I think James Joyner is absolutely right here:
I’m now commuting into D.C. on a near-weekdaily basis. According to GoogleMaps, the office is 13.5 miles from the house. I can usually drive there in 45-60 minutes during off-peak hours, although it can sometimes take much longer if there’s an accident. I can park in the garage next to my office for the day for $12. Conversely, I can drive 15-20 minutes to a Metro station, pay $4 to park, wait as long as 15 minutes for a train, pay another $2.65 to get two blocks from the office 35-50 minutes later, followed by a 5-10 minute walk to the office.So, in order to save $2.70 (plus a nominal amount of gasoline), it would cost me 30-75 minutes each day for the round trip, plus the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle. Given that I earn enough that $3 is poor compensation indeed for that much of my time, I drive unless there’s a really good reason not to.
And they’re about to raise the rates for Metro fares and parking, further skewing the calculus in the direction of “drive.”
The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.
I read on the subway. He privately and autonomously stares at bumpers. It's not just quantity, it's also quality.
He seems to commute during, as he says, "non-peak" hours. Most people, by defintion, commute during peak hours.
During rush hour, subways come every few minutes, not every 15.
Walking is enjoyable.
I hope he suffers during his car ride. A lot. I hope mutters and swears at the traffic, while I serenely sit reading my fabulous book.
Increasing taxes on gasoline is a much better idea than road tolls. Road tolls are difficult and expensive to collect, and easy to avoid. If you're going to do it by transponders in cars, expect those to be defeated or otherwise hacked by a large percentage of motorists.
Gas taxes are not an ideal proxy, but their advantages far outweight this minor disadvantage.
Quite right. Really the only way subways become good choices is for various classes of people for whom it's efficient to not own a car. But when you broaden this to young couples not owning an *extra* car, that still covers a good number of people in many urban areas in the U.S.
Or they could just shoot people who drive.
No, that didn't work...
ostap: I've commuted by car and on the subway (Boston, not DC; if you can read on the way, your subway must be less crowded), and of the two I vastly preferred driving. You get half an hour or so of quiet time to yourself in the morning, without anybody's elbow in your ear, or some Mario Andretti of the underworld stomping on the brakes and yanking your arm out of its socket. Matter of taste, I suppose.
Walking the whole way beats both, of course. Even in winter in Boston. But not a lot of people can swing that.
"The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads..."
What are our gas taxes paying for, if not the roads?
Actually, I thought D.C. Metro was massively subsidized. A lot of it isn't in great shape either. The elevators were always out in the stations when I was there (in my wheelchair.)
The trains are also packed during rush hour. The parking lots are usually full too. I'm not sure the system has much room to expand.
I do think the roads are more or less paid for by the gas taxes. In fact, I think most states skim a bit off the gas taxes for general revenue.
So what would the ideal system look like in your view? Where are the drivers supposed to go, if there's no capacity left in the trains? Just force them to commute even earlier (and later) to beat rush hour? Pay a congestion fee on top of gas taxes on top of wasting their time in their cars?
Team Michael!!
I hate my commute and I have got it down to one or two days a week. But, I love driving, when the roads are not congested, and it really does beat mass transit hands down. The reason we love cars and single-family houses with yards is that they are better than buses and apartments. Duh.
I wouldn't mind a gas tax if I didn't know that most of the revenue would go to the mean, stupid, nigger-hating crackers downstate (I live in Northern Virginia) where they would use it to pass laws against gay people and to establish SWAT teams to hunt down immigrants and poker players.
There's got to be some way to make personal vehicles work for the environment and for society. I do not think that giving more power to the government is the way though. I agree that a carbon tax would be a good incentive but it would be so hard to make it fair, and impossible to make it revenue-neutral.
Our federal government could lead a worldwide trend in getting office work done from home. With an entire major metropolitan area as their test bed they could demonstrate that a wfh culture is a huge attraction for employers. It would revitalize the real estate market in outlying suburbs and vastly improve quality of life throughout the region, especially in the inner city and first-ring burbs. They could cut workers' pay in exchange for wfh privileges and it would be a win-win-win. Videoconferencing demand would create a market to build out the robust fiber network that everybody seems to think exists in other countries, and NoVa would be able to go back to being an Internet powerhouse.
