When Obama started talking about an $850 billion infrastructure package to stimulate the economy, state and local transportation agencies began licking their chops. The federal government currently spends only about $45 billion per year on transportation of all kinds, so $850 billion would be almost 20 years of spending.
Free money.
Flickr photo by Tracy O.
As it turns out, only about $45 billion of the stimulus package is for transportation, which will be like the feds doubling spending for one year. The stimulus bill will not build a lot of new highways or light-rail lines. But it might set some bad precedents for future federal spending.
Historically, most federal highway and transit spending has been in the form of “formula grants.” The formulas use such criteria as population, road miles, and transit vehicle miles of service. Most of the funds in the stimulus proposals fall back on the same formulas that were in SAFETEA-LU, the 2005 reauthorization of federal transportation funds.
The biggest non-formula grant program was New Starts, in which Congress (starting in 1991) offered a huge pot of money for transit capital improvements on a first-come, first-served basis. This gave transit agencies an incentive to choose high-cost transit systems, such as light rail, in order to get as big a share of the New Starts pot as possible.
The Florida Department of Transportation has a web page comparing transportation portions of the bills passed by the Senate and House. The House bill would spend $30 billion on highways; the Senate $27 billion. Divided among 50 states and 400-some metropolitan areas, this isn’t a heck of a lot. Total highway spending in 2006 was about $161 billion, and some of the $27 to $30 billion will replace lost revenues due to people driving less. So the total boost in spending might be about 15 percent.
A person should have Super P Force for about an hour prior to a sexual act and prescription cialis remain in the system for 4 hrs. If you hide your problems, that can affect cost of viagra canada your confidence and make you feel helpless in search for gout pain relief. Here is how cialis super active can help women:Several studies have been conducted that show this drug can help women with voiding issues. Its no secret that there’s serious cash to be cheapest online viagra made on the Net and the chances are your web site is more than capable of paying its own way. The House bill would spend $12 billion on transit; Senate $8.4 billion. The House bill dedicates $2.5 billion to “new starts” (mainly new rail projects); the Senate bill relies exclusively on formulas in SAFETEA-LU that split up funds based on population and similar factors. In any case, $2.5 billion will help build a few, though not a lot of new rail lines. If the final bill follows the senate pattern, there will be virtually no money for new rail lines.
The transit industry currently spends about $45 billion per year on both capital and operations, so the House version especially will give transit a much bigger (26.7%) boost than it gives to highways. What will transit agencies do next year when it is time for them to cut back on spending? No doubt they will demand a bailout.
A potentially bigger problem is that 24 to 28 percent of this highway-plus-transit funding goes to transit. TEA-21 and SAFETEA-LU dedicated only about 15.5 percent to transit, so the stimulus bill significantly increases transit’s share. Despite transit industry propaganda, there is no reason to think that transit spending will be any more stimulating than highway spending, and in the Antiplanner’s opinion the reverse is likely to be true. If the stimulus package is an indication of what Congress will do in the next reauthorization, then the federal government is poised to waste a lot more money on transit.
Perhaps partly to make up for less spending on highways and transit, the Senate bill also includes $5.5 billion for discretionary grants that can go to highway, bridge, transit, rail, port, and intermodal projects. This will be a first-come, first-served pot like the New Starts program and will lead states and cities to propose all kinds of crazy things so that each can get as big a share of the pot as possible. In the Antiplanner’s not-so-humble opinion, that makes this a very bad idea.
Both the House and Senate bills provide $1.1 billion for Amtrak and other intercity rail projects, which is a waste but no surprise. The Senate bill also includes $2 billion for high-speed rail, which will be the most the federal government has ever spent on that outside of the Northeast Corridor. This would set a very bad precedent.
Finally, the House bill provides $3 billion for airports, while the Senate offers only $1.3 billion. This outside my area of expertise so I don’t have anything in particular to say about it.
In general, however, it is the Antiplanner’s opinion that all of this spending, whether on highways, transit, rail, or airports, is going to go to waste. All of these things can either be funded out of user fees or they shouldn’t be done at all. If Congress wants to stimulate the economy, it should offer low-interest loans to states and metro areas to spend on projects that will eventually pay for themselves out of user fees. That would be just as effective at stimulating the economy without racking up huge deficits that can never be repaid or creating constituencies for more wasteful spending in the future.
Update: In case you haven’t seen it, Stimulus Watch lists the projects submitted to Congress by American cities. These aren’t necessarily the projects that will be funded by whatever stimulus package is approved, but they give an idea of some of the inane things that cities want someone else to pay for and allow people to give their feedback on individual projects.
The AP:
A potentially bigger problem is that 24 to 28 percent of this highway-plus-transit funding goes to transit.
Actually, a good start, but still inadequate!!
