“Business As Usual, Electrified” is an awful way to reduce auto emissions

First published by Steady State Herald. Also published on Resilience.

Auto industry voices in Canada have made headlines recently by urging a longer timeline for the transition to electric cars. We should hope that Prime Minister Mark Carney does not give in to this demand.

Yet even if Canada’s federal government sticks to the current policy, and Canadian new car sales are 100 percent zero-emission by 2035, carbon emissions will decline much more slowly than the world needs. That is due to the auto industry’s particularly pernicious strategy for continued growth.

The industry can’t keep boosting unit sales in a country where almost everyone who can drive, does drive. But they can boost revenue by selling bigger, heavier, more expensive vehicles when consumers need to swap their old vehicles for new ones.

With that strategy, Canada’s auto industry has done its part in maintaining the growth of gross domestic product (GDP). But the GDP isn’t all that’s growing. Pedestrian deaths and injuries are growing, tire particulate emissions are growing, traffic congestion is growing, and consumer debt (due to auto loans) is growing.

CO2 emissions from cars are holding steady and should start trending down over the next five years. However, a “Business As Usual, Electrified” transition will reduce emissions far too slowly to meet the climate-crisis challenge.

If you can’t sell more, sell bigger. (GM trucks at former GM Canada headquarters in Oshawa, Ontario, 2022. Photo by Bart Hawkins Kreps.)

Car Bloat in Canada

Statistics Canada figures show that unit sales of passenger vehicles grew just over 20 percent between 2010 and 2024, while population grew 21 percent. Auto sales revenue, however, grew by over 100 percent.

Price tags have soared because the mix of new cars has changed drastically. Most new passenger vehicles are categorized as “light trucks”—SUVs and many models of pick-up trucks. But “light trucks” is a euphemism we should translate as “huge cars.” Most of them are used almost entirely to haul around one or two persons, just like small cars do.

In 2010, the huge-car segment was 54 percent of the Canadian market. By 2024, huge cars made up 87 percent of new passenger vehicles. This trend of “autobesity” or “car bloat” has significant implications for Canada’s strategy to reduce carbon emissions by electrifying vehicles.

First, if the auto industry maintains Business As Usual, the vast majority of internal combustion cars sold between now and 2035 will be huge. They will have correspondingly high tailpipe emissions well after 2035. These emissions are often termed “tank-to-wheel” emissions.

A second emissions category is termed “well-to-tank” emissions. Gasoline or diesel fuel goes from oil wells or mines through an extraction-refining-distribution chain. This adds significant emissions for every liter of fuel burned.

An analogous category—“well-to-grid” let’s call it—exists for electric vehicles (EVs) when electricity is produced by coal- or gas-fired generators. Canada’s grid is powered predominantly by hydro or nuclear power, though, so well-to-grid is not a major category of EV-fleet emissions. (That could change if Canada adopts the “all the above” approach to energy taken by the United States, for example.)

There are also substantial carbon emissions in the manufacture of cars. These emissions are higher for larger cars, and ironically, higher for electric cars than for gas- or diesel-powered cars. If most new cars continue rolling off the assembly lines huge, carbon emissions from auto manufacturing will go up between now and 2035. That will remain true until the carbon-intensive industrial processes in the manufacturing chain are also electrified.

Finally, if Canadians continue to buy as many cars as they do now and drive them as far each year, the fleet of huge cars will continue to take up more roadway surface. Road construction is itself a significant source of carbon emissions.

Beyond the Tailpipe

What will it really take for Canada’s auto industry to reach zero emissions by 2035?  To answer this question, I projected six scenarios using a carbon-emissions calculator developed by the International Energy Agency. I estimated tank-to-wheel, well-to-tank, and auto manufacturing emissions in each of the six scenarios.

I incorporated road construction into my projections, using a Statistics Canada emissions-intensity per dollar estimate, multiplied by total road-construction expenditures for 2024. Passenger cars account for 91 percent of total vehicle kilometers driven, while heavy trucks and buses account for 9 percent. However, trucks and buses individually take more road space than cars. Therefore, I assigned 70 percent of road-construction emissions to the car fleet. (I did not find adequate data to estimate carbon emissions from road maintenance, which would make the analysis closer to complete.)

I estimated passenger-car fleet direct tailpipe emissions at about 72 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 in 2024. This is slightly less than Environment Canada’s estimate of 74 Mt in pre-pandemic 2019. However, when I added the car fleet’s share of emissions from the extraction-refining-distribution chain, from auto manufacturing, and from road construction, car-sector emissions came to over 115 Mt. That’s a 60 percent increase over the tailpipe emissions alone.

 

How will this change over the next 15 years? My “Business As Usual, Electrified” (BAU Electrified) projection through 2040 includes two somewhat optimistic assumptions. First, that electrification proceeds on schedule—20 percent of new cars being EV by 2026, 60 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035. Second, that car bloat gets no worse (but also no better) through the coming years. The car/light-truck mix of new vehicles, and the vehicle sizes within these categories, remain exactly as in 2024. Importantly, however, this would mean that the average size of vehicles on the road would continue to increase. This is because the smaller sedans bought ten years ago would be replaced by large SUVs and pickup trucks.

If Canada’s goal of 100 percent EV sales by 2035 is met, total car-fleet emissions will still drop only 41 percent by 2040.

Based on these assumptions, I projected that Canada’s car-fleet emissions would be 41 percent lower in 2040 than in 2024

A 41 percent drop may sound impressive. But climate experts have warned for years that we must reduce global warming emissions by at least 43 percent by 2030. So, a 41 percent drop by 2040 is dangerously inadequate.

Departures from Business As Usual

Making even modest changes to passenger-transportation rules could reduce these emissions significantly faster. I projected five additional scenarios, the best of which shows total car-fleet emissions dropping by 71 percent by 2040.

Modest changes to a “Business As Usual, Electrified” scenario would bring down car-fleet emissions by 71 percent by 2040.

Scenario 2 is only slightly different from BAU Electrified (Scenario 1). It assumes a 98 percent zero-emission electric grid compared to Canada’s current national average of approximately 84 percent zero-emission.

In Scenario 3, the sedan/light-truck mix is dialed back to 2010 levels between 2026 and 2030. In Scenario 4, the sedan/light-truck mix is dialed back to 1979 levels between 2026 and 2030.

Scenario 5 builds on Scenario 4, except that vehicles within the sedan and light-truck categories drop modestly in size. In addition, I projected new-vehicle sales and average kilometers driven as dropping by 3.5 percent per year starting in 2030.

Finally, in Scenario 6 the annual vehicle-kilometer figure begins dropping by 3.5 percent per year in 2026. In Scenario 6, not only have CO2 emissions dropped by 71 percent by 2040, but the drop begins much sooner. The result is that cumulative emissions over the whole period are much lower.

Rising Demand for Electricity

Car bloat is likely to pose one more serious challenge in the effort to shrink overall CO2 emissions. A fleet of huge electric cars will add greatly to demand for electricity, at a time when we are also working to electrify other important sectors, such as home heating. We won’t have enough renewably generated electricity to meet all these demands for many years. Therefore, a rational policy would conduce moderate levels of new electricity demand.

I calculated that a Canada-wide EV fleet matching the BAU Electrified scenario would require 68 TeraWatts (TW) per year. A fleet of mostly small EVs driving about 60 percent as many kilometers a year (close to Scenario 6) would require only 32 TW per year. Either way, this is an almost entirely new source of demand, as we scramble to convert other carbon-intensive sectors simultaneously. But it would be much less challenging to build out a grid capable of providing 32 TW rather than 68 TW. A smaller grid build-out will likewise require less environmentally destructive mining for critical metals.

Business As Usual Is Killing Us

There are many reasons besides carbon emissions to conclude that a “Business As Usual, Electrified” strategy is a bad route. The huge passenger vehicles now dominating the roads compound the danger to pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone driving a smaller car.

Huge passenger EVs need huge batteries—and thus demand a rapid, reckless increase in critical-mineral extraction.

Huge EVs, since they are heavier than corresponding internal-combustion vehicles, create more dangerous particulate emissions from tire wear.

A fleet of huge cars takes up more road space, increasing traffic congestion.

And, huge cars chew up the roads faster, entailing more road construction and repair.

So, we should support the Canadian government’s plan for new-vehicle electrification by 2035. However, we should also demand that new vehicles be smaller, that the number of cars on the road gradually drops, and that vehicles drive fewer kilometers annually. There is a wide range of policies designed to achieve these goals. CASSE’s Sustainable Transportation Act, for example, includes provisions to get passenger vehicles and freight trucks off the road. It also discourages the purchase and use of the largest passenger cars and trucks.

The sooner such policies are implemented, the better—for drivers, non-drivers, our cities, our roads, our waters, our atmosphere, our future.

Electrification is an important and necessary step for a sustainable, healthy future, but growth-driven Business As Usual—even Electrified—is killing us.

This article is based on research presented at the International Society for Ecological Economics/Degrowth conference in Oslo, Norway in June 2025.

Photo at top of page: On Lakeshore Boulevard East, Toronto, Ontario, October 2015. Photo by Lisa Gallant, released under CC0 Public Domain license, accessed via Public Domain Pictures.

The infinite growth of highways

Also published on Resilience.

In the first few pages of his new book Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction, Erick Guerra lays out several essential points. 

First, while the originally planned Interstate expressway system was completed in 1992, the pace of highway construction spending since then has not slowed.

Second, though President Dwight Eisenhower intended the Interstate system – officially initiated by legislation in 1956 – to be rural, most of the construction funding went to urban and suburban sections, and nearly two-thirds of vehicle travel miles in the system also occur in urban and suburban areas.  

Third, though the length of highways may not be increasing, “There are nearly twice as many lane miles of urban interstate” today as in 1990. (All quotes in this article are from Overbuilt, by Erick Guerra.)

But has 70 years of ceaseless highway construction met the stated goals of relieving traffic congestion and making drivers safer?

On the contrary, “The average time spent in traffic per car commuter increased from twenty-nine hours in 1991 to fifty-four hours in 2019.” Meanwhile, “The US traffic fatality rate is two to four times higher than in Canada or wealthy European countries and has improved much more slowly over time than in peer countries.”

From a political economic point of view, it’s easy to understand one reason the highway system continues to grow: construction companies and their investors expect steadily growing revenues and profits, and successfully prevail on politicians to keep the government funds flowing.

Guerra, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provides another reason: the highway lobby has insisted for nearly a century that more highway lanes were needed to relieve congestion. But since more roadway has always induced more traffic, the battle against congestions is never won.

The only thing to do, then, is to keep on adding more highway lane miles. Just as the US economic system demands infinite growth of GDP, its transportation system demands infinite growth of highways.

This fondness for highways seems to match the view of Premier Doug Ford in my current home – Ontario, Canada. Guerra’s book, however, is US-focused and makes only occasional comparative references to other countries. Yet the lessons that emerge from Overbuilt are valuable for any country or city struggling with car dependency.

“Dan Ryan Expressway bridges over 24th Place in Chicago, seen from Archer.” Photo by Eric Allix Rogers, August 2008, accessed via flickr, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0.

A history of contestation

Guerra looks back to the early years of the 20th century to trace the growth of the highway lobby, but most of Overbuilt discusses the period since 1956. In that year President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act into law, and a massive, decades-long construction program shifted into high gear.

Though the legislation was associated with the Interstate expressways (or “freeways” as they were often termed), Guerra makes clear that the commitment of funding was far wider. Indeed, it had to be. As controlled access roadways, expressways don’t provide direct access to any homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, or parks. The expressway system requires an even more elaborate system of feeder highways, service roads and arterials to connect the motoring public with their actual destinations.

Many of these roads cross state lines, and are referred to as (lower-case) interstate highways. The 1956 legislation funded both Interstate and interstate highways at a rate of 90% federal funding to 10% state funding.

