Using Federal Highway Administration statistics, Subsidyscope has calculated that in 2007, 51 percent of the nation’s $193 billion set aside for highway construction and maintenance was generated through user fees—down from 10 years earlier when user fees made up 61 percent of total spending on roads. The rest came from other sources, including revenue generated by income, sales and property taxes, as well as bond issues. Going back further, the trend is more pronounced. Forty years ago, user fees amounted to 71 percent of revenues spent on roads.

I look forward to people explaining that highway travel may work in Europe, but that the United States isn’t populated nearly densely enough to make it viable as a mode of transportation.

Light rail construction in Seattle (cc photo by Oran Viriyincy)

On a call with bloggers earlier today to talk about job creation policies, Nancy Pelosi outlined a smart idea for “front-loading” infrastructure projects so as to give them a stimulative effect in the short-term while also coping with valid concerns about the medium-term fiscal situation. Imagine a $100 million, five-year project. You could do that by taxing and spending $20 million a year each year for five years. Or you could do it like this:

That way you get job creation punch when it’s needed, but you’re not contributing to long-term fiscal problems.

I note that this would also work with my pet stimulus cause, mass transit operating subsidies.* You could spend $800 million a year (these are made up numbers) for two years on such subsidies, then in year three you hike the federal gas tax to raise $1 billion in new revenue annual. Over ten years, that’s deficit neutral. Then starting in the 11th year, you hike the subsidy level up to equal the revenue that’s coming in.

* I like mass transit operating subsidies because they both help with the state/local budget mess, provide direct employment (to, e.g., bus drivers) and also (by avoiding fare hikes) put money into the pockets of a broad group of people. They can also be implemented extremely quickly.

Yes, as you can see here someone got a full-scale EIS highway constructed between Morgantown, WV and Hamilton, Maryland. Morgantown is a nice place, but the Morgantown metro area has only about 111,000 people in it. Your congressional delegation needs some real clout to get that kind of thing built.

A significant portion of local transportation funding comes from the property tax. The tax is conventionally assessed on both land and buildings, but transportation increases only the value of the land. A more direct, efficient way to fund transportation projects is to tax land at a higher rate than buildings. The lower tax on buildings would allow owners to retain more of the profits of their investment in construction, and have the expected side effect of increased development intensity. A partial equilibrium simulation is created for three sample cities to determine the magnitude of the intensity increase for both residential and nonresidential development if various levels of split rate property taxes were enacted.

It’s important, as a matter of governance, for progressives to spend more time thinking harder about the efficiency of different tax regimes. Tax issues are politically sensitive, obviously, but even in political terms the proof to a large extent is in the pudding. “Big government,” schemes, no matter how controversial, tend to become accepted when they work. But part of making them work is financing them intelligently. This seems like a better way to finance upgrades in our public infrastructure.

Virginia Highways (cc photo by thisisbossi)

Observing the Virginia election campaign from afar, I thought that one potential upside to the fact that Bob McDonnell’s lack of a real plan to finance proposed road construction in Northern Virginia might have the beneficial consequence of making sure that the road construction doesn’t happen. I mean, I hate to knock a pro-tax editorial since lord knows I love taxes, but this kind of sentiment from the Washington Post editorial board doesn’t seem to me to be correct:

Mr. McDonnell’s challenge will be to translate his promises into results, specifically on the state’s most critical challenge: reinvigorating a sclerotic, aging transportation network. Virginia last raised new revenue for transportation almost a quarter century ago; little wonder that it is running out of cash to build roads. We remain skeptical of the flimsy filigree he passed off as a transportation plan, which rejects any fresh taxes to pay for new roads. But by dint of his victory he has earned the right to show it will work. We’d be delighted if he proves us wrong.

The postmortems on the campaign of State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, the losing Democratic candidate, will identify his campaign’s missteps, misjudgments and missed opportunities. Inevitably, one of those will be his at-first tepid, and later unequivocal support for raising taxes to build roads. This will reinforce the conventional wisdom that it is impossible to win an election in Virginia, and elsewhere, on a platform that includes higher taxes.

Sigh.

