4 Ways Bad Zoning Hurts Passenger Rail

by Lenny Zaleski, Rail Passengers Communications Intern

Have you ever visited a city in our country and wondered why there are so many single-family homes within the city limits? Wouldn’t it make more sense to build more apartments, duplexes, condos, townhomes, or flats rather than detached houses, which take up a lot more room?

The short answer is it definitely would, but something is preventing our cities from doing this: single-family zoning laws.

Single-family zoning is a type of classification for residential areas that only allow single-family homes to be built on that land. The types of single-family homes may also be restricted, requiring them to be detached (meaning no homes on the street have walls next to each other).

If you’ve ever wondered why so many towns and cities in America sprawl out, single-family zoning is the reason why. Image credit Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Single-family zoning is increasingly coming under fire for how it has contributed to suburban sprawl, higher property taxes, segregation by economic and racial means, and making climate change worse according to Alexander Von Hoffman, a professor at the Urban Planning and Design Department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

But of course, everything is connected. So here are four reasons why single-family zoning hurts passenger rail.

More Traffic

Because of the size of single-family homes and the number needed to house families in cities, you need to build a lot of them to get everyone housing. When you have to build that much, you end up with a lot of space between those families and the things you need to get to. According to Bill Fischer, a professor of economics at Dartmouth University. In his 2015 book “Zoning Rules!” Fischer documents the various ways single-family zoning laws contribute to suburban sprawl and increase dependence on cars – meaning that more cars go on bottlenecked roads and cause more traffic.

Think about it this way, if you need to drive to every single one of these errands every week in a neighborhood where only single-family homes are allowed, so does everyone else. Let’s say in a week you need to:

• Get groceries.
• Pick up a prescription.
• Take your kid to some activity.
• Go workout.

And you go to the same locations as other people in your neighborhood during the same general times due to work schedules overlapping, everyone in that area has to drive there. Because there are so few options for getting around, our only method of travel in those places gets worse.

No one likes waiting in traffic to go everywhere. Image credit University of California Los Angeles Institute of Transportation Studies.

Passenger rail suffers when traffic is worse for everyone. If it’s harder for people who do have a car to get around, then they probably won’t want to go out of their way for trips they do – like visiting family. Probably easier to just drive your car rather than drive 50 minutes downtown to then wait for your train right? If we had less reliance on cars, connecting to other types of travel would be easier – people end up closer to their locations because of more development, it’s quicker to drive around if you have a car, and you’d be afforded more options like public transit to get from A to B.

But when more people are driving, you don’t just sit in traffic. Your car is doing something too.

Climate Impacts

The thing a car does when it idles in traffic (or is just on at all) is emit carbon dioxide. When everyone is reliant on a car to get everywhere, you need to use it more often to get around. Because of this, people are driving more often for short distances, emitting carbon dioxide everywhere. And that leads to a worse climate for everyone around us.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average car emits around 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. With restrictive zoning creating a dependence on cars, that means drivers around the country emit tons of carbon dioxide every year. This leads to increased greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the leading driver of climate change by warming up temperatures all over the world.

Cars contribute a lot to carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Interesting where busses and passenger rail sit on this list. Image credit Statista.

Climate change has already been seen disrupting passenger rail service. For example, when Hurricane Helene rampaged through North Carolina and other southeast states, Amtrak suspended service for several routes. While there is a discussion to be had around how passenger rail is not involved enough in emergency planning in the United States and should be used as a national security and emergency management tool, the fact remains that increased frequency and danger of natural disasters due to climate will disrupt public transportation services of all kind (and even cars). And that’s assuming you can get to the train at all.

Segregation

Single-family housing is much more expensive to build compared to multi-family homes because of how many need to be built to provide housing to a large population. As a result, it’s often quite a financial investment to buy one. The median home price across the United States was over $400,000 in 2024 according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. To put that in context, the median household income in the United States is a bit above $80,000 according to CNBC.

Because of this cost, lots of low-income people can’t afford single-family homes. And this was by design. Local Initiatives Support Corporation Executive Director Ricardo Flores was interviewed in a news article from KBPS about how single-family zoning helped enable segregation in the United States.

Flores remarked in the interview, “you just add this layer of making it even more exclusive, and bingo — you've created a mechanism in which you can reinforce what you're trying to do, which is segregation, and keep certain people out of certain neighborhoods and accessing certain amenities.”

If you can’t build multi-family units in 81% of a city, where do people who can’t afford single-family homes go? Image credit Othering and Belonging Institute.

Passenger rail is a way for the public to get around, and poor people often use it as a way to get around at a lower cost compared to flying or driving. In many cases, passenger rail is people’s only option if they cannot afford a car or live in a place disconnected from airports. Not to mention, you can’t get to a train if you do not live near it.

Fewer People

When cities are more spread out due to the size of land needed to build single-family homes, you get fewer people in a city. Without mixed-use development (not just a residential building) and multi-family homes, you cannot get as many people into a small space. This is a problem for cities.

Tax bases pay for things as organizations like Strong Towns have dived into before, and single-family housing needs subsidies. As a result, it gets more expensive to live in a city due to the taxes needed to sustain subsidies, and fewer people live in a place. When you have less dense cities due to the McMansions of the U.S., you get fewer people to pay for things that bring tax revenue back to a city, and you get a smaller population.

This is an issue for passenger rail. Less dense cities mean fewer people live near amenities and places to go, which is one of the hallmarks of great train service. Additionally, it means less revenue for a city or overall state, and this can affect the ways communities can fund transportation initiatives that would benefit everyone in the community.

What We Can Do

Issues like urbanism, walkability, and good city development are all essential to passenger rail. We need to seek out ways we can improve our laws, policies, and systems that will enable better transportation for everyone.

So here’s what you can do to help with zoning problems:

• Learn about your town or city’s zoning board. Find out about public feedback opportunities, go to town halls for proposed developments, and support more development.
• Write to your legislators. With the results of the 2024 election, it seems unlikely that change will come from the federal level on this issue (but we can still advocate for it), but find out who your state-level representatives and senators are. Talk to them about this issue in your state.
• Get involved with Rail Passengers Association. Passenger rail touches many parts of urban development, transportation, and infrastructure, and we can all get more done together – YIMBYs, rail fans, and transit supporters alike.