The real “problem” won’t be solved until there is some funding equity to make reparations to non-automotive modes, e.g., ideally 50% for roads and 50% for transit and intercity ground transit, e.g., intercity passenger rail. I say raise the gasoline taxes high enough to pay for this, $0.50 ought to be enough; we need to make up for 90 years of deliberate discrimination against the alternatives, and 9 decades of direct and indirect automotive welfare amounting to trillions and trillions of dollars.
A simple metric would be to bring 90% of the U.S. urban population within 10 minutes walking distance of frequent, regional and local rail and quality bus service–with rail serving the busiest corridors and BRT in the less busy corridors. And 95%+ of the lower 48 state population should be within 5 miles of an intercity rail stop, for good measure.
If this proposal makes some people reading this blog see red, GOOD! You know who you are!
msetty said: The real “problem†won’t be solved until there is some funding equity
JK: Glad to see that you finally agree that transit users should pay their own way like auto users have been for decades.
See:
http://www.portlandfacts.com/Roads/RoadSubsidy.htm
http://www.portlandfacts.com/Roads/Docs/Delucchi_Chart.htm
msetty said: I say raise the gasoline taxes
JK: First we should raise transit user fees (fares) to the point that transit pays its own ways like road users have been for years. Then we can figure out how transit users can pay back the Billions they have been stealing from auto user fees for decades.
Thanks
JK
Politicians couldn’t get away with this wasteful pork (anyone have any real concept of what a trillion is) if we were on the gold standard.
I think national defense should be funded by user fees.
D4P: It is. We call it blood.
You mean that corporations should pay for their own defense.
DS
Msetty wants “funding equity to make reparations to non-automotive modes.” Reparations for what? For being a better form of transportation and outcompeting transit and passenger rail? Certainly not for historic subsidies: Per-passenger-mile subsidies to Amtrak and transit have vastly outweighed subsidies to highways since Amtrak was created in 1971.
Personally, I think river canoeing and kayaking is just as viable a mode of transportation as streetcars and Amtrak. I want reparations for kayakers! I demand that one-half of all public transit and Amtrak funds go to kayaks and canoes.
I totally support kayak/canoe reparations.
I think river canoeing and kayaking is just as viable a mode of transportation as streetcars and Amtrak.
If folks were kayaking down my residential street, I’d have a lot more to worry about than Republicans playing politics with stimuli.
DS
For being a better form of transportation and outcompeting transit and passenger rail?
It’s easy to outcompete when you have the government rigging the game. Go back in time to the 1920s and ’30s (the last time that intra-urban rail really had a chance), and we see myriad regulations stymying the streetcar and favoring the automobile. Among them:
The government paid for the cost of most road improvements, without anywhere near 100% contribution from user fees.
The government capped streetcar fares at five cents, starving the industry of revenues needed for capital improvements.
The government imposed labor regimes on streetcars that were more onerous than those imposed on buses – in many cities it was illegal to operate a streetcar with fewer than two humans on board, whereas buses could get away with only one person.Let’s recall also that at this point in the game, the government was not generally subsidizing mass transit (which was generally privately owned).
By the time that the automobile even started to pay its own way (the 1970s?), its competition was already vanquished, and it had the benefit of decades of subsidized infrastructure behind it. Not to mention that roads were never asked to fund the opportunity costs of their construction – just the accounting costs. Which, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is not a sign of viability.
Can I suggest allowing more HTML? I had that commented all nicely formatted with a list, and then it was stripped out. Or at least mention which HTML tags are allowed and which will be removed?
Looks as if your br tag was wrong, and I think it blew your bquote. IIRC /ol works. But I agree on allowed tags, as often in preview they work but don’t after ‘submit’.
DS
Oh, come on, Dan… Republicans playing politics? Have you read the contents of the bill? Perhaps they are playing politics. But that’s because that’s the way things are done (or in this case, hopefully prevented from being done) in Washington. The whole bill is a political ploy from Congressional leadership, despite what Obama says, designed to reverse the last 30 years of policy trends (give or take) as much as possible with one piece of legislation. There’s barely a drop of Keynesian or supply side or ANY economic theory in the bill at all, other than throw out money everywhere. That, arguably, may or may not have worked for FDR (I argue no), but this is something else. FDR kept it one at a time for the most part. What the h377 is up with all these omnibus bills lately?! Targeted, discretionary, and measurable (and separated). That’s how any stimuli package should work out.
Fortunately, the probability of msetty’s crazy proposals actually being enacted is zero.
It is virtually inconceivable that transit could ever regain more than a tiny fraction of the transportation market share that it has lost over the past few decades. The report of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission estimated that real (inflation-adjusted) capital spending on mass transit would have to be increased by a factor of two or three above current levels, and that that greatly increased level of spending would have to be maintained for almost 50 years, just for transit to regain 2 percentage points in market share, and reduce the market share of automobiles from its current 96% to 94%.
