Book Review: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

 

16th Avenue SW, Cedar Rapids

Charles L. Marohn Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town. Hoboken NJ: Wiley, 2021.

What is the purpose of transportation? Charles Marohn's seminal contribution to this topic has been to note that it depends on where the transportation is occurring. Sometimes it is to get from one place to another quickly and safely; sometimes it is to get around within a productive place. In the first case, you want a road, with the best American examples being the interstate highways between metropolitan areas. Within places, you want a street that accommodates a variety of uses including but not limited to or even favoring automobiles.

America's greatest development mistake has been decades of urban design that practically makes a motor vehicle a requirement for participating in society, and results in streets that try to be roads at the same time: stroads are high-speed roads that also feature commercial development that draws a lot of auto traffic. They are financially unproductive, as he explored in his previous book, Strong Towns (Wiley, 2020), but they are also dangerous. (See especially chapter 2.) It is the safety (or lack thereof) of the places where people live that is the focus of the current book.

The statistical analysis and critical thinking that inform this work are framed by three powerful stories. In the introduction he recounts a conversation between pre-awakening Chuck and a woman whose property is about to be severely impacted by a road-widening project and who can't understand Chuck's explanation of why it will improve her life. (Spoiler alert: It won't improve her life, because, as he comes to realize, "improvements" like these make people's lives worse not better.) Then in chapter 1, we meet the Gonzalez family of Springfield, Massachusetts, whose daughter was killed by a car as they made their way from the public library to the parking lot; young Destiny is lifted from the bin of statistics to stand for all the people who are killed on stroads as they try to go about their daily lives. Finally, in the final chapter, Marohn recounts his own harrowing experience, as he too narrowly missed becoming a victim of design. These stories give life, meaning and purpose to the analysis.

Mt. Vernon Road SE near where two boys on a scooter were badly injured in June

Marohn's most important early premise is that transportation is not neutral, nor strictly technical as engineers might (and apparently do) conceive it. It is a question of values. If we design streets to move cars faster while putting everyone else at greater risk, that's a choice that reflects the city's values. Marohn's mission is to make explicit the values implicit in transportation design. Who matters? What matters?

His hope with this book is to introduce Americans to what previous generations enjoyed: "great streets" (the title of chapter 5). Great streets exist for the purpose of "wealth creation," which in turn "is really about building the capacity to endure over time" (pp. 66-67), allowing for adaptation over time, especially incremental growth. This only works when the growth occurs in ways that increase the city's assets faster than its liabilities: "A city can build miles of streets [to move a high volume of vehicles], but if there is not enough private sector investment on those streets to offset the ongoing maintenance costs, the community is merely growing poorer" (p. 68). Making a street a better place to live increases land value, and land value per acre is the quickest way to measure community wealth. Incremental growth, rather than frozen zoning or large-scale developments, is the way to do this:

Single-family homes add garage apartments or convert into duplexes. Duplexes are redeveloped to become fourplex units. Commercial buildings are subdivided to allow more tenants. Gaps are filled in. Space is used more productively. (p. 71)

We find ourselves back at the financial analysis of the first book. Marohn argues that transportation choices must serve this basic reality, but also that "a prerequisite for building wealth is that a street be safe" (p. 66). The traditional grid pattern does this; the arterial/collector system not only does not do this, it creates traffic congestion and the temptation to widen streets into stroads (ch. 6). He picks apart the analyses used to justify widening streets and bashing highways through towns (ch. 8). Roundabouts do this, if and only if correctly; traffic lights do not, and they waste time and encourage aggressive driving (ch. 7). Chapter 7 may deserve its own post, given that so many of my fellow Cedar Rapidians are convinced roundabouts are spawns of Satan.

In chapter 9, he uses the same logic to discuss public transit. This "is the only way to overcome the geometric space limitations of the street while still building wealth," because buses don't require huge parking lots, but only if it is run with a service orientation i.e. frequent and reliable runs between places of value: "All the public employees, lawyers, accountants, salespeople, clerks, and everyone else working in the core downtown should find it ridiculously convenient to board... and get to wherever they need to be to conduct business in the core downtown" (p. 157). Cedar Rapids's coverage orientation means buses spend a lot of time and money serving areas with few riders, making transit a drain on resources at the same time it is a non-starter for all but the truly desperate.

