HEALTHIER, WEALTHIER, AND WISER
A joke:
Two male traffic engineers were testing out a new bike path when one said to the other, “What happened to that old beat-up bike you used to ride?” The second engineer answered, “Well, I was sitting in the park yesterday, minding my own business, when this great-looking woman rode up, threw her bike down, stripped off all her clothes, and said to me, ‘Take what you want.’ So I took the bike.” The first engineer nodded. “Of course you did. The clothes wouldn’t have fit you anyway.”
I know how that second guy felt. I like my own bike, too. Engineers, as a class, tend to like machinery in general, though most of them, in my experience, like four-wheeled machines powered by internal combustion engines a lot more than two-wheeled machines that run on muscle.a For a long time, I was no different. I loved cars. Most of the appeal came from the usual incentives: more freedom, higher status, better dating prospects. But I didn’t just like owning that 1960 Chevy Impala with the big flat fins I bought with my grocery-store wages when I was a freshman at Brooklyn College, or even the 1964 Grand Prix I paid for with cab fares. I loved driving. I was good at it. And the more I drove, the better I got. By the time I was in my twenties, I knew a thousand different shortcuts and workarounds for every street in New York’s five boroughs. I knew how to avoid double-parked trucks, how to time traffic lights, and how to find a parking space anywhere, anytime, and in the tiniest of spaces. In 1993, the travel publisher Fodor’s even asked me to write a book they called Shadow Traffic’s New York Shortcuts and Traffic Tips. I opened with “I hate traffic . . . I detest delays . . . from the day I got my driver’s license I avoided driving with the hordes.” Today I do my best to avoid driving altogether but I still must at times. When, in the mid-2000s, a car salesman tried to persuade me of the virtues of an onboard navigation system, I was a hard sell, indeed. When I finally got my first GPS-enabled car, the most fun I had using the thing was correcting the directions it offered, because I always knew a better way. (Those who drive with me regularly seem to think this is annoying; I can’t see why.)
Even so, a part of me had been a closet cyclist ever since my Grand Prix was stolen in 1969 and I bought a secondhand bike to ride to Penn. That bike was stolen two years later in Prospect Park when I moved back to Brooklyn.
That secondhand bike was my first bike as an adult. I didn’t know how to ride a bike until I was thirteen years old. I learned out of necessity on an old truck bike my father used for delivering groceries. In those days a storekeeper was not allowed to own a delivery bike in Bensonhurst; he had to rent it from some characters with, as they say, “links to organized crime,” for $8 a month, or $96 a year (about $780 today).b
With a tiny wheel in front and a heavy load of groceries in the basket, a truck bike wasn’t easy to ride; every delivery boy flipped over headfirst on at least one of his first tries. But once I mastered the bike, I became a wild man. Traffic rules meant nothing. Stopping, other than at your destination, was a sign of weakness and meekness. I still remember one time under the “el” on 86th Street riding the wrong way in a tight spot between an oncoming car and a parked car. I squeezed through without stopping but I ended up with ten feet of chrome strip torn off the parked car in my basket. This being Bensonhurst, where damaging someone’s car was akin to horse rustling in 1875 Texas, I got rid of the strip as fast as I could and kept on riding.
As a junior traffic engineer in the Traffic Department in the early 1970s I was probably the only man (there were no women then) who occasionally rode a bike. Bikes were for kids; real men drove Mustangs and aspired to drive a Caddy one day. I biked for recreation mostly through the 70s and then jogged through the 80s. I even completed the NYC Marathon in 1981. Even so, by the 1990s, I was living in Flatbush with my wife, a teenage son, a younger son and daughter, and three cars: one for each driver’s license.
In 2000, though, we moved to Manhattan, and something changed. I discovered—or, rather, rediscovered—the pleasures of biking and walking, wherever possible.
We had moved from leafy Flatbush to Battery Park City, an exceptionally well-planned community at the southern tip of Manhattan. I had miles and miles of bike and walking paths outside the door to my new apartment building. I could stroll or bike along the Hudson River. At times I’d walk the two miles home from work enjoying a different path each time. And I loved it. I felt I was living in this secret park with waterfront views right in Manhattan’s Downtown; I was happy.
Until September 11, 2001.
Battery Park City is nestled between the World Trade Center and the Hudson River. It sits entirely on landfill made mostly from the excavation of the original twin towers. I walked by the World Trade Center that morning at about 8:30, fifteen minutes before the first plane struck. My wife was home in our apartment across the street from the site but luckily with only a river view—away from the direction of the World Trade Center. When she and my oldest son, David, who lived a few blocks away, made it around the wreckage to get to my office, they were covered with ashen debris. It was the last I saw of either office or home for weeks. Since Manhattan south of 14th Street was closed off, I worked on transportation engineering for the Battery Park City Authority while living with relatives in Connecticut and Brooklyn.
