One question I come back to from time to time at this newsletter is what we mean when we say a place feels “crowded.” I think to a great extent what we’re really saying is “there’s a lot of car traffic here.” But because we don’t typically think about cars and car-centric mobility, per se, we make the mental jump that cars are people, and that if a place feels crowded, there must be too many people. In other words, it doesn’t occur to us that the people and the cars are separable.

I argue that this is not just an error, but basically an inversion: population density—i.e., people—don’t make a place feel crowded. Cars do, simply because they, and the road space and parking and assorted infrastructure they demand, take up so much space relative to the people inside (or outside).

The more you dilute population density, the more you spread out the things people need to access. And the more you spread out those things, the more automobile trips you generate in order for people to reach them. As I put it once: “It’s a self-reinforcing problem: in order to dilute traffic, we dilute development, which intensifies traffic, which intensifies the desire to dilute development.”

I’ve come back to this whole thing a lot. Here, for example, in thinking about how large properties that rely on wide trade areas—a Costco, a 20-pump gas station, etc.—make a place feel subjectively more “crowded” than the same amount of activity broken up (more enterprises in more places at a smaller scale). And here, a little bit on the psychology of parking, and how waiting for a spot gives you feeling of being trapped.

But in this piece, I want to give you a new anecdote about all of this. Every time my wife and I visit North Carolina, and drive around various parts of the Raleigh/Durham metro area/Triangle, we’re struck by how crowded and aimless the suburbanized areas feel. You’re always in traffic, and you’re always driving. Crowdedness and distance. “It feels crowded for no reason,” my wife said.

But automobile traffic isn’t crowdedness; it’s the opposite of crowdedness. A land-use pattern that funnels automobiles into a relative handful of very large, car-oriented properties essentially conjures a sense of crushing crowds out of sparseness and emptiness.

After one of these days, back at our hotel, my wife asked me whether these North Carolina counties—Wake, Orange, and Durham—were actually more densely populated than our home or local counties—Fairfax, Arlington, Montgomery, Prince George’s, Prince William, Loudoun.

The numbers are very interesting. Yes, of course, this is anecdotal, and my perception of Northern Virginia traffic is based partly on working remotely (meaning I can forget a lot of it exists). But just based on the randomly selected car trips I can think of, I would say most of the more developed areas in this North Carolina metro area—anywhere outside/between the city and town centers of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, including places like Cary and Apex but also some of the edges of the cities proper—were more crowded. You feel whatever that feeling is that suburbanites identify as “crowded.”

So, the three major metro-area counties in the Triangle have these densities, in descending order:

• Wake County: 1,353.25/sq mi

• Durham County: 1,133.68/sq mi

• Orange County: 374.02/sq mi

And the roughly analogous D.C.-area counties have these densities:

• Arlington County: 9,200/sq mi

• Fairfax County: 2,941.82/sq mi

• Montgomery County: 2,153.80/sq mi

• Prince George’s County: 1,900/sq mi

• Prince William County: 1,400/sq mi

• Loudoun County: 810/sq mi

With the exception of Loudoun, every D.C.-area county is denser than the densest Triangle county. And yet—subjectively, in my experience—any given drive around one of these D.C.-area counties feels less soul-crushing, less simultaneously slow and distant and traffic-choked, than any given drive around the edges and surroundings of Raleigh, Durham, or Chapel Hill.

I never get tired of sharing this graph. It shows traffic in Arlington County decreasing as the county’s population grew from about 180,000 to almost 240,000 people!

This is almost spooky to me; it’s so initially counterintuitive. Now maybe I’m reading or experiencing these density numbers in my own way. Maybe you get funny traffic effects in semi-rural counties, and maybe the developed parts on their own are actually fairly dense, and the numbers are diluted by all the rural areas.

But it seems to suggest that car centricity makes places feel far more “full” than they are; that we really do lack the language for separating automobiles from people; and that it never even occurs to most people that the answer to the perception of crowdedness might actually be density.

The counterexample, of course, is that dense cities also feel crowded. But most of these suburban places will never be that dense, and I’d still argue that cities feel crowded in a different, and much less unpleasant, way. And I’d argue further that a great deal of the perception of noise and hubbub and crushing crowdedness in cities is still down to the small fraction of people in cars, and not to anything inherent in the city itself.

The argument against what I’m saying here isn’t really that it’s wrong, I think, but that we just won’t have the skill or planning to shepherd totally car-centric places into anything much better. That we either like it well enough, or that at least it’s the devil we know. I don’t really know what the long-term prospects are for maturing and filling in suburban areas, though we are seeing this beginning to happen in many places.

But I’m less interested in how exactly that happens over 20 or 30 years, and more interested in the insight that cars are not people, and that most of the places in America that we experience as being too crowded and too full are in reality far too sparse and empty.

Related Reading:

Metro Areas Are Places

Spread Out or Smashed Together?

Congestion, Time, and Distance

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