Trading Places

William T. Bogart on dynamic cities and unaccountable planners

Jesse Walker | December 12, 2006

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Bogart: Buses are theoretically more flexible, although a truly flexible bus system is called a "taxi."

reason: I noticed there wasn't any discussion of taxis in the book.

Bogart: I made a conscious decision with this book to try to keep it, for the want of a better word, "short." The book itself tries not to be sprawling.

The sequel, if anyone buys this one, would work through what the implied policies are. On the general issue of accessibility across a metropolitan area for people who can't afford cars, there's some wonderful work that's being done, both by academic researchers and with some policy experiments, on subsidizing car use for low-income individuals. You can almost think of it as a component of an employment voucher. I have a job in the suburbs, and through one of these programs I get a car with a forgivable or a subsidized loan. And it's not called in as long as I am successfully continuing to work. It is true that there aren't a lot of jobs within walking distance or along fixed-rail systems from concentrations of low-income individuals. The answer is not to try to plop a bunch of jobs in their neighborhoods. The answer is to increase the accessibility.

The person that's been very prominently active on this is Michael Porter of Harvard, with the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. He identifies the problem in a lot of neighborhoods and central cities as isolation. From my perspective, public policies that increase that isolation are counterproductive. And public policies that reduce that isolation, which includes making cars affordable and accessible, are good ones.

For people that can't drive, that's where the quasi-taxi shuttle becomes appropriate.

reason: What's the relationship between commute times and congestion times?

Bogart: Well, commute times in the U.S. have been roughly constant. They fell during the '50s and '60s, as more people started to drive, and then they've remained constant for the last thirty-something years. In central cities in rush hour in the 1950s, you had greater employment densities in the downtown and greater traffic congestion in the downtown. What's happened is the traffic congestion has been more spread out. That's kind of a good thing -- the infrastructure is being used more efficiently and more broadly.

The headline numbers on congestion that people come up with -- billions and billions of hours spent in traffic -- if you actually calculate it, for most people it works out to be a few minutes a day. Granted, there's a lot of things I would rather be doing than driving in a congested situation a few minutes a day. However, if you compare that even to bus travel time, it turns out that people would rather spend a few minutes in congested cars than spend the minutes at the bus stop or walking from the bus stop to their jobs or sitting on the bus. And when you go to fixed rail the commute times are just off the chart relative to the amount of congestion. Except in a few situations -- that's where you find people riding fixed rail. But much of the congestion is a problem we've chosen to have.

reason: You write that "lags in investment mean that existing metropolitan structure will always be inefficient." You also note that "if all the houses in an area are newly constructed at the same time, then they will likely become obsolete at the same time." So is the inefficiency a good thing?

Bogart: It gets us away from that static view and more towards a long-run view. Those static inefficiencies are perhaps a cost of a long-run efficiency. You're much better off having a place where there is this constant flow and flux. That flow and flux means that things are leaving that shouldn't be there anymore, and things are coming in that think that it's a good place for them, and maybe it works out and maybe not.

A wonderful book in many ways is Edge City by Joel Garreau. He talks about people who look at some of the places in Venice and say, "Why can't we build something like that in America?" They forget that the city developed over 800 years. It's not as though an urban planner came in and said, "Let's build this plaza." Developers would go in and build something. If it was great it lasted and people redeveloped it and kept it, and if it wasn't then 20 years later someone came in, tore it down, and built something else. Over the course of a few hundred years you might be left with something pretty nice as a result, because the good stuff stays and the bad stuff goes.

A lot of our negative judgments are taken perhaps too quickly. Some of these Baltimore neighborhoods with rowhouses, maybe 30 years ago someone said, "Why would anyone want to live in a place like that?" Well, it turns out that there's a large number of people who want to live in places like that, for very good reasons. Had we done things that were advocated with bulldozers and wrecking balls, they would have lost that opportunity.

reason: You mention the number and diversity of local governments in urban areas like Pittsburgh. In a lot of the more recently developed areas out west, instead of a host of local governments there's a host of private community associations. Is one landscape more flexible than the other?

Bogart: I don't think we know yet, because the jurisprudence is still evolving about the extent to which the private associations are allowed to operate differently than municipal governments.