Can structural racism in mobility’s costs be compensated?

Cyclists gather on Washington, DC's Black Lives Matter Plaza. (Photo by me)

People of color disproportionately bear the multi-faceted costs of U.S. driving not covered by road users, estimated at more than $250 billion annually in an International Monetary Fund working paper. This racially disparate burden, comprised of externalities like crashes, congestion, and pollution, is a legacy of discriminatory planning and policy.

But amidst the country's civil rights reckoning, people are taking meaningful action:

• Roads have become spaces to fight racism
• Planning processes are better incorporating communities of color
• People are formulating how transportation and urban planning tools historically used to divide might be reformed into sources of racial reparations.

These actions, and the need to build on them, show how emphasizing the relationship between structural racism in mobility and the ongoing movement for equality could help make society fairer and stronger.   

U.S. access, a legacy of racism, imposes inequitable burden on people of color

Racial segregation remains stark in U.S. metro areas, with outcomes such as income and education typically favoring homogenously white neighborhoods. Redlining and highway-building, pillars of 20^th-century urban planning, helped these disparities take root.

Discriminatory transportation policy persists today. For example, loud, mainly white voices in regions including Atlanta, Detroit, and Nashville have recently used stereotypes surrounding public transportation’s multiethnic riders, such as the debunked belief that transit lines are vectors of crime, to help block improvements to those regions’ bus and rail systems.

Racism has also shaped the user experience of our transit systems themselves. Engineer and former Houston METRO board member Christof Spieler describes how many U.S. regions have two-tiered, structurally segregated bus and rail networks prioritizing service for suburban white-collar commuters – often designed around park-and-ride facilities – over connectivity in more diverse, more densely populated communities. And in Washington, DC, a white journalist popular among locals amplified calls on social media for a Black bus operator to be fired for eating breakfast during a Metrorail ride to her next shift.

But while navigating this directly-suppressed access, people of color also disproportionately bear the infrastructural, safety, and environmental costs of supporting mobility:

• Though road congestion is often used as political justification to expand highways, additional road capacity induces demand for more vehicle travel that quickly fills up new lanes. Specifically, Transportation for America found that U.S. car congestion increased 144 percent between 1993 and 2017 despite $500 billion of taxpayer spending on urban highways during the period. However, new road lanes can – like the urban highways that preceded them – displace communities of color. A proposed $7 billion widening of I-45 in Houston, for example, would require demolition of 340 businesses and more than 1,000 homes that the project’s environmental impact statement found disproportionately belong to people of color.
• Car crashes, a decades-long global pandemic that the U.S. has had particular difficulty controlling, are most threatening to people outside of motor vehicles like pedestrians and cyclists. People of color are at especially high risk when on foot or bike. Crash fatality rates among Black pedestrians are 25 percent higher than the national average, and among Native Americans and other indigenous people more than twice as high. Enforcement-based traffic safety strategies exacerbate this disparity, especially on roads designed to prioritize car throughput over safety; for example, Tulsa law enforcement personnel harassed and beat two Black teens for walking on a sidewalk-less street, while a Los Angeles police officer killed cyclist Dijon Kizzee following an alleged violation of vehicle code.  
• Vehicle emissions impose a variety of costs on society, including particulates that put immediate strain on people’s respiratory systems and greenhouse gases that inflict a longer-term toll on life. Communities of color bear the brunt of these environmental costs. Air pollution in highway-pierced neighborhoods, for example, causes chronic health conditions that – even before COVID-19 – harmed people’s quality of life. Such marginalized places are also particularly susceptible to climate change impacts such as rising sea levels, nutritional disparities, and flash flooding.

How can society repay its debt to communities of color?

