I have some more thoughts that might help you to scratch the same itch. Defenders of suburbia and the car (as with many overexuberant technology apologists), fall into what Robert Fishman characterizes as "transportation determinism." The inventions of the steam engine, the bicycle, and the electric trolley do not force us to do anything. They merely open up new possibilities. That does not imply that it is good for us to use them in every context. Collective choices (or "policies") and individual choices largely determine the impact of technologies. Peter D. Norton applies the Social Construction of Technology as a conceptual tool for understanding the car revolution as an aggressive redefinition of street use and set of policies favoring the use of the automobile. Whether SCOT is the best tool, many other historians of technology consider the role of culture in the selection and scope of application of technologies.
For these technological determinists who think we have no choice but to drive, any criticism of suburbs and cars seems like an anti-car attack. For those of us who think that an engine mounted on a carriage is a great invention, the strawman argument is palpable. I think morphine is a great invention. Think of all of the people whose lives have been improved by morphine! But these claims are consistent with the prescription that morphine be carefully regulated and that users abide by these regulations.
I am much more harsh about driving than you are, but we agree that cars and driving have their places, but they are overused as a matter of policy and individual choice. Furthermore, anyone that characterizes us as "anti-car" is missing that many of us are claiming that driving is a context- and dose-related problem, even if I am arguing for very low doses.
There is also the additional matter that "there is value in the suburbs until you price in externalities". And I think that is inaccurately perceived as political too. Spread-out living with all modern amenities and commuting trends comes at great cost, not just in the purchase of a vehicle but in all that is done to support that infrastructurally. Consumers rage at being asked to pay for it - because they're not being told they're paying for what they incurred (and were not warned in advance of making their home buying decisions), they're just facing the prospect of higher taxes, fees and insurance costs. When it comes to the suburban infrastructural landscape, much of it was simply paid-for by states along the way (including disaster relief when communities built in geographically-inappropriate places are wrecked), raiding their treasuries and spending value captured from urban economic engines that should have been reinvested in the urban landscape. Anyone who tries to fix that imbalance, even mildly, is accused of stealing money from families and committing political malpractice. So, it is not just auto infrastructure adding to this imbalance. And shifting costs may, to some folks' irritation, require people to look at cities again for the value they provide. Again, that's not political; that's just reality.
I think the saving grace here is that the infrastructure itself will crumble, no matter what.
Up until the housing crash, the Ponzi scheme was that when the infrastructure bills came due, people just picked up sticks and migrated further outwards to the most recently constructed ring of suburbs. However, right around that time, most cities reached the practical/psychological limit of how far out people are willing to commute from -- the exurban boundary.
So, there's nowhere else to go. The bills are coming due, and people can't move because the housing is too expensive and no new exurbs are being built (at least, not like they were 20 years ago). Their suburbs will either crumble or densify.
This actually makes me wonder if that's not part of what motivates the incandescent NIMBY rage I see in my own city these days. They know they can't leave, but they're furious at our town leadership's efforts to densify. Perhaps a generation or two ago, they'd have just left, but now that they're stuck here, they have nothing to do BUT complain. Even if no one's proposing to force them to pay a single dime of the costs of their extravagant infrastructure, the mere fact of being stuck feels like some sort of political malpractice being committed against them.
Suburbs have enough voting power and standing in state houses that they tend not to crumble... they get expanded, they get subsidized, they get bailed out over and over. Urban residents whose own infrastructure is falling apart watch as their state capitals repeatedly ignore requests to fix serious problems that are not police-related (or, fail to keep companies like power/water/telecom providers accountable or appropriately regulated) while they annually find expensive money to expand sewers and rebuild washed-out county roads in the middle of nowhere. Even former job centers that have been abandoned by industry and are lying fallow in regards to jobs/economic output are repeatedly given infrastructure and economic development subsidies, against all sense, because the people who live in those places vote reliably and they won't move, so it's more of an opportunity for political power to please them than it is to address urban issues overseen by feckless local machine politicians who face no electoral threats.
The structural issues in how we are governed are intentional, and result in states making poor investments in their people and their economies. It's a big part of the reason why road budgets are as big as they are, needlessly, while local transit networks and intercity services (which, even with Amtrak, are state-funded) are starved for money or pared back. You don't need to be an anti-car zealot to understand that exurban development creates an economic death cycle that powers a political virtuous cycle... until you end up like New York and New Jersey and you are constantly teetering on collapse and voters are pushing you off the cliff.
This is *not* my experience of inner-ring suburbs.
Yes, the subsidies and bail-outs happen, but they rarely manage to keep EVERYTHING from crumbling. More often, there's a sort of triage at work: The richest suburbs get the priority, and the less-well-off adjacent ones get less and less prio as you go down the income spectrum.