These are the highlights of a book that dips into additional transportation-related topics like scooters, rideshare, the impractical ideas of Elon Musk, and why police should discontinue routine traffic stops. All are in service of making transportation work, in a safe, financially-sound way, to build communities for people. I could use fewer long block quotes from the first book, which is consistently referred to with its full title and subtitle, but on the whole Marohn is a fluent and passionate writer with a lot of hard evidence to support his arguments.

 

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (V)

Your humble blogger and his humble sister in the days of their suburban childhood

Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here. Response to chapters 3 & 4 is here. Response to chapters 5-7 is here. Response to chapters 8 & 9 is here.

In its final chapter, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020) suddenly gets soul. Author and Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn, having made his case that the bankruptcy of local governments across is a broad but under-recognized problem, turns to the intangible advantages of more traditional approaches to development. Besides restoring your town's economy and government to a sound financial footing, you get neighborhoods with genuine community; opportunities for children to go places on their own; the physical fitness benefits that come from regular walking; something more real and important than our toxic political divide; and the sort of deep meaning to life that comes from living intentionally. He concludes, "Working together in an intentional way, it is possible to make our places stronger financially while also improving the lives of people" (p. 218, italics mine).

Marohn begins chapter 10 with a striking anecdote of their Life Before, in which his daughter meets her bff on the first day of kindergarten, and it turns out she lives right across the street:

My wife and I had lived in our house for over a dozen years at that point. Holly's family had lived in theirs even longer. We were both active families, involved in the community, with work, and with our churches. Yet, the thick woods covering the lots we each occupied along a cul-de-sac was enough of a barrier to our getting to know each other that we didn't even realize our neighbors across the street had a little girl the same as ours. (p. 200)

Not long after, his family moved to "a 1914 home in a historic area" of Brainard, Minnesota (p. 202), and a lot of the chapter discusses his epiphanies about life in a traditionally-developed urban area. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, Chuck Marohn was living on a cul-de-sac? Who would have thunk it?

Because we all come from somewhere. I come from the western suburbs of Chicago, with most of my childhood spent in a house built in the 1960s. It was in an older neighborhood, though, and the town had been around long before the Chicago metropolitan area grew to absorb it. I walked to school most of the time, my family could walk to a corner grocery store, and my parents had no concerns about sending me on errands or letting me loose to explore the area by bicycle or on foot.

I have also always had, for some reasons or other, an ambivalent attitude towards cars.

So maybe urbanism was my destiny. But I've also been fortunate for the last 38 years to live within two miles of my workplace. Had I stayed in DuPage County, I probably would have gotten used to the daily commute from cul-de-sac to office park. Maybe in the 1990s I would have read Daniel Kemmis's Community and the Politics of Place (Oklahoma, 1992) and James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (Simon & Schuster, 1993), and something in me might have been stirred, but I wouldn't have known what to do about it, because what alternative would I have had?

Who would I be if I'd never read Jane Jacobs? Who would I be if I hadn't started following Chuck Marohn?

I am fortunate to live in a place with emerging walkability, in the company of fellow urbanists and cyclists and community organizers who keep pushing the envelope in hopes of sustainable lifestyles, and where the city government, though the Council keeps hankering after subdivisions and game-changing attractions, is visionary enough to build protected bike lanes and sidewalks and do one-way-to-two-way conversions. I am fortunate to live at a time when a variety of writers and designers have given me a vocabulary to articulate my inchoate discontent with 20th century America: people like the new urbanists, Ray Oldenburg, Ellen Shephard, and the inspiration for the Corridor Urbanism group, Dave Alden. I see the world more clearly, and live in it more consciously, thanks to these encounters. And Strong Towns has been essential to all this.

And now those essentials are in this 200-odd-page book:

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (IV)

Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here. Response to chapters 3 & 4 is here. Response to chapters 5-7 is here.

Towards the end of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020), author and Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn suggests a number of approaches cities can use to cope with their precarious financial situations. There are many thought-provoking ideas herein; I'll address three.

Little bets are "small investments throughout a neighborhood, all aimed at improving the quality of life" (p. 155). The idea is to respond to the struggles of people already living there with "the next smallest thing that can be done today," intending "to nudge private capital off the sidelines by giving people confidence in the direction of the neighborhood. He cites the projects of Tactical Urbanism and Better Block as inspirations. Small projects like outdoor seating, crosswalks, and parklets don't cost very much, yet can bring neighbors out and together, and (in keeping with Marohn's financial theme) can convince property owners to make improvements because they're likely to pay off.

