I would love to quit my night job running the grill at the IHOP in Potomac Yards.

Stay away from the turkey sausage this week.

G-d Bless.

See You at IHOP.

Mr Kaag

If you know of a bunch of people with lots of money to throw at three guys who like to beligerently lampoon anyone they can - please send them our way. We’d all love to quit our day jobs.

Considering how much money is at stake in your average federal transportation bill, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone from the opposite side decided they needed a mouthpiece too.

Read the FAQ

Lewis,
There’s nothing sinister about my handle. It’s a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. If you haven’t read that one, drop whatever it is you’re doing and read it first. Vroomfondel is a minor character who appears in just one scene and speaks a grand total of six lines, but that’s enough to express his complete and utter cluelessness. It seemed like a good name for someone who likes to argue on the internet…

I apologize for the hiatus, I was out of town. I have some ‘splainin’ to do, so here we go in no particular order:

I’ll preface this answer by saying that I think it’s difficult to define the exact problem that I think all of us are trying to address. Transportation issues are in many ways inextricably linked with other issues like industry, labor, security, personal autonomy, energy and on and on. So if we’re not careful to define precisely what we mean, then it’s easy for this discussion to spiral out of control.

In line with that, my position is that automobiles DO pay their way if you define that as paying for the infrastructure (and infrastructure maintenance) that they require. It is not my position that automobiles don’t receive any subsidy at all, but this subsidy is tricky to determine. If you are trying to make transportation policy decisions based on which mode of transport requires the least subsidy, then public transportation would lose every time because these modes are much more dependent on subsidy than automobiles. In order to make a case for mass transit, you generally have to rely on what I’ll call soft costs – indirect costs that are difficult to calculate and most of the time are just anyone’s best guess or extrapolation – these are normally not tied to any receipt that you can account for. But I still stand beside my position that if you do the math that I did on my last post, the numbers don’t lie – the federal government’s gas tax is only $100 Million short of covering all of its expenditures on the Federal Highway Administration, and that’s before any other taxes or fees are added in, and in Virginia (I’ll admit I haven’t looked at New York), the DoT was funded by automobiles far in excess of the expenditures it gave to automobiles..

I asked for facts and figures, and Ian and Vroomfondel (who by the way has the scariest name of anyone on the site – it sounds like something I wouldn’t allow children to play around) were kind enough to provide some. I got back today and took a look through the studies cited. I made it all the way through Ian’s first study in the Streetsblog post, but the second link wouldn’t work. I went to the Delucci page and read through part of his study (it’s 2000 pages, give me a break about the whole thing), but didn’t finish it. I saw that VF was linking to Delucci too, so I didn’t read that whole study separately since I assume his positions are consistent in both places.

I’ll talk about my thoughts on these studies first, and then try to go back through and answer the other remaining questions or comments.

On the Subsidies for Traffic study, I will start by commending the authors for putting together a very detailed analysis. They took a lot of things into account, and I would say that they are getting very close to determining the “true costs” of automobile use. That said I still have some problems with the methodology used in this study.

First, I think that some of the costs for automobiles listed, while rational, shouldn’t be included if we’re talking about my point that the gas tax pays for the infrastructure and maintenance. You’re talking about a much bigger picture, and if gas tax is all you’re looking at, then you shouldn’t include all the costs for State Police, DMV, etc… I think what’s missing from this analysis, and something I would actually like to see, is a tally of the revenues next to the expenditures they were conceived to pay for.

What I mean by that is – the federal gas tax was conceived to do something very specific – fund the construction and maintenance of roads. I would like to see all of these things tallied up so that we know what the fees and tolls and taxes were conceived to cover. Some of these fall easily into that breakout – the bridge tolls look like they do this, but some of the rest don’t like the DMV fees. The DMV isn’t designed to pay for itself through the fees it collects, but you have it labeled as a cost without indicating that it was always intended that to be paid for by other funding sources.

The reason I would like to see it this way is that a lot of costs on this list (referring to the summary on p33) are things that aren’t necessarily supposed to be covered by fees levied on cars – state police, fire department, etc… I understand the inclusion, because a portion of their services go to help drivers, but it’s important to understand that the state doesn’t conceive these services based on the automobile, and hence doesn’t tax that way. The police and fire departments exist because there is a need for them regardless of automobiles, and their numbers and funding aren’t determined by vehicles on the road, they’re determined by population data and crime/fire statistics.

