King Marketing

No-one in America, even the nominally environmentally-aware readership of National Geographic, seems capable of even contemplating life without cars, much less moving into denser cities or towns.

It’s all well and good to say that hybrid cars are a solution, but relatively simple changes in urban planning such as zoning ordinances, and federal and state tax incentives, would do a lot to spur positive, anti-sprawl development that would remove the need for daily 100km commutes altogether.

Currently, new housing starts are seen as a leading economic indicator, but when you look at the larger picture, it represents “growth” in the same sense as “cancer.” Here’s why.

For every new low-density development of McMansions evenly spaced on 1-acre lots, water, utilities and other services must be extended, not to mention roads and highways. That means that, like a spider plant that over-reaches in search of sunlight, these “shoots” will also be the first to die off in a drought, be it of oil or water. To continue the metaphor, traditional dense cities are more like the hardy, compact cactus.

This becomes especially important in the hyperdeveloped Southwestern US, where political battles over water diversion between Nevada, Arizona and California seem to presage actual armed conflict, as they have in the developing world.

In the rush to the suburbs and now to the exurbs, we’ve also paved over our best farmland. This is a long-term strategic mistake, because without cheap oil as both energy and fertilizer, we’re not going to be importing Chilean salad greens; we won’t be able to reliably grow grain to feed cattle, so we won’t be eating much meat anymore either. Industrial farming, more akin to strip mining, is practically dead as a doornail anyway due to the depletion of aquifers for irrigation, and the subsequent salinization of previously arable land. (Don’t get me started about pesticide runoff…)

And yet we encourage this suicidal cycle through boneheaded zoning policy, agribusiness policy and tax codes. It is currently more expensive to build high-density infill in most cities than it is to plop out lines and lines of prefab houses in the exurbs. So, perversely, family farms vanish and instant cul-de-sac developments appear. Family values indeed.

This confluence of myopic thinking further exacerbates the erosion of the tax base from cities; increased costs are then incurred to needlessly replicate civic infrastructure like schools, emergency response, water purification and sewage treatment, hospitals and the like, which already existed in city and town centers.

Unless we want our cities to all become like Detroit, then in order to grab back that revenue, the solution is either politically-dangerous forced municipal mergers — or to change the system with incentives to promote denser urban development and disincentivize sprawl.

Some posters on the board, continuing the head-in-the sand theme, complained that they weren’t getting enough new highways for their tax dollar, saying increased European-level gas taxes would force them to use mass transit with “the great unwashed.” (Seriously — Is there a lack of soap in the US? From watching TV it certainly seems like a lot of people don’t use conditioner…but I digress.)

These folks, who will endlessly debate the economic reasoning behind their God-given entitlement to tax cuts, never seem to register that their hard-earned tax dollars largely go to fund highways that promote diminishing returns — hardly fiscal sanity.

From a technical standpoint, adding highway capacity only ensures larger traffic jams, with virtually no time savings. It increases load on ancillary communities and services. Increased air pollution has an effect on health, one that we are now beginning to see with a spike in childhood asthma cases and allergies; this has a cost on the public purse as well. Time wasted in traffic jams means billions of dollars in lost productivity per year.

Yet no-one demands that we impose real-cost accounting on the Viagra-like practice of constant road enlargement.

A recent Maisonneuve article by Ottawa city councillor Clive Doucet points out that adding just two lanes to seven kilometers of highway in that city cost $67 million; if the land had had to be purchased on the market, it would have cost an additional $25 million per kilometer. A single traffic intersection signaling system costs $150,000 to purchase and install, and nearly $45,000 a year to maintain.

By comparison, the entire budget for other Ottawa civic infrastructure — parks, community centres, pools, skating rinks, and day care, serving 800,000 people — is merely $19.3 million.

As Doucet notes, “No one blinks at these prices, but God help the mayor who tries to build a new library.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Cities do not have to look like Houston (skyscrapers surrounded by 1-story big-box malls and highways). We do not need the 401, or more Decarie Expressways.

Cities can look like Amsterdam, Venice, Manhattan, or even Montreal, whose populations can get along perfectly well without any cars at all. (Heresy!)

The money saved could be spent on more important things — beefing up social security, public healthcare, education, and mass transit — and we’d all be breathing cleaner air, too.