Having criticized Yonah for his anti-anti-NIMBYism stance, let me praise a recent post of his on a new BRT expansion proposal for Chicago:
A new proposal by the influential Chicago-area Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), whose board is a collection of some of the city’s top business leaders, goes a lot further, promoting a $1.23 billion project that would dramatically improve connections between the city’s outlying neighborhoods and reinforce the core network of commuter rail and L lines. While Chicago, like all major cities, has a number of transportation priorities, an endorsement by Mr. Emanuel of this scheme as the city’s long-term plan could go a long way towards making the city a place where it is easier than ever to get around without a private automobile.
Yonah explains why we should care:
Why invest in improving Chicago’s transit system, when the city is known as already having one of the nation’s most extensive networks? Because there are hundreds of thousands of people in the city who are underserved. A new Brookings Institution report by Adie Tomer, released yesterday, notes that 400,000 households in the Chicago metropolitan region have no car — representing the second-highest rate in the country. Of those carfree who live in the city itself, just 39.2% can reach 40% of the metropolitan-wide jobs via transit in 90 minutes, far less than in Subway-heavy New York City (51.9%) and even supposedly car-dependent Los Angeles (44.9%). Part of the explanation may be job sprawl, but another is clearly that the radial orientation of Chicago’s existing network makes it difficult to get to jobs outside of the Loop; BRT running along circumferential and neighborhood-to-neighborhood routes would relieve some of those problems. So there is a need for the kinds of BRT the MPC has described. [Emphasis added]
Many of these households are quite poor, and improving their access to job opportunities has the potential to improve their economic prospects, and to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chicago children. Climbing the jobs ladder will allow these workers to become more self-reliant, thus easing the burden of funding social services and crime control measures, among other things. One can make a strong case that voters in the suburbs of Los Angeles and Austin as well as the suburbs of Chicago have good reason to contribute to funding such a project, as the benefits will be shared by taxpayers across the country.
And that is also why voters across the country, or at the very least across the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois, have good reason to be concerned about severe zoning restrictions that choke off the supply of affordable housing. Chicago isn’t a very good example in this regard, as its housing policies are notably less destructive than cities like New York and San Francisco. But the point still stands.