The ongoing racial reckoning has fostered greater solidarity against discrimination. This activism has shown how mobility and urban planning – despite their role in segregation – can also be tools of equality:

• Inclusive spaces: People transcending demographics have taken to roadways – including highways built through neighborhoods of color – to fight racism. These people have endured violence, including vehicle attacks, in their stand for racial justice. DC’s Black Lives Matter Plaza and the similar street projects throughout the country it has inspired, though not substitutes for the deeper policy changes the demonstrators seek, show how communities can embrace and commemorate this heroic stand for equality by creating more inclusive public spaces. Further illustrating the need for racial violence-free space, the Safe Routes Partnership dropped enforcement from its Safe Routes to School Framework in an effort to put an end to traffic stop-initiated fatal encounters between law enforcement and people of color, like the Atlanta police killing of Rayshard Brooks during a DUI investigation. 
• Community engagement: Diligent collaboration with people of color can bolster access, especially for users of active and public transportation. For example, outreach by community development organization Restoration helped increase bikeshare use in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood by 225 percent, while Oakland, Ca. adjusted its COVID-19 Slow Streets program to more effectively connect people with essential services on arterial corridors in response to community feedback largely from East Oakland residents. And the American Public Transportation Association’s Darnell Grisby has outlined transit governance and policy reforms that would help agencies better represent their diverse riders.  
• Reparations: Urban planning-based strategies are a central part of increased discussion on racial reparations. For example, in a Detroit Free Press op-ed, Venture for America fellow Nithin Vejendla suggested that city remove several downtown highways and use the reclaimed land as a source for reparations. Destiny Thomas, founder and CEO of Thrivance Group, subsequently proposed a broader 14-point urban reparations plan – incorporating zoning reform, ride-hailing and freight fees, and neighborhood-oriented transit improvements – in an op-ed for Streetsblog.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to past and present injustice. However, actions that empower and improve access for people of color – like those described above – can help ensure future mobility connects an equitable society free of physical segregation and economic separation.  

How transit could make the pandemic’s next phase controllable and livable

A lightly used MARC train during the COVID-19 pandemic. Large transit vehicles give riders space to physically distance that car-based transportation does not. (Photo by me)

The coronavirus pandemic has forced us all to discover meaning in the basics of our existence. Public transit agencies have done that in an exemplary manner, doubling down on the purest aspect of their mission: providing and protecting essential mobility.

Now, we face a greater shared challenge. COVID-19 still threatens our health and our lives, but we must find a way to get our economy and society back on their feet while keeping the coronavirus at bay.

If we open irresponsibly, the virus will resurge and devastate. But locking down indefinitely would be equally irresponsible; we’d face hunger, bankruptcy, and insanity, letting chains supplant creativity while the marginalized tasked with sustaining the separation make a potentially deadly sacrifice.

We will have to fight for months, possibly years to thread the needle between these two traps. In order to win the fight, we need control – and confidence – over our motion and our lives.

Certain interests, however, are encouraging civilization to surrender to auto dependency, even as the coronavirus contagion ruthlessly tears through their own Motor City. Such a surrender would strip society of its strength and substance.

Here’s how transit, through geometry, bioenvironment, safety, and unity, can keep control in the hands of the people.

Transit’s geometry lets us control our physical distance

Opening Washington, DC's Cleveland Park service lane to pedestrians gives customers of the neighborhood's grocery stores and take-out eateries space to physically distance. If too many people drive to and park at these establishments, it won't be possible to provide this essential space. (Photo by me)  

Mobility has always been a geometry challenge: lots of people must move, but there’s limited space available for the transportation systems that move them. If we get in each other’s way, no one can get where they’re trying to go; if we expand transportation space without rethinking it, however, we create more obstacles by inducing demand for trips. In either case, a community can’t function.

COVID-19 complicates this already-precarious equation: if people come within six feet of each other the virus will have more opportunities to spread, leading to an exponential spike in cases that kills people, overwhelms the healthcare system, and shuts down society.

So how can we provide sufficient mobility to power the responsible reopening we need and yearn for?

