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Driving Reaches Record Levels

By | | Transportation
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Americans drove more than three trillion miles in 2014, exceeding this number for the first time since 2007 and for only the third time in history. Actually, this isn’t quite a record, as the Department of Transportation estimates Americans drove 3.016 trillion miles in 2014 vs. 3.031 trillion in 2007. But if the American Public Transportation Association can get away with calling 2014 ridership levels a “record” even though it is only the 45th highest level of transit ridership in the past 103 years, then we can call 2014 driving a record when it is the second-highest level of driving in history.

Low gas prices may be responsible for the surge in driving in December–a 5 percent increase over December 2013. But the chart above shows that driving began to accelerate in April, while the chart below shows that gas prices didn’t begin falling until August, so improvements in the economy must be responsible for much of the increase.

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John Oliver on Infrastructure

By | | Transportation
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Given that American attentions spans have grown so short that the only way we can learn anything is through comedy, John Oliver’s report on infrastructure is a welcome addition to the debate. He gets some things wrong, but many things right. The Antiplanner was flying to Washington DC when the report was first broadcast, so this commentary is a little late. But if you haven’t seen it, you can watch it below.

Oliver notes that the American Society of Civil Engineers gives a “D-plus” grade to the state of our infrastructure. But he points out that asking civil engineers to grade infrastructure spending is “like having the state of our nation’s tennis balls assessed by the American Society of Golden Retrievers.” Too bad he doesn’t remember this rule later in the broadcast when he notes that both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want to increase federal spending on infrastructure, suggesting that if these traditional antagonists agree on something, it must be right. Of course, what they agree on is that Americans should pay more taxes so their members can get more money from the feds.

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More Taxes Equal More Pork

By | | Transportation
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While many interest groups are promoting increased federal spending on infrastructure on the grounds that it will spur economic growth, the Washington Post reports that the “benefits of infrastructure spending [are] not so clear-cut.” Yet there is a simple way to determine whether a particular infrastructure project will generate economic benefits.

Spending on transportation infrastructure, for example, generates benefits when that new infrastructure increases total mobility of people or freight. New infrastructure will increase mobility if it provides transportation that is faster, cheaper, more convenient, and/or safer than before. 

In 1956, Congress created the Interstate Highway System and dedicated federal gas taxes and other highway taxes to that system. The result was the largest public works project in history and one of the most successful. Today, more than 20 percent of all passenger travel and around 15 percent of all freight in the United States is on the interstates.

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Time to Go on a Diet?

By | | Transportation
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Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx wants you to go on a diet–a road diet. “A typical road diet takes a segment of four-lane undivided roadway and reconfigures it into three lanes with two through lanes and a center two-way left turn lane,” he says.

The theory behind a road diet is simple. From now on, order all of your clothes at least one full size too small for you. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to fit into those clothes.

Foxx argues that road diets can make roads safer and don’t reduce travel times despite a lower capacity. But do they really do that, or do they just force the traffic to go somewhere else, like the excess flesh that hangs out of someone’s too-tight clothes?

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Linking Users and Producers

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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After last week’s election, the Antiplanner failed to note that Seattle voted strongly against another monorail boondoggle. More than 80 percent of Seattle voters agreed this would be a waste of money.

At the same time, nearly 60 percent of Seattle voters agreed to increase subsidies to bus service by raising sales taxes and imposing a $60 a year fee on auto owners. According to census data, 21 percent of Seattle commuters take transit to work. It seems surprising that many if not most of the people who drive to work would be willing to tax themselves to support transit, especially since what they are really doing is supporting light rail, to which the Puget Sound Regional Council allocates all the big bucks while bus transit gets cut.

Texas voters agreed to dedicate half of oil & gas severance taxes to road construction and maintenance. This is expected to generate about $1.7 billion a year.

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Transportation Views

By | | Transportation
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A couple of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies have presented recent research that is worth noting. First, Alan Pisarski, perhaps the nation’s leading expert on commuting trends, takes a look at highway use and the induced demand myth.

His first conclusion is that the recent halt in the growth of driving is due to the economy. Inflation-adjusted per capita incomes today are still below what they were in 2007, so it is natural to expect that driving would be lower. In 2013, however, auto purchases grew and he anticipates that miles of driving will soon start growing at least in pace with the population.

