Did highways cause suburbanization?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
Transit oriented suburbs are structured much differently from highway oriented suburbs.
There is a strong economic premium attached to proximity to the transit station - the closer you are to the station, the higher the premium. As a result, transit oriented development tends to produce dense nodes along the transit corridor. This leads to walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods that enjoy economies of scale, density and association and can become economic engines in their own right.
On the other hand, proximity to a highway is an economic drain - the closer you are to the highway, the bigger the economic hit. As a result, highway oriented development results in sparse, low-density land use that generally separates uses and requires car ownership to perform any errand.
A critical insight. Look at the great Victorian suburbs around London, built along the railroads. These suburbs did not empty out central London, quite the contrary. And the rail connections resulted in dense walkable towns along the railroad lines, with often no car required at either end (in the nearer, denser suburbs).
Even today, people judge the price of homes in greater London by adding together the annual cost of rent or mortgage PLUS the cost of a railroad annual commuter pass into the London central zone.
> Typical urban street layouts generally follow five very distinctive patterns, they are as follows. The Gridiron pattern which dates back to the 1900's. The Fragmented Parallel dating back to the 1950's. Warped Parallel which is from the 1960's era. Loops and Lollipops which was a popular street style in the 1970's. Lollipops on a Stick, this style originated in the 1980's.
Anyway you cut it it is cheaper to transport a single human than to transport a human traveling with a 2 ton metal shell around him.
Highways, on the other hand, are a public bad (I think that's the technical term...) - i.e. they produce net negative externalities that must be borne by society as a whole.
One commenter expressed confusion about why suburbs seem to be hated. I'm not sure suburbs themselves are hated or the design of them for the last 40 years is hated.
From ages 30-38, I lived in a suburb. Prior to that I lived in a variety of places but mostly urban areas. What I came to dislike greatly about suburb design is the need for a car to do simple things like buy a pint of half and half on Saturday morning for coffee. It seemed absurd that I couldn't walk out to a convenience store and be back in 5 minutes to enjoy my freshly brewed coffee.
What often develops in a suburban area is the next irritant: strip malls. They seem like a godsend to a new suburb. But, as traffic increases, a simple Saturday afternoon errand - e.g. buying groceries for the night's dinner - can easily take an hour due to wading through mall traffic.
When my wife and I visited Sonoma County 5 years back we were drawn to the setup of the towns like Sonoma and Healdsburg. They were setup to have a town center that was totally walkable and acted as a community center. If suburbs were designed more like small towns, with mixed residential and commercial use, I think they would be more palatable.
—Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (1967)
Quote is part of excerpt from an excellent book on the topic: "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream" Also, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is a seminal work.
"The American highway is now like television, violent and tawdry. The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages. We whiz by them at fifty-five miles an hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next. They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise. We don't want to remember them. We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time. There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular."
(Segregated universities, among other things, meant that black veterans had a harder time using the benefits from the GI Bill. This was a major factor in the "white flight" to the suburbs.)
I was a history major, did my senior year research on suburbanization, and still barely scratched the surface. It's a big topic. If you want to talk about suburbanization in the US, though, look at the postwar era. The gradual switch to a car-based society provided the infrastructure, but the postwar economic and civil changes funded it.
Mint says I spend a total of about $270 per month to fuel and maintain two cars. Even if I were able to get rid of owning both cars altogether and move into the city, it would still cost me much more for a lower standard of living (by most people's standards).
Who's whining here except you about how the suburbs get a bad rap for being evil? Why don't YOU work to make YOUR urban center better, fix the schools, stop crime, and stop hiding from the big, bad city in the sprawl and disposable lifestyle of the cushy suburbs?
By itself, the suburbs are fine. But it's the zoning that goes out of its way to pave all that greenery you theoretically move out to see, that causes the problems.
No mixed-use zoning clusters the lower-income together into apartment complexes and neighborhoods that have a net negative social effect. Parking lot requirements spread everything out to nigh-unwalkable distances. Varying or non-existent sidewalk requirements finish off any chance of walkability, or even bike-ability. All that space makes efficient mass transit implausible, forcing poorer/younger residents to lock up a significant chunk of their expenses in their cars, and making car trouble a near-catastrophic point of failure. All that space and all those cars also create traffic-related waste that's largely impossible to avoid and very expensive to scale with growth. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods kill any chance at efficient traffic flow. The spacing leads to higher infrastructure costs per resident (higher taxes) which retards or suffocates competition and advancement in the infrastructure space. Etc.
