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If the city stopped transferring wealth from poor, dense neighborhoods to affluent, sprawling ones, I think you would see middle-class neighborhoods asking for more density and more retail so they can get their potholes fixed.

The city doesn't lose anything from the parking lot unless there's nowhere else to build those stores.

Like in a neighboring city with less oppressive laws?

You don't like cars and cities being designed to accommodate them.

You think I don't like cars because I want all forms of transit to be treated equally in the eyes of the government?

If I were supportive of gender equality, would you say that I'm prejudiced against men? If I wanted racial equality, would you say that I'm anti-white?

Just quit trying to tell everyone who chooses something different that they are wrong for doing so.

It's not wrong for people to want to drive everywhere. It's only wrong to force others, especially those who are too poor to drive, to pay more than their fair share for it!

Add to the cost of the roads the opportunity cost of parking. In other words, if a parking lot brings in $10,000 per year in property taxes to the city, and if a store on the same parcel could bring in $400,000 per year in property and sales taxes, then the opportunity cost of the parking lot is $390,000 per year. The city loses that much by requiring that the parcel be used for parking. Guess who pays the difference in higher taxes? Everyone, including people who don't drive.

So you see, the cost of infrastructure for cars is truly staggering when you add together ALL of the costs!

If cars were no longer given favorable tax and regulatory treatment--if the gas tax and other user fees were risen enough to pay for the roads 100% instead of less than half, and if you were no longer guaranteed free, abundant parking at your destination--would you still drive everywhere?

Actually, it's not a lack of planning, it's really bad planning, and far too much of it. Minimum parking requirements incentivize people to drive everywhere, filling the roads and streets with cars which require more, costly infrastructure which doesn't pay for itself by half.

The parking lots themselves also pay hardly anything in taxes compared to the businesses and residences that could be put there, and because they are non-destinations, they contribute to longer travel distances between actual destinations A and B. This makes walking and transit infeasible (not that cars are feasible, see above).

Building codes like height limits, minimum setbacks, and maximum floor area ratios also create sprawl and limit a city's productivity, jobs per acre and tax revenue per acre. So to make up the difference, cities expand out until they can't, and because they never budget for maintenance 30, 40, 50 years down the road, the more they build, the poorer they get!

So it's a huge, misplanned mess, not an unplanned one.

But it means more highways, more roads and more infrastructure spending, and that means taxes on the ultra wealthy.

If only that were true. In the real world, the poor subsidize the affluent. But go on spreading misinformation if it helps to line your wealthy pockets!

Folks don't realize how heavily the US Government subsidized their lives in the 50s, 60s and 70s...the government ain't paying anymore

Actually, city governments heavily subsidize low-density housing for the affluent, wasting land on single-family residential homes that could be used for apartments which house more people, bring in more tax revenue per acre, and require less infrastructure per person. Inefficient zoning is why housing is in such short supply and expensive, why cities have so much traffic, and why cities have budget problems. It's all a big mess, and government is the problem. Yes, much of it started after WWII, with government-backed mortgages and the mortgage interest deduction, but these subsidies continue to exist to this day.

And property taxes assessed on the value of the land perversely incentivize people to come out in droves to oppose anything that can raise the value of their properties. For example, relaxed height limits, minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and minimum parking requirements--these things all attract NIMBYs like flies to a feast. It's all one big, fantastic mess.

Folks don't realize how heavily the US Government subsidized their lives in the 50s, 60s and 70s...the government ain't paying anymore

Actually, city governments heavily subsidize low-density housing for the affluent, wasting land on single-family residential homes that could be used for apartments which house more people, bring in more tax revenue per acre, and require less infrastructure per person. Inefficient zoning is why housing is in such short supply and expensive, why cities have so much traffic, and why cities have budget problems. It's all a big mess, and government is the problem. Yes, much of it started after WWII, with government-backed mortgages and the mortgage interest deduction, but these subsidies continue to exist to this day.