And at the bottom, are the suburbs that HAVE been abandoned and ARE crumbling. This is what I mean when I say this is "not my experience", because I've seen these crumbling inner-ring suburbs up close.
You're mistaking one mechanism of how things go for the ENTIRE way that things go for ALL suburbs. IMO it's actually a highly lossy process, because of the sheer infrastructure bill involved in it all, which means that most suburbs are going to crumble.
So, for example, for every White Plains (in the NY suburbs) that manages to divert resources its way, there's an entire Bronx and a half-dozen Tarrytowns/Yonkers/Port Chesters or Newarks that are crumbling, and there may only be one or two New Rochelles that is embracing extreme densification as a way to avoid the calamity.
I think what's simultaneously happening is that suburbs are slurping all the money (which is finite and doesn't expand with demand) AND aren't always keeping up with everything. Yonkers and Tarrytown are great examples of places that exist due to ungodly amounts of resource commitments while also being unsustainable and showing wear at the fringes... but "crumbling" is how I would describe, like, Paterson or Camden, not Tarrytown.
Even the Bronx is split into "extremely nice, well-tended, wealthy sections", "up-and-coming neighborhoods with gleaming condo towers", and "whatever didn't burn down in the 70s where low-income people live under/over a highway" and these areas are all on-top of one another. The well-tended and up-and-coming sections exist because some people are doing well, but also because the people living under a highway keep getting solutions for their needs kicked forward while the others are getting whatever they need. And that's not nothing: the redevelopment of Mott Haven comes with an astounding infrastructural price tag, necessary because the on-street infrastructure conditions are so bad (due to decay AND new flooding from climate change) that there wouldn't have been a point to building the condos without doing simultaneous infra overhauls. So of course that is getting done, and of course Con Ed/Verizon/DEP can jump in anytime on a whim with a change order and double the length and cost of the project without any oversight correction, and the result is that a bunch of things in Morrisania are not going to get fixed before they break. Yonkers kind of plays out the same way... some parts of it always get whatever share of the money they can get (even if it's not enough) and some parts of it didn't get any investment since the 1960s.
But clearly the people in the nice parts of Yonkers and Tarrytown think they're getting a worse deal than the people in Morrisania or the under-invested parts of Yonkers. That's a thing that never changes in polls, the self-victimization of an audience used to coddling. Sort of like how Nassau County residents think its a place with soaring crime when they were just named the safest county in the country by a national policing organization.
Sorry, I get Tarrytown and Yonkers mixed up since they're so close. But yes, agreed. My main point here was just that if you go off the Strong Towns back-of-the-envelope calculation on a cul-de-sac's cost-vs-revenue balance, you'd need something like 10-20x more property taxes in most places for suburbs to be self-sustaining.
Which, on the flip side, means that if a handful of rich places are leeching resources from other ones, then only the 5-10% of the richest would be able to sustain this in the original mechanism you were outlining. The rest would crumble at differential rates based on their pre-existing prosperity and willingness to continue throwing good money after bad.
Anyways, WRT my original point, a generation or two ago, the people in Yonkers might have fled to Tarrytown or Nassau or wherever else. But now, they *can't*, at least not as easily as they once might have done.
So, now, going forward, the bill that Yonkers is facing is just so unconscionably high, they'll either have to accept crumbling infrastructure or densify until the money makes sense. And if they refuse to do the latter, the former process will devalue their property to the point that it's either worthless and abandoned OR ends up getting densified/gentrified anyways.
exactly! People do not calculate the costs of suburban living appropriately. It reminds me of the fuzzy math of "job creation" ("It'll bring 2,000 jobs to the community!") used to justify some terrible decision involving massive environmental costs (e.g. bringing a paper mill to a small town) for generations to come. They're missing the forest through the trees.
Currently in Geneva and was in Copenhagen last week but the complete EASE at how I’ve been able to use public transport and not need a car always blows me away. Even in the Geneva suburbs at a friends house there are two bus stops nearby that take you downtown easily.
I’m in Berlin and have not just a couple but a metric ton of options for transit-accessible hiking out in the forests and lakes (the S-Bahn curates whole collections on Komoot!)
Once you have invested in a car suitable for road trips, you are almost forced to recoup part of that investment by driving to big box discount stores with their grotesquely large parking lots and access roads.
I have a small idea not well thought out— if we could somehow require/greatly economically encourage road trip car rentals, maybe buying a city car would make sense. Even better, golf carts a la the Villages in Florida.
The fact that almost all of us own a "road trip car" inflicts a devastating pressure on the shape of our cities.
We're a two-car family and never drive to any big-box stores or stores with large parking lots. They're just too far out to be worth it so we deal with the stores with tighter lots and garages in town.
Your idea around rentals will probably be achieved once the autonomous driving problem is solved. If your car can work a taxi business while you're busy doing other things, most people will have it to do that, and then a chunk of those people will decide that if their car is a public utility anyway, they can ride around in someone else's public utility instead of being the public utility provider.
