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When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.
The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.
I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).
There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.
Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.
By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.
Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.
I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.
Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.
The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?
P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.
To me, this seems like one of those things where the disease is worse than the cure, but people don't realize it. Driving is very dangerous; for example, several times more Americans are killed every year in car crashes (including people outside of automobiles being hit). One could certainly argue about all of the relevant costs of crime vs cars, but at the very least it's worth thinking seriously about, and I suspect most Americans don't weigh them anywhere close to what really makes sense.
(I should emphasize, this doesn't mean I think crime doesn't matter, or people should just suck up having to deal with it, or anything like that. A number of American cities have done themselves a great disservice by failing to do anything about crime, homeless encampments, etc. and having lots of these things in your neighborhood is a legitimate concern.)
I believe you underestimate the side effects of the cure. Cars are a tremendous tool for personal freedom with all that entails. Making their ownership less common means curtailing exit rights for many, and placing more control in the hands of those that manage both public transport and the restrictive legislation that is supposed to enable this urban planning.
How much freedom do those cars provide to children, anyone with a disability that prevents them from driving, people who are too old to drive safely, or anyone for whom a car is a significant expense? Or even someone who just dislikes driving? Who gets to experience those exit rights when housing is so expensive?
Cars are still entirely dependent on the government decides to do. Where roads go, when roads are closed, how lights and signs are used to direct traffic flow, road maintenance, etc. I'm all for freedom, but heavily-subsidized "freedom" is a contradiction in terms and an illusion. Dense, walkable, urban environments with a mix of things are what people created spontaneously. Car-dependent suburban sprawl is what the top-down planners created over the past 70 years.
Yes, cars provide some benefits. They also have a lot of costs.
Even for adults with a driving licence, cars only provide freedom in an environment designed for it. That cars provide the illusion of freedom because of an extensive system of government roads is trite, and that the US does not collect enough in gas taxes to fund state highways is well-known. That private car use is associated with an extensive system of licensing and enforcement that is the main cause of negative interactions between government employees and non-career-criminal citizens is also well-known - the "cars are freedom" brigade claim that this enforcement is a tyrannical imposition on them by Blue Tribe car-haters, but when you relax it people start dying.
The bigger issue is parking. A car is a very good way of moving 1-4 people, with luggage, exactly when they want, with the people having full control over their in-journey environment; but only if the journey is from one parking space to another and only if the second parking space is vacant at the time the car gets to it. Driving in London simply doesn't create the sense of freedom that the open road does - partly because of the traffic, but mostly because you can't park anywhere you want to go. Driving in Long Island, on the other hand (I spent a summer working at Brookhaven), does feel freeing because even when the traffic sucks, you are still able to go where you want when you want in a non-shared space and expect convenient parking at your destination. But the price of that freedom is that anywhere you might want to go turns out to be (to Londoners' eyes) a shed on the edge of a giant parking lot.
Delivering enough parking that driving feels freeing requires YUUGE government intervention. Parking mandates are by far the most consequential piece of American land use regulation. Parking scarcity is the main stated reason for NIMBYs NIMBYing.
Even in rural areas, it isn't the people who ruin the popular beauty spots, it's the parked cars. The open road is fun, but when anywhere you might want to stop turns into a battle for a spot, it kills the experience. The only serious crash I have been in was while circling for parking at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park - Yellowstone has already crossed the "visiting the popular bits is unpleasant because parking" threshold and they need to do what Zion or Disney have already done and put the parking lots at the gates and campgrounds and move people round the sites on park transit.
Above a certain population density (and most European and 1st-world Asian cities with metro area populations > 1 million get there), frequent, ubiquitous, clean public transport can provide the sense of freedom that private car ownership does for American suburbanites. It can also cover its operating costs at the farebox if people want it to (only London does this - in other countries local voters have more power, and trying to cover the operating costs of public transport with farebox revenue in dense cities is about as popular as trying to cover the cost of rural roads with gas taxes would be in Red Tribe America). Urban transport in large cities is a solved problem. (So is rural transport - buy a car!)
The interesting question is why the US is unable to adopt the solution outside New York. Clearly the issue is something to do with crime and anti-social behaviour - if American public transport is as unpleasant as motteposters say it is, then I wouldn't want to ride it. In the unlikely event that public transport in Houston suddenly became as clean and crime-free as public transport in Seoul or Taipei, I would happily bet on people being willing to use it, kicking off a virtuous circle of ridership, investment, and supportive land-use changes until 20-30 years later Houston was one of the world's great transit cities.
The real reason Americans don’t use mass transit is not because it’s full of unwashed, mentally ill criminals being creepy weirdos. It’s because mass transit takes forever to get anywhere, and Americans are impatient and rich.
Why can’t Houston build up its mass transit system to where it’s as efficient as NYC? Partly it’s population density- Houston sprawls more, so you’d need many more stops per person to achieve the same coverage. And of course, no one wants a bus stop in their backyard or adjacent to their business. Rich people want bus stops a few miles from the entrance to their neighborhood, so they can go pick up the maid in five minutes, but not so close that it’s easy for poor people who aren’t employed there to get in. Of course, people rich enough to afford an adequate number of cars but not rich enough to afford a maid want no bus stops near their neighborhoods, and in fact are often opposed to sidewalks between bus stops and their neighborhoods. This isn’t so much due to concerns about serious crime as it is concerns about poor people showing up looking for a handout, and littering while they’re here.
Business owners want bus stops located conveniently in front of someone else’s business, not so much because of crime concerns- people taking the bus are understood as working poor who are unlikely to assault or steal- but because they’re assumed to litter and smoke(cigarettes) while looking like they’re loitering, which turns off paying customers and makes it harder to monitor the security situation.
So you’ve got huge swathes of the city where it’s politically impossible to build bus stops, alongside the city needing more of them. Now let’s add in that Americans who vote are rich and can afford cars, especially in Houston where the working poor who actually need to have convenient bus access to the city have extremely low rates of political participation. Now let’s add in that American cities are notorious for fiscal mismanagement and cost overruns in a way Tokyo and London aren’t, and nearly all of them have massive unfunded liabilities to begin with. Finally, if the city is highly reliant on public transit, it’s going to face negative PR in the event of a mass disaster(and Houston suffers from hurricanes)- either the media will be mad at the city for not letting bus drivers evacuate, or it’ll be mad at the city for canceling bus routes that people in Houston have now come to depend on.
What? Rich people pick up their maids in cars? Is this actually a thing?
From the bus stop, not from section 8.
I know, but still.
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