Planning for the Rich by the Rich

The loudest voices in shaping cities can be a non-representative sample, Jarret Walker argues in a piece for his blog Human Transit. Cities need to serve everyone. Aiming for solutions that serves a city's richest is dangerous, because, "The mistake is to forget that elites are always a minority, and that planning a city or transport network around the needs of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t work for the vast majority," Walker says.

The problem of what Walker calls “elite protectionism” is at the root of the obsession with the last-mile problem and the reason for prizing outlandish solutions over practical ones. "Large fixed-route buses are the only form of transit that can quickly scale to an entire city while still using scarce urban space with extreme efficiency. Yet many urban elites assume (subtly or overtly) that bus service doesn’t matter because it’s not useful to them personally," Walker writes.