To be clear, by "globally" I mean here against other Westernized, industrialized countries. If we want to claim to be the wealthiest, best, most shining-city-on-a-hill country in the world, we should be comparing ourselves to people who are in similar circumstances and do urbanism in a model that's based on similar wealth and a similarish social organization. I am not here to debate the value of a traditional Micronesian village as an urbanist space or to try to distinguish between the various ways that societies have organized themselves and their spaces across time and space and declare one or the other superior. Rather, I'm suggesting that there are certain standards that we look for in Western societies, of which the US is one, in their social, geopolitical, and spatial organization, and then looking at how the US might compare to its apparent peers.
And since this is around July 4, I'm going to look at how the US is doing on urbanism along three Jeffersonian axes: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
1. Life
Let's start with a big, long list: nations by traffic-related deaths.
Obviously, there's per capita here, which the US looks middle of the world pack in, just under the global average. But look at the countries above us and below us, and think about their wealth. And then adjust the same list by per billion km of driving. Well, you lose a lot of countries for lack of data. But we look good compared to say a Belgium, a New Zealand, and a South Korea, each of which are higher--but then there's Canada and most of Europe well below.
This is not intended to be conclusive data, but rather an indication: in terms of allowing, promoting, and sustaining the fundamental guarantee of "life," the US is not doing its best.
And that's just actual deaths.
There's a good argument to be made that specific deaths from traffic (while obviously to be minimized) are neither the only nor even the most significant life impacts of transportation and urban design.
There are significant health and environmental benefits from reducing car use. Conversely, cars produce massive negative externalities--that is, beyond the direct effect of a car going somewhere, other social and environmental effects happen to those who are not necessarily behind the wheel or in the vehicle, and these tend to be bad.
Now, how does the US stack up? Well, a lot of those negative externalities are global (i.e. climate change) but not all of them are. And the US has a lot of good programs that help with environmental problems caused by car-centric design, such that it actually comes out pretty well on things like global air quality rankings.
So overall, this is a matter of something that the US could do better on rather than something that's absolutely tanking. The design isn't always great: this type of road is not designed well for life.
And neither is the highway right next to it.
And despite that I would say Milwaukee, where the pictures come from, is better set up for urban design for life than most of the US.
So a middling grade--but goodness could we do better than middling if we prioritized this.
2. Liberty
I've posted about freedom and liberty in urban design and transportation before, multiple times. So I don't want to belabor the point too much.
But honestly, I feel freer in a city where I can go where I want without a car than in one where I can go where I can take my car anywhere.
And this car is limiting my freedom as a pedestrian, of course.
But let's be fair: there's lots of places in the US that do provide some of that freedom. I think of these 14th Street Station patrons as pretty darn free to wander NYC.
And while this meerkat is caged, the people who visit him in the DC Zoo have admirable mobility and freedom.
This dockless bikeshare in Seattle is a great example of urban freedom (even if, like the car on the sidewalk, a pedestrian might disagree).
And I think these Chicagoans are having a wonderful time walking in the street, which is more freedom than they always have but still.
Basically, we know how to build cities in the US that are free to roam and free to wander--but it's not our default urban design.
This is our default design (though this in particular is Louisville, KY).
And the thing is: that's not unheard of internationally either.
This Dutch street is just as parked up.
And presence of a bus aside, this Toronto street ain't so great a design either.
So it's not like we're uniquely doing this poorly--but the degree to which it's the default in our city design is a problem. And the most annoying thing is that it didn't have to be this way. We rebuilt our cities like this; we used to have different, less car-centric systems.
Perhaps we are all, truly, Waiting for the Interurban.
3. The Pursuit of Happiness
This is of course a difficult one to grapple with, because I cannot deny the number of people for whom the car itself is a symbol of both happiness and its pursuit.
And I also don't want to discount the people for whom other elements of our urban design that I don't tend to talk about as much are important as well: the big house with its fenced yard and space.
Say, the house I grew up in as a child.
But I do also want to emphasize that, as with the car-centric design and freedom, I think the pendulum has swung too far in how we build our cities. We tore out the interurbans in Seattle; likewise, we zoned out the possibility of building more of these little apartments (just down the street from the house above):
I grew up in a house with a yard--next door to a multifamily apartment building. I don't think the kids there had a worse childhood than I did. We could catch the same buses, go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, shop at the same stores.
But for a long time their building was only there because it was grandfathered in; any new construction in our part of town had to be like my house (Seattle is doing a bit better on that now, but still not enough in my opinion). And that's the flaw: there's nothing wrong with people wanting the house, as long as that isn't used as a reason to stop the existence of the apartment as well--especially as we experience a massive housing shortage across the country and indeed the world.
And it is a worldwide problem: the pursuit of happiness through homeownership (whether that's house ownership or not) and even just stable renting is a problem worldwide, and so I don't want to pretend that the US has failed here more than anyone else.
And while other countries have tried things like social housing, that hasn't always been a panacea, and even the places that have done so haven't stemmed the tide of rising prices and demand.
This quintessentially Dutch street isn't exactly filled with new buildings. We're not the only ones who need more.
Everyone needs to build more, and build better, in order to allow for that pursuit of happiness for our ever-growing population.
But we have to be smarter about how we build: and the US is one of the biggest offenders in terms of building out into the wilds instead of infilling or building up. Again, there are exceptions, but by and large we sprawl. And that makes for longer commutes (and longer potential commutes even if individuals find better jobs) which have their own impacts on happiness.
So overall, what do I think of how the US is performing on these three metrics?
We're clearly lagging on life--and it's reflected in the underlying life expectancy data.
We're doing better on freedom and the pursuit of happiness--but partly because those are less objective measures. And also partly because everyone is doing less well on some of the elements of those two.
And after all, if this is supposed to be a time of American exceptionalism, of making America great again, of America First--should we really be happy with doing better relatively only because others are doing it badly too?
We can be better at how we build our cities--and we owe it to ourselves now and in the future to do so as soon as we can.
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