Washington DC has proposed an anti-auto transportation plan that is ironically called “MoveDC” when its real goal is to reduce the mobility of DC residents. The plan calls for reducing auto commuting from 54 percent to no more than 25 percent of all workers in the district, while favoring transit, cycling, and walking.
Click image to download the plan’s executive summary. Click here to download other parts of the plan.
The plan would discourage auto driving by tolling roads entering the district and cordon-pricing. Tolls aren’t necessarily a bad idea: as the Antiplanner explained in this paper, properly designed tolls can relieve congestion and actually increase roadway capacities. But you can count on DC to design them wrong, using them more as a punitive and fundraising tool than as a way to relieve congestion. Cordon pricing is invariably a bad idea, much more of a way for cities to capture dollars from suburban commuters than to influence travel habits.
The plan assumes that the district’s population will increase by 170,000 people over the next 25 years, which is supposed to have some kind of apocalyptic result if all of those people drive as much as people drive today. The district’s official population in 2010 was 602,000 people, a 155,000-person drop from 1970. While Census Bureau estimates say the district’s population is once again growing, it doesn’t seem all that apocalyptic if the population returns to 1970 levels.
The Census Bureau estimates that 54 percent of people employed in the district drove to work, while only 37 percent took transit in 2012. Since part of the MoveDC plan calls for discouraging people outside the district from driving to work in the district, it appears the goal is to cut that 54 percent by more than half. DC’s plan to discourage driving by taxing commuters through cordon pricing is more likely to push jobs into the suburbs than to reach this goal.
Congestion isn’t really a problem in downtown DC or on Capital Hill, mainly because the legal height limit prevents Manhattan-like job concentrations. Instead, the main congestion problems are on the highways entering the district. These problems can be solved through congestion tolls, which would encourage some travelers to shift the times they drive. Keeping the roads uncongested would effectively double the capacity of the roads during rush hour, which ironically could allow even more people to drive to work. DC’s anti-auto planners won’t want to do that, which is why they are likely to focus more on cordon pricing than congestion tolling.
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As I documented in this paper, Americans spend about a trillion dollars a year buying, maintaining, operating, and insuring cars and subsidizing highways, in exchange for which they travel about 4 trillion passenger miles per year for an average total cost of 25 cents per passenger mile (about 24 cents of which is paid by users and 1 cent of which is subsidies). In contrast, Washington’s transit system (for the urban area, not just the district) moved people about 2.5 billion passenger miles in 2012 at a cost of $3 billion, or $1.20 per passenger mile (only 34 cents of which was captured in fares).
Meanwhile, the average car and light truck on the road in 2012 got about 20.7 miles per gallon, meaning (at the average occupancy of about 1.6 people per car) it emitted about 268 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger mile. In contrast, Washington’s transit system emitted an average of 285 grams per passenger mile, partly because nearly all of the electricity used to power the MetroRail system comes from burning fossil fuels.
Moreover, driving is rapidly becoming more fuel efficient. The average car and light truck sold last year got nearly 25 mpg, emitting about 235 grams per passenger mile. By 2040, under the Obama administration’s fuel economy standards, the average car on the road will get about 45 mpg, emitting just 130 grams per passenger mile. The Washington MetroRail system, which is stuck using 1970s technology for the foreseeable future, cannot possibly hope to compete.
Here’s the dirty little secret of sustainability plans like MoveDC: Planners aren’t trying to save the planet by moving people to more sustainable forms of transportation, they are trying to save the planet by reducing people’s travel. Someone with a car may travel more than 10,000 miles a year, but take away their car and put them on the best transit system in the world and they’ll probably travel less than 5,000 miles a year. The result is a dramatic reduction in people’s mobility.
Planners say mobility is less important than accessibility, meaning if they put a grocery store, dentist, and coffee shop in the same building or across the street from the building you live in, you won’t need to drive to consume those services. But the great thing about the automobile is that it doesn’t just give us access to a grocery store, it gives us access to a wide range of grocery stores, forcing them to compete on price, quality, and selection. That competition disappears when most are limited to shopping at stores within walking distance.
