T4America
- Posted by ryan on October 19th, 2008 filed in Economics, Policy/Politics
So, the big piece of legislation that determines how money is spent on things like roads and transit is up for renewal in 2009. This is quite a big deal, particularly given recent changes in attitude in the country on transportation issues thanks to climate change awareness, high gas prices, and economic uncertainty. The way we build now looks pretty darn foolish, and this is an excellent opportunity to lay the groundwork for a much cleaner and more economically effective transportation system.
Rob Goodspeed has details here, including a nifty little history of the law in question. Here is the site for Transportation for America, which has been set up to lobby Congress for beneficial changes in the law. They have a five-point plan to fix transportation:
- BUILD TO COMPETE with China and Europe, by modernizing and expanding our rail and transit networks to reduce oil dependence, connect the metro regions that are the engines of the modern economy.
- INVEST FOR A CLEAN, GREEN RECOVERY through cleaner vehicles and new fuels as well as the cleanest forms of transportation – modern public transit, walking and biking – and for energy-efficient, sustainable development.
- FIX WHAT’S BROKEN before building new roads and restore our crumbling highways, bridges and transit systems.
- STOP WASTEFUL SPENDING and re-evaluate projects currently in the pipeline to eliminate those with little economic return that could deepen our oil dependence.
- SAVE AMERICANS MONEY. Provide more travel and housing options that are affordable and efficient, while helping people to avoid high gas costs and traffic congestion. Save taxpayer dollars by asking the private developers who reap real estate rewards from new rail stations and transit lines to contribute toward that service.
Do check it all out, and do let your elected officials know how you feel. My outlook on transportation funding is pretty clear. The gas tax and our limited tolling systems come nowhere near paying for the negative externalities produced by our roads. Should we increase the gas tax and adopt congestion tolling on a wide basis, I suspect we’ll find that we don’t need to build many more roads. This will allow us to focus resources on repairing and maintaining existing road infrastructure. The other top priority should be to remove the statutory bias against funding of rail and transit, so that we can begin investing in fast, clean, and efficient transportation alternatives in a significant way.
It’s nice to think that the stars may be aligning to significantly improve the way we do transportation in this country, but this all won’t happen without lots of public pressure. A lot of people who give a lot of money to a lot of legislators are going to be pushing to keep a system they know and understand.
October 19th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Transportation for America’s plan for expanding mass transit and intercity rail is a total fantasy. The federal government has just committed over a trillion dollars to address the financial crisis. Even more money may be needed to solve that problem. We are entering, or are already in, a recession. We’re also at war (sort of). Federal budget deficits are expected to reach record levels in coming years. There isn’t going to be any money for big new rail, transit or urban development projects. Repairing and maintaining existing transportation infrastructure will take all the money we have. And the lion’s share of that will go to roads and highways.
We are also entering a new era of automobile technology that will make our cars radically more fuel-efficient, clean and cheap to operate. This will have the effect of making car travel even more attractive relative to public transportation than it is now. And Obama is proposing massive new federal spending to accelerate and subsidize this transition to new-technology cars.
October 20th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Mixner, the thought that new automobile technology will save us is a total fantasy. The only way we will get out of this mess is if the focus of our transportation network is shifted to public transit. Suburban sprawl is not a sustainable development pattern even with alternative energy sources.
This Worldchanging article spells it out: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007800.html
Here’s a quote:
“In other words, there is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive. The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car, but eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go.”
Investment in large infrastructure projects is a method for government to create jobs and get us through a recession. Right now the large infrastructure project that makes the most sense is repairing and expanding our country’s currently mediocre transportation systems, which will in turn create a plethora of transit oriented development projects.
check out this New Urban News article for evidence on how that market is already moving in this direction: http://www.newurbannews.com/13.7/octnov08economic.html
October 20th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
The only way we will get out of this mess is if the focus of our transportation network is shifted to public transit. Suburban sprawl is not a sustainable development pattern even with alternative energy sources.
And your basis for this claim is what?
Mass transit provides less than 2% of all passenger-miles of travel in the United States. Cars and light trucks provide almost 80%. It would take decades of aggressive transit-oriented policies just to double transit’s share to 4%, which is still tiny. Under any remotely plausible policy changes, automobiles will remain the overwhelmingly dominant mode of transportation in America for many decades to come. Therefore, the only plausible means of achieving meaningful reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation is through cleaner and more fuel-efficient cars.
