The number of $5 billion (or more) has been bandied about recently as the amount of money we need to fix all the poorly designed and dangerous roads in the City of Sacramento. The number seems reasonable, and I myself have estimated that sidewalk repair alone is $1.5 billion. This is just the city, let alone the county or region. The county and region are in most cases much worse off than the city. I support more funding for this work, some via sales taxes, but more via property taxes. After all, it is property that requires our transportation infrastructure and benefits from a good system.

But what if there is a better way? A less expensive way?

I encourage you to watch the latest (August 24) episode of Not Just Bikes (by Jason Slaughter), titled ‘Even Small Towns are Great Here (5 Years in the Netherlands)‘. He has collected video clips from visits to small towns across the Netherlands. He has two main points about small towns: almost all of them are served by good rail service, and many of the small towns and suburbs don’t need extensive bike structure because there are so few motor vehicles that it is safe and comfortable to ride on any street. My favorite quote from the video is:

“To make a place friendly for cycling, it was more important to restrict cars than it was to build a bunch of expensive bicycle infrastructure. After all, protected bike lanes are just an extension of car infrastructure, right. You don’t need bike paths if you don’t have a lot of cars.”

Not Just Bikes (Jason Slaughter)

A related quote, that I will have to paraphrase, since I can’t find the original source is: We have plenty of space for bikes on our streets, its just that it is currently occupied by cars.

The point, for me, is that we could make much more effective investments if we greatly reduced the number of cars on the road rather than trying to make all our roads safe for bicycling and walking. We need to make car drivers pay the true cost of their transportation choice: fossil fuel extraction, climate change, air pollution, expensive highways, foreign wars and fossil fuel subsidies, and a long list of others. Yes, and making it necessary to build protective infrastructure for walkers and bicyclist to protect them from those drivers. We need to make is more expensive and less convenient to drive, so that people will make other choices.

If we actively and directly reduce car dominance, we might only need $1 billion to fix everything. Still a lot of money, but not out of reach.

Jason moved to the Netherlands from Canada, but the car dominated ‘no places’ that he left are the same car dominated ‘no places’ of the United States, and of Sacramento. In fact, Canada tried to imitate the US, and left themselves impoverished, both economically and mobility wise.

Imagine for a moment, someone saying “Carmichel, where there are so few cars that it is safe to bicycle and walk on any street, and the are great transit connections to all the regional destinations.” They would be laughed out of the room. Yet Carmichael, and unincorporated town in Sacramento County, is about the same size as many of the small cities called out in the Not Just Bikes video. We have designed a horrible world in service of the idea that we can and should drive everywhere. We if we flip that and make it hard and expensive to drive everywhere, places will begin to heal. Even Carmichael.