You might find yourself surprised by the maneuverability of a camper van, at least the standard length ones. We have a Sprinter, and it's not bad for running errands, surprisingly maneuverable. It's a diesel, so even the fuel economy is not bad compared to our car (Subaru Outback).
I assume you're driving a Forester, which is not - to my mind - a "small car". Small would be in the Ford Fiesta, Honda Fit, or one of those little Kia hatchbacks. I used to have something in that niche; not the greatest long-haul vehicle but not bad, and stellar for driving in the urban/suburban environment. I miss the quick steering and the ability to park just about anywhere.
BTW, my kid lives in McAllen, and I think you're dead on about the need for a road car. You need to have capacity to move far and fast...
Ah, a Crosstrek VX maybe? And you're getting 40 mpg. On Texas highways. Interesting. I'd pretty much written off Subaru because none of them seemed to get very good fuel economy, but your experience is intriguing. I like the AWD system (we live well into the Snow Zone, and like winter sports, so we spend a lot of time dealing with snowy roads), and a Crosstrek would be big enough for us. Hmm...
On the flat road, ice free roads of coastal TX, we don’t need AWD. It is a Cross Trek now that you mention it. It has a transmission that claims it becomes very close to manual shifting. I drive gently— avoiding rapid acceleration and unnecessary breaking.
Part of the problem with rental cars is that they're insanely expensive on a per-day basis. Which is in turn largely an overhead problem -- in order to have enough cars for peak demand, rental companies have to own too many brick-and-mortar locations where cars just sit there not earning money.
The only way autonomous driving impacts this is if it creates large enough robotaxi fleets that can meaningfully compete with the rental market. Smart rental companies will get their idle fleets in on the robotaxi action, but either way, Uber showed that a ubiquitous and cheap taxi fleet basically obviates most of the need for renting a car when traveling.
IE, the taxi and rental markets are already weakly coupled like this, but increasing the coupling will put them in more direct competition. Which will in turn reduce the price of renting much closer to the marginal cost of daily car ownership, making it a saner option for road trips.
Ed: Just off the top of my head... my ~$10k car costs about $5.5k/year to drive (I'm including payments even though it's paid off). That's a daily cost of about $15.
The last time I rented a car from Enterprise, even with a friend's employee discount, it was ~$300 for 3 days. That's a daily cost of $100/day, which is just nuts to pay for a road trip.
Not a bad idea, altho it feels like it'd be cost prohbitive - most friends I know who say "oh I'd just rent a car" end up never really leaving the city or bumming rides off their other friends.
Instead, I'd prefer if the default was the "road trip" car and everything else was nearby to you so you can get away with *JUST* the weekender car.
Or alternatively - we should make weekend rail-tripping easier. It won't make every recreational activity possible. But surely, heading to the beach would be more pleasant without a sea of parking needing to be accommodated (but I don't know how you surf via bus). Ski-busses are already a thing, and a delightful one for day-trips. Anyone who has ever gotten stuck on free national parks day knows that every national park would be more pleasant if most visitors arrived by bus or train. Having trains out of the metro that stop at scenic locations - at a hilltop brewery or winery, or a short walk from numerous trailheads - would meet many people's needs for a road-trip vehicle.
(But it seems a LOT easier just to make the day-to-day less focused on driving and the road-trip weekender your primary car)
I love this post and especially the quote about the CNU founders. It's compatible with my own pro-car, pro-city instincts to a T.
Perhaps the phrase "the car" in lieu of something more descriptive engenders some of the misunderstanding you're trying to avoid. If the objection isn't to the car per se but to car congestion or car dependence, those phrases work just fine.
There are several aspects of motoring that urbanists are going to have to come to terms with before any workable improvement can be imagined. The road-tripping freedom described in this post is one of those things. Another is hinted at through the reference to long bus rides. (Any roads big enough to accommodate busses are big enough to be significant car arteries, and therefore big enough to get congested if poorly engineered. Ditto for trucks - we might prefer to pick up some groceries on foot, but those groceries are getting to the store somehow, and it's not on foot.)
"car dependence" sounds wonky and needs a bit of an explanation to someone who's newly thinking about it. But it is the right word. I think saying "I'm opposed to traffic, and being forced into traffic even to make a short trip to the grocery for some salt" is sort of long, "car dependence" again is the right word but doesn't pull 1 year ago me in quite like "traffic"
The exploration of freedom and context, especially of road trips as cultivating a sense of independence, reminds me of what drew me to walking, transit, and the "urban lifestyle" in the first place. For teenagers, it's obvious why having convenient car alternatives would be valuable. But even when you do have a genuine choice between driving and not, the same sense of freedom that you describe on road trips (and which I enjoy myself) is often shifted to walking and transit in the city. On foot/transit, traffic becomes much less of a barrier. You don't have to lug your car around with you, worrying about guessing the right amount of time to pay for parking for. You can enjoy the spontaneity of having drinks when you weren't planning to, or going downtown or some other urban area where traffic and parking might not just be a burden, but a legitimate obstacle to doing so in a car. The same sense of spontaneity that exists on a road trip in stopping at little diners or museums gets inverted in the city where, if you're not avoiding/bypassing commercial streets in the first place, getting in and out of your car to check a store out makes you question each time if it's worth it.
