SUBURBANIZATION IS A SOCIALIST DISASTER.

That might not be what Grant Ennis, Brent Toderian, and Tom Flood had in mind when they wrote "The One-Hour City Conspiracy" for Streetsblog, positing "Too many people are forced into car-dependent lives, with more health harms, more crashes, more noise, more air pollution, more social isolation — and less space for everything good our streets should be giving us."

Read on, though, and note Your Tax Dollars at Work (I remember the signs hailing the a-building next section of Interstate 94 in that way) with Technocratic Overreach and Government Spending as far as you can pedal a bike.

They seek to be ironic, or perhaps sarcastic, or perhaps unintentionally funny, defending their advocacy of walkable neighborhoods.  But note how little of the Suburban Experiment, or Sprawl, or those houses made of ticky-tacky, involved trade-tested betterments.

The “15-minute city” model is based on the original concept of a city: having the things we want and need closer to where we live. The idea is that we should be able to get to our everyday essentials within, ideally, 15 minutes on foot, bike, or public transit. What’s scary about that?

Health-harming industries have long used the conspiracy trope of the “Nanny State” trying to keep us in our figurative “cribs.” And this trope serves to distract from what may be an actual conspiracy – what we might call a “One-Hour City” conspiracy. Rather than creating cities where life’s essentials are close-by, government decisions such as setback laws, road width and parking minimums, have spread out our communities and put the essentials at least a one-hour walk, bike, or public transit ride from where many of us live.

That’s far enough away that many people use cars, as there aren’t enough hours in a day to access everything you need without one. At the same time, driving commute times have passed the one-hour mark, meaning that many people are trapped for hours each day in their cars. Too many of us, and more every day, live in these kinds of places.

The one-hour city probably does not involve a bunch of evil men in suits conspiring around a big, sinister table. Short of audio-video footage of said meetings, or extensive documentation, we’ll never know for sure. But we do know from extensive evidence that there is a collection of aligned interests that make a lot of money from people driving more. These actors have lobbied for laws that make it harder to get to shops, businesses, schools, restaurants, and government and medical services near to where people live.

Government decisions.  Lobbying.  Rent-seeking.  But it would be a stretch for the good-government types at Streetsblog to note that setback laws, road width and parking minima, are quintessential nanny-state actions, only it's plain Mrs Persimmon and not Mary Poppins being the nanny.

Gosh, you could look at this passage and suggest that there is no such thing as wise public administration, but there's a lot of the soft corruption that sails under the banner of public choice at work.

This lobby directly and indirectly pressures government into undertaking policies that spread us out. They have a financial interest in doing so. The diverse array of policies that make them more money are numerous and also include increasing government subsidies for road building, bans on apartment buildings, the underfunding of public transit, bans on local shops and services, excessive parking minimums, road and lane width minimums, subsidies for driving, and much more. These laws force people to drive, which increases profits to these industry players.

Is it too much to ask for some sort of cost-benefit analysis that might establish how "underfunded" the streetcars and buses are or how "overfunded" the roads are?  But that might suggest the entire urban planning enterprise attempts to provide road socialism with big city characteristics.