Things like building more NoVa roads or expanding I-66 won’t solve Virginia’s traffic congestion problems. Right now the limited road capacity is operating as a constraint on further sprawl. Building more road capacity will encourage more sprawling development. But the reason Northern Virginia’s roads are crowded is that there’s a lot of stuff in-and-around Northern Virginia, there are limited non-road options for getting around Northern Virginia, and the roads are largely free. If you want less congestion over the long run, you need to tackle these issues head on. That means things like improving Virginia Rail Express so commuter rail is a more reasonable option for people; it means building the Metro Silver Line and—crucially—actually doing the increased density and urbanization in Tyson’s Corner; it means building Columbia Pike Streetcar; it means getting Virginia to support building a separated blue line through Downtown DC.

That would cost money and so, yes, taxes would be necessary. But higher taxes to build more roads isn’t what Northern Virginia needs. And ultimately like all jurisdictions plagued with traffic problems around the world, there’s ultimately a need to recognize that congestion pricing is the only really stable way to ensure a reasonable flow of traffic.

McDonnell’s pseudo-plan is not going to work but the alternative the Post is pushing wouldn’t work either.

Among political operatives there’s a lot of talk about the idea that in the wake of Michael Bloomberg’s surprisingly narrow re-election the White House blew an opportunity to intervene in the race on behalf of Democratic City Comptroller Bill Thompson and pick up a win. Ben Smith writes that the outcome is “a profound embarrassment for a Democratic establishment – from the White House on down — that abandoned his rival, City Comptroller Bill Thompson, as a hopeless loser.”

I think it’s at least worth considering the possibility that this tactics-tinged lens is the wrong way to look at things. What if Obama just preferred Bloomberg on the merits, but felt that political considerations compelled him to offer nominal support for the official Democratic nominee? After all, what are the issues on which Obama’s positions are more closely aligned with Thompson than with Bloomberg?

I can name a few on which Obama and Bloomberg are in sync. For starters, education. Obama and Arne Duncan are clearly in the “education reform” camp of the intra-Democratic split, pushing accountability and charter schools. Today Obama will be touting education reform in Madison, Wisconsin talking up the $4.35-billion Race to the Top (RTTT) fund that was included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This is an agenda totally in line with what Bloomberg and Joel Klein have been doing in New York, and the general fear among reformers has been that absent Bloomberg NYC education policy will be made by the United Federation of Teachers. Similarly, on transportation Obama and Secretary Ray LaHood have been infuriating George Will by pushing transit, walking, and bicycles. You never find an “anti-transit” politician as such in New York, but the Bloomberg administration’s push for congestion pricing and spree of bike lane construction have turned Transportation Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan into a hero of transportation reform. Thompson, by contrast, ending his campaign rallying against Bus Rapid Transit.

Are there some clear examples of urban policy issues on which Obama is pushing an agenda that’s at odds with Bloomberg?

As I wrote yesterday, legal crackdowns on distracted driving are a public health no-brainer. When you try to pilot a fast-moving and extremely heavy vehicle while also sending and receiving text messages and phone calls, you are endangering not only your own life but the life of everyone else trying to get from point A to point B. Thankfully, members of congress are considering legislative action to address the problem. Oddly, however, as Elana Schor explains it’s become a point of political contention.

Basically Jay Rockefeller and a group of three Republicans wants to offer extra money to states that tackle distracted driving. But back in July, a group of Democratic senators proposed penalizing states that fail to pass bills tackling distracted driving. Chuck Schumer, sensibly, is on board for both approaches. Kay Bailey Hutchison, less sensibly, opposes the stick approach and does so in a manner designed to analogize herself to white supremacists:

“I don’t think we ought to get into states’ rights,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), who is campaigning for her state’s governorship next year, said. “[T]he states have addressed this in very different ways, but many of them are addressing it.”

Vernon Betkey, chairman of the Governors’ Highway Safety Association (GHSA), which represents state highway officials, echoed Hutchison’s stance in a Thursday appearance before the House transportation committee.

Hutchison’s opponent, of course, is Rick Perry who’s been making noise about secession recently. Obviously there’s something in the water down there.