We returned home in late September but it was never the same. The fires burned till December. Every day moving vans took our neighbors away. After six months, my wife had had enough. Where to move to next?
This time I decided to follow my father’s footsteps. In 1951, he had moved us from Brownsville to Bensonhurst to be within walking distance of his grocery store. In 2002, I did the same, moving to an apartment in Greenwich Village, eight blocks from my office on Houston Street. There were seven different ways to walk from my home to the office, one for each day of the week. Every day I’d pick a different side street and always find something new. Depending on the wait for the elevator, the entire trip took between ten and eleven minutes, and I wasn’t anxious or rushed for a single one of them. As a boy, I had been a bit discomfited by the fact that my father walked to work, while most of the other fathers drove. Now I knew my father was the wisest of them all. He picked his home to minimize travel.
Despite all this, I didn’t entirely trust that I’d discovered anything useful about the future of transportation. I knew I felt good about walking and biking. But I also knew that I was supposed to feel good. Much of what I read now professionally is pro-cycling and pro-walking, sometimes embarrassingly so. Some of the most frequently published writers on the subject of smart transportation are practically messianic, and heresy, such as suggesting that privately owned automobiles might have any place at all in some ideal future transportation infrastructure, is severely punished. Support for cyclists and pedestrians was in tune with my political sympathies, my social contacts, and even my bank account, since my company is frequently hired by clients interested in transforming the world into a less automobile-centric place. In 2012 we even self-published a book with the advocacy organization America Walks, Steps to a Walkable Community. If your work is advising municipalities how to build walkable communities, you probably should like walking.
There were other questions: Were alternatives to driving getting better, or was driving itself just becoming more miserable? Had the alternatives been better all along? Does adding a few miles of cycling and walking to your daily routine improve your mood, or does driving degrade it? Both?
The fact that crankiness is a frequent result of commuting by car more than about twenty-five minutes each way isn’t really in dispute. As the last chapter pointed out, people regard long commutes of any sort as the equivalent of cleaning out a clogged drain. Five days a week. With your bare hands. And they’re right. Longer commutes are associated with higher blood pressure and more frequent headaches. But they’re far worse for commuters who choose to drive than for those who take an alternative, generally mass transit by rail. The constant road vibrations experienced by drivers, and the inability to stretch or move while experiencing them, puts pressure on the discs of the lower back, with the predictable result: more lower back pain. The physical toll isn’t even the worst of it. The psychological stresses of long-distance commuting by car can be even higher. Part of the reason is that it’s much more difficult to adapt to driving for forty-five minutes each morning than, for example, taking a train. Even the most unpleasant train commute departs at about the same time daily, occupies the same amount of time, and requires so little attention that it’s even possible to sleep while shuttling back and forth. Car trips, on the other hand, are far more variable, more subject to delays due to road construction, traffic, and weather. For the same reason that it’s easier to adapt to a noise, even an annoying one, when it occurs at the same rhythm and frequency, than to one that is constantly changing pitch and volume, it’s less stressful to commute long distance by train than by car.
Driving does offer some compensating advantages over mass transit, of course, including a greater sense of autonomy and control.c But one of the seeming conveniences of driving—that getting from home to work doesn’t force you to walk any farther than from your kitchen to your garage at one end, and from your employer’s parking lot to your desk at the other—isn’t a benefit. It’s a liability.
The big-time health benefits of walking are not a secret. More than a century ago the English historian George Macauley Trevelyan began a book titled, simply, Walking, with the line: “I have two doctors: My left leg and my right. When my body and mind are out of gear . . . I know that I shall have only to call in my two doctors to be well again.” He knew what he was talking about. Walking thirty minutes a day—as little as a mile at each end of a daily commute, for example—lowers the risk of heart disease by up to 40 percent, reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes by as much as 60 percent, and can cut the risk of stroke by a third. Osteoarthritis? Walk thirty minutes a day, and reduce your risk by 18 percent. In the 1990s, Japan’s Osaka Company began surveying its employees in order to get a handle on the impact of lengthening the distance they walked to work, and their risk of higher blood pressure. Every additional ten minutes spent walking to and from work was associated with a 12 percent reduction in hypertension.
Then there’s the not dying part. The Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, whose database now contains more than a quarter million records from more than a hundred thousand people, representing 1.8 million person-years, found that low fitness was the strongest predictor of death in any given year—more than obesity or even smoking. The Harvard Alumni Health Study, which followed more than seventeen thousand subjects for nearly twenty-four years, found that walking thirty minutes a day cut mortality by nearly a quarter. It doesn’t do your waistline any harm, either.
