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Sprawl

By Alex Marshall

The word "sprawl" has about as much relevance to the average dweller on the island of Manhattan as the phrase "alternate side of the street parking" has in Houston, Texas. New York City has its problems, but a proliferation of new suburban subdivisions is not among them.

Outside the city though, many people are discussing, and looking for solutions, to the problem of sprawl, which is the word urban planners have come to use to describe the phenomenon with which everybody has become familiar in the suburbs. In their spread-out subdivisions, shopping malls, and box-in-a-lot office buildings, the suburbs waste space; they eat up land. They sprawl.

And they are sprawling more and more. During the last decade, new suburban housing in the nation consumed twice the equivalent of the state of New Jersey.

Along with more sprawl in the last decade, have come more of the bad things we associate with sprawl, namely traffic jams and congestion.

According to the Texas Transportation Institute, the average American spent 45 hours waiting in traffic in 1997, compared to 16 in 1982. That is a huge increase. Some cities fared even worse. Atlantans had to wait 68 hours.

By contrast, the average driver in metropolitan New York, according to the Institute, was stuck in traffic about 34 hours.

It appears, then, as if New Yorkers have made a bargain. In return for having a dense city that relies on mass transit, we spend less time waiting in traffic. Put another way, in return for less sprawl, we have less traffic congestion. That is the way commentators have played it.

The reality is almost the opposite. And in this reality, we see the true bargain New Yorkers have made with sprawl. It is a bargain the rest of the country should contemplate.

THE TRUTH ABOUT NYC TRAFFIC

The problem with the study is that there is at least one big difference between the average New Yorker and the average American. The average American drives everywhere. His longest walk is to the car in the driveway. Most New Yorkers take the subway, ride the bus, walk a lot, even pedal a bicycle. A look at various statistics suggests that 40 percent of all daily trips by New Yorkers are not by car. In Manhattan, that figure is probably 90 percent.

So, what if we compared just New Yorkers while driving to other Americans while driving? Even a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation catapults New York to a level of traffic congestion comparable to Atlanta or Charlotte, the worst sprawlers. The reality is, as you would expect: New York has some of the worst traffic in the nation. It simply is less on average because so many New Yorkers do not drive.

THE COST TO TRAVELERS

The average family in Houston spends almost $9,000 a year on transportation, or 22 percent of their income, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project in Washington. This is the highest in the country. In the New York region, the average family spends under $6,000 a year, or 14.5 percent of their income. This is, after Hawaii, the lowest in the country.

It is no accident that Houston, Atlanta and Dallas are at the top of the charts. These regions have built lots and lots of highways, which mean that people have to drive more and more. Mass transit is not an option. Families not only spend more, they have less to spend, because average incomes are less than in the Northeast. The burden is particularly hard on poor families. The Surface Transportation Policy Project estimates that poorer households in these sprawling regions must spend more than a third of their income on driving.

Compare that to New York City. For a mere $63 a month, the price of a MetroCard, theoretically you can go anywhere. That is $756 a year. Factor in a few cabs, and you still are paying far less. While rents in New York are high, the cost of getting around is not. This is not only an inexpensive system, it is an equitable system. Both the stockbroker and the busboy have a fast, cheap and easy way to get around.

THE TRADE-OFF

Here is where we get to the root of the issue of sprawl, and how it affects New Yorkers. Basically, New Yorkers have made a bargain. In exchange for a great mass transit system, we get a walkable, street-centered city where you don't have to spend a lot of money on a car. But if you do drive, you also get some of the worst traffic in the country. That is the bargain other cities around the country are facing with regards to sprawl.

Mass transit is usually sold as relieving traffic congestion. Actually, as the figures from New York suggest, it probably makes traffic worse, by increasing the density of the city. But it does provide an alternative to getting stuck in traffic. And that is no small thing.

"The congestion of cars in Paris is just as bad as the congestion in Los Angeles," said Roy Kienitz, executive director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project. "But only 40 percent are subjected to it in Paris, while 90 percent are subjected to it in Los Angeles."

The solution to sprawl is basically to stop building highways, and start building mass transit. But what you get in return for this is not only less sprawl; you also get more traffic. This bargain gets easier to make if you realize what happens if you just keep building more highways, which is what the sprawlers did. That is, traffic gets much worse anyway. And in addition, you drive more and more, and spend more money on it.

There seems a bit of a paradox here when it comes to traffic congestion. It seems that no matter what you do, traffic gets worse. This is true. If you build more highways, you get more traffic, because it encourages automobile-oriented development. If you do not build more highways, and instead build more subways and train lines, you also get more traffic. That is because mass transit promotes more housing in existing areas, and most of those people will have cars, if affordable. Here is another way to look at it: Given a choice, most people will own a car and use it before they will use mass transit. In effect, mass transit works in a contemporary age by allowing the pressure of bad traffic to build, until people are willing to take mass transit to avoid bad traffic, and eventually, they are willing not to own a car at all. That is what happens in Manhattan. It is so expensive to house a car, park it and use it, that most people opt out of cars entirely. That is why we have a real city.

But, we do get something for giving up our cars, and getting into the subway, beside just forced proximity to strangers: Cash. Because public transportation is a lot cheaper than using your private car. It is particularly cheaper than using your car in a sprawling metropolis like Charlotte, Dallas or Houston.

Basically, the physical form of an area is determined by how it spends its transportation dollars. Build a lot of highways, as in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and other Sunbelt cities, and you get a city where you drive more time and more distance. And thus spend more money on driving.

The choice the average city in America is facing is whether to get more like New York, or more like Atlanta. Right now, many cities are trying to do both, which is lousy policy. Charlotte, for example, is building a huge outer beltway, and spending a billion dollars on a new mass transit system. This is crazy, but neither politicians nor the public like to face the painful truth: there is no solution to bad traffic. You can only provide an alternative to it, in the form of creating a more real city, through less highways, and more mass transit. Which also means, less sprawl.

Alex Marshall, a journalist, is the author of the recent book, How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken

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