In Search of Car-Free America: Why Walkable Places Are Popular for Vacation but Not Everyday Living

as a youtuber who talks about cities i recognize that urbanist discourse is largely dominated by memes and tick tocks and i've made peace with it so here's a meme that was shared quite a bit recently maybe over shared and i'm gonna ruin it by just explaining the joke which is the americans love to visit places that are super walkable and relatively free of cars but they repeatedly choose to live in places that are largely unwalkable and car dominated anyway today i'm going to investigate this idea dig into some research and give you my takeaways and it's all up next this is city nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewers suggested topics always encouraged and this one was suggested by me and what i want to talk about today is this idea that there's a mismatch between the built environment that people pay a lot of money to go visit and spend time in and the places where people actually live and there's a question embedded in that which is is what we're actually talking about a mismatch between supply and demand in other words are people's travel habits and vacation choices really a sort of revealed preference that demonstrates that we aren't building nearly enough housing in walkable urban environments i'll get to some of the research later in the video but first let's flesh out what we're talking about which is places you can go in the u.s where you can experience walkable car free living rather than the way most americans live their day-to-day lives which is using your climate-controlled personal vehicle to go from climate-controlled place to climate-controlled place some of these show up in that meme like college campuses which are mostly car free everything's walkable by design and there's lots of places to linger and study and people watch but let's be real it's college and a lot of the people who are spending time here can't afford a car anyway so it's really a self-selected group that's primed for car free living you can even say city parks fall into this category especially the expansive ones where you can feel like you're away from cars entirely and in a way even golf is a walkable car free environment except people still manage to drive motorized vehicles around big grassy expanses aren't really what i'm interested in for this video though what i'm talking about is places that have an urban feel to them places where people go to get away from their day-to-day lives yeah but they don't go to get away from the hustle and bustle they go where they can experience it like i would even put cruises in this category you're voluntarily submitting yourself to close proximity to thousands of people for days on end and not just a random cross-section of the population but specifically the type of people who think it's a good idea to go on cruises yeah that calls for a book recommendation i'm even talking about places you might travel to in your own city though like public markets i discussed this in another video but part of the appeal of these places is that you're in a setting where the pedestrian is king you don't really have to cross any streets and you interact with people in a much more direct way so pike place market in seattle of course but i'm also thinking of places like the original farmer's market on third and fairfax in la you've got lots of independent food vendors so it's a great place to grab a bite do a little shopping engage in some people watching and it is car free of course well until you get outside the market building where of course there's ample parking the original farmers market is adjacent to and i believe shares parking with the grove purportedly los angeles favorite shopping dining and lifestyle destination okay we have to talk about quote unquote lifestyle centers a bit you started seeing these things crop up in the late 90s and early odds they're usually like remodeled shopping malls with the roof torn off and they're organized as main streets and blocks and people flock to a place like this i mean sure for the fine dining options but mainly i think because it's a distillation of exactly the kind of walkable city environment that people have a hunger for but don't always seem to embrace in their daily lives it's a simulacrum of the kind of bustling city environment that you might have been able to find in the us in like the 1910s and can still find in cities outside the us that were developed before the advent of the automobile with charming storefronts narrow pedestrian only streets and lots of outdoor seating but here in america it has to be a hermetically sealed environment that you access by parking in the adjacent multi-level parking structure i mean just imagine building an ersatz pedestrian friendly downtown that's made up of mall chain stores but completely surrounding it with surface parking lots and then literally calling it the downtown of your city that's where we're at of course there are shopping malls themselves which are a bit out of fashion now and kind of a bastardization of the original galleries or passages of old european cities kind of the same way lifestyle centers are weird hyper capitalist recreations of pedestrianized european shopping streets like rue montergay in paris or kai to funkaral in madrid yeah i butchered those or stay with me recreations of great european plazas and public spaces like very literal recreations welcome to the largest hotel in the u.s the venetian in las vegas where all the charm of venice probably the world's most famously car free city is on full display you can float down a pitch perfect replica of the grand canal to the dulcet tones of a singing gondolier shop at the finest haberdashers dying in a highly faithful replica of saint mark's square purchase i don't know 64 ounces of your favorite frozen beverage from an authentic street vendor it's all here or if you need a simulation of a roman market street that's pretty much completely indistinguishable from the real thing vegas has you covered there too with some of the finest marble sculpture work known to man and always the finest dining establishments for your alfresco enjoyment the vegas strip is actually full of these pedestrianized areas usually indoors and climate controlled but you're starting to see more and more outdoor environments like this bespoke pedestrianized street that runs between the link and the flamingo it's extremely popular you know when people come to vegas they generally seem just fine ditching their cars and just hoofing it from place to place so it does make you wonder i do want to talk about theme parks particularly disney because they are probably america's most popular notoriously car free spaces i just point out that given what's happened with ticket prices in the last 20 years there appears to be nearly unlimited demand to spend all day in a place that has an extremely walkable environment notwithstanding the ruinously expensive and mediocre food and super long lines for all the attractions that are actually worth experiencing the price of a single park single day ticket has risen by like 300 percent just since 2000 it used to be 40 bucks and now you're paying 160 on a summer weekend i mean honestly i'll probably still pony it you know it is interesting that the places we're talking about where people have gone to the greatest lengths to create artificial car free environments southern california vegas central florida also tend to be some of the most car dominated regions in the u.s and i really don't think it's a coincidence okay i'm still going to get to