Bike Lanes and Progress: a Play in One Act

A YIMBY Dilemma

Scene: an outdoor cafe on Bloor Street in Toronto. ANNE and BIANCA are seated at a table, nursing cups of coffee.

ANNE: I hear the government of Ontario is going to legislate that cities can't build new bike lanes if the cost is losing a lane of traffic for motor vehicles.

BIANCA: I heard the same thing. I imagine they're thinking of this very street. Both Toronto and Mississauga have removed auto lanes from their portions of Bloor in favour of bike lanes, or have suggested that they will. I hope Ontario changes its mind. 

A: I disagree. Preventing new bike lanes that would kill auto lanes is good, actually.

[BIANCA chokes on her coffee]

Original art courtesy of Amber Black

B: How can you say that? Bike lanes promote cycling, and we need much more of that! It's the best way to get around a city. It's good for cyclists, who can get around cheaply while maintaining their health. It's good for cities, because it's efficient; more travel with less space devoted to it. And it's a low-to-no emission mode of travel, which is good for the planet. Why should we be in favour of something that makes it harder to build bike lanes?

A: We should be in favour of it because we're YIMBYs. YIMBYs like us know that the problem in the West today is we don’t build any more, and the reason we don’t build is local governments prevent it. Further, we know that the solution is to go over the head of local government to provincial or state governments, and if we have to, over their heads to the national government, to prevent the local level from interfering.

B. Are you listening to yourself? The point of YIMBYism is that local control is bad because it prevents things from being built. This proposal is just that: an attempt to prevent bike lanes from being built, even if the local government wants them.

A.  Let's back up. What is a YIMBY? It's the opposite of a NIMBY, the sort of person who says “I’m all in favour of building that thing, but Not In My Back Yard”. It's because of NIMBYs that we have a housing crisis in Toronto, and in most North American cities. It's simple supply and demand. For decades, we haven’t built enough housing, so there isn’t enough of it; as happens when a good is scarce, the price of the housing we do have rises to meet demand; and as a result, housing is largely unaffordable. And why haven't we built enough houses? The same reason we haven't built enough solar and wind farms, or airports, or transmission lines, or anything else: NIMBYs make building things impossible.

B. Yes, I know all this, but—

ANNE, ignoring the interruption: The NIMBYs are behaving rationally. Building any kind of new infrastructure offers regional benefits, but imposes local costs. Building new housing is good for new homeowners, who get to have a place to live, and it's good for local businesses, who get to have more customers, and it's good for government, which gets to receive more property tax, and it's good for the community as a whole, which benefits from lower-on-average housing prices... but it's bad for the local community, which has more trouble finding street parking because of increased competition. And it may now have worse views, more shade, more noise, and so forth.

B. <rolls eyes> That would surely seem to be the case, Socrates.

A. Oh, hush, and let me finish. So the benefits of housing are widely spread out, but the costs are concentrated among its neighbours. That means those neighbours are protecting their own interests by opposing new development. And as they have the power to vote for local government, but any newcomers don't, because they haven't actually moved in yet, local government is particularly responsive to NIMBYs. So local authorities veto projects, or impose a soft veto by imposing extra costs or delays, and nothing gets built. If we multiply that situation across the entire province, or nation, what happens is nothing gets built anywhere. And indeed, that's what's happened since the 1970s or so, which explains why we seem to be paying more and more for less and less of everything.

B: Yes, I agree with all of that. We're "Yes In My Back Yard" YIMBYs, we see this problem, and we recognize that we need to build—housing, solar farms, subways. We want the abundance agenda: a future of prosperity for all through building more and better infrastructure. I'm glad you understand that. Do you also understand that you're arguing my point for me? YIMBYs want to build! This proposal forbids the construction of new bike lanes.

A: But it's not forbidding new bike lanes. It's forbidding new bike lanes that would replace auto lanes. Taking away auto lanes makes congestion worse. That's imposing a global penalty on everyone's trips. Meanwhile, who benefits? It's the elected officials who get to farm votes by portraying themselves as friends of the environment, or bikes, or some other form of progressive talking point. Costs for the many, benefits for the few... that's what YIMBYs oppose. So the YIMBY move is to support this proposal.

