This is not the suburbs

Does this look like the suburbs?

Clark Street. From Daley Plaza at the heart of the Chicago Loop, it heads north along the Gold Coast and ambles through Lincoln Park and Lakeview on the way to Wrigley Field. 

This is not the suburbs.

The Clark Street corridor is a walkable urban neighborhood that we’ve been treating like sprawling suburbia—like a place to drive through rather than a place to live.

The largest unmet demand in American real estate is for walkable urbanism—neighborhoods close to downtown with high-quality (rail) transit service and lots of amenities within walking distance of home. There is plenty of demand for a few such neighborhoods in Chicago, too.

There are too many people living in the Clark Street corridor for it to be efficiently served by a transportation infrastructure that prioritizes through traffic and parking over transit and biking on every single street. What works in the more sprawling, auto-dependent neighborhoods to the west doesn’t work near the lakefront. There’s no reason we should continue to treat all of our 814 streets as though they were all the same, when they’re obviously not. There’s plenty of room for some variety in Chicago—for a few streets that prioritize pedestrians, or cyclists, or transit over cars. When it comes to streets, we could use a little more choice and competition.

The good news is that we have enough density in the Clark Street corridor to justify having one street that prioritizes commuter transit and shopping over driving and parking. It's the densest place in the city. We’re lucky to have enough density for world-class transit, for great neighborhood shopping in a pedestrian environment, and for car ownership to be an option rather than a necessity. We can spend less on car loans, gas, insurance, maintenance, and parking and more on real estate and restaurants. We could be wasting less time stuck in a car than anyone in Chicago—and spending more time at the beach or the bar, the zoo or the Cubs game, with our families and our friends.

Time for greatness

The density of a city and the transportation infrastructure that serves it generally evolve together. As population density changes, the infrastructure adapts to provide an appropriate, cost-effective, efficient mix of options for getting around town.

From its founding through the 1950s, the city of Chicago became increasingly dense. It was planned and developed around the largest network of streetcars that has ever existed. There was an electric streetcar line on almost every street, and there could be no development without one. 


In the 1950s automobiles and buses replaced streetcars and the city's population began to decline, sprawling out into the suburbs. Taxpayers fled, while spending to build and maintain roads ballooned as we replaced streetcars with the most expensive and least efficient transportation option on the menu: the private car. The result is some of the worst traffic congestion in America. While the suburbs have continued to grow, by 2010 the population of the city itself had declined to its lowest point since 1910. 


But things have begun to change again. For many, the dream of suburban living has evolved into a nightmare of traffic congestion, parking lots, and strip malls. It's boring. People have been moving back downtown for the convenience and the culture. Dynamic companies have begun relocating to the city center to attract a creative workforce that favors urban living. It's more fun. 

The transportation infrastructure needs to accommodate and encourage greater density and continued economic development. We need a growth-oriented strategy that brings more people and fewer cars into the Loop every year--more commerce and less congestion. The system we have today was designed for the era of suburban flight. It’s out of sync with the future of Chicago. 

It’s time for an upgrade to a modern transportation infrastructure that’s in time with the great city we are becoming. 

Greatness.

Mediocrity.

Greatness.

Reverse Option Analysis

My antidote for the status quo bias is the Reverse Option Analysis. That’s where you reverse the positions of the status quo and the proposed change. You treat the proposed change as if we had been living with it for generations; you treat the status quo as if if were a proposal for something new.
Ready?

How would we view a proposal to change from a status quo of electric streetcars in dedicated lanes to a new system of diesel buses stuck in traffic?

The Reverse Option Analysis makes the status quo bias obvious: people accept buses in traffic not because it’s a good strategy but because it’s the status quo.

The Status Quo Bias

How come no one ever has to make an argument in defense of the status quo?

I spend a lot of my time making an argument for change—for designing smarter systems and investing more responsibly. How come those of us who want change have to work so hard to make a convincing argument, while advocates of the status quo get to just sit back and shake their heads?

There’s a good reason, actually. It’s the status quo bias.

The status quo bias is a good thing. It’s essential to our ability to survive and thrive. Our instinctive conservatism—our preference for keeping things the way they are—protects us from incapacitating self-doubt and the misery of regret (did I marry the wrong guy, choose the wrong career, buy too big a house?). It relieves us of the burden of constantly reassessing our past choices. It keeps us from becoming mired in thoughts of what might have been and allows us to get on with our lives, to make the best of what we have.

But as an advocate of change, the status quo bias is my biggest problem.

Good enough is the enemy of better.

The status quo bias is that look people get on their faces when they realize that I’m rethinking what they’ve always accepted as the natural state of things. They look at me like I’m asking, Are you sure you’re happy in that marriage? Are you sure that’s the right job for you? Didn’t you overspend on that house?

They can recognize that there’s a problem with the role of cars in our city. They can acknowledge that other cities have undertaken major changes that have fixed that problem, and that—theoretically, at least—we could do it too. And still it is inconceivable that we would do anything at all about it. There’s a gap between “we should” and “we won’t”: it’s the status quo bias.

It’s the status quo bias that allows people to confidently dismiss progress with the phrase, “That would be great, but it’ll never happen.”

The status quo bias serves us well from day to day, but it’s a liability when we’re deciding how to invest billions of dollars in taxes, making decisions that determine what assets and liabilities taxpayers will own for generations to come. Big, strategic decisions (more highways, parking lots, and congestion or a modern electric tram in every neighborhood?) deserve an unbiased, objective, critical thought process.

For public-policy decisions to determine how we invest in energy and transportation infrastructure, we should adopt the following practices:

(1) Acknowledge the natural status quo bias in ourselves and others, and make a conscious effort to be open-minded and creative in our thinking in order to compensate for the status quo bias;

(2) Be just as critical and demanding of the status quo as we are of proposals for change, so that we make a fair and rational comparison between them; and

(3) Consider the Reverse Option: for example, how would we view a proposal to change from a status quo of electric streetcars in dedicated lanes to a new system of diesel buses stuck in traffic?