Cars and the Luxury of Space
No North American city is overcrowded. Not a single one.
Of course, it is true that many of us encounter crowds in our daily routines—something that recent social distancing instructions have made us more keenly aware of. And those crowds were what prompted New York governor Andrew Cuomo to say this in a press conference and tweet on Sunday:
This is not life as usual. There is a density level in NYC that is destructive. It has to stop and it has to stop now. NYC must develop an immediate plan to reduce density.
(I've seen some suggesting that Cuomo was calling for reducing the city's resident population—which would presumably require forcing New Yorkers out of their homes—so let's be clear: in context of his remarks, Cuomo clearly did not mean population density. He clearly meant crowding in public.)
What's not at all true is the vaguely misanthropic suggestion that there are simply too many of us to share our cities comfortably or safely. "There are too many people!" is a sentiment I hear just as often from suburbanites in my mid-sized Florida city (with less than 1/10 the population density of NYC) as it's voiced in NYC—only here in Florida, the impetus for the complaint is usually traffic congestion, not sidewalk congestion.
Everybody thinks their city is overcrowded. Nobody's actually is. Americans have the largest homes in the world. We have wider streets than most of the world does. We have ample parks and a colossal amount of retail space. There is simply no shortage of breathing room.
Or at least, there wouldn’t be if we didn’t reserve the majority of publicly accessible space in our cities for people who are traveling inside their own individual giant metal boxes.
Our cities are unusually spacious, but cars monopolize most of that space.
This is true even in places where many residents choose not to drive. There's a famous illustration that perfectly captures the actual experience of life in a city like New York for someone walking around:
Illustration by Claes Tingvall of the Swedish Road Administration
No wonder the sidewalks are crowded!
That empty void is a non-place. A non-place is somewhere nobody ever wants to be—just to move through and get over with. Cars and other motor vehicles are colossal generators of non-place. It's not just the space they occupy while being driven—a lane roughly twice the car's width, and a 2-second following distance ahead and behind. It's also that we reserve staggering amounts of land for parking these vehicles. Then add in driveways to access that parking. Add in landscaping buffers to separate buildings from the ugliness of the roads and the parking lots. Add in the negative space created by the likes of freeway on-ramps. The total is staggering. A suburban office park can easily be 10% place, 90% non-place.
The minority of our land that remains is where humans are expected to go about our entire lives, and do all the things that create value (in every sense of the word “value”).
Image by Charles Marohn, from The Real Reason Your Local Mall is Failing.
This is the cost of automobile orientation. Given a fixed area of land—say, a city block—if you want to accommodate cars for every person coming and going, you can fit a lot less productive activity on that land. And yet your infrastructure and service costs will be the same or even higher.
This is fundamentally a geometry problem: cars simply gobble up space, both when they’re in use and when they’re parked. Autonomous technology doesn't solve that. Electrification doesn't solve it. Uber and Lyft don't solve it. Elon Musk certainly has no idea how to solve it.
An essay from all the way back in 1973, titled The Social Ideology of the Motorcar by André Gorz, brilliantly captures the basic futility of designing a city around universal car ownership. Gorz argues that the automobile is, by its nature, a luxury product. This doesn't mean there's something elitist about wanting to have or drive a car. It means that the car is a product whose greatest benefit—the ability to travel farther, faster, with greater convenience, than other people—hinges on most people not having access to it. As soon as everyone has access to it, the benefits don't scale, and in fact are largely negated.
In other words, if you want everyone to have a car, you can't have New York City anymore; it’s impossible. You have to turn New York City into Atlanta or Houston. And once you've done that, everyone lives farther from each other and still can't get anywhere fast, and everyone still experiences crowding and congestion—just of a different sort.
Read: Dealing With Congestion
Cars result in “spiky” patterns of crowding.
Amid California’s shelter-in-place order, which allows you to leave your home for exercise, reports emerged this week of beaches within driving distance of Bay Area cities being overwhelmed by day-trippers. Many neighborhood parks and streets in San Francisco are quiet and could accommodate a lot more socially distanced recreation.
Shoppers around the world are consistently reporting long lines and shortages of basic staples like toilet paper at big-box superstores like Costco. Meanwhile, your best bet to obtain such staples may be a neighborhood bodega, whose customers are largely coming from within walking distance.
The common thread here is how universal car usage tends to collapse distance. Popular destinations become even more popular, and more crowded, than they would be otherwise. In a world designed to facilitate walking, rather than one that crowds out walkers in order to afford luxurious amounts of space to drivers and their vehicles, we would have more decentralized patterns of movement. A handful of shoppers at each of a few dozen corner stores instead of hundreds of shoppers at one Walmart would likely result in less crowding and less spread of contagion.
We have a chance right now to see things with new eyes.
Collective crises are interesting moments in which the boundaries of the possible become fluid. And when they solidify again, it’s not by snapping back to where they were but by settling into a new shape, at times both familiar and unfamiliar. We’ve all experienced historical phase shifts like this—consider the permanent changes to everyday life brought about by the fall of the USSR, the 9/11 attacks, or the 2008 financial crisis.
This is not to be at all glib about the tragedy of what is occurring right now. It's merely to observe that in a crisis, we re-evaluate things that weren't up for discussion in normal times.
Take New York, where a lack of effective social distancing— some of it by choice but some no doubt due to crowding on sidewalks and public transit—has played a major role in the city's becoming the epicenter of coronavirus in the United States. One of Governor Cuomo's proposed responses is to pedestrianize streets, allowing walkers to spread out at a time where vehicle traffic is at a minimum anyway. (Mayor De Blasio says he will begin to do so this week, though his first steps appear tentative and limited.)
My hope is that New York will not only do this in a big way, but that it will plant a seed in the minds of New Yorkers who will experience for the first time a little taste of what their streets could be.
Here’s a similar proposal from Toronto to pedestrianize Yonge Street. Other cities, especially outside the U.S., are talking about ambitious expansions to their bike networks—temporary, but pieces of which could become permanent. There are plans in Bogotá and Mexico City, and petitions in U.S. cities such as Berkeley to take similar steps. These are ideas that would be off the table in normal times—or at least moving so quickly to implement them would be—but these are abnormal times.
We will imagine a different city, or maybe even try it out, because we're forced to. But then when the threat of illness has receded, we'll still be free to keep the parts we liked about it. Will we?
Let's take the opportunity to do some reflection on the staggering cost of reserving the majority of our public space—even in New York—for people's giant metal boxes.
(Cover photo via Flickr.)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.