People might try to travel in a seemingly sealed-off car. But anyone who’s sat in a traffic jam knows that there isn’t space for mass solo driving, from dense cities to sprawling suburbs.

  

Furthermore, all people – including drivers – are pedestrians for part of every trip. But if we devote too much space to moving and storing solo cars, people will be hemmed onto dangerously narrow walkways and likely forced to congregate within six feet of each other.

In the past, people have tried to solve this problem by traveling in the same car, popularizing options like shared ride-hailing, casual carpooling or “slugging,” and simply giving friends or relatives rides.

But none of that is possible now, because people riding in the same automobile inevitably sit within six feet of each other.  A person could hire their own driver, but this option might be the worst of both worlds: they’ll still be in close proximity to the driver while, thanks to the extra miles of travel necessary to pick them up, road congestion increases.

Thus, large vehicles like buses and trains – which provide people space to spread out and can physically separate vehicle operators from passengers – are an ideal motorized solution. In order to keep the public safe and connected, these transit options must:

• Operate frequently and reliably, allowing for onboard physical distancing while ensuring crowds don’t build at stops and stations. Some places, like Houston, boosted transit service during the pandemic’s early days; now, frequent all-day service will be a must for bus, urban subway, and suburban rail lines around the world. Boston's MBTA, for example, is planning a return to full service in the coming weeks to ensure riders have sufficient space to physically distance.  
• Be supported by broader strategies to manage demand, including employer-facilitated staggered shift times and telework options for those who are willing and able to log in from home, continued government-managed restrictions on mass gatherings that catalyze sudden localized ridership spikes and overcrowd confined spaces, and sufficient availability of masks, testing, and contact tracing that help prevent the coronavirus from spreading.
• Serve corridors featuring wide sidewalks and complete streets, ensuring everyone has space to conduct physically-distanced business and activities.  Such space can allow people to access businesses, as DC is doing by giving people room to spread out in front of grocery stores, and also help reopened establishments operate more safely, as Tampa, FL is doing for its restaurants.

Providing this quality of service won’t be free of charge – in fact, it will require rethought transportation funding, of which the $25 billion CARES Act transit stimulus is a start. But the resulting space to move will give people the freedom and protection they need right now. 

Transit’s scale permits bioenvironmental control, providing people-friendly, virus-hostile places

A worker disinfects a New York subway train. For the first time in its history, New York MTA has suspended overnight train service to allow for additional cleaning. (Photo courtesy of New York Daily News)

As part of their COVID-19 management strategies, states and localities could mandate that car owners spend hours disinfecting their vehicles at the end of every day they drive them.

This would be a herculean effort to require of an individual. Accordingly, ride-hailing companies don’t require their drivers to take such action, though they’ve distributed sanitizing lotion and wipes to some of them.

Transit agencies, however, have made their fleetwide cleaning programs more stringent to help combat the pandemic. Simple economies of scale make this possible, giving the public more control over the sanitation of their mobility environment.

Because they operate many vehicles, transit providers can purchase powerful disinfectant and other cleaning supplies in bulk. They also can train and equip professionals to conduct the cleaning safely and properly. Even transportation network companies conduct such intensive cleaning – of the bike- and scooter-share fleets that, in contrast to their car services, they manage and operate centrally.  

In some cases, transit providers have had to reduce service in order to make the necessary adjustments to their cleaning protocol. For example, the DC area's WMATA closed more than a fifth of its Metrorail stations in late March in order to ensure it had the resources to sanitize more highly trafficked parts of its system. Also, this week New York City Transit began shutting down its subway late at night – for the first time in its history – to test and execute new disinfecting methods.

    

Evidence from responses to prior disease outbreaks, however, indicates that over time agencies can integrate enhanced cleaning into their general operations and remain ready to handle future epidemics.