Anyway most of the vehicle carbon comes from a very few old hoopties and trucks, and the government could subsidize the retirement of those vehicles pretty inexpensively. But, lots of them are driven by immigrants and minority folks, so we all know that isn't going to happen.
Mr. Joyner is a bit ridiculous. As others have pointed out, he is driving to and from work during peak hours, not off hours; trains run every few minutes during peak hours; furthermore, a gallon of gasoline a day is not really nominal. If he wants to ride in his car, fine. But he shouldn't pretend that there is some sort of conspiracy forcing him to do it.
As for your complaint that it takes four hours on the Beltway to get out of DC, you can drive entirely around the Beltway in considerably less than four hours. Yes, it would be nice if no one used the roads except you, but that isn't going to happen. If you don't like traffic, move to West Virginia.
"Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit." - Megan
OK, I'll bite. WHO are you going to tax? Since there are many corporations out there who are not in or anywhere near a downtown area there are necessarily people who would have great difficultu getting there using mass transit. Indeed for many there is no mass transit at all. That is even in a metro like Chicago, where I used to live. If you work downtown, using metra, or if close enough an EL made a lot of sense. If you worked in another suburb though... there was virtually no way to make it happen.
People like that are imposing no negative externality on you. Their life is about the luck of the draw as much as yours. I've known more than one person who bought a house in an area specifically for a job, only to have their unit spun off and their office move to a suburban office. Their options were to sell their perfect house, take a huge hit in doing so [because areas close to the new place were far more expensive] OR, quit the job and search for another, losing pay and benefits and more.
Sometimes you just can't make the mass thing work. I think it would be better to make the train free using a consortium of fuel tax and employer incentive, thus tipping the balance towards it being cheaper to take the train for those who can. Perhaps you could make major hiways to a city center tollways, but not do that to all hiways. Then it would hit those who could take a train but don't. Either way there would be large pain for certain groups.
I think by far the better bet is to have perks for telecommuting. Many office workers could telecommute, it's just that managers want to be able to see your face. It would be easier, cheaper and much quicker just to do that...
I'd also like to see some data on the relative size of subsidies for roads vs. mass transit. Austin (where I live) just passed a Metro budget and one data point that struck me from the newspaper article is that buses cover only 10% of their costs from fares. That's a 90% subsidy rate. I'm sure bigger metro areas like DC do better, but I'd be surprised if mass transit users cover the costs better than road users, even if negative externalities were appropriately taxed (carbon taxes, etc.).
Mr. Joyner isn't considering the per-mile vehicle costs. It's more than just gas. It's brakes, oil, depreciation, insurance, etc. There's a reason the IRS lets you deduct 48.5 cents per business mile. I use 33 cents/mile whenever I want to make a rough calculation of what a car trip will cost me. (E.g. should I drive 200 miles to get a cheaper fare out of a busier airport?)
The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads
As others have pointed, those of us who dive on the supposedly “free roads,” pay for the privilege of doing so every time we go to the pump. Whether the government is actually spending all of the money on building and maintaining roads and bridges rather than diverting some of it to other programs is another issue.
Of course, cycling those sort of distances is both cheaper and more efficient than one person/car or mass transit methods.
Healthier too!
I'm amoung the folks D mentions above; I commute from one suburb to another. I bought my house near my employer, who eventually went bankrupt after the dotcom meltdown. I'd certainly like to be able to Metro to my current job. Driving gets tiring; if nothing else I could zone out instead of having to maintain the focus driving requires. I'm going from Laurel, MD to Reston, VA, and the Metro option just doesn't exist.
The migration of businesses from the city ro the suburbs has made mass transit a lot harder to implement. An argument can be made that this migration happened in part because of the poor existing mass transit combined with the road subsidy, but that doesn't make the current situation any easier to change.
I've linked some government numbers comparing the subsidy levels of different transportation modes here. Megan is way off base.
I tried to just post a trackback but kept getting an error.
yours/
peter.
