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Smart Growth: Presentation to Technologie, transports et modes de vie Palais du Luxembourg Paris 6 December 2001 By Wendell Cox, Wendell Cox Consultancy It is a pleasure to be here with
you today. I first of all want to express the gratitude of Americans for the
strong support France has provided after the tragic events of September 11.
Your president, Jacques Chirac was the first international leader to visit
our country after the attacks and was the first to visit the World Trade
Center site. Today I may say some things that
will be very surprising and may, in fact, be upsetting to some of you. There
is international concern about urban sprawl --- the tendency of our cities to
consume more land. There is no doubt that this is happening. But there is
serious question about the extent to which, if any, it is a problem. Much of
the data analysis I will present is based upon information from the recent
Jeffrey Kenworthy and Felix Laube volume on international cities and
transport from 1960 to 1990. A strong anti-sprawl movement
has emerged around the world. In the United States, the movement uses the
title “smart growth,’” and I intend to describe to you the problems with
smart growth today. The smart growth movement
largely holds that we need to make our urban areas more compact and dense, so
that less land is taken. In addition, smart growth seeks to significantly
increase public transport use, while discouraging both auto use and highway
construction. Principal smart growth strategies involve rationing ---
rationing of land through development bans in certain areas and urban growth
boundaries --- rationing development by larger per unit fees, ostensibly to
provide infrastructure. Two rationales for smart growth
are particularly erroneous. The first is that urban sprawl must be contained
to preserve valuable agricultural land. Indeed, agriculture has become much more
productive throughout the world, and we simply don’t need all the land that
was required for agricultural production before. Over the past 50 years,
urbanization in the United States has consumed less than one-fifth of the
land that has been taken out of agricultural production. The second erroneous
rationale is that urbanization is consuming open space. In fact, over the
last 50 years, 1.5 hectares of rural parks have been established for every
1.0 hectare of new urbanization (Figure).
If you followed the debate in
the United States, you would get the impression that urban sprawl and
suburbanization were exclusively American issue. I presume you know that our
American central cities have lost population, while suburban areas have grown
significantly. I presume that you also know that the same thing has happened
in European cities. Virtually all of the growth has been in the suburbs for
approximately 50 years. You can see this by considering
the population density losses of the Paris urban (developed) area compare to
that of Chicago. While Chicago started from a lower 1960 base, the rate of
density loss in the Paris area has been greater (Figure).
Of course, it is clear to all
that American cities are less dense than those in other parts of the world.
European urban areas are five times as dense as those in the United States
(Figure). But as I noted before, virtually all urban areas are sprawling to
lower densities.
There is a close relationship
between high density and high public transport market share. In Europe,
public transport market share is about 20 percent. This compares to less than
two percent in the United States (Figure). And if New York is excluded, the
figure is closer to one percent. In fact, New York is the most untypical of
American cities and resembles a European city more.
The smart growth advocates tell
us that urban sprawl has created traffic congestion, and that if we will just
impose their solutions, conditions will improve. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Traffic densities rise as population density rises. This is
clear from both the domestic US and international evidence. With its higher
population densities, Europe, with its higher urban densities, has double the
traffic densities of the United States (Figure).
It is, of course, true, that as
population densities rise, people tend to drive less. But the reduction in
per capita driving is not even close to that which would be required to
reduce overall traffic volumes. In the United States, traffic volumes tend to
increase from 0.8 to 0.9 percent for each 1.0 percent increase in density
(Figure).
But because higher traffic
intensity increases traffic congestion, average travel speeds are reduced.
This means that not only is there higher travel density, but there is a
higher density of vehicle hours. Further, the US evidence shows that air
pollution reduction is optimized between 55 and 90 kilometers per hour --- a
speed well above the average achieved in urban areas (Figure). The theory is
proven by the performance. Both nationally and internationally, higher
densities are associated with higher air pollution intensity.
The NOx table is typical of the
comparative pollution densities of international cities (Figure).
Meanwhile, air pollution is going
away. We have seen driving increase approximately 30 percent since 1970. Yet,
air pollution has fallen, from 5 percent for NOx to more than 40 percent for
CO2 and 60 percent for VOCs (Figure).
Because traffic densities are
lower, and travel speeds are greater, cities that sprawl more tend to have
lower journey to work travel times, both domestically and internationally .
This is exactly the opposite of what is advertised by the smart growth lobby.
In the United States, the average automobile commute speed is more than 55
kph. The average public transport commute speed is approximately 22 kph. This
means that people who have cars have access to five times as much
geographical area in which to travel and work.
