In classical economics, there are three factors of production: land, labor, and capital. Good regulation of private land, and good management of public land, can attract labor and capital. In order to flourish, municipalities must ensure their policies and regulations facilitate (i.e. make profitable) the land development patterns shown on the right below. Instead, most are set up to encourage the patterns on the left: parking minima, setbacks, use-separated zoning and LOS-first public spaces. The result is that infrastructure liabilities far outweigh their tax base, they repel both capital and labor and end up broke.

How shall we regulate land? Should we?

The most insidious result of the car-first development pattern is the constituency of car owners it creates. Once you own a car - and so mentally discount the cost of insuring, maintaining, fuelling the car - then every trip looks free. Political discussions and public investment decisions begin to assume that everybody comes with a machine; they conflate ‘driver’ with citizen, and relegate non-cyborg humans to a category of ‘other’, the ‘pedestrian’ who isn’t naturally considered first in site layout or public space design, but who must be ‘accommodated’ by so-called ‘complete’ streets and ‘extra’ features like crosswalks. Sidewalks are the original war on the car.