As for the merits of Hutchison’s proposal, it would be interesting to see a legislator stake out a principled opposition to all federal conditional financial grants. You could do that either by opposing all federal financial grants (no money for highways, schools, etc.) or by opposing all conditionality. But to stake out the view that there’s nothing wrong with conditional grants per se but that we daren’t interfere with states’ sacred right to permit dangerous driving practices seems very strange.

As Ryan Avent says, Metro expansion is great, especially when it’s done properly, but you can’t just keep adding new branches in the suburbs:

One final point: Metro is a network. When a new extension is built, the additional connectivity increases the value of all the other nodes on the system. But while that increase in value is significant, it’s not nearly as great as the benefit conferred on people located along the extension, who suddenly have easy access to the whole of the system. And meanwhile, the usage generated by the extension does generate some direct and indirect costs on other users.

These costs are increasingly borne by users in the core of the system, where growth in the number of trains and passengers have led to crowded conditions on platforms and back-ups during peak periods. To some extent, this can be addressed by increasing peak fares, but given the obvious value of Metro, the growth in the system’s spokes, and the fact that the District is better suited than almost anywhere else in the metro area to handle increased density, it seems clear that new core capacity is needed (as well as a new river crossing over or under the Potomac).

Probably the best way to add capacity would be to construct the proposed “separated blue line” through downtown. Among the other virtues of that plan, it would have an immediate and obvious benefit to many people in Virginia, as well as improving the performance of the overall system, thus broadening its potential constituency. The Brown Line idea shown here also has a lot of merit and would, I believe, be less hideously expensive. But either of these proposals would cost a lot of money—there’s no cheap way to build heavy rail beneath an existing city. That said, the benefits would be enormous, both to the areas directly served and in terms of the enhanced value to the rest of the network. The completion of the Green Line has already had a completely transformational effect on swathes of the city.

Here I think the key thing to keep in mind is that when you’re talking about new heavy rail construction, the potential benefits can be quite large but you have to decide if you actually want to seize them. This is the area around one of the proposed stations:

If you added a Metro station there, would the local area permit the surrounding quarter mile or so developed as a fairly dense walkable community? Or would people hear about proposals to build on the green space and up-zone the built-up area and decide that would lead to too much traffic? Maybe instead they’ll want to just turn the undeveloped patch into another parking lot. That’d be no good. And the existing land use patterns around Maryland’s Green Line stations don’t inspire a ton of confidence.

But for a second thing, I would merely emphasize the fact that the whole point of advocacy for high-speed passenger is precisely that Amtrak as it currently exists isn’t a good idea. The United States doesn’t have a real high-speed passenger rail system, and the problems with Amtrak don’t justify that situation, they’re a symptom of it. If you look at the Acela routes, which is the closest thing to HSR we have in the United States, they’re turning a profit. The biggest losses are on low-speed long-distance routes like New Orleans to Los Angeles and Chicago to San Francisco. That’s dumb. To get from Chicago to San Francisco, people should fly. The HSR point is that a reasonably speedy train from Chicago to Milwaukee or from Chicago to Indianapolis would be valuable.

Third, while we probably should try to avoid running routes that involve huge operating losses, there’s no particular reason the government should treat passenger rail investments the way a business would treat investment in a new factory and expect it to earn a financial return. Infrastructure is infrastructure. Highways don’t “make money” they facilitate activity. Transit and intercity rail are the same way. Charging money to avoid overuse and to efficiently allocate scarce spaces makes sense. But the creation of public infrastructure in general, and of passenger rail in particular, isn’t a bad business proposition it’s just not a business proposition at all. It’s a policy proposition.

As he observes, this problem tends to get particularly bad in smaller cities. The reason, I assume, is that public sector agencies usually only do a good job of customer service if someone for some reason makes it a particular point of political emphasis. And in a small city like his example of Kalamzoo, the bus system is probably a sufficiently marginal phenomenon that nobody wants to raise it.

