Why So Much Driving?
- Posted by ryan on August 27th, 2007 filed in Cities
The Post helps me out with updated figures. For those keeping track at home, that’s $1.4 billion in annual federal spending on transit versus $42 billion in annual federal spending on highways.
And as the Post notes, it’s not just the disparity in dollar amounts. Highway funds can be used at the discretion of local governments; if there’s popular support for a new road, bada bing, the road gets built. Transit funds, on the other hand, come with years of close federal examination; the FTA pores over every aspect of ridership projections and engineering decisions. That doesn’t just cut down on the number of new projects. It also reduces the extent to which transit projects reflect things that local users actually want, or that planners determine an area needs.
But hey, it’s not as if the nation has concerns about fuel costs, congestion, and global warming (or “minor” problems like sprawl and 40,000 dead motorists each year). Clearly this is an optimal use of government resources.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Paint me a scenario where those numbers are flipped, and they’re spending $42 billion on transit and $1.4 on highways. What then? $5 says most people will still sit in their cars in gridlock listening to XM Radio and complaining on their cellphones about how bad the roads are. You might make a dent in inner-suburb mass transit use, if you could lower the bus wait time to something less than 15 minutes. And you might move more city drivers to finally ditch their cars, but the raging wall of manure that is the sprawl crowd loves being able to hop in the jalopy and go anywhere anytime. Until mass transit becomes that convenient, that wall will continue to rage.
Americans are a curmudgeonly lot. We’d rather curse the darkness than light a candle.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
You’re no doubt right in thinking that there are some commuters who just won’t be happy unless they’re driving a Hummer fueled by baby seal fat and kitten fur. I think, though, that the number of people who are willing to take mass transit, and it’s not a small amount given the paltry level of funding nationwide, suggests that there are a lot more commuters at the margin. People who would take transit if there were a station a little closer or if the trains ran a little more often. Better funding isn’t about getting everyone on a train or a bus; that would be prohibitively expensive. It’s just about making a meaningful shift in the numbers, and I think that’s possible.
The margin argument works on the other side of the equation, as well. For one thing, if you shift $1.4 billion from highways to transit, you’ve cut highway spending by a measly 3 percent but you’ve doubled transit spending. And given the massive coverage of the road network, additional miles of highway don’t add much more connectivity, while the small extent of the transit network means that new lines add a lot of coverage at the margin. In terms of bang for the buck, a dollar spent on transit goes much, much farther than one spent on pavement.
August 27th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
The same convoluted discussion is taking place on the Tenleytown Yahoo Group where the luddites opposed to new development in their community (unless it is a one-story drive-through bank) are trying to discredit New Urbanism and Smart Growth by using flawed arguments from the LA Times and Libertarians who think that Smart Growth is a government ploy against the free spirit of the American man-of-action.