Second, I think the report unfairly skews the costs associated with automobiles without doing a full accounting of the revenues. For example, if we stick with the fire department example from above, there are revenue streams that this entity generates that aren’t accounted for. The Fire Department IS a bunch of trucks that race around to put out fires, so their existence and services are a product of all of the costs invested. If you look at Manhattan, there are an average of 701 “serious incidents” every year in that borough. The average property value per square mile in 1992 was $1.84 Billion. (I couldn’t find data old enough to go exactly with your study timeframe, so I took the average number of serious incidents for all years and the average property value per square mile in 2000 minus the average value per square mile for 1990 divided by ten – times two and added to the 1990 value for the two years until your report to get the average property value per square mile in 1992) If we assume that each block is a tenth of a mile, and each fire only endangers one one-hundredth of that block – which I consider to be a conservative estimate – then each of those fires endangers $1.84 million in property. Thus, the responses by fire department vehicles in 1992 saved $1.28 Billion in property. That saved property was taxed by the city and state, and led to revenues that aren’t accounted for. That’s a huge revenue, and it only covers one borough in NYC.

You may say that this is too attenuated and therefore outside the scope of your research, but I disagree. This is a direct revenue to city and state coffers that automobiles and their infrastructure make possible.

You’re also not considering the business and corporate taxes paid by businesses that are dependent on automobiles. Any food delivery, UPS or FEDEX, even grocery stores all derive their revenue, which in turn pays these taxes, from automobile use. So, in my opinion this data is heavily skewed to make the automobile appear more costly. The problem with the way you have it set up is that a lot of indirect costs that aren’t contemplated by the direct taxes, tolls and fees are accounted for (police, fire, DMV, etc..), but these indirect revenues are not.

My biggest critique of this though is that it should be cost-benefit, not cost-revenue analysis. I understand the difficulties encountered in compiling the report, and I understand that at a certain point, you start to enter the realm of speculation that you didn’t want to enter, but the bottom line is that by including costs like the DMV, you have already crossed the line. Since the DMV was never intended to be paid for out of the revenue sources you list, it skews the numbers toward heavy costs. But this fails to take into account the reason behind having different taxes – like income and property taxes – fund the DMV. The utility in having a DMV is to ensure some standard of safety in the licensing and use of automobiles, which protects everyone including pedestrians and bicyclists. So it’s valid for them to pay for a DMV, even if only policemen and firefighters will be licensed to drive. Ensuring that drivers understand the rules of the road and are operating safe vehicles helps to ensure that pedestrians don’t get run over. This admittedly isn’t easy to quantify, but I don’t see much utility to a comparison of costs to revenues.

This starts to touch on the indirect or soft costs – the social and environmental costs – which I will admit I am not a fan of. I noticed that you omitted them from the tally, which is commendable, but you still discuss them. The reason I don’t like the soft costs is because they are much more difficult to quantify than the indirect benefits. For instance, it is easy for me to see what UPS paid in business taxes to NYC and the state of New York last year. Then I could easily ask for an accounting of how many ground deliveries they made and tie those taxes to revenues which are in turn tied to individual deliveries. The indirect costs don’t work that way – pollution is a great example. How do you derive a number for the cost associated with pollution? You could point to things like the EPA (or the NY equivalent) and say that it’s tied to the operating cost of that organization, but that doesn’t tell you what the real cost is. Take carbon dioxide – I don’t agree with Global Warming and therefore don’t consider it a pollutant, but assume that it is. How do you measure the damage that it does? What specific damage has the CO2 from New York cars caused to the people of New York, and what was the cost to fix it? It can’t be tallied – it can only be estimated, and typically through poor methods. It’s the same thing with health costs – how many death certificates list “air pollution” as the cause of death? I’d guess probably none, but you’ll hear people advocate that this is an environmental and social cost associated with the automobile because air pollution can aggravate some conditions. Well, so can secondhand smoke. If air pollution doesn’t kill you – if a doctor can’t tell you that - then how do you know that it has a cost? Even if it does kill someone, how do you tally the cost of a person’s life?

If the point is that the roads should pay for themselves, I agree only to a point. We have to remember that the government is stepping in to fill rolls that aren’t well suited for private enterprise – so it doesn’t make sense to run roads – or any transportation infrastructure – as a private enterprise that has to cover its own costs. Now, I agree that it’s nice when roads pay for themselves, but I don’t think that’s always feasible, and mass transit would certainly suffer if we started to run all transportation this way. If we always had to evaluate gross receipts generated against costs imposed, many government programs would go away – education, defense, NASA, labor, virtually everything.