Isn't the right solution really to keep building freeways in proportion with the populace? It may FEEL like the Beltway covers the whole Washington Metro Area after spending so much time on it, but it's just a feeling. There's even more cash on hand, since the District and nation have gotten alot more prosperous/capita than when the freeways were originally built.
Public transit HAS to take alot longer than cars, by its nature, except in places where. Even in NYC, as good as it gets, it takes on avg 50 min to get most places by transit; it only makes sense because driving takes a little longer still. In uncrowded cities, the commute is more like 20-30 min. In Austin (hi, Chris), it's between 20 and 25 min unless you have to take I35 in rush hour.
Congestion charging is appropriate in London, where it really is hopeless to build enough freeways, but in the DC suburbs?
Thanks for the link to the chart from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Peter. I’ve heard similar numbers about the mythical “subsidy’ for automobiles used to justify subsidies for various transit boondoggles when our State Legislature and the “libertarian*” Governor Jesse Ventura shoved LRT down out throats even though the numbers showed it was one of the most expensive ways to move people on a per passenger mile and that was assuming ridership numbers which of course never materialized (as the critics pointed out repeatedly).
Basically drivers just about pay their own way** through gas taxes, MVET, weighing stations, etc. The same usually cannot be said for those who travel by metropolitan bus or train systems except in some urban areas where ridership numbers are large enough to make these self-supporting enterprises.
* I say “libertarian” in square quotes because it seems that the only people who would have confused Jesse Ventura with being a “libertarian” were members of the national media and people who generally didn’t live in Minnesota while he was governor.
** Although some local governments do use local property tax dollars to pay for things like road repairs. Arguably that is a subsidy although one could argue legitimately that the people paying the taxes are the ones most likely to use and benefit from the maintenance.
The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads
Free roads are inefficient, but it can be so without being a subsidy. Please do not confuse the issue of subsidy with the problems of a poor pricing scheme. The problem is that gasoline usage is a fair proxy for overall road use, but not a perfect one for usage at particular times and places when there is congestion.
Consider an analogy: "insulating" health insurance can encourage overuse and without being a subsidy to patients. Everyone pays premiums, even appropriate premiums for their health, but a cost structure with zero deductible would insure overuse.
In actuality, health insurance could be viewed as a subsidy to overusers in that case; road funding is actually fairer because of the use of gas taxes. Probably a closer analogy is to insurance where the charges to the patient are the same regardless of the doctor or dentist on the approved list, and the popular doctors or dentists are always extremely busy and impossible to get appointments with.
The vast majority of road funding is, as pointed out by others, paid for by gas taxes that very nicely fall on the people who use the roads. At least for any federally subsidized funding, such as the Beltway. (The federal government redirects a lot to VDOT. OTOH, Gov. Warner's championed plan for a regional governmental body consisting of members appointed by local governments has led to a board instituting some road funding paid for out of completely different taxes.) By contrast, mass transit is very much subsidized out of general tax revenue.
Free roads are not, ipso facto a subsidy to drivers, and you surely need to back up that assertion more. However, it is certainly correct that in the absence of congestion charges, roads will be massively overused at popular times.
"I'd also like to see some data on the relative size of subsidies for roads vs. mass transit."
What I would like to see is data on the relative size of subsidies for roads vs. mass transit per user mile expressed in current dollars. I think if you totaled up the amount spent on roads, parking garages, cars, driveways, eminent domain, accidental death and injury, insurance, and added in the cost of the negative externalities, people would be totally freaking shocked. Go to Google maps and zero in on Kansas, Nebraska, ect. somewhere and wonder why in the hell there are so many roads out there. Kansas population: 2,764,075 est 2006
Across most of the United States, there is a road every mile. Its a huge grid out there. North Dakota 70K square miles, pop 640,000
Many people seem to be confused by the "free roads", claiming they pay for them in the form of gas taxes. Quite right, but that still doesn't charge for the congestion. For example, think of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure you're paying for it, but because you're not paying per item, if you're like most people, you tend to eat more than you'd really care to when you go to one of these places.