For example, San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System, which bolstered its cleaning program as part of its 2017 response to a Hepatitis A outbreak, has sustained more service for essential workers during COVID-19 than many of its U.S. peers have. And overseas, a 2015 outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome gave transit providers in Seoul – a place that’s sustained relative normalcy during the coronavirus crisis – experience with enhanced sanitation measures.

Furthermore, the control public transportation gives us over our bioenvironment extends beyond just transit vehicles and to all of the outdoors. By reducing air pollution, transit protects our lungs and hearts, making it easier for our bodies to function and reducing the chances people will experience lethal complications of respiratory diseases like COVID-19.

A UCLA study, for example, found that people infected with COVID-19’s Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome predecessor were more than twice as likely to die if they lived in a highly polluted place. Preliminary findings of a Harvard study awaiting peer review similarly suggest that for every sustained one-microgram-per-cubic-meter (µg/m³) increase in the concentration of Particulate Matter 2.5 a person is exposed to, the chances the person will die should COVID-19 infect them increase by 8 percent.

Researchers based in Wuhan, meanwhile, found in 2018 that subway expansions in China reduce PM2.5 concentrations by an average of eighteen µg/m³. Additionally, preliminary observations suggest that the 25 percent decline in PM2.5 concentrations during China’s coronavirus lockdowns saved up to 36,000 lives for each month they lasted.

While lockdowns aren’t sustainable environmental policy, transit improvements are. Thus, Wuhan authorities may want to listen to science and count the urns that stacked up outside funeral homes during the city’s coronavirus outbreak – and calculate how many lives cleaner air now might save from forthcoming diseases – before celebrating renewed traffic congestion and smog.

    

Transit gets us where we need to go, safely and together

A rider boards a Montreal bus through the rear door during the COVID-19 pandemic. Transit keeps society moving, in the face of humanity's many challenges. (Photo courtesy of CP24)

Fatally flawed working papers notwithstanding, there’s no evidence that transit use makes a person more likely to catch a respiratory infection. A London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine survey of 6,000 people in Britain, for example, found that those who don’t use buses or trains are somewhat more likely to come down with flu than transit riders are.

Data shows quite clearly, however, that for each mile traveled people on transit are ten times less likely to die in a crash than people in cars. Transit lines and hubs also boost activity density in the neighborhoods they serve, reducing miles driven and bolstering these safety benefits. Conversely, some of the same factors that make COVID-19 particularly threatening to the low-density areas it’s now spreading to – like limited health care resources – also render car-based mobility more lethal in those places; crash fatality rates are about two times higher in the U.S. countryside than in more urbanized locales.

Yet superior physical safety is just one component of transit’s greater unifying stability. And right now, we must come together and figure out how to make our shared spaces – and our society – work for everyone.

While auto dependence separates people, reinforcing conflict, social strata, and economic inequality, large-scale transit use fosters a culture that everyone – regardless of race, income, or creed – engages in together. For the system to work all riders must cooperate, respect each other, and navigate shared challenges, resulting in a network of connectivity that’s simply there for us, no questions asked.

By sustaining and protecting transit, we’ll be able to stay connected while controlling this virus, helping build the unity we need to address the problem. 

Amtrak: a model for essential transit during COVID-19

The Capitol Limited's sightseer lounge. Visible outside: Harper's Ferry, WV. (Photo by me)

As I biked up DC’s deserted 4^th St SW on a recent evening, the silence of a pandemic-plagued city gave way to a familiar diesel-electric roar. I looked up to witness a shred of normalcy: two Amtrak locomotives hauling the Silver Meteor train down to Miami, as they’ve done daily since Richard Nixon nationalized U.S. intercity passenger rail service almost 50 years ago.

       

For sustainable transportation friends and foes alike, it’s easy to be tough on Amtrak. Be it the chronic delays, aging train equipment, or out-of-stock café cars, evidence of underfunding and neglect – or, depending on how one looks at it, an inability to make money – can be seen on pretty much any given trip. Though I’m an adamant supporter of intercity passenger rail, I’ve emphatically given in to negativity’s temptation and ragged on the railroad from time to time.

