Last month we wrote a post about planning critic Randal O'Toole. We were generally kind to Mr. O'Toole and heaped praise on many of the arguments that he had presented on a podcast from the CATO Institute, where he is a Senior Fellow. We did take issue with a few of his contentions, particularly regarding the development pattern preferred by Americans and whether we could afford it long-term.

We have always believed it respectful to notify someone if we have written about them, especially when our words are critical. In this instance, I sent a brief note to Mr. O'Toole and was surprised to hear back from him immediately. He was kind in his critique of our posting and offered some thoughts of his own in the comments section.

This exchange of ideas has blossomed into a series of joint discussions that we are going to begin today. What will immediately follow this posting is a post from Randal O'Toole on the topic of "Federal Highways and Urban Form." Following that will be one from the Strong Towns Blog on the same subject. We are posting these jointly on this site and on O'Toole's, which can be found at http://ti.org/antiplanner. 

Tomorrow, a brief response to each argument will again be posted jointly.

Please take the time to read the next two posts. We encourage you to join this discussion and post your thoughts on each essay here or at the Anti Planner blog.

Many opponents of low-density suburbs — areas they derisively call “sprawl” — argue that Americans would not have chosen to live in such areas unless they were subsidized or forced to do so. One of the most important such subsidies, they claim, is the Interstate Highway System.

“For more than a generation,” argues former Milwaukee Mayor and current head of the Congress for the New Urbanism John Norquest, “urban sprawl sprung up with federal assistance [such as] excessive road building . . . that interfered with the free market.” He adds that, “urban superhighways should be relegated to the scrap heap of history.”

Would our cities look a lot different if the federal government had not built the urban interstates (which were the first major urban highways built with federal assistance)? I argue that the differences would be minor.

First, unlike many local roads, 100 percent of the cost of the interstate system was paid for out of gas taxes and other user fees (tolls plus taxes on autos, trucks, and tires that were created to pay for such roads). The urban interstates make up 42 percent of the lane miles of the interstate system but carry 66 percent of the vehicle miles of travel, which makes up for much of the differences in the costs of urban vs. rural roads. While gas taxes are a poor user fee, this shows that people were willing to pay build the urban interstates, so most would have been built even if they were left to the states or private highway companies.

More important, the interstates were not the primary force shaping our urban areas. This is illustrated by a 1927 New York Times review of what is now considered a classic film, Metropolis. This movie depicted a futuristic city consisting almost entirely of skyscrapers, but the reviewer — none other than H.G. Wells — argued that this was “silly.” Such a “vertical city of the future” is “highly improbable,” he said, because cities had already begun decentralizing (or, as the English put it, “centrifugal”) years before the automobile became popular. “The British census returns of 1901 proved clearly that city populations were becoming centrifugal,” says Wells, “and that every increase in horizontal traffic facilities produced a further distribution.”

Those “horizontal traffic facilities” include the horsecar in 1832, the electric streetcar in 1888, and Henry Ford’s mass-produced automobile in 1913. Each of these gave a new class of people the mobility they needed to escape the dense cities — and escape they did. By 1922, Ford himself predicted that most people would soon live outside of the cities. “Cities are doomed,” he said, adding, “We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city.”

In the same year, Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out that the automobile, electricity, and telephones together eliminated any advantages to living or working in dense areas. The “skyscraperites,” as Wright dismissively called those who wanted to build up, not out, were following a “blind alley.”

Census data show that the population of Manhattan, the closest American city to the Metropolis vision, peaked in 1910. By 1950, before any interstate had been built, its population had fallen by 16 percent. By 1960, when most interstates were still only on the drawing boards, Manhattan’s population had fallen a total of 28 percent. Today it is around 30 percent less than in 1910, meaning only a small portion of the loss took place after most interstates were built.

The same story can be told of other American core cities. Yes, some of them lost population after the interstates were built, but they were already declining before.

The automobile, not federal highways, enabled people to move out of the cities. If anything, as Harvard planning Professor Alan Altshuler once pointed out, the interstates actually slowed the decline of downtowns by relieving the traffic congestion that many people and businesses were trying to escape.

The automobile would not have led people to move to low-density suburbs if they didn’t want to live in such suburbs in the first place. As previously noted, before 1900 wealthy and middle-class people were already moving to suburban areas thanks to electric streetcars. The automobile democratized mobility and the suburbs, offering working-class people the opportunity to own their own homes. (Sadly, it too often appears that what many anti-sprawl types want is a return to a more stratified society in which only the well-to-do enjoy low-density suburbs and the working class are confined to higher-density areas.)

Nor are suburbs a purely American phenomenon. When Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy compiled their massive databook on Cities and Auto Dependence, they thought they were proving that European cities were less auto-dependent than American and Australian ones. Instead, their 1960-1990 time series data showed that all cities were rapidly decentralizing thanks to increasing auto driving. Since Asian and European cities were denser to start with (and had lower average incomes), they just appeared to be less affected by decentralization than their younger counterparts if you only looked at one year, not the entire time series. What Newman and Kenworthy call “auto dependence” is really “auto liberation.”

