There’s more to Transportation Abundance than “build more”

Abstract for Transportation for the Abundant Society, Gregory Shill (ASU) and Jonathan Levine (Michigan)

The abundance movement has rapidly gained traction as voices across the political spectrum seek to overcome artificial scarcity in housing, energy, and infrastructure. In all these areas, transportation policy is a binding constraint—yet with limited exceptions, it’s one the movement has overlooked. This Article seeks to fill that gap by showing that abundance cannot succeed without rethinking transportation policy from the ground up. While this suggests a big lift, it offers big rewards: once reconfigured, transportation policy can be a powerful accelerant of abundance.

At present, the signature goal of abundance advocates—amping up housing production—stands to collide with a key driver of scarcity: development restrictions fueled by traffic concerns. Building more housing in auto-dependent regions without reconfiguring transportation will reinforce the very logic of those restrictions. A mechanical application of the prime abundance directive—build more—would thus miss the mark: outside the exceptional case of high-speed rail, “more” is often the problem. (See urban renewal.) But “less” isn’t helpful either. What’s needed is a new approach.

Drawing on original interviews with leading transportation officials and scholarship in local government law and planning, this Article makes two key contributions. First, it proposes a theory of transportation for abundance. Abundance suggests that more is better, but its canonical accounts falter when defining the desirable “more” and what’s needed to support it. This Article intervenes with a concrete and scalable framework from urban planning: transportation access, which measures system performance by the ability of users to reach destinations. Though seemingly uncontroversial, anchoring policy in this objective would mark a revolutionary departure from a century of transportation planning.

The Article’s second contribution is to show that transportation reform is essential—not ancillary—to abundance, particularly for housing affordability, climate goals, and social equality. Transportation can’t stay in the backseat if abundance is the destination.