And property taxes assessed on the value of the land perversely incentivize people to come out in droves to oppose anything that can raise the value of their properties. For example, relaxed height limits, minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and minimum parking requirements--these things all attract NIMBYs like flies to a feast. It's all one big, fantastic mess.

Folks don't realize how heavily the US Government subsidized their lives in the 50s, 60s and 70s...the government ain't paying anymore

Actually, city governments heavily subsidize low-density housing for the affluent, wasting land on single-family residential homes that could be used for apartments which house more people, bring in more tax revenue per acre, and require less infrastructure per person. Inefficient zoning is why housing is in such short supply and expensive, why cities have so much traffic, and why cities have budget problems. It's all a big mess, and government is the problem. Yes, much of it started after WWII, with government-backed mortgages and the mortgage interest deduction, but these subsidies continue to exist to this day.

And property taxes assessed on the value of the land perversely incentivize people to come out in droves to oppose anything that can raise the value of their properties. For example, relaxed height limits, minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and minimum parking requirements--these things all attract NIMBYs like flies to a feast. It's all one big, fantastic mess.

This is one reason why property taxes should be replaced with a fee that covers only the property's actual burden on the city. For example, a property with a longer street frontage costs the city more in street and sidewalk amortization and maintenance, tree trimming, emergency response, etc. A property with more impermeable surface (roof, driveway) costs the city more in sewer amortization and maintenance. And so on.

The way property taxes are normally assessed transfers wealth from poor neighborhoods to affluent ones, and then we wonder why few people are able to pull themselves out of poverty!

The mortgage interest deduction incentivizes us to purchase rather than rent. It seemed like a good idea at the time to encourage people to invest in their homes, but we now know that's a very bad idea. Not just because it harms the economy by reducing mobility, but also because it encourages people to oppose new housing in order to protect their investment by restricting supply. They do this by protecting density limits which in turn limits property tax revenue and makes the land tax-inefficient (low tax revenue, high maintenance costs). This not only causes a housing crisis, but we also wonder why our cities keep running out of money!

The mortgage interest deduction benefits only the middle class and the wealthy, not poor people who don't itemize. One simple way to remove the incentive is to raise the standard deduction higher than most incomes. When you no longer need to collect your tax-advantaged receipts for the year, wouldn't tax time be a lot more pleasant?

Driving is a public activity, for example. Governments are now starting to track license plate data with cameras. (It is bad enough to collect such information in the first place, but that is a different topic).

Every car on the road is a hazard, so from a safety perspective, it makes sense to collect license plate information from passing cars. The real issue is the data retention policy.

Not that it even matters. The roads are still filled with cars, so it seems the convenience of driving outweighs the loss of our vehicle's privacy. So maybe we should reconsider the way we force developers to build more parking than the market wants, and business owners to provide more of it than their customers want, and the way we pay people to drive everywhere by transferring wealth from people who don't drive to those who do. The loss of freedom and property rights preceded the loss of privacy by over half a century!

Driving is a public activity, for example. Governments are now starting to track license plate data with cameras. (It is bad enough to collect such information in the first place, but that is a different topic).

Every car on the road is a hazard, so from a safety perspective, it makes sense to collect license plate information from passing cars. The real issue is the data retention policy.

Not that it even matters. The roads are still filled with cars, so it seems the convenience of driving outweighs the loss of our vehicle's privacy. So maybe we should reconsider the way we force developers to build more parking than the market wants, and business owners to provide more of it than their customers want, and the way we pay people to drive everywhere by transferring wealth from people who don't drive to those who do. The loss of freedom and property rights preceded the loss of privacy by over half a century!

It's not just a war on poverty, it's a war against those who want to feel good about themselves by being wealthier than someone else and by sprinkling pennies down from above, which they call "charity." Those are the people who work to keep the poor poor by opposing any legislation that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor because that's "stealing," and supporting regressive taxes (inexplicably not stealing) and other laws that redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich.

