Monthly Archives: September 2007

Mark Delucchi, a researcher from UC Davis, has a new paper asking, “do motor-vehicle users in the U.S. pay their way?” His answer is a rehash of work he completed more than a decade ago, but since planners will no doubt start citing it, I might as well preemptively review it.

Should motorists pay for the costs of driving at the pump. . .
Flickr photo by Scott Ingram Photography

Delucchi submitted the article to Transportation Research; at the risk of possibly violating someone’s copyright, I’ve taken the liberty of posting it here. Most of his original research, which dates back more than a decade, can be found at either Delucchi’s site or the University of California Transportation Center.

Continue reading →

To cheer you up, give a rare commercial plug to my favorite airline, and mainly to save myself the trouble of writing another long post, I am going to refer you to a web site called The Slog, which details with only slight exaggeration the trials and tribulations of trying to drive between Portland and Seattle.

This 175-mile drive (which the Slog web page rounds up to 200 miles) has some of the heaviest traffic in the Northwest, mainly because anti-auto crusaders who dominate the transportation departments in both Oregon and Washington have done their best to delay any increases in road capacities. The Slog makes fun of this, calling it “the longest three-hour drive in history,” with Ken Burns-Civil War-style music, pan-and-scan, and narrative.

Continue reading →

In recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of the Edsel, Time magazine has published its list of the 50 worst cars of all time. I usually ignore such lists, because the main reason commercial sites like Time put them on the web — with only one entry per web page — is to get you to click on as many of their web pages (and view as many annoying ads) as possible.

This list, however, earned Time a lot of mouse clicks from me after I found the second car on the chronological list was the Model T Ford — probably the most important car ever made. The Model T made Henry Ford a billionaire and allowed him to double worker pay — an action that reverberated throughout the economy. The Model T’s low cost brought mobility to the masses and made a huge contribution to the economic growth of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Largely because of the Model T, Time‘s sister magazine, Fortune, named Henry Ford the “businessman of the 20th century.”

So why did Dan McNeil, a Pulitzer-prize winning auto critic, put the Model T on his list? What were his criteria for putting any car on the list?

Continue reading →

Rail transit is a waste of money, and what little benefit it provides in the form of congestion relief is far exceeded by its cost. That is the Antiplanner’s general opinion, and it is shared by economists Clifford Winston, of the Brookings Institution, and Vikram Maheshri, of UC Berkeley.

The two have written a paper, On the Social Desirability of Urban Rail Transit Systems, that has been circulating around the Internet for awhile (and was previously mentioned by the Antiplanner). Now it is being published in the Journal of Urban Economics.

At $170 million, the cost of building each mile of Seattle’s new light-rail line is enough to construct four miles of a four-lane freeway. If Seattle is lucky, its light rail will carry 30 percent of a single freeway lane; the national average is just 25 percent.
Flickr photo by brewbooks.

Winston and Maheshri examine 25 light- and heavy-rail systems in the U.S. and find that, with the exception of the San Francisco BART system, “every system actually reduces welfare and is unable to become socially desirable even with optimal pricing or physical restructuring of its network” (emphasis in original).

Continue reading →