Why the Automobile Will Never Die – Part II
by Lewis DerkinsMay 27th, 2008, 5:31 pm
Today began on a sour note for me.
I catch the same Metro in Virginia every morning, but this morning, as I walked into the station three minutes before the scheduled arrival time of my usual train, I listened as it pulled out of the station. Now, normally I wouldn’t complain about speedy service, but people plan based on a schedule - is it really too much to ask Metro to stick to it?
So I waited, and long story short, I got to work after a 35 minute commute. Now, I compute this time from door to door (house to work). I live two and a half miles from work (or 1.8 as the crow flies according to Google Earth). When I bike to work, I can easily cover this distance in less than 20 minutes without breaking a sweat. I can run this distance in under 20 minutes. Hell, I can walk two and a half miles in 35 minutes. So what is Metro’s problem?
This is why the automobile will never die – and illuminates the problems with public transportation that dog its advocates.
I rarely every drive to work, but let’s use my experience today as a case study, because it gets even better. Once I got to work, I realized I had forgotten my ID, which I need to get into the building, so I had to turn around and go back. Twenty two minutes later, I was back home and retrieved my ID. This is 37% faster than my trip to work. Why the inconsistency?
Another twenty three minutes and I was back at work and had squandered over an hour of my day – admittedly because of my stupidity – at a cost of $4.95 ($1.65 per trip), which is low since I didn’t have to park a car anywhere (Metro doesn’t extend very far into the suburbs).
Compare this to a car. On the rare occasions that I drive to work, it takes exactly five minutes. So even if I forget my ID, I’m only in the hole for about 15 minutes if I turn around and head back. My car gets 27mpg in the city, so my 7.5 mile journey (2.5 miles times three trips) would use a little more than a quarter of a gallon of gas. With gas near $4 per gallon, that would cost me a little over one dollar.
It would be much cheaper and faster to drive, even with skyrocketing gas prices and with horrible DC traffic.
Now let’s factor in the fact that I have somewhere to go after work today, and am not just coming home. This little jaunt will cost me approximately another $4, and will no doubt consume another hour of time.
But people keep pushing for mass transit above all else.
Let me point out again – I ride, and advocate for, mass transit. But here is why you will never hear me say we should discourage people from driving – mass transit is not a magic cure-all solution.
Today, the Washington Post ran an article about Metro’s inability to handle the increased ridership that higher gas prices have pushed toward the system.
Officials are looking for ways to buy or lease more buses, expand parking, encourage employers to stagger work schedules and persuade current riders to avoid the peak of the morning rush period.
Did you just read that? If you look closely, they’re trying to discourage people from using the system at exactly the times that it is needed most.
This system can’t handle the demands of the economy in DC. Here’s the chief planner:
“We’re not always going to have the solutions,” said Nat Bottigheimer, Metro’s chief planner. “We’re trying to give examples of the kinds of things that can be done so people will be comfortable taking a leap of faith to change a habit.”
Well, that’s certainly a great plan, chief. “We’re doing basically nothing, you figure it out for yourself, and don’t use the system too much while you do.”
This is why the car will never die. Mass transit simply cannot work for everyone, period. The DC area has one of the most comprehensive public transit systems in the country, and it simply cannot accommodate the demand for transportation. No amount of hatred toward the automobile is going to change the fact that not everyone can use the Metro.
Here’s what I suggest – fund the crap out of Metro. Expand the system to embrace as many of these potential riders as possible. At the same time, fix our roads and expand them to handle the volume of traffic so that we don’t have to waste as much gas idling in traffic. A complex problem requires a comprehensive solution. This will not be solved by bike-to-work weeks or feel-good publicity for Metro. All options have to be funded and expanded including (gasp) … highways.
Posted in Highways, Light Rail, Mass Transit |
your “arguments” in this piece are nonsensical.
if everyone else chooses to drive as well, driving is neither fast nor cheap.
converting urban land to automobile storage isn’t cheap or particularly wise.
it’s not about “hatred of the automobile.” it’s about the automobile being an utterly impractical and increasingly expensive option as urban “mass transit.” it’s about americans waking up to that fact.
fix and expand the metro and get better biking facilities and you’re in business. use your car to get out of town on the weekends.
I fail to see how an argument that Metro is way more expensive and time consuming than my car is nonsensical.
I actually think those are the two main factors people consider when choosing their mode of transportation and you seem to agree.
I don’t dispute that if everyone else starts to drive, the roads will be clogged, but how does that hurt my argument that they already are clogged and need to be expanded – along with Metro?
The only thing nonsensical about my argument is that I continue to use Metro even though it costs me more money and time than a car, and constantly pisses me off with its horrible inconvenience.
American’s don’t need help to wake up to the idea that cars are impractical. The government needs to wake up to the fact that our infrastructure is crumbling around us.