The program also funded the acquisition of land for new or expanded highways.

In urban areas, that land was occupied by homes and businesses. By the late 1950s, “New interstates were displacing nearly one hundred thousand families per year but providing no relocation support.” Disproportionately, highways were directed through Black, Brown and poor neighbourhoods. (See Justice and the Interstates for a close look at the ongoing struggle to rebuild these neighbourhoods and provide recompense for families that lost their homes or businesses.)

The highway program was criticized on other grounds as well. For one thing, the phenomenon of induced demand was evident even seventy years ago. Guerra writes that “As noted by early observers such as [US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and [philosopher of technology] Lewis Mumford, increased traffic was generally the largest and most substantial effect of new highway investments.”

Even without adequate payment for expropriation of urban lands, urban highway building is exorbitantly expensive. Guerra writes that about $2.5 trillion (in inflation-adjusted dollars) have been doled out by the federal Highway Trust Fund since 1956 – with most of that funding going to urban highway projects. The spending continues today. Although the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) has been widely praised for supporting renewable energy and urban public transit, Guerra writes that the Act will also put “hundreds of billions of dollars into building, rebuilding, widening, and maintaining an already overbuilt roadway system.”

This 1973 photo shows “Heavy traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago Illinois. It is the busiest in the United States with 254,700 vehicles daily, according to figures released in March, 1975, by the Federal Department of Transportation. The Kennedy Expressway in Chicago is the second busiest (not shown) with 234,100 vehicles per day.” Photo by John H. White, October 1973. in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration. Accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

 

Meeting peak demand

Going back nearly a century, the nascent field of traffic engineering developed a method that is still used today to provide a rationale for highway expansions.

That method was to peer into the future and guesstimate what the future car and truck traffic demand will be – not to find ways to reduce that demand, but always to provide enough highway space to meet that demand. And not just “meet the demand” but “meet the peak demand”. And not just meet “peak demand” but “demand in the thirtieth busiest hour projected during the next twenty years.”

Why the thirtiest busiest hour, instead of the twentieth or fortieth or one-hundredth busiest hour? Guerra says the choice was arbitrary, but was codified as a standard nevertheless. But the choice to plan and build highways to meet demand in the 99.98th percentile busiest hour has kept highway builders busy, and made the US ever more car-dependent, ever since. Due to induced demand, however, the new or expanded highways quickly fill up and even the demand during routine weekday “rush hour” stays ahead of roadway supply.

Guerra shows how gas-tax revenues from less-than-peak hours are used to subsidize traffic at the most congested times – the reverse of congestion pricing. Accordingly, he cites congestion pricing as one of the most significant ways to reverse the pattern of overbuilding.

But surely all these roadway “improvements” have led to greater public safety? Many highway engineers will claim success on that front, pointing to a drop in deaths per Vehicle Mile Travelled (VMT). Guerra responds:

“From 1955 to 1980, the fatality rate per vehicle mile had halved. To put it succinctly, Americans were driving nearly twice as much, thanks to wider and higher-capacity roadways, and killing about the same number of people after adjusting for population growth.”

In agreement with engineering professor and author Wes Marshall (Killed by a Traffic Engineer), Guerra believes we should discuss traffic risk primarily on a per capita basis as is done with most other public health hazards. Judged on this basis, the expanding highway system looks like a very bad safety investment:

“The places with the most highways have the most arterials, the most local roads, the most driving, and the most traffic fatalities. Across urban counties, each 10 percent increase in roadway per capita corresponds with about a 4 percent increase in traffic fatalities per capita.”

A looming fiscal crisis

Of course the highway system can’t keep on expanding forever, given the finiteness of land and resources. Guerra writes that “the current transportation finance model is unsustainable and fast approaching a fiscal crisis.”

Thus the first step to ending the pattern of overbuilding is to stop funding new highways, and stop maintaining, and even dismantle, some of the highways now in existence. A second step, as mentioned previously, is congestion pricing.

Better funding for public transit might help too, but Guerra cautions that in most areas of the United States, public transit is nowhere near competitive with cars in terms of travel times and convenience; increased funding may convince very few drivers to switch to transit. Such is the legacy of 70 years of induced car dependency.

He also draws on the distinction between accessibility and mobility to advocate another change:

“Measuring accessibility – people’s ease of getting to the places they are trying to go – instead of mobility – traffic speeds, traffic volumes, and highway capacity – is perhaps the single most important shift that needs to take place to begin to evaluate and assess the impacts of transportation investments properly. Movement and traffic are quite simply the wrong way to measure the transportation system.” p 162

Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding. But the recipe for converting an overbuilt network into a safe, sustainable transportation system is still being worked out in countries and cities around the world.

Photo at top of page: “Passing over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with a good view of the skyline in the background.” By The West End, August 2008, accessed via flickr, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Facilitating a dangerous way of life – traffic engineers in a car culture

Also published at Resilience.

Wes Marshall calls attention to a paradox about the profession in which he began his career:

“It would make sense to assume that newer cities, built with all the knowledge that traffic engineers continue to accumulate, should be our safest cities. But that is not the case. It’s the older cities—mostly built before traffic engineers existed— that tend to be safer.” (Killed by a Traffic Engineer, p 202) 

Elsewhere in the pages of his new book, Marshall notes that the paradox extends to areas within cities as well: “Streets built before the advent of traffic engineers are some of our safest, often with far fewer fatalities and severe injuries than the new-and-improved, fully traffic-engineered versions.” ( p 257)

Killed By A Traffic Engineer, by Wes Marshall, Island Press 2024.

Marshall is now a professor of civil engineering and urban planning at the University of Colorado Denver. He distills 25 years of learning into Killed By a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System. (Island Press, April 2024) While he would like to see his profession become an agent for sustainability, safety, and conviviality, that will require a radical transformation of goals and methods.

The book is an extended take-down of the idea that the voluminous design guidelines, published by groups such as the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), provide evidence-based formulas for safe roads and streets.

Marshall argues that in fact these guidelines, far from prioritizing safety, put traffic volume and speed first. To the extent that safety is considered, he says, safety is typically viewed from the perspective of the drivers, and not those outside cars or trucks. Finally, he demonstrates through extensive historical research that many of the engineers who worked with or developed the guidelines over the past 70 years were aware that supporting evidence was lacking or fragmentary. 

Given the above summary, readers interested in transportation systems and planning might wonder if Marshall’s book largely repeats points made by Charles Marohn in his excellent book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. (Wiley, 2021)

There is some overlap and the messages of the two books are strongly complementary. Yet Marshall includes so much relevant detail, and such insightful probing of engineering and safety research, that Killed By A Traffic Engineer is worth every minute invested in reading its 344 pages, even for those who have already read Marohn’s work.

Marshall’s focus is almost solely on traffic engineering practice in the United States, but residents of car-dependent areas in other countries are likely to find a great deal of relevance in the book. 

In this review we’ll look at a few of the major topics Marshall covers.

First, there is the poor quality of evidence, and frequent misapplication of that evidence, underlying many traffic engineering guidelines. Second, the “factor of safety” used successfully in structural engineering often has contrary consequences in fields that, like traffic engineering, should account for human behaviour. Finally, using per-vehicle-mile safety metrics, instead of per capita metrics, blinds us to the true danger of a society in which driving substantial distances is an obligatory daily ritual for most people.

“Fatal accident on 32 Ave & 68th St NE, Calgary, Alberta, August 2008.” Photo by RAF-YYC, from Wikimedia Commons.

What didn’t they know, and when didn’t they know it?

A nascent field of study got its own scholarly journal when the Eno Foundation began publishing the Traffic Quarterly in 1947. The journal, which was later renamed Transportation Quarterly, continued until 2003 – and it appears that Marshall has read every article in every issue.

Rather than simply assume that the current massive tomes of road and street guidelines are based on extensive safety research, Marshall quotes many Quarterly articles to establish the contrary.

An important case of misapplied data was passed down as Heinrich’s Law, or the “accident triangle”. In 1931, Travelers Insurance employee H.W. Heinrich examined some data on industrial accidents. He determined that “In a workplace, for every accident that causes a major injury, there are 29 accidents that cause minor injuries and 300 accidents that cause no injuries.” (quoted by Marshall, page 94)

Would this same relationship apply in other settings or in other time periods? Who knows? Yet it became widely accepted among traffic engineers that a similar proportional relationship would exist between very serious crashes, moderately serious crashes, and crashes resulting in only minor dents or scratches to cars.

If  a steady, proportional relationship existed between accidents of differing severity, then it would follow that by reducing all accidents of any sort, we would reduce the serious accidents that maim or kill people.

This fixed proportional relationship was an illusion, but it was often a convenient illusion. Particularly when comparing the crash rates of specific locations, data on serious accidents might be too sparse to draw any valid inferences. Aggregating all crashes, however, might seem to provide an adequate number of data points.

As Marshall points out, this methodology cast a harsh light on downtown areas. Such typically congested areas often have a relatively high number of crashes. But since speeds are low, most of the crashes will be fender-benders.

Higher-speed arterials may have few fender-benders, but more serious injuries or fatalities.

An analyst working on the assumption that the total number of crashes was a reliable proxy for serious crashes would label the downtown locations “more dangerous” and the arterial roads “less dangerous”. This line of thinking led traffic engineers, more than sixty years ago, to try to improve safety by lessening congestion. Marshall writes:

“For much of the history of traffic engineering, we considered traffic congestion to be a proxy for road safety. As our good friends over at AASHO1 inform us in their 1957 manual on urban arterials, ‘Congestion breeds accidents.’” (p. 99)

Marshall highlights weaknesses in available data sets in other respects as well. He writes that the best accident data for the whole US is the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). The FARS reports contributing causes, but unless there are eyewitnesses or surveillance footage, the police often have no reliable way to determine something as basic as the speed the driver was driving. This results in a set of statistics that stretches credulity:

“Over a recent six-year period, 28,642 pedestrians lost their lives on streets with a posted speed limit. How many of the drivers who killed these 28,642 pedestrians were speeding? According to FARS, the answer is 2,015.

“Go look at almost any road. Does it seem within the realm of possibility that the speeding problem is limited to 7 percent of drivers? Of course not ….” (p 236)

Suppose the fatal crash report does include speeding as a contributing cause. It is all too easy to conclude “case closed”: the driver was to blame for speeding. But how much sense does this make, in a system where most roads are designed to facilitate speeds higher than the speed limit, where cars are marketed with the promise of exhilarating and consequence-free speed, where law enforcement seldom tickets drivers who are driving modestly above the supposed maximum legal speed, and where most drivers speed whenever the roads are free enough of congestion to allow this? Is it really sensible, in such a system, to simply blame the driver for speeding in those cases where an accident results, when the driver is doing what nearly all drivers routinely do?

Even more to the point, Marshall argues, traffic engineers will only contribute to safety when they stop focusing on the after-the-fact blaming of individual drivers, and work instead to design roads where speeding is not the predictable and average behaviour.2

Why a margin of safety may increase danger

Civil engineers, Marshall writes, typically receive much more instruction in structural engineering than in traffic engineering. But some eminently logical practices in structural engineering do not transfer well to traffic engineering.

An engineer designing a bridge support might calculate the strength needed to support the maximum expected weight, and then double the size of the pillar to add a “factor of safety”. An engineer designing a culvert might estimate maximum water flow, and then double the size of the culvert to add a factor of safety.

The double-strength pillar does not induce heavier trucks to cross the bridge, and the double-size culvert does not induce more rain to fall, so the factors of safety hold true.

But suppose traffic engineers work in the same fashion. Starting from the specified design speed and the estimated traffic volume, they consult the guidelines and sketch a roadway with a certain number of lanes of a certain width, with a certain amount of space beside the road that is cleared of any obstacles such as trees or parked cars. Then, to create a factor of safety, they might increase the width of the lanes, add a lane or two, and increase the amount of clear space beside the road.

