M
manualman
Guest
I’m in land development, so I routinely attend conferences on land planning, sustainable development initiatives, etc. My experience is typically that the guys whining about urban sprawl are academics with no business experience that advocate command and control strategies to force developers to make nicer urban centers.
So I was quite surprised and interested at the theme of a recent speaker. He asserted that all the environmental hubub about efficiency, energy reduction, carbon footprints, etc was all dead wrong in focus. The focus is so often on recycling water bottles, using CFLs and buying hybrid cars, etc… Meanwhile modern communities are DESIGNED to make us all get into our cars every time we want to do anything. Most folks have assumed that unrestrained capitalism / market forces lead to this ‘urban sprawl’ design type. But it isn’t true!
Anybody in land development knows that the local, county and state government has a VAST regulatory (name removed by moderator)ut on development. Zoning codes typically REQUIRE that retail be built away from residential districts. Industrial employment centers are kept FAR away from where people live, shop and play. New developments are REQUIRED to build a certain number of parking stalls, donate land for roadways, install turn lanes and widen fronting highways. All these actions are a de facto government SUBSIDY that forces ALL people to pay for the enormous costs of making the world highly convenient for CAR travel. Those that would prefer to walk or take the train are required to pay for the huge parking lot at Target and the freeway widening that have the side effect of spacing things so far apart.
His proposed solution was elegently simple: restore the TRUE cost of auto usage to the auto USERS and FREE those who would prefer other means of that cost burden. Let Target decide how many parking stalls to provide. Don’t require them to provide ANY. If parking is short, entrepenuers will pop up and provide it - for a cost. If people had to DIRECTLY pay the actual impact cost of car usage, market forces would encourage us to build communities more like they used to be (walkable and mixed uses).
Most Americans (me included) can’t walk ANYWHERE useful from their homes. How did we get this way? In most cases, law. It’s simply illegal to build a 7-11 at the front of my subdivision, it’s zoned residential. This is a large part of why we’re fat too (again, me included!) Even if you do live a mile or so from a suburban shopping area, it’s likely that you’d face death if you tried to walk to it. The road system is designed ONLY for cars. Pedestrians are an afterthought at best (again, because the regs focus almost exclusively on traffic volume capacity).
Zoning laws, minimum parking counts, highway improvement impact fees, front and side setback standards are all ways in which the government has unintentionally forbidden us to walk anywhere and ensured that we got a development pattern incompatible with functional transit. Take all that away and we’d have what we had in EVERY community built before those laws took effect: mixed use, walkable and aesthetically pleasant communities. And a side effect would be more energy savings than CFL’s, green buildings or hybrid cars could ever dream of. Maybe we’d be in better shape too.
Think about it some. Capitalism works better than we give it credit for. We just don’t always realize the ways in which we’ve already skewed the cost/benefit effect with government spending and laws.
Search for “Congress for a New Urbanism” for more on the idea.
So I was quite surprised and interested at the theme of a recent speaker. He asserted that all the environmental hubub about efficiency, energy reduction, carbon footprints, etc was all dead wrong in focus. The focus is so often on recycling water bottles, using CFLs and buying hybrid cars, etc… Meanwhile modern communities are DESIGNED to make us all get into our cars every time we want to do anything. Most folks have assumed that unrestrained capitalism / market forces lead to this ‘urban sprawl’ design type. But it isn’t true!
Anybody in land development knows that the local, county and state government has a VAST regulatory (name removed by moderator)ut on development. Zoning codes typically REQUIRE that retail be built away from residential districts. Industrial employment centers are kept FAR away from where people live, shop and play. New developments are REQUIRED to build a certain number of parking stalls, donate land for roadways, install turn lanes and widen fronting highways. All these actions are a de facto government SUBSIDY that forces ALL people to pay for the enormous costs of making the world highly convenient for CAR travel. Those that would prefer to walk or take the train are required to pay for the huge parking lot at Target and the freeway widening that have the side effect of spacing things so far apart.
His proposed solution was elegently simple: restore the TRUE cost of auto usage to the auto USERS and FREE those who would prefer other means of that cost burden. Let Target decide how many parking stalls to provide. Don’t require them to provide ANY. If parking is short, entrepenuers will pop up and provide it - for a cost. If people had to DIRECTLY pay the actual impact cost of car usage, market forces would encourage us to build communities more like they used to be (walkable and mixed uses).
Most Americans (me included) can’t walk ANYWHERE useful from their homes. How did we get this way? In most cases, law. It’s simply illegal to build a 7-11 at the front of my subdivision, it’s zoned residential. This is a large part of why we’re fat too (again, me included!) Even if you do live a mile or so from a suburban shopping area, it’s likely that you’d face death if you tried to walk to it. The road system is designed ONLY for cars. Pedestrians are an afterthought at best (again, because the regs focus almost exclusively on traffic volume capacity).
Zoning laws, minimum parking counts, highway improvement impact fees, front and side setback standards are all ways in which the government has unintentionally forbidden us to walk anywhere and ensured that we got a development pattern incompatible with functional transit. Take all that away and we’d have what we had in EVERY community built before those laws took effect: mixed use, walkable and aesthetically pleasant communities. And a side effect would be more energy savings than CFL’s, green buildings or hybrid cars could ever dream of. Maybe we’d be in better shape too.
Think about it some. Capitalism works better than we give it credit for. We just don’t always realize the ways in which we’ve already skewed the cost/benefit effect with government spending and laws.
Search for “Congress for a New Urbanism” for more on the idea.