What a thoroughly ignorant comment. I don't know anyone who by chance or by making the most of the opportunities they do have, tend to be wealthier than someone else, did it to make themselves feel superior to those who have less. I don't know anyone who DOES donate to charity sprinkle "pennies." It's rather upwards of thousands of pennies. I don't know anyone who is wealthier than many who work to keep the poor, poor. They do, however, don't support the massive government backed redistribution of their wealth to the poor, because it is, in fact, stealing. Your mileage, obviously varies.

We've tried unopposed for thousands of years to eradicate poverty through charity alone, and it didn't work. Then we tried it for a few short decades through government support amid fierce opposition, and finally made some headway and figured out what needs to happen next, yet its opponents still call the war on poverty a "failure."

"The poor shall always be with you." That is a quote from the Christian scriptures, and it seems rather relevant. I don't know if you have ever been anywhere here in the US or abroad where you have witnessed actual poverty. Many of the "poor" in the US are rich by other standards. So, let us frame the conversation differently: What do you deem to be "poverty?" Perhaps that is where the discussion needs to start, yet again.

The cycle of poverty is one of today's common analogies of slavery, and sadly there are many who want to perpetuate it for their own happiness and financial gain. Just as people did long ago with slavery's more overt form.

Agree to a point. There are those who have amassed vast amounts of material wealth and want to keep it all to themselves. Sad but true, this is human nature. However, there are those who live quite comfortable lives that would probably be much more comfortable, even luxurious, were it not for their personal commitment to supporting charities that directly impact the conditions of the poor.

It's not just a war on poverty, it's a war against those who want to feel good about themselves by being wealthier than someone else and by sprinkling pennies down from above, which they call "charity." Those are the people who work to keep the poor poor by opposing any legislation that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor because that's "stealing," and supporting regressive taxes (inexplicably not stealing) and other laws that redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich.

We've tried unopposed for thousands of years to eradicate poverty through charity alone, and it didn't work. Then we tried it for a few short decades through government support amid fierce opposition, and finally made some headway and figured out what needs to happen next, yet its opponents still call the war on poverty a "failure."

The cycle of poverty is one of today's common analogies of slavery, and sadly there are many who want to perpetuate it for their own happiness and financial gain. Just as people did long ago with slavery's more overt form.

Cars have the best convenience

Would they be as convenient without laws that force developers to build more parking than the market wants?

And would they be as convenient if the roads paid for themselves 100% from gas taxes and other user fees instead of less than half?

When was the last time you bought groceries without carrying any form of government ID? This used to be common.

It's tragic how we willingly give up our freedoms and enlarge our governments just for a little convenience. "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little Convenience, deserve neither Liberty nor Convenience." (Benjamin Franklin)

That's interesting because the conservative mentality is to make everyone dependent on Big Oil and subsidized roads, and to take away the right of business owners to decide how much parking to provide for their customers. And thanks to zoning laws, it's no longer practical for many people to go to the store for a gallon of milk without carrying some form of government ID with you. Is that freedom?

I think true freedom is when you can walk and bike everywhere you need to be.

Stop paying people to drive everywhere. Stop telling businesses how many parking spaces they have to provide for their own customers. Stop making poor, compact neighborhood subsidize urban sprawl. And then internalize the negative externality of burning fossil fuels, perhaps with a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend so it isn't a burden on the poor.

I think the market can solve the problem, if we would let it.

Or they could stop transferring wealth from poor neighborhoods to wealthy ones. Racist policies create racist results.

parking on the lawns...

If your neighborhood has lawns, it's probably being subsidized by those without lawns. Beggers can't be choosers!

It could be his own street, in small quiet suburbia, once safe to let your kids run around on has now turned into a highway.

You can thank planners for that!

And while traffic may not be good for residential neighborhoods, it's great for commerce. So why not allow retail uses for the properties along the now-highway? Then the middle-class neighborhood may need less welfare from poor neighborhoods, and the neighborhood may even be able to pass the popsicle test.

There was a time when it was safe and practical to go to the store and buy a gallon of milk without carrying any form of government ID. These days, you pretty much have to drive everywhere, so kids don't get to learn independence, and that's a real shame.