The advantage of little bets is a city can try something new where failure is not catastrophic, or likely to saddle the town with a long-term financial drag. I don't know how much the city has spent on bike lanes, but the first wave downtown cost about $3 million, which is a rounding error in a city budget of $500+ million, and you're not stuck with them if they don't work because the streets have to be repainted sooner or later anyway.

Under construction, 2013

A game-changer of a hotel/convention center, on the other hand, is a big bet, with long-term obligations if no one buys it, and they've had a poor track record in other cities, even if they do bring Lady Antebellum to town (see esp. Sanders 2014). The key question every official should ask is, "What if it fails?" If the answer is, we're out a small amount of money and self-esteem, then go ahead. If the answer is, we're screwed, don't do it.

Neighborhood evolution is what happens when change is not prohibited by zoning and other boards, environmental regulations, or empowered hostile neighbors. Neighborhoods that are frozen in time "damage the entire community," in part because they prevent the city from adapting to, well, anything, but particularly financial realities. They also exclude or burden a lot of people: "When city regulations demand that everything be built at a large scale and to a finished state, we not only price out much of society but we ensure that many of those who do own a home will struggle with that investment" (p. 163). So,

It is critical that every neighborhood in America be allowed, by right, to evolve to the next level of development intensity. That means empty spaces need to be allowed starter homes, even small houses, on footprints that can be expanded over time. It also means that single-family homes must be allowed to add accessory apartments, or convert to a duplex, without any special permitting, approval of neighbors, or added conditions. To become more financially productive, we need our neighborhoods to thicken up. (p. 163)

 He reminds us that "mixed use" is what all neighborhoods were until recently. And those traditional neighborhoods continue to be the most financially productive, even in decline.

Three blocks from my house is a small apartment building, one of several in the Wellington Heights neighborhood. It's bigger than the houses around it, of course, but not outlandishly so. It adds to the density and affordability of this core neighborhood without making a spectacle of itself. Why can't we do more of that? Because property values, I know. And parking, and noise, which are the usual complaints dragged out when neighbors want to stop a project. Maybe if more people in the city knew what a dangerous game we've been playing all these years, it would help tip the balance in favor of better housing.

Subsidiarity is a pliable concept but usually associated with local control of policy making. He quotes the definition from Wikipedia, for pity's sake; I'll step up to the Catholic Encyclopedia: "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good." (The Catholic Encyclopedia had a particular fondness for the Tea Party movement, which got a lot of Republicans elected to statewide offices who thereupon preempted local decision-making with at least as much vigor as Democrats ever did, but let it pass.) Marohn argues that local governments with restored decision-making power could make more rational decisions, and wouldn't have to rely for needed revenue on sprawl (or business subsidies, or game-changing projects, ...).

It's hard to be against subsidiarity, because all it's saying is everything should be done at the correct level, whatever you think that level is (unless you favor one-world socialist government, maybe). But state sovereignty has been abused everywhere, not least in states like Iowa run by people who hate the national government but also hate cities. (Recall Governor Kim Reynolds's comments about Des Moines and Iowa City not being the real Iowa, as she signed a bill preempting sanctuary cities.) You'd like to see cities given a real chance to chart their own courses. 

Two caveats: 

1. Unlike Americans in the age of Alexis de Tocqueville, we live in a national/global economy, and it's hard to imagine economic policy being made entirely on a local scale. As we in Cedar Rapids saw after the 2008 flood, when an overwhelming disaster occurs, it's nice when the nation has your back. In a perverse way, President Trump's failure of leadership in the face of the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the need for a functioning national government. But we shouldn't rely on or defer to the national government on matters of local competence. 
2. As Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton have articulated (The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, Island Press, 2001), most cities are part of a more complex metropolitan area that frustrates rational decision making. We need effective metropolitan governance.

But allowing for a federal role where appropriate, and effective metropolitan policy cooperation rather than rivalry and poaching, empowering local governments needs to happen.

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (III)

Marion IA Wal-Mart, Black Friday morning 2019

Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here. Response to chapters 3 & 4 is here.

Chapter 7 of Charles Marohn's new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Restore American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020) introduces the concept of measuring a place's productivity by calculating taxable value-per-acre, a concept to which he was introduced by Joe Minicozzi of Urban 3 LLC, but which they were both astonished to find was a standard planning tool 100+ years ago before it got forgotten. "It is lost wisdom, abandoned with so many of our ancestors' hard-gained insights" (p. 141).

