It’s cheaper to own a car than to use mass transit. When you take all the costs into account (and even ignoring the convenience factor) it’s not really surprising at all:
Anti-car people will argue that the high cost of living in New York City or San Francisco is some kind of anomaly, and that proper government action could magically create low cost of living dense urban areas. I am doubtful. Government regulations usually drive up costs rather than reduce costs (with the exception of regulations carefully thought out to prevent value transference). In fact, the rent control laws in New York City, which liberals think are making housing more affordable, are actually contributing to the high cost of living here. I’ve previously suggested two reasons why dense cities are so expensive: (1) dense cities create transportational and space inefficiencies; and (2) dense cities attract liberal voters who elect liberal politicians who enact dumb laws which increase the cost of living. Maybe there is some third or fourth reason as well. Until someone can demonstrate a place where it’s reasonable to be carless and it doesn’t cost a fortune to live there, one has to assume that such places are inherently economically inefficient.
The arguments against cars and sprawl are aesthetic (and elitist), not economic.
[Saturday update]
Randall Parker has further observations.
[Bumped]
I agree with your statement that arguments against cars and sprawl are aesthetic (and elitist), not economic. Nonetheless, urban sprawl and car culture are the result of a massive public subsidy to roads. If roads were privately owned and tolled our urban forms in the US would be substantially different. I would be in favor of auctioning all roadways to the highest bidders and relieving the feds, states and localities of the responsibility for building, maintaining and policing roads.
By the way the economist Walter Block has done a substantial amount of research on the topic of public roads versus private roads.
http://mises.org/literature.aspx?action=author&Id=443
Is it a subsidy when consumers pay 40.3 cents per gallon (here in Colorado) in gasoline tax? Properly done, that tax would then be spent on roads (not bicycle paths). If the amount actually spent on roads is higher than the gas tax collections, then that excess is a subsidy.
Likewise, when calculating the cost of public transportation, we need to add in the direct subsidies because rider fares are rarely high enough to pay the costs.
Let me put it another way; it is a subsidy when your road use is not metered by the mile. Gas taxes don’t provide equal taxation for your road usage. If you pay forty cents a gallon in tax and you get twenty miles per gallon you pay two cents per mile for your road usage. If you get forty miles per gallon then you pay only a penny per mile for your road usage. There is no match between the gas tax and your pro rata share of road usage. Theoretically, the gas tax actually encourages people in small vehicles to drive more and crowd the roads more(a subsidy). In actuality, gas taxes have very little impact on how many miles people drive, i.e. road usage. They, rarely but occasionally, influence the decision on whether to buy a more fuel efficient car.
Imagine what would happen to everyone’s electrical usage, if it was not metered, and we didn’t pay for it by the kilowatt hour. If, instead, we payed a tax to fund the power grid and we could use as much of it as we wanted whenever we wanted. There would be no incentive for you to use your electricity in an efficient way. When its ninety-five degrees outside there would be no reason not to set your thermostat at fifty five. Every time society maxed out its electrical usage there would be a call to build more electric plants, more power lines and more transformer stations all at taxpayer expense.
If the taxes couldn’t pay for it, then we put cops on the power lines to monitor our usage and limit what we could use. If we exceeded our legal allotment then they could write us a ticket or even put us in jail. What was essentially a resource allocation or economic problem would then be a public policy, political and legal problem. It would be insane. Yet, that is exactly how we handle our roadways.
Well, Jard, the big problem with private roads is, unlikely the bogus argument for the Fairness Doctrine, the location of a road really is a scarce public resource. I mean, it’s not like we can let several firms compete for providing roads between me and my work (5 miles away). It’s not plausible to build several equivalent roadways over that short distance, and let the best win while the others wither away. You really can have only one road.
And if you have only one road between A and B, how can you avoid massive government oversight? You can’t just rely on the free market mechanism of having no one use the road if it is poorly designed, dangerous, not kept up — because there is no realistic alternative.
And if you’re going to have massive government oversight, well, maybe you might as well have the government just build and maintain the road in the first place.
I’m not saying you’re wrong a priori. But it seems like a complex and tricky thing to do right, and maybe something that can only be really implemented well with modern technology. Like, maybe government could specific the layout and performance of roads, and then award competitive contracts every few years to firms to build and maintain them. The cost would be directly paid by the road’s users through those magic FastTrak transponders, which would bill you for whatever segments of the road you use. Presumably the government would have to mandate standards for the FastTrak, so even if there is competition among providers and billing services, the transponders are not all mutually incomprehensible.
