America’s Driving Mandate: Don’t Call It “Freedom”
In the beginning, there was public right of way – the freedom of movement between & amongst property. And then, America decided to mandate a specific vehicle for the public right of way above all else -> America’s Driving Mandate: Don’t Call It “Freedom”
There is a story Americans like to tell about ourselves: that we love our cars, our cul-de-sacs, our three-car garages and two-car commutes. That we “chose” this. That suburban sprawl is the natural expression of an American preference for space, privacy, and the open road, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is a coastal scold trying to force us into a crowded apartment over a noisy bar.
It’s a great story. It is also, in the most literal sense, advertising — sold to us for nearly a century by the auto industry, the oil industry, and others whose business models depend on robust car and oil sales. And the proof that it’s advertising, rather than reporting, is hiding in plain sight, in the price of a house.
Start with a basic question. If Americans truly prefer car-dependent suburbia above all other ways of living, why is it illegal to build almost anything else?
What’s fascinating to me is that this mandate exists almost exclusively at the local & State level. And it has grown over a period in American history where the overwhelming drumbeat has been for more freedom while also demanding less freedom in the most basic of human freedoms – the freedom of movement.
We have not had a free market in American housing or transportation for at least seventy years. What we have had, instead, is the most ambitious land-use experiment in human history: a continent-scale effort to make one specific lifestyle — single-family house, two cars, every trip outside the home only possible by driving — not just available, but mandatory.
The rules went by polite names, though YIMBYs have done our level best to make them pejoratives: Zoning. Parking minimums. Setback requirements. Street level-of-service standards. Floor-area ratios.
But strip away the planning jargon and what you find is a driving mandate dressed up as land-use regulation. If your neighborhood requires every home to come with two parking spaces, every store to come with a parking lot four times the size of the store, and every street to be wide enough for a fire truck to do a three-point turn, you have not built a place where people can choose to drive. You have built a place where they have no choice but to drive.
What’s To Be Done?
This is not a car vs. bike issue. This is a “how do we allocate scarce public goods” issue. It’s a freedom issue. Where does one person’s freedom to use a public good begin & end? Where does one individual’s freedom begin to cost society as a whole?
Historically, Americans have insisted that the free market & democracy generally make the best decisions around public goods. But that’s not what is going on.
There is a name for an economic system that uses regulation to mandate one product, criminalize the alternatives, and subsidize the chosen one with hundreds of billions in hidden cross-payments. It is not capitalism. It is not the free market. It is central planning — Soviet in structure if not in aesthetic, with cul-de-sacs instead of microdistricts and Olive Gardens instead of bread lines.
The people who have spent the past fifty years calling YIMBYs socialist for wanting to legalize apartments have somehow not noticed that they are the ones running a command economy. The suburbanist who insists the market chose this is standing inside a regulatory cathedral built specifically to deliver his preferred outcome.
The answer is to methodically deregulate at the county & State level. These are not TV politicians. These are politicians you can talk to. And deregulation does not mean that hordes of smoke-belching factories and slumlords will arrive in a rich, quaint, picket-fenced county. Instead of regulating property, regulate behavior. Don’t say – “you can’t have a corner store here”, say “you can emit more than X decibels or more than X liters of grease”.
The way out is not to flip the mandate. We do not need a law banning suburbs, or mandating urban living (“you will live in a pod/eat the bugs/15 minute cities/the globalist conspiracy”) any more than we needed the laws banning everything else. The way out is freedom — actual, market-based freedom — to build what people want to live in, and to let them pay for what they actually prefer:
Legalize the missing middle. Legalize the corner store. Legalize a building without a parking lot. Charge market prices for driving, and for street parking.* Let the price signal do the thing the price signal is supposed to do – the thing it is best at, and is uniquely qualified to do.
If suburbanists are right that Americans love sprawl, they have nothing to fear from this. The market will deliver them more of what they say it wants. And if they are wrong — if, given the freedom to choose, Americans turn out to want walkable neighborhoods at something like the rate the prices have been telling us for thirty years — then we will finally have what we have not had since before most of us were born: a country where the place that you live is a choice you make, rather than a choice made for you.
The car commercials told us we were free on the open road. The real freedom is the one they spent a hundred years lobbying us out of: the freedom to choose whether we want or need the car at all.
*And for transport – maybe add a bike lane or a sidewalk before using eminent domain for a bigger road. Instead of just doing traffic counts…maybe study where people actually go so you’re planning for movement instead of car speeds. Fund transportation methods based on the ability to move people per mile instead of just cars. Further reading :)