However, the reasons to choose walking or cycling, or even mass transit, over driving aren’t just the negative ones, nor is it just that walking and cycling improve your cardiovascular health (though they do). My subjective reactions to incorporating walking and cycling into my daily routine were objectively true. They make everyone feel a whole lot better. Any kind of exercise, but especially regular, moderate exercise like walking and cycling, increases levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine: the neurotransmitters whose lack is a prime cause of depression. A study at Duke University compared a brisk thirty-minute walk three times a week to taking the antidepressant Zoloft. Walking worked at least as well. It’s not like this was a single outlier study, either. A group of health economists in England studied eighteen years of data on more than eighteen thousand commuters who had been surveyed about their own mental health: whether they felt worthwhile or worthless, slept well or poorly, how well they coped with life problems. The more time they spent walking—or on public transportation—the higher their scores. As one of the researchers put it,
You might think that things like disruption to services or crowds of commuters might have been a cause of considerable stress. But as buses or trains also give people time to relax, read, socialise, and there is usually an associated walk to the bus stop or railway station, it appears to cheer people up. . . . Our study shows that the longer people spend commuting in cars, the worse their psychological wellbeing. And correspondingly, people feel better when they have a longer walk to work.
For me, though, the biggest advantage of getting around using my feet for something other than operating a car’s accelerator might be that it makes me smarter. Or, at least, less stupid. The reason is a little seahorse-shaped section of my brain—yours, too—called the hippocampus, two of which are located just under the center of the temporal lobe. The two hippocampi are critical in storing and creating memories. They’re the part of the brain first damaged by Alzheimer’s, and the one where amnesia due to oxygen deprivation occurs. Even if we avoid amnesia or dementia, though, memory gets a lot less useful the older we get, largely because the hippocampus naturally shrinks as we age.
It doesn’t have to. Though a lot of otherwise well-educated people still seem to think that a brain cell, once lost, is gone forever, this isn’t true at all. So long as you continue to produce a protein known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, your brain will build new neurons and strengthen the capacity of existing ones. How to increase BDNF production? Exercise, of course. Study after study shows that more exercise improves memory and cognition, in every animal from humans to rodents. Yes, rodents. Wire an exercising mouse up to an MRI and what you’ll see is more neurogenesis—more production of nerve cells—in our old friend, the hippocampus. Which allows me to say, with a straight face, that when it comes to the hippocampus, size matters.
Getting to work by foot or on my bike would make me a lot healthier, a good deal happier (or less depressed), and a little bit smarter (or less forgetful) even if I were the only one in New York doing so. There are even researchers who believe that walking, in particular, was so critical for human evolution that intelligence itself was a side-effect of bipedalism. But there’s another benefit, one that has implications not just for individual commuting decisions but for a whole spectrum of transportation policies, from the way we design intersections to the speed limits we set. Choosing to drive less improves society’s mental health, too.
This isn’t exactly a new idea. In 1950, Disney produced a cartoon entitled Motor Mania that starred Goofy as a Jekyll-and-Hyde character who transforms from placid and gentle Mr. Walker into a psychotic bucket of rage—Mr. Wheeler—once he steps into the driver’s seat of his convertible. Goofy’s “windshield perspective”d is even more powerful today. A 2013 study found that neighborhoods, streets, and even people look very different to drivers than they do to pedestrians, cyclists, or even bus riders. People driving cars, for example, are a lot more likely to be suspicious of unfamiliar streets and hostile to less affluent neighborhoods. When subjects were shown four different ambiguous videos—a girl texting from a park bench, for example—the ones who saw the incident as it would have appeared from the front windshield of a car rated the actors as more threatening, less considerate, even less educated than subjects who saw the video from the viewpoint of a pedestrian, a cyclist, or a bus rider.
This is because what we see is largely determined by how we see. Driving demands tunnel vision—literally. A 2010 simulation produced by the National Association of City Transportation Officials shows that a driver’s “cone of vision” automatically excludes peripheral information, and that the faster a car travels, the more that cone narrows: moving at thirty miles per hour gives drivers less than 25 percent of the amount of visual information that they receive at fifteen miles per hour. The lack of visual context makes for snap judgments; and because drivers have to be more alert to rapidly developing dangers in a way that pedestrians aren’t, those snap judgments tend to be negative ones.
The good news is that, although driving makes us more suspicious, walking makes us more hopeful. I know this sounds a little odd coming from someone who lives and walks in New York, where, as the joke goes, a tourist asks for directions by saying, “Can you tell me how to get to Central Park, or should I just go f&%k myself?” But it’s true. Our sense of psychological well-being is a function of the number of positive contacts we have daily with others—not just friends and family, but strangers and neighbors. And those positive contacts are a lot more frequent outside a car. Cars do their very best—with their micro-controlled climates, audios, and even scents—to seal the driver away from the rest of humanity (and from the impact they themselves have on the environment: noise, fumes, and particulates) inside an aluminum box. It’s actually a very weird development: cars offer a wholly artificial micro world. Maybe it’s to parlay the car as a mobile suburb.