Perhaps there aren't many people who experience both kinds of freedom as people sort into an urban or suburban lifestyle (I like the point the other commenter made that once you get a road trip car, you might feel encouraged or even compelled to use it in the city) and this leads to the divide. Just as suburbanites feel blocked from accessing urban areas, urbanites do too in trying to access the suburbs, so we lead our respective lives in the way that makes most sense for the context. Your story of the person who faced this challenge in looking for a more affordable home shows why it's beneficial to add more density in the city while looking to improve transportation options in the suburbs. As things stand though, it's no wonder why so much of this "debate" is people talking past one another.
>>The mere fact that this does have a political valence tells me we’ve been getting all of this very wrong.
Perhaps? I deeply *want* this to be true, but every time I look at the real world of politics, all I can see is layers upon layers of needless valence.
At some point, one has to admit to oneself that the valence may be *the point*. Which is indeed frustrating to anyone who expects policy to be remotely rational, as you and I do.
But I can't help but wonder if WE are the ones who are "doing it wrong". If the entire species is made up of half-rational hairless apes who are all obsessed with valence, then perhaps getting rationality out of them is an exercise in valence, not rationality.
My wife and I left the city relatively recently for a life in...not even a suburb really, we're so far out. And technically we lived in a "suburb" before moving, but I realize from reading here that my 'burb was so old and so close in that it was "the city", despite having its own government, police, fire dept, etc. I do like living out here. It's quiet, wildlife come to visit, we're near family, etc. However, I also miss my city home, where I could walk to the grocery or my favorite coffee shop, where our daughter could roam with her friends in reasonable security, where all the joys and amenities of a city were in easy striking distance. I like living out here, but I feel for the kids I see. Their lives have to be so managed because there's little way to just go DO stuff as a kid. Very few things can be walked to. I do see teens buzzing by on their ebikes or escooters, and good for them. At least they are getting out.
As for us old people, my wife and I spend weeks each year wandering in our camper van; we love to drive. Here at home I resent the fact that we almost HAVE to drive (or ride my motorcycle) to do anything - get groceries, go to a pharmacy, hit the pet store, see a movie, go to a restaurant, etc. The standing joke is that "everything" is 5 miles away", and that's not far from the reality. My wife appreciates being closer to her sister and nephew and their families, and it's enchanting to watch sandhill cranes land in the yard and walk over to raid the bird feeders, but enough to compensate for having to drive everywhere all the time? I miss my old neighborhood.
oh hello, I have finally found my people. I'm learning there's even a name for us. How interesting.
"Think of how many people say something like, We might stay in the city if there was less crime, or if we could afford it, or if the schools were better…"
I hear this all the time. And I think, okay, you've identified a few arguable downsides. But few people adequately count up the cost of living in a suburb and commuting into a city. To me, cities offer SO many more upsides than downsides. And suburbs offer SO many more downsides than upsides that people simply don't consider. There's a major downside to a commute (less time, more costs, reduced mental wellbeing). There's a downside to fewer cultural opportunities and access to services, etc. For me, none of that is worth slightly more affordable rents and space.
Probably the biggest upside to a city, I think, is the exposure to possibility. Children can see a wide array of professionals and conceive of doing such a wide range of work. I see so many young people in rural/suburban areas falling into drugs and alcohol and I believe it's because they feel trapped and simply cannot envision a way out.
I wish we could just build massive, secure parking garages outside the city that are free to use, then put frequent self-driving trams on literally every street in the city, and limit in-city driving to delivery, emergency, work, and moving vehicles. It’s great to have a car for road trips and vacations, less so for in-town driving
I have some more thoughts that might help you to scratch the same itch. Defenders of suburbia and the car (as with many overexuberant technology apologists), fall into what Robert Fishman characterizes as "transportation determinism." The inventions of the steam engine, the bicycle, and the electric trolley do not force us to do anything. They merely open up new possibilities. That does not imply that it is good for us to use them in every context. Collective choices (or "policies") and individual choices largely determine the impact of technologies. Peter D. Norton applies the Social Construction of Technology as a conceptual tool for understanding the car revolution as an aggressive redefinition of street use and set of policies favoring the use of the automobile. Whether SCOT is the best tool, many other historians of technology consider the role of culture in the selection and scope of application of technologies.