I am not saying our urban areas would look exactly the way they do today without the federal interstate highway program. A system of toll roads driven by profits, or at least the need for each road to cover its costs, would have avoided many of the costlier parts of the Interstate Highway System. It is impossible to predict just exactly what differences this would make.

But with or without interstates, most Americans would still be living in single-family homes on moderately large lots in neighborhoods that separate residential uses from businesses. Those who advocate a return to nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century patterns of development mast face the fact that they are going against the desires of most Americans. The regulatory regimes required for a return to more compact development are not only undemocratic, they will have huge unintended and undesirable consequences.

This post, composed by Randal O'Toole, is jointly posted at the Anti Planner blog.

There is no question that the greatest force that shapes the form of American cities is transportation. And, since the National Defense and Highways Act of 1956, the federal government has dictated that the country’s transportation system would be based almost exclusively on the automobile. While we won’t overlook the improved standard of living and prosperity this has created, we do argue that we have long since crossed the threshold of diminishing returns on this approach. If America is to have true prosperity going forward, we need to reexamine our transportation investments and the land use pattern they induce and choose approaches that pay a higher rate of return.

America’s cities of the industrial era are sometimes romanticized by the ill-informed. While “efficient” from a pure land-use standpoint, these were not places of prosperity for the masses. Living conditions were horrid by today’s standards, with poor sanitation and environmental quality leading to rampant disease and high mortality rates. No American today would desire to live in such a place.

There were two groups of people, however, that avoided the urban suffering of the industrial era. The first was the wealthy, who could live on larger properties in and on the outskirts of town and, during the most suffocating times for one’s health, could escape entirely to the countryside. The second were farmers. While a tough life, farmers avoided what Thomas Jefferson called the “pestilence to the health” found in the city.

After World War II, America emerged from the dark days of the Great Depression with unrivaled economic power and opportunity. While the Soviet Union had lost approximately 28 million people – mostly young men – and had, along with Europe, been physically decimated, the United States suffered comparatively few casualties and no damage to the domestic structure. As the economy transitioned to peacetime, there was an opportunity to enter the post-New Deal era by truly expanding prosperity for the long-suffering middle class.

A myriad of programs were put in place to help the returning troops get an education (previously something accessible almost exclusively to the rich), obtain job training, buy a house and generally partake in an expanding “American dream”, a term coined by historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, The Epic of America, but put on hold for a generation. As Adams described it,

“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”  

Part of expanding the American Dream – a life better and richer and fuller for everyone – meant co-opting the new interstate highway system, which was originally envisioned primarily for national defense, to free the middle class from the ill effects of urban life. The increased mobility of highway travel, along with new government housing subsidies, allowed millions to “flee” to the new suburbs. This created wealth, prosperity, opportunity and a much higher standard of living for the American middle class.

(It should be noted at this point that this did not apply to everyone. Racial segregation and discrimination meant that many could not partake in this new prosperity. Programs of Urban Renewal – the planning profession’s response to the inequities of “white flight” - only made the problems of urban poverty worse.)

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Americans built thousands of miles of highways as the cities devolved and the suburbs expanded. This pattern continued through the Jet/Satellite era of the 1970’s and 1980’s, with inner suburbs maturing and the second and third ring suburbs being established. As the Internet era was experienced in the 1990’s and early 21^st Century, many major urban areas were experiencing rapid development beyond their third tier. The U.S. Census even coined a new term – “micropolitan” – to describe what were essentially critical masses of people without the traditional urbanity.

At some point in the half century between the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act and the start of the recent Financial/Housing Crisis, our approach to transportation infrastructure became less about sound investment in America’s future and more about propping up a false reality that manifests itself in our land use pattern. Consider:

• We started off paying for highways primarily with gas taxes. Now the highway trust fund is insolvent and we are financing much of our highway improvements through debt.
• We started off using federal funds only for interstate highways. Now, through a myriad of programs and earmarks, we fund regional and local road systems as well.
• We used to fund transportation improvements based on national priorities. Now we get projects such as the famed “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska, a $320 million bridge to serve 50 people on a remote island in the state of a powerful senator.
• We used to only assist G.I.’s in getting into a new home. Now we have numerous programs and subsidies for an “ownership society” where everyone that desires can own a home.

Most people in America now enjoy a standard of living that, from the perspective of an early 1950’s citizen, would have normally been experienced by only the wealthy. We don’t disparage this outcome. We simply ask two basic questions:

1. At what cost?
2. Can it be financially sustained?

Our auto-oriented transportation system has fully matured. At some point in the last five decades we crossed over from improvements that generated a return in prosperity to ones that rob us of our wealth yet provide little in the way of added benefit.

If today we simply removed the subsidies that prop up the current system, we would find that the decentralizing of our urban form would slow, or reverse, and sheer market efficiencies would create a more dense development pattern. If we can’t stop subsidizing, if we at least focused our resources on projects that had the highest return, it would have much the same impact.

The “American Dream” is about opportunity, not about providing each family with a single-family home on their own lot. Our national transportation system needs to be about national priorities, not about propping up a false vision of American prosperity.

This post, composed by Charles Marohn, is jointly posted at the Anti Planner blog