Moreover, packing more people and services into smaller areas drives up the price of land, making housing unaffordable and increasing the costs of providing groceries and other services. To avoid the high cost of housing, we’ll have to live in smaller homes, another hidden planning goal. Multifamily housing actually uses more energy per square foot than single-family homes, but planners make up for that by getting people to live in 1,000-square-foot apartments instead of 2,000-square-foot homes.
Less mobility, smaller homes, higher consumer prices: that’s the sustainable future we can look forward to thanks to plans like MoveDC. Americans probably won’t accept that, so it might be more appropriate to name it “Move Out of DC.”
I just had an Idea… Maybe if Austin implements an excessive cordon pricing scheme the old timers and locals will get what they want, errrr, people to stop coming here.
“These problems can be solved through congestion tolls, which would encourage some travelers to shift the times they drive.”
The problem with congestion tolling advocates is that they cavalierly say things like this like it’s not a big deal to 9 to 5er’s who’s job depends on punctuality. “But now they can get to work faster!” Right, for a significant price. Again, like that’s not a big deal.
Seeing as we already pay a user fee for highways, congestion pricing is an added tax with the intent of changing behavior. Seems a bit odd that such blatant social engineering would be so heavily championed here.
Seeing as we already pay a user fee for highways, congestion pricing is an added tax with the intent of changing behavior. Seems a bit odd that such blatant social engineering would be so heavily championed here.
Congestion is an externality problem. Additional users entering a congested road impose costs on each other in additional to themselves. The tolls are necessary to keep the level of service on the roadways from dropping sharply. When it comes to congested networks, people can pay with money or with their time, which is the default outcome in the untolled situation. Since different users have different values of time, some will choose to pay a toll and some will not, accepting a long commute duration. Some behavior change will occur, but it will likely leave some, if not all users better off.
In D.C., the people who use the subway are generally choosing the latter. That is because roadway congestion is so bad, and they have been given no real alternative. It would be interesting to see how commuters responded once those roadways were less congested. Remember, incomes in the D.C. area, especially for federal workers, are quite high. I would think that a large proportion of them would gladly make the tradeoff of paying the toll (assuming it is set at reasonable levels) in exchange for a shorter commute. That is ‘behavior change’ that they would gladly accept. Offering a higher-quality service at a higher price is much better than offering a uniformly poor level of service at a lower price with no alternative.
This is all conditioned on the D.C. planners using the money wisely, however. If they fritter away the revenue from the tolls, they could easily leave a large number of commuters worse off. This is a realistic concern, with the example of the Dulles Toll Road being used as a cash cow to pay for Silver Line capital subsidies.
I haven’t read the plan, but from Randal’s description of it, their some things that just don’t make sense. For example, why are they citing auto commute mode shares in the District and setting arbitrary reduction targets for them while citing cordon tolls as a featured policy. People who live in the District are either work inside the cordoned area already or would be commuting to jobs outside of the District, implying that they are traveling in the non-peak direction during peak hours.
Then there is the bit about ‘rapidly rising travel costs’ and carbon emissions. Well, travel costs are not rising rapidly, they are rising at a rather manageable pace. And carbon emissions in this country are falling, not rising. Unless they have measurements of emissions for the DC area that suggest otherwise, this claim is just wrong. Of course, the ‘rapidly rising travel costs’ part could just be a self-fulfilling prophecy — if costs are not rising as fast as the planners would like, they can find ways to impose higher costs.
I’m also curious about the part that juxtaposes mobility and accessibility. Do they not recognize that the two concepts are related? That accessibility is just mobility with some measure of activities thrown in? And that reducing mobility, either deliberately or through benign neglect will, all else equal, also reduce accessibility? This doesn’t seem to be very well thought through.
MJ said: “Congestion is an externality problem.”
I agree 100%. I’m just pointing out that when it comes to externalities affecting cars on highways intervention is needed according to Antiplanners. Interventions to internalize other problems???? Social engineering!!!
It’s not “Antiplanner,” it’s “Anti-planning-that-results-in-outcomes-I-don’t-prefer-Pro-planning-that-results-in-stuff-I-like-er.”