In this case the factor of safety is counter-productive. The extra lane(s) induce more traffic to travel on the newly widened road, while the wider lanes and wider visual clear space result in drivers speeding up. With more traffic traveling at higher speeds, the risk of serious injury or fatalities is increased, not decreased, by the “factor of safety”.

“car accident @ vestavia hills”, Birmingham, Alabama, July 2011, photo by Rian Castillo, licensed under Creative Commons ATTRIBUTION 2.0 GENERIC, accessed via flickr.

The fatal flaw in “per vehicle mile” safety metrics

Traffic safety is often quantified using a per-vehicle-mile, or per-million-vehicle-mile, ratio. This has serious consequences. Marshall writes,

“Conventionally, distance traveled is the denominator in our crash rates. The number of crashes, injuries, or deaths on our roads is the numerator. You’d think that focusing on reducing the numerator so as to improve crash rates makes the most sense. The problem is that we’ve instead focused on increasing the denominator. In other words, given the way we measure road safety, we all seem safer if we all drive a lot more. We built places that force us to do so. Crashes go up a little, but we drive a lot more, so we’re convinced we improved safety.” (p 356)

Marshall supports his point with both a hypothetical example and with real-world data.

He asks us to consider the fictional towns of Driveton and Heresville. They each have lost 150 citizens in traffic crashes over the past 10 years. Does that make them equally safe?

Well, the average citizen of Driveton drives 25,000 miles per year, while citizens of Heresville only average 5,000 miles per year. Driveton’s fatality rate is 1.2 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles – approximately the US average – while the fatality rate in Heresville is 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles. If vehicle miles is the denominator, then Heresville is 25 per cent more dangerous than Driveton.

But consider one more important piece of data. Driveton has 50,000 people, while Heresville has 200,000. But they have the same number of annual fatalities. A citizen of Driveton has four times as much chance of dying in a traffic crash as a citizen of Heresville. And yet, Marshall writes, “conventional traffic engineering metrics tell us that Driveton is safer.” (p 85)

Using a per capita metric, rather than a per vehicle mile metric, tells us something crucially important about car-dependent mobility systems.

Marshall looked at 24 years of data from the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System. This data set includes the zip code of the drivers, and population density data is also available for each zip code. After grouping zip codes into twelve categories ranked from highest to lowest population density, Marshall writes, 

“What I found is that those living in the most urban places in the United States experience safety outcomes on par with the safest countries in the world. It gets worse and worse at every step in between until you reach the most rural places, which are on par with the most dangerous countries in the world. The difference? In the United States, you are six times more likely to die on the roads if you live in the most rural areas than in the most urban.” (p 92)

When we use a population metric, rather than a vehicle mile ethic, it’s clear that traffic violence is a greater risk to people who live in more car-dependent areas.

“One of the greatest barriers to road safety is having to drive everywhere, all the time, even for the simplest errand,” Marshall concludes. “More specifically, the greatest barriers to road safety are the places we’ve built that force people to drive everywhere, all the time, even for the simplest errand.” (p 356)

Traffic engineers have aided and abetted that car-dependency, by prioritizing vehicle capacity, speed and throughput on our roads and streets. Making safety the priority – that is, shrinking the per capita rate of traffic deaths and injuries – will require new ways of thinking. Traffic engineers will need to think about why public transit is a non-existent or unattractive option for so many people, and what they can do to help make good transit possible. Traffic engineers will need to plan streets that are safe for children to cross without worried adults hovering around them. Traffic engineers will need to plan streets that people with reduced physical ability can cross safely, and without going hundreds of meters out of their way. Traffic engineers will need to co-ordinate with urban planners to promote neighbourhoods where residents can routinely go shopping, go to school or work, and meet and visit with friends without getting into cars.

Traffic engineers will need to focus more on accessibility, and less on mobility.3

As Lewis Mumford wrote in 1963, in one of Marshall’s favourite quotes, “A good transportation system minimizes unnecessary transportation.”4

Notes

1 American Association of State Highway Officials, the precursor of today’s American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

2 This is a perspective also discussed at length in Jessie Singer’s 2022 book There Are No Accidents, reviewed here.

3 For a discussion of the difference between mobility and accessibility, see The Mobility Maze.

4 Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City, 1963, quoted by Marshall, page 359.

Image at top of page:, “Multi vehicle accident – M4 Motorway, Sydney, NSW, October 2012, photo by sv1ambo, from Wikimedia Commons.

Essential voices for the turn away from car dependency

A review of When Driving Is Not An Option

Also published on Resilience

In forward-thinking municipalities across North America, elected officials and staff members can learn important lessons by taking on the Week Without Driving Challenge. As Anna Letitia Zivarts describes it, “participants have to try to get around for a week without driving. They can take transit, walk, roll, bike, or ask or pay for rides as they try to keep to their regular schedules ….”

When Driving Is Not An Option, published by Island Press, May 2024

In most municipalities, the challenge leads to a difficult but eye-opening week. That’s because in most areas getting around without driving is inconvenient, dangerous, very time-consuming, or next to impossible. As Zivarts writes,

“Even for participants who might already bike, walk or take transit for some of their weekly trips, we’ve heard that the experience has helped them comprehend the difference between taking the easy trips and taking all trips without driving.” (all quotes from When Driving Is Not An Option, Island Press, May 2024.)

Zivarts is a low-vision mom with the neurological condition nystagmus, and a wealth of information and insight about mobility. She started the Disabled Mobility Initiative in Washington state in 2020. “My first goal was making nondrivers visible,” she writes. “I was tired of hearing from elected leaders that ‘everyone’ in their communities drove, so spending more money on bus service or sidewalks just wasn’t necessary. I knew it wasn’t true ….”

In fact, many studies have shown that in most areas of the US, approximately 30% of residents do not drive. When Driving Is Not An Option makes clear that nondrivers are a varied group. Some don’t drive because they have a disability, some because they are too young to drive, some because they can’t afford to drive, some because they have entered the last seven to ten years of life during which an average American can no longer drive safely.

If transportation departments and urban planning staff do not include the voices of nondrivers, they are unlikely to develop policies and infrastructure that will reflect the needs of their whole communities.

In particular, Zivarts notes, planning departments must take care to listen to involuntary as well as voluntary nondrivers. She describes voluntary nondrivers as “people who have the financial resources, immigration status, and physical ability to own and drive a vehicle but choose not to.”

While she makes a strong case for a coalition that includes both voluntary and involuntary drivers, her book highlights “the expertise and lived experience … that comes from involuntary non-drivers, with an emphasis on the expertise of low-income, Black, Brown, immigrant, and disabled people, caregivers, and queer and trans people.” And she does a superb job of bringing us the insights from this wealth of expertise.

For much of my adult life I’ve been among the voluntary nondrivers. I have also had periods when due to disability I’ve been unable to drive, and as a senior I anticipate a time, coming soon, when I won’t be able to drive. But in recounting the experiences of the wide range of nondrivers she has worked with, Zivarts offers many perspectives that were new to me.

The problems and shortcomings – with existing infrastructure, municipal planning policies, traffic engineering standards, and university curricula for would-be planners and engineers – are manifold. Zivarts’ book is excellent in describing specific problems, and equally good at linking the issues of mobility justice to other struggles. So we learn about the connections between car-dependent transport policies and housing affordability, the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards, and the challenges of climate mitigation and adaptation.

The book’s subtitle is “steering away from car dependency”, and to accomplish that goal we need not just clear knowledge but also an effective coalition that draws on as many groups as possible. Zivarts quotes former Seattle mayor Mike McGinn:

“Politics runs on power, and those defending and benefiting from the status quo have power. Whether those directly benefiting from the billions spent on road expansion or those who have their transportation choices and convenience deeply subsidized, not just by dollars, but by the lost lives, lost health, and lost opportunity of those most damaged by overbuilt roads and pollution. To beat that kind of entrenched privilege and power takes more than white papers, it takes organizing.”

Zivarts lays out the stakes and the hope in a concluding paragraph that needs to be quoted in full:

“As the sky turns orange, the storms get stronger, and the waves higher, we are reminded of the immediacy of the threat and the moral prerogative to disrupt failed mobility and land use systems that are locking us into decades of carbon emissions. We also need to be reminded of the immediate daily and cumulative public health and environmental harms from tire dust, noise pollution, and traffic violence/enforcement, harms that wealthier, Whiter, nondisabled people are largely able to avoid. But those of us who can’t drive, because of disability, age, or income, see every day how automcobility is failing us. And we also believe that it must be changed. With our guidance, and a recognition of this leadership, we can and will create a different future.”

Photo at top of post from getarchive.net, public domain.

Finding safe paths through suburbia

Also published on Resilience

The post-WWII suburban settlement pattern assumes and reinforces car travel as the default transport choice for its residents. Do such settlements have a future when the temporary energy bonanza of the past 100 years falters? And can residents of suburbia begin to create that future today?

This series on the transition from car-dependency to walkability has examined the integral, sometimes convoluted relationship between land use planning and transportation planning. We’ve looked at major, top-down initiatives as well as small-scale efforts to intensify suburban land uses. This post will look primarily at small scale, from-the-ground-up efforts to make suburban travel safer for people who want to make more trips on foot or on bike.

The problems of suburbia arise not only at a local level, but are also due to national laws and subsidies that favour car ownership, state and provincial funding and specifications for expressways and major arterial roads, a housing development industry whose bread and butter is clearing land on the urban fringe for cookie-cutter subdivisions, and an entrenched culture within municipal governments that prioritizes throughput of vehicles in transportation plans.

Changes are needed at all of those levels – and some of those changes will take a lot of time, money, and political will. At a local level, though, political will can implement some important changes in very little time and with modest expenditures.

The Strong Towns organization promotes an approach that de-emphasizes large, comprehensive, expensive projects that will take years to produce results. By contrast, they advocate a simple, bottom-up approach to making small changes, starting right away:

“1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.

2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?

3. Do that thing. Do it right now.

4. Repeat.”1

Some of the barriers to walkability are small and can be quickly fixed – but in some cases they are left unfixed for years because “we are doing a transportation masterplan” which will, hopefully, propose a solution to be implemented years from now. A good example would be installing curb cuts that could make crossings accessible to someone pushing a stroller or traveling in a wheelchair. Simple improvements like this, when repeated at dozens of locations, can make life easier for many citizens and build hope and confidence that a municipality is moving in the right direction – even if larger and more elaborate changes are also needed.

A related approach, known as “tactical urbanism”, has been popularized by Mike Lydon and put into practice in many cities. (For an excellent introduction to Lydon’s approach see the video Tactical Urbanism: Transform your City Today! hosted by Gil Penalosa of 8/80 Cities.) Tactical Urbanism also looks for projects that can be implemented quickly and cheaply, though they might fit into a grand vision for much larger change to follow. By implementing changes quickly, on a pilot-project basis, this approach also allows much more effective public consultation.

As Lydon explains, typical public consultation processes fail to reach many of the people most affected by projects. The advantage of rapidly implemented pilot projects is that they allow public consultation to happen outdoors, onsite, where the people most affected by a change can see how the change is affecting their daily lives.

An example would be a “road diet”, in which a section of a four-lane collector road is reduced to three lanes – one travel lane in each direction, plus a shared center lane for left turns – thus freeing enough space for a protected bike lane on each side. Another example would be installing a “bump-out” at an intersection to reduce the unprotected distance a pedestrian needs to cross. These pilot projects can typically be done with nothing more expensive than paint and flexible, temporary plastic bollards. Following onsite consultations during the pilot project, the plan can be scrapped, modified, or implemented on a more durable permanent basis – all in less time than a comprehensive masterplan process would need to get to a draft stage.