Has Scott changed his name to Rivlin?
TO,
I never said Ds weren’t playing either. I just dislike R tactics more than D tactics. Waiting in line for school to get out, brief discussion with two other parents confirmed that none of us thought anyone knoew what they were doing. Note to practioners of logical fallacy on this site: note how I didn’t conflate this discussion with anything else.
DS
Dan,
Not conflate? We were talking about canoes and you’re talking about coffee klatching in the schoolyard. C’mon, dude, back to boat reparations. Stay on topic.
;o)
I say again: If folks are kayaking down my residential street, I’d have a lot more to worry about than Republicans playing politics with stimuli. These reparations would be prodigious indeed.
DS
Rather than the “chum” I threw out here earlier last night for The AP’s denizens to chew on, it is much more likely that the current crop of Congresscritters will substantially increase subsidies for transit AND roads overall than dare to increase fuel taxes. For many of these “progressives” such increases would be “regressive.” Never mind that the well-off drive a lot more miles than the poor, while spending a lot more money to do so.
Rationalitate’s history of government subsidizing and favoring the automobile while cripling the alternatives is quite correct, and responsible for the small market share that transit and the other options currently have. Of course, for the less than 10% of U.S. urban households who live within easy walking dixtance of some form of rail station, transit’s market share is more on the order of 10%-20% of personal trips, but I digress.
Rivlin probably won’t believe it, but I do believe in market pricing, but it must be applied first to the auto/highway system, since that mode is the 30-ton whale while transit, walking and bicycling are the 600-pound dolphins tagging along.
Ideally, the first step would be to wean the auto insurance industry off lump payments towards charging by each mile driven. Modern GPS and information technology makes this relatively cheap to implement, and for most urban households it would reduce auto insurance costs by a few hundred dollars per year.
Todd Litman and numerous others estimate that changing auto insurance to pay as you go would reduce annual VMT about 8%-10%–an excellent start, IMNSHO. This would increase the market share for the alternatives, including rail (where it exists). This move alone would dramatically reduce pressure to expand roadways, wiping out hundred of billions in highway expansion “needs” as well.
Second, urban areas nationwide need to adopt the parking management and pricing principles advocated by Dr. Donald Shoup of UCLA. Pricing parking based on demand would have the benefit of giving those willing to pay a bit more easy access to available parking, and for those not willing to pay, a strong incentive to use alternatives such as transit, walking or bicycling.
A third consistent policy would be to direct transportation expansion dollars into a policy of installing frequent and fast electrified transit to within 0.5 mile of at least 90% of the U.S. urbanized population by 2030. The most relevant model is Switzerland, where more than 80% of the population is within one kilometer of a train station–a fact giving rail a 17% mode spare as measured by passenger miles. In the case of the U.S., much of this would have to be in the form of electrified bus rapid transit (in the form of electric trolley coaches, hybrid electric buses, and possibly fuel cell vehicles), with the highest traffic corridors served by the various forms of rail. Switzerland (and the Netherlands) are particularly good examples of what can be accomplished for the numerous large urban regions in the U.S., many of which are larger and more densely populated than Northern Switzerland (7 million people in about 7,500+/- square miles). In California and Northern Nevada (Tahoe, Carson City and Reno) there are 13 million+ people within a few 150-mile long corridors crossing in downtown Sacramento) ; in Southern California there are nearly 20 million people within 100 miles of downtown Los Angeles, at urban densities averaging over 6,000 per square mile, excluding wide swaths of desert and mountains.
A fourth consistent policy would realize that most of the quantifiable economic benefits from transportation–whether roads, transit, air travel, etc.) accrue to business activity, directly collecting value in land. Recognizing the value added by providing improved access, a significant portion of long-term transit operating expenses should come from land-related taxes and impact fees. Of course, with transportation pricing forms moving much of the cost of driving from fixed to marginal expense, transit would achieve higher load factors and much better farebox recovery. Also count me in as a strong advocate of bidding out transit operations, the only policy recommendation I think Wendell Cox ever had a clue about.
One of the policy aims should also support the potential choices of the 30% to 40% of Americans that Christopher Lienberger has estimated desire a denser, more transit-oriented lifestyle. I think with higher marginal costs for driving–such as caused by shifting insurance to a mileage-based billing system and Shoupian parking policies–the vast majority will prefer “walkability” over the current suburban street pattern. Historically, a very large percentage of the housing stock in “streetcar suburbs” were single family, for the record, so this is not really a debate about “forcing” people into flats and apartments as opposed to detached houses. See also http://www.salisburync.gov/lm&d/2020/pdfs/03b-cityhistoryandcityform.pdf, and a modern capitalist taking advantage of the concept, http://www.streetcarsuburbs.com.
