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Who Pays Their Own Way in New York?

by Lewis Derkins
July 26th, 2008, 11:37 pm

We often hear that automobiles are heavily subsidized. We hear that there are far more expenditures for automobiles than revenues derived from their use. This argument is typically used to advance pro-bike and pro-mass transit agendas.

We hear, without much evidence, that bicycles pay their own way. We’re told that mass transit has less social costs than autos.

But this begs the question – is this true? Who actually pays their own way?

The short answer is that no one does. However, a comparison of the expenditures and revenues for each of these modes of transport makes one thing very clear – cars pay a much “fairer share” than anyone else. If we want to force everyone to cover the expenditures that subsidize their chosen transport, bicyclists would have to pay $352.25 more per year, mass transit riders would have to pay $941.20 more per year, and cars would only have to pay $211.10 more per year. Cars are clearly pulling their weight.

I recently engaged Charles Komanoff in a debate on Streetsblog that got me thinking about this question. Mr. Komanoff wrote a study for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign called Subsidies for Traffic. In his study, Mr. Komanoff states that New York’s drivers fall $2.4 billion short of covering their costs. To arrive at this figure, he tallied all of the costs of expenditures for automobile infrastructure, services and maintenance, and compared that to all of the tallied revenues that cars brought in from tolls, fees, taxes, etc…

If we want to force drivers to pay their way, we should consider a tax or fee that will apply to all of them since they all contribute to this discrepancy. There are two ways to do this – apply the tax to each car, or each driver.

I say that drivers should pay, and this seems to fall in line with the arguments that pro-bike and mass transit advocates make - you should be made to feel the true costs of your behavior. If you buy a car, but never drive it, you don’t inflict the same costs as a driver who is on the road for 100,000 miles per year. So assessing this fee against drivers makes more sense because it strikes at the true source of the cost – the people who drive.

There are 11,369,280 licensed drivers in New York. If we want to force them to cover the cost of their $2.4 billion shortfall, that comes to $211.10 per driver per year.

Now let’s take a look at other transportation options in New York.

New York City is fully committed to a Bicycle Master Plan designed to “accelerate the growth of safe cycling”. It is difficult to find the figures that correspond to the expenditures to make this possible, but a search for the word “bike” in the three volumes of New York City’s Adopted Capital Commitment Plan for FY 2008 shows 22 bike infrastructure projects grouped under 17 line items totaling $27.858 million.

Numbers of daily bike riders in New York are difficult to calculate. Estimates range from Transportation Alternatives’ high mark of 130,000 per day to a low estimate I made based on Census data and New York City screenline counts of 28,170.

If we use the high estimate, bicyclists should each pay $214.29 more per year. Using the low estimate, they should each pay $988.92. The true number is probably in the middle, so if we split the difference, we arrive at a total of 79,085 riders who should each pay $352.25 more to cover their expenditures.

Mass transit riders fare much worse. New York MTA’s farebox revenues are 39% of MTA’s total revenues and account for $4.165 Billion. Data in this area is also difficult to decipher because MTA administers tolls for automobiles as well as mass transit systems. However, if we look at their budget and exclude the organizations that rely on toll revenues (only look at NYCT/SIR, MTABC, LIRR, MNR, and LIB), total expenses come to $8.419 Billion. This leaves a $4.254 billion gap between what riders pay, and the expenditures that are made on their behalf.

New York MTA anticipates 2.35 Billion riders in 2008. Assuming a base fare price of $2, fares would have to be increased by $1.81 to cover total expenses, a 91% increase in fare price.

For practical purposes, the people most affected by this fare increase would be commuters who use mass transit. New York has a population of 8,597,844 and 29% take public transportation. This represents 2,493,375 riders. Since a commuter will make 2 trips per day, these commuters account for 1.269 billion trips. (260 work days times two trips per day times 2,493,375 riders = 1.296 Billion trips). If each of these trips costs $1.81 more, the average commuter will pay $941.20 more per year just to get to work.

This would also negate any fuel savings mass transit would give you – one trip, no matter how short, would suddenly cost almost the price of a gallon of gas.

Pro-bike and mass transit advocates will be quick to point out that I’m not including all automobile costs. This is true, I use Mr. Komanoff’s study as a basis for comparison, and he (commendably) omits “environmental and social costs imposed by motor vehicles through air and noise pollution, accidents, use of land and congestion”.

You could say that this would drive car costs sky high, but I have two responses:

First, if we consider the full costs of automobiles, we need to consider the full benefits as well, and these are significant. We would have to include the economic benefits of personal freedom and efficiency, the time savings that cars afford, the benefits that cars enable when emergency vehicles respond using road infrastructure and save property and lives, the benefits of tax revenues derived from businesses that use automobiles for revenue and the cascading beneficial effects on employment, poverty, and education. These benefits go on and on.

Second, these costs don’t belong to cars alone. Mass transit has similar negatives in terms of pollution from the power plant that generates the power for the trains, the increased congestion that metro causes - people like to build and congregate around the lines, which makes traffic worse, the land that the government seizes to build the lines, the noise and the crowds, the lost time and inconvenience of waiting for trains, and the corresponding loss of efficiency. The materials that make up bikes require energy to produce and assemble, and some are very difficult and expensive to produce - notably aluminum, it takes many more bicycles to match the effectiveness of one car for certain types of work, the bike encourages you to exhale more CO2 than walking or riding a car would. Bicycles force you to be healthier, but they also punish you if you aren’t physically capable of using them, and though they may burn more calories, bicycles also expose you to the elements and thus more discomfort and danger. Let’s also not forget that both of these forms of transit kill pedestrians just like cars do. In fact, bicyclists kill pedestrians at a rate equal to cars and are ten times more dangerous to themselves as cars are proportional to their numbers. Bicyclists are also reliant on much of the same infrastructure that cars use, so many of these costs apply to them as well, and I left out any attempt to add in a proportionate share of auto-infrastructure costs that benefit bikes and mass transit– local roads, lighting, bridges, tunnels, etc…

Ultimately, I did the same analysis that my opponents have used to express to me that cars don’t pay their way, and since all of the hidden costs and benefits are difficult to calculate, this method is both more accurate and easy to verify.

Critics of my findings may also argue that these costs shouldn’t be spread evenly, only people who use it should pay for it – or at least pay proportionately for their use. But this argument will also hurt cyclists and mass transit riders – not just drivers. This method is already how I calculate the cost for mass transit riders, and it would probably end up being much worse for cyclists since fewer of them are serious riders and more are recreational riders – it’s beneficial to them to spread the costs.

Regardless of what costs you feel should be included, it’s very clear that in terms of the expenditures laid out for these modes of transport - cars already come closest to covering them.

As someone who almost never drives to work – I ride metro or bike every day – I am in no hurry to pay these extra fees. However, pro-bike and mass transit advocates seek to impose these costs on cars as a way to take them off the road. My response is “fair’s fair”. If we force one mode to cover its expenditures, all modes should have to do the same – that way people really make responsible choices based on the costs they impose on the rest of us.

But why would I be motivated to advocate this when it hurts me? Simple – not doing it hurts me too. If the pro-bike and mass transit lobby goes unchallenged on this, they will force drivers off of the road and onto mass transit systems that can’t meet the demand. This makes my commute more painful. It puts more unprepared bicyclists on the street and leads to more accidents. It also drives up the cost of every single thing that I buy – from toothpaste, to food, to furniture to property.

Fair choices aren’t just fair, they keep all of us from feeling the pain of poor policy decisions based on one sided analysis.

Posted in Bicycles, Car Taxes, Highways, Mass Transit, Spending, Subways, Tax Increases, Uncategorized Rage |