But the national railroad has done some things right recently. Northeasterners are getting brand-new Acela trains, while Southerners are set for a restart of service on the temporarily-suspended-for-15-years New Orleans-Mobile line. And freight rail companies have gotten some doses of sharper teeth when their dispatchers delay Amtrak trains. 

  

The railroad’s projected Fiscal Year 2020 operating profit – the first such outlook in its history – seemed a fitting reward for this progress.

That coronating projection didn’t account for novel coronavirus. But while the operating profit won’t arrive this year, amidst virus-inflicted adversity Amtrak has accomplished something no formula could have predicted: emerging as a model for essential mobility that the world can learn from.

Here’s what Amtrak has done to provide safe, equitable, national train service during COVID-19.

Amtrak has sustained nationwide connectivity

Amtrak trains at Pittsburgh, PA's station. (Photo by me)

With ridership at 8 percent of pre-pandemic figures, Amtrak has doubled down on its core mission: the lifeline mobility that keeps hundreds of communities, including many our air and highway systems have left out, connected. The railroad continues to operate its full national network of long-distance lines.

Amtrak has not had the luxury of chopping areas with severe COVID-19 outbreaks from its network, as the lockdown of Wuhan and Hubei Province allowed China Railway to do. Instead, it’s had to navigate a hodge-podge of state orders and federal guidance to keep its passengers and trains moving.

Amtrak’s ability to preserve its national network – in the midst of a leadership change, nonetheless – demonstrates the importance of publicly funded mobility to the country during crisis. For example, airlines – despite receiving 50 times as much stimulus funding as Amtrak did – have cut domestic capacity by as much as 80 percent.

The national railroad has also set itself apart from other North American intercity rail providers. In the U.S., privately-funded Virgin Trains USA has shut down Florida’s Brightline for the foreseeable future, while the state-owned Alaska Railroad suspended almost all of its passenger service through early July. Canada's Via Rail has also suspended service on its three long-distance lines that extend to the country's west and east coasts. 

When forced to make service changes, Amtrak has done so equitably 

A Northeast Regional train at Washington, DC's Union Station, as seen across the platform from the departing Palmetto. The Regional continues operating, albeit at reduced frequencies, during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by me) 

Amtrak has reduced service on many of its regional corridors, which normally constitute the system’s greatest ridership generator. It’s had to fully suspend service on certain corridor lines in cash-strapped states such as Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Michigan, while international mobility restrictions have forced it to temporarily truncate three lines that cross the Canadian border.

But for the most part, the railroad has maintained a level of essential service on its corridors, just as it has nationally. Amtrak has structured its regional cuts in a way that sustains affordable, equitable access for those who need it. For example:

• On the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak has suspended its Acela service – the white-collar demand for it transferred to Zoom and Skype for the time being – while continuing to operate all-day service (albeit at limited frequency) on its more affordable Northeast Regional.
• In Northern California, the dedicated, comfortable buses connecting Emeryville’s station to San Francisco are not running, but essential riders can still transfer to BART and use the region’s regular transit system to cross the bay.

Amtrak’s focus on essential corridor service differs from France SNCF’s strategy. SNCF has suspended its low-cost Ouigo trains, limiting high-speed service to only its pricier TGV InOui option.

(SNCF, however, deserves commendation for using its TGV trains to shuttle coronavirus patients from hard-hit areas like Strasbourg to other French regions with more hospital capacity.)

Furthermore, Amtrak has caught up on some deferred maintenance during the service reductions. For example, workers have replaced door motors, suspensions, and other key components of Capitol Corridor railcars in aforementioned Northern California, putting the line in position to provide more reliable service to riders once they return.

Amtrak has done its part to prevent COVID-19 from spreading

A segment of the California Zephyr line, seen here making its Davis, CA stop during non-pandemic times, was suspended for two weeks when an employee tested positive for COVID-19.  