For these technological determinists who think we have no choice but to drive, any criticism of suburbs and cars seems like an anti-car attack. For those of us who think that an engine mounted on a carriage is a great invention, the strawman argument is palpable. I think morphine is a great invention. Think of all of the people whose lives have been improved by morphine! But these claims are consistent with the prescription that morphine be carefully regulated and that users abide by these regulations.
I am much more harsh about driving than you are, but we agree that cars and driving have their places, but they are overused as a matter of policy and individual choice. Furthermore, anyone that characterizes us as "anti-car" is missing that many of us are claiming that driving is a context- and dose-related problem, even if I am arguing for very low doses.
This is very well put.
There is also the additional matter that "there is value in the suburbs until you price in externalities". And I think that is inaccurately perceived as political too. Spread-out living with all modern amenities and commuting trends comes at great cost, not just in the purchase of a vehicle but in all that is done to support that infrastructurally. Consumers rage at being asked to pay for it - because they're not being told they're paying for what they incurred (and were not warned in advance of making their home buying decisions), they're just facing the prospect of higher taxes, fees and insurance costs. When it comes to the suburban infrastructural landscape, much of it was simply paid-for by states along the way (including disaster relief when communities built in geographically-inappropriate places are wrecked), raiding their treasuries and spending value captured from urban economic engines that should have been reinvested in the urban landscape. Anyone who tries to fix that imbalance, even mildly, is accused of stealing money from families and committing political malpractice. So, it is not just auto infrastructure adding to this imbalance. And shifting costs may, to some folks' irritation, require people to look at cities again for the value they provide. Again, that's not political; that's just reality.
I think the saving grace here is that the infrastructure itself will crumble, no matter what.
Up until the housing crash, the Ponzi scheme was that when the infrastructure bills came due, people just picked up sticks and migrated further outwards to the most recently constructed ring of suburbs. However, right around that time, most cities reached the practical/psychological limit of how far out people are willing to commute from -- the exurban boundary.
So, there's nowhere else to go. The bills are coming due, and people can't move because the housing is too expensive and no new exurbs are being built (at least, not like they were 20 years ago). Their suburbs will either crumble or densify.
This actually makes me wonder if that's not part of what motivates the incandescent NIMBY rage I see in my own city these days. They know they can't leave, but they're furious at our town leadership's efforts to densify. Perhaps a generation or two ago, they'd have just left, but now that they're stuck here, they have nothing to do BUT complain. Even if no one's proposing to force them to pay a single dime of the costs of their extravagant infrastructure, the mere fact of being stuck feels like some sort of political malpractice being committed against them.
Suburbs have enough voting power and standing in state houses that they tend not to crumble... they get expanded, they get subsidized, they get bailed out over and over. Urban residents whose own infrastructure is falling apart watch as their state capitals repeatedly ignore requests to fix serious problems that are not police-related (or, fail to keep companies like power/water/telecom providers accountable or appropriately regulated) while they annually find expensive money to expand sewers and rebuild washed-out county roads in the middle of nowhere. Even former job centers that have been abandoned by industry and are lying fallow in regards to jobs/economic output are repeatedly given infrastructure and economic development subsidies, against all sense, because the people who live in those places vote reliably and they won't move, so it's more of an opportunity for political power to please them than it is to address urban issues overseen by feckless local machine politicians who face no electoral threats.
The structural issues in how we are governed are intentional, and result in states making poor investments in their people and their economies. It's a big part of the reason why road budgets are as big as they are, needlessly, while local transit networks and intercity services (which, even with Amtrak, are state-funded) are starved for money or pared back. You don't need to be an anti-car zealot to understand that exurban development creates an economic death cycle that powers a political virtuous cycle... until you end up like New York and New Jersey and you are constantly teetering on collapse and voters are pushing you off the cliff.
This is *not* my experience of inner-ring suburbs.
Yes, the subsidies and bail-outs happen, but they rarely manage to keep EVERYTHING from crumbling. More often, there's a sort of triage at work: The richest suburbs get the priority, and the less-well-off adjacent ones get less and less prio as you go down the income spectrum.
And at the bottom, are the suburbs that HAVE been abandoned and ARE crumbling. This is what I mean when I say this is "not my experience", because I've seen these crumbling inner-ring suburbs up close.
You're mistaking one mechanism of how things go for the ENTIRE way that things go for ALL suburbs. IMO it's actually a highly lossy process, because of the sheer infrastructure bill involved in it all, which means that most suburbs are going to crumble.
So, for example, for every White Plains (in the NY suburbs) that manages to divert resources its way, there's an entire Bronx and a half-dozen Tarrytowns/Yonkers/Port Chesters or Newarks that are crumbling, and there may only be one or two New Rochelles that is embracing extreme densification as a way to avoid the calamity.