Someone might complain that I don’t see any role for tolls, “HOT” lanes and such ilk. I suppose there is a place for them, but the idea that toll roads could play THE primary role in improving urban transportation is malarkey, particularly if VMT per capita continues to drop over time as it has begun to during the past few years.
Rationalite, Are you arguing that FDR’s New Deal was designed to kill the streetcar, or merely that it was an unintended consequence?
If you wind the clock back to the 1820s and 1830s and substitute equine for auto you can imagine for yourself what impact the internalisation of equine externalities would have had on Streetcars, autos and the American way of life in general.
Doubling the cost of running a horse-drawn vehicle would have limited the size and density of urban centres and discouraged investment in omnibuses and streetcars and consequently made the introduction of electric streetcars a very high-risk investment.
Assuming steamtrain operators also had to internalise their environmental and social costs then there would have been no public transport and therefore no practical way to house workers at Ford’s first factory other than in company tenements.
Of course, the absence of cities and mass transit and the high costs of equine transport would have accelerated the development of the bicycle and it’s offspring – the autocycle. Resulting in autos accounting for 99% of trips instead of 95%.
msetty Says:
February 10th, 2009 at 12:19 am
The AP:
A potentially bigger problem is that 24 to 28 percent of this highway-plus-transit funding goes to transit.
Actually, a good start, but still inadequate!!
The real “problem†won’t be solved until there is some funding equity to make reparations to non-automotive modes, e.g., ideally 50% for roads and 50% for transit and intercity ground transit, e.g., intercity passenger rail. I say raise the gasoline taxes high enough to pay for this, $0.50 ought to be enough; we need to make up for 90 years of deliberate discrimination against the alternatives, and 9 decades of direct and indirect automotive welfare amounting to trillions and trillions of dollars.
A simple metric would be to bring 90% of the U.S. urban population within 10 minutes walking distance of frequent, regional and local rail and quality bus service–with rail serving the busiest corridors and BRT in the less busy corridors. And 95%+ of the lower 48 state population should be within 5 miles of an intercity rail stop, for good measure.
If this proposal makes some people reading this blog see red, GOOD! You know who you are!
THWM: Mr.Setty that’s a fantastic idea and yes transport policy over the last 90 years has been a fiasco.
Though with our crooked governments, this isn’t very likely to happend.
I personally do not think we need to be giving either transportation mode a “one-up” on the other, but should be enacting policies that create a more market-based and equitable transportation system, which should include possible privatization in areas. I really don’t think the highway or transit lobbies are going to help much.
msetty,
Rationalitate’s history of government subsidizing and favoring the automobile while cripling the alternatives is quite correct, and responsible for the small market share that transit and the other options currently have.
No, it’s nonsense. Transit has been losing market share for decades, even as it receives massively higher public subsidies per passenger-mile than highways. The same thing has been happening in Europe, Canada and Australia. Transit simply cannot compete with cars on speed, convenience, comfort or flexibility. As cars have become affordable for more and more people, they have become the overwhelmingly dominant mode of transportation because of their inherent advantages – even in Europe, where gasoline costs two or three times as much as in the U.S., and where land-use patterns are more conducive to transit service.
Switzerland (and the Netherlands) are particularly good examples of what can be accomplished for the numerous large urban regions in the U.S
I don’t have data on Switzerland to hand, but the modal share of urban rail transit (“Tram & Metro”) in the Netherlands is tiny, even lower than the EU-25 average, and actually fell slightly between 1995 and 2004, from 0.087% of all land passenger-km to 0.086%. In the EU-25 altogether the modal share of Tram & Metro also fell slightly, from 1.26% of passenger-km in 1995 to 1.23% in 2004. As of 2004, passenger cars accounted for 73.5% of passenger-km, and powered two-wheelers (scooters and motorcycles) for another 2.3%. The motorization rate (number of passenger cars per thousand inhabitants) has been growing steadily, from about 400 in 1995 to about 480 in 2004. The size of the EU’s motorway network grew by 41% between 1990 and 2003, and the road network excluding motorways grew by 22%. The future for passenger cars in Europe looks very bright. The future for transit looks dim.
All data from Eurostat’s Panorama of Transport: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-DA-07-001/EN/KS-DA-07-001-EN.PDF
Correction: “the modal share of urban rail transit (â€ÂTram & Metroâ€Â) in the Netherlands is tiny, even lower than the EU-25 average, and actually fell slightly between 1995 and 2004, from 0.87% of all land passenger-km to 0.86%.”
msetty Says:
Rationalitate’s history of government subsidizing and favoring the automobile while cripling the alternatives is quite correct, and responsible for the small market share that transit and the other options currently have.
THWM: With out a doubt there’s an anti-rail bias in government, we once had a railroad network with close to 260,000 miles of track, while today we have close to 140,000 miles.