Obama knows this, which is why his transportation policies are focused on better automobiles rather than a futile effort to get people to radically change their housing-and-transportation-related lifestyles.
October 20th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Mixner, are you one of Randall O’Toole’s proteges? Your statistics seem flimsy at best.
What say you to this:
http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=2887
The freedom to choose is one of the key virtues of our nation. For too long transportation has been an area where most people have been denied that freedom. The current state of transportation in suburbia is rather totalitarian. People are given no choice but to get around in automobiles
An increase in funding for public transportation does not mean reducing people’s ability to drive. It just means putting all modes of transportation on an equal playing field so that people have the ability to choose whichever mode they please. Give people the choice, that’s all we need.
October 20th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Your statistics seem flimsy at best.
See BTS Table 1-37, U.S. Passenger-Miles, for example.
As you can see, transit provides less that 2% of total passenger-miles of travel, as I said. In fact, it’s only slightly more than 1%. Passenger cars and light trucks provide more than 80% of total passenger-miles, and more than 90% of all ground transportation passenger-miles.
What say you to this:
http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=2887
I note that it quotes the communications director for the House Transit Committee stating that “the timing couldn’t be worse” for a shift in federal transportation spending towards more transit, because of the financial crisis and other economic problems. Of course, even if there is a shift towards transit, it is likely to be small, and have only a negligible effect on modal shares. The vast majority of federal transportation infrastructure spending will still go to roads and highways.
October 20th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
So, you get accused of using flimsy, misleading stats and you back it up with flimsy, misleading stats? Good job.
Those national stats are largely irrelevant because no one is proposing to build a subway between two rural towns connected only by a dirt road.
Those stats are also largely irrelevant because they show the result of spending priorities skewed towards roads rather than transit. Focus the mode split data on a Metro area, and things change. Better yet, if you focus on the areas actually served by that transit, the statistics are much more favorable.
October 20th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Alex B,
Huh? Obviously, mass transit provides a greater share of passenger-miles within metro areas than passenger-miles in the country as a whole. But so what? What matters with respect to the energy efficiency and emissions of our national transportation system (or even just our national ground transportation system) is modal shares in total, not modal shares only within metro areas.
And since mass transit overall is at best only slightly more energy efficient than autos anyway, simply substituting transit for autos would do very little to increase energy efficiency.
And if you think you can persuade tens or hundreds of millions of Americans to give up their low-density, big-home, car-based suburban lifestyles for high-density, small-home, transit-based urban ones (which is what would be needed to achieve a large-scale reduction in the total amount of travel) then I think you’re living in a fantasy world. It goes against the overwhelming trend of the last 50 years or more.
October 20th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Why does Mixner hate people that don’t want to live in Sarah Palin’s Real America? Why do you want to steal the wealth of urban dwellers and spread it around to the suburbs? Why such a vulgar libertarian?
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/01/vulgar-libertarianism-watch-part-1.html
October 20th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Mixner,
The reasons to invest in mass transit are many - energy savings is only one. Auto transport does nothing for congestion, inefficient land use, quality of life, spatial efficiency, etc.
October 20th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
The reasons to invest in mass transit are many - energy savings is only one.
As I said before, transit overall is at best only slightly more energy efficient than cars per passenger-mile of travel. Transit rail tends to be more efficient than cars (at least, if only operating energy is considered. If the energy of construction is included, transit rail may be less efficient than cars.) Transit buses tend to be less efficient than cars. Future cars are likely to be much more energy-efficient than today’s models. So simply substituting transit for car travel will do little or nothing to save energy, and may even use more energy.
Nor would higher density save much energy or emissions by reducing the amount of travel or by reducing housing energy use (heating, cooling, etc.). As Edward Glaeser shows in his paper The Greenness of Cities, the difference in CO2 emissions between central city households and suburban households is small, on the order of 10%. Even if we could somehow rebuild the suburbs of all our metropolitan areas so that they were as dense as the central cities, we’d only reduce total energy consumption and emissions by around 10%. This is equivalent to increasing the average fuel economy of our automobile fleet by 2 or 3 mpg. So the realistic potential for energy and emission savings from higher density is negligible.
Auto transport does nothing for congestion, inefficient land use, quality of life, spatial efficiency, etc.