I think what's simultaneously happening is that suburbs are slurping all the money (which is finite and doesn't expand with demand) AND aren't always keeping up with everything. Yonkers and Tarrytown are great examples of places that exist due to ungodly amounts of resource commitments while also being unsustainable and showing wear at the fringes... but "crumbling" is how I would describe, like, Paterson or Camden, not Tarrytown.
Even the Bronx is split into "extremely nice, well-tended, wealthy sections", "up-and-coming neighborhoods with gleaming condo towers", and "whatever didn't burn down in the 70s where low-income people live under/over a highway" and these areas are all on-top of one another. The well-tended and up-and-coming sections exist because some people are doing well, but also because the people living under a highway keep getting solutions for their needs kicked forward while the others are getting whatever they need. And that's not nothing: the redevelopment of Mott Haven comes with an astounding infrastructural price tag, necessary because the on-street infrastructure conditions are so bad (due to decay AND new flooding from climate change) that there wouldn't have been a point to building the condos without doing simultaneous infra overhauls. So of course that is getting done, and of course Con Ed/Verizon/DEP can jump in anytime on a whim with a change order and double the length and cost of the project without any oversight correction, and the result is that a bunch of things in Morrisania are not going to get fixed before they break. Yonkers kind of plays out the same way... some parts of it always get whatever share of the money they can get (even if it's not enough) and some parts of it didn't get any investment since the 1960s.
But clearly the people in the nice parts of Yonkers and Tarrytown think they're getting a worse deal than the people in Morrisania or the under-invested parts of Yonkers. That's a thing that never changes in polls, the self-victimization of an audience used to coddling. Sort of like how Nassau County residents think its a place with soaring crime when they were just named the safest county in the country by a national policing organization.
Sorry, I get Tarrytown and Yonkers mixed up since they're so close. But yes, agreed. My main point here was just that if you go off the Strong Towns back-of-the-envelope calculation on a cul-de-sac's cost-vs-revenue balance, you'd need something like 10-20x more property taxes in most places for suburbs to be self-sustaining.
Which, on the flip side, means that if a handful of rich places are leeching resources from other ones, then only the 5-10% of the richest would be able to sustain this in the original mechanism you were outlining. The rest would crumble at differential rates based on their pre-existing prosperity and willingness to continue throwing good money after bad.
Anyways, WRT my original point, a generation or two ago, the people in Yonkers might have fled to Tarrytown or Nassau or wherever else. But now, they *can't*, at least not as easily as they once might have done.
So, now, going forward, the bill that Yonkers is facing is just so unconscionably high, they'll either have to accept crumbling infrastructure or densify until the money makes sense. And if they refuse to do the latter, the former process will devalue their property to the point that it's either worthless and abandoned OR ends up getting densified/gentrified anyways.
Being from St Louis, you know what’s up about crumbling suburbs!
Indeed; we have ALL KINDS of them!
exactly! People do not calculate the costs of suburban living appropriately. It reminds me of the fuzzy math of "job creation" ("It'll bring 2,000 jobs to the community!") used to justify some terrible decision involving massive environmental costs (e.g. bringing a paper mill to a small town) for generations to come. They're missing the forest through the trees.
Currently in Geneva and was in Copenhagen last week but the complete EASE at how I’ve been able to use public transport and not need a car always blows me away. Even in the Geneva suburbs at a friends house there are two bus stops nearby that take you downtown easily.
I’m in Berlin and have not just a couple but a metric ton of options for transit-accessible hiking out in the forests and lakes (the S-Bahn curates whole collections on Komoot!)
Once you have invested in a car suitable for road trips, you are almost forced to recoup part of that investment by driving to big box discount stores with their grotesquely large parking lots and access roads.
I have a small idea not well thought out— if we could somehow require/greatly economically encourage road trip car rentals, maybe buying a city car would make sense. Even better, golf carts a la the Villages in Florida.
The fact that almost all of us own a "road trip car" inflicts a devastating pressure on the shape of our cities.
We're a two-car family and never drive to any big-box stores or stores with large parking lots. They're just too far out to be worth it so we deal with the stores with tighter lots and garages in town.
Your idea around rentals will probably be achieved once the autonomous driving problem is solved. If your car can work a taxi business while you're busy doing other things, most people will have it to do that, and then a chunk of those people will decide that if their car is a public utility anyway, they can ride around in someone else's public utility instead of being the public utility provider.
Ironically, I own a small Subaru SUV, but I hardly ever drive it since retiring. I have almost everything delivered.
I am planning to buy a true road vehicle— a camping van, which I will definitely not be driving around town.
For us in Texas, keeping a road car is essential because you will have to escape a hurricane, a flood, or a multi-day blackout on short notice.
