Save Us from Subsidized Highways!

The hearing that I testified at yesterday heard from five witnesses: four who supported transit as a “core climate solution” and one skeptic. I like to think we were about evenly matched.

My testimony focused on two points. First, despite increasing transit subsidies by 1250 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1970, transit travel has declined from 49 to 45 trips per urban resident and transit’s share of urban travel has declined from 4.0% to 1.6%. Second, even if we could get more people to ride transit, transit uses as much energy, and emits nearly as much greenhouse gases, as cars; and the trends suggest that cars will be more environmentally friendly than any transit system in the country by 2025.

There were two interesting responses to my testimony. First, another witness said (and I’m quoting from memory), “All he did was divide total greenhouse gas emissions by passenger miles.” A reporter told me later that it sounded like he was questioning my methods, but his real argument was that more money spent on transit in combination with smart-growth land-use planning would lead to reduced auto driving.

I don’t believe that is true (and said so), but even if it were true: can you imagine AT&T (back when all phones were land lines) telling Congress, “We want you to restrict property rights, drive up housing prices, and prevent people from living in their preferred lifestyles so that we don’t have to extend our lines so far?” Or FedEx or UPS saying the same thing today? Why is transit so special that everyone else in the country has to completely rearrange their lives just for it?

You can say the answer is “climate change,” but transit agencies and smart-growth planners wanted to do all these things before climate was an issue. The truth is that transit is a declining but politically powerful industry, and part of its power comes from the fact that it is publicly owned and so elected officials have a vested interest in keeping it going.
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In a very real sense, transit is just like the British coal, rail, and other nationalized industries in the 1960s: its main purpose is no longer transportation but to meet other political goals such as keeping transit workers employed and construction contracts going to transit builders. If transit were private, no one would argue that we have to make the world less convenient and more expensive for the 95 percent of people who travel by car so that it will be more convenient for the 1 or 2 percent who travel by transit.

The other response came from the subcommittee chair, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ). Apparently in response to my statement that we have given three-quarters of a trillion dollars in subsidies to transit since 1970, he said, “The last transportation bill included $200 billion for highways, and all of that was a subsidy.”

The Antiplanner opposes highway subsidies as much as transit subsidies. But in fact all of that $200 billion came from gas taxes and other taxes from highway uses — taxes that Congress created or dedicated to highways as user fees in 1956.

Are gas taxes a user fee? Or are they a subsidy to highway users? If they are a subsidy, then let’s just get rid of them. We have the technology today to pay for roads out of vehicle-mile fees or tolls. Let’s do it.

Better yet, just privatize the roads. Then users can take their choice: Do you want to drive on the road where 20 to 40 percent of your fee goes to subsidize transit? Or do you want to drive on the road where all of your fee goes to the roads you use? Unfortunately, with government ownership, we don’t get that choice.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

54 Responses to Save Us from Subsidized Highways!

  1. Borealis says:

    I am all in favor of relaxing the parking requirements. Businesses should be able to build a store with minimal parking and see what happens in the market place. Certainly one of those downtown businesses with minimal parking will be more economical and beat a store that overbuilds parking spaces, such as Wal-Mart.

  2. the highwayman says:

    Then Wal-Mart will have to initiate a cover charge.

  3. Francis King says:

    I think parking is more complicated than this.

    Experience in the UK has been decidedly mixed.

    Setting maximum parking works well on usages like offices, where the employee is obliged to turn up, and if there is no parking space for them, they have to find some other way of getting to work. The management decides who gets a parking space, and who doesn’t. Since offices are very dense trip generators (approx one person or car per 20m2 in a high-rise tower block), removing parking spaces at the office is a good way of reducing car trips, and preventing congestion.

    Setting maximum parking does not work on housing. Unless the reasons for buying cars are removed, people have the same number of cars, whether or not they have a parking space. Cars end up parked on the kerb, on grass verges, on the footway itself, at junctions, etc. This causes safety problems. Which is why one council is going back to minimum parking for housing. Each house will have to have enough parking for every car.

    The amount of parking that retail requires depends on the nature of the shops. Many shops benefit from being pedestrianised – footfall is increased in a pedestrian area. Supermarkets, though, require good car access. Where car parking is provided outside of local shops, it needs to be restricted to a maximum stay of one hour, to allow for turnover.

  4. prk166 says:

    It would be nice to see more roads privatized.

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