Once again, I’m not going to ask you to take my word for it. A neuro-economist (an academic specialty that you don’t come across every day) named Paul Zak has written an entire book on how the hormone oxytocin—the “trust” hormone, associated with both childbirth and breastfeeding—is produced whenever we have a trust-building interaction. It’s suppressed when we have a stressful interaction. “Oxytocin surges when people are shown a sign of trust.”
It’s not just that oxytocin makes individual people more likely to trust others; it promotes more trust, empathy, and compassion in an entire community. Things that cause a surge in oxytocin make us more empathetic and compassionate. And research shows that, wherever people can walk without fear of being run over by a car—and, even more important, without worrying about their children—they produce more oxytocin. Walt Disney didn’t know anything about the neurochemistry of oxytocin when he built the original Main Street at Disneyland, a thoroughfare that is so pedestrian friendly that parents let their kids walk right down the middle of the street, side by side with trolley cars, but his intuition was correct: reduce threats, increase happiness.
Social cohesion and trust are improved just by living in a place with less traffic. Though the social costs of a physical environment dominated by the automobile have been debated ever since the Model T, the best (and still the most cited) study of the subject dates to the late 1960s, when Donald Appleyard, then professor of urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, performed a rigorous survey of three residential streets in San Francisco. On the surface, the streets seemed close to identical: same topography, similar demographics, and, of course, the same weather (in San Francisco, a pretty changeable thing). They differed in only one significant respect: the number of vehicles that traveled along the street on a typical weekday. On average, fewer than two thousand cars traveled down one street daily; on another, the number was eight thousand. On Appleyard’s “Heavy Street,” sixteen thousand vehicles a day. The residents of each street were then asked to complete detailed questionnaires about their respective networks of friends and acquaintances.
The results weren’t unexpected, but the degree of difference was still startling: residents on the street with the lightest traffic had, on average, three close friends living on the same block; those on the heaviest, less than one. The people living on “Light Street” had more than twice as many acquaintances on their streets as the people living on “Heavy Street.” Asked to draw pictures of their blocks, they included more, and more accurate, details. When Appleyard performed follow-up interviews on his subjects, they explained why: on a heavily trafficked street, “home” meant that part of the world that was inside the doors of their houses or apartments. On the lightly trafficked ones, the concept had a very different meaning—people living there consistently referred to the entire block as “home.”
One reason that Appleyard’s results continue to be cited is that they’ve been replicated in places as far afield as Bristol, England, and as close to the original study as Contra Costa County in California. That’s where Appleyard’s son, Bruce, performed a similar study in 2005, this time with kids. He surveyed and interviewed children living on lightly and heavily trafficked streets to see how the number of cars passing in front of their homes changed the way they saw their neighborhoods.
Again, more traffic equaled less community. Like his father, Bruce Appleyard asked his subjects, groups of children, aged nine to ten—to draw maps of their neighborhoods: where their schools were located, their friends’ houses, places they liked or hated. Children who lived in heavy traffic neighborhoods could barely include any detail about their own blocks, much less their neighborhood. The main road in front of the school attended by both groups of kids is lined with trees; the kids who lived on heavily trafficked blocks, whose parents were—sensibly—fearful about letting their kids even walk across their own streets, drew no trees at all; the ones on lightly trafficked streets did. Kids who lived on less walkable, more heavily trafficked streets drew maps made up of random paths, disconnected from one another, and certainly unconnected to any larger community. Kids who lived on streets that permitted them to travel on foot drew accurate maps of their routes to and from school and playgrounds. And they included a lot more playgrounds; those who lived on walkable streets found 40 percent more places to play than those who didn’t. Depressingly but unsurprisingly, the more traffic that kids were exposed to, the more likely they were to show streets and intersections as dangerous. Appleyard’s conclusion? “As exposure to auto traffic volumes and speed decreases, a child’s sense of threat goes down, and . . . ability to establish a richer connection and appreciation for the community rises.” Or, as one of Appleyard’s ten-year-old subjects who was lucky enough to live on a walkable block put it, “I like my naborhod [sic] because I have lots of friends, and because I can play there when ever I want.”