I’ll admit, I didn’t read much of Delucci’s study because he admitted up front that it wasn’t a cost-benefit analysis, it was just a tally of costs. So I have the same problems with that methodology that I do with this one.

To Ian’s point that driving should be half again as expensive as it is, I return to my argument about market forces – I don’t think that’s significant enough to stop people from driving. Until you start to see it in Europe and Asia, where they have the infrastructure to enable them to avoid automobiles, and they already pay a higher percentage of these costs, then you won’t see it here.

Now on to the rest:

To Vroomfondel’s point about my false dichotomy – I agree, and I believe I saw a recent post from Judd which was also in agreement, that the people should choose their transportation and city layouts. It isn’t lost on me that there has been a move toward planned community suburbs where they create an artificial pedestrian-friendly city center. My point with the comparison is that I don’t believe that the government is socially engineering people, and that if they were, you wouldn’t have a choice about your mode of transportation.

Vroomfondel and Capatilist made a point about loans being made to private landowners to encourage development. I acknowledge that this happens, but I disagree that it is social engineering to keep us chained to automobiles. Any businessman – as Capitalist especially should know – will always seek to externalize as many of his costs as possible. That doesn’t mean that they won’t build the subdivision or the big skyscraper downtown. In my opinion, this is one area the government SHOULD NOT BE INVOLVED IN. If someone wants to build it, they should pay for it. But, the government doesn’t build to maintain dependence on cars, they give these loans and subsidies because they are gullible and want to use the jobs they created, or the dollars they generated for the economy as talking points in the next election cycle. How often do you hear them say – “we built this huge hotel and it brought 2000 more cars per day into the road system I neglect”? You don’t, they’ll give a $300 Million subsidy to Hilton hotels – which I think is wrong in many ways – and then they’ll talk about how many people work there, what a boon for tourism it has been, how much tax revenue it generates, and is projected to generate. I agree that this is a perfect scam, but I don’t think that private enterprise wouldn’t build if the government didn’t subsidize. I think that’s a bluff that the government falls for out of stupidity.

Capitalist – I realize that there is a lot of content here that you may not have read, so to catch you up, I don’t live in a McMansion or use a car to commute. I live two blocks from a metro and use it every day, unless I ride my bike when the weather is nice. I don’t know what else to tell you except that corporate forces totally dictate everything about your life from what you eat, to what you wear, to what you information you receive. As a capitalist, I assume you know that. If you’re point is that Government socially engineers the automobile into the American conscious the same way it engineers Coca-Cola and Nike – by getting out of the way – I completely agree. I will read your link and book though – but you’ll have to give me time, I do have a day job.

Capitalist – on the trillion dollars comment – if you’re going to use that, you’re entering dangerous territory because that oil doesn’t just go to automobiles. It touches virtually everything in our society. Personally, I don’t factor that in because it doesn’t make sense to – you’re making an ideological leap that wasn’t given as a justification for the war. The war in Iraq was waged (wrongly) on the premise of WMD, and is supposedly now being fought against terrorism. Neither of those things has anything to do with the oil wells. Now, I admit that strategically we are interested in the middle-east because of oil, but again, that’s not just automobiles – so how would you portion out those costs to every other activity in our society from transporting your food to lighting your house? I also don’t buy this argument because if we went into Iraq to get the oil, it makes no sense that our oil prices continue to go up. If we were there to take it and keep it cheap, then we’re catastrophically failing, which may be your point, but I disagree with this analysis since we don’t get very much of our oil at all from Iraq.

Capitalist – I disagree with you on what people would be doing. There are no laws preventing them from doing those things now, and there are plenty of places where people do live in those types of communities, but look at Judd’s latest post, our position is that you shouldn’t assume that everyone should do what you would do.

That’s it folks, let me know if I missed anyone.

You know what … I’m going to buy Shoup’s book and read it because I’m a lunatic. Thanks for the recommendation.

Free parking on public space … Here’s a major problem that I deal with every day. Right now, many residents in Virginia’s Arlington and Fairfax counties (on the Orange Line Metro right outside Washington DC) drive their private cars to Metro stations, park their cars in the (completely inadequate) Metro parking lots, and ride the Metro into DC where they work. Parking costs $4.50 per day at East Falls Church, my stop. When you add in the cost of riding the Metro (upwards of $5.00 for many people), you’re approaching $10.00 per day to park your car and get to and from work. Living closer to the Metro station so you can bike or walk there and not drive is cost prohibitive. Condos sell for $800,000+ right next to the Metro where I live. Rents are exorbitant. Plus, the parking lot holds only about 500 cars (an eyeball estimate) and fills up between 5:30 and 6:00 AM, and even that early you’re lucky to find a spot. All of these factors actually incentivize driving! If your company provides free parking in DC, it’s actually cheaper to drive to work every day, even factoring in the price of gas.