The good news is that thanks to GPS and smart phones, we’re now living in a golden age in terms of what it’s possible to accomplish in this regard. The NextBusDC iPhone ap can figure out where you are, which bus stops you’re near, which lines stop there, and when the buses are coming (not just when they’re scheduled to come, but actually when they’re likely to show up) thanks to GPS transmitters on the buses. In general one of the best things a city can do these days is simply open information flows up so that third parties can develop interesting applications. If Google can access your city’s public transit scheduling data, then people can use Google Transit to figure out how to get where they’re going and your agency doesn’t need to worry about coming up with a better map-making program than Google’s. But by the same token, if some rival firm does invent a “better than Google” mapping program, they’ll be able to access your data too and launch a competing product.

LA is, in fact, neither the most nor the least transit-oriented city in America:

And since LA is so much larger than, say, Portland the LA mass transit situation is a much bigger deal in national policy terms. The question facing cities like these that aren’t very transit-friendly but nonetheless have lots of transit users is how do they want to go in the future. Should they continue with policies that favor the rich over the poor while being simultaneously deleterious to public health and the environment? That doesn’t sound like a great idea to me. Instead, it makes more sense to build density near existing rail stations, to invest in improved bus service and bicycle infrastructure, and to encourage future development to take on a more compact form.

The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

This strikes me as largely an adventure in definitional games. Why would you take an accounting of American cities that leaves out the three largest cities? Should we really list Travis County, TX (i.e., Austin) as part of a phenomenon called “The White City” when its proportion of non-Hispanic whites—51.8%—is dramatically below the national average? Austin is a bit less black than the country as a whole, in other words, but it’s also less white. Rather than an disproportionately white city, it’s a disproportionately Hispanic and Asian city.

But to take what I think is the ray of truth here, if you take a place that’s under-invested for decades in walkable urbanism and then create a bit of walkable urbanism the tendency is for that bit to become very expensive. And since African-American households have lower incomes and substantially less wealth than white households, the tendency is for the walkable urban places to become white. But to raise this as an objection to building walkable urbanism is like saying that we shouldn’t try to have great public schools, because poor people might not be able to afford to live near them. That’s totally backwards—the inability of poor people to afford to live in good school districts highlights the need for more good educational opportunities not fewer. By the same token, if investments in walkable urbanism cause prices to shoot up and price people out of the area that shows that we need more walkable urbanism.

Meanwhile, a number of “uncool” sunbelt cities are working to change their policies. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz is pushing for bicycles, there are newish light rail systems in Houston and Dallas and Phoenix, etc. And I’m not sure why majority-black Washington DC—home of by far the biggest and most successful example of postwar urban rail investment in America—doesn’t count as an example of progressive transportation policy.

Now comes Valley Metro, in one of the most apparently unpromising locations for transit of all, and it’s working, though not quite the way transit does in, say, New York, Boston, or Washington. Every day, Valley Metro attracts some 33,000 riders, way above the projected 26,000. But what’s interesting is the clientele. Unlike systems elsewhere, which are used principally by commuters, the 20 miles of rail in Phoenix running along the central spines of Phoenix and then through Tempe to Mesa are used largely by students shuttling between Arizona State University’s downtown and Tempe campuses, and people going to restaurants, bars, ball games, and cultural events downtown. Only 27 percent of the system’s riders use it for getting to work (compared to 60 percent elsewhere), which suggests that for now at least the Phoenix light rail will flourish as a sort of jitney service supporting a post-industrial metropolis’ ongoing cultivation of a classic entertainment district downtown, higher education there and in Tempe, and associated nodes of new and intensified development along Central Avenue.

Moving possibly intoxicated students around seems to me to be an underrated virtue of public transportation. Austin’s a fun town, for example, but when I was there I wished there weren’t quite so many people driving around after having so much fun. Growing up in New York then going to school in Boston and moving to DC, I’ve never really dealt with drunk driving youth culture on a consistent basis. In the parts of the country where there are no good alternatives I guess people are just accustomed to that sort of thing happening. But it’s really bad and dangerous.

But now comes the word that bus drivers are engaged in some kind of protest against recent concerns about the safety of their driving methods that involves S9 drivers refusing to pass S1/S2/S4 buses as the local buses make their stops. Obviously stopping and waiting at all the local stops completely defeats the purpose of creating an express bus alternative.