I have yet to find a study that shows how walking increases romantic opportunities but it certainly worked for me when in 1971, after graduating from Penn, I moved back to Brooklyn to the Prospect-Lefferts Garden area. For the most part the neighborhood is made up of great stone or brick houses on tree-lined streets named Maple and Midwood. I, however, lived on Beekman Place, which, despite the ritzy-sounding name, consisted of six-story buildings and no trees on a rundown, dead-end street abutting busy Flatbush Avenue on one end and the open cut of the Brighton subway line on the other. My walking, needless to say, was on the prettier blocks or in nearby Prospect Park, where I met Daria, the woman I would eventually marry (and, more important, stay married to).
I did have a secret weapon: my dog, Pepita. Once, in my bachelor days, I yelled at Pepita for stalling in the middle of Flatbush Avenue (she was never on a leash) only to hear a throaty voice, attached to a leggy brunette, asking, “Is that the way you treat all your women?” A brief fling followed. It’s a treasured memory—one I wouldn’t have acquired had I crossed Flatbush in a car.
Although the discovery of all the hard data and sophisticated research that reinforced my prejudices in favor of less car dependence was satisfying, it was puzzling too: if living in dense, walkable towns and cities made people healthier and happier, how in hell did we ever get in this mess in the first place? What was it that made moving to the suburbs so damned appealing?
The answers are, like the subject, complicated. Some people did—and still do—dream of a house with a fence in front and a garden (or swimming pool!) out back. Others sought out suburbs as an escape from cities that seemed, and often were, dirty, crowded, and dangerous. A lot of families continue to shop for a suburban school district in search of what I call the Lake Wobegon Effect: a place where all the children are above average and therefore get an above-average education (though their math must be a little below average if they believe this to be true). But the best explanation for why Americans overwhelmingly chose suburban living for more than fifty years, and so many continue to do so today, is money. They voted with their wallets, for suburban houses whose cost per square foot was so much lower than that of the available housing stock in densely populated urban centers.
But that just pushes the question one step further back. Why did suburbs enjoy such a cost advantage? One reason is that it actually was more efficient to build in places that didn’t have much existing construction in place, even when the new houses needed new sewer, telephone, and electric lines. For the same reason, building a new road is often cheaper than widening an old one, where half the cost can be destruction, rather than construction, and a quarter goes to maintaining the existing traffic on the road under construction.
But there’s a big difference between the kind of efficiency that can be quantified by a physicist and the sort studied by economists. The velocity-time graphs used by physics students to study acceleration might look a little like the supply and demand curves that economics students use to study prices. They’re not. Demand curves can be manipulated. If we—and by “we” I mean all of us, acting through our local, state, and federal governments—decide to do so, we can alter the supply of most things, and thereby change their prices. If a rent-control law keeps prices below what people are willing to pay for housing, the housing supply contracts; if a new zoning law favors construction in a previously vacant area, the supply expands.
Which is exactly what happened with the GI Bill’s requirement that government-guaranteed home loans go only to new construction, or the Eisenhower administration’s decision to build forty thousand miles of heavily subsidized highways. The relative advantage of car-dependent suburban living didn’t come from the impersonal forces of the market in action, but from a sequence of decisions made by fallible human beings, decisions that could very easily have gone in an entirely different direction. In some other countries, including many in Europe, they did take a different direction. Europe still has some nineteenth-century streetcars that have run uninterrupted to this day, including the Blackpool Tramway in England and Budapest’s electric tram. Fifty years of sprawl in America then does, in fact, look a lot like a fifty-year mistake—one that didn’t have to happen.
Which made me wonder whether we could, as a thought experiment, rewind that bit of history, and ask whether a society that depended on hundreds of millions of driving trips daily was actually more cost-effective in the long run. What if an environment that made driving less appealing was actually more economically efficient?
There are a lot of reasons to think it would be. It’s not just that traveling to work by car is expensive in monetary terms, though it is. The total average cost of driving, including depreciation, maintenance, and insurance, runs about 61 cents a mile, and since the average automobile used for commuting to work contains only 1.1 people, every commute costs a little more than 55 cents per passenger mile. This means that, if you’re an automobile commuter traveling twenty-five miles each way to work, you’re spending around $30 a day for the privilege, not including the cost, if there is one, to park. You’re also spending an hour every day for which, unless you’re a cabbie or bus driver yourself, you’re not getting paid, and during which you’re not doing anything productive at all. For the average American, that’s another $24. In transportation, time really is money.
During the fifty years we’ve been running this very expensive experiment in voting-with-your-wallet transportation policy, has it been worth it? Are we more prosperous, on average, than we would have been without spending hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing automobile commuting? The subsidies definitely changed behavior; the United States still leads the world by a lot in vehicle miles traveled, even after the current decline. More than 85 percent of us depend on cars for almost all our transportation needs. But it’s getting harder and harder to argue that this has produced an optimal amount of prosperity. One reason is that, paradoxically, all that driving seems to be correlated with lower economic productivity. Put another way, the more “inefficient” roads are, the more economically efficient are the areas they serve.