They make it practical for investors to 'park' their money into real estate and keep houses off the market.

Then allow rentals only in owner-occupied units.

And switch at least partially from property taxes to land value taxes in order to discourage banking of vacant land and end the reverse subsidy of suburban middle-class single-family homes at the expense of poor inner-city residents.

And if you're really concerned about home affordability, allow cities to upzone heavily trafficked residential streets (the ones you don't want your children to play on anyway) for multifamily homes in order to drive down home prices by flooding the housing market. You can further reduce rents by about $100-200 per month by abolishing minimum parking requirements.

The economies of scale are there, but cities have incentives to swallow long term maintenance costs in exchange for short term tax base infusions.
It doesn't help that many if not most small towns are dominated by developers, realtor groups, and their sycophants.

I see, it just doesn't work when gated communities pay for their own roads. It's better when the poor subsidize the rich, right?

It's unfortunate the way poor inner-city residents subsidize their wealthier suburban neighbors. Not only does it create a "reverse Robin Hood" situation where cities rob from the poor and give to the rich, it also gives people the false impression that the suburban lifestyles idolized by Republicans are sustainable which cannot be further from the truth. It keeps people trapped in the cycle of poverty, raising crime rates, and makes infrastructure-intensive, tax-inefficient suburban living all the more attractive when it should be doing the opposite!

Then suburbanites pat themselves on the back for their good fortune, and they vote for whomever promises to perpetuate the vicious cycle (usually Republicans again), when all they are really doing is creating an economic mess for future generations to clean up.

Someone once said, "A democracy...can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

It seems we're following in Venezuela's footsteps.

there is a tremendous amount of real estate consumed by retail outlets

That's absolutely true. We force brick and mortar retailers to build more parking than the market thinks is necessary, and we mandate minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and height limits, and if stores don't meet these arbitrary requirements that drive up their building costs and property taxes, we don't let them build at all.

In the end, the only retailers who can afford to navigate these regulations are big-box chain stores who are able to woo local governments into giving them massive tax breaks. And then we wonder why cities have no money!

Online retailers can build in small towns where land is cheap and the people are just glad to have the jobs. Then we subsidize their shipping costs. So the decks are stacked against brick and mortar stores.

The death of retail isn't happening naturally. We are causing it ourselves. Once again regulations are killing commerce just as it did in Soviet Russia. We have met the anti-capitalists and it is us.

Not budgeting for maintenance is how this country can "afford" nice things. It's a Ponzi scheme..

Then instead of repairing old bridges, we build new ones right next to the old ones and let the old ones crumble. Or we raid other budgets, or we raise massive infrastructure bonds, or we simply build new neighborhoods for the rich and let the poor live with potholes, broken sidewalks, and the occasional water main break. Because keeping the poor segregated from the wealthy is the American Way! (Try to build apartments in a middle- or upper-class neighborhood and you'll quickly see what I mean.)

Clearly we need more parked cars and fences along the road for people to hit instead of pedestrians and bicyclists. Get those bad drivers off the road before they do any real damage!

Unfortunately, transportation engineers have been facilitating the opposite by removing roadside trees and therefore violating their code of ethics to protect public safety. Isn't it ironic when they widen streets to make it easier for paramedics to respond to collisions caused by wide streets?

That and other reasons are why transportation engineers are the stooges of the engineering profession.

Clearly we need more parked cars and fences along the road for people to hit instead of pedestrians and bicyclists. Get those bad drivers off the road before they do any real damage!

Unfortunately, transportation engineers have been facilitating the opposite by removing roadside trees and therefore violating their code of ethics to protect public safety. Isn't it ironic when they widen streets to make it easier for paramedics to respond to collisions caused by wide streets?

That and other reasons are why transportation engineers are the stooges of the engineering profession.

Imagine your favorite street in town didn't exist. Could it be built today if the construction had to follow your local rules?

