The Abolition of Traffic

Government control of roads and public transit was promised to guarantee accessibility, efficiency, and high-quality service. The time it takes most people who want a house or an affordable apartment to get to work is a clear sign that this has failed. While it would be easy to go into the theoretical problems and issues with the historical development of zoning and transportation networks, the much harder question is creating a vision for the future that does not make things worse with an attempt to go back to a time that is currently inaccessible. Providing better outcomes with as minimal changes as possible is accessible through ingeniously reduced regulation and a greater space for creativity in the market. Reducing the poor set of tradeoffs for those who want to work in cities can occur from many different directions. The first and most obvious is reduced building code requirements and state imposed cost of production. A recognition of the formative effects of zoning laws is needed to inform a reduction in zoning overall and a shift of existing regulations to a more flexible model. Additionally, greater freedom in transportation innovation must be allowed to account for the unchangeable reality that people will typically maximize their own space and quality of life as close to other people as they can afford.

Housing is extremely expensive to build, particularly in areas where there is a dense enough mass of people to create traffic. Development of existing structures and creation of new ones in the proximity of cities is prohibitively expensive, so it is only natural that most apartment buildings are extremely utilitarian. Housing could be a far more profitable market if the vast share of cost directly contributed by the government was reduced. Traffic arises because the quality of life at the price that people are willing to pay is simply not accessible anywhere near their places of work. They are willing to spend an extended amount of time in the car or bus because it is their best option. While citizens are making their preferred choice by living outside of the city, it says something about the situation that best option usually includes significantly over an hour in the car. Every day’s commute is a direct decrease in welfare that millions of Americans experience. A primary way to solve this problem is to simply reduce the shortage of high-quality housing in urban areas. Lower taxation on developers and less stringent building requirements could allow renovations to take place more quickly and for unutilized land to be quickly put to its most valuable purpose. The situation is a crisis in many American metropolitan areas, and local state and federal governments should seriously question why they are making the construction of any housing more difficult.

Zoning laws cannot even be said to have always been well intentioned, yet even the most well intentioned zoning laws have led to higher levels of traffic. The categorization of certain areas as commercial and residential have automatically separated people from the places where they need to go for their daily work. Rather than a rich tapestry of apartments, townhomes, and businesses that makes old world cities so livable, American cities have an uncomfortably clear delineation between where we are supposed to work and live. While this was often initially supported by a desire to make houses and apartments more pleasant, the reduction of factories means the industry now presents far less negative externalities than it once did to those who lived by it. In fact, the amount of traffic to get into cities suggests that living nearer to a place of work is highly positive rather than the negative lifestyle factor it once was. Rather than degrading the lives of those who live near the centers of industry, they now provide a synergy that cultivates and develops communities to have more opportunities of all kinds than communities that are primarily residential.

Even the city that uses its land most effectively will still eventually run into some sort of space constraint. This fact necessitates the rapid development of transportation technology. Only transportation technology can bridge the gap between people’s simultaneous desires for space and the sort of opportunities that can only arise when lots of people are in one place. Cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas have potential to benefit from an ingenuously constructed subway system, but that is only one of many potential options. The subway idea is appealing because it uses land that would have no other purpose as it is far below the surface. Self driving cars could greatly decrease the amount of traffic on the road and make the travel experience more enjoyable. These are just two examples of the boundless creativity possible in the market. Ultimately, the best thing the government can do is step back and create space for those who want to try new transportation technologies. They have had their time to create something effective and failed to use it well.