Here’s the root of the paradox: within the developed world, the measure that seems to indicate the most mobility—VMT—is negatively correlated with productivity measures like gross domestic product. Moreover, region-by-region, the more mobility is constrained by tolls or congestion, the higher the GDP. Even though congestion costs Americans $121 billion in wasted fuel and unproductive time annually, a study from Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute found a powerful correlation between per capita traffic delay and per capita GDP; and the correlation wasn’t negative, but the opposite. For every 10 percent increase in traffic delay, the study found a 3.4 percent increase in per capita GDP. It’s not that congestion itself increases economic productivity, but that places with a lot of congestion are economically vibrant; those without, not so much.
In fact, in a paper published just as I was completing this book, a group of anthropologists and systems scientists found that density has been powerfully associated with prosperity as much in the ancient cities of pre-Columbian Mexico as in twenty-first-century Manhattan (though the prosperity of the four thousand archaeological sites they found was measured in monument building and house size rather than GDP). The reasons seem to be the same, though: density promotes more, and more frequent, social interactions—and social interactions are essential for all forms of human productivity, from harvesting crops to selling razor blades to performing music to building factories. This isn’t a function of simple size. It isn’t just that larger cities just make more stuff than smaller ones; in both ancient and modern communities, the more interactions there are between people, the more output there is, even when population is held constant. As an economist would put it, density results in increasing returns to scale—and congestion seems a small price to pay for that.
The opposite is also true: policies intended to reduce congestion, usually by building more and wider roads, lead to lower productivity, and therefore less money in the average family’s bank account. There are two big reasons why. The first is that, despite all the faith that we put in markets to allocate resources in the most efficient way, when it comes to roads, we are apostates. We assume that all those drivers—like all those suburban home buyers—are making free-market decisions to drive on all those new roads. But then we do an absolutely terrible job of creating a free market for driving. We don’t put a price on all that use. We make some roads free, and some subject to tolls. Some are paid for by gas taxes, some not. It’s as if we had opened a fruit market where apples were a buck apiece, and pears were free; even if shoppers preferred apples, you’d still be unable to keep pears in stock. The existing road system, all too often, works the same way, with drivers making decisions about the routes they take based on completely artificial—usually political—decisions about whether and how much they’re going to be charged for using a finite amount of concrete and asphalt. This is the opposite of efficient.
Professionals have a technique for figuring out the optimal solution to congestion problems, one that minimizes both time and cost. It’s called a Wardrop Equilibrium for the English transportation analyst John Glen Wardrop, who formulated it in 1952. He assumed that travelers would, over time, choose the shortest route under prevailing traffic conditions, the route that can’t be improved by picking another one. After a bunch of travelers successively adjust their routes, a situation with stable routes and flows appears: an equilibrium. Wardrop formalized this with two principles: first, that a point exists where “no driver can reduce his journey time by a new route” and second, as a consequence, “average journey time is at a minimum.”
In order for this to happen, though, drivers need to pay a higher price for traveling on a desirable route, or at a popular time. Otherwise, you can’t get to equilibrium, because average journey time can’t ever reach the most efficient state. So long as they have no price signals that tell them how, and how much, they would benefit by commuting at different times, drivers will inevitably commute inefficiently. The airlines have figured this out; that’s why they charge wildly different prices for seats depending on when they are reserved. This is what congestion pricing is all about.
I first heard the term congestion pricing at one of the monthly Midtown Circulation meetings I held in the late 1970s, when I was an assistant commissioner at the New York City Department of Transportation. To be fair, they weren’t my favorite way to spend time. In fact, they were about as productive as herding cats through a fish cannery, mostly because the attendees were intrinsically at cross-purposes—they included community members and representatives of business groups, pro-driver associations like AAA, and pro-bike organizations like Transportation Alternatives. We would discuss how a new computerized signal system would make speeds go up or how changing parking regulations and targeted enforcement could reduce congestion. But, in my heart of hearts I knew the answer was far simpler: fewer vehicles. I just couldn’t figure out how to get there.
And then, one day, I learned. The guy who taught me was a prototypical absent-minded professor wearing a worn tweed sports coat with elbow patches and trousers from another era. His name was William S. Vickrey and he was a professor of economics at Columbia University. He quietly pointed out the futility of trying to improve travel for cars in such a dense area. He talked about how hotels and airlines raised prices at Christmastime when demand soared. He talked about how a car, especially a driver-only car, was the least efficient way of using space, which was the most precious resource in Manhattan. And that we should treat it the same as any other precious resource: put a high price on it. He called it congestion pricing.e
In 1980 I had a chance to do something about it. I wrote a traffic regulation that would prohibit driver-only cars, Vickrey’s least-efficient vehicles, from entering Manhattan for free from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Effective September 1980, they would have to use a tolled bridge or tunnel to enter.