The friendly social scene onboard a train normally is one of Amtrak’s main selling points, especially for its long-distance lines.

But the idea of being onboard a vehicle for days at a time, dining together and using the same restrooms, has parallels with a much less essential and sustainable transportation mode that catalyzed much of coronavirus’s early spread: cruise ships. Prior personal experience had me concerned about how people riding the rails might fare during COVID-19; a couple years ago, I experienced some nasty norovirus symptoms starting about 36 hours – the normal incubation period for that disease – after a trip on Amtrak’s San Joaquins line.

The railroad, however, has responded to the pandemic with neither the laissez-faire approach of cruise operators nor the heavy-handed enforcement of some local transit providers.

Instead, Amtrak has employed diligence and professionalism akin to Seoul’s subway, keeping its riders and employees safe while sustaining the essential mobility it’s tasked with providing. The company has enhanced its sanitation practices, messaged the importance of mask-wearing and other hygienic steps riders can take, limited bookings so coach-class riders can spread out, and provided contactless room service to sleeping car passengers. It has also respected the risk and sacrifice of transit employees and other essential workers, organizing the national April 16 #SoundTheHorn campaign in their honor. 

Amtrak is by no means sheltered from COVID-19, as people have ridden its trains when unknowingly infected. But when an employee came down with the coronavirus, the railroad quarantined all members of the employee’s Salt Lake City crew base, resulting in temporary suspension of the California Zephyr’s Reno-Denver segment that those Salt Lake personnel operate. After the employees completed their 14-day quarantine, service on the segment resumed.

Thanks to these steps and strategies, no cluster of COVID cases to date has been linked to an Amtrak train.

What’s Amtrak’s role in this crisis going forward?

The Silver Meteor's tracks, as seen near Jacksonville. (Photo by me)

Amtrak, just like all of us, faces an uncertain future. But it’s positioned itself to fulfill three clear-cut societal needs in the coming weeks, months, and years:

• Firstly, the railroad will provide essential mobility, as it’s doing now and always has.
• Amtrak will also be essential to our economic recovery from COVID-19. It’s unclear how quickly airlines will be able to restore capacity as society recovers, meaning people’s ability to resume intercity travel – be it for business or pleasure – might depend on rail connectivity. The railroad has prior experience with this, having surged capacity when the skies were closed after 9/11.
• And finally, Amtrak’s resiliency during this pandemic will make the railroad an essential resource for other transportation providers. For example, it could collaborate with currently-moribund cruise ship companies to bolster and expand intercity ferry services like the Alaska Marine Highway that connect to rail lines and provide important connectivity.  

In order for this to happen, our leaders must understand that the national railroad is essential. Without such understanding, the U.S. would risk the fate that befell Mexico’s intercity passenger train system shortly after a 1990s economic downturn – near-complete disappearance. 

  

Fortunately, Amtrak has bipartisan support, rendering such a fate unlikely.

But COVID-19 has not meant a moratorium for Amtrak’s ongoing infrastructural and operational challenges. The Amtrak Alerts Twitter feed, for example, features its regular cocktail of freight train interference (also essential during the crisis), mechanical issues, and signal problems. In late March, the railroad’s Auto Train derailed in DeLand, FL, forcing it to suspend or reroute all of its Northeast-to-Florida lines; fortunately there were no serious injuries and Amtrak worked to restore service on those lines within several days.

Can elected officials synthesize their support for rail and address these challenges?

Earlier on that bike ride the Silver Meteor rolled above, I traversed the Anacostia River Trail’s bridge over those same CSX tracks a couple miles up the line. My bridge crossing coincided with the passing of a long freight train hauling lumber, tanks carrying unknown liquids, and a litany of other items. Mesmerized, I stopped to watch it, reflecting on how our freight rail system – the world’s best – is keeping shelves stocked, food on the table, and lives from falling apart.

