Land use planning vs. the free market

[dmaze]

I wrote in a protected post that the free market makes poor land-use decisions, as evidenced by LA/San Diego/generic suburban sprawl. But is that really true?

One thing that Trains magazine used to bemoan was that government paid to maintain the road infrastructure, where private companies by and large maintain the rail infrastructure. I can imagine a sequence of events where (1) people want to move on to large plots of land far from the city; (2) enough people do that that existing transportation infrastructure is inadequate; (3) government builds better, free roads; (4) go to 1.

That suggests a possibly more libertarian view of the world. What happens if government never built roads, and only private individuals did? You'd presumably wind up with all toll roads everywhere, with tolls set high enough that the road owners could make a profit. So if driving to work costs $0.10 per car-mile, then people would look for housing closer to their work or otherwise economize, right?

But if that many people want to drive, and running roads is profitable, that leads to more roads getting built, and competition drives down the tolls. And we already know that fuel costs doubling doesn't induce people to drive smaller cars, live closer to work, or car-pool. Similarly, housing prices doubling doesn't actually seem to affect people's decisions.

I don't think this is a good theory, then. I'm not sure what the right answer is; "somebody" should make it more "attractive" to live closer to the urban core or to workplaces, but then if the city is "attractive" then your choices are to pay money to live there, pay money to live far away, or take a less-expensive but still sprawly intermediate option. If the real problem is a transportation problem, provide good ways that aren't roads to get there. But...that's still awfully fuzzy.

Comments

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

I recommend reading Getting There by Goddard, about the building of the American macadam highway system. The long and the short of it is that there has never been a "free market" in land use options, every. It's always been decided in back rooms in (mostly) Washington.

[jadia.livejournal.com]

I think another factor that you haven't mentioned is the cost of moving all the stuff people need into an urban area. Is it really better for everyone to live clustered in a huge city (boston/nyc/sf/etc.etc.) when you have to essentially transport massive quantities of food, toiletries, drinking water, etc. into this small plot of land? Then you need to transport all of the massive quantities of sewage out of the area, too. Is that "better" than having people more spread out? If so, how come?

I'm genuinely curious. I can think of some arguments for that and some arguments against it. I guess it mostly depends on what you're optimizing for.

[dmaze]

Here in particular, I think there's a clear answer. Transporting pretty much anything is about moving large quantities of it to a central location, then redistributing it. Want Stuff from China? Load it into intermodal containers, move it from China to LA, and distribute it from there. Want it in the Midwest instead? Stack the containers three high on a train a mile and a half long and move it to Chicago, and distribute it from there. Sending stuff by FedEx? It goes via Atlanta. Moving electricity? High-voltage power transmission lines from generators to substations, which redistribute it again.

So if you were planning to put a million people somewhere, you have fewer power lines, less water and sewer pipes, and truck drivers spend less time on the road to get stuff from the central distribution centers to the people.