It didn’t exactly work out as I hoped. We were sued by some of the same people that used to make those Midtown Circulation meetings such a breeze, including AAA and the Metropolitan Parking Association (a trade association—this is actually a euphemism for “lobbyist”—representing New York’s garage operators). Injunctions. Delays. And then, the verdict: I—or, rather, the City of New York—did not have the authority to discriminate between driver-only and carpool cars. That power rested with the state, whose governor, Hugh Carey, no great friend of Ed Koch’s (not that there are many real friends in politics), had no interest in provoking AAA.
I am nothing if not stubborn. In 1987, I introduced a similar plan as part of a series of traffic relief strategies. More than a thousand businesspeople marched on City Hall to protest the “draconian plans” of Schwartz and Ross Sandler, the city’s new transportation commissioner, who had replaced Anthony Ameruso, then fighting a perjury indictment connected to the scandal at the Parking Violations Bureau. Full-page ads were taken out in all the dailies saying, “Commissioner Schwartz: Stop Fouling Up Midtown Traffic.” (I was told later by Mel Kauffman, the real-estate tycoon who placed the ads, that the original version was “Stop F%&king up Midtown Traffic.” He later became a client.). Once again, I learned that mayors and governors find it difficult to get people to pay for something valuable that they think they’ve been getting for free, and the plan went nowhere.
If insanity is, as they tell us, repeating the same behavior and expecting a different result, I probably should plead guilty. In 2001, I was called to a meeting to discuss a platform paper on transportation that I had written for the team representing a dark-horse candidate for mayor of New York City. (Full disclosure: I had written dozens of similar papers for candidates and elected officials, but this was the first time I had been paid for it!) A major element was congestion pricing.
I entered the candidate’s office on Lexington Avenue and was led to a desk in the middle of a very busy floor where I first met Michael Bloomberg. I liked him instantly. He was no-nonsense and a numbers person—my kinda guy. He had read it and peppered me about congestion pricing. He didn’t like it, or so it seemed. It was unfair, unworkable, and likely would hurt business. I countered and parried and thought I gained some ground but it was hard to tell. His first term came and went with nary a mention of congestion pricing.
In 2003, however, things changed. Mayor Ken Livingstone turned London into the first Western city to implement congestion charging, as they called it.f I was jealous, of course. Congestion pricing was invented in New York decades before by a professor at Columbia but London beat us to it.
Competition is a powerful thing, especially to a man like Mike Bloomberg. After London beat New York in the competition for hosting the 2012 Olympics, the mayor got, shall we say, motivated. In 2007 he took up the cause. He got about as far as anyone, which is to say, not very far. While the New York City Council held a largely ceremonial vote in favor, the state legislature, which needed to pass legislation enabling the city to set tolls, never even held a vote.
Congestion pricing, however, is about as hard to kill as Rasputin. As of this writing, I am advocating for another congestion pricing plan, this one known as Move NY, and it may even be on the way to being implemented as you read this. Or not—I’m used to disappointment on this subject. The reason is that when you give something valuable away for free, demand is essentially infinite. As a result, urban traffic congestion just keeps getting worse. I may be a little unhinged on the subject of congestion pricing, but the really insane idea, the one we keep trying over and over again with exactly the same crappy results, is fixing congestion by building more roads.
There’s another reason for the congestion paradox. Why is increasing congestion, generally thought of as a bad thing, associated with greater economic prosperity, a good thing? It’s because most of the measures of transportation efficiency tend to focus on mobility. But mobility isn’t what’s really important, for either happiness or prosperity. What matters is access. And it’s just as easy, and a lot more efficient, to improve access—to stores, or entertainment, or employment—by decreasing the distance between, for example, home and supermarket than it is by increasing the speed by which to get from one to the other.
That’s how the paradox is resolved, about why people without cars in more densely populated neighborhoods get where they need to be more efficiently than drivers in sparsely populated suburbs. The Walker family (remember Goofy) lives in a neighborhood where they can walk half a mile at a not very brisk pace from their front door to a drugstore. Takes them ten minutes. The Wheelers, on the other hand, live in a place where the nearest drugstore is five miles away, and even when the roads are clear of traffic and they make all the lights, it takes them fifteen minutes to drive there and park. The Wheelers have superior mobility. The Walkers have superior access, though, because, when it comes to access, proximity is ten times more important than speed. And access, not mobility, is what drives prosperity. We’re not just happier, healthier, and smarter in denser communities. We’re richer, too.
