In the 1994 film “Blank Check,” an escaped convict drives over an 11-year-old’s bicycle, hastily writes him a blank check to cover the damages, and speeds away thinking the problem is behind him. Unforeseen by the convict, the kid fills in the check for $1 million, buys a mansion with a waterslide, begins traveling by limo, throws lavish parties, and burns through the remainder of the cash in a matter of weeks.
It’s obviously not a terrific movie, but as a kid myself it provided me with a painful and lasting revelation: A windfall is only as great as your capacity to sustain it.
As I look back over the past few months and see the school bus driver shortages, the snow issues, and the plowing difficulties, I can’t help but think that we are that kid, coming to the realization that taking care of big systems actually requires a lot of money. The city’s infrastructure is overbuilt and expensive.
Urban living, including density, has tradeoffs. Greater density can mean more neighbors but also less infrastructure. Even under snow, families in a denser city can still walk to school, the grocery store, the library, and local restaurants. Workers can get to work. The city keeps buzzing in all weather.
There is no question that political leadership has an impact on how public facilities get managed, and insufficient funding is a major problem. But the system we have of 1,300+ lane miles of streets and dispersed schools is the product of decades of planning and design that centered around automobiles. By rethinking how we pay for services and lay out our city, we can make year-round transportation more efficient, environmentally friendly, and cheaper to maintain.
Anchorage was designed from the mid 20th century onward with the expectation that single-occupancy vehicles were going to be the primary mode of transportation. I say designed because, while there is no question that many people love the convenience of driving and some even love driving itself, the system we see today would not have been possible without massive public subsidy and policy intervention over multiple decades. These were very expensive policy choices because they required:
- Building and maintaining roads to facilitate all travel by cars for every trip that anyone makes anywhere, forever.
- Setting aside huge amounts of land to store vehicles when not in use.
- Placing the cost to own, maintain, and operate a motor vehicle on each household rather than providing a wider range of choices.
This car-centered thinking still pervades most transportation policy at just about every level, and it costs us a lot of money: Providing services to suburban development can be up to 2.5 times more expensive than urban development. The December snow storms showed us just how much less resilient suburban development really is. The city became paralyzed as soon as the use of motor vehicles was no longer absolutely guaranteed.
No matter how you feel about cities, it’s absurd that we have thousands of people living only a few miles from the places they need to get to, who essentially become prisoners in their own homes the moment driving is no longer an option. An obvious point that’s worth repeating: Schools don’t close in snowy weather because the school buildings themselves don’t function. They close because too much snow makes it impossible to access these places without the use of a motor vehicle.
There are other paths we could have taken. City leaders could have built a system around travel by bus, bicycle, aerial tram, or any other mode. They could have built baseline infrastructure to expect that most movement in the city would happen on foot. Ultimately, they prioritized motor vehicles, and those infrastructural preferences of the past have significantly limited what we can do in the present. But they don’t mean that we can’t start moving in a better direction today.
We can start by changing our default expectations about how people move around the city and incentivizing development of neighborhoods where amenities are grouped together. Rather than building and designing from a starting point that assumes everyone must drive, let’s start by assuming that everyone will use a sidewalk. This would mean more things would naturally be within walking distance of each other, and that there would always be usable walking infrastructure connecting these places. And all of this infrastructure would be ADA-compliant and accessible to everyone.
We thought we had a blank check, so we built a lot of infrastructure that felt convenient at the time. It ended up being fragile, expensive, and more than we can handle.
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This post is a submission to The Alaska Current. Please send submissions to news@thealaskacurrent.com.