Then there is the matter of
public transport. Public transport is very effective in certain markets.
Public transport provides a valuable service in highly dense core cities and
to employment in the cores of such cities. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a
much more effective public transport system that RATP provides with buses and
the metro in the ville de Paris. But the suburbs are another matter. This is illustrated by Portland,
Oregon, our leading ecological city. Portland has adopted all manner of smart
growth policies, including a highly restrictive urban growth boundary and
substantial increases in public transport service. Yet, even in Portland, few
people can get to their jobs on public transport that is automobile
competitive outside downtown. Public Transport provides reasonably time
competitive service to the central business district, from 78 percent of
residences in the urban area. But less than 15 percent of the metropolitan
area’s jobs are in the central business district. The other 85 percent have
little, if any transit service. Our survey of 100 Portland suburban locations
leads to a conclusions that, on average, fewer than five percent of residents
can reach a particular suburban work location on public transport that is
time competitive (Figure). That means, quite simply that people will not ride
public transport, because they will not take trips of 90 minutes or more that
can be accomplished in 20 to 40 minutes by car.
Which bring us back to Paris ---
that ultimate city of western civilization. No urban area has a more dense
core. No city is more walkable or public transport oriented. Portland is
surely not Paris. Indeed, Paris is not Paris. The
city that we associate with Paris is only a small core of a much larger urban
area. Approximately 80 percent of the people in the Paris area live outside
the ville de Paris. Approximately 85 percent of the employment is outside the
core. Generally, time competitive public transport service is not provided
from suburban residential locations to suburban work locations. There is no
doubt that the public transport system effectively serves the central city,
and also provides effective service to the central city from the suburbs on RER.
But in this ultimate of western cities, public transport simply does not
provide time competitive mobility in the suburbs. You are not going to force the
millions of Americans who live in the suburbs into the city. Neither are you
going to force 8 million Parisians into the city from the suburbs. Whatever we do in the central
city it is time to recognize that there are not the financial resources to
provide the comprehensive time competitive public transport services
that would be required to effectively
serve suburb to suburb markets. In many cities, suburb to suburb markets are
commanding virtually all of the growth. But there is more. American
anti-sprawl activists like to claim that low income households are disproportionately
harmed by sprawl. And, while sprawl tends to increase transport expenditures,
it lowers others. The cost of living is generally lower in more sprawling
urban areas (Figure). This is probably also true in Europe, where higher
distribution costs due to slower operating speeds and higher labor costs
generally tend to be associated with more dense areas.
Which brings me to perhaps the
most important point --- that smart growth increases social inequity. The
American dream of home ownership has achieved an record household rate of 70
percent in recent years. Yet, as you know, America has less affluent
minorities, especially African Americans (blacks) and Hispanics. Their home
ownership rates remain in the 45 percent to 50 percent range, well below that
of non-Hispanic whites. But in recent years there has been progress, and
minority home ownership has risen at a faster rate than that of non-Hispanic
whites. But as anyone with the most
remote acquaintance with economics knows, when you ration a scarce good, the
price goes up. So as the smart growth advocates implement their urban growth
boundaries, they ration land and drive the price up, not only of land but of
other factors of housing production, since their rationing also reduces
competition in the home building and development industry. The effect can be
seen in eco-friendly Portland, where housing affordability has dropped by far
the most of any major urban area in the last decade (Figure). Portland
apologists have tried to claim that Portland’s strong population growth is
responsible for the rising prices, but that does not explain why Phoenix and
Atlanta, with much stronger growth, experienced improvements in affordability
over the same period. In the San Francisco Bay area, planners are rationing
housing development through very large development impact fees, which are the
same rate regardless of the value of house being constructed. This has been a
significant contributing factor to San Francisco’s high cost housing market,
which is the nation’s least affordable.
And so the anti-sprawl movement
and smart growth does not deliver on its promises. There is more traffic,
more time in traffic, more pollution, higher cost and more social exclusion.
This is not to support urban sprawl, it is rather to support development
wherein urban planners interfere with market forces to a minimum. A year or so ago, a number of us
of like mind met in the Rocky Mountains and adopted the :”Lone Mountain Compact,”
which set out principles of market based development. The key philosophical
underpinning of that statement is that (Figure): …absent
a material threat to others or the community, people should be allowed to
live and work how and where they like. Such a view is consistent with
the philosophies of our two nations, that have faced so many challenges
through the years to preserve liberty.
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