I agree to a point – fix and expand Metro, get better biking facilities – and expand the highways.
NONE of these systems should be operating at full capacity – that’s not optimal because it doesn’t allow any room to flex.
Travel choices are profoundly affected by the price of parking. 99% of car parking is free, and what isn’t free is highly under-priced. The annual subsidy for off-street parking in the united states is larger than the national defense budget, medicare, and so on. As high as 386 billion. Generally this is as a result of zoning laws and goverment policy. The success of the car as a form of transportation depends on massive subsidy for both rights-of-way maintinence (more than half of all gov’t expenses, seen broadly) and terminal capacity (parking) . The car is unique among forms of transport because it requires truely massive investment in terminal capacity compared to other ways of getting around. The rise of the automobile was only possible because zoning laws largely shifted the cost of parking out of the transportation sector, and into the prices of everthing else. That’s why 99 percent of parking is free.
If you actually had to pay the realistic cost of parking your car up front, few people are willing to pay that much. But this way we all do pay, because it’s essentially invisible, and we have no choice.
In addition, most roads have no user-fee, and the few tolls that do exist are also highly subsidized, and only a fraction of that cost is paid for by gas taxes, which are themselves are only a fraction of the tax rate seen in any other developed country. The rest of the cost is covered by a combination of sales taxes, income taxes, and most other taxes. Most of the taxes you pay go to the costs of road maintence - regardless of whether you own a car.
Without all these built-in subsidys and zoning laws, you would have a lot more money in your pocket, which you could choose the spend on user-pay highways, user-pay parking, etc., but most people wouldn’t because it just wouldn’t be sensible, because a lot of the money from all those user fees would go to build fantastic rail and bicycle infrastructure, and the differences in zoning would result in compact, walkable communities where cars are often un-neccessary, and tend not to fit into the mix well anyway. Transit could then be made largely free, or at least very cheap, and healthcare would be better, and with improved safety nets there would be much less crime, and so on and so on.
Lee, Can you show us how or where you got the 99% and $386 billion figures? Thanks.
Also, you reference the U.S. defense budget. I suggest you take a look at the following Department of Defense budget data before you embarrass yourself any further.
We can continue this discussion after you do your homework.
Lee,
There are a lot of ambiguities in your argument:
First - where did you get the figures Judd mentions above?
Second - how do you determine that parking is “under priced”?
Third - what subsidies are you talking about, who pays them?
In order to answer without that info, I’ll have to make some assumptions. As far as zoning laws go, I don’t see how that amounts to a subsidy on the automobile?
Now, I know that corporations can get tax exemptions for transportation benefits they give to their employees, but if this is what you’re referring to, I don’t think that makes the cost of parking invisible. If your company doesn’t offer it, you end up paying it, and around here in DC, that isn’t cheap - and if 99% of the parking in this city is free, there must be a 99% larger city somewhere in the vicinity that I simply haven’t discovered because I pay for parking EVERYWHERE. Even if the companies do pay for it, you’re still paying because they simply decrease your salary to offset the “benefit” and then get the double advantage of the write off for themselves on the taxes.
You mention that cars have a larger terminal capacity as opposed to other forms of transportation, but that’s only really true to an extent, and that depends on how you define transportation. Are we talking about transportation that can accomplish the exact same things as a car - same flexibility and route variability, because in that case, we’re not talking about subways, planes and trains, we’re talking essentially about bicycles - but even there terminal capacity gets tricky - a car can carry more people than a bicycle so you need more bikes. Now admittedly, it probably still doesn’t equal the terminal capacity of cars, but that’s a very narrowly focused argument that is neglecting a lot of other factors - for instance, in winter when it’s -10 degrees and icy, I can’t ride my bike to work and carry four people along with me - so treating terminal capacity as the only important measure to determine why people chose to drive is inaccurate. I would pay four times more than I do to park if it was that cold and nasty - which it often is in DC.
If we’re just talking transportation in general, it’s not really fair to compare terminal capacity of trains and planes to cars. Cars have a much higher terminal capacity because so many people drive. If that many people refused to drive and would only be willing to ride metro or fly, then those modes of transportation would need to significantly increase their footprint to meet the demand. Airports aren’t small - neither are planes or trains.
The other problem with the subsidy argument is that all other forms of transportation are also subsidized. Assume that you’re correct about the parking, which I’m still not sure about, if all subsidies went away, parking may quadruple, but so would metro fares, so I don’t really see your point here. That’s not going to benefit public transport at all.