The idea of congestion pricing is not just to take the gas tax and recollect it at toll booths. The point is to alter the tolls so that during peak hours they are VERY expensive to compensate everyone for the fact that your car is contributing to their traffic jam-induced delays (and vice versa). Conversely, during off-peak hours, the tolls are essentially zero.
This has an effect that no amount of gas taxing can ever have.
If you're going to look at the cost of negative externalities, then you need to look at positive externalities as well, such as the benefit for businesses being accessible to customers, distributors, and employees, the benefit to homeowners of having access to services, markets, and each other, etc. A lot of people seem to forget that roads actually predate the automobile by quite a bit. Roads are, in fact, a prerequisite for civilization— not just modern civilization, but civilization, period. How much is that worth?
yours/
peter.
Peter, the benefits of personal mobility aren't externalities; they're internalized. Moreover, your argument assumes that, absent cars, people wouldn't have access to businesses or services, which is silly. People managed to consume services and goods even before the automobile.
Looking at the cost of externalities for roads or mass transit is a ultimately pointless exercise, as we can add or subtract all sorts of externalities at whim.
Partly, there are roads in places like middle-of-nowhere Kansas because there are a few people out there, and they need to get from place to place. The question is, is the cost per driver mile of these roads greater or less than the cost of a more densely used road in the suburbs. If the cost per driver mile of these roads is higher than the cost per driver mile of a suburban or urban road, than the general cost per user mile statistic is useless in comparing the relative values of roads and mass transit, because these roads cannot be effectively replaced with mass transit.
As long as there are places inaccessible to mass transit, most people will continue to need a car. For the foreseeable future, it is going to be impossible to retrofit suburban America to be completely accessible to mass transit, so roads will continue to be necessary, so much of the road construction money will be needed in any case.
Although people consumed goods and services before the automobile, the consumption patterns of goods and services has changes significantly since the introduction of the automobile.
Over the course of a month, I will visit approximately a dozen specialized stores that cater to a limited subsection of the population. These stores could not stay in business if their customers were limited to walking distance or current mass transit, and I seriously suspect that current suburban areas cannot have a efficient and effective mass transit retrofitted for anything other than commuting to dense urban areas.
This doesn't serve as an argument against congestion pricing for road travel, just to point out that much of that road construction budget would be necessary even in the presence of an effective and efficient mass transit system. Personally, I think that expansions in telecommuting and internet purchasing will make the whole issue less important in the near future.
Civilis, the greatest concentration of those stores is in . . . New York City, where almost no one drives anywhere. It's true you couldn't have all those stores in places with very low population density, but that's the point. Living in Kansas is no more a civil right than living in Manhattan, and the government is not obligated to fund your decision to do so.
Alright, but it's a bit of a stretch for me to travel to New York from Northern Virginia to shop, especially if I'm limited to mass transit.
Seriously, the question is "Can we create the sort of commuter pattern found in New York elsewhere in America? If so, how much will it cost?"
I'd imagine if we started from scratch, with a lot of subsidies to get started, we could create a new city with a commuter pattern primarily based around an economically viable mass transit system, and we could find enough people willing to live in that sort of social climate. As you've said before, New York, due to its unique location and history, is a city with a reasonably mass-transit centered commuter pattern. But I doubt there is any other population center in the country that we can convert to a mass-transit centered pattern without an inconceivable amount of money, political power and without economically devastating the area in the process.
New York City has a population density of about 8,000 people per square mile. The Washington DC metro area has a population density of 750 people per square mile. I'm comparing apples to oranges here, admittedly, but as I'm not in DC itself I think it's fair for analysis purposes; where I live in Fairfax County is probably in or around the 750 mark. Are we just assuming that with the right government motivation a commuter pattern which works fine for a city of 8000 people per square mile will work with 750 people per square mile?
Wow, major correction on my part. My part of Fairfax County has about 4000 people per square mile (Fairfax County as a whole averages 2500). Of course, New York County, NY, has about 66,000 people per square mile, so the ratio is similar. All numbers taken from the 2000 US census.
I'm not talking about cars, I'm talking about roads. Sure, without roads you would have access to whatever businesses or services you could walk to or ride an animal to, with whatever goods you or your pack animals could carry. But that's a pretty serious limitation to the marketplace, wouldn't you agree? However, if you want your society to be able to utilize the power of the wheel, you will need roads to some degree or another.
yours/
peter.