In the USA, we are no longer allowed to build nice things like we used to. I love some of the old streets in Europe but we can't build them here due to required street widths, setbacks, floor area ratios, parking requirements, height limits, and so on. We've legislated beauty away, unless your vision of beauty involves a lot of asphalt and empty space.

Government is not a business. It should not be run like a business.

I beg to differ:

Back when I did engineering work, I worked on two separate contracts for very similar projects at roughly the same time. Project A was for a city, while Project B was being paid for by a developer. For Project A, we signed a lump sum contract with the city to do the study and design and then an hourly billing schedule for inspection. For Project B, we had an hourly agreement with the developer to provide the same services... [this] developer was in my office twice a day getting updates, checking on progress and overseeing my work... When he got my bill, he demanded hourly itemization and scrutinized the entire thing, refusing to pay when he thought things shouldn't have taken as long as they did. It was a pain and I remember being annoyed, but I also remember it got done quickly and for a tiny fraction -- [perhaps] 1/3 the cost -- of what a very similar project cost the public client.

This illustrates one way that a government could be run more like a business for the benefit of all taxpayers.

The solution is to ask why is traffic so bad in the first place.

Because people tolerate that traffic enough to create it and sit in it at the same time. Because sitting in traffic is more desirable than the alternatives available to them.

Because traffic congestion is a sign of prosperity, and so the only thing worse than having congestion is not having congestion.

There is no economic incentive to build small places for small rents.

That's true, which is unfortunate because low rent areas are a property tax windfall for cities compared to single-use residential areas. The poor subsidize the wealthy.

But fortunately, today's new luxury rentals are tomorrow's low rent districts. And thanks to gentrification, the opposite is also true. It's the circle of life!

Even worse, the kind of land use patterns that encourage social interaction have been outlawed in much of the USA. We are no longer allowed to build cities the way we used to.

"Oh, you're in a bad part of town - you're going to pay even more!"

That already happens, not because Uber consciously decides to charge more for customers in bad parts of town but because drivers refuse to go to those areas until the price goes high enough to make the risk worth the reward.

It's unfortunate how we've created and worsened bad parts of town by abusing zoning laws in order to segregate the rich from the poor. Middle- and upper-class members of the ethnic majority call it maintaining community "character" but that's just a euphemism for keeping the poor and minorities away. Meanwhile, the wealthy suburbs siphon money from the poor but tax-efficient (per acre) urban areas in a legalized form of reverse welfare, and after discouraging productive uses of land in this way, we wonder why we can't afford to keep our bridges from falling down. Seriously, you just can't make this up!

start with the actual hard cases, like suburban road networks

You mean the roads that aren't very good at moving traffic from A to B because there are so many intersections to slow that traffic down, and that aren't very good at being destinations (the A or the B) because of their high speeds? Those stroads really need to go no matter what. Once we do that, the task of figuring out how to make the infrastructure that remains will be much simpler.

According to the first link:

Use of the 85th percentile speed concept is based on the theory that: the large majority of drivers: are reasonable and prudent

Unfortunately, 80% of participants in one study rated themselves as above-average drivers. This disproves the above theory that "the large majority of drivers are reasonable and prudent."

So the rationale behind the 85th percentile rule doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

If you have any further doubts that traffic engineers are raving lunatics, please watch this short video created by a recovering engineer. It's absolute madness.

If traffic throughput is important, then because it peaks at about 60 mph on freeways, freeway speed limits should be lowered, right? As a bonus, it would also improve fuel economy, which peaks at around 25-60 mph depending on the vehicle.

But that's only if you value throughput over speed, which not even traffic engineers do.

The folks at Strong Towns argue that when the streets are designed for speed (wide lanes, no obstacles like trees near the curb, no curbside parking), the drivers generally feel safe to drive fast, regardless of the speed limit or billboards, so they do; and when that expectation is violated by, say, a pedestrian, people die. (See, for example, http://www.strongtowns.org/jou... : when the infrastructure is designed to make drivers who make mistakes safe, it makes it dangerous for pedestrians who make mistakes or are merely in the way of a driver's mistake.)