In principle, if we were dealing with a more rational species, you could then also implement the very useful scheme of differential pricing. Charge a different price for the use of different lanes, so that if you are in a big hurry and willing to spend the dough, you can move over to the low-traffic speedy lane, while if you are just going to Grandma’s house you can dawdle in the jammed-up cheap lanes. The fact that right now the guy late for a career make-or-break appointment, or the parent driving a child to the ER, are forced to use the exact same service as folks just taking a spin or making a beer run is inefficient and unjust madness.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t play well politically. People think good roads should be as “free” as, oh I dunno, top-quality healthcare, just to pick a random example.
I think the cost of living is high in cities like New York and San Francisco because a lot of people want to live there. High demand = high prices. Same thing in Vancouver, Canada, where I live. Sprawl is a consequence of the same supply & demand relationship. If you’re willing to live further out and commit the time to commute, your cost of housing decreases. The cost of public roads is a contributing factor to the cost of living further out, not a primary factor. You need density to make mass transit work, of course. To get people to use mass transit, you need to make it a convenient mode with high frequency of service and many access points. That usually means some sort of rail system, and you can’t justify the capital cost unless there’s a lot of ridership.
“To get people to use mass transit, you need to make it a convenient mode with high frequency of service and many access points.”
That isn’t Seattle’s plan.
Their plan is to build 10+ story buildings next to every interstate or state highway to generate permanent bottlenecks. One highway has land sold to the feds to prevent any hope of widening. I5 through downtown has the Washington State Convention Center sitting atop it – and wiping out another lane of through traffic. The transportation secretary was on record saying that the bottleneck was “By design.”
As toll-roads have problems with Washington’s constitution (they’d have to be -new- roads), the state of repair of roads in general just keeps heading downhill. 53% of gas funding goes to transit, as does 3% of daily commuters.
The new plan is to take a lane away from general purpose traffic on a long list of roads to convert those lanes to bicycles only. Bike lane’s aren’t a huge deal, but the planning is typical. Three north-south roads that are separated by one block in the east-west direction -all- had two lanes (one north, one south) allocated for bicycles. There isn’t enough traffic to truly justify just one of the lanes.
So, summing up Seattle’s plan: Make it so irritating to drive that people take a bus instead.
“If you pay forty cents a gallon in tax and you get twenty miles per gallon you pay two cents per mile for your road usage. If you get forty miles per gallon then you pay only a penny per mile for your road usage. There is no match between the gas tax and your pro rata share of road usage. ”
You’re missing the weight factor. It’s why semis pay so much in road taxes.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:PUrdWkggBQkJ:www.citi-habitats.com/media/pdf/rentals3quarter2007.pdf+average+rent+harlem&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
The average rent in Harlem is 1200/Month, really quite affordable.
Carl:
“And if you have only one road between A and B, how can you avoid massive government oversight? You can’t just rely on the free market mechanism of having no one use the road if it is poorly designed, dangerous, not kept up — because there is no realistic alternative.”
It’s funny how the same people who make this argument are usually the first to stand up and call for more government spending on the “realistic alternative” of transit. So, just because roads are owned by private entities, this precludes the possibility of parallel rail, transitways, and bike paths? The scarcity of the real estate itself would be a huge incentive to replace roads – slowly and organically – with rail or other, less land intensive, alternatives.
In the, say, 20 years it took this to gradually happen of course, local zoning laws would probably change significantly to attract businesses closer to residences, or else the businesses would relocate or disperse to where the talent lives. Or else they would pay for employees to set up home offices and telecommute.
What a terrible world it would be! A sprinkling of high-density mixed-use communities surrounded by semi-rural and green space and connected by a varied mix of toll roads, trains, and other forms of transit! People staying home with their families AND having a career. Every child growing up walking distance to school and nature. That sounds like… well, that sounds a lot like new urbanism.
“So, summing up Seattle’s plan: Make it so irritating to drive that people take a bus instead.”
That is the Left’s approach to incentives generally: Ignore economic optimality and instead subsidize heavily the things leftist like and tax highly the things they don’t like. Then when consumers use the remaining least-bad alternatives the leftists can claim to be supporters of free markets and incentives. This is the same intellectually dishonest game that is used to justify ethanol fuel, electric cars, wind and solar power generation, carbon taxes and every other economically suboptimal scheme the Left favors.
“Anywhere public policy intersects spending or investment, somebody
tends to win”.
When the US Parks 2 carriers in the middle east, the Oil companies
are winning. When the Navy is out killing pirates the global corporations are winning. When the County subsidizes utility construction, suburban real estate developers are winning.
