The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner blew it yesterday by saying there was no free parking in Manhattan, which shows this Oregon resident doesn’t spend much time in the Big Apple. It turns out Manhattan has lots of free on-street parking, though on many streets you have to move your car to the alternate side of the street every night.

This doesn’t change my main point, which is that it is one thing to argue that cities should not price parking below market rates where there is a market for parking. I have no problem with this. But it is quite another thing to argue, as many urban planners following the Shoup model do, that private businesses should be required to charge for parking (or be limited in how much parking they can provide) in areas where the market rate for parking is zero (meaning most areas outside of central city downtowns).

But I began to wonder: if there is so much free on-street parking in Manhattan, why would someone pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their own personal parking space? Census data indicate that, outside of towns in Alaska that are not accessible by auto, Manhattan has about the lowest rate of auto ownership in the United States: just 22.5 percent of households have a car, compared with more than 90 percent in the rest of the country. So you might not think there would be much demand for parking.

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Every few years, the Federal Highway Administration conducts a major survey called the NHTS to find out how Americans travel. The 2009 survey collected questionaires from more than 150,000 different households. Some of the results from that survey are now available in several formats.

The complete dataset is about 500 megabytes in ASCII format. Much briefer are a number of frequently-asked for table, including tables showing daily trips and miles by household income, mode and purpose, and other variables. You can also design your own table, though many useful variables in the survey, such as person miles of travel, are not (yet?) included in the design-your-own tables.

The first thing that must be noted is that the 150,000 households surveyed were not an accurate cross-section of the nation. For example, they surveyed one household for every 1,000 people in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area, but only one for every 11,000 people in the Chicago metropolitan area, and (apparently) no one at all in the Atlanta metro area. Further, though more than two-thirds of Americans live in urban areas of 50,000 people or more, only about 61 percent of the surveys came from such areas.

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The 2001 National Household Transportation Survey (NHTS) found that the average motor vehicle contains about 1.6 people (see table 16). But a report from the Department of Energy observes that “intercity trips [have] higher-than-average vehicle occupancy rates” (see appendix C-3, page C-3.4).

How much higher? The answer, curiously, comes from the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which commissioned a study that found the average occupancy of autos in intercity trips is 2.4. Any fuel-efficiency comparisons of autos and intercity rail should use this number, not 1.6.

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The Pew Charitable Trusts looked at highway revenues and found that they fail to cover highway costs. Only 51 percent of the cost of highways came from user fees in 2007, says Pew.

According to a Pew data file, 2007 highway user fees totaled to $98 billion while “non-user revenues” spent on highways totaled to $70 billion and another $25 billion came from bond issues. I’ve checked Pew’s source data (table HF-10 from Highway Statistics) and the numbers are accurate.

However, the Antiplanner has a few quarrels with Pew’s interpretation of the data. Most important, Pew counts as “user revenue” a number that the federal government identifies as “highway user revenues used for highways,” which in 2007 was $97.9 billion. But users actually paid $124.5 billion. Just because federal and state officials diverted most of the different to mass transit and non-transportation related funds doesn’t mean they aren’t paid by users.

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Recently, the Federal Transit Administration added Historical Data Files to the National Transit Database. These files include operating and capital expenses, trips, passenger miles, and other data for all federally funded transit agencies from 1991 through 2007.

I downloaded the files and put all the ones that were important to me — operating expenses, capital expenses, fare, vehicle revenue miles, vehicle revenue hours, directional route miles, trips, and passenger miles — on separate worksheets of a single spreadsheet (4.4 MB Excel file). All of the years in the columns of all of the worksheets are identical, and the agencies and modes in all of the rows are also identical unless you resort them.

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Each year, about one out of 40 households receive a letter from the Census Bureau demanding that they fill out an American Community Survey asking such nosy questions as how much money each person in the household earns each year, how they heat their house, and whether they have a flush toilet. Though some have suggested that people should boycott the decennial census as too “intrusive,” the Antiplanner is a voracious consumer of census data, and so I was proud to receive and fill out the 28-page survey form form this year.

This survey is an annual extension of the Census Bureau’s so-called long form, which has been given to one out of six households each decennial census since at least 1960 (including the Antiplanner’s in 2000). As I filled out the 2009 form, it occurred to me that some of the questions have not been significantly updated since 1960.

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The Antiplanner is a data junkie. When the Federal Transit Administration publishes each year’s National Transit Database, I feel like running down the street like Steve Martin in The Jerk: “The 2008 Transit Database is here! And I’m in it!” (I did, after all, ride the Washington Metro more than a few times in 2008.)

As in previous years, the 2008 database comes in two very different formats: the database and the data tables. Both are self-extracting exe files (if, like the Antiplanner, you have a Macintosh, you may need a special program such as File Juicer to extract the data). Each has more-or-less the same data, but the data tables are easier to read while the database is easier to manipulate in an Excel spreadsheet.

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The Department of Energy has just published the 28th edition of the Transportation Energy Data Book, including data for 2007. Since this was the source of some of the Antiplanner’s data used to compare energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of cars vs. rail transit, it is worth taking a look to see what has changed.

Two of the most important pages contain tables 2.13 and 2.14, physical pages 64 and 65. These list the energy consumption per passenger mile of various forms of transportation between 1970 and 2007.

The tables indicate that, between 2006 and 2007, energy consumption per passenger mile of cars increased by 0.1 percent. For light trucks, it decreased by 0.9 percent, but for transit buses it increased by 1.3 percent. Airlines reduced energy consumption per passenger mile by 3.0 percent; Amtrak by 5.1 percent; and light/heavy rail transit by 4.8 percent. However, commuter rail energy consumption per passenger mile increased by 4.4 percent.

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During my last trip to DC, I happened to listen to a debate over a proposal to build a streetcar line in Baltimore. “People won’t ride a bus,” argued one of the streetcar advocates. “To attract tourists, we need to have a streetcar.”

Meanwhile, within a two-block walk of the Cato Institute offices, I could find dozens of buses: charter buses in front of hotels, open-top tour buses filled with tourists, Bolt buses, two-story-high Megabuses, and many more. Most of them filled well over half their seats, except for the city buses which ran nearly empty.

Rail advocates are fond of claiming that Margaret Thatcher said, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure” — as if support from a fiscal conservative lends credence to their cause. In fact, there is no evidence Thatcher ever said this “or indeed shared the sentiment.”

The truth is that intercity buses are staging a revival, attracting riders of all ages from all walks of life. They are doing so by offering services you can’t get from Amtrak at much lower prices. But because they are unsubsidized, they are ignored by would-be policy makers such as the Surface Transportation Policy Commission. Moreover, accurate data on bus ridership are very hard to come by.

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Here are some numbers to think about. The European numbers are from Panorama of Transport, published by the European Union. The U.S. numbers are from the National Transit Database and National Transportation Statistics.

As of 2004, page 23 of Panorama says that 137 cities in the EU-25 had light rail or streetcars (trams), compared with just 27 in the U.S. (including vintage trolleys). Thirty EU-25 cities had what the Europeans call “metros,” including what we would call subways, elevateds, and commuter rail, compared with 14 in the U.S.

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