HOT for Women
- Posted by ryan on January 8th, 2009 filed in Cities
Eric Morris follows up his earlier defense of congestion pricing today, and he adds some information I hadn’t seen before:
He finds the equity issue isn’t nearly as clear-cut as it may seem. Those with higher incomes and education do use the toll facility more than others — but not that much more. Many low-income people use the facility frequently; you don’t have to be rich for your time to be valuable. Moreover, many wealthy drivers do not use the facility at all. In all, Sullivan feels the “Lexus lanes” argument is largely a red herring.
Interestingly, the most important factor in predicting who will use toll lanes is not class, but gender. Women use the SR 91 tolled lanes 10 percent more than men do. This is probably due to the fact that women’s travel patterns are more complicated than men’s, and that even in this enlightened era, women undertake a disproportionate number of the household-serving trips. Since women have a more difficult time balancing home and work responsibilities, they are more likely to take advantage of the time savings. In a weird way, tolling may strike a blow for gender equality too.
On the subject of errand running, I’ve often been mystified by the notion that drivable suburbanism is the superior developmental pattern for getting things done quickly. Obviously a big trip to the grocery or hardware store is more easily done with a car, but when taking many small trips, rather than one big one, I think walkable neighborhoods win out more often than people think. Going from (say) the doctor, to the pharmacist, to a restaurant for lunch, and back to work is maddening in a car in a place like Raleigh. But when I was working in downtown Washington, it was fast and refreshing to walk the few blocks from each spot to the next.
So, you know, don’t assume that errand runners prefer suburbs, especially in a world with car-sharing and Peapod.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Ugh. I’d suggest staying away from the comments of that post.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
That brings up the argument someone had that people won’t take advantage of the ability to walk to the grocery store because it will take too long, so that even if it’s walkable they’ll still drive. Of course, that assumes weekly or monthly grocery-shopping trips, whereas–I assume–in more urban, walkable areas people take more smaller trips to buy their groceries.
January 8th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
the most important factor in predicting who will use toll lanes is not class, but gender.
The SR-91 data do not show this at all. I’ll take Eric Morris’s word that there is a 10% gender effect. (It’s a few years since I looked at the Sullivan report.) The report shows that drivers with incomes above $100,000 were about four times as likely than those who earn less than $40,000 to have used the toll lanes on their last trip on the highway.
In addition, the maximum toll at the time of Sullivan’s 1999 study was $3.50. Now it’s north of nine bucks. That may make a difference. I talked with Sullivan when I was writing my article about this (click on my name), and there were no more recent analyses and no plans to do one. I certainly don’t blame Sullivan for this - it was obvious he’d love to see more data.
The claim that the Lexus Lanes argument is a red herring rests, when you track back from think tanker a to his citation of think tanker b citing think tanker c (see Ryan’s previous blog post), on the single slim reed of the Sullivan study. Or more exactly, not so much Sullivan’s data as a somewhat tendentious reading of what Sullivan said about his data. The data, in my reading of them, contradict the claim. Sullivan reads them somewhat differently from me.
Readers are invited to click back to the report and judge for themselves. What I do think beyond debate is that it’s ridiculous that we need to base a decision on whether to invest billions of dollars in HOT lanes on this single rather outdated study. If any funding agencies are reading this, call Ed Sullivan and ask him to update his study.
January 8th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Interesting. Thanks for looking into this, Ben.