Walkability and your bank account
Walkability and your bank account
A more walkable city means more money in your pocket, and an overall healthier you. - Vision Zero post #3
I wonder how many of you are fully sold by now as I ramble about the benefits of walkable cities for the third post in a row. I’m sure most of my readers agree with my analysis, however, there’s a chance you still aren’t sold on the idea of diverting money away from car infrastructure and towards more complete streets.
If you’re not sold yet, maybe this post will do it.
Vision Zero may not seem like it at first glance, but if fully implemented, would likely save you and your family money and improve your city's economy.
Three of the top five costs for the average American are housing, transportation, and healthcare. The two most expensive are the cost of housing at $2,025 per month and transportation at $1,025 per month, third is food at $779, fourth is insurance and pensions at $729 per month, and fifth is health care at $488 per month.
Americans ultimately spend 58% of their income on housing, transportation, and health care and there’s proof that more walkable cities can decrease the costs of all of these things.
Furthermore, study after study after study shows that walkability is good for business. Businesses often gawk at the idea of pedestrianization that impedes parking, but that sentiment needs to change.
First, I briefed you on the problems and potential solutions to financing Vision Zero. Second, I showed you what Vision Zero would look like in your neighborhood. And in this final Vision Zero series post, I will “close the deal” by showing how Vision Zero could help your bank account and improve your well-being.
Health costs
I’ve found several ways in which Vision Zero could reduce healthcare costs and make you healthier overall.
To learn more about the impacts of walkability on public health, I spoke with Nate Matthews-Trigg - an Albuquerque resident, an affiliate instructor at the UW School of Public Health, and an Advisor to the New Mexico Environmental Health Network. I asked Nate what he thought about Vision Zero as it relates to public health and its effect on healthcare costs for people. Nate touched on several things in his response regarding vehicle-related injuries, chronic diseases, active transportation, biodiversity, and the overall burden felt by the understaffed healthcare industry.
Every year, several hundred pedestrians are either killed or injured after being struck by cars in Albuquerque. Those who survive the collision typically need medical attention - which can be costly. Depending on the nature of the accident and the type of insurance held by the driver, the medical bills can be debilitating.
On the other side of the wheel, and again depending on the nature of the accident, the driver can be sued for between a few thousand and several million dollars for hitting a pedestrian. And even if insurance does cover most of the costs, that driver’s insurance premium is likely going up.
Matthews-Trigg told me:
Healthcare remains overburdened and understaffed. Safer roads could result in reduced vehicle-related injuries, helping to reduce a critical strain on ED and hospital capacity and associated costs.
There is the feedback effect of more people choosing to use active transportation, as they feel safer biking or walking to work, school, or for leisure. This could lead to a longer-term reduction in chronic diseases [and] result in cost savings, as chronic diseases already account for nearly 75% of US healthcare expenditure [Source]. We would also likely experience less air pollution (particulates and ozone) as there would be less vehicles on the road with more people choose to engage in active transportation.
It’s no surprise that walking more makes people healthier. Italians notoriously eat and drink their fair share of carbs and wine, but they are largely healthier than Americans thanks to their lively built environment. Italian cities are human-scale - making walking preferable to driving.
The Diabetes Education Services estimates that Italians walk 95 miles more per year than Americans - increasing the life span of Italians by almost four years.
Air pollution from cars, for millions of people every year, causes asthma, COPD, heart attacks, decreased lung function, leukemia, low birth weight for infants, and more - often leading to death. While we know that 56 pedestrians died from being hit by cars in Albuquerque last year, it’s unclear how many people died prematurely due to a life of living in a car-riddled city.
The physical health benefits of living in a walkable city might be obvious, but there are mental health benefits too. Matthews-Trigg tells me:
Engaging in active transportation, and exercise in general, has been shown to benefit mental health in addition to physical health. Access to nature is also associated with mental health benefits. Walking or cycling provides more opportunity for people to enjoy nature.
