Cost of sprawl: Part 1
Sprawl is threatening to bankrupt us in more ways than we might realize. Let’s have a look at several of them:
Direct Costs
The US imported 4,289,772,000 barrels of oil in 2010, which at today’s price of $105/barrel is almost half a trillion dollars. Fully one third of our imports come from nations deemed dangerous or unstable. With each “uninstall” attempted on Middle Eastern and African dictators, the instability grows.
Much of that money goes to nations that don’t really like us all that well ... and some downright hate us. So a portion of the half-trillion dollar annual impoverishment of the US gets into the hands of organizations bent on destroying us. How much harm would Osama bin Laden have been able to do without petroleum dollars? And what is the cost, in lives and dollars, of the wars waged as direct or indirect results of petro-dollars getting into the wrong hands?
Sprawl should shoulder much of the blame for this staggering expense. Study after study have shown that per-capita performance is substantially better in the city than in surrounding sprawl. This is no surprise, since sprawl requires us to drive everywhere.
The half-trillion hemorrhage, unfortunately, is only the beginning. Today, we’ll look at some of sprawl’s toll on city budgets. Later, we’ll continue that discussion and also look at its impact on neighborhoods and individuals.
I lectured yesterday in Santa Fe on some of these issues, and illustrated them with a comparative study of two places. One was a sample of sprawl in the image at upper right (click to increase it's size). It was just north of downtown Santa Fe, but it could have been anywhere. It’s a 90 acre slice of sprawl exactly 1/2 mile wide. For comparison purposes, I took the exact same area and laid out a prototypical neighborhood based on new urbanist principles (see Neighborhood plan at upper right, click to increase size). Let’s look at the basic metrics of each example:
Sprawl
Housing Units: 114 (all single-family)
Shops & Offices: none
Civic Spaces: none
Civic Buildings: none
Arterial: 13.3 linear feet/unit
Main Street: none
Streets: 101.4 linear feet/unit
On-Street Parking: none
Service Thoroughfares:
Driveways: 108 linear feet/unit
Neighborhood
Housing Units: 814 (includes single-family units from cottages (throughout the plan) to mansions (on the right side of the plan,) townhouses, carriage houses, mews units, and live/work units over Main Street (on the left side of the plan)
Shops & Offices: 99.27 square feet/unit
Civic Spaces: 1 square & 4 playgrounds/pocket parks, total of 2.63 acres
Civic Buildings: 4, flanking the central square
Arterial: none
Main Street: 2.13 linear feet/unit
Streets: 28.03 linear feet/unit
On-Street Parking: 2.02 spaces/unit
Service Thoroughfares:
Driveways: 9 linear feet/unit
Rear Lanes: 10.2 linear feet/unit
Alleys: 4.45 linear feet/unit
Note: if you’re wondering how the total linear footage of alleys and rear lanes can be so low, it’s because there are a significant number of mews units and carriage houses on the same alleys and rear lanes that serve housing units as well.
Since World War II, the US has chosen to build almost everything according to the sprawling pattern. Here are some of the consequences that choice has on city budgets:
Police
The sprawl above allows police to protect 46 housing units per mile of travel. The neighborhood allows police to protect 175 units in that same mile. This has a very real impact on police department budgets. While it might take the same length of time to apprehend a suspect in either setting, police don’t spend most of their time with guns drawn or handcuffs out. Rather, the lion’s share of their time in the field is spent on patrol in most places. Because each police team can protect only 1/4 as many homes per mile in sprawl, you need close to four times as many police in the field to afford the same degree of protection. The city also has to buy, fuel, and maintain four times as many patrol cars to get that same level of protection on patrol.
Fire
Fire protection has similar issues. Fire trucks don’t patrol the streets like police, of course, but the fire ratings that determine the cost of your homeowners’ insurance is based in no small part on a city’s average distance from fire stations to housing units. Larger numbers of units protected per mile of street allows the city to save its citizens many millions of dollars in insurance costs without having to build, staff, and equip nearly so many fire stations. And with some fire trucks topping a half-million dollars apiece, the total cost of a new fire station can be a major item in a city’s budget.
Dollars aren’t the whole story, however. For almost every house in sprawl, there’s only one way in: pull up to the front of the house and fight the fire (or the criminals) from there. Traditional neighborhoods, however, provide the additional benefit of alley or rear lane access, which just might be the difference in life and death in some emergencies.
And this is only the beginning ... check back over the next several days for the rest of the story for cities, neighborhoods, and citizens.