Dan Says:
I think river canoeing and kayaking is just as viable a mode of transportation as streetcars and Amtrak.
If folks were kayaking down my residential street, I’d have a lot more to worry about than Republicans playing politics with stimuli.
THWM: http://www.uscgboating.org/
Rivlin’s grasp of the facts is as tenuous as Scott’s. I repeat my prior insinuation about sock puppetry.
We do not get our own facts.
DS
“It’s easy to outcompete when you have the government rigging the game.”
It’s also easy to rig the numbers when the only standard you use to evaluate transit choices is “-blank- per-passenger-mile.”
Dan,
Rivlin’s grasp of the facts is as tenuous as Scott’s.
If you think any of my factual claims are false, you are welcome to try and rebut them.
Dan:
Rivlin’s grasp of the facts is as tenuous as Scott’s.
Rivlin, Dan is not saying that any of your facts are false. Just that you are like The AP in tending to ignore those that don’t fit.
No one statistic paints the complete picture. The 1.7% or so passenger mile share for U.S. transit can be contrasted with the fact that high quality transit (rail and BRT) serves considerably less than 10% of the U.S. urban population within easy walking distance (see http://www.reconnectingamerica.org for source data).
Similarly, while the share of passenger miles by motor vehicle in Europe is around 70%-80%, its share as measured by total trips is usually within a few points either way of 50% depending on the country, not the 89%-90% trip share in the U.S. Big difference, I’d say (links to varous sources of European and other transportation statistics at http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm80.htm (around Tables 5 and 6).
The biggest problem that Dan, myself and others of our “ilk” have with you, and often The AP, is that you tend to pontificate on the basis of too data points. It may be that motor vehicles dominate passenger miles in Europe, but their share of total trips has tended to stabilize around 50%, plus or minus a few percent. In many European cities (not all), the alternatives still are very important and in some cases added together dwarf auto usage. I’m increasingly of the view that the automobile has not really increased mobility or saved time, as argued in this paper, http://www.ias.ac.in/sadhana/Pdf2007Aug/293.PDF.
Here is the Abstract:
Success and failures in urban transport planning in Europeâ€â€understanding the transport system
HERMANN KNOFLACHER, Institute for Transport Planning and Trafï¬Âc Engineering, University of Technology, Vienna A-1040
e-mail: hermann.knoflacher@ivv.tuwien.ac.at
Abstract. Technological determinism has become a kind of religion for many people since it appears to offer solutions for societal problems as never before in history. Transport is one of the fascinating technology branches developed during the last 200 years. Effortless movement over long distances has become possible for car users as long as cheap fossil energy is available. However, the effect of fast
transport on urban structures and society was not taken into account when developing these technical means. Technologists and economists have used indicators for expected beneï¬Âts of these fast transport modes without taking into account the real system effects on society and urban structures. Plausible assumptions and hopes
instead of scientiï¬Âc understanding of the complex system are used in practice. In contradiction to widely held beliefs of transportation planners, there is actually no growth of mobility if counted in number of trips per person per day, no time saving by increasing speed in the system, and no real freedom of modal choice. Modal choice is dependent on physical and other structures, the artiï¬Âcial environment built by urban planners, transport experts and political decisions. The core hypothesis of traditional urban and transport planning ‘growth of mobility’, ‘travel time saving by increasing speed’ and ‘freedom of modal choice’ are myths and do not exist in the real urban and transport system. This is the reason why urban planning and
transport planning based on traditional non-scientiï¬Âc assumptions is creating continuously not only more transport problems, but also environmental and social as well as economic problems all over the world, where these principals are applied. Urban transport planning in Europe, understanding the transport system and the solutions are presented in this paper.
Keywords. Transport planning; urban trafï¬Âc; trafï¬Âc flow; transport system of Europe.
Ed Glaeser supports urban living, and implicitly, more investment in transit:
http://www.dcexaminer.com/opinion/Help-the-environment-stay-in-the-city-39422222.html.
His conclusion:
…The data suggest a strong general pattern: households in dense urban areas have significantly lower carbon emissions than households in the suburbs.
So California environmentalists have things exactly backward. If climate change is our major environmental challenge, the state should actively encourage new construction, rather than push it toward other areas.
It should ease restrictions in the urban cores of San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego. More building there would reduce average commute lengths and improve per-capita emissions. Higher densities could also justify more investment in new, low-emissions energy plants.
Similarly, limiting the height or growth of New York City skyscrapers incurs environmental costs. Building more apartments in Gotham will not only make the city more affordable; it will also reduce global warming.
Henry David Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
Surely, Mike, this will stop the commenters here from misstating Glaeser. cough.
