Comments | dzm: Land use planning vs. the free market

dzm

Land use planning vs. the free market

Nov 25, 2006 09:47

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 ( Read more... )

transportation, urban-planning

Comments 3

ocschwar November 25 2006, 18:51:17 UTC

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 November 27 2006, 15:49:52 UTC

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.

dzm November 27 2006, 16:00:19 UTC

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.