The Suburbs Aren't Changing

In the 1940s and ‘50s, several economic and social trends prompted the move of America’s mostly white middle class families from city centers into quickly growing suburbs. Increasing average incomes and a richer middle class following World War II was an economic factor. The average American family’s desire for more living space and economic mobility was one of the social trends. Racial tensions in city neighborhoods was another. But the underlying enabler behind such rapid growth of the suburbs was the automobile and the burgeoning US interstate highway system that it was dependent on. This new network of roadways connected the country’s major cities from coast to coast, but also connected downtown city business districts to far away residential suburbs, which for the first time made a long-distance daily commute possible. Fueled by the auto industry itself, car ownership and suburban home ownership became closely linked with the cultural ideal of American success. So for the next several decades, suburbs grew rapidly because dense city centers simply could not offer the space to support this dream for a price that middle class America could afford. But as people moved further and further away from cities, these suburban ecosystems became more and more dependent on the automobile for primary access back to the city.

The transportation problems in the US today are often blamed on “America’s car dependence”. This is generally a fair statement, but the more nuanced answer is that transportation systems and land use in the US have been arranged in such a way that owning a car and driving it everywhere is often the most convenient or only way to get around. Almost a century after the proliferation of the automobile, we are in a situation where familiarity with vehicle ownership lets us ignore other transportation options that might better suit our varying use cases. In fact in many cases, and in contrast to many other countries, cars had a many-decade head start over other commuter transit options for suburban areas in the US. And financially, our transportation system and regulations mask the true cost of driving to most people. Either deliberately or subconsciously, we’ve been trained over time to think about driving costs associated only with gas and parking, and not so much the depreciation of your vehicle, insurance, registration, and maintenance costs per mile. AAA estimates that in 2022, driving your personal vehicle costs you around $0.75 per mile (assuming you drive a Toyota Camry about 15,000 miles per year in Illinois…it goes up to $1.30 per mile if you drive a Ford F150 in Texas. Find out your vehicle ownership cost here: https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/drivingcosts/). This adds up if you are using it to commute, say, 30 miles from a suburb into a city and back several days a week.

And it turns out, most of us do choose to commute via personal car. The amount the average American drives is much higher than a resident of most other countries (Americans drive on average ~13,000 miles per capita per year, which is the highest in the world. Canada is second at about ~9,000 miles per capita per year. See where other countries stack up here: https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/how-much-do-americans-drive/). This is in part due to how spread out we’ve designed our cities and the surrounding suburbs.

However, in the fight for awareness of this country’s transportation problems and adoption of more sensible systems in our society, we should bifurcate our arguments for urban and suburban solutions. Land use and densities in urban areas are so vastly different from suburban areas that the same modes of transportation cannot be applied in both types of environments because people in each environment have very different transportation needs. One size literally, and figuratively, will not work for these very different worlds. We can (and must) solve the car dependency issue in our cities, but asking people to give up their cars in the suburbs without an equally convenient or attractive alternative mode will not be successful.

In the suburbs, what we can do is make investments in public transit (e.g., commuter rail) and EV charging infrastructure coupled with selling smaller vehicles to make incremental - but important - reductions in overall system vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, respectively. We will not be able to meet our transportation and climate goals in the US otherwise. It’s likely that many trips within the suburbs will continue to be taken via car…because that’s actually the best mode for some suburban use cases. The eager urbanist might want to get rid of cars in the suburbs too, but in a world where you have to pick your battles and spend resources in the right place to achieve real change, the suburbs are not the place for this fight. The suburban market is also too critical for the automotive industry to lose, so we should expect this industry to invest heavily in protecting the business they have with suburban customers. So we must instead make it as easy as possible for a suburban family to switch to a personal car that uses greener fuel sources (i.e., EV). Then let’s focus on creating other viable options for traveling into a city from the suburbs and finding solutions for trips within city centers where a car really isn’t the best mode.

To solve the suburb-to-city car dependency problem and create real behavior change, we must provide other convenient and cost competitive transportation options into the city, make it easier to use alternative modes of transportation like walking, biking, rideshare, and public transit within the city, AND we must make it harder to drive cars in the city. These initiatives together will help make progress towards solving safety, congestion, and pollution issues caused by suburban vehicles being used in cities.

Here are four transportation and land use policy changes that regional planning organizations can focus on to achieve better commuting outcomes for suburban residents and better city mobility for urban residents:

1. Improve commuting options from the suburbs into the city

• Metropolitan regions need to invest in a better commuter rail system

• Make people more aware of the real cost of driving

• Improve commuter rail frequency and first-/last-mile access to transit from suburbs

• Offer rapid commuter bus options and create dedicated bus lanes on highways

2. Invest in transportation modes, technologies, and businesses that improve road geometry in cities (i.e., shared rides and transit)

• Invest in high frequency public transit service, giving visitors confidence that there is always a train or bus that can get them around the city

• Incentivize pooled rideshare options to limit the number of empty or minimally utilized Uber/Lyft cars in cities

• Improve walkability in cities, protecting pedestrians from traffic by creating more sidewalks with barriers

3. Make it harder to drive a car in the city

• Remove mandatory parking minimums for new developments

• Implement dynamic tolls for driving a car into dense city centers during peak periods

• Remove portions of street parking, requiring people to park in garages instead; remove all free city parking

4. Promote EV charging infrastructure buildout in suburbs

• Make EV subsidies available to more consumers by loosening foreign component supply chain restrictions for OEMs

• Standardize charging infrastructure and vehicle-side charging connectors to make it easier to charge an EV at any station

Changing the relationship that America has with the automobile is not an easy task. It’s also not a challenge that can be tackled by any one person, group, or entity. Behavior change is achieved by the presence of seemingly equal or better alternatives with new benefits (“carrots”) as well as systemic levers that push people away from the status quo (“sticks”). The two sides to this equation are owned by, and therefore must be solved by, distinctly different government, business, and social groups creating carrots and implementing sticks. A problem of this scale and the solutions outlined above deserve focus and attention by the appropriate groups at each level of the problem. So let’s first invest in finding better solutions than a personal car for getting around our cities. Then in the meantime, other resources should go towards adopting EVs in the suburbs…because personal car ownership there simply isn’t changing any time soon.