Capital Letters: Linear Thinking

In which our man in Washington contemplates the virtues of urban planning, literacy, and marriage

Michael W. Lynch from the May 1999 issue

By Michael W. Lynch
Date: Sat, February 20, 1999 4:49:49 PM
From: [e-mail]
Subj: TOD Declared DOA in D.C.

A few days back, I received an e-mail: "After reading Virginia Postrel's recent editorial on smart growth," a transit expert named John Niles cryptically advised, "I'm pretty sure you'll find this briefing...interesting."

"This" was a seminar on sprawl, sponsored by the Denver-based Center for the New West. So there I was at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) building, clutching a cup of Starbucks and staring down at a sign-up sheet listing names from the Federal Transit Administration, the American Planning Association, the Sierra Club, and a pile of unfamiliar acronyms, such as CUED and FHWA. No sign of Al Gore, America's new urban-planner-in-chief. I was thankful for that.

Sprawl, as you know, has become one of the hottest new national issues. In an era without a cold war, where everyone who wants a job has one and the government even takes care of the erectile problems of poor men by passing out Viagra, I guess it makes sense that hard-to-find parking places in suburban malls would catch the attention of the would-be next president.

Deconstruct the issue: People who complain about sprawl, insofar as they live in it, are people who have fled crowded cities, where they hated their small houses, had to fight for parking, disliked their neighbors, and couldn't stand the schools. Now they are upset that others, who hated their small houses, had to fight for parking, disliked their neighbors, and couldn't stand their schools, did the same. Why move to the suburbs if the problems of the city follow? It makes a sort of sense.

It's the "proposed solutions" that leave me scratching my head. We have plenty of open space. Anyone who ever climbs off a bicycle and boards an airplane knows this. So let's break out the dozers, scrapers, and backhoes, and build some housing pads and roads, and make this suburban thing work. Unthinkable.

Instead, the pony-tailed planning crowd wants to turn the suburbs into the city by building small houses, one on top of the other, with little parking and narrow roads. And since bus stations have long been the focal point of communities everywhere, they imagine people will gladly give up their suburban ranch houses for 19th-century row houses so long as they have a transit station in the neighborhood. This is called the New Urbanism or, in bureaucratic speak, Transit Oriented Development (TOD).

Hence yesterday's presentation, "Measuring the Success of Transit Oriented Development: Retail Markets and Other Key Determinants." As I waited for it to start, it struck me that I was covering not Washington politics but a city council meeting in some granola-infested town, like Davis, California, where I spent my childhood. The room was filled with 40 or so bureaucrats looking for any relief from their drab cubicles and busybodies who live to enlighten others through regulations. A mustached man in a dark suit, his graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, pranced about the room, sporting a large white button proclaiming "Mass Transit." (This fellow owns a bike that folds into a G.I.-style duffel bag and, I would later learn, has a broad vision for humanity: "We can be more than commuters.")

The presenters, Dick Nelson and e-mailer John Niles, were consultants from Seattle. "We are not professional planners," said Niles, "but policy wonks. ...We are here for feedback." While they never actually came out and said it, Nelson and Niles had one message for this crowd of professional planners: Americans are a wealthy people, shops are located in many places, and we like to drive to them. So TOD, like most of your other bright ideas, will fail.

Niles' main evidence for this claim, which formed the bulk of the presentation, concerned the locations of popular retail stores. Only 20 percent of car trips are for work. So to cut out trips, one must locate everything on a transit line, which must also be located close to residential housing. Niles calls such things as good restaurants, price clubs, and Home Depot "trip generators." And "trip generators" ruin planners' schemes.

Niles and Nelson knew the crowd was hostile, so they stuck to graphs, charts, and maps and let audience members form their own conclusions. (The presentation can be downloaded at www.globaltelematics. com.) Some listeners just didn't get the point.

One woman interrupted toward the end to ask what category they put gourmet-food chain Trader Joe's in--big stores or specialty stores? Mini-superstores, they said, precisely the type of shop that is a "trip generator." People drive to Trader Joe's, as I did in San Francisco even though I could have walked to a half-dozen other stores to buy similar products. This behavior never occurred to the questioner. She felt that Trader Joe's might cut down on traffic because they are a "progressive" company, meaning that people like her might convince them to locate near bus stations.

The TOD people want to "shift paradigms," so Americans give up the convenience of their cars for the stench of the bus or the crowd of the commuter train. A fellow with a pinky ring and a patch over his left eye said we have to "up our ambitions by a factor of 10." A particularly agitated fellow from Metro called the presentation of facts "counterproductive." He declared, "If oil goes to $20 a barrel, people will have to go back to the inner city."

The bike-in-the-bag mass transit enthusiast was soon up. He's a classic type--a true lunatic who can never quite believe that he isn't asked to present on the hundreds of panels he attends each year. He puts up with the experts as the price of getting his hands on the microphone in the Q&A period. He rambled about bicycling in the suburbs, told of a girl upset by a fender bender that could have been avoided if she'd just grown up without worries on a bus, and decried how business exists only to make a profit.

Near the end, Phil Burgess, president of the Center for the New West, obviously couldn't stand it any longer. He grabbed the microphone and gave a little speech himself, one grounded in a reality that escaped many in the room and was being actively wished away by the others. His message was simple: The cost of commuting in cars is lower than ever, with gas cheap and wireless phones allowing work while stuck in traffic. This means that the benefits of mass transit must become even greater to compete. By this time, many of the bureaucrats had left.