I’m Curious

Posted by on . 34 comments.

What is Tyler Cowen’s preferred answer to the question of how we should move 400-odd million Americans around?

I respect Mr Cowen very much, but I think it’s long past time we stopped listening to libertarians on the issue of whether or not to build high-speed rail. Who will ask whether road construction remotely passes any of the tests they’re so prepared to push on rail? And if we begin charging an appropriate fee on drivers to maintain existing roads and reduce congestion, what do they all think will happen to land use patterns and transportation mode share?

Consider: the Texas DOT determined that gas tax revenues came nowhere close to covering life-cycle road costs, and that for a typical road to cover its costs of maintenance and construction the gas tax might need to approach $2 per gallon. Now, what does Europe’s experience suggest about the viability of transit and rail in places where gas taxes approach that level?

It really is quite bizarre how these people react to the notion of improving rail service.

Comments

  1. dcpatton says:
    August 27, 2009 at 4:11 pm

    Ryan,

    Is there a similar argument for rail vs. trucks in the commercial hauling biz? If the true life-cycle cost of the roads was passed onto the trucking companies would they switch to rail only for long-haul shipping? Then the life-cycle road costs for people in cars would be even higher.

  2. BruceMcF says:
    August 27, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Yes, if the true life-cycle costs of roads was passed onto trucking companies, we could easily finance a program to electrify the 32,000 miles of STRACNET and establish 100mph Rapid Freight paths.

    After all, damage done to roads is not proportional to weight per axle, but more like the square of the weight … so road freight is massively undercharged for the damage they do.

  3. Michael perkins says:
    August 27, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    It’s actually closer to the fourth power of axle loading.

  4. Omri says:
    August 27, 2009 at 5:04 pm

    “Is there a similar argument for rail vs. trucks in the commercial hauling biz? If the true life-cycle cost of the roads was passed onto the trucking companies would they switch to rail only for long-haul shipping? Then the life-cycle road costs for people in cars would be even higher.”

    Not just long haul. There is no reason any commercial facility with a truck loading dock can’t be served just as well by a freight rail side track. That’s how things used to run.

  5. Rob says:
    August 27, 2009 at 5:26 pm

    It’s actually quite amazing that America’s priorities are such that we give away what should be discretionary goods (roads and highways) but expect the market to take care of the necessities (food, health care).

  6. BruceMcF says:
    August 27, 2009 at 6:04 pm

    Omri Says: “Not just long haul. There is no reason any commercial facility with a truck loading dock can’t be served just as well by a freight rail side track. That’s how things used to run.”

    Yes, but long haul is the most extreme waste of fuel, and Rapid Freight Rail at 100mph ensures shorter loading dock to loading dock times even with a short truck haul on both sides.

    Alan Drake’s STRACNET electrification proposal

  7. Tyler Cowen says:
    August 27, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    Ryan, highways may well be overbuilt, I don’t doubt that. But you don’t have an argument here for HSR, other than to claim we should not listen to libertarians. You need to make a positive argument for the HSR line under consideration because it didn’t pass the cost-benefit measure put up by an advocate. And yes that means keeping in mind that even if the roads were an earlier mistake we now have them in place at perhaps a relatively low marginal cost. On this issue I really am persuadable and I can easily see the case for HSR in the Northeast corridor. If you give me a good case for Texas I will listen and perhaps change my mind. I would also request that you go back and reread your post and ask what in there is likely to change the mind of an honest skeptic. Do I count merely as “these people”?

  8. Mixner says:
    August 28, 2009 at 12:59 am

    Ryan writes,

    Consider: the Texas DOT determined that gas tax revenues came nowhere close to covering life-cycle road costs, and that for a typical road to cover its costs of maintenance and construction the gas tax might need to approach $2 per gallon.

    I see this claim a lot in the writings of urbanism and transit proponents. The only basis for the claim appears to be an item in a Texas DOT “newsletter.” There’s no data source. No study. No description of the methodology. Nothing. From the description in the newsletter, the claim appears to be limited to roads within the state of Texas, and appears to be based on state gas tax revenues only.
    Using government data on revenues and expenditures, Randall O’Toole estimates that road and highway subsidies total between about half a cent and one cent per passenger-mile. At an average fuel economy of 20 mpg and an average vehicle occupancy of 1.6, that works out to about 16-32 cents per gallon of gas. This study, from the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC-Davis, reached conclusions similar to O’Toole’s.

