City The Times Misleads on Smart Growth
Eric Pryne’s story in Sunday’s Seattle Times, headlined “Despite planners’ best efforts, many people choose the commute,” sounds like bad news for pro-density Smart Growthers who want to encourage people to live where they work through planning, zoning and transportation decisions. Pryne’s story makes the case that long commutes—from Auburn to Enumclaw, for example, or from Federal Way to Redmond—are becoming the norm because of personal choice, not because of poor city and transportation planning. (The conventional wisdom among Smart Growth supporters is that providing reliable, frequent transportation to the places people want to go and clustering jobs and housing in the same location will lead people to live and work in compact neighborhoods.) People frequently take jobs far away from home (and vice versa), Pryne argues, because of “personal preferences that are stronger than any aversion to longer commutes.”
One insurance agent who lives in Tacoma and drives every day to Enumclaw, Pryne writes,
says he considered moving when he got the job in Enumclaw, but uprooting his family was too big a price to pay.“It would just upset a lot of the kids’ routines,” Griffiths says. “The only reason to move would be to reduce my commute time.”
Another Enumclaw worker drives one hour each way, or about 450 miles a week, from Fremont, because he and his wife “just like the neighborhood.”
Pryne’s smug conclusion: “People don’t necessarily do what planners think they will.”
But wait a minute. Buried elsewhere in the story is an important point:
The geographic divide between home and work is most pronounced in bedroom communities where there simply aren’t many jobs.Six of seven working residents of Sammamish, 10 of 11 working residents of Mountlake Terrace and 11 of 12 working residents of Newcastle commute to jobs elsewhere.
In other words, living in the suburbs typically means driving a long way to work.
And check out the graphic that runs with the story. Areas that are orange have higher percentages of people who live where they work; areas that are green have lower percentages. Because the map only takes into account geographical area, not population per area (i.e. density) it looks like an awful lot of the Puget Sound region is made up of long-distance commuters. However, if you consider which areas have most of the region’s population, the picture grows considerably less grim: Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Redmond all have higher percentages of people living and working in the same community than outlying suburbs like Arlington, Black Diamond, and Maple Valley. And the densest community of all, Seattle, also has the highest percentage of people who both live and work there. The real conclusion of Pryne’s story, then, should be this: Sprawl doesn’t work. Density does.
I agree with ECB that generalizing about personal preferences regarding where people live vs. where they work based on a few interviews almost surely will lead to incorrect conclusions. Human behavior is, and habits are, way too variable. One thing I would take from the article is that by far the most typical commute is not one from downtown Bellevue to or from downtown Seattle. That is the big problem with sinking so much money into a fixed rail system (read: ultimately inflexible). Trying to force density because a transportation mode choice already has been made almost certainly will fail. Not many successful centralized social-engineering programs like that spring to mind.