B: Oh, come on. Haven't you heard of induced demand?

A: Certainly I have, but you clearly want to tell me, so please go ahead.

B: Well, it's only fair, you clearly wanted to tell me what NIMBYism was. As the saying goes: if you build it, they will come. There's latent demand for travel, and we build new infrastructure to satisfy those trips, but by making it easier, you generate even more demand. So if you build a road to reduce congestion, you make it easier to take road trips, so road usage increases, and you get more congestion than before. Given that's so, the best kind of bike lane is one that removes a lane of auto traffic: it creates more biking demand, while making auto trips more difficult on the margin, encouraging bike trips and discouraging ones by car.

A: Sure, you reduce demand for auto trips on the margin. But that reduced demand isn't evenly distributed. People who don't live in the area will avoid traveling there, and will re-route their trips to other roads. Maybe a few won't travel at all. But people who live in the area have to use roads that are now permanently more congested. They suffer a permanent and significant cost to every trip they take from now on. That hardly seems fair or progressive.

B: Remember earlier when you were talking about how NIMBYism is rational? Yes, it's bad for locals. Progress has always created costs, but the benefits exceed them, which is why we want it. It's unfortunate that some costs can't be spread equitably. People who lose a lane of auto traffic near them have their lives made slightly worse, but there have to be bike lanes, indeed a network of them, for the whole community to benefit.

BIANCA stirs her coffee, then continues: But there’s lots of unpleasant infrastructure to go around. Some people need to live near water-treatment plants that make everything smell like manure on hot days. Some people need to live near highways and suffer long-term health impacts from air pollution. Some people need to live near entertainment districts and put up with noise pollution. The best we can hope for is that these costs are widely spread out, so no community must bear too much of a burden. In this case, locals can substitute some auto trips for bike trips, so they actually are getting a benefit as well as a cost.

A: Tell that to the elderly, or the family with kids, or the family that needs to get groceries.

B: With the right equipment, the elderly can bike. And so can kids. And bike trailers make grocery shopping easy. But look at it from a different angle: families with kids are already having to buy special equipment to manage their lifestyles, like minivans, or car seats. We're not asking them to take on any special burdens, just changing the kinds of consumption that they signed up for when they became a family, but whatever. I'll cede your point that some trips will become worse, and some local residents will be worse off, some of the time. But I'll bite that bullet: it's the price of living in society.

A: Well, since you're being so generous and ceding my point, I'll return the favour and cede your point that building more bike lanes is a good thing, and that if a government wants to build something, we shouldn't prevent it.

[beat] 

So I presume I can count on your support for building new highways, like Highway 413?

[BIANCA chokes on her coffee again]

B: Absolutely not.

A: Wait a minute. I thought your whole argument was that new infrastructure means productivity and prosperity and paycheques and progress and other good things that start with P... pizza, I guess. And further, that governments should want to build and we shouldn't block them from doing so, even some people complain. Please explain why all of that is true, but not for new highways?

B: Because all of that is true, if what we're talking about building is something good, or useful, or necessary. But that's not what we're talking about. For the record, I would also argue against the government building cocaine refineries, or digging bottomless pits to throw cash into.

A: Be serious.

B: Okay, fine. I would also argue against the government building coal-burning power plants, or nickel mines that put chemical runoff into the water table, or hospitals that wouldn't use penicillin. It's not that I think we need less power generation, or resource extraction, or health care. I want more of all those things.

A: But—

BIANCA, ignoring the interruption: And if this was 1910, when power plants had to burn coal, and nickel mines had to emit pollution, and hospitals had to practice without antibiotics, I would have supported building them. But it's not 1910; we have better alternatives now. We can have mines and power plants that don't pollute, and hospitals that use penicillin... so let's choose to build those alternatives, and not to build bad, outmoded projects. I trust you'll now withdraw your accusation of hypocrisy.