DS
Rivlin: “I don’t have data on Switzerland to hand, but the modal share of urban rail transit (â€ÂTram & Metroâ€Â) in the Netherlands is tiny, even lower than the EU-25 average, and actually fell slightly between 1995 and 2004, from 0.087% of all land passenger-km to 0.086%. In the EU-25 altogether the modal share of Tram & Metro also fell slightly, from 1.26% of passenger-km in 1995 to 1.23% in 2004. As of 2004, passenger cars accounted for 73.5% of passenger-km, and powered two-wheelers (scooters and motorcycles) for another 2.3%. The motorization rate (number of passenger cars per thousand inhabitants) has been growing steadily, from about 400 in 1995 to about 480 in 2004. The size of the EU’s motorway network grew by 41% between 1990 and 2003, and the road network excluding motorways grew by 22%. The future for passenger cars in Europe looks very bright. The future for transit looks dim.”
ws: These are motorized statistics. What’s your point? Did you know that biking and walking constitute almost 50% all travel in the Netherlands? On a per mile (or km) basis, walking and biking hardly registers – but still holds the majority of all travel in many European cities. This is a misleading statistic that you have presented.
Cars are good, but have their limitations. Mass transit is good, but has its limitations too (same with walking/biking). The point being is that we need all forms of transportation, however, we should not cater to any single form. Often times, building communities for the benefit of making cars happy (massive parking, wide roads, etc.) creates a negative impact on other forms of transportation. The question is, where’s the balance?
Regarding subsidies per passenger miles/kilomter, airplanes are the most efficient – but this tells us nothing of its effectiveness of transportation in urbanized areas. If so, why doesn’t everyone own an airplane? Screw cars and walking.
I have noticed some people who champion cars as the only method of transport have the least bit knowledge of how cities work, function, and breathe.
msetty,
The 1.7% or so passenger mile share for U.S. transit can be contrasted with the fact that high quality transit (rail and BRT) serves considerably less than 10% of the U.S. urban population within easy walking distance
So what? What’s your point in “contrasting†those two statistics? I’m guessing that you mean to imply that you think the geographical coverage of “high quality transit†should be increased. But simply contrasting those two numbers is not an argument for that proposition. Do you have an argument for it? If your point is not that you think transit coverage should be increased, what is your point?
Similarly, while the share of passenger miles by motor vehicle in Europe is around 70%-80%, its share as measured by total trips is usually within a few points either way of 50% depending on the country, not the 89%-90% trip share in the U.S. Big difference, I’d say (links to varous sources of European and other transportation statistics at http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm80.htm (around Tables 5 and 6).
Those tables provide no data on modal shares of total trips for European countries. Only on modal shares for selected European cities. Since public transport is concentrated in cities, its share of total trips in cities is obviously likely to be much higher than its share of trips in nations as a whole. And the tables contain no data at all on the United States.
And as discussed before, “number of trips†is not a meaningful general measure of transportation benefit anyway. Benefit is a matter of both number of passengers and distance of travel. If it weren’t, people wouldn’t be willing to pay more to travel further and governments wouldn’t be willing to subsidize longer trips more than shorter ones.
msetty,
Ed Glaeser supports urban living, and implicitly, more investment in transit:
No, Ed Glaeser supports letting people choose for themselves how they want to live and get around. He is generally opposed to central planning and coercive action by the government.
The article you quote from is based on the work Glaeser reported in his paper The Greenness of Cities. Unfortunately for advocates of density-and-transit lifestyles, Glaeser found that the environmental benefits of dense urban lifestyles are relatively small. Using a midrange estimate of the enviromental cost of carbon emissions ($43/ton of CO2), the cost of the emissions for an average suburban household in a U.S. metropolitan area (MSA) is only around $200 per year higher than for an average central city household in that MSA (see Table 2: Suburb-City Difference in CO2 Emissions). In some MSAs, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, suburban households actually emit less CO2 on average than central city households.
$200 or so per year is unlikely have any meaningful effect on housing and transportation choices. The difference in housing costs alone swamps the difference in emissions costs. Why would anyone move from suburb to city to save $200 in emissions costs when such a move would likely increase their housing costs by thousands of dollars?
ws,
These are motorized statistics. What’s your point?
I thought it was clear. My point was that msetty’s suggestion that there is a dramatic difference in land-use and transportation patterns between the U.S. and Europe (specifically, the Netherlands) is false. Public transportation provides a moderately larger share of travel in Europe than it does here, but on both continents the car is overwhelmingly dominant. And Europe has been sprawling and suburbanizing over the past few decades just like the U.S. The road and motorway network in European is growing, the rate of car ownership is growing, and the market share of transit is tiny and falling. That’s the take-home message.
Rivlin:“I thought it was clear. My point was that msetty’s suggestion that there is a dramatic difference in land-use and transportation patterns between the U.S. and Europe (specifically, the Netherlands) is false.”
ws: I have just pointed out that almost %50 of all trips are by bike and foot in the Netherlands. This is a clear departure from the typical land-use and transportation methods found in the US.