    If you have any SERIOUS basis for the $2 per gallon number you state above, please produce it.

    Now, what does Europe’s experience suggest about the viability of transit and rail in places where gas taxes approach that level?

    That it doesn’t make much difference. Over the past 50 years, passenger-miles of travel in Europe by transit and rail has remained relatively flat, while passenger-miles of travel by private motor vehicle has skyrocketed. Over the past 50 years, the rate of growth in cars-per-capita in Europe has been about the same as in the U.S. In fact, in recent years, as the car ownership rate in the U.S. has approached the saturation point, the growth rate in Europe has been higher than in the U.S. And the growth rate in Europe’s motorway network has also exceeded the growth rate in the U.S. interstate/freeway network. Even with gas prices 2 to 4 times the price of gas in the U.S., Europeans seem to love getting around by car almost as much as Americans.

  9. Ben Ross says:
    August 28, 2009 at 8:37 am

    even if the roads were an earlier mistake we now have them in place at perhaps a relatively low marginal cost.

    We’re currently arguing over a highway-widening plan that would spend $4 billion to add 4 lanes to one section of one radial interstate in Washington. (The new lanes would have tolls – but the toll revenue would be small and $4 billion in subsidies would be needed.) Why are the libertarians so preoccupied with rail and ignoring this?

  10. low-tech cyclist says:
    August 28, 2009 at 9:36 am

    Tyler Cowen points out that “even if the roads were an earlier mistake we now have them in place at perhaps a relatively low marginal cost.”

    I’d be curious about just how low those marginal costs are.

    While a brand-new interstate doesn’t need much maintenance for awhile, it seems that any highway that sees much use by trucks eventually reaches a point where they have to replace not just the surface of the road, but the top couple of feet of roadbed underneath the surface.

    That is certainly a lot less expensive than building an interstate from scratch, but it still can’t come particularly cheap.

    It seems to me that there’s an interesting cost-benefit comparison to be made between doing that road-rebuilding work, and building a parallel freight rail line to take the trucks off the highway.

  11. jack lecou says:
    August 28, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    Ryan, highways may well be overbuilt, I don’t doubt that. But you don’t have an argument here for HSR, other than to claim we should not listen to libertarians. You need to make a positive argument for the HSR line under consideration because it didn’t pass the cost-benefit measure put up by an advocate.

    First of all, the cost-benefit measure in question wasn’t “put up by an advocate”. The cost benefit measure was actually put forth by Glaeser, so the “advocate’s” contribution was only to show that even Glaeser’s own simple methodology didn’t support his conclusions when somewhat more accurate numbers were fed in. A genuinely rigorous measure might well come up with an even more favorable result.

    And unless I’m missing something, I think Ryan’s point is that you have to be equally skeptical of all modes, and you’ve got to build something, so something’s got to give.

    If you concede that highways are overbuilt, that leaves rail and air. And if rail doesn’t pass your cost benefit test, air probably doesn’t either — adding capacity in built up areas is at least as expensive as rail, and doesn’t come with any of the attendant land use benefits.

    But then you’ve concluded that we’re overbuilt, period, and that we should all just stay home, which seems absurd. It’s more likely something is wrong with the analysis. There’re obviously large but difficult-to-count economic benefits to greater connectivity, as well as population and demand growth.

  12. low-tech cyclist says:
    August 28, 2009 at 3:40 pm

    jack lecou, as usual, summarizes the real state of play quite nicely.

    I don’t know if all routes that are viewed as good HSR candidates are overbuilt in terms of highway lanes. What does the highway from Cleveland to Pittsburgh look like? Damned if I know; I haven’t driven it since 1983.

    I’m familiar with the DC-NYC stretch of the Eastern Corridor, though, and while it has portions that could use a few more lanes (e.g. the southernmost 30-40 miles of the NJ Turnpike), there are places (such as the northern part of NJ) where you’ve already got a dozen lanes of NJ Turnpike, plus several more lanes of Garden State roughly paralleling it, and other fairly big local roads.

    At some point, you’ve got to ask: where are you going to put more asphalt?

