot of people want density—if they didn't, housing prices in NYC, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, and others wouldn't be so high. Hold supply relatively constant while demand increases, and you get prices that zoom up. I would, in many ways, draw the opposite conclusion from yours.
Yes, but folks living in suburbs don't stop folks who like density from having it.
It's interesting that suburb dwellers never complain about other people's living choices. It's always the city fans who can't tolerate folks who want something else.
BTW - If you want high-density housing, you're going to have shared walls. It's unclear why you blame suburbs for that.
> 4) Tying education and education funding to geographic location.
That's actually less of an issue in densely populated areas, for somewhat obvious reasons.
As to the "car subsidy" argument, every time I've checked the numbers presented by folks who claim it exists, I've found that their accounting is borderline fraudulent. Of course, they're typically just passing along numbers from someone else, but ....
There is maybe one mass-transit system in the world that pays its operating costs and they all receive massive subsidies for capital expenditures, often from the gas tax....
Not even close.
Also, the vast majority of city dwellers go out of their way/pay extra to not live as environmentally efficiently as possible, so it's absurd to claim that environmental efficiency is the most important criteria.
Suburbs provide some things far more efficiently than cities do. And, cities provide other things more efficiently. The fact that you value one set of things more than the other does not imply that your choice is correct.
No, they just vote against spending any public money on things like public transit, or against raising car and gas taxes. If suburbians paid their own way I wouldn't mind them either.
Subsidizing public transportation is an economic drain on society. The correct answer is to have self-sustaining, profitable public transportation. This can only happen in cities with sufficient population density, such as NYC.
Car and gas taxes? Tax the hell out of them, since the costs right now are so over-externalized. Eventually, that will start to force more population density, and then we can talk about sustainable public transportation.
Subsidizing alternatives to car usage reduces the externalities of car usage. You can't effectively disincent car usage in the absence of alternatives.
It's quite a consistent argument when I say that I am in favor of taxing gas and automobiles. In fact, I think they should be taxed at much higher rates, to internalize the costs that are currently being externalized. Ideally, the costs of roads and bridges are covered by those taxes. Thus they're usage-based and not subsidized by those not using them.
I'm not sure why you think the best way to internalize the costs of car usage is to subsidize public transportation. That's just backwards thinking.
As car usage becomes more expensive due to taxation, cities will become more dense. This is the point where we can start talking about building infrastructure for public transportation, that will then make economic sense thanks to population density. It makes no sense to have a bus meander around the suburbs for hours to pick up a few riders, all traveling to different parts of town. It's an impossible idea. You have to have density first. Tax cars and gas so that they pay for their own infrastructure and environmental consequences, and density will be a natural outgrowth, at which point public transportation will be more viable.
I'll make you a deal. Let the cities pay for the mass transit systems (capital and running costs) and let the urbs pay for their highways. Both pay for their streets.
Go for it.
Yes. They do. That giant sucking sound you hear are the burbs bleeding the urban tax base dry.
Further, in my area, the burb leaders cock block anything that smells like it might help the urbans.
My city would be sparkling and new if we didn't have to subsidize the standard of living of all the deadbeats in the burbs.
That is a silly notion. Are you assuming those out in the burbs don't pay property tax, vehicle related taxes, tax on purchases and every other tax in existence?
I'm positive we'd all learn quite a bit if we actually dug into the numbers.
Not sure how cities incorporate in Canada but that's how it usually is here.
Communters do tend to also help support public transportation systems that are made available, in effect subsidizing them. Afterwards they leave & cost the city absolutely nothing beyond some infrastructure.
I can name ten(s) of cities in the United States that absolutely die the moment 5-6pm strike, but were couriered money in by suburbanites during the day and would have zero infrastructure otherwise.
I too am generalizing, of course.. I couldn't imagine seeing suburbanites as vultures.
Citation please.
(This should be interesting.)
I'll disagree, because the truth is that SOME suburbanites commute. In most places, most don't.
And then there's SF, where a significant number of city-dwellers commute to the suburbs....
Yup. Making a generalized statement about a widespread, general phenomenon:
Urban centers subsidize everyone else, suburbs are freeloaders.
This is really basic, uncontroversial information.
Example county level:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/welfare-state/Content?oid...
State level:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923084.html
Same thing happens at the local level.
If you don't like the costs of the programs that you push, look in the mirror.