If you live in an American city, you can probably hear the sound of vehicles at all times during the day. I know I can. Sometimes it’s an F-250 with a missing catalytic converter, but most times it’s a car going a little too fast. Without knowing it, the noise of a vehicle can impact your mental and physical health immensely. Harvard researchers say that long-term exposure to noise pollution results in higher stress, anxiety, and higher chances of cardiovascular diseases - “every 5-decibel increase in the average 24-hour noise level was associated with a 34% increase in heart attacks, strokes, and other serious heart-related problems.”
Studies show that cutting vehicle speeds by 30% can reduce vehicle noise by 50% - a promising result that proves even small improvements can bring large benefits.
Road rage is another cause of stress for drivers and pedestrians alike.
After an Albuquerque Isotopes baseball game in 2023, a bout of road rage between a couple of drivers led to an innocent kid being gunned down. The Governor’s response was to declare a public health emergency and she banned guns in public areas throughout Bernalillo County.
This car-centric area of town has four major sports stadiums (and really nothing else) and sees heavy traffic during gameday. If you attend one of these games, it’s common to be in traffic for up to an hour after leaving a sporting event.
Trying to leave the parking lot after an Isotopes game is an interesting social experiment as you can almost cut the tension in the air with a knife. The bottle-necked exits of parking lots set the stage for a game of honking, getting cut off, and inching your way toward the street.
Pro tip: It’s nearly impossible to make eye contact with anyone in their tinted hunks of metal, but if you roll your window down and smile, they’ll let you in. Bringing a little bit of humanity to an inhuman experience helps ease the tension in the air.
Most people in the sea of vehicular madness don’t realize they're stuck in a car-centric nightmare. To them, it’s just a reality of living in a city. To me, it’s a cruel form of torture as I yearn for a people-centric Albuquerque where I can get to an Isotopes game without a car and kids don’t die from road rage incidents.
The US fares poorly compared to other developed nations when it comes to healthcare spending per capita. Much of that comes from the fact that the US doesn’t have socialized healthcare (maybe a topic for a later post), but also from our lifestyle - largely dictated by a car-centric built environment.
You can’t fit all of the health benefits of walkability into one post, but they’re more than enough to make Vision Zero worthwhile. Walking more, and being exposed to less pollution, brings benefits to your body that translate into a longer life and lower healthcare costs. Furthermore, these benefits averaged out across an entire population would theoretically mean lower health insurance costs for everyone.
As they say, the best healthcare is prevention - and Vision Zero aims to prevent some of the worst effects of car pollution in car-centric America.
Walkability is good for the economy
Transportation
Transportation is the second largest expense for Americans. Between car payments, fuel prices, insurance, and vehicle maintenance, the average American spends over $1,000/month on transportation. If Albuquerque became more walkable and invested in a more robust public transit system, the standard family might be able to get by with one car and an e-bike - or no car - saving cash flow in an increasingly expensive world.
Vision Zero is about creating equitable transportation options for everyone. Pedestrians who are killed or injured by vehicles in Albuquerque, according to the city, are most likely low-income, disabled, non-white, and/or people without a vehicle. Providing safe streets gives our most vulnerable populations the freedom to access the city, and gives the rest of the population a cheap, reliable way to get around.
While Vision Zero is primarily about walking and rolling, it’s also about reliable public transit. Transit enables pedestrians to navigate the entire city without a car. In Albuquerque presently, car-free living is only doable along the Central corridor thanks to the ART rapid bus transit line. The bus system in Albuquerque, as of 2023, is free for everyone - a great first step in creating an equitable transportation environment in the city.
Public infrastructure investments for walking, rolling, and transit help save you money on transportation because it’s more efficient for society than everyone buying and insuring their own private transportation. The average car is parked 95% of the time! This means the second highest cost to the average American is only used 5% of the time. Instead, the US should invest in street cars, buses, bike lanes, and denser housing to build a world where you don’t have to spend $1,000 per month to access your city.
Housing
Speaking of denser housing, a denser urban area means more housing, which means more affordable housing. Vision Zero strengthens the City of Albuquerque’s Housing Forward initiative by enabling housing density and decreasing costs for utilities and roads.