Regular but temporary “open streets” programs – that is, closing streets to cars so they are open to people – have helped millions of people envision and understand how they could experience their cities in safer, more enjoyable, more pro-social ways. The most famous of these experiments began decades ago in Bogotá, Colombia. Today Bogotá’s program includes more than 100 km of city streets which are opened every Sunday, to a vast range of activities including exercise classes, street theatre, children’s games. The Open Streets program has spread to scores of cities, including many in North America, and has often led to permanent establishment of pedestrian blocks.2

“We’ll work with anyone – but we won’t wait for anyone”

Tactical urbanism programs often get their impetus from small groups of residents proposing changes to city staff. In some cases, though, tactical urbanist improvements are made directly by citizens who have tired of waiting for the slow wheels of bureaucracy to turn. This was the subject of a fascinating webinar entitled “Direct Action Gets the Goods: The Rise of Illicit Tactical Urbanism.”3 Led by Jessie Singer, author of There Are No Accidents, the webinar heard from anonymous direct action activists in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chattanooga. Their activities have included painting city-standard crosswalks at locations suggested by community members through a website form; installing benches at bus stops that lacked any nod to user comforts; and installing temporary bollards to convert a dangerous right-turn lane into a traffic-calming bump-out.

As the panelists explained, sometimes the citizen-installed crosswalks or benches were quickly removed by city staff. Just as often, however, city staff received so many messages of support for the new improvements that they were left in place, or quickly upgraded to a higher standard. In either case, the publicity the groups receive on social media ensures that important issues get a boost in visibility. Although advocacy work is sometimes seen as a win-or-lose game, a Crosswalks Collective Los Angeles member explained, “with guerrilla urbanism, there is no such thing as losing.”

“Where the sidewalk ends”, North St. Louis, photo by Paul Sableman, May 9, 2012, licensed via CC BY 2.0 DEED, accessed on Flickr.

Follow the footsteps

When city staff take a close look at what citizens are accomplishing or attempting to accomplish on their own, they may discover ways their suburban environments can be improved. In an article entitled “Walking to the Strip Mall,” Nico Larco notes that informal pedestrian routes are common around suburban strip malls, indicating that even without good infrastructure, significant numbers of people walk to these malls. He notes that:

“Pedestrian networks in suburbia are much more than just sidewalks along streets. They include sidewalks within private property, cut-throughs, the streets themselves, paved and unpaved bike paths, informal goat paths, makeshift gates in fences, and kickdowns.”4

While these routes make it easier for some residents to get to and from these malls, they are far from ideal. The routes may be muddy, rough, impassable for people pushing strollers, strewn with garbage, routed through ditches, vacant lots, woods, and may be unlit at night. They often also lead to the rear loading-dock area of a strip mall, rather than the parking lot side where store entrances are located.

However, city staff should be looking at each case to see whether it is feasible to formalize some of these informal routes to make them useful and safe for a greater number of nearby residents. For example, it may be possible to secure an easement on a strip of private land, so that an informal pedestrian route can be formalized, paved or otherwise maintained, and lighted. Perhaps a public access doorway can be installed at the rear of a building, providing straight-through access for pedestrians who would benefit from a formalized pathway from their homes to the commercial entrances of the mall.

Clearly, each case will be different and not all of the informal pedestrian paths are likely to be good candidates for upgrading. But if they don’t take seriously the “votes” of citizens who are already marking out paths with their steps, municipal officials will miss an important chance to learn and to improve their suburban environments.

Walkable, bikeable, or both?

Jeff Speck has written,

“Walkable cities are also bikeable cities, because bicycles thrive in environments that support pedestrians and also because bikeability makes driving less necessary.”5

Once supportive and safe infrastructure is provided, rates of walking and biking go up dramatically. But biking is likely to be even more significant in suburban contexts, simply because distances tend to be greater. For the foreseeable future, many suburban trips are likely to be too long for walking to be a practical option – but the range of bicycles is growing due to electrification.

With the widespread availability of electric-assist bikes, a big share of suburban trips are now fully within the range of adults of average fitness. E-bikes can be a convenient, healthy, and economical transportation choice for individuals. Several US states and cities are now providing subsidies to residents for purchases of e-bikes.6

A study of e-bike potential noted that in England, an average person could comfortably use a bike for a trip of 11 km (6.8 miles), while the same average person could go 20 km (12.4 miles) on an electric-assist bike.7 One conclusion is that e-bikes could reduce car use even more in rural and suburban areas, where transit services are poor and distances are longer, than in urban cores where there are many options for the mostly short trips.

According to the United States Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, in 2021 just over 50% of all trips were three miles or less.8

Source: Estimated for the Bureau of Transportation Statistics by the Maryland Transportation Institute and Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory at the University of Maryland. The travel statistics are produced from an anonymized national panel of mobile device data from multiple sources.

If the average resident of the US or Canada is as physically capable as the average resident of England, then even the trips in the third and fourth categories on the chart above would be feasible for many people on e-assist bikes. That would make bikes and e-bikes practical options for about 80% of trips – as long as there is safe infrastructure on which to ride those e-bikes.

The benefits of a switch by a significant segment of the population to e-bikes for many of their daily journeys would include not only a substantial reduction in traffic, but also a reduction in CO2 emissions, better health for the people making that lifestyle change, and significant cost reductions both for individuals and for cities.

Citing AAA figures, Michael Thomas wrote this month that

“After fuel, maintenance, insurance, taxes, and the like, owning and driving a new car in America costs $10,728 a year. My e-bike, by comparison, cost $2,000 off the rack and has near-negligible recurring charges.”

If a typical two-car family can trade one of their cars for an e-bike, that can make suburban housing suddenly much more affordable. But even the cost savings aren’t “the real reason you should get an e-bike,” Thomas wrote, because

“Study after study shows that people with longer car commutes are more likely to experience poor health outcomes and lower personal well-being—and that cyclists are the happiest commuters.”9

Should your municipality consider offering subsidies to encourage e-bike use? Consider that a $400 (US) subsidy could cover from 20% to 40% of the cost of a good e-bike, while that amount would be too small to be relevant to the potential buyer of an electric car. Consider also that e-bike charging stations could be installed at libraries, schools, shopping malls, and other destinations at a small fraction of the cost of electric car chargers, with little or no need to install electric grid upgrades.

* * *

There are a host of complications in transforming car-dependent suburbs. When I started this series on car-dependent suburbs, I planned to finish with one post on making the transformation to walkable, bikeable communities. That concluding post has now stretched to three long posts and I’ve just scratched the surface.

Clearly the best option would be to stop digging ourselves into these holes: stop building car-dependent suburbs now. But if you’re already in a car-dependent suburb, the time to start the transition to a walkable community is also now.

Notes

1 In “The Strong Towns Approach to Public Investment,” by Charles Marohn, Strong Towns, Sept 23, 2019.

2 See The Open Streets Project for information on these programs.

3 Part of the Vision Zero Cities 2023 conference sponsored by Transportation Alternatives, Oct 18, 2023.

4 “Walking to the Strip Mall: Retrofitting Informal Pedestrian Paths,” by Nico Larco, in Retrofitting Sprawl: Addressing Seventy Years of Failed Urban Form, edited by Emily Talen, University of Georgia Press, 2015.

5 Walkable City, 10th Anniversary Edition, by Jeff Speck, Picador, 2022, page 72.

6 “Free electric bikes? How many US cities and states are handling e-bike subsidies,” electric.co, 19 Feb 2023.

7 “E-bikes and their capability to reduce car CO2 emissions,” by Ian Philips, Jillian Anable and Tim Chatterton, Transport Policy, February 2022.

8 “More than Half of all Daily Trips Were Less than Three Miles in 2021,” US Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, March 21, 2022.

9 “The real reason you should get an e-bike,” by Michael Thomas, The Atlantic, 20 Oct 2023.

Photo at top of page: “A man walks south on Cobb Parkway just south of Southern Polytechnic State University and Life University, a stretch of US 41 lacking sidewalks almost entirely. He’s got a long walk ahead to find the next crosswalk, which is 0.9 miles from the last one at Highway 120 — a stretch that is also almost completely devoid of sidewalks on both sides of the street.” Photo by Transportation For America, Metro Atlanta Pedestrians series, on Flickr, taken March 30, 2012, licensed via CC 2 BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED.

Turning a new leaf in suburbia

Also published on Resilience

Social critic James Howard Kunstler referred to suburban sprawl as “the greatest misallocation of resources in history.”1 In his view, “The suburbs have three destinies – as slums, salvage yards, and ruins.”2

While agreeing that suburbs in their current form are “hopelessly maladapted to the coming world of energy descent,” permaculture pioneer David Holmgren nevertheless believes that “Low-density detached housing with gardens is the ideal place for beginning a bottom-up revolution to recreate the household and community non-monetary economies that our recent forebears took for granted as the basis for an adequate, even comfortable, life.”3

Suburbs have not come to an end – I’m my region, in fact, they are still adding suburban sprawl like there’s no tomorrow. Signs of positive transformations of suburban developments exist across North America, but you might need to look carefully to notice.

This post will look at some of those signs of transformation and how they might be accelerated. In contrast to the last post, Can car-dependent suburbs become walkable communities?, this post and the next will focus mostly on small-scale initiatives.

The major theme of this series of posts has been the contrast between car-dependency and walkable communities. Walkability is a transportation issue, of course, but it is more than that.

It is often said that transportation planning and land use planning are two sides of the same coin.4 It’s important to look at both issues, not only as they are addressed in government policies, but also as they are addressed by individuals or small groups of neighbours.

For the purposes of this discussion, three key features of suburbia are:

  1. zoning rules that mandate the separation of residential districts from commercial districts and industrial districts;
  2. the default assumption that people will drive cars from their homes to workplaces, stores, cultural events, and recreational facilities; and
  3. the organization of the resulting car traffic into maze-like local residential streets, larger collector streets, six-to-eight lane major arterials, and expressways.

These basic parameters have many implications as discussed in previous posts. The practice of driving everywhere means there also needs to be parking at every location, so that a typical suburban district has several parking spaces for every car. (See How parking ate North American cities.)

The funneling of traffic to bigger but more widely spaced roads leads to traffic jams during every rush hour, and dangerous speeding when traffic volumes are low. The dangerous collector and arterial roads put vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, at risk of death or serious injury in getting from their own immediate neighbourhoods to other neighbourhoods. (See Building car-dependent neighbourhoods).

And the low residential and employment density of sprawl makes it difficult and expensive to build public transit systems that run frequently and within a short walk of most residents. The result is that suburban sprawl seldom has good transit, which in turn strongly reinforces car-dependency. (See Recipes for car dependency.)

Change will not be optional

Notwithstanding the difficulties of transforming the suburban pattern, I believe it will happen for this simple reason:

That which is not sustainable will not be sustained.

First, suburban sprawl is not financially sustainable, particularly in the governance arrangements we have in North America. As Strong Towns has demonstrated through numerous articles, podcasts and videos, North American suburban expansion has been a Ponzi scheme. While expansion infrastructure is usually paid for through a combination of federal government and developer funding, local municipalities are left with the liabilities for infrastructure maintenance and eventual replacement. That wouldn’t be a problem if the new districts could raise sufficient property tax revenue to cover these liabilities. But they don’t.

Low-density housing tracts, interspersed with one-story shopping centers and strip malls, all surrounded by expansive parking, don’t bring in nearly as much property tax/acre as denser, multi-story developments in older downtown districts do. The low tax revenue, coupled with very high maintenance-replacement liabilities for extensive roadways, parking lots, and utilities, eventually catch up with municipalities. And then? Some can keep the game going, simply by getting more funding grants for even further sprawl – thus the “Ponzi scheme” moniker – but eventually they run out of room to expand.

