Is Mobility More Important than Density?
Urban planners, land-use scholars, and other experts often advocate for greater density. But economist Tyler Cowen has an interesting blog post suggesting the US would do better to promote mobility, instead. His argument for mobility has considerable merit. But much depends on what kind of mobility we are talking about. Currently, increasing mobility in the sense of speed of transportation is less significant than increasing mobility in the sense of making it easier for people to “move to opportunity” by migrating from one place to another. Increasing the latter type of mobility often requires allowing greater population density (though, as discussed below, that may be compatible with increasing per-person living space).
Here’s Tyler’s argument:
American history is much more about rapid and cheap transport than about extremes of population density. Even New York, our densest major city by far, became dense relatively late in American history. To this day, the United States is not extremely dense, not say by European or East Asian standards.
But in American history, themes of horses, faster ships, safer ships, turnpikes, canals, our incredible river network, railroads, cars, and planes have been absolutely central to our development. America has put in a very strong performance in all those areas. When it comes to density, we have a smaller number of victories….
These days I see an urbanist movement that is more obsessed with density than with mobility. I favor relaxing or eliminating many restrictions on urban density, and American cities would be better as a result. Upward economic mobility would rise, and Oakland would blossom. But still I am more interested in mobility, which I see as having a greater upside.
One issue is simply that urban density seems to lower fertility. It is not obvious the same can be said for mobility.
And do you really want to spread and replicate the politics of our most dense areas?….
The density crowd is very interested in high-speed rail, which I (strongly) favor for the Northeast corridor, but otherwise am not excited about, at least not for America. Otherwise, the density crowd works to raise the status of a lot of low-speed means of transport, for instance bicycles…..
I prefer to look to a better future where higher-speed transport is both affordable and green. Ultimately, low-speed transport is a poor country thing….
I do not wa
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