Gas prices are skyrocketing right now due in large part to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The U.S. country-wide average just surpassed $4.30 a gallon, a number that’s changing so fast we had
to update it multiple times over the course of writing this script. California is well on its
way to six dollars a gallon. Here in Canada, Vancouver has already blown past two dollars
a litre and it looks like the rest of the country is not that far behind. This is a big deal — gas
prices play an outsized role in people’s perceptions and experiences of the cost-of-living
because transportation is a basic need and gas is particularly volatile compared to food or housing.
When prices go up, people really do hurt. A 2008 study found that 80% of low-income workers in the
U.S. commute by car, most of them alone in their own vehicle. Under a high gas price scenario
equal to $5.20 a gallon in today’s dollars, they calculated that low-income solo car commuters have
to dedicate almost 9% of their income solely to buying gas to get to work. That’s absurd,
and it doesn’t include other car-related expenses or money spent on gas to go anywhere else.
A few years ago, when the price of gas was about $2.30 a gallon,
Americans were asked in a survey how high it would have to go before they would drive much
less or seriously seek alternatives to driving. The average answer that people gave was $4.40 a
gallon. That’s pretty much where we are today, so let’s talk about alternatives to driving.
As a society we’re very much used to thinking about this in terms of individual
choices — considering carpooling, taking public transit, dusting off an old bike, or maybe even
buying an eBike. Considering changes that you can make in your own life is great — a lot of
people are surprised for example at how useful bikes can be. They’re basically like a range
extender for walking, allowing you to cover 3 to 5 times more distance in the same amount of time.
But even more important than people’s individual choices about how to get around are our collective
choices about how to design and build our cities. We often have the impression that driving is the
default obvious way to get around and everything else is a sacrifice — either unpleasant or
impractical — but this is largely because since World War II we’ve generally built our cities
to encourage driving and discourage other modes in fundamental ways that we often don’t realize.
Density is important in any discussion of alternatives to driving. Zoning policies
that limit density are often done in the name of “avoiding traffic” at the local level,
but spreading cities out forces people to cover longer distances to get where they need to go,
which encourages driving over walking and cycling. Public transit can cover longer distances
but if you limit the number of people who can live near a station or line
you make it harder to financially support the high frequencies that people find convenient.
Zoning in North America also often goes further to separate people from their destinations by
concentrating stores into big malls, often on the edge of town isolated from residential areas, as
opposed to the traditional pattern of stores being more integrated into residential neighborhoods in
close proximity to people’s homes. Beyond density and zoning, road design matters a lot too. If
you have big, wide, arterial roads with loud, fast-moving traffic, infrequent intersections with
long traffic lights, and parking lots in front of every business, you’re basically requiring
people to drive if they want anything remotely resembling a practical or comfortable experience.
We can see how much infrastructure and design matter from the simple fact that places with
different infrastructure and design have very different mobility patterns. Let’s take a look at
Ottawa, Canada’s mid-sized capital city. In more suburban districts like Kanata and Orleans, 75%
of local within-district trips are done by car. We’re talking about getting groceries,
taking your kids to school, visiting friends, going to the gym, and some shorter commutes. In
the Ottawa Inner Area, the central residential district that includes areas like Sandy Hill,
Centretown, the Glebe, and Old Ottawa South, just 30% of these local trips are done by car. That’s
an enormous difference and as anyone who knows the city can tell you, central Ottawa is hardly some
European urbanist paradise. This is basically just traditional pre-war North American development.
Much of the land is still taken up by detached homes, but they’re built relatively densely,
with some exceptions, and there’s a reasonable diversity of other housing types,
with multiplexes and apartments mixed in, some older and some newer. This part of the city
has a highway and some wide arterial roads, but the main shopping streets like Bank and Elgin,
which used to have streetcars, are relatively human-scale and pedestrian-friendly. Matt
Pinder has an interesting article about walking down Bank Street and seeing the transition from
traditional pedestrian and transit-focused design to newer car-centric development.
None of this is unique to Ottawa. There’s a good chance your city or even suburb has neighbourhoods
on different parts of this spectrum too. Lots of Canadian suburbs do a good job of having schools
in the middle of residential neighbourhoods and accessible by foot or bike, for example.
Car dependency is a massive problem in North America, ingrained into our laws, expectations,
and assumptions, but most of the ingredients to the solution are already here. If we can
re-learn some of these components of traditional design then maybe we don’t have to be quite as
stressed about the cost of gas, or the much bigger general cost to buy and maintain so many vehicles,
which altogether costs the average Canadian household between $5,000 and $16,000 a year,
depending on whether we’re talking about a single person household or a couple with children.
Obviously building a more balanced city doesn’t mean that no one will ever need or want to drive —
some people carry heavy tools to work and some people have family to visit in the countryside,
among other reasons. But we can and should build cities so that driving is not a basic requirement
by default, where people can drive less and own fewer cars. Despite pretty high rates of
licensed drivers, people in Ottawa’s central residential neighbourhoods own about half as
many cars per capita as people in the suburbs but they still make just as many trips per day,
in large part due to walking. That’s a win for their finances, their health, and the environment.
The mobility statistics that we looked at here only included within-district trips to show the
effect of local neighbourhood design. We ignored trips to other districts, like commuting downtown,
because older more central neighbourhoods have the advantage of proximity.
Someone from the distant suburbs just can’t bike downtown in any reasonable time
and they don’t necessarily have a direct transit route either. With that said,
it’s hard to separate density from location. A denser, more compact city allows you to live
closer to things. It can be the difference between a 5 kilometre commute and a 15 kilometre commute,
which has an enormous impact on what types of transportation are practical and convenient.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget to
reconsider your assumptions about the inevitability of car dependence…
and subscribe. A special thanks to our supporters on Patreon.