    At which point you’re left with the choice jack outlines: stay home, or build something. Telling everyone to stay home is a non-starter. So: what does it make sense to build?

  13. Alon Levy says:
    August 28, 2009 at 9:27 pm

    Ben Ross: the libertarians are anti-rail because they’re funded by oil and car giants. Wendell Cox has engaged in paid lobbying for highways; Heritage and the Reason Foundation both get their endowment from big oil contributions. That Randall O’Toole admits highways are subsidized by even a cent speaks volumes about how much money they really get.

  14. freemti says:
    August 29, 2009 at 12:22 pm

    Well a vast chunk of “Libertarians” are nothing more than erstwhile republicans that either don’t like being slotted into that grouping or have honest differences the the hard right tilt on social issues that the GOP seems to have gone for of late. Public transportation is wrapped in the imagery of socialist worker bees riding the government funded proletariat-movers to their jobs at the collective. It is in direct contrast to the image of the stalwart libertarian, safely ensconced in his private automobile, driving on roads that he himself carved out of the landscape (owned by him presumably) with his teeth, while the theme from Atlas Shrugged plays in the background.

  15. Ben Ross says:
    August 29, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    Alon: Yes, Cox, O’Toole, etc. – I wrote about it here. But plenty of real economists of a libertarian inclination, like Tyler Cowen, are honestly blind as far as I can tell.

  16. Alex B. says:
    August 29, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    Yeah, too many libertarians want to adjust the system and the funding to fit their parameters starting now, and pay no attention to the massive distortion in the marketplace that’s occurred over the past 50+ years – to say nothing about the negative consequences this has on us.

  17. jack lecou says:
    August 29, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    Yeah, too many libertarians want to adjust the system and the funding to fit their parameters starting now, and pay no attention to the massive distortion in the marketplace that’s occurred over the past 50+ years – to say nothing about the negative consequences this has on us.

    I think the very concept of path dependence is utterly anathema to many libertarians, particularly the ones of the Cox & O’Toole stripe. The idea that our current choices are fundamentally limited by the choices of past generations and decades is incompatible with the whole “people obviously must want giant parking lots because that’s what we have” shtick. I’ve even seen a few lame papers written trying to disprove the existence of path dependencies entirely.

    Cowen on the other hand is clearly aware of them, and the idea of locking ourselves into a potentially suboptimal outcome even seems to factor strongly into the whole extra cautious approach to rail. Yet he doesn’t seem interested in trying to walk-back any of our past missteps, or to really allow for the fact that NOT making a choice locks us into a path just as much as making one does.

  18. Mixner says:
    August 30, 2009 at 3:58 pm

    The idea that our current choices are fundamentally limited by the choices of past generations and decades is incompatible with the whole “people obviously must want giant parking lots because that’s what we have” shtick.

    They’re not incompatible at all. If past generations had built a giant national rail network instead of giant parking lots that policy would also have “fundamentally limited” the choices of people today in certain ways. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t reverse the policy if they wanted to.

    There’s no serious evidence that the people want to reverse the basic land-use and transportation policies of the past 50 years. There’s a bit of tweaking going on at the margins — a rinky-dink light rail line here, an isolated pocket of TOD there — but nothing to suggest a wholesale change in people’s underlying preferences for low density and cars.

  19. jack lecou says:
    August 30, 2009 at 11:39 pm

    “Tweaking at the margins” is almost invariably how a massive shift in preferences actually manifests itself.

    But you’re missing the point. It’s not only our choices that the past constrains, it’s our very preferences. When parking lots are all that’s on the menu, and all that most people know, how do imagine people are supposed to suddenly, en masse, even know they’re ABLE to order off menu, let alone do so?

    (And that’s a rhetorical question. I know you don’t get it. Your obtuseness is epic. So I’m leaving it at that.)

  20. Mixner says:
    August 31, 2009 at 2:06 am

    That’s it, Jack. People don’t even REALIZE they have choices about how to vote and what to buy. Go with that theory. It’s a surefire winner.

  21. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 4:20 pm

    Well, I said I wouldn’t, but this is so sad, I have to bite.

    Please explain how your theory of choices and preferences reconciles the apparently near universal preference of (say) 1970s Americans for the “convenience and economy” of weak, drip-style coffee, as opposed to the not-yet-universal-but-growing fondness of 21st century Americans for espresso-style beverages.