I wrote about how cities finance infrastructure projects in my first Vision Zero post. For the full run-down, read Vision Zero is a vision worth funding. In summary, the post talks about how the City of Albuquerque (like most American cities) uses tax revenue generated within the region to build roads, water lines, bike trails, and other cool stuff, but the sprawling nature of American cities has made it so the businesses and homes that the city’s infrastructure serve aren’t economically productive enough to generate enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure they benefit from. Denser, more walkable urban areas take less infrastructure investment per capita than a sprawling, car-centric area.
For analytical purposes, we can translate that productivity into value per acre. The more revenue and wealth generated on an acre, the better that acre is suited to help pay for the roads and utilities that serve that acre. In general, roads and utilities in the sprawling suburban acres of American cities are subsidized by the productive, tax-generating core acres:
Business and inequality
Downtown areas in America often host a spectrum of small restaurants packed tightly into a few square miles, typically offering the only truly walkable neighborhood in all of town. A cluster of small businesses often brings more taxable income per acre to a city than big box stores like Walmart and Lowes. And unlike big box stores, small businesses help retain and build wealth in their neighborhood since profits stay local and don’t go to out-of-state investors like the Walton family or Jeff Bezos.
Vision Zero, if fully implemented, would enable small businesses to thrive in your neighborhood. If your neighborhood had a dentist, a small grocery store, a coffee shop, and safe streets, you’d be more likely to patronize them.
Small businesses were the cornerstone of the American economy at a time when wealth inequality was lower than it is today:
Since the end of WW2, the US has gone on a sprawling spree. Exclusive car-dependency and monoculture low-density zoning drove out the viability of small businesses. By forcing everyone to buy a car and do all of their shopping at the regional big-box shopping area, we’ve served to the likes of Walmart, Costco, and Amazon - and we left the locally-owned neighborhood amenities behind.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison writes:
Active streets are beneficial to new small stores or restaurants. According to one source, small stores or restaurants usually cannot compete with chains on advertising, but they can do better with a location on an already busy street. Additionally, pedestrians and cyclists out-consume drivers over the course of a month. Pedestrians and cyclists may purchase less items in one trip, but tend to make more frequent trips than drivers. It is easier to make an impulse stop while walking or biking than it is driving. Providing street improvements for pedestrians and cyclists may increase sales by 30 percent, according to one source… Walkability is also a tourist magnet. Think about places you love to visit and want to go back to. Was it walkable and pedestrian friendly?
Some of the most-visited locations in the world are the most walkable. Walkable environments are not just healthier and better for your wallet, they’re more enjoyable. Humans evolved in walkable environments - so it should be no surprise that we thrive in them and seek them out whenever we need a vacation.
Cars are a liability for business owners in many ways. Just within the past year, vehicles have damaged plenty of small businesses in Albuquerque and Santa Fe:
Sources and news links: Vehicle crashes into Albuquerque Photography Business - Car crashes into shop at Rio Grande and Indian School - Man captures truck crashing into New Mexico gas station - Albuquerque business in clean-up mode after car chase led to truck crashing into wall - 1 injured after car crashes into restaurant in northeast Albuquerque - Car crashes through wall of Albuquerque diner - Driver crashes into a tattoo shop in Downtown Albuquerque - Occidental Life Building is damaged in car crash - Downtown Albuquerque News
Whether you’re a historic building lover, small business owner, aspiring entrepreneur, cyclist, pedestrian, asthmatic, or just someone who wants to save money - a walkable city is likely in your best interest. All of the costs I went over in this post add up to a serious strain on our personal bank accounts, and on the the economy at large.
While this is a series about how great Vision Zero is, it should be noted that no single program can fix everything about a city. People should start demanding a more ideal built environment from their elected representatives. It will take a political push to fully implement Vision Zero and the many supporting programs like Housing Forward and Complete Streets.
It feels like there is a lot of energy building toward walkability locally and nationally, and it is because more people are talking about it. My main goal in writing this series is to get more people weighing in on how they would like to see their environment built.
I want more people talking about what the data tells us - walkable cities are better for our planet, health, and money. Hopefully, you’re sold on that by now.