As Charles Marohn has written, “Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that’s just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes.”5

Worth noting is that as climate instability forces infrastructure reconstructions to happen more frequently and to higher standards, the pressure on municipal governments will be even more intense. And as energy costs spike higher, fewer residents will be able to afford the long commutes in private cars that they now take for granted.

When suburban municipalities face bankruptcy, what will the choices be? Certainly one choice is to abandon some areas to become, in Kunster’s words “slums, salvage yards, and ruins.” For reasons explained below, I think it’s more likely that municipalities will allow more varied and denser developments than are currently permitted by zoning codes, so that a larger property tax base can help cover infrastructure liabilities.

Suburban sprawl is also likely to prove unsustainable at the level of individual homes. Debt has grown rapidly in recent decades, and a great deal of that debt is in the form of mortgages by homeowners – many of whom live in the far reaches of suburbia.

Jeff Speck wrote “The typical American working family now lives in suburbia, where the practice of drive-’til-you-qualify reigns supreme.”6 Due to a dearth of affordable homes inside American cities (and in Canadian cities as well), new home buyers have only been able to qualify for mortgages far from urban cores. The price for somewhat cheaper housing, however, is that each working member of the family is likely to need a car to get to and from work. In Speck’s words,

“The average American family now spends about $14,000 per year driving multiple cars. … Remarkably, the typical ‘working’ family, with an income of $20,000 to $50,000, pays more for transportation than for housing.”7

When families are paying for the biggest mortgage they qualify for plus the cost of keeping two or more cars on the road, the shock of higher interest rates, a rise in unemployment, and/or higher gas costs can be too much to sustain. Referring to the 2007-2009 oil price spike and economic downturn, Speck explains that “as gasoline broke $4.00 per gallon and the housing bubble burst, the epicenter of foreclosures occurred at the urban periphery.”8

In coming economic crises, on a collective scale or an individual scale, I wouldn’t expect the suburbs to be abandoned or to be torn down en masse and rebuilt. Frankly, I don’t expect society to be wealthy enough to simply start over in other places or following other patterns. Instead, I would expect both municipal governments and individuals to muddle through by making a wide range of adjustments. And some of those are starting already.

The household as a place of production, just consumption

As Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson have written, “Built environment change is slow and contested. In a developed city, turnover (additions and alterations) in the built stock is typically much less than five per cent per annum.”9 But while buildings, lots and streets may change slowly, the activities that go on there may change more rapidly.

One significant change has been happening already, in spite of zoning rules that typically disallow the change.

In a post titled “Your Home Office Might Be Illegal,” Edward Erfurt wrote,

“The frontline zoning battle for the right to work out of your home hit center stage during COVID. Under most zoning codes, we are all breaking the law.”10

He adds that “Working from home and working out of a home has become normalized. … Others have even taken the next incremental step of leaving a corporate job to open a new business in our homes.”

Simply turning a blind eye to zoning violations is one thing, but Erfurt urges municipalities to take a proactive approach:

“Home Occupations should be permitted by right in every zoning category in your community. Whether you are working remotely for a large corporation or running your own business, you should have the right to do this within your home. Cities should encourage home occupations as a tenet of their economic development strategy, and a single line could be added to any code to focus the planners.”

Robert Rice describes how the dynamic is now playing out in Houston:

“This is how the Suburban Experiment really ends: not with explosive legislation, but with regular people making the best of what they have. In Houston, what we have is houses. I propose that these new house-businesses, home offices, and de-facto multifamily residences are the first increment of intensity for a suburban neighborhood.”11

Some of these changes are taking place in accord with current law and some in defiance of current law. However, many jurisdictions across North America are now changing rules to allow modestly greater density in residential areas, including in suburbs. Travis Beck recently wrote:

“Minneapolis, for example, ended single-family zoning effective January 2020, allowing the construction of duplexes and triplexes on all residential lots. Oregon passed legislation in 2019 requiring cities with populations above 25,000 to allow construction of duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes on all residential lots. And California’s 2021 Senate Bill 9 allows the construction of duplexes on residential lots and the splitting of sufficiently large lots into two parcels, effectively allowing four housing units to be built in place of one.”12

Even the province of Ontario, infamous for bungled attempts to enrich land speculators by fast-tracking sprawl on previously protected lands, recent legislation specifies that “up to three residential units are permitted ‘as of right’ on most land zoned for one home in residential areas without needing a municipal by-law amendment.”13

Intermittent additions of one or two residences per lot may seem insignificant compared with the scope of the housing crisis; such zoning changes are certainly not sufficient to make suburbia sustainable. Yet such changes provide for greater flexibility in housing options and promote actions by individual property owners and small contractors, in contrast to the large developers who are often spoken of as the only actors who can solve the housing crisis. Paradoxically, the pace of densification on a lot-by-lot basis could pick up in an economic downturn, if significant numbers of homeowners decide it makes sense to downsize their overly-large residences by creating one or two rental units.

It’s not only the number of residential units and the number of residences that matter, but also the kinds of activities that happen in residential neighbourhoods. As discussed above, a large number of suburban homes are now de facto workplaces. The work done in and around homes, whether or not that work is counted in official economic statistics, could become a greater factor in the suburban economy.

The Victory Garden movements of the last century encouraged people to raise food in their own yards, whether they lived in cities, the nascent suburbs, small towns or rural areas. In the US, during WW I about one-third of US vegetables came from Victory Gardens. By 1943 during WW II, there were 12 million Victory Gardens in cities. A Wikipedia article notes that “While Victory Gardens were portrayed as a patriotic duty, 54% of Americans polled said they grew gardens for economic reasons while only 20% mentioned patriotism.” (Image on left is a WWI-era poster from Canada; at right is WWII image from use. Images and data from Wikipedia article Victory garden.)

One of the key features of most suburbs, visible from the street or from the air, is the small- or medium-size plot of lawn adjacent to each single-family dwelling. But the biological desert of the standard lawn can easily be replaced with something much more life-giving. Alexander and Gleeson write:

“Digging up backyards and front yards and planting fruit and vegetables, keeping chickens, and composting, are important practices, reconnecting people with the seasons, the soil, and the food on their plates. In the words of permaculture activist and educator, Adam Grubb, we should ‘eat the suburbs’.”14

A frequent objection to this idea is that few people could raise all their own food on a typical suburban lot. Quite true, and quite beside the point. More relevant is that many and perhaps most suburban residents could raise a significant portion of their fruits, vegetables, herbs, eggs, and other foods if they choose. In the process, they and their communities would become more resilient while promoting greater local biodiversity.

Suburban landscapes often include many other strips of green, kept semi-alive through regular mowing and sometimes watering: strips between areas of parking lots, in front of strip malls, on medians within major arterials, within the “cloverleafs” of expressway interchanges. Alexander and Gleeson invite us to imagine the transformation of these areas:

“Over time, we can imagine food production crossing beyond household boundaries, too, re-commoning public space. This is already under way, as people reclaim nature strips for food production, plant fruit trees in the neighborhood, establish community gardens, and cultivate unused land through “guerrilla gardening.’”15

Alexander and Gleeson write in an Australian context. In North America, a great example of similar change is the work of permaculture proponent Jan Spencer in Eugene, Oregon. Over the past twenty-three years he has transformed his quarter-acre suburban lot into an oasis. Starting with an 1,100 square foot home fronted by a driveway big enough to park six cars, Spencer gradually turned the driveway and surrounding spaces into three-dimensional gardens, added enough water tanks to collect thousands of gallons of rainwater to keep his gardens happy through the typically dry local summer, and built a 400 square foot living space for himself so he could rent out three rooms in the house.16

As Spencer explains, a key permaculture principle is to design each change so that it meets multiple purposes. With his changes he has, among other things, increased the residential density of his property, provided an income for himself, taken major steps toward food security, added carbon storage, buffered the effects of extreme heat, drought, and rainfall, and reduced the draw on city utilities such as the water system.

Such activities hold the potential of turning the suburban household “into a place of production, not merely consumption.”17

Trip generation

What do home offices and front-yard gardens have to do with transportation? Recall the incantation of traffic engineers: “trip generation.”

A home with, for example, two adult residents “generates” fewer trips when one of those adults can work at home most days instead of commuting. The home will generate fewer trips to buy groceries if the household grows a lot of their own vegetables in the summer, and perhaps puts up some of those vegetables for the winter too.

A family with two or three cars for each working member may find they can trade one of those cars for a bike, taking the bike on grocery runs much of the time. Each family which reduces the number of cars they own not only reduces traffic, but also reduces the number of parking spaces needed both in their immediate neighbourhood and at the stores, schools or workplaces they can reach without driving. Which, in turn, makes it more feasible to gradually increase the number of residences in a neighbourhood or the number of stores in a shopping plaza, as the need to devote precious space to parking is reduced.

Obviously, not every suburban resident can make these type of lifestyle changes at present. Just as obviously, we don’t need all, or even most, suburban residents to become car-free before we see a major impact on traffic patterns and usage of public transit. Finally and obviously, only a limited number of people will willingly bike or walk outside of their immediate neighbourhoods until we make the roads safe for them, and few people will willingly switch to public transit if the service is slow, infrequent, or unreliable.

So zoning and land use changes, while necessary, are not sufficient to transform car-dependent suburbia into sustainable, walkable communities. Many changes to transportation policy and infrastructure are also needed. Some of these will require governments to play a major role, but many can be initiated by small groups of neighbours who see immediate problems and advocate or demonstrate simple solutions. Those changes will be the subject of the next post in this series.

Notes

1 TED talk transcript, April 20, 2007.

2 Quoted by Leigh Gallagher in The End of the Suburbs, Penguin Books, 2013; page 206. As an aside, it was in Gallagher’s book that I first learned of the Strong Towns movement; I have been learning from their blog posts, books, podcasts and videos ever since.

3 Foreword to Degrowth in the Suburbs, by Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; page vii.

4 E.g., see Land Use Impacts on Transport: How Land Use Factors Affect Travel Behavior, by Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, Victoria, BC. Page 3.

5 “America’s Growth Ponzi Scheme,” Strong Towns, May 18, 2020.

6 Walkable City, 10th Anniversary Edition, by Jeff Speck, Picador, 2022; page 30.

7 Walkable City, page 30.

8 Walkable City, page 30.

9 Degrowth in the Suburbs, page 12.

10 Edward Erfurt, “Your Home Office Might Be Illegal”, on Strong Towns blog, Oct 13, 2023.

11 Robert Rice, “The End of Suburbia Starts with Disobedience,” on Strong Towns blog, Oct 13, 2023. Rice explains both the differences and similarities between the deed restrictions that are common in Houston, and the zoning-based restrictions much more common in most American cities.

12 In “ADUs Can Help Address The Lack Of Housing. But They’re Bad Urban Design.” by Travis Beck, Next City, Oct 5, 2023.

13 From “Backgrounder: More Homes Built Faster Act, 2022”, Ontario Government Newsroom, November 28, 2022.

14 Degrowth in the Suburbs, page 133.

15 From “Suburban Practices of Energy Descent,” by Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson, Energy Transition and Economic Sufficiency, Kreps & Cobb, editors, Post Carbon Institute, 2021; page 189.

16 See Spencer’s description of this project in “Transforming suburbia,” on Resilience.org, October 6, 2023, and a video tour of Spencer’s property conducted by Laura Sweeny of Raintree Nursery.

17 “Suburban Practices of Energy Descent,” page 190.

Image at top of page: Levittown, PA, circa 1959, adapted from public domain image at Wikimedia Commons.

Can car-dependent suburbs become walkable communities?

Also published on Resilience

“The majority of urban areas in most cities today are car-dependent,” writes urban planner Tristan Cleveland, “leaving little room for walkable growth unless cities can convert large areas of existing suburbs into pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods.”