TFA says that the bulk of accidents occurs at relatively few intersections, so I wonder what characterizes those (other than heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic).

intractable recession: The US, in general, is a declining superpower and its starting to show. our skin-and-bones transportation budget, crumbling bridges, and pothole ridden highways are so common as to be a feature. A decade of intentional federal gridlock by republicans clammouring for austerity measures in the face of a housing market crisis and educational loan crisis didnt help. and a decade prior our zeal to fight the war without end amen depleated a lot of our reserves from the clinton adminstration that could have been used to shore up what 60 years ago was a mark of american achievement...namely our highway infrastructure.

Actually, the problem isn't so much recession as it is a lack of economic growth. Just being out of a recession isn't enough. We can't afford the roads we're building unless the economy (and the tax revenues) grow at a good rate.

It's a dirty little secret, but our transportation budgets aren't adding up. To oversimplify: Every time we extend infrastructure, we add two drains on budgets. The first is depreciation - basically a way of budgeting for the cost of replacement years down the road. The second is maintenance - budgeting to repair the infrastructure. It's easy to ignore depreciation and kick the can down the road. And it's easy to skimp on maintenance (especially if the results won't be too bad before the next election cycle). Which means we end up building infrastructure where the tax revenues can't adequately fund the ongoing costs of the infrastructure once we remove the other necessary ongoing costs of an expansion (city services such as police & fire, etc).

What's worse is our ongoing style of expansion is frequently fault intolerant. Say you put in a big box store such as Walmart. Big box stores, as a general rule, aren't the best producers of tax revenue per square foot. You're frequently better off with a dense commercial or residential development instead - a tall apartment building, or a bunch of small stores. So already, when you add a big box store, it's not the best bang for the buck. And those big box stores tend to require their own infrastructure - new intersections, sometimes new roads, etc - since they are frequently built on the edge of development. But what's worse is if the big box store goes under - it's hard to find another tenant due to the size of the structure.

If you want to read more about this, I'd recommend either the Strong Towns website, or the American Conservative. The latter may seem odd, since walkable, liveable communities is frequently seen as a liberal idea, but there's a strong fiscal argument for New Urbanism.

the cost of improving brakes is likely to be far, far less than the economic cost of excluding millions of people from driving, in a society where driving is nearly essential for daily life.

Or taking bad drivers off the road would create better drivers and help free ourselves from an overdependence on a single mode of travel (a single point of failure), one that consumes massive amounts of land for roads and parking, drains similarly massive amounts of money to overseas oil and car companies, and creates respiratory problems, up to $1,600 per person per year.

Do ghettos exist outside of cities, or do they exist because cities take wealth from financially productive run-down areas and use it to attract newer but relatively unproductive big-box stores in middle-class neighborhoods?

If the latter, it would appear that breaking up cities as if they were monopolies would prevent the flow of wealth from the poor to the rich and thereby prevent ghettos from forming.

The more fundamental problem is that traffic engineers in the USA don't distinguish between streets (short segments of road with lots of buildings and driveways) and non-street roads (connections between places). Consequently, they design these street/road hybrids that have many intersections, like streets, but also high speed limits, like roads. And then to try to overcome a limitation of the hybrid street/road design, they prioritize traffic speed and throughput over safety, where you or I would make safety the first priority. As part of that, they removed roadside trees because motorists kept hitting them. So now without trees protecting pedestrians, the same motorists hit pedestrians instead. How's that for progress?

Reality agrees with me, my experience working in traffic engineering trumps your lies about some study you don't understand.

"The [traffic] engineering profession is insane," so please forgive me if I don't hold your experience in high regard.

Meanwhile, you didn't explain why my interpretation of the 60 mph study is flawed.

So you are saying that the person in front did have anything to do with the crash?

Why would someone who isn't "driving on a road too close to the vehicle in front, at a distance which does not guarantee that stopping to avoid collision is possible" run into the person in front? Or do you disagree with this definition of tailgating?