The constant in transportation technology from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century was change. New modes repeatedly extended the boundaries of cities and changed the way we lived. But that was an aberration over the course of human history. Since then? Not too much has changed. A person can navigate New York City almost perfectly with a fifty-year-old map.
This has had real consequences. In spread-out metros that are growing in population, highways quickly become overcrowded; expanding them is costly and ultimately ineffective. Commute speeds are slowing inexorably as congestion increases. In North America, at least, rail transit is too expensive to build in meaningful amounts and it faces formidable ideological opposition. And the vaunted self-driving car, as imminent and yet illusory as nuclear fusion, will not transform the basic geometry of road capacity. Could they squeeze out a few percent more from the legacy of the 1950s and 60s? Maybe. But that will buy us at most a few years.
The greatest promise for matching technology to the modern worker has always been the idea of divorcing work from transportation entirely: telecommuting. The tools that would enable white-collar workers to clock in remotely have been available for decades and have improved dramatically in the digital era. That could theoretically finally enable Wright’s vision of the complete dispersal of population. But would it? Despite evidence to the contrary, employers remain skeptical of the productivity of remote workers. And any number of human drives keep people stubbornly collocating to be closer to family, friends, and cultural amenities as well as their workplaces. These drives are unlikely to change with technology—and thus, our transportation dilemma is likely to endure.
The best option is to densify our cities. This is hard, too: Adding housing in established neighborhoods will always be more complex and expensive than building on empty farmland. Real estate also remains comparatively cheap in declining or decentralized cities. When many people don’t really care how close they are to the historic urban center, like in Atlanta or Houston, cities can sprawl basically ad infinitum. But the environmental cost is huge, and it’s simply not an option in parts of the country where cities have already grown into each other, like the Northeast Corridor and Southern California.
For a century, we lived off the legacy of rapid innovation. It allowed our cities to grow exponentially and, therefore, the cost of our housing to decrease dramatically. But we’ve now pretty much burned through the benefits of these gains and there aren’t obvious technological saviors on the horizon. We must make do mostly with building up and densifying the urban areas we already have. As transportation goes, so go our cities.