I love lobster. A grilled lobster tail with a little bit of butter is the most divine food I can imagine. If I had the option, I would eat lobster every day. So why can’t I, an American living in a country of unequaled prosperity, eat lobster every day?

Well I can, if I am willing to pay for it.

You see, nobody subsidizes my lobster for me. And since I have to pay the full cost, I probably average a meal of lobster tail once a year. For the most part, if I want meat, I eat chicken, pork or beef in the form of hamburger. And I’m good with that. I could eat lobster every day if I really wanted to, but I’d have to cut way back on other things I am not willing to live without. So I make choices.

Yesterday, Mr. O’Toole made the following comment in his posting:

“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.”

While some people prefer the modern version of an urban lifestyle, many people desire a low-density suburb with their own single-family house. We agree.

The real question is not whether this desire is real, but whether it is the product of reality. Are we really paying for our lobster, or have we masked its true cost so that it is not discernable from that of a cheeseburger?

O’Toole indicates that:

“…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).”

This may have been true for the initial construction of much of the system (the 90% paid by the federal government), but as the system has aged, we have found user fees to be insufficient. In 2007, only 72% of the cost of construction and maintenance was covered by user fees. The rest were paid by general fund receipts, debt and other taxes and assessments.

Today we are barely treading water on a system in rapid decline. In my home state of Minnesota, Mn/DOT released a 20-year plan detailing $65 billion in needs and just $15 billion in funding. An immediate $1 per gallon increase in the state gas tax is needed to cover this gap – an amount unthinkable, not to mention politically impossible. How can this be if we are actually ready to pay the full cost?

If the automobile were magically replaced with teleport technology that was ubiquitous and cost nothing, there were be an overwhelming demand for large tracts of land that had mountain views, a fresh stream, a clear lake and some beautiful trees. But this isn’t solely a matter of how we would like to live. It is a question of each of us balancing priorities and making choices fully vested in the both the cost and benefit sides of the equation.

Federal spending on highways has shielded us from the cost side of the equation. If we were actually – each and every day - paying the long-term cost of building and maintaining our highway systems, people would inevitably choose a lifestyle that was more efficient, less expensive and higher density that our current pattern of development.

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

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.