Assuming this dispute can get resolved, the next step for the S-buses should be to find portions of 16th Street where it makes sense to create well-enforced bus only lanes by taking lanes away from private automobiles or parking.

Via Ryan Avent, David Owen says that congestion pricing would be bad for the environment because traffic jams inspire people to take transit instead of driving.

This is, in my view, a very silly line of argument. It’s probably true that you could construct a model of a situation in which congestion pricing increases the net quantity of driving. But if that situation exists, and you want to change it, then there are lots of good policy options available. You could use the revenue from congestion pricing to finance more attractive transit options. Or you could take advantage of the reduce congestion to start taking lanes away from private automobiles and building bike and bus lanes. You could do all kinds of things.

The main point I would make is that the issue of whether or not you should congestion-price roadways is more-or-less at right angles with the question of how much your public infrastructure should promote driving versus cycling or transit or walking or anything else. The point of congestion-pricing is that the most efficient way to manage the scarce resource of space on crowded streets during peak hours is via a congestion price. That’s true no matter how much or how little driving you’re hoping to see. If you want people to drive less, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and invest in transit and bike infrastructure. If you want people to drive more, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and be stingy on transportation alternatives. But either way if you want to avoid productivity-killing traffic jams you ought to charge people for driving at peak hours.

I rode the Copenhagen Metro today and damn was it expensive—about $4 for the cheapest available (i.e., two zone) single ticket. That left me scratching my head as to why you would possibly put the fare so high. It turns out, however, that if you buy tickets ten at a time you get almost a 40 percent discount.

That’s much more reasonable, but it still strikes me as high. In general, cities everywhere seem to me to tend to charge too much for fares. The marginal cost of an additional passenger is extremely low—running a half full train costs the same as running a 75% full train—so basic economic logic indicates that the price of riding should also be very low. If the concern is that you shouldn’t have everyone’s tax dollars going to subsidize something that not everyone can take advantage of then the best solution might be to have a special tax on property located near metro stations. At the end of the day, getting more people to ride a system you’ve already built is beneficial even to the people who don’t ride it. In DC, for example, if people stopped taking Metro you’d have terrible traffic jams. Even someone who never rides Metro is benefiting from the fact that other people do ride it.

Was out in the suburbs of Copenhagen today for a bit, and they look, well, a lot like American suburbs except with smaller-than-average houses. But if you go visit an American suburb with smaller-than-average houses—usually an older one—then you’ll very much have the right idea. What was quite different, however, was the transportation from the suburbs into the central city. Copenhagen’s suburbs are organized around the “finger plan” illustrated in the map on the right. Each finger is, as you would do in the United States, built around an arterial road. But the roads have fewer lanes than an American arterial would have. But running alongside them (or at least running alongside the one our bus was driving on) are very nice, very wide bike paths. And roughly parallel to the roadways are the S-Tog commuter rail lines.

Consequently, there are fewer people driving on the road than you would have in the US and there are more people biking and taking the train.

It’s worth noting that this sort of thing leaves overall automobile congestion neither better nor worse than an alternative strategy of fewer options and wider roads would. Insofar as you build road capacity, drivers will fill that capacity up. You get a choice of what level of automobile traffic you want to see the congestion at. But if you actually want uncrowded rush hour roads then you have basically only two choices. One is that you can build “road to nowhere” type projects where the economic rationale for infrastructure development is so poor that people don’t really want to drive on your shiny new highway. The other is that you can do congestion-pricing. But absent congestion-pricing, even the really admirable provision of alternative modes has limited impact. When valuable goods are given away for free, you get shortages. Copenhagen is apparently considering following Stockholm and Oslo and implementing a congestion fee, but they haven’t done it yet.

Still the moral of the story is, I think, pretty clear. When you build infrastructure to facilitate commuting from suburbs to central cities, lots of people will avail themselves of the opportunity to move to the new suburbs. But how they actually get to the central city depends on what kind of infrastructure you build. If you build giant highways, they’ll drive. If you build smaller roads and also some trains, then some people will drive and some will take the train.

