Episode Summary

  1. Humans are generally bad at estimating. This includes our planning related to automobiles. Private costs like depreciation, parking, gas, insurance, car washes, customizations like floor mats, roof racks, and trailer hitches, repairs add up. Social costs like: pollution, expectation for free parking, the lack of affordability, noise, infrastructure expectations, and the danger (unsafe at any speed) should give us pause as we consider our relationship to the automobile.
  2. Streets, Roads, Stroads, whatever you want to call it, places where automobiles operate are dangerous. Even though we're driving less miles more drivers, passengers, and pedestrians are being injured and killed.
  3. Affordable housing is a supply and demand issue.

The hidden costs of car ownership (6 min read)

It's more dangerous to drive and walk across the street than ever before in the United States (5 min read)

Ontario Canada's Housing Affordability Task Force and their 55 recommendations (7 min read + the 55 recommendations).

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone. I’m Kyle Gulau and on this show, patterns of development, we take less than 10 minutes each week to deconstruct what's going on in real estate, architecture, and urban planing.

I hope this show provides value by giving you case studies and examples to consider and discuss with your peers. My own goal is that through repetition we can build pattern recognition, and apply experienced thinking in our own backyards.

First up this week an article about the true costs of automobile ownership in Forbes written by Carlton Reid.

I love this quote from the article: Motorists underestimate the total private costs of car ownership, “while policymakers and planners underestimate social costs.”

Let's talk under estimating private costs: depreciation, parking, gas, insurance, car washes, customizations like floor mats, roof racks, and trailer hitches, repairs, the responsibility of being in control of a couple thousand pounds of plastic and steel that can kill someone.

Let's talk social costs: pollution, expectation for free parking, the lack of affordability, noise, infrastructure expectations, the danger of getting hit by a vehicle.

A favorite stat of the show -- America’s 250 million cars are oversupplied with an estimated 2 billion parking spots. That's 8 spots for every car in our country.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of politics here. It's really political suicide to touch cars because you'll get burnt. To paraphrase author Stefan Gössling, "Yes, much of the built environment entrenches car use, but, famously, many people drive pitifully short journeys when it would be just as easy—and certainly cheaper and healthier—to walk. Getting people out of cars isn’t something that most politicians want to broach..."

We're not car haters on this show. I'm just not sure the true costs are really understood. And in an inefficient marketplace how might we gain some efficiency? I believe...is the question.

Let's talk more about that cost, an article now from the New York Times. Pedestrian Deaths Spike in U.S. as Reckless Driving Surges. We've talked about it multiple time on this show, pedestrian and traffic deaths are at an all time high, but we haven't really talked about why. To read from the article by Simon Romero,

"Empty roads allowed some to drive much faster than before. Some police chiefs eased enforcement, wary of face-to-face contact. For reasons that psychologists and transit safety experts are just beginning to explain, drivers also seemed to get angrier.

Dr. David Spiegel, director of Stanford Medical School’s Center on Stress and Health, said many drivers were grappling with what he calls “salience saturation.”

“We’re so saturated with fears about the virus and what it’s going to do,” Dr. Spiegel said. “People feel that they get a pass on other threats.”

Dr. Spiegel said another factor was “social disengagement,” which deprives people of social contact, a major source of pleasure, support and comfort. Combine that loss with overloading our capacity to gauge risks, Dr. Spiegel said, and people are not paying as much attention to driving safely.

“If they do, they don’t care about it that much,” Dr. Spiegel said. “There’s the feeling that the rules are suspended and all bets are off.”

Nearly 32,000 people were killed in vehicle crashes in the first nine months of 2021, a 12 percent increase from the same period in 2020, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. We're driving less miles, and it's costing more lives.

It's more dangerous to drive to the airport, then it is to get inside what is effectively a metal tube flying at 30,000ft and going 500mph.

Again...I am not anti-car. I think it's important that we decouple the idea of car commercials, the vision that Elon Musk sells to shareholders, and the general word "freedom", from what is clearly a very costly part of our transportation infrastructure...

Here's a pattern for you, we talk about transportation, then we talk about housing. What are the options for our citizens to get safe comfortable shelter, and how can the move around in physical space?

So let's talk about housing. Ontario's Housing Affordability Task Force and their 55 recommendations. For the sake of this show, we can't cover all 55 but I agree with the summary provided by the CBC and author Mike Crawley,

  • Increase density in neighbourhoods zoned exclusively for single-family homes.
  • Repeal municipal policies that focus on preserving a neighbourhood's character.
  • Set uniform provincial standards for urban design, including building shadows and setbacks.
  • Legislate timelines for development approvals, and if the municipality misses the deadline, the project gets an automatic green light.

Interestingly enough, "Limit the time spent consulting the public on housing developments," made the cut.

Quoting the report, "NIMBYism is a large and constant obstacle to providing housing everywhere. We cannot allow opposition and politicization of individual housing projects to prevent us from meeting the needs of all Ontarians."

Which leads us to our patterns of the week:

  1. Humans are generally bad at estimating. This includes our planning related to automobiles. Private costs like depreciation, parking, gas, insurance, car washes, customizations like floor mats, roof racks, and trailer hitches, repairs add up. Social costs like: pollution, expectation for free parking, the lack of affordability, noise, infrastructure expectations, and the danger (unsafe at any speed) should give us pause as we consider our relationship to the automobile.
  2. Streets, Roads, Stroads, whatever you want to call it, places where automobiles operate are dangerous. Even though we're driving less miles more drivers, passengers, and pedestrians are being injured and killed.
  3. Affordable housing is a supply and demand issue.

Talk to ya'll soon...