Transportation Policy for the Golden Years
Some thoughts on adapting transportation and land use with the goal of increasing both years of life and life in years.
One of my recent posts expanded on a chapter (Transportation Policy for the 100-Year Life) that I contributed to an edited volume detailing legal and policy challenges presented by the growth in American lifespans. That post explored a puzzle: the exceptional status of the United States as a rich country that has a low life expectancy, including for the affluent (it’s not only a distributional story). As a general rule, rich countries enjoy long life expectancy, but while the U.S. is by most measures at the top of the heap of large rich countries in income and wealth, our life expectancy is four or five years shorter than in other OECD countries with far lower levels of both, like Portugal.
Taking this context on board,1 this post amplifies two other aspects of the chapter: the contribution of transportation policy to reducing American life expectancy (and some reforms that might help) and the role of land use regulation and local government in increasing quality of life in old age. You can think of these as increasing quantity of life and quality of life. In approaching these two goals, I did not limit myself to urbanist-friendly ideas. It’s clear that many tens millions of older Americans have revealed a preference for a less-urban lifestyle, and it is hard to take seriously ideas (e.g., building denser housing and more public transit) that start with assuming that away.
I. Transportation Policy for Growing Old Increased Longevity
For much of American history, those who lived to see their centennial birthday enjoyed a special form of freedom: as they aged, their level of independence generally increased—and it remained at a high level even deep into old age. Thanks to technology—the rise of streetcars, rail networks, and eventually automobiles—mobility options grew over time. When the very elderly could no longer safely operate newfangled motorcars, in midsize and even small cities and towns they could ride streetcars until the middle of the twentieth century.
Today’s centenarians enjoy a great many rights and comforts unknown to those of the past,2 but they also face a grim reality: a diminution in their ability to get around. In the postwar era, a new transportation paradigm designed around private automobiles became official policy. In the very beginning, cars were toys of the upper class, but this changed by the 1920s. Personal automobility was increasingly embraced by mass society in the United States—as it was everywhere in the world—as the nation grew more affluent.
Changes to the built environment upset the old equilibrium. A new universal expectation of being able to drive from curb to curb was accompanied by new infrastructure and created new freedoms, but as a byproduct it also contributed to a form of unintentional codependency: a built environment that assumed car access made it difficult to access essentials, like jobs, schools, grocery stores, medical care, and the like without a car.
This model of organizing society’s physical space of course excluded people not fortunate enough to own cars. It also excluded those who, due to a neurological, physical, or other disability, were unable to drive. But when life expectancy at birth was only 69.8 years, as it was in 1960, it didn’t exclude a great many people who were too old to drive safely. Today it does.
The number of American centenarians grew by 50% between 2010 and 2020. The absolute number (80,000) is still low, but if you add in those over 80 (estimated at 15 million in 2025 and projected to be about 23 million in 2035) the contrast with the past grows sharper.
In brief, the increase in the share of Americans with very long lifespans makes plain what most of us would prefer to forget: just as we were once too young to drive safely, at some point, if we’re fortunate, we will be too old.
With apologies to the statisticians, at a conceptual level you can think of this as being akin to a bell curve, where the drivers who experience the greatest difficulty driving safely are those who are very young and very old. As much as the U.S. struggles with addressing the needs of teenagers and children to access necessities at the left tail of the age curve, there are at least many efforts to do so (school buses, for one). Far fewer for older adults.
Notwithstanding the generally uncompetitive position of the U.S. relative to our peers on life expectancy, the curve is also becoming increasingly skewed to the right, i.e., toward people living into very old age. Americans who reach their eighties typically outlive their ability to drive safely by seven to ten years—and those who reach 100 may face decades of diminished access to amenities and necessities. Many who are no longer able to operate a vehicle safely could use public transit if reliable networks still existed.
The assumption of universal automobility creates two barriers to realizing the promise of the 100-year life. First, it contributes to shortening Americans’ lifespans. Compared to peers in other high-income countries, American life expectancy is notably brief (as described in my earlier post). Second, the assumption of driving reduces independence in the golden years. While these problems have multiple causes, they share a common input: a built environment that requires driving as the price of full participation in society.
