Voting With Your Feet
Ilya Somin | 8.24.2024 10:30 AM
Urban planners, land-use scholars, and other experts often advocate for greater density. But economist Tyler Cowen has an interesting blog post suggesting the US would do better to promote mobility, instead. His argument for mobility has considerable merit. But much depends on what kind of mobility we are talking about. Currently, increasing mobility in the sense of speed of transportation is less significant than increasing mobility in the sense of making it easier for people to "move to opportunity" by migrating from one place to another. Increasing the latter type of mobility often requires allowing greater population density (though, as discussed below, that may be compatible with increasing per-person living space).
Here's Tyler's argument:
American history is much more about rapid and cheap transport than about extremes of population density. Even New York, our densest major city by far, became dense relatively late in American history. To this day, the United States is not extremely dense, not say by European or East Asian standards.
But in American history, themes of horses, faster ships, safer ships, turnpikes, canals, our incredible river network, railroads, cars, and planes have been absolutely central to our development. America has put in a very strong performance in all those areas. When it comes to density, we have a........