Photo via mikeonbike

This week, the New York Times published an article about European urban planners’ attempts at undermining the use of personal automobiles. In Europe, cities are intent on creating environments that are “openly hostile to cars” in order to “tilt drivers towards more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.” Interestingly, the article was published the same week as Nicholas Lemann’s apologia for low-density suburban living in The New Yorker. Lemann, whose progressive credentials are unimpeachable (he’s the publisher of The Nation, after all), argues that people living in car-friendly suburban environments on the fringes of major cities do so because they actually like, want to:

…is there really a huge pent-up demand to move from the suburbs to the city, just waiting to be released by wiser government policies? James S. Russell…uses the term “megaburbs” to describe what cities have become. In much of the world, it seems pretty clear that most people who have the chance do leave dense inner cities, while staying in metropolitan areas.

In Europe, it’s possible for a city to actively discourage people from driving. But in America, a prominent establishment lefty can approach the question of pro-density government policy with a skepticism that European planners apparently do not share. So what gives?

By way of an answer, the Times just published a roundtable on European and American car culture that tries to get at differences between our approaches to urban and transit policy. Predictably, the libertarian Reason Foundation’s Sam Staley argues that that difference is one of political culture: American society is organized around individual freedom and choice (which the automobile embodies, in Staley’s mind), while European society is not. And just as predictably, Harvard scholar Edward Glaeser (who is basically Staley’s polar opposite and virtually every urban planning issues) argues for congestion charges, gas taxes and other policies that can encourage density while raising revenue.

Housing market analysts Laurie Volk and Todd Zimmerman take a more pragmatic approach: driving is highly unpleasant, and the fact many people have to drive practically everywhere is eroding our collective quality of life, as well as our environment and economy. We have to do something about it, even if our response to our car-centric culture isn’t as punitive as in Europe, or as potentially-dramatic as Glaeser-style policy prescriptions:

…as a nation, our automobile infrastructure has increasingly become our destiny. In most urban areas and suburban agglomerations it has become noticeably less convenient to drive, particularly to and from work. As work decentralized over the past half-century, massive highway infrastructure spread across the land facilitating suburb-to-suburb commuting and inducing development and its concomitant traffic — or is it traffic and its concomitant development?

Although cities are moving to control and even discourage automobiles in their dense centers, notably New York City, Washington and San Francisco, obviously American settlement and transportation patterns are very different from Europe’s. The reversal of our national misallocation of infrastructure — significant increases of transportation alternatives and housing options in our urban centers — will be a long and challenging task, one that many of our current leaders simply lack the courage and stature to face.

For them, the challenges facing American transit policy are as political as they are cultural. There is a “misallocation of infrastructure” based on America’s long-standing romance with the automobile, as well as a lack of political will in correcting this misallocation. This week’s discussion on urban transit issues, from Lemann, Glaeser and others, gives a sense that America’s transportation and infrastructure problems will be solved by a gradual reappraisal of social priorities—and not by arbitrary, European-style attempts at making driving hell.