What’s the contribution of driving to shortening American life expectancy? One study attributed 10% of the gap in American men’s life expectancy versus men in peer countries to elevated levels of motor vehicle deaths. Not only is the high level of traffic deaths relevant here but the high number of life-years lost to those incidents, given their overrepresentation among causes of death for the young. Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of premature death for Americans aged 1 to 44. In 2021, they accounted for more such deaths than the other top five causes combined. Among these accidental deaths, traffic fatalities are the leading or second leading cause for virtually all age groups above one year. Because they disproportionately affect the young, these deaths have an outsize impact on American life expectancy.
While Americans do drive more than residents of other high-income countries, this doesn’t fully explain our elevated roadway mortality. The United States road transportation system claims more lives even on a per-mile-traveled basis. In a recent three-year window, America’s rate of per-capita deaths per vehicle mile traveled was 300 percent that of Norway, more than 200 percent that of the UK, and about 165 percent that of Germany.3
II. Two Margins for Improvement: Quantity of Years and Quality of Life
Addressing these challenges requires a two-pronged approach: a transportation-driven approach that maximizes life-years saved and a locational-competition approach that makes some areas, and in the long run ideally most areas, more appealing to grow old in.
First, we should adopt proven, cost-effective safety interventions. In 2020, nearly half of all fatalities among US vehicle occupants were people not wearing seat belts, with speeding associated with nearly one-third of traffic fatalities. Given limited budgets, policymakers should prioritize interventions that maximize lives saved per dollar spent, such as primary enforcement of seatbelt laws, automated speed and red light enforcement, and vehicle speed limiters for “super speeders” who engage in extreme speeding (as Virginia and Washington State have recently adopted). I wrote about some of these ideas and more in a short piece on second-best transportation solutions. “Second-best” theory in economics recognizes conditions where optimal reforms are not feasible and seeks to identify the best ones that are feasible. I’d put all these reforms in that bucket because they (arguably) fail to address some of the root problems that explain much of why U.S. traffic fatalities are elevated, and yet they would actually lower those fatalities.
Second, the market for retiree location offers a promising path forward. Drawing on the consumer-voter model developed by economist Charles Tiebout,4 local governments can join with developers to compete for retiree population share, allowing seniors to sort into communities that foster greater access to valued amenities in their golden years. Some areas already demonstrate this potential through walkable neighborhoods, transit options, or shuttle services. Most seniors don’t want to move, but on an optimistic version of this theory they might benefit even if they stay put: just as customers of one store gain when a rival store runs a sale or improves its offerings, so too can competition of this type help motivate areas saturated in twentieth-century automobile-dependent planning to up their game in a bid to improve quality of life and retain residents.
For municipalities and developers, the financial benefits of attracting or retaining retirees are substantial. Retirees have assets and bring revenue through property and consumption taxes but tend to use fewer public resources relative to families with children. This creates an alignment of incentives where improving accessibility for seniors becomes financially advantageous for communities.
To be clear, this is not so much a freestanding solution as a mechanism for encouraging experimentation and generative competition. But the ingredients are there and I think a coordinated focus on this would help unearth and activate the relevant incentives.5
In Conclusion
Transportation policy plays a central role in addressing both challenges of extended longevity: making it more broadly available (by saving lives) and enabling those who achieve very old age to thrive. By facing up to the limitations of the human body, we can increase American life expectancy while enhancing quality of life in the golden years—restoring a form of independence that Americans once took for granted, but that improvements in science and technology have, paradoxically, made harder to sustain late in life.
This is a Britishism that I’m going to try to will into being in the U.S. Let’s hope it has a better fate than “fetch.”
By observing some problematic developments in society relative to a century ago I do not mean to idealize that period, which would overall have been worse to live in in nearly every way.
See FN 27 of the book chapter.
His surname is pronounced “tee-bow,” like the former quarterback Tim Tebow. Bill Fischel even researched the question and confirmed this. However, it is unclear to me whether the adjectival form (Tieboutian) has a standard pronunciation and “tee-bow-tyan" sounds odd to my ear. If you know, get in touch!
Of course there’s always the potential for additional incentives to help accelerate change. A topic for a different day.
I love your work: there are not many of us in the transportation + abundance space. Is there a place or places that are doing it right, when it comes to transportation for the golden years?