Rivlin:“And Europe has been sprawling and suburbanizing over the past few decades just like the U.S
ws:I’d agree that Europe has experienced suburbanization over the years, however, these developments look and interact way differently than typical auto-dependent developments in the states. Just like most New Urbanist developments have occurred in the suburbs; they are a complete departure from typical sprawl developments. I would not put NU in the same league as typical suburban developments – although they both occur in the same location to the city core.
European “suburbs” are more of a “village” concept than an autotopic sanctuary that you are describing. Suburbanization is not a problem and outward growth is not either. It’s how it functions, and when you break the differences down between European suburbs to American ones; the European counterparts are more pedestrian friendly, more mixed-use and offer better mass transit options.
Just because Europe has had suburbanization does not put them in the same league as American suburbs.
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Unfortunately for advocates of density-and-transit lifestyles, Glaeser found that the environmental benefits of dense urban lifestyles are relatively small.
Um, this is bullsh–.
Scott, your propensity to misstate findings is striking and easily refuted. Why do you try this patently puerile tactic here, pray tell?
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DS
ws,
I have just pointed out that almost %50 of all trips are by bike and foot in the Netherlands. This is a clear departure from the typical land-use and transportation methods found in the US.
You mean you asserted those claims. You’ve offered nothing to substantiate them.
Ditto for your claim about the supposedly different nature of suburbanization in Europe vs. the U.S. I agree that is different, but not dramatically so. On both continents, the car is king. Bus and train travel is only a small share of the total. Europeans increasingly shop at malls and Big Box stores, just like Americans. Europeans may never become quite as sprawled and suburbanized as Americans, if only because Europe is simply so much smaller in geographic area than the U.S., but they’re heading in the same direction we are.
Dan,
Scott, your propensity to misstate findings is striking and easily refuted.
My name isn’t Scott and I didn’t misstate anything. I don’t consider a difference on the order of 12% to be “far more.” I’d call it “slightly more.” Regardless of what adjective you prefer to apply to that difference, its economic value is too small to have much of an impact on where people choose to live. Who’s going to move from Houston to San Francisco to save $500 a year? The difference in rent or mortgage payments for just one month would likely be more than that.
By the way, it doesn’t make much sense to announce that you’re ignoring me, and then keep responding to my posts.
Rivlin:
$200 or so per year is unlikely have any meaningful effect on housing and transportation choices.
Now you’re misstating my point about the Glaeser article.
My point was regarding the 1.7% transit share in the U.S.: transit share is more like a 10% to 20% transit share in the less than 10% of urban areas where effective transit is provided. In those cases, you can be sure walking and bicycling shares are more than just minimal levels.
As for your $200 per year cost of carbon emissions, in the U.S. we don’t charge this right now to anyone, so of course it won’t have any impact on the location of residences and business. The more likely impact is for the 30%-40% of the housing market for denser, more walkable and transit-friendly neighborhoods shown by Leinberger and others.
I suggest you download and read the Knofflacher paper. It is written in a dense technical style, but that doesn’t undermine Herr Professor’s conclusions. I would pay particular attention to the 1998 Schafer paper referenced there.
Rivlin, are you sure you’re not really an Eliza computer program? You sure continue to sound like one.
Here is a link to a May 2008 blog posting by Krugman that summarizes the share of various modes, by country. I haven’t figured out yet where Krugman scanned the figure from, but it does look familiar. When I track it down, I’ll post the reference here or in a newer thread.
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/the-eh-team/
msetty,
My point was regarding the 1.7% transit share in the U.S.: transit share is more like a 10% to 20% transit share in the less than 10% of urban areas where effective transit is provided.
Again, so what? Of course transit use is higher in dense urban areas with extensive transit services and higher costs for using a car. If that’s all you’re saying, I agree. But the vast majority of development is not dense urban areas and does not have extensive transit services.
As for your $200 per year cost of carbon emissions, in the U.S. we don’t charge this right now to anyone, so of course it won’t have any impact on the location of residences and business. The more likely impact is for the 30%-40% of the housing market for denser, more walkable and transit-friendly neighborhoods shown by Leinberger and others.
The point is that even if we were charging for carbon emissions it would probably make little difference to overall housing and transportation choices because the charge is too small relative to the costs of housing and other living expenses to matter. As for Leinberger, I think his claims about housing and lifestyle preferences are nonsense.
msetty,
Here is a link to a May 2008 blog posting by Krugman that summarizes the share of various modes, by country.
No citation, and the numbers refer to share of trips. I’ve already explained why trips is not a meaningful general measure of transportation benefit.
Rivlin:
I’ve already explained why trips is not a meaningful general measure of transportation benefit.
