Millard-Ball Examines High Cost of Wide Streets

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Adam Millard-Ball spoke to Bloomberg CityLab about his research on the land value of streets in the United States. Millard-Ball calculated the widths, land areas and land value of streets in 20 different counties in the U.S., and he found that streets averaged 55 feet wide, even in residential areas with low traffic. Streets are much wider in the United States than in other parts of the world. In the counties he surveyed, Millard-Ball found that streets took up 18% of the total land area. He said cities could use some of the land currently allocated to streets for bike lanes, transit, green spaces or housing. He also noted that decreasing standard street sizes could help reduce housing development costs. “People are already using streets for housing, just not in a sanctioned way,” he said. “Why do we rule out 20% of a city’s land and declare it off limits for that?”

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Millard-Ball on Twin Concerns of Fire Safety and Housing Access

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Adam Millard-Ball spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle about housing developments planned for parts of California that are prone to wildfire. The state Attorney General’s Office has opposed some of these developments, arguing that they pose grave danger in an era when uncontrolled wildfires threaten the state. The article notes that devastation in places like Santa Rosa, Paradise and Redding, in the so-called wildland-urban interface, has underscored how suburban sprawl is not only a target of fire but fodder for it, hastening the speed and intensity of blazes. Limiting development, however, can frustrate growth plans of small towns and cities and undermine progress on the state’s housing crunch. “There are really these twin concerns coming into conflict now,” Millard-Ball said. “The state’s housing crisis makes it an imperative to make it easy to build housing. At the same time, there’s the threat and tragedy of wildfires.”

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Parking Access Encourages Driving, Millard-Ball Finds

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Recent articles in Medium and Sightline highlighted the findings of Associate Professor of Urban Planning Adam Millard-Ball’s new research on the relationship between parking and driving in cities. While many cities have been designed under the assumption that the urban environment should accommodate people’s desire to drive, researchers led by Millard-Ball found that that assumption is backward. “Increased parking causes more car ownership and more driving while reducing transit use,” the team concluded, noting that “buildings with at least one parking space per unit have more than twice the car ownership rate of buildings that have no parking.” The Sightline piece cited Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup’s observation that parking spaces are a “fertility drug for cars.” Furthermore, the research team found no correlation between parking supply and employment status, indicating that buildings with less parking do not limit the job prospects of their occupants.

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