Treating our national passenger railroad with similar dignity will bring America’s people together.

How neighborhood land use and equity define #StayHome

A chalkboard sign in an Arlington, VA front yard urges people to stay home. (Photo by me) 

Stay-at-home orders are the mobility misnomer of our day.

Just as rush-hour-only “commuter” transit lines frame inequitable service as acceptable and calling someone a “jaywalker” blames people for unsafe pedestrian environments, #StayHome is a perfect on-paper solution to coronavirus.

But a true stay-at-home order – i.e. literally no one can leave their homes – severs people from their life needs, and around the world chaos have resulted when something even closely resembling one has been announced. For example, Turks dangerously crowded into stores moments after the country curfewed 31 cities this past weekend; Donald Trump’s abrupt cessation of Europe-U.S. travel last month led to comparably unsafe and unsanitary conditions at airports. And mass flight from Wuhan preceding that city’s lockdown helped make the then-regional coronavirus outbreak into a global one.

To avoid these types of problems, U.S. states and cities’ mobility restrictions, though often worded as “stay-at-home” orders, have plentiful exemptions that make them something more along the lines of “stay local, act reasonably, and socially distance” directives.

Constructs such as built environment, wealth, and occupation then influence how the directives play out, shaping how people move and interact.

Accordingly, though COVID-19 doesn’t consciously adhere to zoning codes or telework policies, such societal constructs affect how the virus spreads and who it hits hardest. Though the mechanisms may vary by a given place’s combination of land use and density, the end results we’ve seen tend to be similar and tragic: the essential, but overlooked people society most depends on are ravaged by not just the disease itself, but also the unemployment, hunger, and other devastating consequences it’s brought us.

But is there a built environment that can stave off coronavirus’s health and economic impacts, protecting people from illness, keeping communities logistically and economically functional, and sustaining quality of life? Or is telling everyone to stay home, knowing that’s not actually feasible, really the best we can do? In pondering what might constitute the right mix of separation and connectivity during this time, I’ve found that my own neighborhood just might offer some answers.

***

Social mixing is a way of life in high-intensity, vertical cities. This mixing facilitates collaboration that powers our global economy and allows for a fun, fast-paced lifestyle, but it also renders people in dense places particularly vulnerable to coronavirus exposure.

Strong, proactive leadership can control COVID-19 in these places, as seen in cities such as Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore that have sustained relative normalcy in the face of the crisis. But the experiences of Wuhan, Madrid, and New York show how explosively the situation can escalate in a dense environment should the aggressive measures needed to suppress an outbreak be absent or belated.

Dense places allow people to live near their life needs, but if too many people are outside at once fulfilling those needs case numbers may rise uncontrolled. This conundrum shaped New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent statements about overcrowding of outdoor spaces, in which he incorrectly but perhaps instinctively referred to the crowding as “density.” Viral spread amidst such crowding tears these places apart by attacking the people who shape their character and connectedness, like the 50 New York MTA workers COVID-19 has taken from us.   

Conversely, fear of such overcrowding and out-of-control spread might pressure everyone who can do so to stay inside, even if stay-local orders deem things like outdoor exercise and fresh-air-getting essential activities. For example, on a recent socially-distanced bike ride through Arlington, VA, I observed a desolate Rosslyn-Ballston corridor – one of the densest parts of the U.S.’s national capital region, an emerging coronavirus hotspot. Closed businesses like Clarendon’s delicious Heritage Brewpub and Roastery symbolized the crisis’s toll on the transit-oriented corridor’s economy and well-being.   

*** 

  

At first glance, it might seem that people who live in low-intensity, horizontal suburbs and exurbs – where much of life happens in spacious homes and yards – can maintain relatively normal routines at minimal risk of contracting or spreading the virus. They can go out on walks with their families and pets, for example, with little reason to be concerned about accidentally stepping within six feet of someone else.