If all those people in Rural America would pay for their electricification,
i’d be happy ending the subsidies on mass transit.
If all those farmers in Red America would stop taking Agricultural Subsidies, I’d be happy to end mass transit subsidies.
“If all those farmers in Red America would stop taking Agricultural Subsidies, I’d be happy to end mass transit subsidies.”
So, you have MASSIVE majorities in government – so put your damn money where your mouth is and get the subsidies stopped.
And you’d rather support piracy than endure one more second of knowing that ending piracy benefits corporations?
“When the Navy is out killing pirates the global corporations are winning.
And you’d rather support piracy than endure one more second of knowing that ending piracy benefits corporations?”
Merely pointing out that the beneficiaries are the ships owners and
the cargo owners.
When the police patrol a poor neighborhood, the beneficiaries are poor folks who need protection from the scum found on many a neighborhood street.
as for Al,
Shouldn’t the Republicans be the ones who ask to end subsidies for agriculture?
“Shouldn’t the Republicans be the ones who ask to end subsidies for agriculture?”
Why?
They have the power of a raman noodle.
““Shouldn’t the Republicans be the ones who ask to end subsidies for agriculture?”
Why?”
Only Nixon can go to china, — Spock
Is it a subsidy when consumers pay 40.3 cents per gallon (here in Colorado) in gasoline tax
Yes, it is — but not the way the automobile haters think.
It’s a subsidy to the trucking industry. Most of the wear on roads (hence, upkeep costs) comes from trucks. It’s a function of vehicle weight.
If fuel taxes were allocated fairly, we would have less freight hauled by truck and more railroads but the automobile would not disappear.
The only organization that’s really made mass transit work well is Disney. Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow had a plan that may actually have worked. Unfortunately, development came to an end when Walt died.
Before I try any actual thinking I will say this.
Most of my oh so enlightened (all of them college dropouts like me) liberal minded freaks of friends (no they are freaks, social deviants) are in fact smart people, but they assume an intelligence that isn’t theirs based upon their defiance of social norms.
Most of them live in the lincoln park area of chicago, and don’t own cars anymore, they only update their drivers liscenses so that they can defer portions of their taxes to indiana rules rather than illinois.
One of them, since he got rid of his car, hasn’t visited his mother once in almost 10 years. Since then, he’s gotten married had 2 kids, filed for bankruptcy, taken “loans” from his mother, who was there to visit her boy, but he has never found his way across the border for any reason other than pretending he’s an indiana resident.
Same for some of the other friends, but to a lesser degree.
There is a selfishness to this “I don’t need to go anywhere I can’t walk” attitude. I lived in other countries, and was technicaly poor, but I still visited my mother, I still made my brothers wedding, and if I was somewhere that there were roads that got me somewhere, I would get in my car and I would make it to important moments for my friends.
I drove from chicago to vegas for a 1 night trip 3 times, so that I could be a part of my friends getting married. I got in my car and drove to florida for the same reason, I made it to kentucky twice for a cousins christening, and again for another cousins divorce. (the divorce one is a complicated story)
I drove from chicago to Hammond Louisiana 4 times, because I was the only one that could be counted on to help a friend move back to my area, in an escort, since my friend was too posessive of certain posessions, that he didn’t trust the mover.
It took 4 trips.
If I didn’t have a car, my friend in Louisiana would have been assed out, if I didn’t have a car, I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of those other very cherished (other than the divorce one, though there is a degree of satisfaction that I felt) If I hadn’t had a car.
If you don’t have a car, if you don’t have freedom of independant movement, you are a parasite, and must depend on people who DO have cars, or on people who are taxed to pay for innefficient busses and trains to get you where you need to go.
this “walking” society is a lie. They will walk a few blocks, they won’t walk the miles that the working class did at the turn of the century to get to where they needed to go, instead, they parasiticaly demand that they have a right to go from one place to another, and everyone else that is not them pays for it.
Meanwhile, they ignore their family and at the funeral will say “I don’t remember them looking like this.”
and the proper response for a real human would be “because you haven’t seen them in 10 years you piece of crap!”
But I guess it’s a virtue to destroy the only valid connection we have through humanity and humanity alone.
Jim Taggart doesn’t deserve Dagny’s loyalty, but he does deserve her love and pitty.
As for the conditions of roads.
In freeze thaw states like most of the great lakes region, it doesn’t matter if a vehicle had ever traveled on a road, the roads will need the same degree of maintenance.
