Why Suburbs Should Love Urbanism

We often see transit planning and urbanist design cast as a fight between suburban and urban interests: spending money on transit in urban areas, for instance, as an attack on suburban drivers, as in Ontario politics, or congestion pricing as an attack on suburbanists, as was widely suggested around New Jersey opposition to NYC's recent implementation of a congestion zone in lower Manhattan. But as this article reminds us, it's never that simple: suburbs are part of their urban design, and what benefits the latter often also benefits the former, no matter how much they complain beforehand.

Here I want to highlight a few ways in which urban development is good, actually, for surburban interests. These may seem obvious, but somehow they often get missed in the contrived binary between the two.

1. Suburbs Use Urban Amenities

Look, I'm not saying there's no one who primarily remains within their suburb. In fact, if we really built quality fifteen-minute city design into our suburbs, there could perhaps be many--and if we count people with limited mobility and car access, there undoubtedly are.

But by and large, suburban areas exist because they are "outside the walls" of urban areas, and they draw on the benefits of those cities in larger conurbations and metropolitan areas. The Patriots may play in Foxboro, but the Red Sox are in Boston proper; NYC congestion pricing operates precisely because so many people come across from New Jersey (and down from Connecticut and upstate New York, and over from Long Island); London has grown again and again up from the single square mile "City of London" out to what we know as Greater London today and still manages to have massive entanglement with the suburbs even beyond that. Imagining that what's good for the city is bad for the suburbs is like pretending that killing an oak tree would be good for the fungi growing on its roots. It's a mutualistic relationship: the city benefits too, of course. But it often makes more sense to concentrate building and development in the city itself, which allows every suburb to benefit, rather than focusing building in each suburb to make them equal.

There's a reason most of Sound Transit's first stage of building (and the second, and in theory the third) is focused in Seattle, even if the Board of Directors has required representation from the suburbs as well.

The expansion has taken these guys out of Seattle, and there was always an airport line, but service is still concentrated in the urban core--for good reason! 

This goes even for suburbanites who don't directly use the urban transit themselves, as in the NYC example linked above: suburban drivers in the city get to go faster if there are fewer others using the roads.

2. Virtuous Cycles

As we've discussed before in terms of Paris and London, extensive transit (and other urban development) builds on itself to something greater than the sum of its parts.

I love the Milwaukee HOP tram, but its downtown-only, limited functionality makes it less effective as transit. It implies a potential without delivering on it fully. I say that with love; I really enjoy using the HOP. But it's not a full-scale system.

Free her!

Also not a full system on its own? The Paris tramways.

But the Paris trams, unlike the HOP, are not the only intra-city rail service. They can be partial (albeit significantly more extensive than the HOP) because they are part of something greater. This particular tram pictured above is pulling into a stop at a station for the RER, which looks like this:

The integration between them makes both of them more effective: a heavy-rail can't go everywhere, and neither can a tram, but they can work together in a virtuous cycle to make the whole city easier to transit.

And before anyone points out that the HOP also goes to a train station, I know. Here's a sign about it, in fact:

But Amtrak at Milwaukee Intermodal Station isn't the RER. It's an intercity rail station, like this one in Paris too: Gare du Nord.

The tram doesn't go here, but the RER line does (in fact, I took line B between them on the trip where I took this picture). So Milwaukee has two but not three of these links in the Paris system (both stripped down to have fewer connections and less track as well), and thus has less access to the cumulative benefits of that kind of urban infrastructure.

What does this have to do with urban vs suburban? Well, the RER and the tram in Paris actually go primarily to suburban areas, because the virtuous cycle is so powerful that it enables transit outside of the urban core. Milwaukee's HOP is purely downtown. Heavier investment in the urban space allows suburban connections to that urban center become more viable, and thus benefits the suburbs as well.

I'm not dissing Milwaukee here. It punches well above its weight in US terms. I'm saying that the more we allow this kind of virtuous cycle anywhere, the more powerful it becomes.

3. City Borders Are Semi-Arbitrary

OK, quick quiz: what city is this photo from?

What about this one?

They're from the same metro area, but different legal entities. And neither is the city that most people actually associate with this metro area. The first is Cambridge, MA; the second, Somerville, MA. Both are part of the Boston Metro Area--there's a reason that Harvard graduates, who went to school in Cambridge, stereotypically say they went to school in "Boston," and its not just weirdness about saying they went to Harvard.

It's because the city-suburb division is a continuum, not a binary, and the lines are sometimes almost as arbitrary as some diplomats carving up the Middle East along straight lines. Inner suburbs of New York in New Jersey can be just as or more urbanist than the city proper. 

Yes, there are suburbs that differ widely from their city in terms of transit use and density. But there are also ones that are fundamentally part of the same place. And while politicians might have incentives to emphasize the latter, and I'm not advocating for wanton, willy-nilly absorption of suburbs into cities, we all benefit when we realize that "suburban" and "urban" investment in transit, development, and urbanist infrastructure is not a zero-sum game.