    Remember, it can’t be because of any particular brand new invention, since espresso in it’s modern form was invented in Italy at least 3/4 of a century ago, and has been available in US cafes in places like Boston and San Francisco almost as long. Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle in 1971. Yet, for the most part, people in the 1970s and 1980s didn’t choose to consume it. Why?

    Perhaps your theory is that the people of the 1970s represented a distinct “culture”, with a different set of preferences, than contemporary Americans, in the same way that, say, contemporary Italians and Americans are different cultures, except across time rather than space.

    If so, please explain why a similar cultural shift is not allowed to happen in transit. For example, imagine that the “cultures” of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were specimens of an American “car culture”, with a strong preference for automobiles and automobile-friendly environments. Then posit the existence of a separate mid to late 21st-century American “transit culture” that exhibits stronger preferences for compact neighborhoods and rail transit.

    Why is such a transition of cultures and shift in preferences possible for coffee but not for transportation? If you concede that it’s allowed, what do you imagine the transition period looks like? (Keeping in mind that even with coffee, a relatively straightforward consumer good, the shift in preferences took decades to manifest itself and is even now ongoing, while transportation/neighborhood style is an extraordinarily complicated public/private good involving trillions of dollars worth of built environment.)

  22. Mixner says:
    August 31, 2009 at 4:31 pm

    Another strawman argument, Jack. I never said a dramatic transformation in consumer preferences regarding land use and transportation is not possible. Of course it’s POSSIBLE. But there’s no EVIDENCE that such a transformation is happening, or is likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

  23. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 4:34 pm

    But there’s no EVIDENCE that such a transformation is happening, or is likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

    This blog.

  24. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 4:39 pm

    Or for that matter, the (increasingly numerous) light rail projects you dismiss as “tweaking at the margins”.

    Or the increasingly serious attention proposals for high speed rail lines in various places are getting (notably California).

    Again, hypothetically, what is it exactly you imagine the (multi-decades long) transition period for such a shift is going to actually look like?

  25. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    (Or the increasingly positive (and prevalent) depiction of urban life in TV shows and pop culture. Compare to the depiction of urban vs suburban life in sitcoms of two or three decades ago…)

  26. Mixner says:
    August 31, 2009 at 5:32 pm

    The only thing you mentioned that would even pass the laugh test as serious evidence of a dramatic transformation in consumer preferences is the growth of light rail. But even a cursory examination of the numbers demonstrates that the impact of light rail on the nation’s overall transportation system is trivial. After several decades of growth, light rail accounts for only about 4% of trips by transit, and about the same fraction of passenger-miles by transit. As a share of total trips, and total passenger miles, light rail is negligible. The equivalent of a rounding error. Moreover, light rail is not inducing much, if any, substitution from cars even in the few minuscule travel markets that it serves. Mostly it’s just poaching bus riders. The growth in travel by car vastly outstrips the growth in travel by light rail. Between 1980 and 2006, passenger-miles of travel by light rail increased by about 1.5 billion passenger-miles. Over the same period, passenger-miles of travel by cars and light trucks increased by about 2.2 TRILLION passenger-miles. For every extra mile Americans travelled by light rail, they travelled more than a thousand extra miles by automobile. This is your evidence of a dramatic shift in transportation and land use preferences away from cars and sprawl? It’s a joke.

  27. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 7:23 pm

    The only thing you mentioned that would even pass the laugh test as serious evidence of a dramatic transformation in consumer preferences is the growth of light rail.

    The bolded part is where you go wrong.

    Nobody said the transformation is dramatic. I guess it could look that way in 75 years, if something does turn out to happen. But only in retrospect, in the historical long view. In the here and now this sort of thing doesn’t really need to look dramatic.

    I also don’t share your odd view that these sorts of things are somehow spontaneous or inevitable. Thus I would say it’s more like we might be in the earliest, slowest, stages of such a transformation, if we keep working at it. Or it might fizzle out into nothing — especially if we take seriously your bizarre prognostication that it can’t happen because it hasn’t already happened, and then sit it out.

    (And that goes both ways, of course. It might be 2085, with decades of transit popularity, and the whole country crisscrossed in trains or whatever, but things start happening to start changing things in yet another direction. Nothing is forever, least of all tastes.)