You might find yourself surprised by the maneuverability of a camper van, at least the standard length ones. We have a Sprinter, and it's not bad for running errands, surprisingly maneuverable. It's a diesel, so even the fuel economy is not bad compared to our car (Subaru Outback).
I assume you're driving a Forester, which is not - to my mind - a "small car". Small would be in the Ford Fiesta, Honda Fit, or one of those little Kia hatchbacks. I used to have something in that niche; not the greatest long-haul vehicle but not bad, and stellar for driving in the urban/suburban environment. I miss the quick steering and the ability to park just about anywhere.
BTW, my kid lives in McAllen, and I think you're dead on about the need for a road car. You need to have capacity to move far and fast...
I own the smallest Subaru SUV, smaller than a Forester--can't remember the name right now. On the interstate it gets about 40 miles to the gallon.
Ah, a Crosstrek VX maybe? And you're getting 40 mpg. On Texas highways. Interesting. I'd pretty much written off Subaru because none of them seemed to get very good fuel economy, but your experience is intriguing. I like the AWD system (we live well into the Snow Zone, and like winter sports, so we spend a lot of time dealing with snowy roads), and a Crosstrek would be big enough for us. Hmm...
Hey, I think I must correct myself. I can go 450 miles on a 15 gallon tank of gas, so that’s 30 mpg.
On the flat road, ice free roads of coastal TX, we don’t need AWD. It is a Cross Trek now that you mention it. It has a transmission that claims it becomes very close to manual shifting. I drive gently— avoiding rapid acceleration and unnecessary breaking.
Part of the problem with rental cars is that they're insanely expensive on a per-day basis. Which is in turn largely an overhead problem -- in order to have enough cars for peak demand, rental companies have to own too many brick-and-mortar locations where cars just sit there not earning money.
The only way autonomous driving impacts this is if it creates large enough robotaxi fleets that can meaningfully compete with the rental market. Smart rental companies will get their idle fleets in on the robotaxi action, but either way, Uber showed that a ubiquitous and cheap taxi fleet basically obviates most of the need for renting a car when traveling.
IE, the taxi and rental markets are already weakly coupled like this, but increasing the coupling will put them in more direct competition. Which will in turn reduce the price of renting much closer to the marginal cost of daily car ownership, making it a saner option for road trips.
Ed: Just off the top of my head... my ~$10k car costs about $5.5k/year to drive (I'm including payments even though it's paid off). That's a daily cost of about $15.
The last time I rented a car from Enterprise, even with a friend's employee discount, it was ~$300 for 3 days. That's a daily cost of $100/day, which is just nuts to pay for a road trip.
I confess I can't fathom how the rental car companies are still in business post-Uber.
Because some people don't want to rely on Ubers while traveling?
Also, Uber is great for short car rides, not for long ones.
And Uber doesn't service everywhere. It's really hard to get one at, say, 3am.
I do about 8-10 trips all over the country every year and have been relying exclusively on Uber for transportation for over a decade now.
Obviously there are some people who still prefer car rentals. I just don't know who they are.
I'm at a loss here. I mean, just because it works for you doesn't mean the math works out the same for everyone else.
Not a bad idea, altho it feels like it'd be cost prohbitive - most friends I know who say "oh I'd just rent a car" end up never really leaving the city or bumming rides off their other friends.
Instead, I'd prefer if the default was the "road trip" car and everything else was nearby to you so you can get away with *JUST* the weekender car.
Or alternatively - we should make weekend rail-tripping easier. It won't make every recreational activity possible. But surely, heading to the beach would be more pleasant without a sea of parking needing to be accommodated (but I don't know how you surf via bus). Ski-busses are already a thing, and a delightful one for day-trips. Anyone who has ever gotten stuck on free national parks day knows that every national park would be more pleasant if most visitors arrived by bus or train. Having trains out of the metro that stop at scenic locations - at a hilltop brewery or winery, or a short walk from numerous trailheads - would meet many people's needs for a road-trip vehicle.
(But it seems a LOT easier just to make the day-to-day less focused on driving and the road-trip weekender your primary car)
I love this post and especially the quote about the CNU founders. It's compatible with my own pro-car, pro-city instincts to a T.
Perhaps the phrase "the car" in lieu of something more descriptive engenders some of the misunderstanding you're trying to avoid. If the objection isn't to the car per se but to car congestion or car dependence, those phrases work just fine.
There are several aspects of motoring that urbanists are going to have to come to terms with before any workable improvement can be imagined. The road-tripping freedom described in this post is one of those things. Another is hinted at through the reference to long bus rides. (Any roads big enough to accommodate busses are big enough to be significant car arteries, and therefore big enough to get congested if poorly engineered. Ditto for trucks - we might prefer to pick up some groceries on foot, but those groceries are getting to the store somehow, and it's not on foot.)