I've no objection to making welfare a county-level thing, so cities can pay what they want (and are willing to fund) and suburbs can pay what they want (and are willing to fund).
Deal?
This should be fun.
Well, sure, and they provide services to residents with those taxes, just like the cities do. Cities don't have any claim on that money. If the cities really think they're getting a raw deal tax-wise, then they can institute a municipal income tax the way NYC does. I suspect New York is the only city that can actually get away with it over the long run, though.
>Meanwhile, they commute into a city on a freeway paid for by the urbanites and enjoy all the benefits of city infrastructure, without paying for it.
They pay for the freeways with gas and income taxes. At least in my state cities don't maintain freeways, that's done at the state level. Their employers pay taxes to the city, they pay taxes on everything they buy on their lunch break. On Friday night they come into the city and drop more money in bars and restaurants, and part of that money makes its way into city coffers. Shouldn't the cities be returning some of that money to the suburbs?
In any event, it's not the suburbs that come out ahead tax-wise. It's the rural areas. Rural America is heavily subsidized at both the state and national level and most of those studies don't make any distinction.
One other point... the highway system, which city people always count as a "subsidy" of other areas is most heavily used to move goods from one population center to another. The rural areas would never have built the highway system because they don't need it.
So their taxes go to pay for services only they use, and my taxes go to services that we all use. How is that fair?
> They pay for the freeways with gas and income taxes.
That's just an example. They spend half of their day in the city every weekday, they are going to end up utilizing some services that are paid for by municipal taxes sooner or later. It's simply ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Unless of course suburbanites aren't allowed to walk on the sidewalk or visit city parks where you live.
> On Friday night they come into the city and drop more money in bars and restaurants, and part of that money makes its way into city coffers.
Ahh, the old boost the economy/trickle down theory. I would rather they just pay taxes to the city, frankly. The money that possibly makes its way into city coffers is much less than it would be if they just paid taxes directly to the city.
> In any event, it's not the suburbs that come out ahead tax-wise. It's the rural areas.
This simply serves to demonstrate our point. Nobody is arguing otherwise, rural areas are definitely subsidized more than urban or suburban areas.
However, the same issues that cause rural areas to be so unequally subsidized apply to urban areas vs suburban areas too. It's just exacerbated in the case of rural areas.
Suburbs would depopulate if we urbanites withheld our largess.
No, that's folks moving away because US cities are a disaster.
Suburb dwellers don't have an obligation to fix or pay for cities.
I get that you like cities. Good for you, but they're your problem. If you can't make them work....
In a nutshell, this is what I find so frustrating about these discussions and really the only reason I got drawn in in the first place!
I live in the country on a small farm. I have a long, expensive drive into work. I can only get relatively slow broadband (lucky to get any at all) and it's expensive; I have no city services, so I'm responsible for maintaining my own water treatment and sewage equipment; everything takes a long time; if I run out of something critical, the closest grocery store is 8 miles away and charges an arm and a leg; more reasonably priced ones are about 13 miles away. And I consider myself lucky they are that close.
I don't bitch about this because I made the decision to incur these costs so my family can have the lifestyle we like.
If people want to live in a dense city, on top of each other (and I lived in NYC for 8 years), fine. That's their choice; I don't have to like it. The reality is that people will do what's in their own self interest regardless of what others want them to do. So work for cheaper, cleaner energy; work for lower-impact building processes and improved street layout; work for smaller, more energy efficient houses; work for more public transit (the bus 12 miles from my house can get me into the city in 1/3 the time it would take me to drive there).
But don't tell me where I can live!
You're making the assumption people want to live there because of the density and not because there are certain types of jobs that pay more in big cities. I could make twenty or thirty percent more if I moved to NYC, but that's something I'll never do.
It's just as likely for every person who wants to live in a dense city there's someone else who lives there for career reasons but would rather live somewhere else. The second person drives up the cost of housing just as much as the first.
Glaeser's book and a lot of the other work on economic geography make it clear that the two are inherently related and evolve together; density promotes knowledge spillover effects, dense markets, and various other Good Things. See also some of Richard Florida's work (though it can be frothy at times).
The fact is, the rising cost of energy, especially petroleum, makes large scale suburbia unsustainable. Public policy needs to reflect this.
Ah yes, the fabled "free market".
Subsidize sprawl with money looted from urban areas. People move the burbs. Claim it's demand driven.
What impresses me is that people increasingly choose urban despite the sprawl tax.