Hey, escape it *inside the Beltway*, which is where most of the fun stuff is anyway. GMU excluded, of course, but even we have an Arlington campus inside the Beltway. A trip from DC to somewhere good hardly ever involves the Beltway, unless you are angling to visit Baltimore or points further north. Even Middleburg -- horse country and quite nice at that -- can be reached by a straight shoot on Rt.50.
Please tell me you're joking. I thought you were a libertarian.
I didn't realize that being a libertarian entailed supporting massive government highway development.
Living in Kansas is no more a civil right than living in Manhattan, and the government is not obligated to fund your decision to do so.
Wow, so let me get this straight: If one "chooses" to live in Kansas (and let me point out I mean WESTERN Kansas, since Eastern Kansas is more densely populated) one should just expect to have poor services and roads. If you want good roads, you should "choose" to live in Manhattan.
That would seem to be a complete inversion of reality. In Western Kansas, where you might have to drive 20 miles into Dodge City or Garden City to get to a Wal-Mart, it would seem to me that it would be the MOST efficient place to spend money on good roads to minimize the time spent in travel; while in Manhattan where one can literally walk out one's front door and shop in the most recognizable boutiques in the world, and where legendarily few people even own cars, spending on roads few or none use would be one of the LEAST effcient uses of such money.
Incredible.
Oh and just to be clear, I was talking about Mahattan, New York and not Manhattan, Kansas. Though of course as a university town Manhattan, Kansas may indeed have Gucci and Prada outlets for all I know. :)
liberalrob says:
In Western Kansas, where you might have to drive 20 miles into Dodge City or Garden City to get to a Wal-Mart, it would seem to me that it would be the MOST efficient place to spend money on good roads to minimize the time spent in travel...
Megan's talking about minimizing carbon usage for large groups of people, not time for individuals.
Big problem: We can't unsubsidize drivers. Unless we plow up the federal highways, which is an idea I sort of like. I suppose we could sell the roads and cease to publicly fund their upkeep. Hard to see that happening. Short of unbuilding the roads, the subsidy is pretty much a done deal.
If places like Kansas weren't covered with a grid of roads, you city people would starve to death while the food was rotting away on the farms. And even us country folks might have strange and monotonous diets. Within ten miles of where I live - and that's a hell of a long way to carry food without wheels - there's one potato farm, one strawberry farm, a cattle ranch (incongruously placed in a Michigan forest), and a whole lot of apple orchards...
Before talking about taxing consumers for gasoline, I think the government should take away all the oil industry's subsidies, tax credits and deductions. Especially the subsidy of providing for the military defense of friendly Arab police states.
Let the market price of oil reflect the true cost of all that.
Thank you, markm.
Megan's musings seem almost perfectly free of any historical awareness. Before the "good roads" movement, dedicated to "getting the farmer out of the mud," city dwellers got few of the fresh vegetables and fruits that Megan likes to eat. They subsisted on bread, potatoes, salted meat and butter, dried and canned vegetables, and condensed milk. Fresh fruits were special treats.
Megan can scoff at roads, but the people of today's NYC, proudly paying twice as much for food in their shockingly inefficient little grocery stores as suburbanites pay in supermarkets, would starve to death in a few weeks without roads bearing motor trucks full of food. They would also be ill-clad, smelly, and bored without roads bearing motor trucks full of clothes, personal hygiene products, and TV sets.
(Even Megan's precious super-high-density cities-- you can count the number of American cities dense enough to really utilize rail mass transit on one hand-- need autos and motor trucks if they don't want to drown in horse manure or employ large fractions of their populations as porters.)
Yes, they consumed far fewer goods and services. America didn't get fully automobilized until after WWII, despite making a good start after the mid 1920's. The dramatic rise in standard of living (per-capita housing sq-ft, per-capita consumption of fresh and frozen veggies, per-capita travel for leisure, you name it)-- plus the enormous increase in wages earned by women-- from 1925 to 1975 or so, with the steepest rise after WWII, was both powered by and reflected in greater automobility.