"car dependence" sounds wonky and needs a bit of an explanation to someone who's newly thinking about it. But it is the right word. I think saying "I'm opposed to traffic, and being forced into traffic even to make a short trip to the grocery for some salt" is sort of long, "car dependence" again is the right word but doesn't pull 1 year ago me in quite like "traffic"
forced traffic, mandatory traffic
The exploration of freedom and context, especially of road trips as cultivating a sense of independence, reminds me of what drew me to walking, transit, and the "urban lifestyle" in the first place. For teenagers, it's obvious why having convenient car alternatives would be valuable. But even when you do have a genuine choice between driving and not, the same sense of freedom that you describe on road trips (and which I enjoy myself) is often shifted to walking and transit in the city. On foot/transit, traffic becomes much less of a barrier. You don't have to lug your car around with you, worrying about guessing the right amount of time to pay for parking for. You can enjoy the spontaneity of having drinks when you weren't planning to, or going downtown or some other urban area where traffic and parking might not just be a burden, but a legitimate obstacle to doing so in a car. The same sense of spontaneity that exists on a road trip in stopping at little diners or museums gets inverted in the city where, if you're not avoiding/bypassing commercial streets in the first place, getting in and out of your car to check a store out makes you question each time if it's worth it.
Perhaps there aren't many people who experience both kinds of freedom as people sort into an urban or suburban lifestyle (I like the point the other commenter made that once you get a road trip car, you might feel encouraged or even compelled to use it in the city) and this leads to the divide. Just as suburbanites feel blocked from accessing urban areas, urbanites do too in trying to access the suburbs, so we lead our respective lives in the way that makes most sense for the context. Your story of the person who faced this challenge in looking for a more affordable home shows why it's beneficial to add more density in the city while looking to improve transportation options in the suburbs. As things stand though, it's no wonder why so much of this "debate" is people talking past one another.
>>The mere fact that this does have a political valence tells me we’ve been getting all of this very wrong.
Perhaps? I deeply *want* this to be true, but every time I look at the real world of politics, all I can see is layers upon layers of needless valence.
At some point, one has to admit to oneself that the valence may be *the point*. Which is indeed frustrating to anyone who expects policy to be remotely rational, as you and I do.
But I can't help but wonder if WE are the ones who are "doing it wrong". If the entire species is made up of half-rational hairless apes who are all obsessed with valence, then perhaps getting rationality out of them is an exercise in valence, not rationality.
My wife and I left the city relatively recently for a life in...not even a suburb really, we're so far out. And technically we lived in a "suburb" before moving, but I realize from reading here that my 'burb was so old and so close in that it was "the city", despite having its own government, police, fire dept, etc. I do like living out here. It's quiet, wildlife come to visit, we're near family, etc. However, I also miss my city home, where I could walk to the grocery or my favorite coffee shop, where our daughter could roam with her friends in reasonable security, where all the joys and amenities of a city were in easy striking distance. I like living out here, but I feel for the kids I see. Their lives have to be so managed because there's little way to just go DO stuff as a kid. Very few things can be walked to. I do see teens buzzing by on their ebikes or escooters, and good for them. At least they are getting out.
As for us old people, my wife and I spend weeks each year wandering in our camper van; we love to drive. Here at home I resent the fact that we almost HAVE to drive (or ride my motorcycle) to do anything - get groceries, go to a pharmacy, hit the pet store, see a movie, go to a restaurant, etc. The standing joke is that "everything" is 5 miles away", and that's not far from the reality. My wife appreciates being closer to her sister and nephew and their families, and it's enchanting to watch sandhill cranes land in the yard and walk over to raid the bird feeders, but enough to compensate for having to drive everywhere all the time? I miss my old neighborhood.
oh hello, I have finally found my people. I'm learning there's even a name for us. How interesting.
"Think of how many people say something like, We might stay in the city if there was less crime, or if we could afford it, or if the schools were better…"
I hear this all the time. And I think, okay, you've identified a few arguable downsides. But few people adequately count up the cost of living in a suburb and commuting into a city. To me, cities offer SO many more upsides than downsides. And suburbs offer SO many more downsides than upsides that people simply don't consider. There's a major downside to a commute (less time, more costs, reduced mental wellbeing). There's a downside to fewer cultural opportunities and access to services, etc. For me, none of that is worth slightly more affordable rents and space.
Probably the biggest upside to a city, I think, is the exposure to possibility. Children can see a wide array of professionals and conceive of doing such a wide range of work. I see so many young people in rural/suburban areas falling into drugs and alcohol and I believe it's because they feel trapped and simply cannot envision a way out.
I wish we could just build massive, secure parking garages outside the city that are free to use, then put frequent self-driving trams on literally every street in the city, and limit in-city driving to delivery, emergency, work, and moving vehicles. It’s great to have a car for road trips and vacations, less so for in-town driving