Steve Mouzon is principal of Mouzon Design, an architecture and urban design firm, based in Miami Beach, Florida, and author of The Original Green, book and blog.
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Comments
Cost of Sprawl
Looking at the top 15 countries who export petroleum to the U.S. I would say mabey 3 of these countries pose any type of threat to the U.S. oil supply. ( Iraq, Nigeria, Angola.) These account for less than 8% of exports. If you take a close look Lybia doesn't even make the list. It shows how speculators can manipulate stock prices by making something out of nothing.
List: http://tinyurl.com/7ldt
Even if we don't import from
Even if we don't import from Libya, they contribute to the world market. Even the potential threat to the Libyan oil supplies sends oil prices soaring in the US. Then there is Venezuala and Hugo Chavez, certainly not a friend of the US. And didn't most of the 9/11 hijackers come from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Osama bin Laden? I think Steve's point is pretty solid.
analysis and oil threat
Good job, Steve, this is the kind of information we need to present an appropriate side-by-side comparison--then let decisionmakers choose.
As for oil, Geoff, the supply is tight enough that a country need not be a direct exporter to the U.S. in order to pose a threat to cheap oil in the U.S. If Libya normally exports its oil to the E.U., then stops, the E.U. still needs oil, and will be willing to pay a higher price to obtain it. Whether they get it from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia or Russia hardly matters: the overall world supply is reduced by the reduced supply of the vendor Libya.
You see? Speculators (these are investors, by the way), yeah a bit. Reduced supply is the culprit that makes speculation pay. Welcome to the future.
arrow
here's another arrow for your quill...
If a school is placed in a neighborhood, as you described above, there a good chance more kids would be walking to school. If there were enough kids traversing the .25 mile trek to warrant a reduction of one bus in the yellow fleet loser cruisers, heaven forbid two buses, then each school system would save a pretty penny. In one community I investigated each bus accounted for $125,000 a year. The expense included bus driver salary, insurance, prorated cost of the bus, maintenance and gas.
My advice, SmartCode or no SmartCode, make smart choices.
Design Comparison
While your main points may be valid, your comparative examples of design don't do much for your credibility or the credibility of your arguments. The example of "sprawl" seems to have extremely low public works standards and appears to be responding to some significant environmental constraints. Your "neighborhood" example is extremely simplistic, obviously doesn't address any physical constraints, and seems to have been just thrown together to generate some numbers (which still needed further explanation) to use in this article.
Your casual "it could have been anywhere" comment shows your lack of concern for the importance of the conditions of the site location on the ultimate design solution. Your table top solution might work anywhere in Florida, the desert potions of New Mexico, or anywhere else that's flat with sandy soils (and/or with no rain), but there are a lot of places that don't fit those criteria. (Since you already have THE design solution, stick to the areas where it will fit.)
Sprawl is definitely a problem, but it's not just an issue of density and certainly not one of street patterns. The real issues have to do with public policy toward transportation and land use, how taxes support different alternatives, and what homebuyers want (which, thankfully, seems to be changing).
You may be on the right path, but "puff" pieces like this don't do much to get us there.
re: Design Comparison
FWIW, the Sprawl sample was simply the closest piece of sprawl to the place where I was presenting. One could debate endlessly where to find the perfect sample to analyze, but picking the closest one seems like a fair strategy. Otherwise, you're stacking the deck in favor of whatever conclusions you want to draw. Picking the closest sample is more akin to playing with the cards you're dealt.
As for the Neighborhood, I should have described it differently: it's not so much a specific design (because you need a site to do a specific design, of course.) Instead, it's a design construct meant to produce metrics typically found in New Urbanist plans for the purpose of comparing to the sprawl sample.
As for your comment on "it's not just an issue of density and certainly not one of street patterns," I take serious exception, especially with the last part, if I'm understanding you correctly. Street patterns aren't the entire story, but they play a very large role in why the neighborhood pattern performs better than the sprawl pattern.
Design isn't just "puff"... it really matters. Look at what public-policy-only planning gave us before the New Urbanism, and then look at what happened when physical design became a part of the equation again. The resulting physical environments and their consequences are starkly different.
Design Comparison
@Bob: Agreed, this article does not adequately address the frustrating barriers to implementing higher density design and more walkable streets. Municipalities will most likely change their zoning code to encourage mixed use, high density and walkable streets when the preponderance of evidence supports these ideas as solutions. This article does, however, give some valid reasons for municipalities to encourage, or mandate, progressive development patterns through vehicles like SmartCode.