The tractor trailors do more damage on bridges and such, but the foundation of damage delivered in the freeze thaw states is caused by the fact that there are numerous freezes and thaws.
I don’t know the engineering, but I can describe a portion of it, yet I won’t because I will likely screw it up.
I will say this, and I can’t find a reason to disagree with it, had a friend who said that especially in sandy area’s like the great lakes area’s Roads should be built like bridges. It isn’t just road flex, it’s the ground itself that shifts, because we just lay down roads on top of stuff, ignoring the fact that we live on land that is constantly shifting.
I don’t know the reason we use the aggregate asphalt mix here (chicago area) which falls apart every 3 years, but we do, and that is why every year car’s fall to crap, not when it’s cold, but during a winter warmup.
Sinkholes the size of ranch houses is ridiculous. We redirected a river, we can’t find something that doesn’t break EVERY EFFING YEAR!?!
I don’t know the reason we use the aggregate asphalt mix here (chicago area) which falls apart every 3 years,
Er…Doug, you live in Chicago. What do you think is the reason that government pays contractors — curiously enough, if you look it up, you’ll they’re always the same contractors — a large sum of money but the contractors need to do it again very soon? Especially since in Europe they can construct roads that last 20 years without repair, and, gee, they have winter there too?
If you didn’t know about it before, you’ve stumbled across one of the first, best and most ancient form of Democratic Party corruption. It works simply:
(1) CItizens complain about pothalls, awful roads.
(2) Government raises taxes to fix roads.
(3) Government picks a contractor that, purely coincidentally, happens to be government’s brother in law, or largest campaign donor, or both. Because the need is urgent, the competitive bidding process is…er…abbreviated, in the interests of efficiency. We can’t wait too fix those roads! Just the other day an ambulance carrying a sick orphan child failed to get to the hospital on time!
(4) Government shovels a big pile of money to contractor. This is “investment” in our future, if you’re a Chicago community organizer.
(5) Contractor paves the road according to union rules and minimum standards, set in 1927, naturally walking away with a huge profit, part of which he kicks back to government. The road starts to crack and decay within the week.
(6) Go to Step (1), rinse, repeat.
Want to know why Stimulusaurus was loaded up with lots and lots of construction projects? Now you know.
I thought the high cost of living in big cities was a simple matter of supply and demand: lots of people want to live there, and are willing to pay more to do so, and there’s only so much space to go around.
> Let me put it another way; it is a subsidy when your road use is not metered by the mile.
That’s nonsense in a prom-dress.
Consider Disneyland. It makes money from its patrons, yet doesn’t charge per-experience.
“Merely pointing out that the beneficiaries are the ships owners and the cargo owners.”
And, you know, anybody who wants to actually buy the goods those ships carry. Particularly if they want to pay a reasonable rate for them, have them in any manner of “on-demand,” etc. International commerce depends on freedom of the seas, especially freedom from piracy.
You know Jack, just because they’re corporations doesn’t mean they’re evil. Nor are they any more (or less) likely to follow virtuous or evil leaders than, say, governments or political movements. Corporations aren’t some mystical force of nature, crushing all in their path like rampaging glaciers. They’re human constructs. They’re just a bunch of humans that happen to have the same objectives for a given amount of time. Their actions are determined by their members, as their members determine to be (correctly or not – and the answer to that will determine the “given amount of time”) in their own interest. If nobody wanted them around (by not wanting what they have to offer), then they wouldn’t exist. Just ask Eastern Airlines, or British Leyland. Or General Motors and Chrysler, if the market (ie, “the rest of us”) get a say.
“Consider Disneyland. It makes money from its patrons, yet doesn’t charge per-experience.”
Sure it does. It just considers one experience to be one day’s visit to the park. However many sub-experiences a visitor packs into that day is entirely up to them.
The per-mile gas tax confusion is a canard – only toll roads charge by the mile. The rest of us pay into a road-maintenance kitty by the gallon. Supposedly those of us who spend less on gas (with either high-mileage vehicles or a refusal to travel long distances) draw less benefit from the infrastructure that the kitty is supposed to maintain. Those of us with heavy vehicles and higher-maintenance vehicles supposedly draw more use out of it. Then the bigger problem becomes that the kitty (already small for the specific task that it’s meant to pay for, and getting comparatively smaller, because people do decide to drive less or buy a better-mileage machine if the tax goes up; not to mention that the road repairs are done as Carl laid out above) gets lumped in with the bigger overall public kitty, which gets shoveled out to the crooked infrastructure-maintenance crowd, PLUS the public dole crowd, the staffer-affairs hush-money crowd, and a whole bunch of other expenses other than what that original road-only kitty was really supposed to do. This would be helped a little if there were lockboxes for every government program, and no super-kitty existed in which to hide corruption, but those people who originally wrote the rules for these things thought the rest of us would notice if Bob Congressman or Jane Alderwoman was walking out of office 10 or 20 million bucks richer than when they walked in, and toss their sorry asses in jail where they belong. Oops.