It might be counter-intuitive, but the most productive blocks in any city tend to be older commercial and residential areas. Marohn includes an analysis he did in 2011 of two commercial blocks in his hometown that will be familiar to Strong Towns followers: the "old and blighted block" with 11 unattractive properties outperformed the block consisting of a brand new Taco John's Restaurant by 41 percent, $1.136 million to $803,000. Minicozzi's compared a downtown redevelopment area in his home of Asheville, North Carolina, and found it produced nearly 10 times the property tax per acre as the new Wal-Mart on the edge of town, as well as 1.76 times the sales tax per acre and a dozen times the jobs per acre (Table 7.1, p. 139). Yet city governments continue to push for the shiny and new, supporting them with tax incentives and wasteful infrastructure. "Across North America, our poor neighborhoods tend to subsidize our wealthy neighborhoods" (p. 141).

This is simple analysis that can be done as long as you have access to tax records, which are open records, or should be. (In researching a 2018 piece on big box stores in the Chicago area I found much of Cook County's tax records to be inaccessible.) Fancier analysis can include the cost of public infrastructure involved in serving the place, but acreage is a reasonable quick-and-dirty substitute. If anything properties closer to the center of the town should get a bonus because their streets, sewer pipes, and such are shared by the entire town, while infrastructure at the edge is used only by the specific property (pp. 114-115).

In Cedar Rapids, between my own calculations and those by my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan, we find results consistent with those found in Lafayette, Louisiana, and other places by Urban 3:

• Great America Building (2016) $13,999,048

• Bever Block (2017) $2,153,423

• 1420 1st Av NE (2018) $1,740,695

• SW Wal-Mart (2016) $501,557

• NE Wal-Mart (2016) $456,917

The Bever Block and 1420 1st Av NE have been demolished and replaced at some taxpayer expense with nicer buildings that have more parking. They still probably outperform the big box stores, which conjecture can be explored in future analysis. And maybe this summer I can play with some residential property tax numbers.

The moral of the math is, of course, that the more towns expand in a way that doesn't pay for itself in the long run, the deeper the hole they're digging for themselves, and the harder it will go for them on the day of reckoning. "The merciless nature of the math suggests this will be resolved in time" (p. 144). 

That is a scary prospect, one that's explored in chapters 5 and 6, mostly with math and logic. (For a starker picture of the smash to come, see the works of James Howard Kunstler, like The Long Emergency (Grove/Atlantic, 2005)). If we understand enough to pivot to "a chaotic but smart approach to evolving our cities" (p. 123), well and good, but if we can't afford to maintain what we have--and Marohn argues persuasively that we can't--some of our built environment is going to have to be abandoned. That is not going to be pretty or pleasant. And politics being what it is, the desirable approach that is locally-driven, rationally-based and community-minded is likely to be swamped by the parochial interests of those with wealth and political power who drove a lot of the expansion in the first place and don't feel now like they're getting subsidized. Those without means, who suffered from white flight and disinvestment, and now are suffering from gentrification, are going to take it in the teeth again, aren't they?

Happily, beginning with chapter 8, Marohn has some more hopeful ideas about managing the future.

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (II)

Cedar Rapids City Hall

Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here.

Chapters 3 and 4 of Charles L. Marohn's new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020) make two critical empirical arguments I'll just touch on here before I get to what I really want to write about. In chapter 4, Marohn deconstructs the case for more infrastructure spending, which relies heavily on the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) to the effect that [a] our current set of roads, bridges, &c. is in poor shape (usually indicated by grades from C to F), and [b] we need to spend X amount of dollars to repair or enhance or replace it, or else [c] we will collectively suffer Y amount of dollars in lost income. (Residents of my town will notice an astonishing similarity to the school district's argument to blow up all but one of our elementary schools.) Marohn points out that X is typically greater than Y, in fact more than double Y in the case he cites, and that it includes unproven assumptions about behavior such as people would be working during the time they spend stuck in congested traffic, or that wider roads wouldn't attract more traffic.

Most of chapter 3 is devoted to explaining what Marohn calls the Municipal Ponzi Scheme (p. 50). Because governments at all levels have built to stimulate future growth instead of accommodating what's already there--discussed in the last installment--we are overbuilt, which means the economic activity in most areas does not generate sufficient tax revenue to pay for maintenance. (See Figures 3-1 and 3-2 as well as his discussion of them.) The only way to make that up is to for new areas to be developed that don't at first need maintenance, so that those real estate taxes can be used elsewhere.

