What do Americans have to fear from new housing being built in their neighborhoods? Last month, a study from Sacramento reached a decisive conclusion: 63 percent of respondents said a primary concern was the impact on traffic and parking. Neither neighborhood character, school overcrowding, crime, nor environmental impact topped 25 percent.
That survey illustrates something you can see at any neighborhood meeting or on the local news: America’s automobile-dependent transportation system is making it impossible for us to fix a shortage of homes that now numbers in the millions, one reason that a new home is harder to afford than it has been in decades. The best place to build those homes is where people drive the least, and not just because neighbors want less traffic. Less driving also means a lower cost of living (transportation is the second-largest household expense after housing), fewer car crashes (a leading cause of death for young Americans), and a smaller impact on the environment (cars are the largest source of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions).
A new report from the Brookings Institution sheds some light on where America’s missing housing should be built to reduce future residents’ driving time, and it’s not as simple as just putting all that housing downtown. Instead, the report shows, even the suburbs exhibit huge variation in how much time residents spend behind the wheel each year.
The geography of Americans’ driving habits is sometimes reduced to a simple binary, with car-dependent suburbs on one hand and a handful of walkable urban neighborhoods on the other. In reality, the report shows, wherever you are in a metro area, the closer you are to clusters of shops, restaurants, and services, and the less you’ll drive.
Like, a lot less. In Dallas–Fort Worth, the country’s fourth-largest metro, about 1 in 4 residents lives within 3 miles of five different “activity centers,” the Brookings researchers’ term for those busy spots. Another 1 in 4 residents has just four “activity centers” within 7 miles of home.
Each year, a household in the second group drives 15,000 more miles than a household in the first. Moving from one part of the suburbs to another could save a typical driver $1,000 a year, hundreds of hours of driving, and thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions.
Not all sprawl is created equal, in other words. There are many places well within what’s conventionally considered “suburbia” that not only save residents an enormous amount of time and money by enabling shorter car trips. They also hint at a possible future where typical car trips are short enough to one day be replaced by other modes of transport, such as walking, biking, scootering, or other forms of new electric mobility. “You have people in every metro within 3 miles of five activity centers,” said Adie Tomer, one of the report’s co-authors. “That’s a biking distance.” There’s a 15-minute city in suburbia too. You just need to redesign the streets.
Tomer and Caroline George used a model fueled by data from a company called Replica, which uses cellphone records, credit card transactions, and census data to create a travel model that goes far beyond the typical commute-based analysis. That’s important: The commute tends to be a person’s longest trip, but most trips are not commuting trips. That trend has only increased since the onset of remote work.
The most dramatic driving reduction comes in the New York metro area, with its robust transit network and amenity-rich neighborhoods. There, living far from the hubbub will add another 20,000 miles to your household’s annual mileage. But surprisingly, some of the biggest proximity advantages actually occur in the country’s metro areas worst served by transit, like Houston or Atlanta, where the “close to activity” group travels 40 percent less than its “far from activity” peers. This is true not only near downtown and midtown, but also in amenity-rich locations on the exurban frontier, like Kennesaw and Alpharetta, Georgia, each of which is more than 25 miles from Atlanta’s city center.
Typically, the strategy for adding people to the city without adding traffic has been what’s called “transit-oriented development,” in which new buildings pop up along the fingers of the metropolitan train or bus network. This approach has some problems: For one thing, U.S. transit service is often quite bad. For another, in many cities, this policy amounts to corralling new residents along the busiest, loudest, most dangerous, and most polluted streets.
What this data suggests is that substantial reductions in driving could be achieved by a different policy: just putting more people within a few miles of stuff like malls, colleges, office complexes, and historic town centers. Currently, these parts of town account for just 1 in 3 residents of big U.S. metro areas. Adding new residents could take the form of what some planners call “stealth density,” in which housing types like duplexes and garage apartments are allowed to fill in suburban neighborhoods across the metropolis.
The real benefits will mainly accrue to people moving in. But existing residents should have a selfish interest in building up those areas instead of the fringes: It will mean less driving, less traffic, and less competition for parking in the metro area as a whole. It will mean less of all the externalities that go along with all that driving. And it ultimately may begin to reverse a trend in which the average American’s driving distance doubled from 20 miles a day in 1969 to 40 miles in 2017.
The solution was pretty simple all along. As Tomer said: “Turns out, when you put more stuff near people, they don’t have to travel as far, and that has huge impacts on what we’re able to achieve economically and environmentally.”