This is true even in places that are thought of—correctly—as expensive. Some of the American cities with the highest housing costs, places like New York, Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Seattle, are also among the top ten metropolitan areas in total affordability, precisely because they are the least expensive to get around in. San Antonio, for example, looks like a bargain when housing is the only measure, cheaper even than Detroit or Indianapolis. But transportation costs in San Antonio are nearly $3,500 more a year than they are in San Francisco (and nearly $5,000 more than in New York). Not a bargain at all.
The conclusion seems inescapable, at least to me. Though most Americans, and a very significant number of people around the world, will continue to depend on the automobile for commuting and shopping well into the foreseeable future, for a larger and larger number of people, the benefits of living in dense communities outweigh those of lightly populated suburbs. And now they’re the ones voting with their wallets, moving to places that offer proximity and access instead of mobility. In fact, that’s one reason the rents are higher in places with enough density to provide good mass transit: they’re the most desirable places to live for an awful lot of affluent and well-educated people of all ages, but especially Millennials. The ones who are old enough to have completed college and are therefore most able to afford living in the most densely populated neighborhoods in the country are choosing to do so in record numbers. The percentage of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds with a college degree living in close-in neighborhoods—those within three miles of a city’s central business district—was 43 percent in 2000. By 2010, it was 55 percent. Meanwhile, college degrees were found in only about 35 percent of households outside the urban cores. It’s not just that driving has become more unpleasant than it used to be—though it has—but that other alternatives are becoming more pleasant. Seen in this light, it looks a lot like the universal love affair with the automobile and everything that went with it was the historical anomaly: an accident of history.
When you add transportation costs to your budget, New York doesn’t seem quite so expensive. David Smucker (Sam Schwartz Engineering) and CityLab.
After the Second World War, the United States occupied a historically unprecedented place in the world. While the entire planet had suffered through a decade and a half of depression and war, in 1945, America was the only place that was richer than when the whole mess started: more prosperous in absolute terms, and enormously wealthier than any other nation in Europe, Asia, or Africa. It also occupied a very sparsely populated continent, compared to anywhere in Europe and Asia. The temporary wealth advantage and the permanent geographical one combined to build the highways and the suburbs that defined America from the 1950s through the 1970s.
They continue to define the country today. The car isn’t going away. One reason is that, as above, roads are—mostly—forever. All those suburban housing developments and sprawling municipalities were made possible by the automobile, and no one is going to walk away—pun intended—from a trillion-dollar investment. There’s another reason, too, which is that people like cars. Or, more accurately, they like the idea of cars, the version of automobile travel that is a staple of thousands of hours of television commercials every year: families in their four-wheel-drive SUVs visiting and—a pet peeve of mine—driving on spots of unspoiled natural beauty. Testosterone-heavy drivers racing down uncongested and beautiful country roads, or performing controlled skids through urban traffic: “Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt.” Even though the reality rarely lives up to the dream, dreams matter. Though ideal car travel is, by definition, available only when everybody doesn’t pursue it, that isn’t going to change everybody’s behavior.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to. As we saw in Chapter 3, even the Millennials haven’t stopped driving. They’ve just slowed down. No reasonable prediction suggests anything but a change at the margins: instead of 85 to 90 percent of all travel by automobile, perhaps “only” 75 percent or so.
But that 10 percent difference is hugely significant. It will determine how much of our national income should be invested in highways, and how much in subways; how much in sprawl, and how much in density. Entirely because of this marginal change, the future looks a lot more like the pre-automobile past. Only better. Easier to navigate, more accessible, and definitely safer, for pedestrians, transit users, and drivers. You know: smarter.
The consequences are gigantic, especially for the cities and towns that want to be part of that future. In the chapters that follow, we’ll visit dozens of them that are remaking themselves as attractive choices for the growing number of people who have joined the street smart revolution.
a Even so, a couple of engineering nerds—if this isn’t a redundancy—have calculated that cycling is the most efficient form of transportation ever invented, with more than 98 percent of the energy produced by the rider actually transmitted to the wheels.
b I could go on and on about the mob in my neighborhood, but that’s another book.
c Or maybe not so much. See Chapter 7.
d The phrase was originally coined in the 1990s to describe the belief, widely held among transportation officials from engineers to traffic cops, that everyone (even in New York) gets from place to place by car. It’s now mostly used to express literally what it says: the way the world looks from behind a car’s windshield.
e I kept in touch with Professor Vickrey on and off during the years and was elated one day in October 1996 when I heard on the radio that he had won the Nobel Prize for Economics. I planned to call him to congratulate him and suggest we celebrate. Sadly I never connected with him again, though. He died three days after the announcement. The Nobel Prize can only be awarded to a living recipient. I’m at least glad he lived long enough, eighty-two years, to learn he had won.
f Singapore had actually done so in 1975.
