|
Abstract: There are two barriers to realizing the promise of the 100-year life in the US. The first is that few get to live it: unlike peers in other high-income countries, the life expectancy of Americans is short. Paradoxically, however, boosting American longevity would aggravate a second problem: on important dimensions, Americans enjoy less independence in old age than their peers. These problems have something perhaps unexpected in common: a built environment that requires driving as the price of first-class citizenship. That bargain, a legacy of twentieth-century transportation and land use policy, first lops years off of life expectancy by claiming lives at disproportionately young ages and then saps independence and quality of life among the small share of Americans who are fortunate to reach very old age. This chapter proposes two solutions. First, it urges road safety interventions that maximize life expectancy and thus expand the promise of the 100-year life. Second, it develops a variant on the classic Tiebout model of residential sorting that applies the concept more narrowly to enable retirees to thrive (transportation-based “gray Tiebout sorting”). It details the instrumental promise of such a market and its potential for broad spillover benefits.
|