Yet the processes of change are even more difficult in suburbs than in urban cores: “The barriers to walkable design are greatest in such suburban contexts, where the momentum for car-oriented design is most entrenched.”

Cleveland is an urban planning consultant who works with Happy Cities, a consultancy based in Halifax and Vancouver. His 2023 PhD thesis, Urban Intercurrence, is a thorough, enlightening, readable, jargon-lite study of how and why some suburban districts embark on the transition from car-dependent sprawl to walkable neighbourhoods. (A tip of the hat to Strong Towns, where I first learned of Tristan Cleveland’s work through this podcast interview.)

The work’s subtitle – “The Struggle To Build Walkable Downtowns In Car-Dependent Suburbia” – indicates an important limitation in scope. This is not a study of attempts to convert a car-dependent suburb as a whole, but more simply to develop a high-density, walkable district within a larger suburb. Even so, Cleveland demonstrates, the pitfalls are many and successes to date are partial at best.

Cleveland’s insights make for a good follow-up to recent posts here on car-dependent development. A first post, Recipes for Car-Dependency, looked at car-dependent development on a regional scale, in which a superfluity of highways and major arterial roads is matched with scarce, infrequent public transit. The second post, Building Car-Dependent Neighbourhoods, focused on car-dependent development at a neighbourhood scale.

But once car-dependent regions and neighbourhoods are established, is it possible to retrofit them, in whole or in part, to escape this car-dependency?

In my opinion it is not only possible, but is probably inevitable – though it may take a long time and it may involve difficult disruptions. Probably inevitable, because the suburban lifestyle is built on and presupposes cheap energy to power swarms of private cars which each carry one or two occupants many kilometers to work, school, and shopping on a daily basis. When this energy is no longer available and affordable to most residents, car-dependent lifestyles will change by necessity.

In the meantime, some residents and municipalities are already promoting car-lite or car-free lifestyles for other important reasons: to improve public health by simultaneously reducing air pollution and the diseases of sedentary lifestyles; to build social cohesion by encouraging more people to walk through their neighbourhoods to local shops; to cover rising infrastructure maintenance costs by achieving compact urban and suburban developments with a higher tax base; to make frequent and timely public transit possible in districts with sufficient population density.

As Cleveland notes, walkable neighbourhoods are in high demand but scarce supply, leading to sky-high rents and real estate prices in such districts. And since most North Americans now live in suburbs, providing the walkable neighbourhoods many people would prefer to live in will necessarily involve a significant degree of suburban retrofitting.

Urban Intercurrence provides detailed looks at four concerted attempts to build walkable downtown districts in suburbs. One is in a suburb of Vancouver, another in a suburb of Toronto, a third in a classic “edge city” in the orbit of Washington, DC, and one about ten miles from downtown Miami, Florida.

Before diving into the specifics of each project, Cleveland provides a valuable primer on a hundred years of car-prioritized developments. This history is essential to understanding why the retrofit examples have all had slow and limited success.

The history review and the examples are relevant and useful to transportation activists, environmental justice activists, municipal planners and officials.

Intercurrence and inverse feedback

For a PhD thesis Urban Intercurrence is remarkably light on specialist jargon, and Cleveland also defines clearly what he means by words or phrases that may be unfamiliar to a lay audience. Many of the issues he discusses will be familiar to any activist who has attended public meetings in favour of adding bike paths, reducing width of car lanes, or repurposing some of the vast area now devoted to car parking.

There is, to be sure, an out-of-the-ordinary word in the thesis title. Cleveland adopts the word “intercurrence” from political science, where it refers to “the ways in which multiple, contradictory paradigms of thought and practice can co-exist within institutions, and how their contradictions can shape policy.” (Pg 5. Unless noted otherwise, all quotes in this article are from Urban Intercurrence.)

The contradictory paradigms sometimes come from professionals who are educated with different orientations. In recent decades the urban planning profession has been strongly influenced by the movement to create safe, attractive, walkable districts, Cleveland says. Traffic engineering departments, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the swift and unimpeded movement of vehicles. Both groups are involved in suburban retrofits, and sometimes the result is a project that spends much public money to encourage walkability, and just as much or more money widening car lanes on more roadways, thereby discouraging walkability.

A paradigm like car-dependency tends to be self-reinforcing. If nearly all the residents in a district travel by car, then shopping centers have their doors opening to large parking areas, instead of opening directly to a sidewalk where the rare pedestrian might pass by. If each single-family home needs two or three parking spaces, then residents and their municipal councillors typically fear that even a mid-size apartment building will overwhelm the neighbourhood’s parking supply.

Nevertheless, car-dependency sometimes causes discontent with car-dependency. In many suburban areas today, roadways are so chronically congested that voters are ready to approve new public transit systems. At the same time, housing developers used to building low-density, car-dependent subdivisions may switch to advocating for high-density developments once they’ve used up most of the available land.

Cleveland writes, “I refer to these contradictory feedback processes — which undermine car-dependence, reinforce walkability, or at least enable a shift towards walkability — as ‘inverse feedback.’” (pg 5)

He cites clear examples of competing paradigms and inverse feedback in each of the four suburban retrofit case studies. In each case, inverse feedback provides an opening for walkability advocates to initiate change. Importantly, however, when car-oriented interests offer support to walkability, that support is limited and insufficient to result in a walkable neighbourhood:

“To complete a shift to walkability, it is necessary, at some point, for walkability to begin to reinforce itself on its own terms, at the expense of car-dependence. That is to say: it is necessary for walkable interests to identify as such, to defend their needs, to establish separate standards, and to normalize those standards. It is also essential for walkable development to achieve a sufficient scale that it can begin to attract other, similar growth. Car-dependence may cause backlash that inspires change, but to complete change, it is essential for those who have a direct stake in walkability to complete the transformation.” (pg 6)

The timeline is long, very long

Two important facts jump out when reading the four case studies of retrofits. First, change in these instances is primarily a top-down process, promoted and initiated by local governments, major developers, or both. Second, the move to walkability has taken thirty or forty years, with action stalled for years in some cases, and while significant progress has been made, none of the four projects have yet fully realized their original goals.

In Surrey, BC, a suburb of Vancouver, formal planning for a walkable downtown district began in the 1980s. Zoning changes alone failed to convince developers to build high-density projects geared to walkability. The city finally took major steps in the 21st century, building a new city hall and public library complex in a prime location. Even then developers hesitated, so in 2007 “The city established the Surrey City Development Corporation (SCDC), an arms-length company for which the city remained the sole shareholder, but which could raise capital, build market-oriented development projects, and partner with other development firms to help to encourage them to invest.” (pg 134)

The new developments were located adjacent to a station of the SkyTrain, a commuter train that goes to downtown Vancouver. The existence of the SkyTrain helped convince many car-dependent residents to support a walkable, high-density Surrey City Centre. However, this expensive transit line made it difficult to get funding for other intra-suburb lines that might have been of even more benefit in freeing Surrey residents from car-dependency. As Cleveland explains:

“A SkyTrain can appeal to otherwise car-dependent voters because it can replace the one trip that is most difficult to make by car — commuting through traffic to work — and it can also help to alleviate rush-hour traffic by replacing some of those car trips. And it does not consume road space. However, a SkyTrain to downtown does not meet the needs of people who rely on transit for everyday trips, such as going to daycare, visiting friends, or buying groceries. … A high-speed connection to the downtown makes one kind of trip faster, but does little to enable a complete transit-oriented lifestyle throughout one’s community.” (pg 145-146)

SkyTrain route from Surrey City Centre to downtown Vancouver (image via Apple Maps)

The interplay between transport decisions made by different levels of government has been a complicating factor in all four of the the suburban retrofits Cleveland examines.

Spontaneous generation

As Brian Eno sang on Before and After Science,

“If you study the logistics
and heuristics of the mystics
you will find that their minds rarely move in a line.”1

This aphorism comes to mind when considering the massive roadways that snake through the should-be-walkable suburban retrofits. The plans of the traffic engineers follow a curious logic indeed.

In his book Paved Paradise, Henry Grabar highlighted an assumption deeply embedded in North American traffic engineering. He discusses the Parking Generation Manual published in 1985 by the Institute of Traffic Engineers. Underpinning the nearly infinite specifications for required parking, Grabar says, “the premise is simple: every type of building creates car trips, and projects should be approved, streets designed, and parking constructed according to the science of trip generation.”2

The belief that a building itself somehow generates traffic, and a multi-unit building generates multi-traffic, guides not only parking requirements but also roadway planning. In this thinking, it is not a car-dependent lifestyle or urban layout that generates traffic, it is the mere existence of buildings where people live, work, or shop. As long as this thinking guides traffic engineers, urban planners’ hopes for dense, walkable districts get sidetracked.

In the Uptown Core project in Oakville, Ontario, Cleveland writes,

“Traffic studies … predicted the community would have high traffic demand, requiring wide roads throughout the community. Studies predicted high traffic, ironically, precisely because the community was dense: traffic models assume each unit produces a certain number of traffic trips, regardless of whether the community is designed to be walkable or not.” (pg 203)

Tysons, Virginia is the largest and most famous suburban retrofit project in North America. As a classic “edge city,” Tysons in 1993 had few homes but a forest of high-rise office buildings where 70,000 people worked. The only way to get to these buildings was by car. Two examples of “inverse feedback” helped to prompt a retrofit: prime development land was getting scarce, and roads choked with traffic were undermining the original locational advantage for this mega office park.

Following a wave of investment in high-density housing, the population of Tysons rose to 29,000 by 2021, of which 10,000 lived in transit-oriented developments near the new Silver Line commuter rail service to Washington, DC.

But the planning for a walkable district had to contend with traffic engineers at the county and state level. They insisted that, ideals of walkability notwithstanding, Tysons would need to accommodate ever greater numbers of private vehicles. As a result, “Tysons’ smaller collectors and minor avenues are larger than the widest highways in many cities, at seven to ten lanes.” (pg 166)

Multi-lane highways even run directly past the commuter rail stations, making it unattractive or impossible to build new developments in close proximity to the stations. Ringed and bisected by high-speed, high-volume, high-pollution, very wide roads, Tysons can be summarized as “islands of walkability amidst rivers of car-dependence,” Cleveland writes. (pg 151)

Intercurrence in Tysons is reflected in government expenditures that work at cross-purposes:

“I am aware of few examples where government has spent so heavily to achieve a goal while spending so heavily to undermine it: billions of dollars on subways, sidewalks, and bike lanes, and nearly a billion dollars for widening roads and onramps, and billions more on widening its highways.” (pg 193)

Another lesson to be drawn is that “if it is difficult to shift one path-dependent institution, it is more difficult to shift two simultaneously, Cleveland writes. “Multilevel governance can therefore create additional barriers to change, reducing the likelihood that all relevant institutions will shift to support walkability simultaneously.” (pg 180)

An all-or-nothing proposition?

Because the factors reinforcing suburban car-dependency are many and strong, and most suburban retrofits have had limited success to date, some urbanists have concluded that incremental approaches are doomed to failure.

Cleveland cites various authors who “argue it is better for a single developer to own enough land to build a full-scale walkable community at once, establishing a critical mass of dense housing, pedestrian-friendly streets, and high-quality public spaces, all within walking distance of local shops and services.” (pg 230)

But Cleveland concludes (correctly, I believe), that

“It is important for cities to learn how to implement incremental retrofits, because cities cannot achieve their most urgent goals by retrofitting those few exceptional sites where government owns a former airport, military base, or other large piece of land, and can redevelop it all at once.” (pg 230)

In a coming post we’ll look further at possibilities for incremental change toward walkable suburbs, including changes that are undertaken not by governments but directly by residents.

Photo at top of post: “Express Lanes at Tysons Corner ”, photograph by Trevor Wrayton for Virginia Department of Transportation, licensed by Creative Commons. accessed via flickr.

