Suburbanite Kevin Drum is having an interesting discussion with city-dwellers Matt Yglesias, Ryan Avent, and Atrios about the walkability of Woodbrige, a subdivision of Irvine, where I grew up. On this, I have credentials: I spent 18 years in Irvine, three more in other parts of California, and now live in DC. I am the daywalker. Kevin's point is pretty simple: Woodbridge was built to be walkable, but nobody walks. And nor would you expect them to. There's nowhere to go. Irvine is spread out. The houses are on large lots. It was built for cars and extremely cheap gas. The roads are huge, the driveways palatial (six or seven kids could use one driveway for handball), and there are parking lots for the parking lots. Your friends live three miles away. Your work is 10 miles away. Groceries are heavy. There's no metro or convenient mode of public transportation. I lived there for a number of years, and I drove everywhere. Walking was entirely a form of recreation. It hardly ever occurred to me to understand it as a mode of transportation. Conversely, I now live in DC. Like a good Californian, I even brought my car out here. Living without a car seemed absurd. But over the past three years, I've essentially stopped using it. It's not that I've changed. I visit my family in Irvine frequently, and when I'm there, I borrow my grandmother's golden Honda Civic. But something fundamental shifted. When you live in a dense city, driving is not only non-essential, but also a huge pain in the ass. The streets are knotted with traffic. The parking is nonexistent. The pedestrians are everywhere. Metroing to Pentagon City takes me 20 minutes. Driving takes me 30, and I arrive in a bad mood (not helped by the fact that I'm now in Pentagon City). Driving to work takes me 20 minutes, and I have to pay $10 for parking. Biking takes me ten, and I get to laugh at the cars backed up across 16th street. To often, conversations about transportation and density tip into questions of virtue. But I don't walk, bike, or Metro because I'm a good and decent person. Despite barely ever using it, my blue Ford Focus sits vigilantly in my garage, and my driver's insurance is up-to-date. In DC, I don't drive because it doesn't make sense to drive. The space that would've been used for wide streets and big parking lots and ubiquitous gas stations is instead handed over to more homes and more shops and more markets and more restaurants and more places where my friends live. The money that would've been pumped into driveable infrastructure has instead built a backbone of subways and bus systems. The question here is never about getting people to virtuously decide to stop driving in Irvine, but building cities such that it makes sense for people to walk and use public transit in Woodbridge. In general, people don't drive or not drive because the preference is embedded in their personality. Rather, they intuitively follow their incentives and choose the transportation options that make sense. In Irvine, driving made sense. There may have been sidewalks, but the built landscape was created for cars. In DC, walking makes sense. The built landscape includes roads, but it was made for people. That's the difference.