In short: suburbs are great place if you're relatively wealthy and they aren't too big yet. But they're not self-sufficient or healthy socio-economic communities.
In what way are urban areas self-sufficient?
I meant in terms of being able to locally supply the jobs, services and opportunities that their residents need to grow and prosper.
I don't know if they're evil, but it looks to me like they combine the worst aspects of urban living with the worst aspects of rural living (surrounded by people but isolated from them; at the same time you can have isolation, but not solitude).
Smoking has no real benefits. It has a short term plus of making one "feel good"; but nobody claims smoking is "good", while the above goals of driving are.
So I don't really know what point you are trying to make. People all know the dangers of driving, but are willing to trade those for the benefits. People know the dangers of smoking, and are willing to trade those because they are addicted, and for no real benefits. There's a big difference.
And as they forget, it slowly stops being true.
Last time I checked nobody helped me pay for my car, my registration or my gas taxes. Which do help pay for public transit...
Am I missing something?
One can argue whether road costs are covered by user fees or not. The subsidized policing and EMS costs are typically ignored, for example. You might want to include some of the military and intel budgets related to oil security.
What constituted a "higher standard of living" for us was a short commute, walkable area, cultural activities near our house, diversity in every sense of the word, and an area with a sense of community.
For raising our daughter, we balanced the quality of public schools with the education received by being around different people from different walks of life. Our goal as parents is to raise not only a reasonably intelligent child, but one who can understand and empathize with people different from her.
Btw, despite being < 1 mile from what would be considered the inner city, we have very little crime. I think this is due in part to neighbors all being close. We know when someone is out of town and what work schedules are. We also have a decent contingent of people who work from home. Add to that my own impression, from being raised in a poor working class area, that inner city crime certainly exists but has taken on a boogie-man hype factor.
I wouldn't trade my education at a broke-ass, shoddy, prison-like public city school for any private or suburban school with vaulted ceilings and brand new textbooks and everyone else looking and acting exactly like me.
And sure, there is crime in cities, but it's not like us city dwellers live in constant fear, scampering from one blue telephone to the next. My parents have had one break-in in the almost thirty years they've lived in the city. I've never been mugged or otherwise attacked. But I've met so many suburbanites who have ridiculous ideas about city life - all city dwellers carry around guns/knives, getting shot at is a frequent part of city life, etc.
Is this ever really the case? It seems thrown out there so much, but I've never observed a case of people all acting the same. Especially in a school.
There were essentially two classes of kids at my high scool: the cool kids and the uncool kids. The cool kids were your standard preppy (American Eagle preppy, not actual New England preppy) football player types. The uncool kids wore black and were in band.
Fun story: I decided to start wearing my hair in liberty spikes one time. Every class period that day, each teacher started off by asking wtf was wrong with me. I almost got sent to the guidance counselor over it.
Oh, and there were no ethnic minorites at my school. When I was a senior in high school, I heard rumor of one black kid just starting the 7th grade, but I never saw him. But no Asians, no Indians (of either kind), no Hispanics. I didn't interact with a non-Christian white person on a regular basis until college.
> spikes one time. Every class period that day, each teacher
> started off by asking wtf was wrong with me. I almost got
> sent to the guidance counselor over it.
Shock-value styles don't indicate much to most observers, other than that someone is unhappy with the status quo and wants to shake things up in an immature manner. Seriously, what did you expect to accomplish by that? Do you really think your teacher's response was unjustified? I don't see how such behavior demonstrates a real diversity in anything of importance or value.
> Oh, and there were no ethnic minorites at my school.
So unless the people in your school were BORN different, you are judging them as being the "same", and of diminished worthiness with whom to interact?
Seems almost like racism - prejudging people based on the skin into which they were born.
And yeah, the teacher's response was unjustified (precisely because hairstyle is such a trivial thing).
and a terrible teaching practice. How could a teacher expect the student's mind to be ready for learning after being made to feel like a freak of nature? "WTF is wrong with you?! Okay, now turn to the chapter on quadratic equations." Did they think a student could just switch gears and turn off the emotional impact? (I'd be a little afraid of the student who could shrug it off.)
