Debating L.A.'s Growth, Traffic and Transit
The Transit Coalition's Bart Reed and USC planning Professor Peter Gordon debate transit and traffic in L.A. in this five-part point-counterpoint series.
"L.A. County's Metropolitan Transportation Authority recently decided on a novel approach to mitigating the area's notorious traffic congestion: charging drivers to use some carpool lanes. Is this fair? Does it signal a new era in transportation and growth planning in L.A.? And where's that "subway to the sea"? All week, the Transit Coalition's Bart Reed and USC Professor Peter Gordon debate traffic, growth and transit in Los Angeles."
Topic of discussion include: toll roads, the "subway to the sea", congestion pricing, sprawl, and the future of the city.
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Re: the Subway to the Sea
Re: the Subway to the Sea debate (+ CCDC Rant Exclusive)
Prof. Gordon and other public transit-capacity-expansion skeptics across the U.S. (including Secretary of Transportation Peters and FTA Administrator Simpson) keep making the wrong assumptions and asking the wrong questions in their analysis of the costs and benefits of various transportation projects.
Building transportation infrastructure should be about *accessibility*, not just mobility. A mile of Broadway in Manhattan should not have the same travel value as a mile of, e.g., the Sam Houston Tollway. Yet distance traveled is used as a measuring stick.
It should be about giving people a viable and convenient choice of mode in reaching their destination, and being able to avoid vehicle congestion altogether. Transit should not be built so that *someone else* will leave their car at home and make *your* drive smoother.
Right now gas is $3.60 a gallon on average in the U.S. The economics and geopolitics of energy dictate that this price will only rise further. I wonder how bad this worsening crisis will get before our leaders finally start proposing honest solutions whereby we invest in the planning and infrastructure needed for people to leave their houses without driving a car to get to their destinations. I wish they'd stop lying to us and telling us that punishing corporate strawmen will end high prices (it won't) or that increasing domestic production and destroying our environment in the process will be a supply panacea (it won't). Mass transit, mass transit, mass transit. Consumption taxes, consumption taxes, consumption taxes. Maybe if we repeat it enough people will start listening.
Physician... You know the rest.
Mass transit, mass transit, mass transit. Consumption taxes, consumption taxes, consumption taxes. Maybe if we repeat it enough people will start listening.
Which is it? Mass transit or consumption taxes? The two are mutually exclusive. Surely use of mass transit is a consumption. Surely consumers of transit are not being taxed.
Transit riders pay
Transit riders pay consumption taxes - they're just called "fares."
Negative Taxes
Transit users are subsidized. Only in Transitworld would a subsidy be called a tax.
2006 National Top 50 Aggregate Transit Data:
Total Operating Funds Expended $23,891,400,000
Total Capital Funds Expended $10,261,000,000
Annual Passenger Miles 40,763,900,000
Fare Revenues Earned $8,847,900,000
Cost 84¢ per passenger mile.
Charge to riders 22¢ per passenger mile.
Get back to us when fares reach $1.10/pass mi.
Robert, I would agree with
Robert, I would agree with you that transit is indeed taxpayer subsidized and that it is, more often than not, costly to build. However, we probably disagree about what measuring sticks would constitute a "successful" transit system. "Great Rail Disasters" and other publications by transit critics, to my mind, ignore the tremendous positive externalities of transit. I'd be puzzled by anyone who thinks that, say, the Washington, DC Metro is not an engine for physical and economic development in the region, or that the region would be better off had the system never been built.
I believe that, at a time when cheap motor fuels are a thing of the past and when our urbanized areas are becoming the ever-more dominant drivers of our economy, that transit is, and will steadily become even more so, an indispensable component of the transportation network. I believe that those metropolitan areas with the strongest transit components to their transportation networks are in the best position to weather a high energy price future. In short, in my mind it's well worth the costs. I also think it to be short-sighted to make policy decisions that encourage more driving, such as new and expanded intra-metropolitan highways.
So then, if you believe that transit investment is a waste of money for something you'll never use, do you also actively oppose new road and highway projects built with your tax dollars that you'll never lay rubber on? It just seems to me, based on my observations, that such outcry just isn't there for road projects by the same people who oppose transit projects on cost grounds. Is it possible that by its public-good nature, transit provokes a more visceral response?
ChevyChase - Don't feed the trolls
ChevyChaseDC... do you think that an industry that can make a country go to war cannot afford internet trolls?
There is nothing, nothing, that the carbon-auto industry will not do to protect its trillion-dollar subsidies.
There are dozens of paid and wannabe trolls for them crawling the internet engaging good people in useless "debate". We need to build a mass movement to remove the restraint-of-trade tariff on our public investment.
http://www.frepubtra.blogspot.com/
Trillions Now
No one is asking for anything more than supporting evidence.
No Disagreement
You'd be surprised. I've no problem with externalities. They exist and while difficult to measure they cannot be ignored. I wasn't addressing those. The simple fact is that internally transit is massively subsidized. Go ahead, make the case for externalities but start by acknowledging that transit is massively and directly subsidized as well. Pointing to fares and calling them user taxes is both incorrect and an insult to readers.
Drivers are subsidized too
Transit is no more subsidized than roads/gasoline and the level of the gas "tax" amounts to a subsidy as well.
The true cost of gasoline, without government intervention, including foreign aid to oil producing countries, military interventions, tax incentives, etc is by the most conservative measures in the $5-$6/gallon range (other estimates have it as high as $15). And this does not even include the dramatic loss of life and injuries caused by auto dependence. 42,000 people die each year in traffic accidents and rail transit 10 times safer per passenger mile. Factor in those costs in loss of productivity and the cost per gallon goes even higher.
Crickets chirping...
Yes? And the list of these auto subsidies? I just showed with NTD data that transit is subsidized 60¢ per passenger mile. Were POV travel subsidized the same, the bill would come to $4 trillion. Just where in the entire $17 trillion US economy are you finding room for a quarter of the economy going directly to subsidizing the auto passenger? You don't. You are absolutely wrong in your uninformed assertion that "Transit is no more subsidized than roads/gasoline." Worse you spout the old and long abandoned $5-$15 per gallon "True Cost of Gasoween." That would be $800 billion to $2.6 trillion which again is far far less than what is demonstrably thrown at transit passenger miles.