A: Sure, if highways were a 1910 technology that had been entirely superseded, I would withdraw it. But they aren't, so I won't. Come on, a highway is the very definition of useful economic infrastructure! The more of them we have, the more trips we can serve. Your whole argument about induced demand is that there is latent demand for trips, and if we build highways, people will use them immediately, to the point where they become congested. That congestion is a sign they're doing something valuable and useful! So let's build more of them.

B: The issue is not that highways are a 1910 technology that's been superseded. The issue is that in 1910 there were great highways to build that offered lots of return on investment. But we've been busy since then, and we've built lots of highways. By the time you reach our day, we've picked all the low-hanging fruit. Yes, the value of a network scales with each node you add, so long as there are new nodes. But geography is finite and we've already connected them all. There's nothing left to do now with road connections but tinker around the edges. Not to mention that back then highways were cheap: cheap to buy the land, cheap to build, cheap to maintain. Highways are really, really expensive now...

A: So are subway stations, or high-speed rail lines, or airports.

B: ...which only means that if we're going to build anything that costly, we should know the payoff will be. And it's clear that highways no longer offer good payoffs, because the network is built out. But the network of rapid, high-quality transit in cities, or between them, isn't. Obviously we should look at the business case for any project we might want to build, but we should expect that any new highway won't have a good one.

A: You're trying to have it both ways. Either governments should build, or they shouldn't. And if they should be building bike lanes and subways, they should be building highways too. Or traffic tunnels under highways, for that matter.

B: I think the principle "government should build infrastructure that is good, and not build infrastructure that is bad" is a consistent principle we all can, and indeed should, endorse.

A: Whereas I think you're setting yourself up for failure. The principle to endorse is actually government should build, full stop. Once you say that some things shouldn't be built, you have to come up with ways to prevent those things from getting built. And then you're giving ammunition to the critics of all projects, not just the ones you happen to dislike.

B: That ammunition is already there, in the form of [makes air quotes] 'budgeting'. We can't build everything everywhere all at once, because we don't have the money for it. So we have to prioritize what we build this year, or next year, or any year. And prioritizing is just another name for 'picking good projects'.

A: We seem to have wandered away from the issue, which is whether we should cheer when cities rip out infrastructure that's being used, like roadways filled with auto traffic, to put in other things, like bike lanes.

B: I thought you were going to say "to put in other things that won’t be used, like bike lanes".

A: Not at all. I appreciate the value that a high-quality, connected bike-lane network will create. And I believe in induced demand; building that network will encourage more bike trips, so it will get used. Yes, bike lanes are good things! What's more, I believe in the abundance agenda, and that it's time to build. But precisely because I believe all of those things, I don't think we should destroy existing transport infrastructure, any more than we should retire functional nuclear power plants or airports.

B: Well, I too believe in the abundance agenda, and I too believe it's time to build. And so I also believe we should be building out our bike lanes, as the lowest-hanging fruit available for moving people around crowded cities. But because cities are so crowded, we can't have it all on every street: there isn't room for two lanes of traffic each way, as well as a bike lane, and wide sidewalks, and street furniture, and so on. Sometimes we have to choose, and given that lanes for auto traffic are commonplace and bike lanes are rare, it's appropriate in some instances to get rid of the former to build the latter.

A: Huh. I have to confess, I'm surprised; if we're both on the side of progress and abundance, it seems to me you would have to have been convinced by my arguments.

B: Well, I feel the same way about you.

A: You mean that even though we share an intellectual framework and a moral commitment, we can also still have strong disagreements?

B: Frankly, if we didn't, it would be a bad sign. Lack of disagreement is for cults and political parties, not healthy social movements.

A: Still, it's disquieting. For some reason, it seems like this argument should end with one of us definitively defeating the other.

B: That sort of thing is fine in fiction. But this is the real world.

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Changing Lanes on the Road

Next week I’ll be in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at the 37th annual conference of the International Association of Transportation Regulators.

I’ll be giving the opening AI keynote speech on Monday (7 October 2024) on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and Mobility.

If there’s interest in a meetup among my readers, please get in touch and we’ll set something up!

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