It’s easy for residents of these places to feel self-sufficient and protected in their homes, whether or not they’re told to stay local. Accordingly, it’s also easy for these people to assume that everyone else “shouldn’t be on buses, they should be at home,” as the city manager of Montebello, CA, a Los Angeles suburb, stated when that municipality shut down its transit network as a COVID-19 control measure. 

   

But the single-use zoning underlying those life-defining homes and yards makes hub-and-spoke mobility and supply networks essential to these places’ viability even during normal times. Thus, people working on the front lines can’t just stay at home if these neighborhoods are to persevere, but instead must toil in close proximity at the distant big-box stores and distribution centers that such neighborhoods depend on. If COVID-19 is introduced to such hubs, these essential workers are the first in harm’s way.

Evidence indicates that though the coronavirus may take longer to reach low-density places, it’s just as lethal once there, supporting the possibility of such hub-and-spoke behavior. Northern Italy’s ravaged towns demonstrate the most extreme potential consequences of this, while tragic flare-ups in places like Palm Beach County, FL show that U.S. suburbia is not immune to this danger.  

*** 

If too many people go out during the COVID-19 pandemic, the consequences are obvious. But the cost of too many people staying in is also unacceptably high, and vulnerable populations bear the brunt of it.

This begs the question: is there a neighborhood-level combination of space, density, and land use that could equitably protect everyone from the virus until a vaccine is created? A combination that would help us avoid mass unemployment and stir-craziness while minimizing the risk of coronavirus exposure for essential workers and teleworkers alike?

In theory, such a medium-density, mixed-use neighborhood requires enough people and businesses to support a locally powered economy that takes care of life needs, but also enough space to ensure the customers and workers who power those businesses can do so safely:

• The presence of multiple small grocery stores, markets, and pharmacies keeps individual establishments from becoming overcrowded, protecting the health of and reducing strain on employees while providing residents diverse options. When possible, these stores utilize locally sourced, polycentric supply chains to keep their shelves full, minimizing the need for large-scale distribution hubs that could foster outbreak hotspots.
• People have space to go outside their residences and fulfill needs like groceries, exercise, or travel to essential jobs. This space ensures people on foot don’t have to interact too closely with each other or with automobile drivers.
• While most residents don’t have to leave the neighborhood for their own day-to-day needs, essential, sustainable public transit ensures people who need to get in or out, such as health and service industry workers, can do so safely and efficiently.

My DC neighborhood of Cleveland Park has some of these characteristics, but the community’s conversation surrounding density and growth – long ongoing, but certain to be changed by COVID-19 – demonstrates just how precarious a balance we must navigate to keep people and businesses healthy.

Even before the pandemic, the neighborhood’s businesses were in a fight to keep their doors open. Plenty of residents see influxes of mixed-use density, like that the proposed Macklin project will provide, as a way to expand businesses’ customer base while also giving local consumers more options. But others feel the community must become a regional hub, drawing patrons from other places largely by preserving and expanding car storage, to get an economic jolt.

The need to adhere to stay-local orders boosts the case for density that can make neighborhoods like Cleveland Park economically and logistically self-sufficient, as well as for space-creating conversion of currently car-obligated public spaces into bikeways or pedestrian plazas.

But the multi-unit complexes needed to provide that density may result in unnerving social mixing, and accordingly pushback that could fuel arguments for sprawling, auto-oriented land use contrary to the goals described above.

Now that we’re more attuned to the threat novel viruses pose, new complexes could be designed with features such as in-unit laundry and open, inviting stairs that minimize unnecessary mixing, helping alleviate anti-density concerns. These features, however, not only aren’t always feasible, but could significantly affect neighborhood affordability and accessibility.

Once the long-term outlook for this pandemic becomes clearer, it will be easier to envision how COVID-19 and the mobility limitations it’s necessitated will affect the built environment, space, and connectivity of our neighborhoods. But though the discussion is just beginning, finding the right balance could save lives, jobs, and our sanity.