For cities in need of cash, new growth provides it. In the pattern of development we're experimenting with today--one that is government-led, spread out, and mostly homogeneous across the entire continent--new growth gives a local government decades of free cash flow. That makes it easy to understand the natural reaction of city leadership, as well as American society in general, when those liabilities come due and the insolvency starts to bite: pursue more growth. (p. 54)

The discussion can get technical and mathy, but Marohn's prose is quite accessible, and it's well worth the time spent getting through it. Someone's been selling you a bill of goods, and it's good to understand that.

Marohn begins chapter 3 with the controversial proposition that cities should "run a profit" (p. 37). He takes care, after he's shocked us with that, to explain that cities aren't designed to maximize profit, as a business would be, only that in order to run out of money, they have somehow to take in more of it than they spend.

The proposition is shocking because we are used to associating profit with businesses run in the interest of their proprietors, shareholders &c.--as Adam Smith famously wrote, we get our dinner from the baker's and butcher's "regard for their self interest"--while government is attend to the public's wishes and needs with something like the "benevolence" Smith pooh-poohed.

Governments act where there is identifiable market failure--an economic term with a fairly precise definition, although it's applied rather pliably in the real world. At the risk of offending any economist who has read this far, market failures in practice fall into two broad categories:

• situations where the prerequisites for market behavior do not hold, such as competition among sellers (and buyers), sufficient information for buyers to make a good choice, and excludability i.e. there must be something that can be transferred from the seller's control to the buyer's control for a price. Those prerequisites do not apply in cases of monopoly, complex or changing information about products, or non-excludable things like clean air, national security, and roads. In those cases we can expect government to step in with regulation or direct provision of services.
• situations where the outcomes of an efficiently-operating market are not politically acceptable, either because everyone is seen as deserving of some good regardless of ability to pay (merit good), or because production or use of something causes harm to other people not involved in the transaction (externalities). Obviously this could apply to almost anything, which alarms political conservatives and should alarm the rest of us, but it traditionally has included things like K-12 education, parks, and libraries. Current controversies over housing, health care, and public broadcasting revolve over whether they are merit goods; controversies over energy production and marijuana legalization focus on their externalities.

Whatever the problem, if there were profits to be made from addressing it, some private actor would have responded to the incentive. So how can governments be expected to run profits responding to political demands the market has certified to be insufficiently profitable?

Marohn isn't, however, expecting cities to maximize value for shareholders (p. 37), only "to endure"(p. 40) which requires it remain financially solvent. Even that is a challenge given the range of tasks local governments take on. Yet, as he pointed out at the outset of the book, cities have been meeting that challenge throughout human history. "Places that were not successful in harmonizing competing interests went away, their failures adding to a reservoir of cultural wisdom on how to build great places" (p. 41). The solution is to take a cautious approach, both to the range of tasks undertaken, and the scope of each task. It is not sufficient to say "people want it" (p. 50)--there must be a reasonable expectation that there will be revenue to meet it.

Because cities, unlike private businesses, cannot normally cease to exist, their behavior should be risk-averse. A business that takes a huge risk might achieve huge success, or it might spectacularly fail, in which case the owners will declare bankruptcy, its employees will eventually get new jobs, and the world will go on pretty much as it had been. Maybe it's true that businesses "will all eventually fail and be replaced by new upstarts" (p. 40). A city that takes a huge risk cannot fail; it can only "linger on, performing its functions poorly, failing to serve--and in some instances, doing harm to--the people that form the community it governs" (p. 38). Remember that next time someone in your town is promoting some "game-changer" scheme.

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (I)

Marohn, Charles L., Jr. Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020. xii + 240 pp.

I don't remember when I first ran across the work of Charles Marohn, who founded Strong Towns as an urbanism advocacy organization in 2009. It was probably around 2013, when I was doing research for a college course on the phenomenon of place, and in the process fell in with new urbanism. I've spent countless hours listening to the Strong Towns podcast, reading (and occasionally contributing to) the blog, and using Strong Towns material in my classes. (The current work will be assigned reading this fall in my Politics of the City course.) In 2015, Corridor Urbanism, the local group I co-founded, hosted Marohn for a public talk in Iowa City and an appearance before county officials in Ely.

Marohn has published collections of his blog posts--I have two of these in my office--but the current book is the first that systematically presents his ideas. Needless to say its publication has been the object of much anticipation in the Strong Towns universe. What follows here is less a review than a reading diary.