And I’ve explained why I think it is. In terms of functionality in “walkable” areas, a short 0.25 mile walk can be as “valuable” to an individual as a 10 mile auto trip to a given activity, given that the same activities are also within walking distance.
You’re very dense, and I reject your reasoning (sic).
The huge problem with your bias is that motorized modes also have huge economic and environmental disbenefits, which offset the benefits. If the “benefits” of driving are so huge, then–assuming you’re a market-oriented sort of person, which I think is more of a facade, as Rationaliste points out–then you should be willing to pay for those disbenefits, which mainly don’t exist with non-motorized modes.
You should also be willing to accept the fact that a more sensible economic pricing system would “internalize” the various negative externalities of motor vehicle use, AND happily do so because doing so would get a lot of marginal motor vehicle traffic off the road and given them more space to gain the various “benefits” of happy motoring. But no…auto apologists like you like to deny economic and environmental reality.
msetty,
In terms of functionality in “walkable†areas, a short 0.25 mile walk can be as “valuable†to an individual as a 10 mile auto trip to a given activity, given that the same activities are also within walking distance.
I don’t know what “functionality” is supposed to mean in this context or how you’re proposing to measure it. You keep ignoring the relationship between trip length and trip cost. Why would I pay the extra cost of travelling 10 miles if I got the same benefit (or “value” or “functionality” or whatever you want to call it) from traveling only 1 mile?
As for your comments about “disbenefits” (I assume you mean “costs”), externalities and pricing, if you think you have a serious analysis of the positive and negative externalities of different modes of transportation – not just private motor vehicles, but mass transit too – and a serious proposal for incorporating those externalities into transportation pricing, I’d love to see it.
Rivlin:
Why would I pay the extra cost of travelling 10 miles if I got the same benefit (or “value†or “functionality†or whatever you want to call it) from traveling only [0.25, 0.50, 0.75 or] 1 mile?
Right.
Thanks for making my point about the potential value of mixed land uses and walkability this found; of course, over short walkable distances in pedestrian friendly areas, walking becomes much more viable versus driving.
And in a real functioning city, I can take a frequent bus or train to work to avoid the parking charges that should be assessed at most if not all work parking locations, and use the car-sharing service once every week or two for the times when I need to go to Costco or go on a weekend tour of the Wine Country or the Hamptons, ditching and no longer the second car, or in many cases, all cars, since shoe leather, a bike, and/or a transit passes provides most of the daily mobility I need.
This thread is now boring me.
Not “…this found…” but “…this round…”
msetty,
Right.
Sorry, but “right” is not an answer to the question. Why would I pay the extra cost of travelling 10 miles if I got the same benefit (or “value†or “functionality†or whatever you want to call it) from traveling only 1 mile? Do you have an answer or don’t you? Remember, you’re trying to come up with an argument to justify your bizarre claim that general transportation benefit can usefully be measured by “number of trips” rather than by passenger-miles of travel.
Rivlin, You mean you asserted that trips is not a meaningful general measure of transportation benefit. Just as you have asserted that that msetty’s suggestion that there is a dramatic difference in land-use and transportation patterns between the U.S. and Europe (specifically, the Netherlands) is false.
What you have failed to do is provide anything other than preconceptions to support your arguments.
“Why would I pay the extra cost of travelling 10 miles if I got the same benefit (or “value†or “functionality†or whatever you want to call it) from traveling only 1 mile?” Because when you walk you don’t get to make that ostentatious gesture to your poor cousins of driving past in your shining new automobile. Ditto for the big house on the outskirts of town. But if you are an economist you will ignore these psychological benefits because you can’t assign a standard dollar value to it and, ipto facto, if you can’t assign a standard dollar value to it it can’t exist. Makes the world a whole lot easier to understand if you seperate it from reality, that’s the lesson I’m learning from most of your “discussions.”
Oh, silly me. I confused poor Rivlin.
I said “right” when I should have given the following answer:
“Right. You wouldn’t.
Thanks for making my point about the potential value of mixed land uses and walkability this round [IN THEIR ABILITY TO SHORTEN TRIP DISTANCES]; of course, over short walkable distances in pedestrian friendly areas, walking becomes much more viable versus driving [AND MUCH MORE OF A “BENEFIT” — since Rivlion insists that I use the EXACT wording HE, or the Eliza program, wants.]
And in a real functioning city, I can take a frequent bus or train to work to avoid the parking charges that should be assessed at most if not all work parking locations, and use the car-sharing service once every week or two for the times when I need to go to Costco or go on a weekend tour of the Wine Country or the Hamptons, ditching and no longer the second car, or in many cases, all cars, since shoe leather, a bike, and/or a transit passes provides most of the daily mobility I need.
This thread is now REALLY boring me.