For the sake of comparison, note that Copenhagen is a pretty small city. There are 521,000 people in the city proper and 1.8 million in the metro area. That would make it the 30th largest metro area in the United States, slightly bigger than the Las Vegas MSA and slightly smaller than the Kansas City MSA. All told, about 129 million Americans live in metropolitan areas that are bigger than metro Copenhagen. About a third of Danish people live in Greater Copenhagen, whereas over 40 percent of Americans live in metro areas that are bigger than Greater Copenhagen.

When it comes to urban transportation, path dependency issues are everywhere. The more car-dependent people are the more political support there’ll be for car-promoting policies. Conversely, the more there retail and job opportunities are already accessible through non-automotive means, the more realistic it is for new residents to get by without a car, or for a family to get by with only one. And one interesting thing about the District of Columbia is that according to the Census Bureau we’re nearly fifty-fifty in terms of commuting patterns.

The city is also poised for further development and population growth in the years to come. So a crucial question is what form will that development take? If an outdated zoning code and short-sighted neighborhood groups force all new development to include vast swathes of parking, the city stands a good chance of “tipping” into a car-dependent pattern over time. Alternatively, if we create a situation in which new residents own cars if and only if they’re inclined to pay the true cost of owning and storing a vehicle, the city could achieve a clear majority for people who commute through non-automotive means. If that happens, the political context will exist for policies that clearly prioritize moving people over moving automobiles—things like dedicated bus lanes, separated bike paths, and traffic light timing schemes that take into account pedestrian safety and convenience. If that happens, it’s likely to be self-reinforcing.

With policy tilted more in favor of ease of transit, walking, and cycling more people will decide against relying on a car for day-to-day use. And that will create a bigger market for things like Zipcar and walking-accessible neighborhood retail. Most American cities are so firmly in the car-dependency camp that it’s a bit hard to know how you might get from here to there. But DC is right in the middle, and stands a good chance of evolving over the next couple of decades into a solid urbanist model, though it could also turn into a major missed opportunity.

Mike Tomasky wants to know why jet planes haven’t gotten any faster:

But here’s my question. Ever since the development of the noble Boeing 707, which started flying in 1958, transatlantic travel has taken what it takes today: seven or eight hours. Doesn’t it seem weird that they’ve never been able to improve this at a price regular people can afford? We had the SSTs, but a seat on one ran $10,000 a pop and they’ve now been discontinued anyway. [...] We have ovens that cook food faster than they did in 1958. We have computers that compute a million times faster. In 50 years’ time, the advance in innovation and speed in any number of areas has been breathtaking. Trains are faster (usually, where governments have invested in it, which excludes my beloved nation). So how is it that jet travel reached its technological end point in 1958? I’ve always wondered about this and would appreciate explanations.

My understanding is that this mostly has to do with fuel consumption. The underlying technology of “making planes go fast” has advanced quite a bit and was applied to the Concorde and a variety of military applications. The way a jet works, if you want to generate more power you need to use (and carry) more fuel and that costs money for reasons that have nothing to do with the R&D or production costs of the plane. Existing passenger jets typically operate at somewhat slower speeds than their engines are capable of achieving precisely for fuel economy reasons. Modern jet engines are very efficient at converting fuel into power already; the technological improvement needed would be some way to make the fuel itself cheaper. It’s also worth noting that passenger jets are already quite fast. To go substantially faster, you’d be traveling supersonically and that would restrict the number of routes your plane could actually fly on due to sonic boom issues. That, in turn, would make it hard to amortize the R&D costs in a way that made the planes a reasonable deal on a per-unit basis.

All this adds up to a situation in which the thing airlines are looking for from Boeing and Airbus are ways to make planes more efficient in the sense of moving more passengers per unit of fuel.

It is interesting, however, that based on the rapid pace of advance in aerospace technology in the roughly sixty years between the Wright Brothers getting their patent and 1969’s double-wammy of the Concorde and the Moon Landing you would have thought the ensuing 40 years might be full of further exciting innovations. Instead we decided that neither supersonic passenger travel nor landing people on the Moon was a particularly economical use of fuel.