One could argue that since the lots are filling up by 5:30 AM and people are willing to pay $4.50, that market forces are sorting themselves out.

But the government is not a private enterprise motivated by profit and loss and therefore doesn’t act like one. For instance, there’s no push to build the Metro parking lots upward, i.e. 3, 4, 5, 10 stories high. There’s no push to plaster the entire parking lot with advertisements to bring in more revenue. There’s no desire to incentivize drivers to get out of their cars and take mass transit (which would bring in more revenue at the end of the day) by reducing parking fees and fares so that riding the Metro was less expensive than driving (which it currently isn’t).

From my experience, there’s nothing smart, strategic, forward-leaning, or even socially responsible about the way the DC Metro conducts its business. It’s really about raising rates and fees to pay for the massive number of government workers, justifying the budgets for next year, punching in at 9 AM, leaving at 4 PM, and moving one day closer to retirement and a pension. I’d like to think that the $4.50 I pay every time I park at the Metro is the free market at its meanest and leanest. I suspect not.

I think parking at suburban commuter rail stations should be free and plentiful. Pay for it with our income taxes. Who cares if the lots fill up! The result would be fewer cars on the road, more people taking mass transit, less personal expenditures. Everyone wins. What do you think?

About capacity and demand: Regardless of how you feel about the desirability of motorized traffic, it seems to me that additional lanes are just a recipe for misery because in the end you’re back to the same traffic jam, only with more people in it, and that’s not even considering the extra pressure on feeder roads, destination parking, and other infrastructure, not to mention additional noise, pollution, and accidents.

About Shoup’s work: The standard reference is “The High Cost of Free Parking.” That’s a tome of 752 pages, but the executive summary is straightforward. Free parking has a number of detrimental effects, including unnecessary long-term parking because people have no incentive to move their cars. Drivers end up cruising for parking, which creates additional traffic as well as dangerous and annoying violations such as double-parking in bike lanes (my pet peeve).

Shoup’s solution is easy: Introduce a charge for parking, and choose it just high enough to make sure that there’s, on average, one free spot on each block. This eliminates the need to cruise for parking, and it generally reduces the stress level of everybody involved, without significantly reducing parking capacity.

That much is almost obvious. What really blew my mind, though, is that the rate that frees up one spot per block seems to be ridiculously low, around $2.75 per hour at peak hours. It’s an amazingly simple idea, and everyone wins.

Mark Gorton did a great interview with Shoup, available, where else, at Streetsblog
http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/12/21/donald-shoup-plays-with-parking-fees-and-matchbox-cars/

Gorton, however, is funneling millions of dollars into projects that we at Commuter Outrage think are not in the best interests of the republic.

How is encouarging New York City to be more bikeable, walkable and transit-friendly bad for the republic? I just don’t see it.

As a guy who OWNS A CAR, I would love to see fewer of my fellow New Yorkers driving because when they are all out on the road in their cars, they are in my way. They are what’s known as “traffic.” I’d love for it to be easier for me to get around without a car. I’d love to have more viable choices in how I get around — more subway and bus service, better bike infrastructure and ferries. That’s an increase in my freedom, not an imposition.

the decision to build is made BEFORE the government gets involved.

Lewis, that might be how it works for unsuccessful real estate developers or guys building a single home somewhere but for those of us who are actually making money in real estate development, I’d say, something like two-thirds of the game is the securing of government permissions, support, favors and subsidies. It’s almost Soviet out there, Lewis. You have no idea.

Building walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly, new urbanist stuff is getting easier every year. But for the most part all of the regs, the zoning, the subsidies and incentives are in building auto-dependent, big box, sprawl crap.

200 years later, our govt is still designed to settle the frontier. This is where your sprawl comes from. This is why it’s big govt social engineering. If Americans were left to their own devices free of big corporate and big govt interference, they’d be living in cities, towns, villages and on farms, much less dependent and enslaved to automobiles and cheap crude oil than we are today.

It doesn’t take a math whiz to see that WAY more money gets taken in from cars than is given back to cars.

Lewis, did you account for the trillion or so dollars we spent over the last six years establishing a police presence alongside our Middle East gas station? You might want to punch up some of those numbers as well. I’m not even going to get in to the monetary value of the Greenland ice sheet staying ice. But it seems like there should be some pro-rating for that too.