some research on what all this means and maybe a little philosophical interlude if you can stand it but first quick reminder to hit the like and the subscribe if you're into like lifestyle center and theme park content give the patreon a gander if you want to help support the channel directly and sub count check the channel now has enough subscribers to fill m t bank stadium home of the baltimore ravens i feel like i don't talk about baltimore nearly enough on this channel and even though i'm not crazy about the parking mode they've got going on here i do think it's a travesty that this stadium and this city got snubbed when they were selecting the 2026 world cup venues don't do baltimore like that okay let's zoom out and get philosophical because we have to deal with this idea that what people really want is walkable urbanist neighborhoods despite the fact that the vast majority of people do not live in these kinds of places after all this is america and despite whatever failings we have as a political system freedom of choice really is king even when it's the point of our own detriment to me this idea is embedded in the nation's founding documents which went through a lot of revisions and word smithing july 4th 1776 adoption of the declaration of independence which lays out the rationale for establishing a breakaway republic we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness interesting word choices and sort of characteristic of the times i guess but i've always found it super interesting that happiness itself isn't listed as a specific right only the pursuit of happiness in other words there's no claim that happiness can be attained in any permanent way i mean were any of the founding fathers secretly buddhist eh maybe they were just realists fast forward to the mid to late 20th century if you go to planning school and you take your history and theory courses you're going to read the american political philosopher john rawls rawls saw society writ large as being defined by fairness to all people so social institutions which planning is largely concerned with needed to be designed to be fair across a diverse range of characteristics and attributes of the citizenry it's all interesting stuff and i do encourage everyone to read rawls but the one characteristic people vary on that he cited the one that jumped out at me in particular was what he called a reasonable conception of the good life i just think that's such an interesting phrase and it just seems particularly american to me an important part of the freedom us citizens have is the latitude to pursue whatever it is they see is constituting the good life and rawls acknowledge that problems crop up when one person's conception is unreasonable to the point of being unfair to other people there's no doubt we live in a society where there are several competing ideas of what the good life is and they're contradictory and maybe even mutually exclusive ideas which is what i think a lot of our current struggles around urbanism and housing affordability are all about okay that's as deep as i wanted to go on that but if you watch this channel you know it's a recurring theme i kind of wanted a part here where i talk about the arguments for why people should want to live in dense walkable places but i've kind of done that before and it's sort of preaching to the choir anyway what's more relevant here is that people do have the choice to pursue their own conception of happiness and the real question is are we providing people enough choices to where they can reasonably do that and maybe for the people who love to visit lifestyle centers or spend their days at theme parks walkability is just a lark it truly isn't something they want in their everyday lives for whatever reason i mean there has to be a reason so many people live in the suburbs right so the grand thesis here is that there are more people who want to live in dense walkable places than actually have the ability to do it so there's a mismatch between what people want and what's actually available i really shouldn't even have to explain this as it should be apparent in the price per square foot that's commanded by what are pretty modest housing units in the dense areas of our most walkable cities but here's the research and data i promised earlier first from the national association of realtors which surveys this kind of thing on a regular basis because understanding trends and housing preferences is sort of their thing for this one in particular they ask respondents how satisfied they are with the quality of life they experience in their community and then they ask them if they agree or disagree and how strongly with the statement that there are a lot of places to walk nearby such as shops cafes and restaurants the very consistent finding is that people who agree strongly with that statement about walkability report much more satisfaction with their quality of life you could say these are people who are having more success in their pursuit of a reasonable conception of the good life the second piece i want to leave you with is this paper from transportation research part d which is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that focuses on the interaction between transportation and the environment the paper is evaluating household residential preferences for walkability and accessibility across three u.s regions by zhiang yan there's actually a lot of good research you can find along these lines so just use this paper as a jumping off point i'll leave a link in the description but the author developed a discrete choice model for housing preference that he applied to the atlanta detroit and seattle regions and found that walkability was a strong determinant of housing choice in seattle but not the other two cities he points out that there are two possible explanations for this either people in seattle are weirdos who simply have a stronger preference for walkability than people in atlanta or detroit or there's such a scarcity of walkable housing locations in the other two regions that it's seen as such an ultra rare commodity that people don't even bother factoring it into their housing location decisions even if it's something they value the academic term for this kind of mismatch is residential dissonance the author cites some other research that supports this second explanation and then points out that walkable neighborhoods are much much more scarce in the atlanta and detroit areas than they are in the puget sound region so the research and evidence suggests that there's significant undersupply of walkable housing choices in atlanta and detroit and probably most u.s cities and meanwhile the city that does have more walkable housing choices has massive affordability problems so this is where we're at and it's a tough picture any way you look at it okay that's where i'm gonna cut it this was a bit different a little more philosophical and theory heavy let me know down in the comments if you enjoyed this kind of change up thanks to the patrons as always for helping keep this channel chugging along i'll be back with a new topic next week and i'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 213,743

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, disneyland, disney world, urbanism architecture, universal studios, the grove, the original farmer's market, pike place market, m&t bank stadium, rue montorgueil paris, calle de fuencarral, the venetian, the venetian las vegas, linq, linq las vegas, caesars palace, caesars palace las vegas

Id: aGjc-gsh834

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2022