Generally speaking, I find the kind of broad “Cities: Yea or Nay?” culture-war debates pretty exhausting and pointless. And it is, for the most part, a culture war, fought by people who disdain or feel threatened by the social influence of others. Data point: the subhed on Robert Bruegmann’s recent op-ed in Politico, which reads: “Why urban yuppies have it all wrong.” It’s a tempting rhetorical trap, because so many people have chosen sides – or have had their side chosen for them – and because reducing transportation policy to a culture war allows everyone to feel like all they need to know about it is their own personal experience and feelings. It’s also, obviously, a totally symmetrical phenomenon: for every “urban yuppies” jab there’s an urbanist who makes some throwaway reference to suburbanites being fat, or rich, or whatever. It’s all very stupid, and as a general rule we should all stop judging each others’ choices. (We should also be more aware of the extent to which people don’t get to choose what kind of community they live in.)

Anyway, I clicked on and read Bruegmann’s piece mainly because he’s the author of Sprawl: A Compact History, the reading of which I attempted to liveblog last fall. (See parts one, two, and three.) And I’m writing something about it partly because I’m too busy to write the longer thing I’ve been working on for a while, but also because I think there’s a really basic flaw to the column that’s both extremely important and not at all obvious to the casual reader.

Basically, Bruegmann’s argument is that sprawl is fine – good, even – because car travel is more efficient, timewise, than public transit, and so Atlanta shouldn’t be worried about its recent designation as the most sprawly city in the country. It certainly shouldn’t attempt to fix its problems with sprawl and congestion by building more public transit:

In any case, the remedy for the problem of traffic congestion is not some massive transit-building program… Atlanta, like virtually every American city, would probably benefit from an expansion of the transit system, particularly to accommodate those who cannot, for one reason or another, drive. Even a major expansion, however, is unlikely to alter in any fundamental way the fact that most people except for those traveling to or from a few very dense nodes are going to do most of their travel by private automobile because in greater Atlanta, as in greater New York or greater Paris, the automobile is simply so much faster and more convenient everywhere except at the very center. [my emphasis]

This is a really remarkable paragraph for a person who is an emeritus professor of urban planning to write, and then publish, without immediately requesting a retraction or addendum or something.

The reason, if you think about that bolded part for a just second, should be pretty clear: what Bruegmann is referring to as “the very center,” where “the automobile is simply so much faster and more convenient,” varies a crazily huge amount between New York, Paris, and Atlanta, both in absolute size but also more importantly as a proportion of the entire metropolitan area. That’s obvious to anyone who has been to these cities, or is even casually familiar with them, but we can get a pretty good estimate of how big each “very center” is by looking at each metro area’s mode share: the percentage of people who choose to take public transit to work. Presumably, after all, people choose transit mostly because it’s the most efficient way to get where they’re going, with some consideration also for the fact that it saves a ton of money.

In the Atlanta area, about 3.7% of people take public transit to work; in the New York area, it’s about 30%. Paris is skewed somewhat because a huge percentage of people walk, but the drive-transit split works out to about 67-33. So we can very roughly estimate that the “very core” makes up, respectively, 4%, 30%, and 33% of these cities.*

Why the huge difference? Because a much larger percentage of the New York and Paris metropolitan areas are built at a reasonably dense, pedestrian-friendly scale where it makes sense to walk to the nearest bus or train stop, and where, when you get off that bus or train, you are likely to be able to walk to your job without too much trouble, either. In those cities, what Bruegmann refers to as “a few very dense nodes” make up, in fact, a continuous fabric of urban neighborhoods that are home to a huge percentage of the metro area’s residents.

In other words, Bruegmann forgot to talk about land use. At all. He forgot to mention that Atlanta, like basically everywhere else in the country (including metropolitan New York!), has basically made it illegal to build neighborhoods that resemble the transit-friendly nodes that, in Atlanta as elsewhere, are some of the most popular parts of the metropolitan area. As a result, as greater Atlanta has grown over the last few decades, it has failed to produce the kind of neighborhoods that allow people to choose not to drive, regardless of the quality of the public transit network.

Which makes the whole finger-wagging at urbanists pretty silly. It may be the case that Atlanta needs more roads; I don’t know. It seems very clear – as Bruegmann himself admits, pulling the kind of rhetorical underhandedness that bugged me in his otherwise thoughtful book – that Atlanta needs better public transit. But without spending hardly any money at all, it could make what transit it already has much more useful simply by changing its land-use laws and letting people build more housing and jobs around major bus and rail lines.

It’s a measure of just how invisible land use policy is, though, that Politico would publish an op-ed on urban form and transportation choices without thinking that it needed to spend a single word on the subject. It is my hope that one day this will not be possible.

* Obviously the Paris number is ridiculously low, since it’s unlikely that the 40% of people who walk, if they had to choose between driving and transit, would mostly choose to drive. But whatever, the broader point stands.