In case you missed it, current Transportation Secretary (and former congressman from IL-18) Ray LaHood got the Deborah Solomon treatment in last week’s New York Times Magazine. The interview is fairly broad but not very deep, but still gives some notion of the administrations priorities when it comes to livable communities. But although I’ve been relatively happy with a lot of LaHood’s statements (particularly on high speed rail), I have to take issue with this nugget from the interview:
I think everybody will have an automobile. I think it’s amazing in America when you drive around and look at new homes that are being built, there are three-car garages. I don’t think you’re going to see families with three cars. I think you’re going to see families with one car, possibly two.
As I say more than once in the text, Carless in Chicago is not an anti-car book. And I accept that not everyone lives in as dense an environment as Chicago, and that in some parts of Chicagoland, people will rely on cars for primary transportation. But I think LaHood’s comment reflects one of the real limitations to the ways in which government analyzes problems. For example, here in Chicago, we have a terrible parking shortage, which has resulted in laws and regulations to encourage the creation of new parking. (This itself is a terrible policy, for reasons explored in Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking.) We fail to examine the problem from the perspective that there may simply be more cars in the city than we can responsibly keep, and rarely examine policies to lessen the parking shortage by reducing their numbers.
To be fair, I should point out that my viewpoint may have some unlikely allies. Way back in 2000 during his first stint as Ford’s CEO, Bill Ford, Jr. said:
The day will come when the notion of car ownership becomes antiquated. If you live in a city, you don’t need to own a car.
That’s the kind of private sector leadership I can get behind.
