George Will Defends Sprawl

George Will is sad.  It seems he expected the only Republican in Obama's cabinet not in charge of blowing stuff up (shout-out to Secretary Gates) to be more reliably in favor of conservative principles, like the right to build whatever you want, wherever you want ugly strip malls and McMansions.  Unfortunately, Secretary of Transportation Ray Lahood, uses words that Will finds depressing like "transformational" and "Portland."

What the WHAT?  He writes:

LaHood, however, has been transformed. Indeed, about three bites into lunch, the T word lands with a thump: He says he has joined a "transformational" administration: "I think we can change people's behavior." Government "promoted driving" by building the Interstate Highway System—"you talk about changing behavior." He says, "People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work." High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is "the wave of the future." And then, predictably, comes the P word: Look, he says, at Portland, Ore.

People who use Portland as a case AGAINST transit and pedestrian friendly development have either never been there or are seriously out of their minds.  In Mr. Will's case I assume it' s the former as he's typically the light in an increasingly Dark Ages party, and would encourage him to hop on a bike and light-rail around town to see how pleasant an experience it is.

Now here comes the weird part...

Once upon a time, government was supposed to defend the shores, deliver the mail and let people get on with their lives. Today's far-seeing and fastidious government, not content with designing the cars Americans drive to their homes and the lightbulbs they use in their homes (do you know that, come 2014, the incandescent lightbulb will be illegal?), wants to say where their homes can be. And to think that Republican Ray LaHood, Secretary of Behavior Modification, is an enthusiast for this, well, cozy relationship between Washington and Peoria, and everywhere else, too.

What George doesn't seem to understand is that combating sprawl isn't just about behavior modification for it's own sake.  Yes, it can easily be argued that there are significant social benefits to living in a community where people actually see neighbors from time to time and aren't forced to having their only interaction being a Costco shopping cart collision.  In fact it's about allocation of resources.  Want the government to take less of your money?  Then we cannot afford to serve far flung developments any longer.  He genuinely doesn't seem to understand that current transportation funding actually encourages more waste.

Add up all the costs of vehicle travel including the cost of roads, insurance, gas, parking (yes even if you don't pay, someone is,) etc. and you get an average of $1.33 per mile travelled.  We'll even be generous and spot you the cost of the international conflicts over the oil necessary for auto transportation.  For an average driver, that works out to be $22,000 a year.  Check out your actual cost with this cool calculator here. 

According to the same study, the savings per mile of transit is about .22 cents.  Note that this is for urban commute time travel meaning just about everyone.  Rural transit is actually slightly more expensive because of low ridership.  Which brings us back to the original point and the focus of my posts on sprawl.  It's really really expensive.

Mr. Will, if you're going to insist on a market-centric orientation for public policy, the least you could do is insist on ending the heavy subsidy to sprawl.  I agree that the market is smart in that the collection of consumer decisions will favor the path of least resistance/cost, but first we have to make sure that these decisions are actually made based on the real costs.

More importantly, after writing a column titled "Why Ray Lahood is Wrong" Will never gets around to saying "Why Ray Lahood is Wrong."  You would think that one would at least bother to make the case of why sprawl is a good thing if you're going to defend it.  Instead we get some intellectually mushy rant about government having too much influence in our lives.  Actually, most of us think that the market has been grossly distorted by government policies and badly want to get it out of the way so that cities look the way they should have looked all along.

If you want to build an entrepenuerial society?  End the government's intervention on behalf of sprawl.