New Orleans and Houston have raised serious questions about the nation’s ability to evacuate effectively major urban areas in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. The more recent Houston evacuation is rightly viewed as the more successful, as 2.5 million people managed to get out of the area by car. Things could have been better. In the future, freeways need to be made one-way much earlier, and there should be preexisting fuel-contingency plans. The biggest tragedy was in New Orleans where many households were without cars, and no serious attempt was made to use the hundreds of buses that were available before the hurricane and subsequent flood.
Houston is as good as it is likely to get. The city is unique in having a very effective freeway system that has been expanded so much that traffic congestion is little worse than it was 20 years ago, according to the annual Texas Transportation Institute mobility data. Imagine how much worse it would have been if the roadway system had been swamped by the more than twice as many cars as would have been trying to escape Houston if its population per square mile were as high as that of Los Angeles or San Francisco. On the other hand if Houston, like Portland had smugly refused to build new freeway capacity seeking (hopelessly) to socially engineer people into transit, not nearly so many people could have been evacuated.
An estimated 2.5 million people were able to evacuate from Houston because they had cars and because the roadway system has been upgraded to handle the rising population.
For nearly two decades, urban planners and environment interest groups have sought by every means possible to prevent the building of new highway capacity. The justification was a belief that building new highways created more traffic, which is akin to believing that building more maternity wards would increase the birthrate.
In most urban areas, traffic congestion has become much worse because road capacity has not kept up with growth. This means more than just a longer trip to work: It means that it will take more time than we have to complete major evacuations if they should be necessary.
The same interests have promoted so-called “smart growth” strategies that try to increase urban densities. A favorite tactic is to draw an urban-growth boundary outside of which development is not allowed. Such strategies have been widely shown to drive up the price of housing, which will lead to lower rates of home ownership and a less vibrant economy. But there is another toll. By definition, acts of terrorism affect a particular geographic area. If the affected area has a higher density, there will be more casualties. The worst part of it is that there is no good reason for urban densification. According to the 2000 Census, less than three percent of the nation’s land area is urbanized. Moreover, improved agricultural productivity has taken so much land out of production that the human footprint is now smaller than it was in 1950 by a land mass equivalent in size to Texas and Oklahoma, combined
It is time to pull the plug on the densification and anti-highway programs that promise to make the nation’s urban areas less safe and secure.
– Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public-policy firm in metropolitan St. Louis. He also serves as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris (a national university).