I’m curious where you get the idea that most of the taxes you pay go to the costs of road maintenance regardless of whether you own a car? In fact, over half of the taxes you pay fund entitlement programs like social security, medicaid, income security (welfare) and medicare. Another quarter of our budget funds the military. The entire discretionary spending in the budget, which is the only place transportation dollars come from, constitutes 11% of the taxes you pay. Debt interest constitutes the rest. Of the discretionary spending, only 17% (or 2% of the overall buget) goes to DOT. And of that total, only a little over half goes to highways. That’s hardly most of your taxes.
Your last paragraph just completely loses me. You’re saying no one would pay the user fees that we would have if there were no subsidies, but somehow those user fees - that no one is paying - would build us a great bike and metro systems? What are you talking about? There are tons of cities that already have top of the line systems, and no one uses them. Look at Denver’s T-REX, the expanded, state of the art, rail line carries 38,000 people per day, compared to 280,000 cars per day on the highway that goes the exact same place.
And I can tell you one thing, if you think that simply getting rid of cars is going to fix all of the social ills in this country, you are living in lala land. Take a look at Paris - a city built around the same ideals you desire - they have rampant racism and bigotry, they are insanely hostile to foreigners, their industry is so uncommpetitive that they have a net loss of young talent, and they have social policies that basically make it impossible for you to get a job. Your happy pills must have kicked in because you took a dive off the deep end on this one.
The figures are in the book, “The High Cost of Free Parking”, by Donald Shoup.
Parking is generally considered to be under priced because most areas in the country have minimum parking requirements that are based on the Institute of Transportation Engineers studies on “parking demand” for free parking lots in suburban communities with little available transit. Shoup shows that these studies are not very robust.
By requiring developers to built this large amount of parking (and Shoup shows that the requirements are quite a bit higher than actual demand), the price is driven to zero due to excess supply. In a free market, land developers and owners would not be required to build any parking, they would build the amount of parking they saw fit, and would likely need to charge for the use of the parking in order to match demand and supply. Some developers or owners might not charge for parking based on market conditions, but that would be their choice.
At the time we were developing zoning laws, it was not possible to efficiently charge for on-street parking, and there were significant overflow and congestion problems caused by people trying to park in downtown areas. Now that we have parking meters, it is possible to charge for the use of on-street spaces such that the congestion problems are reduced or eliminated.
He didn’t say 99% of DC city parking was free, he was talking about all parking in the US.
The subsidy is mostly paid for by land developers, in the form of physical parking space construction (about $5000 per space for surface lot, higher for garage or underground), and foregone revenue because the restrictions on required parking are typically more stringent than required FAR, building footprint, building height, or other zoning law requirements. In most cities, 4 parking spaces are required for every 1000 sqft of office space, and 4 parking spaces takes up on average 1200 square feet. For restaurants, the required spaces can be many times the floor area of the building.
@Michael:
I can’t say that my academic and professional training in Economics has extended as far as Mr. Shoup’s work. We at Commuter Outrage are establishing an online reading list and library of relevant academic work on transportation, which should be online by the end of the summer. After reading Shoup’s book, we’ll post a link to its Amazon.com page along with our review.
As for the cost to construct one surface parking space, which you give as $5,000, consider the following: According to the International Parking Institute, a parking industry trade association, a reliable average cost per space for a multi-level garage is $7,000, although the actual cost can range from $4,500 to more than $20,000, depending upon type of construction, special features, etc. According to IPI, annual operating cost for a garage is $650 per space, and according to Parking Structures: Planning, Design, Construction, Maintenance, and Repair by Anthony P. Chrest, Mary S. Smith, Sam Bhuyan, Mohammad Iqbal, and Donald R. Monahan (this will also be part of the forthcoming Commuter Outrage library), the cost to operate surface parking is about $100 per year per space. Assuming both parking facilities operate only 12 hours per day (conservative), 365 days per year (about right), and assuming a useful life of 10 years (for depreciation cost), the hourly cost is 14 cents for surface parking and 31 cents for garage parking. $1.00 per hour is a fairly common rate for surface and street parking, and $5.00 per hour is probably a reasonable national spaces-weighted average for garage parking. It seems to me – and I know you’ll correct me if I’ve erred in the math – that the average parker pays well in excess of the cost of parking.
Never mind the fact that most parking is operated as a source of net revenue – i.e. profit. Cities use it as a source of additional funding (the public sector accounts for about half of all U.S. parking revenues, according to IPI) and there are countless private firms – in econ-speak, profit-maximizing entities – in the parking business. These businesses – dozens in DC alone – would not be in business if their customers did not pay the cost of the parking spaces plus some additional margin.
Free parking also isn’t free; its price just isn’t always explicit. The cost to construct and operate free parking is implicit in the prices consumers pay at the business served by the parking structures. If a business isn’t factoring in the cost of offering free parking to its customers into its prices, that’s the business’s problem, not the customers, and certainly not the tax-payer’s.