What happens when you reschedule a doctor’s appointment? Or an oil change? Or anything like that? Depending on where you live, you might push it out a couple of days or maybe a week, or you might end up with a new appointment next month.

That happened to me the other week. My parents in lightly populated Hunterdon County, New Jersey can generally reschedule stuff for the next few days. Our doctor in Fairfax County, Virginia, on the other hand, can generally only rebook an appointment about a month later (unless it’s something urgent—they’re good about that.)

A few weeks ago I got new wiper blades at the AutoZone in Herndon, not far from where I live, by the western edge of Fairfax County. It’s a somewhat older, denser area. I got there at about lunchtime, and asked the fellow at the counter if he could look up the blades for my car. He punched the info into his computer and recommended a mid-priced set of blades, which I went with.

Before I rang up I asked him if he could put them on (I know it’s easy, but sometimes it’s the easy things that get you.) But he told me that since he was the only staff member in the store—the man I could hear in the back was doing wholesale supply calls—he couldn’t leave the store. He told me to come back in 30 or 40 minutes when there’d be a second person.

So I did some grocery shopping and came back, and there was still only one person working the store, but it was a different person. “Hi, I was told by the other guy to come back in half an hour so someone could put my blades on.” “Oh great, I just sent him to lunch and now it’s just me,” he said. “But hold on, I’m doing seven things at once here, maybe I can do eight.” He asked me to stay in the store—hold down the fort, as it were—while he sprinted over to my car and swapped out the blades like a pit crew in NASCAR.

I rang up, thanked him, and went out to try my new blades. And…the righthand blade wasn’t fully contacting the glass, leaving wide streaks of washer fluid across half the windshield. I wasn’t going to ask the poor man to mess with them again, so I put the receipt in my wallet and decided to just come back another day.

Well, the next day I was visiting our vet in Leesburg, 20 minutes northwest and in the next county over. The area is less built up, as Loudoun County suburbanized later and is further from the core. On the way home I passed an AutoZone. That would be easier than an extra drive to the first store, so I pulled in and spoke to the guy at the counter. This store was pretty empty and better staffed. He came out right away to take a look at the new wipers, noted they looked defective, and then punched my car info into the computer.

“They don’t work because they got you the wrong blades,” he said.

He refunded me (the receipt said I needed the original packaging but he marked the item “defective,” which I assume overrode that requirement.) He recommended the cheapest blades—$10 cheaper—because he said they’re same as the premium ones. And he installed the new ones and had me try them out to make sure they worked.

I was in the outer suburb/exurban area of Gainesville, Virginia working on this article back in April, and I did a little shopping in their Wegmans supermarket. It’s the same exact building as the one we frequent in Fairfax—and the same, for that matter, as the ones I grew up occasionally shopping at in Princeton and Bridgewater, New Jersey—but it felt emptier, more open, more spacious. It was kind of nice to just park by the entrance, move quickly through the store, and ring up without a long line.

Both of these little shopping experiences—plus my month-delayed doctor’s visit—made me think. I think I sort of get the appeal of moving out to the suburban periphery—wherever that is at a given moment, and that’s part of the problem. You do really feel the noise, the crowds, the intensity, the constant pricks of adrenaline, fade away. You feel like there’s more space, like you can breathe.

But it also reminds me of this point I made last week on the sprawling development in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area:

The feeling I just kept getting was one of artificial distance. Some people perceive that as open space, I think. They see that as worth it to have to drive everywhere. I see countryside that has been spoiled just a little bit; not enough to turn it into a real city or even a cohesive built environment, but just enough to ruin its original appearance and function. There are just these vast areas of sort-of-developed land.

Simply putting more housing units more or less randomly in the middle of this adds density, but it probably isn’t going to make it feel more like a place. The pattern is just not built for that. Maybe NIMBYs in places like this basically understand that.

In other words, NIMBYs sort of grok that fundamentally the development pattern is not designed to grow or increase in intensity. NIMBYism in this kind of landscape sort of makes sense. Eventually density does and will ameliorate this near-total car dependence, but it will probably make traffic worse in the short term—enough to make substantial new housing very difficult politically.

However, more people meaning more traffic is not inevitable, and a good development pattern helps. Take a look at this chart. It lists major thoroughfares in Arlington, Virginia, and shows that with considerable population increases over the last 20 years, traffic has actually trended down (even on U.S. 1!)

Arlington is pretty compact relatively speaking, so it’s built for densification in a way that outer suburbs are not. But still, this is a really neat and important piece of data.

But the funny thing is that objections to traffic and a general sense of crowding mostly come down to cars, not people. And in any case, that feeling of quiet relief out in the new, distant suburbs is kind of artificial. It’s something that inherently, by definition, most people can never have. When you find yourself moving somewhere and then immediately being annoyed by other people moving there, you’ve got it wrong.

The idea that there’s some “escape”—that a few deserving people can leave the hustle and bustle, keep everyone else out, and enjoy all the benefits of the metro area with none of the perceived costs—just doesn’t describe a functional or human way of planning land use or making real places. Not everything that feels good is good.

It’s sort of like the tragedy of the commons: everyone does what makes sense individually, with devastating outcomes for the public good and, ultimately, for every individual too.

However, as my little stories show, I have on occasion driven far away into less populated towns to get appointments or buy stuff. But if I moved there, I’d be a small part of diminishing that convenience. We can’t make places worth caring about if they’re designed to work with as few people as possible.

But on the other hand, services and resources need to scale up along with density. It’s not great for appointments to be chronically booked a month ahead, or for schools to become overcrowded, or whatever other scenarios people fear. Making that work, especially in a development pattern not meant for incremental growth, might be tough—very tough—but it’s necessary.

And I want to add that part of it is also in our minds and habits and expectations. Saving two minutes in the checkout line, or parking a little further from the store entrance, doesn’t amount to much of anything at all. Learning not to perceive these things as enraging impositions on some imagined, impossible state of absolute frictionless convenience is part of being an urbanist, and, I think, part of being an adult.

Related Reading:

A Hard Day’s Wash, Part 2

Rural New Mexico Blues

Cultivating Contentment

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