The Cost of Convenience

Arian Horbovetz (Twitter: @Arianhorbovetz) is a Strong Towns member who blogs at The Urban Phoenix. This post is republished from his blog. You can also check out the Urban Phoenix Podcast for more of Arian’s great work.

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Image via Flickr user Haydn Blackey

In 2017, I wrote a piece called “What have we sacrificed for transportation independence,” about the impact that building a nation around exclusive personal mobility—i.e., the automoble—has had on our community environments. Today I want to take that one step further and acknowledge the devastating effects of our “convenience culture” in the United States.

Let’s begin with the assumption that the most important lessons we learn, the most transformative journeys we take, and the most powerful experiences we have, are rarely “convenient.” The things that make us better are usually the things that require us to dig a little deeper and find something in ourselves that makes us feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. While convenience is a welcomed privilege, what makes us who we are usually requires a modicum of work, or self-reliance, or shared effort. If this is not your experience, then this post may not be for you.

For the rest of you who are still with me, let’s talk about the above assumption as it relates to our communities. Do we make the hard choice to bike to work instead of drive—in an effort to reduce pollution, make our community safer, and advocate for a more sustainable mode of transportation—or do we simply drive? Do we conveniently order from Amazon, or do we seek a similar purchase that might strengthen our local economy? Do we use Grubhub, or do we contact our favorite local establishment directly to ensure they get the most from every order? Do we use Uber, or do we see if there is a public transit option that might get us to where we need to go?

European cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen are notorious for prioritizing less “convenient” forms of transportation in favor of bikes and public transit, which empower us and expose us to sociocultural diversity. The lessons learned via non-exclusive mobility are the true soul-resurrecting elements we can all benefit from. In other words, if we truly support the idea of strength through adversity, we must embrace the less convenient avenues of mobility, commerce and lifestyle.

And yet, in a country of perpetual chest-thumping, relentlessly championing the illusion of toughness and grit, we look for the closest parking space at the gym. We curse the driver that takes an extra second to make a left turn, delaying us during our commute. We berate the local business that doesn’t have the “in-and-out” convenience parking we ravenously crave. American “strength” is suddenly brought to its knees when we can’t find a parking space within a few hundred feet from our destination.

This is what happens when we over-prioritize the most “convenient” (and most exclusive) form of transportation. For example, of the 37 OECD nations, the United States has the second lowest gas tax behind Mexico, which has no gas tax. In fact, the U.S. gas tax is almost exactly one-quarter of the OECD average per gallon. The low fuel tax is a financial lubricant for the proliferation of the automobile as an affordable choice instead of the exclusive one. In essence, we have made it financially easier for people to get around using the most inefficient, unsafe and environmentally unfriendly mode of transportation this planet has ever seen. Couple this with more than a half-century of urban demolition, residential displacement and racially-diving highway creation, and you get a mode of transportation that is so convenient and exclusive that few other modalities have a chance.

And it’s not just cars. It’s megastores like Walmart that, ironically, we welcome into our rural and suburban worlds on the promise of jobs and inexpensive merchandise—when what we get in reality is a monopolistic machine that pays unlivable wages and makes it impossible for small businesses to compete. The end result is actually a loss of American jobs and a culture that is built around a one-stop-shop solution that is highly subsidized and simultaneously damaging to local economies.

Services like Grubhub make it easy for consumers to order from local restaurants. But these third-party food delivery services can take up to 30% of each sale, creating a no-win scenario for restaurants: Use Grubhub and have your profit margins stripped, or go it alone with less exposure, because the public doesn’t want to look beyond their favorite apps to fulfill their cravings. Grubhub has quietly become one of the most powerful “pay-to-play” constructs in our local economy.

These are just a few examples of convenience culture and how this model of commerce is slowly eliminating the chance for small businesses to thrive. The more we subscribe to the convenience economy, perpetuated first and foremost by the drastic over-prioritization of the automobile, the more we feed into our own undoing. Whether you’re a rural American who loves the convenience of Walmart, or an urban American who just wants to find the closest parking space in front of your favorite farm-to-table restaurant, remember that true patronization often takes effort.

With this in mind, let’s be fine with parking a quarter-mile away and getting some exercise on the way to our destination. Let’s pay a little extra to shop at our local market. If we all work a little harder and a little smarter, we can overcome the temptation of convenience culture and reclaim our community strength by doing what is more difficult.

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