Talking Headways Podcast: The Value of Cities

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re heading to the capital of Texas for Movability Austin’s Movability Summit, where I’m giving the keynote speech. I discuss how cities and density create long-term value, and how auto-dependent monocultures affect household budgets by extracting wealth.

Dedicated listeners of Talking Headways know the program: You can listen to the audio in player embedded below, read the full transcript here or check out the excerpt below.

Today, we design transportation systems primarily for cars alone, disabling 30% of society that can’t drive or doesn’t want to. Ana Zivarts shared this number with us on Episode 488. This is also what’s frustrating about the idea of running cities, quote-unquote, “like a business.” As my friend Laurel Padgett-Seekins told us on Episode 573, businesses can have market segments.

They can exclude specific people who aren’t in their target demographic. But cities, transit agencies, public agencies, they can’t do that. They are meant to serve everyone. As we develop new technologies that can serve a great purpose, sometimes we become over-reliant on them or don’t build parallel infrastructure paths that allow people to participate meaningfully without them.

And by leaving people out, we’re reducing the value that supports a greater quality of life. Our cities have value in the proximity they can create, but our systems are built to extract value, not generate it. We allow speculation and give our value to speculators only to extract it through taxes and suffer the resulting boom and bust cycles.

In a car-oriented monoculture, we are extracting value from cities the way a venture capital firm would treat an older business, stripping it for parts and giving the value to others. And let me be clear, I’m not blaming the car here. They are but one tool in a toolbox. I’m pushing back on a system that puts them at the top of the pyramid and ignores geometry, space constraints and the value of proximity and access.

The car monoculture is an evolutionary dead-end, like the redwood tree. Redwoods are my favorite tree. They are majestic, but also a time capsule of a planet that doesn’t exist anymore. They used to exist in the whole northern hemisphere, and through evolution specialized to take moisture out of the air.

That atmosphere no longer exists except in certain parts of California and one small part of China. We are limiting ourselves in the same way with our evolution into a car monoculture, requiring cars and phones to participate in a society that’s always changing and trying to extract resources from us.

Stepping away from a monoculture of automobility towards a multimodal culture of access will create more long-term value for people and likely diversify our ability to adapt into the future.