There are obviously many other ways of reducing congestion than trying to get people to switch from driving to using transit. There’s no serious case that transit is a cost-effective solution to congestion even where it can have a meaningful effect at all. Ed Glaeser has shown that sprawl reduces congestion. In particular, the decentralization of jobs from urban cores into the surrounding suburbs reduces congestion by reducing the number of commuters converging on the urban core.
As for “quality of life” I really don’t understand why you can’t see the huge value of car travel to people. Cars provide fast, comfortable, convenient, on-demand, point-to-point transportation. Most people seem to find that highly beneficial to their quality of life. It’s just so much more attractive than using public transportation. That’s why cars have become so overwhelmingly dominant and transit has withered away (and the same thing is happening in Europe).
October 30th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Now wait just a minute — transit options are no more energy efficient than autos? Per passenger? Where on earth are you getting that information? Wendell Cox? Randall O’Tool(e)? Nothing I have seen even suggests that, and beyond that, it fails even the common-sense test — how is a rail car containing 50 people less efficient than those 50 people in, say, 42 different cars?
Cars are highly convenient, which I will not dispute. But at least in their present form, they are unsustainable, requiring enormous amounts of fossil fuel to operate, with our land-use patterns needlessly increasing the vehicle-miles-traveled.
As to your question here:
If you think you can persuade tens or hundreds of millions of Americans to give up their low-density, big-home, car-based suburban lifestyles for high-density, small-home, transit-based urban ones (which is what would be needed to achieve a large-scale reduction in the total amount of travel) then I think you’re living in a fantasy world. It goes against the overwhelming trend of the last 50 years or more.
There’s the rub. Ultimately, we won’t need to convince people away from this lifestyle option. World oil production is declining at an aggregate rate of (best estimate) about 9% annually, though that figure can be mitigated by some more “drill drill drill.” (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5e78778-a53f-11dd-b4f5-000077b07658.html)
With the rapacious growth in demand from the developing world, you can mark it that $5/gal, then $8/gal, then $10+/gal gasoline is in your near future. At that point, the suburban lifestyle you glowingly describe will, sadly, become a luxury option, and investing in both alternative energy (getting over our puritanism about nuclear, for example) and alternative modes won’t just be nice-to-haves, it will be SURVIVAL.
And if rail/transit is less than 2%, we better GET BLOODY CRACKING.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Now wait just a minute — transit options are no more energy efficient than autos? Per passenger?
In general, per passenger-mile of transportation transit overall appears to be at best only slightly more energy-efficient than autos. See here for some numbers and analysis: http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
it fails even the common-sense test — how is a rail car containing 50 people less efficient than those 50 people in, say, 42 different cars?
This misunderstanding seems to be very common among transit proponents. If transit vehicles always ran fully loaded, or at least mostly loaded, then they probably would be significantly more efficient than autos. But they don’t. Most buses and trains are fully loaded only during rush hour on weekdays (if then), and only on busy segments of their route. The rest of the time, most of the seats are empty, and the vehicles are burning fuel to haul around all those empty seats. The average load factor of U.S. transit buses is below 20%. That is, on average, 8 out of 10 seats on a bus are empty. Obviously, that’s not very energy-efficient.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:55 am
I don’t believe I ever uttered the word “bus.” Buses, to me, are necessary evils which must be offered simply because there will be some elements of society who cannot afford cars. That’s a separate argument. I’d never argue that buses, on aggregate, are more efficient that cars. (That’s an old Coxian trick — as soon as I utter the word “transit,” you insert “bus.”) I’d bet the average load factor of rail transit systems is far greater than 20%. (And at least trains are MOVING at rush hours — I can’t say the same for the Beltway.)
Looking at the chart you linked to, what do you know, aggregate rail transit (even accounting for crappy systems, like San Jose) is *more* energy efficient, with the potential to become more so with more riders, as oil prices increase and, in addition, as the subsidies that underlie auto infrastructure phase out. (And there are a lot of external costs left out of even that analysis.)
But all that is only one part of the argument — the external costs of relying solely on auto-only infrastructure is what I’m concerned about, along with the fact that rail can be powered by the electric grid far easier than automobiles (so far, though I’m hopeful for the next generation of EVs). As peak oil hits, rendering liquid fuel prohibitively expensive, that will become increasingly important.