I agree 100%. I’m just pointing out that when it comes to externalities affecting cars on highways intervention is needed according to Antiplanners. Interventions to internalize other problems???? Social engineering!!!
Care to be more specific?
Here in Portland, Oregon planners have been trying to do something similar and even more dramatic… here they want to reduce auto trips to 10% and increase ‘active mobility’ to 90%. However, instead of inducing behavior change what actually winds up happening is an induced demographic change that leads to higher housing prices and cost of living, higher density housing , dramatically shifting neighborhoods, and increased real estate profits and tax revenues. In that respect, it seems more like persecution to drive away certain residents and attract others, the progressive’s version of Jim Crow.
As I recall, efforts to change behavior in order to reduce pollution have been discussed at length over the years on this blog, no?
As I recall, efforts to change behavior in order to reduce pollution have been discussed at length over the years on this blog, no?
Yes, they have. I don’t think anyone has seriously objected to the concept of managing pollution so as to avoid unhealthy levels. We have objected to measures that do so in wasteful, ineffective, or needlessly restrictive manners. Incidentally, these quite frequently happen to coincide with the methods chosen by transportation planners, as this DC plan exemplifies.
I’ll have to go back an look, but I believe that policies that would charge polluters for their pollution have been soundly rejected by the Antiplanning community on this blog.
Puuuhhhhleeeeeeze. This is a DC plan, as in the corrupt self-centered parasite government of the District of Columbia.
Despite getting huge recession-proof economic stimulus from the rest of the country, DC residents dream of a way to extract money from those commuters who have to work in Nation’s Capital. Congress won’t let them directly tax commuters, so the next best thing is to throw up a moat around DC and charge people to enter into the Nation’s Capital. Don’t think for a second that the money collected will be used to help commuters.
Somebody should make a movie about a country with a capitol city that exacts tribute from the various districts in the nation. Maybe even demand they hold drawings for young people to compete in Redskin Stadium in some sort of entertaining reality TV games.
Sandy Teal wrote:
Puuuhhhhleeeeeeze. This is a DC plan, as in the corrupt self-centered parasite government of the District of Columbia.
Sandy, I was born in the District of Columbia (for reasons beyond my control), but have not lived there since 1960, and have no special interest in returning. And I am not especially a fan of the politics of the municipal government of D.C. (commonly called “the D.C. Government”). But the “limited home rule” that the District of Columbia enjoys today (complete with its own elected officials) has resulted in a much better government than was present when the city was ruled directly by Congress, with racist Southerners with names like Bilbo, McMillan and Broyhill largely in control of the city. Even under former “Mayor-for-Life” Marion Shepilov Barry, Jr., the city was better governed than it had been under Congressional rule (though not well – in 1989 the reliably liberal Washington Monthly magazine named D.C. The worst city government in America), and some of the problems that the Monthly documented then are still problems 25 years later.
Despite getting huge recession-proof economic stimulus from the rest of the country, DC residents dream of a way to extract money from those commuters who have to work in Nation’s Capital. Congress won’t let them directly tax commuters, so the next best thing is to throw up a moat around DC and charge people to enter into the Nation’s Capital. Don’t think for a second that the money collected will be used to help commuters.
The D.C. “limited home rule” charter that was passed by Congress in the early 1970’s does indeed forbid the imposition of a commuter tax (in other words, an income tax on people that work in the District of Columbia but do not reside there). The congestion toll cordon would presumably also tax plenty of D.C. residents, since the cordon proposed was well inside the corporate limits of D.C. Note that I am not expressing an opinion about the value or appropriateness of such a tolling scheme, though I am generally sympathetic toward plans that propose to allocate scarce highway capacity by putting a dynamic price on it.
Somebody should make a movie about a country with a capitol city that exacts tribute from the various districts in the nation. Maybe even demand they hold drawings for young people to compete in Redskin Stadium in some sort of entertaining reality TV games.
As for getting tributes from the rest of the nation, the champion in that regard is not probably not D.C., but the neighboring Commonwealth of Virginia ranks high on many lists, especially spending by the Department of Defense.
The stadium where the NFL Washington Redskins play their home games, FedEx Field, is located in suburban Landover, Prince George’s County, Maryland.