  28. Mixner says:
    August 31, 2009 at 8:22 pm

    Nobody said the transformation is dramatic.

    I wrote that there’s no evidence that a dramatic transformation is happening, or that such a transformation is likely in the foreseeable future. You responded to that statement with four pieces of alleged evidence that such a transformation is taking place. None of your alleged evidence is remotely serious. Your appeal to “this blog” and TV shows is too daft to bother with. And a comparison of the growth in light rail against the growth in automobile travel over the past three decades (1000-to-1 in favor of automobiles) just makes the idea that we are moving away from cars and sprawl to even a small degree, let alone a dramatic one, all the more implausible.

  29. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    I wrote that there’s no evidence that a dramatic transformation is happening, or that such a transformation is likely in the foreseeable future. You responded to that statement with four pieces of alleged evidence that such a transformation is taking place. None of your alleged evidence is remotely serious. Your appeal to “this blog” and TV shows is too daft to bother with. And a comparison of the growth in light rail against the growth in automobile travel over the past three decades (1000-to-1 in favor of automobiles) just makes the idea that we are moving away from cars and sprawl to even a small degree, let alone a dramatic one, all the more implausible.

    I’ll ask again for a concrete description of how you think such a transformation actually begins. Let’s say this isn’t occurring right now. But suppose, arguendo, that such a transformation does start to occur sometime in the next couple decades. What happens first? What does it look like in the early days?

    Honestly, from your comments, the only thing I can infer is that you think the way this happens is that, say, 75 million people just wake up one morning and decide they’ll start taking the bus to work. That’s obviously foolish.

    So enlighten me.

  30. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 9:23 pm

    And a comparison of the growth in light rail against the growth in automobile travel over the past three decades (1000-to-1 in favor of automobiles) just makes the idea that we are moving away from cars and sprawl to even a small degree, let alone a dramatic one, all the more implausible.

    This is also silly – I imagine you could come up with exactly the same sort of statistics to claim that fancy coffee was doomed in 1983. “Only a tiny minority of Americans drink espresso drinks,” you would say, “and most of those are European immigrants. The sales growth of espresso drinks is minuscule, while sales of Folgers and drip coffee at Denny’s restaurants are growing faster than ever. 99.98% of Americans surveyed simply laughed in the face of our surveyors when asked if they would pay $3 for a cup of coffee. Face it: espresso is a dead end in America.”

    Alternately, one might observe that every Starbucks store that opened quickly sold more coffee than even the most optimistic projections…

  31. Mixner says:
    August 31, 2009 at 10:18 pm

    I’ll ask again for a concrete description of how you think such a transformation actually begins.

    A sustained shift in transportation from cars to transit. A sustained shift in housing from low density to high density. To actually achieve a dramatic transformation in housing and transportation infrastructure and usage, these shifts would have to persist for many decades. But there’s no evidence that any such shift has even started. If there is a shift at all in the future, it would probably be modest. Transit has withered away to such a small part of our total transportation system that even a doubling or tripling of ridership would have very little impact on the overall pattern of transportation and urban development in the United States.

  32. jack lecou says:
    August 31, 2009 at 10:23 pm

    A sustained shift in transportation from cars to transit. A sustained shift in housing from low density to high density. To actually achieve a dramatic transformation in housing and transportation infrastructure and usage, these shifts would have to persist for many decades.

    I agree. That is what a shift is, but how does it start. When such shifts occur, where, how and when does the change in preferences begin?

  33. dWj says:
    September 1, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/07/30/0730txdot.html

    and

    http://www.statesman.com/news/content/region/legislature/stories/04/09/0409gastax.html

    seem to suggest that the state gas tax results in $3.1 billion a year, which means state and federal gas taxes would combine to about $5.5 billion, while spending tops out at $4 to $5 billion. So how does one apportion revenue and cost among roads so that every single road produces less revenue than is put into it, while the total is the other way around? Is this related to the time cost of money, and some large related deficit run several years in the past when roads were being built? Or is it a local/state/federal issue that I’m confusing?

  34. Russell Nelson says:
    September 2, 2009 at 2:49 am

    http://www.ruf.dk — beats the pants off trains because it’s single-seat door-to-door.