The first two chapters of Strong Towns describe the factors that led to the suburban model of development which has dominated American places since World War II, and why that model is proving problematic. The causal factors were political (land values too high in mature cities for new people to achieve success, concerns about returning to a peacetime economy) and financial (plenty of available money as America emerged from the war as the only undamaged power), but also professional hubris (belief that certain experts possessed the formula for building successful places) [pp. 27-30]. This combination of factors promoted and enabled risky behavior, because governments, mostly the U.S. federal government, were taking on the risk instead of local public and private actors. As a result:

Modern development is built all at once and to a finished state, a condition that does not naturally induce the rising land values necessary to drive redevelopment and renewal. We have defeated the stifling constraint of high land values, but in exchange we sacrificed the stability that has been the hallmark of cities throughout time. [p. 30]

In explaining how so many professionals got things so wrong, Marohn draws on the ideas of philosopher Nassim Taleb and physicist Neil Johnson. All three are redolent to me of the 18th century British political writer Edmund Burke, who criticized the rationalism that dominated the world of ideas in the Age of Enlightenment. Burke viewed with alarm proposals to overthrow social institutions in the name rationality; his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1791, anticipated the bloodbath it would become when its rationalism ran smash into reality. His argument, even early on, was that social institutions contained collective wisdom that no individual or group of individuals could approximate. We aren't, in short, as smart as we think we are, and we should approach change with due caution. (For this wisdom he was long known as the "father of conservatism," though given what conservatism has become today he would surely demand a paternity test.)

Burke

The wisdom collected over time, contained in our social and political arrangements, makes those arrangements "anti-fragile," in Taleb's words (p. 4), when we recognize and respect their "complexity" (Johnson's term, p.12). Early American settlers weren't philosophers or physicists, but living on the competitive edge of existence forced them to understand their situations or go broke (or die). Once financing became readily available, that level of awareness got lost.

The underlying assumption of the American development pattern is an abundance of resources.... We could, as Johnson suggested, act "cleverly or stupidly, and yet still end up with an embarrassment of riches." And we did.... Have a crime problem? Just hire more police.... Have a traffic congestion problem? Just build more lanes.... Are sales at the big box store stagnating? Just close it and build a new one in a better location.... No matter the problem, and no matter how bad it becomes, there is no force compelling us to evolve our habitat, to change the way we live together. [p. 13]

16th Av SW at Williams Blvd, Nov. 2017

We live today with the legacy of the last 75 years of development, and will inevitably pass it on to future generations. In some places, the inhumane design and inability to keep up with maintenance are already obvious from the dilapidated housing and potholes and empty commercial buildings, or from the impossible traffic in a tangle of high-speed "stroads." In other places, where there's enough wealth or at least financial wizardry to keep things pretty, the inherent flaws might not be so obvious. But they are there.

Marohn commends returning to our species' legacy of "small, isolated bets [which are] an opportunity to gain knowledge at low risk.... In fact, it's better to fail early when the stakes are low" (p. 17). But in towns across America, large or small or medium-sized (like mine), the belief remains in an easy fix in some "game-changing" form or other, along with the assumption that a federal grant can be attained to pay for it. We're running out of time to learn this lesson. This book gives Marohn and Strong Towns another crack at teaching it.

Bike lanes are examples of "small bets" that don't cost very much to implement

VIDEO: Chuck Marohn in Iowa City

Chuck Marohn (Source: strongtowns.org)

The Iowa City public access channel, City Channel 4, recorded the Curbside Chat by Strong Towns President Charles Marohn on Tuesday, June 30, 2015. The link is http://view.earthchannel.com/PlayerController.aspx?PGD=iowacity&eID=1276. The entire presentation, including Q-and-A, runs 1:45:00.

Iowa City-based readers may also view the talk on City Channel 4 at the following times:

July 18, 2015 @ 09:00 AM
July 20, 2015 @ 06:00 AM
July 20, 2015 @ 05:00 PM
July 22, 2015 @ 02:00 PM
July 23, 2015 @ 12:00 AM
July 24, 2015 @ 10:00 PM

OTHER STORIES:

Charles Marohn, "Iowa DOT Chief: The System is Going to Shrink," Strong Towns, 6 July 2015
B.A. Morelli, "Road System Will Shrink, DOT Says," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 15 July 2015, 1A, 15A