Megan's worst error is assuming our predecessors were all fools or knaves. Though the student will run into a few contrary myths, invented quite recently by reactionaries trying to demonize "sprawl," the history of automobility and suburbanization is one of American families greatly improving their standards of living by dispersing from cramped dwellings in crowded, dangerous, polluted, noisy, costly cities[1] to roomier homes in pleasant communities with better air, more public parks and spaces, lower prices, and less crime. Such Americans did not lose access to the specialized amenities of the cities like museums or shops-- those remained within an hour's drive whenever wanted, which was just occasionally, as you would expect.
Of course some people, especially singles looking for mates who want many choices, and rich folks who can afford to insulate themselves from most city dangers, still prefer to live in big cities, along with those too feckless to move out. The fact that such minorities exist (and the singles nearly all want to move to the suburbs after they find their mates and produce children) does not prove that high-density life is best, or even very pleasant, for everyone.
Last year I pointed out to Megan and her readers (based on D.O.E. figures) that surtaxing or restricting transportation is a very inefficient, as well as a very obnoxious, way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even eliminating all transportation fuel use (passenger and freight, every fossil-fueled mode) would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by less than a third.[2] Coal-fired electrical generation emits more than the entire transportation sector. You could replace the coal with nuclear without disrupting people's lives at all, apart from somewhat higher electric bills.
Crowding people into cities by punishing automobility is a poor way to avert global warming. Such a policy might help you realize some early- 20th- Century totalitarian vision of the perfect society, all the workers going back and forth between their apartments and factories on trains which run on time, with mass trips to the stadium every weekend, but I can't see why Megan should propagandize for that.
[1] When America's large cities were targets for the USSR's large nuclear weapons in the 1950's and 1960's, only fools failed to at least consider moving to the suburbs. Why do you think so many US cities have "ring roads" like the DC beltway? Those were built so traffic could skirt smoky piles of radioactive rubble after a Soviet nuclear attack.
[2] Which would be insane, no one wants to starve to death now to avert possible global warming decades in the future.
The problem is one of structure. Inherently, low density areas cannot really support a world class transit system like NYC. So DC metro, because of the low density structure of the region, should by all evidence have a really shitty transit system. The solution, then, is to build dense.
Also, it should be pointed out that the gas taxes do not cover all the expenses of driving. Because living in far away sprawl requires more infrastructure per square mile per citizen. So someone living in, say, NYC requires less miles of road, they also need less road per person, and therefore are more efficient with their road needs. Increased traffic in roads leads to increased frequency of maintenance.
Of course, ignorant America wants 2 acres in the middle of nowhere and a 2 hour commute, and of course lower gas prices to boot. You idiots get what you deserve, I hope you get in an accident drinking your latte.
A couple quick comments:
Like transit fares, gas taxes pay for a portion of road costs, but only a portion. (The subsidy rate is lower than a typical bus system but higher than Metrorail.)
None of the road subsidy figures include LAND COSTS, which is by far the biggest input factor in urban/suburban areas (roads can easily consume 20% or more of an urban area - surface transit also uses land, of course, but at a much, much lower rate per passenger than roads). Hence roads are much more subsidized than even people like Megan recognize - we all pay for it collectively through higher housing costs. Ignoring the cost of land when calculating road subsidies is like ignoring the cost of labor when calculating transit subsidies - of course it's going to make things look good when you pretend that you get that factor for free.
"Highway" v. "Transit" subsidy totals also exclude lots of other costs: administration? Maintenance? Policing? Parking ALL large transit agencies must cover their own costs for administration, enforcement/security, and parking. Those functions are not included in tallies of "highway" spending yet they are all provided by the government, without even the pretext of a dedicated tax "user fee".
The 'free ride' on a road is, among other things, that you don't pay for the congestion and time delay you impose on others.
That is the basis of the London congestion charge rather than road construction and maintenance per se.
The other big negative externality is of course air pollution. Urban air pollution is almost entirely cars (and trucks, and buses).
Electronic road tolls are easy these days: see Toronto Highway 407 or Singapore.