Notes

1   From the song “Backwater” on the album Before and After Science by Brian Eno, 1977.

2   Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise, Penguin Random House, 2023; pg 153.

Reckoning with ‘the battering ram of the Anthropocene’

Also posted on Resilience

Is the word right on the tip of your tongue? You know, the word that sums up the ecological effects of more, faster and bigger vehicles, driving along more and wider lanes of roadway, throughout your region and all over the world?

If the word “traffication” comes readily to mind, then you are likely familiar with the work of British scientist Paul Donald. After decades spent studying the decline of many animal species, he realized he – and we – need a simple term summarizing the manifold ways that road traffic impacts natural systems. So he invented the word which serves as the title of his important new book Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It.

The field of study now known as road ecology got its start in 1925, when Lillian and Dayton Stoner decided to count and categorize the road kill they observed on an auto trip in the US Midwest. The science of road ecology has grown dramatically, especially in the last 30 years. Many road ecologists today recognize that road kill is not the only, and likely not even the most damaging, effect of the steady increase in traffication.

Noise pollution, air and water pollution, and light pollution from cars have now been documented to cause widespread health problems for amphibians, fish, mammals and birds. These effects of traffication spread out far beyond the actual roadways, though the size of “road effect zones” vary widely depending on the species being studied.

Donald is based in the United Kingdom, but he notes there are relatively few studies in road ecology in the UK; far more studies have been done in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. In summarizing this research Donald makes it clear that insights gained from road ecology should get much more attention from conservation biologists, transport planners, and those writing and responding to environmental impact assessments.

While in no way minimizing the impacts of other threats to biodiversity – agricultural intensification and climate change, to name two – the evidence for traffication as a major threat is just as extensive, Donald writes. He cites an apt metaphor coined by author Bryan Appleyard: the car is “the Anthropocene’s battering ram”.

Traffication has important implications for every country under the spell of the automobile – and particular relevance to a controversy in my own region of Ontario, Canada.

A slow but relentless increase

One reason traffication has been understudied, Donald speculates, is that it has crept up on us.

“These increases have been so gradual, a rise in traffic volume of 1 or 2 per cent each year, that most of us have barely noticed them, but the cumulative effect across a human lifetime has been profound.” … (All quotes in this article from the digital version of Traffication.)

“Since the launch of the first Space Shuttle and the introduction of the mobile phone in the early 1980s,” Donald adds, “the volume of traffic on our roads has more than doubled.”

Though on a national or global scale the increase in traffic has been gradual, in some localities traffication, with all its ill effects, can suddenly accelerate.

That will be the case if the government of Ontario follows through with its plan to rapidly urbanize a rural area on the eastern flank of the new Rouge National Urban Park (RNUP), which in turn is on the eastern flank of Toronto.

The area now slated for housing tracts was, until last November, protected by Greenbelt legislation as farmland, wetland and woodland. That suddenly changed when Premier Doug Ford announced the land is to be the site of 30,000 new houses in new car-dependent suburbs.1 And barring a miracle, the new housing tracts will be car-dependent since the land is distant from employment areas and services, distant from major public transit, and because the Provincial government places far more priority on building new highways than building new transit.

Though the government has made vague promises to protect woodlands and wetlands dotted between the housing tracts, these tiny “nature preserves” would be hemmed in on all sides by new, or newly busy, roads.

As I read through Donald’s catalog of the harms caused by traffication, I thought of the ecological damage that will be caused if traffic suddenly increases exponentially in this area that is home to dozens of threatened species. The same effects are already happening in countless heavily trafficated locales around the world.

“A shattered soundscape”

Donald summarizes the wide array of health problems documented in people who live with constant traffic noise. The effects on animals are no less wide-ranging:

“A huge amount of research, from both the field and the laboratory, has shown that animals exposed to vehicle noise suffer higher stress levels and weakened immune systems, leading to disrupted sleep patterns and a drop in cognitive performance.”

Among birds, he write, “even low levels of traffic noise results in a drop in the number of eggs laid and the health of the chicks that hatch.” As a result, “Birds raised in the presence of traffic noise are prematurely aged, and their future lifespans already curtailed, before they have even left the nest.”

Disruptions in the natural soundscape are particularly stress-inducing to prey species (and most species, even predators, are at risk of being someone else’s prey), since they have difficulty hearing the alarm signals sent out by members of their own and other species. To compensate, Donald writes, “animals living near roads become more vigilant, spending more of their time looking around for danger and consequently having less time to feed.”

A few species are tolerant of high noise levels, and seldom become road kill; their numbers tend to go up as a result of traffication. Many more species are bothered by the noise, even at a distance of several hundred meters from a busy road. That means their good habitat continues to shrink and and their numbers continue to drop. Donald writes that half of the area of the United Kingdom, and three-quarters of the area of England, is within 500 meters of a road, and therefore within the zone where noise pollution drives away or sickens many species.

Six-hundred thousand islands

When coming up to a roadway, Donald explains, some animals pay no attention at all, others pause and then dash across, while others seldom or never cross the road. As the road gets wider, or as the traffic gets faster and louder, more and more species become road avoiders.

While the road avoiders do not end up as roadkill, the road’s effect on the long-term prospects of their species is still negative.

When animals – be they insects, amphibians, mammals or birds – refuse to cross the roads that surround their territories, they are effectively marooned on islands. Taking account of major roads only, the land area of the globe is now divided into 600,000 such islands, Donald writes.

Populations confined to small islands gradually become less genetically diverse, which makes them less resilient to diseases, stresses and catastrophes. Local floods, fires, droughts, or heat waves might wipe out a species within such an island – and the population is not likely to be replenished from another island if the barriers (roadways) are too wide or too busy.

The onset of climate change adds another dimension to the harm:

“For a species to keep up as its climate bubble moves across the landscape , it needs to be able to spread into new areas as they become favourable . … In an era of rapid climate change, wildlife needs landscapes to be permeable, allowing each species to adapt to changing conditions in the optimal way. For many species, and particularly for road-avoiders, our dense network of tarmac [paved road] blockades will prove to be a significant problem.”

Escaping traffication

Is traffication a one-way road, destined to get steadily worse each year?

There are solutions, Donald writes, though they require significant changes from society. He makes clear that electrification of the auto fleet is not one of those solutions. It’s obvious that electric cars will not reduce the numbers of animals sacrificed as road kill. Less obvious, perhaps, is that electric cars will make little difference to the noise pollution, light pollution, and local air pollution resulting from traffication.

At speeds over about 20 mph (32 km/hr) most car noise comes from the sound of tires on pavement, so electric cars remain noisy at speed.

And due to concerted efforts to reduce the tailpipe emissions from gas-powered cars, most particulate emissions from cars are now due to tire wear and brake pad wear. Since electric cars are generally heavier, their non-tailpipe emissions tend to be worse than those from gas-powered cars.

One remedy that has been implemented with great success is the provision of wildlife bridges or tunnels across major roadways. In combination with fencing, such crossings have been found to reduce road kill by more than 80 per cent. The crossings are expensive, however, and do nothing to remedy the effects of noise, particulate pollution, and light pollution.

A partial but significant remedy can be achieved wherever there is a concerted program of auto speed reductions:

“Pretty much all the damage caused by road traffic – to the environment, to wildlife and to our health – increases exponentially with vehicle speed. The key word here is exponentially – a drop in speed of a mere 10 mph might halve some of the problems of traffication, such as road noise and particulate pollution.”

Beyond those remedies, though, the key is social reorganization that results in fewer people routinely driving cars, and then for shorter distances. Such changes will take time – but at least in some areas of global society, such changes are beginning.

Donald finds cause for cautious optimism, he says, in that “society is already drifting slowly towards de-traffication, blown by strengthening winds of concern over human health and climate change.”

There’s scant evidence of this trend in my part of Ontario right now,2 but Donald believes “We might at least be approaching the high water mark of motoring, what some writers refer to as ‘ peak car ’”. Let’s hope he’s right.

1 A scathing report by the Province’s Auditor General found that the zoning change will result in a multi-billion dollar boost to the balance sheets of large land speculators, who also happen to be friends of and donors to the Premier.

2 However, there has been a huge groundswell of protest against Premier Doug Ford’s plan to open up Greenbelt lands for car-dependent suburban sprawl, and it remains unclear if the plan will actually become reality. See Stop Sprawl Durham for more information.

Note to subscribers: the long gap between posts this summer has been due to retina surgery and ensuing complications. It’s too early to tell if I’ll be able to resume and maintain a regular posting schedule, but I do hope to complete a post on transforming car-dependent neighbourhoods as promised in May.

Building car-dependent neighbourhoods

Also published on Resilience

Car-dependent neighbourhoods arise in a multi-level framework of planning, subsidies, advertising campaigns and cultural choices. After that, car dependency requires little further encouragement. Residents are mostly “locked-in”, since possible alternatives to car transport are either dangerous, unpleasant, time-consuming, or all three.

At the same time, municipal officials have strong incentives to simply accept car dependency – it takes bold new thinking to retrofit such neighbourhoods. Voters are likely to resist such new directions, since it is hard for them to imagine making their daily rounds using anything except private cars.

This post continues a discussion of what car dependency looks like on the map. The previous installment looked at car dependency on a regional scale, while this one looks at the neighbourhood scale.

Both posts use examples from Durham Region, a large administrative district on the east flank of Toronto. With a current population of about 700,000, Durham Region is rapidly suburbanizing.

I’ve picked one neighbourhood to illustrate some common characteristics of car-dependent sprawl. I have chosen not to name the neighbourhood, since the point is not to single out any specific locale. The key features discussed below can be seen in recent suburban developments throughout Durham Region, elsewhere in Ontario, and around North America.

Let’s begin to zoom in. In the aerial view below you can see new subdivisions creeping out towards a new expressway. Brown swatches represent farmland recently stripped of topsoil as the first step in transforming rich agricultural land into suburban “development”. (In the short time since this aerial imagery was obtained, the brown swatches have become noticeably more extensive.)

The neighbourhood we’ll focus on includes a high school, conveniently identifiable by its distinctive oval running track.

Subdivisions here are built in a megablock layout, with the large-scale grid intended to handle most of the traffic. Within each megablock is a maze of winding roads and lots of dead-ends. The idea is to discourage through traffic on residential streets, but this street pattern has many additional consequences.

First, from the centre of one megablock to the centre of another nearby megablock, there is seldom a direct and convenient route. A trip that might be a quarter of a kilometer as the crow flies might be a kilometer or two as the car drives. In the worst areas, there are no available short cuts for cyclists or pedestrians either.

Second, the arterial roads need to be multilane to cope with all the traffic they collect – and as “development” proceeds around them they are soon overwhelmed. “Recovering engineer” Charles Marohn explains this phenomenon using an analogy from hydrology. At a time of heavy rain, a whole bunch of little streams feed into progressively larger streams, which soon fill to capacity. With a pattern of “collector” roads emptying into secondary arterial roads into primary arterials and then into expressways, suburban road systems manage to engineer traffic “floods” each time there is a “heavy rain” – that is, each morning and afternoon at rush hour.1

As we zoom in to our high school’s neighbourhood, note another pattern repeated throughout this region. Within a residential neighbourhood there may be a row of houses close to and facing an arterial road. Yet these houses are on the equivalent of a “service road” rather than having direct access to the arterial. For motorists living here the first stage of a journey, to the arterial road just 50 meters from their driveway, requires driving ten times that far before their journey can really begin. Though the maze pattern is intended to limit traffic in such neighborhoods, residents create a lot of traffic simply to escape the maze.

The residential service road pattern has the effect of making arterial roads into semi-controlled-access roads. As seen in this example, there are few driveways or other vehicle entry points in long straight stretches of such an arterial. This design encourages drivers to drive well above the posted 60 km/hr speed limit … whenever the road is not clogged with rush-hour traffic, that is.