Second, Pisarski points out that new highways may result in more driving, but this is a positive benefit, not an argument for not building more roads. Highway “expansion improves and expands choice for both previous and new users,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be nice if transportation did not impede people from acting on their economic and social interests?”

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The State of State Highways

By | | Transportation
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A new Reason Foundation review of the condition of state highways (which includes interstates) finds that, in general, they are improving. Highways are doing particularly well in Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Texas. However, highways in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey are faring poorly.

“A widening gap seems to be emerging between most states that are making progress, and a few states that are finding it difficult to improve,” says the report. Moreover, “There is also increasing evidence that higher-level road systems (Interstates, other freeways and principal arterials) are in better shape than lower-level road systems, particularly local roads.”

Some of the differences between states are purely geographic. For example, fatality rates per billion vehicle miles are higher on rural roads than urban roads, so states with higher shares of rural driving, such as South Carolina and Virginia, have higher overall fatality rates.

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Wired Gets It Wrong Again

By | | Transportation
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“Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse,” asserts Wired magazine. “The reason you’re stuck in traffic isn’t all these jerks around you who don’t know how to drive,” says writer Adam Mann; “it’s just the road that you’re all driving on.” If only we had fewer roads, he implies, we would have less congestion. This “roads-induce-demand” claim is as wrong as Wired‘s previous claim that Tennessee fiscal conservatives were increasing Nashville congestion by banning bus-rapid transit, when actually they were preventing congestion by banning dedicated bus lanes.

In support of the induced-demand claim, Mann cites research by economists Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto and Gilles Duranton of the University of Pennsylvania. “We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” Mann quotes Turner as saying. Mann describes this relationship as, “If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate.” If this were true, then building more roads doesn’t make traffic worse, as the Wired headline claims; it just won’t make it any better.

However, this is simply not true. Nor is it what Duranton & Turner’s paper actually said. The paper compared daily kilometers of interstate highway driving with lane kilometers of interstates in the urbanized portions of 228 metropolitan areas. In the average metropolitan area, it found that between 1983 and 1993 lane miles grew by 32 percent while driving grew by 77 percent. Between 1993 and 2003, lane miles grew by 18 percent, and driving grew by 46 percent.

That’s hardly a “perfect one-to-one relationship.”

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It’s Not an Affair; It’s a Committed Relationship

By | | Transportation
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USA Today asks, “Is USA’s love affair with the automobile over?” The Antiplanner is always irked when someone calls people’s use of cars a “love affair,” because it implies that driving is irrational. In fact, people’s use of cars is entirely rational, as they are the fastest, most-convenient, least-expensive of getting between most places inside of an urban area as well as for journeys up to a few hundred miles.

Ironically, USA Today quotes a study from the Department of Transportation (previously cited here) that pretty much concluded that the very slight (2.4%) decline in driving since its 2007 peak was almost entirely due to the economy, and not a change in tastes. USA Today pretty much ignores that conclusion so they can underscore opinions by car-haters from US PIRG who want to divert even more highway user fees to transit and other modes of transportation.

If there is any reason for a decline in driving other than the economy, it is demographics. Baby boomers are retiring and retired people don’t drive as much, especially during rush hour. The ratio of workers to non-workers is declining, so rush-hour traffic might be a little better. That doesn’t mean there is no reason to try to fix congested roads; roads that are congested today are bound to remain congested in the future unless something is done such as implementing congestion pricing.

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What Infrastructure Deficit?

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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An economist named Ed Dolan who lives in Washington state opines that the collapse of the Skagit River Bridge reveals an “infrastructure deficit.” That’s certainly the prevailing wisdom. But consider this.

The bridge collapsed because one of its supporting beams 14.5 feet above the pavement was hit by an oversized truck that should not have been on the bridge. If that oversized truck had hit that beam in 1955, the year the bridge was built, it would have collapsed then. Instead, the bridge stood for 58 years before being hit by such a truck.

Show me any bridge and I can conceive of a truck big enough to bring it down. That doesn’t prove we have an infrastructure deficit; it only proves that every bridge has a limit to what it can carry. Height and weight limits are posted for most bridges; the driver of the truck crossing the Skagit River last week apparently neglected to read the signs.

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