Teachers are supposed to inspire learning not setup barriers to it.
To whit: almost half of my graduating class was reported as valedictorian to the colleges they applied to. Why? Everyone with over a 4.0 was valedictorian. How'd we get over a 4.0? Becuase they added the bonus for honors courses on after doing the division, not before. Get an A and a B in two honors courses? That's ((4 + 3) / 2) + (.25 * 2) = 4.0!
This is why I have such a low opinion of education in general.
Secondly, lo and behold, I was both immature and unhappy with the status quo! So, I did exactly that. Accomplish something? It wasn't about accomplishment, it was about eliciting that reaction. It was pretty freaking hilarious. People acted like it was the end of the world. They couldn't possibly imagine that anyone would be different from anyone else in any real way. It's not like high school offered any kind of real academic challenge or interesting discussion. I had to do something to make those 8 hours of being babysat a day interesting, until I could get back home and start coding again.
I refer to race because that a pretty visible example of how everyone was the same. I don't believe that anyone is better than anyone else for anything but their accomplishments. Nice troll, though.
People moved out to the burbs because it was the affluent thing to do and was supposed to guarantee a rewarding lifestyle. It's not for everyone. There are those, myself included, that find neither the relaxing solitude of the country, nor the engaging diversity of the city in the suburbs. It would have been a better use of resources to create a green city environments that would have served everyone.
However, my inner city is apparently not as nice as yours, so for me the desire to live in the city and not have to drive as much is out weighed by my father/husband desires (whatever those are).
If I lived in the same city area as you I may have made the decision to be in the city even with my family.
Just some food for thought...
When many people think of cities they think of New York, Chicago, LA, etc. There are smaller, second tier cities that offer good proximity to an urban center and cultural life while still giving good public education and safety. A city fitting this description that I'm really high on right now is Portland, Me.
When I was single I lived in Boston for a bit and didn't own a car. It was one of the happiest periods of my life. A monthly pass for unlimited bus and train was about $45. The low price allowed me to live in the city, sharing an apartment of course, on a $26K salary.
One of the benefits of relying on public transit is being able to read. Nowadays I'd probably code but laptops were large and expensive then. (There is nothing more wasteful of your time/life than sitting in a traffic jam IMO.)
I worked out in a section of the city called Forest Hills. On Fridays, after workouts ended around 10p, I'd take the Orange line down to Chinatown to eat. I'd regularly walk around side streets late night and never had a problem. (You get used to guys asking you if you need anything. A quick "Nah, I'm cool" and they'd walk away.)
I don't know your nearest city so only you can judge the safety, but I looked up the violent crime index for my own and it's on par with Chicago.
Then he points out other reasons for suburbanization. Well, these reasons may exist but even so their existence does not prove that the other major reason -- the highway subsidy -- did not exist. In other words, if it wasn't for the highway subsidy the other issues, white flight etc., would not be as big, because only the richer could afford white flight.
I think a major piece of the puzzle is that living in a car dependent area has been an effective way for the middle class to segregate from poor people. If you're not rich enough for the well policed part of the city, you can still get a car and live somewhere poor people have difficulty getting getting to.
What you say makes sense but I think suburbs would have sprung up over time without highways just because the population was growing and people would be willing to move further away from urban areas as cars became safer and more common.
I think a major piece of the puzzle is that living in a car dependent area has been an effective way for the middle class to segregate from poor people.
For me, personally, this very much drives my choice to live in the suburbs and to drive a car instead of using public transportation: I'm unwilling to settle for the lowest common denominator.
-land rights mobility
-class system mobility
-economic mobility
Smaller companies in the field are also buying into these shuttle services, eg, Genentech shares their shuttles with some smaller biotech/drug companies.
The Silicon Valley suburbs are a very unfortunate accident of available land and timing. Personally, the very first thing I did when I moved to Sunnyvale was start looking for an apartment in San Francisco -- I thought I could handle it, but found that I couldn't stand living in the area's suburbs.
"This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline."
There were many factors involved in suburbanization. Emergence of a new middle class, white flight, proliferation of cars (thus highways have been built) to name just a few.