Whereas the Disneyland “box” gets spent mostly on the parks – or else the park attendance suffers because stuff breaks down and it can’t live up to its reputation from past experiences, so people stop visiting multiple times in their lifetime. Which has started to happen, even before the current slowdown, and is part of why Disney stock has dropped precipitously in the last year.
“Er…Doug, you live in Chicago. What do you think is the reason that government pays contractors — curiously enough, if you look it up, you’ll they’re always the same contractors — a large sum of money but the contractors need to do it again very soon? Especially since in Europe they can construct roads that last 20 years without repair, and, gee, they have winter there too?”
I used to live in downtown Chicago. I rode my bike a lot. I was a student of potholes. My friends and I noticed that every time a road was repaved, within a few months it would get cut up again, by various city departments that probably didn’t coordinate with each other, in order to repair or install something. And the patching after those repairs was always shoddy, leaving the road in worse shape than it was in before. In one or two years a road would look almost as bad as it did before it was repaved. This wasn’t always true but it was a common pattern for busy streets (Wells comes to mind, probably because I used it frequently). So while Carl’s explanation is probably valid, and probably applies also to the repair process, I think it’s true that haphazard bureaucratic incentives and simple incompetence are a major problem as well.
the same friend said something like that. “They don’t want to hire people who will tell the city to get rid of all the tunnels. It’s bandaids on bandaids.” or something like that.
Here’s the key portion of some old bloggage on (as the title states) misery of mass transit:
When I relied on Dallas Area Rapid Transit (so much for truth in advertising) to go to work, I had to leave the apartment at 8:30 PM catch the 409 bus at about 8:40 PM to get to work at a few minutes before the shift started at 10:00 PM. I had to leave home an hour and a half before work to make a twelve mile commute.
Relying solely on mass transit limits one’s shopping choices. Not all the stores you want to visit are conveniently placed along bus routes. And try getting on a bus after buying some furniture from Wal-Mart.
Then there’s the weather. How many of these mass transit hawks ever had to walk 150 yards through a driving rain, wait several minutes for the bus to show up, and then walk two blocks through that rain from the destination bus stop to work? Or stand in subfreezing weather waiting for the bus that’s running 30-45 minutes behind schedule because of the icy roads? One should be able to go to work on a rainy day without having to pack a change of shoes, and winter commutes shouldn’t have to require ski pants.
And then there’s transferring buses. Sometimes transfer waits are almost 30 minutes. That’s more time taken out of your day, and more time stuck standing in inclement weather.
If you rely on the city bus to get around, you are a slave to someone else’s schedule. It is a helpless feeling.
One thing I didn’t mention in that post: the very reason I worked third shift was bus routes. The 409 didn’t run early enough to work first shift, or late enough to take me home after second shift.
And the people who want to buy the cargo when it reaches its destination, most of whom tend to be not-rich.
When I relied on Dallas Area Rapid Transit (so much for truth in advertising) to go to work, I had to leave the apartment at 8:30 PM catch the 409 bus at about 8:40 PM to get to work at a few minutes before the shift started at 10:00 PM. I had to leave home an hour and a half before work to make a twelve mile commute.
Why not ride a bike?
I biked 3 miles to school for a year
Gah. You just reminded me about the years I spent as an undergrad attending a so-called “commuter” college that had nowhere near enough parking, oversold the parking it did have, and charged so much for it that anybody living within a few miles of campus was almost better off walking. I put a lot of miles on my bike until the school finally started a shuttle bus route that went off-campus to places with plenty of free parking.
The only time I paid for a parking sticker was when I had an on-campus job that started before most commuting students were even out of bed in the morning. Those were the days.
I liked biking to school, Except when it was freezing rain.
A place like dallas, it wouldn’t be bad. 12 Miles? 30 minute ride
and your legs would be in great shape.
Uh, 12 miles is a way whole lot more than 30 minutes. The bus is faster. I’d rather be waterboarded – less time consuming.
Consider that the ground is not perfectly level. There will be long stretches of gentle inclines, which are painful speed-slowing leg-agonizing torture for those of us who are not trained athletes.