High traffic speeds make crossing such roads a dangerous undertaking for pedestrians and cyclists. True, there are some widely-spaced authorized crossing points, with long waits for the “walk” light. But when getting to and waiting at a crosswalk is not convenient, some people will predictably take their chances fording the rushing stream at other points. How many parents will encourage or even allow their children to walk to school, a playground, or a friend’s house if the trip involves crossing roads like these?

Just across the road. High school is on the left of the road, residential neighbourhood to the right.

Pedestrian access is at best a secondary consideration in such developments. Consider the aerial view below.

Directly across one arterial road from the high school, and across another arterial from a residential neighbourhood, is a cluster of big box retail stores including a Walmart Supercentre. The Walmart has 200 meters of frontage on the street, but in that stretch there is no entrance, nothing but concrete wall to greet the occasional lonesome pedestrian.

From another direction, many people live “just across the street” from the Walmart and other stores. Except … would-be pedestrian shoppers will need to cross not just a multilane urban highway, but also hectares of parking lot, before reaching the doors of a store. These stores are large in retail floor area, but they are dwarfed by the land given to parking. In accord with minimum parking requirements, the stores have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide “free parking”. But there is no requirement to take the convenience of pedestrians into account. The doors open to the parking lots, not to the streets, because the vast majority of shoppers will arrive in large private vehicles that will need to be stored somewhere while the owner goes shopping.

Nevertheless there will be a small minority in such neighbourhoods who get to the store on foot or on bike. A few might be brave, stubborn environmentalists or exercise freaks. But mostly they will be people who can’t afford a car, or who can’t drive because of some type or degree of disability. Disproportionately, they will be elderly and/or in poor health. Particularly when carrying heavy bags of groceries, they will not want to go far out of their way to get to a crosswalk, preferring instead to make the shortest straightest trip home. It is not an accident that high-volume arterial roads in suburbs account for a large proportion of pedestrian deaths in North American cities. It is not an accident, either, that a disproportionate number of these deaths are inflicted on elderly, disabled, poor, or racially disadvantaged pedestrians.2

Lamp posts

Out beyond the beyond

It is now widely recognized that car-dependent suburbia hurts public health via an increase in diseases of sedentary lifestyle and due to the stress of spending many hours a week in alternately frenetic and creeping traffic.3 The environmental costs of sprawl include high carbon emissions, impermeable ground covering that rapidly flushes polluted run-off into diminishing areas of creeks and wetlands, and urban heat-island effects from so much concrete and asphalt. Particularly in Ontario, new tracts of car-dependent sprawl can only be built with the sacrifice of increasingly scarce class one farmland.4 Finally, groups such as Strong Towns have documented the long-term fiscal disaster of suburban development.5 Even though higher levels of government typically pay much of the initial cost of major infrastructure, municipalities will be on the hook for maintenance and eventual rebuilding – and property taxes in low-density suburbs seldom bring in enough revenue to cover these steadily accruing liabilities.

Yet in Ontario the large property developer lobby remains as strong a political force as ever. The Premier of Ontario makes no real attempt to hide his allegiance to the largest property developers.6 In Durham Region, after a long public consultation process recommended intensification of existing urban areas to accommodate growing populations, politicians suddenly voted instead for a sprawl-expanding proposal put forward by the development industry lobby.7

So in 2023, corn fields and pastures beyond the current edge of suburbia are being bulldozed, new maze-like streets laid out, thousands of big, cheaply-made, dearly-purchased, cookie-cutter houses stuffed into small lots. For a brief period new residents can look through the construction dust and see nearby farmland or woodland – until the edge of suburbia takes the next step outward.

Suppose you believe, as I do, that this ruinous pattern of development should not and cannot last – that this pattern will not survive past the era of cheap energy, and will not survive when its long-term fiscal non-sustainability results in collapsing services and municipal bankruptcies. When car culture sputters, falters and runs off the road, can these thousands of neighbourhoods, home to millions of people, be transformed so they are no longer car dependent? That’s a big question, but the next post will offer a few ideas.

For today, the edge

Image at top of page: Bulldozertown (click here for full-screen image). All photos used here are taken in the same area shown in satellite views.

Notes

1 Charles Marohn, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Wiley, 2021; pages 85–87.

2 For analyses of trends in pedestrian deaths, see Angie Schmitt’s 2020 book Right of Way (reviewed here), and Jessie Singer’s 2022 book There Are No Accidents (reviewed here).

3 See “Suburbs increasingly view their auto-centric sprawl as a health hazard,” by Katherine Shaver, Washington Post, December 28, 2016.

4 “Ontario losing 319 acres of farmland every day,” Ontario Farmland Trust, July 4, 2022.

5 See “The Growth Ponzi Scheme: A Crash Course,” by John Pattison, strongtowns.org.

6 See The Narwhal, “Six developers bought Greenbelt land after Ford came to power. Now, they stand to profit,” November 17, 2022; BlogTO, “All the crazy details about Doug Ford’s controversial stag and doe party with developers,” February 9, 2023.

7 See The Narwhal, “Ontario’s Durham Region approves developer-endorsed plan to open 9,000 acres of farmland,” May 26, 2022.

Recipes for car dependency

Also published on Resilience

A car-dependent society isn’t built overnight. It takes concerted effort by multiple levels of government and industry to make private cars the go-to, all-but-obligatory choice for everyday personal transportation.

If you want to see what car dependency looks like on a map, you need to look at a regional or neighbourhood scale. You need to see the options people have for the kind of trips they make on a routine, everyday basis.

This series looks at the layout of car dependency in my part of Ontario, Canada.

Durham Region is an administrative district on the east flank of Toronto. The Region covers about 2500 square kilometers, but most of the current population of about 700,000 lives in the southern communities bordering Lake Ontario.

As shown below, there is an extensive network of expressways and major arterial roads connecting Durham Region with itself and with the rest of the Toronto megalopolis. Two east-west expressways cross Durham Region, two north-south expressways cover part of the Region, and there are dozens other highways and major arterials.

A region-scale map. The roads with signs circled in blue are multi-lane, controlled-access highways. Other roads shown in grey are major arterials. Downtown Bowmanville and downtown Toronto are about 75 kilometers apart.

The passenger-rail network, on the other hand, is terribly sparse.

Passenger rail routes through Durham Region, shown in thin blue lines.

One commuter rail line runs east from Union Station in downtown Toronto. It currently terminates in Oshawa, though an extension as far as Bowmanville is promised in a few years. (It’s been promised “in a few years” for more than a few years.) A long-distance line, Via Rail, passes through Bowmanville but does not stop. That means rail travel is not a realistic option for most Durham residents, most of the time, in most directions.

It wasn’t always this way. The passenger rail network was much more extensive a hundred years ago. Though I haven’t found a good map of regional rail lines in the 1920s, there is one from about 50 years earlier:  1875.

Ontario railways constructed or chartered in 1875. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

As shown below, in 1875 Durham Region residents already had not just an east-west connection to Toronto, but two passenger rail lines running north-south through the region. Other lines had been chartered and some were actually built and in operation by the early twentieth-century, though they are a faded historical memory today.

There are many reasons society might have chosen to fund extensive networks of highways, while letting rail networks wither and die. But two powerful industrial lobbies benefitted when passenger rail was eclipsed in favour of private cars. The consumption of liquid fossil fuels rose steeply with the ascent of car culture, to the benefit of Canada’s still large and still influential petroleum industry. And at the provincial level, “by the early 2000s Ontario had become the largest auto-producing jurisdiction in North America.”1

Widespread car dependency is now taken for granted in Durham Region – except by the minority who are either unwilling or unable to get into a car every day. We can illustrate why with the aid of a few more maps.

Living right next to a city about the size of Chicago, in a metroplex of some 7.2 million people, many residents of Durham Region commute to work somewhere in Toronto or its suburbs. For most of these commuters public transit is an unattractive choice.

A major commuter rail line, the GO Train, does connect southern parts of Durham Region to downtown Toronto at Union Station. For those who work near Union Station or one of the other stations, the GO Train may be a great commuting option. For all others, public transit gets more complicated and less attractive.

Consider commuting to what is called “north Toronto” – an area now pretty much in the center of the megalopolis. This area is a typical commuting destination for Durham residents. As the map below shows, the trip is straightforward and relatively quick by car.

Driving from downtown Bowmanville to north-central Toronto, a distance of 64 km, takes about 45 minutes.

To make the same trip by public transit, you need to check schedules carefully and hope your connecting routes run at the hours you need them. Plus, you need to allow 2 to 2.5 hours for the trip that could be done by car in 45 minutes.

Taking public transit from downtown Bowmanville to north-central Toronto takes a minimum of 2 hours. Some of the routes run at reduced frequencies on weekends/holidays, and do not operate late at night.

Let’s look at another, shorter, trip. Ontario Tech University is the only university whose main campus is in Durham Region. Suppose you need to go from downtown Bowmanville to the Ontario Tech campus in Oshawa – just 22 or 23 kilometers. It’s easy by car:

But again, you need to budget more than twice as much time to go by transit:

For these and countless comparable inter-region trips, existing infrastructure and services put tremendous pressure on people who travel by transit. They might consider moving to a residence much closer to their destination – but housing costs are more astronomical the closer you go to Toronto. They might look for a different job or choose schooling closer to home – even if that means settling for a second or third choice. More likely, they might start saving for a car so they can become part of the traffic. And if none of these are possible, they need to devote a large chunk of each day to their commute.

Car dependency takes more than one generation to build – but it’s not always easy to escape.

Stalled in the 1950s

A curious video advertisement was produced for General Motors in 1954. Most ads for car companies show their products cruising along scenic and empty highways. But “Give Yourself the Green Light” took a very different tack: it showed motorists sweating in stalled or crawling traffic, on roads packed with other equally frustrated motorists. In this case GM wasn’t selling cars, at least not directly – they were selling more roads. Specifically, the video was part of an intensive lobbying campaign to persuade voters and car consumers to support massive government expenditures for more and wider highways.2

That expanded highway construction effort still continues almost 70 years later. The roads have gobbled up vast tracts of land and vast sums of tax dollars, but haven’t vanquished the dreaded rush hour traffic tie-ups. Today, rush hours are much longer than an hour, and extend much farther out from city centers, through suburbs and exurbs.

But the current government of Ontario, led by Premier Doug Ford, remains under the spell of that 1950s vision of endless, wide, and free-flowing highways. True, they are now budgetting for and planning major, long-overdue subways and commuter rail expansions in the most crowded parts of the Greater Toronto Area. Perhaps they recognize there simply is no room for wider roads in those areas, and so the only way to reduce congestion is to give more drivers a way to leave their cars at home.

At the edges of urban sprawl it’s another story. Far out from the center of Toronto, where there are still no good public transit options, the Premier is pushing hard to build two more expressways along the north and north-west edges of the metro area. These highly controversial routes, if constructed, will augment ultra-expensive privately run toll road Highway 407, recently extended through Durham Region.

These expressways do more than eat up large amounts of space – which happens to be some of the best scarce farmland in Canada – for travel lanes, medians and interchanges. They also facilitate and encourage equally space-hungry housing forms and commercial developments – developments which will need abundant parking since driving will be the only way to get to and from them.

In the next installment we’ll examine car-dependent development patterns at the neighbourhood level, along with the provincial and regional policies that continue to promote this pattern.

Photo at top of page: Restricted Access – Highway 407 toll route in northeast Durham Region, photographed on Feb 17, 2023. Full-screen image here.

Footnotes

1 The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Automotive Industry”.

2 The superb series Not Just Bikes includes many excerpts from the GM video along with commentary by vlogger Jason Slaughter, in the recent installment “Would You Fall For It?”