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Abstract: A growing chorus known as the abundance movement seeks to overcome artificial scarcity in the built environment—especially housing. Yet this movement’s signature goal of increasing housing production collides with a central driver of scarcity: development restrictions rooted in traffic concerns. Advocates often assume that building more housing will generate support for needed transportation reform. Experience suggests otherwise. In auto-dependent regions, adding housing without reconfiguring transportation tends to reinforce the logic of restriction. Unlocking abundance’s promised feedback loops requires re-grounding transportation policy in its relationship to land use.
This Article makes two contributions. First, it introduces into legal analysis a core urban-planning framework: transportation accessibility, which evaluates system performance by users’ ability to reach destinations. Though facially modest, anchoring policy in accessibility would depart sharply from a century of practice, with significant implications across state and local government law.
Second, drawing on 13 original interviews with current and former transportation officials, the Article develops a novel account of institutional barriers to reform. Far from the marble corridors and mahogany courtrooms where law is articulated, transportation policy is functionally made in the unglamorous offices of state and local government. We call this institutional crucible—shaped by agency culture and industry convention as well as hard law—“transportation policy linoleum.” It helps explain why proven, seemingly unobjectionable reforms routinely wither. The Article closes with a policy playbook designed to help accessibility break through the linoleum and deliver abundance.
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