They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot

In the field of urbanism and land use policy, there are two major anti-market forces at work in America: zoning laws that mandate low density, and parking laws that mandate lots of parking. Both are often ignored when it comes to discussions of transportation and the environment, but the Washington Post has a rare story about parking. The story is specifically focused on Tysons Corner, a suburban edge city outside of DC which has become a major job center in recent years. The town's Wikipedia article calls it "the opposite of a bedroom community, with a daytime population greater than 70,000 and a nighttime population of about 18,000."

Anyway, like most edge cities in America, the place is literally paved over, with 40 million square feet of parking compared to 28 million square feet of office space. And at 167,000 spots in total, there are more than three times the number of spots (50,000) as in "downtown Washington" (what exactly that means – everything in DC? – is unclear). Though the article laments all this parking, it's never exactly clear why there is so much parking. Is it built by the government, or built by private developers? Do the developers build it because that's what the market demands, or do they build it because minimum parking regulations force them to? The article gives a few hints that it's the government, not the developers, who want all the parking:

Yet private developers, including the big retailers, are ready to do with less parking. They welcome the chance to spend less money building parking structures, which can cost as much as $40,000 per parking space. [...]

"The market quickly figured out that you didn't need as much parking," said Arlington board member Chris Zimmerman (D). [...]

"County planners may also be an impediment, Schwartz said, noting that the county increased its parking requirements recently for some developments."

Overall, I'm not terribly impressed with the article. It could have gone a lot deeper explaining why exactly there is so much parking, discussing the economics of minimum parking regulations and the Catch-22 that says that mass transit won't be built without density, but density won't be allowed without transit. Or they could have picked a developer and had him discuss the costs of the project and layout of a particular project if he built the whole thing according to how he wants it, versus the plan that he'll eventually be forced to accept due to minimum parking regulations. For a deeper treatment of the subject, see Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking. I haven't read the book, but it sure looks interesting – you can find reviews and discussion of the book and the idea here, here, and here, with an ungated article from 1999 by the author on the same subject here.

(HT: Planetizen, an invaluable daily stream of articles related to land use, urbanism, and transportation.)

Humans go to work, come home, stay home

Over at the Antiplanner's blog (I find his blog's name incredibly ironic given the author's views, but that's for another time), where I often find myself sucked into repetitive arguments about the merits of contemporary American land use and transportation policy, one commenter made the assertion that individualized transport is inherently superior to mass transit because:

By definition and, communal transport meets only the most common needs. One might lower their aspirations, but it would be like telecom reverting to the party-line phone at the general store.

I take issue with this comment on a number of levels, but today I read an article in the NYT that suggests that "common needs" might be just about all we need. The article is about a study published in Nature that analyzed the movement pattern of 100,000 people in an unnamed European country via cell phone records. The Times write-up didn't have any quantitative specifics, and the study itself is gated, but the researchers concluded that "[i]ndividuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work." It makes you wonder how necessary the on-demand flexibility of the road/car system really is.

Edit: Reader DS points to this link for an ungated version of the article.

Thomas Edison builds the first el

From Wired, today is 125th anniversary of the debut of Thomas Edison's elevated electric railway demonstration in Chicago. The project was financed with $2 million in private funds, through the newly-incorporated Electric Railway Company. It's enough to make you nostalgic for the days when the government wasn't so involved in transportation and regulating land use, and that it was actually possible for the market to come up with transportation solutions other than the privately-owned, publicly-supported automobiles of today.

It's important to remember, though, that while government regulations was minimal enough that private mass transit companies could exist, they were still hampered by Big Brother. For example, in Chicago, the early elevated train lines didn't go into the central business district because of NIMBY opposition:

Instead trains dropped passengers at stub terminals on the periphery due to a state law requiring approval by neighboring property owners for tracks built over public streets, something not easily obtained downtown.

Road building and the Great Depression

I was reading today a book on the history of roads in 20th century America called The Geography of Nowhere. I was a bit disappointed in the book itself – I was looking for a more detailed treatment of the funding and scope of government road projects – but I came across this interesting bit about road expenditures before the Great Depression: "A commission under President Hoover concluded that the automobile was the 'most potent influence' on the rise of local taxes between 1913 and 1930." This caught my eye because according to Amity Schlaes' The Forgotten Man, property taxes were the most difficult tax for Americans to pay during the Great Depression. In a time before the widespread adoption of income and sales taxes, property taxes made up the lion's share of local government revenues: two-thirds of all revenue according to Dick Netzer, and over 90% of all taxes levied in cities of more than 30,000 according to David Beito.

Because this was in an era before politicians recognized the incremental wisdom in at least pretending to fund roads with user fees, this run-up in taxes was part of a larger trend of the pre-WWII era: property owners and renters were subsidizing roads for the benefit of the wealthy. Real estate developers who ran private forms of mass transit (mostly streetcars) and who were in direct competition with government-financed roads were some of the biggest payers of taxes, which makes the transfer especially ironic. I'd known that road construction was a big driver of industry and commerce in the first half of the twentieth century, but I hadn't realized the exacerbating effect those costs had during the Great Depression.

Transportation tradeoffs

In the US at least, it's common wisdom that people simply don't like mass transit. They won't use it, ever, some say. Of course, from an economic point of view, that's absurd – every good has its utility value, and costs can go from zero to almost infinity. While American doesn't seem to be in danger of becoming anything but a 90% car society any time soon, the NYT has an article that reports huge upticks in ridership of public transit systems throughout the US. (I blogged about a similar article a few months ago, but this one is much more comprehensive.) While traditionally transit-oriented cities like New York are reporting gains in ridership, the biggest gains are coming from systems in places that are very car-oriented: Miami's commuter trains saw year-to-date increases of almost 30% in April, and Minneapolis-St. Paul's Hiawatha Line saw a rise of 16% over the past year.

The article cites rising gasoline prices as the primary impetus for the shift, and notes that the trend could indicate that the economy is still strong:

“If we are in a recession or economic downturn, we should be seeing a stagnation or decrease in ridership, but we are not,” said Daniel Grabauskas, general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which serves the Boston area. “Fuel prices are without question the single most important factor that is driving people to public transportation.”

Limousine liberals may be on to something

What do ya know – apparently those latte-sipping, gay-marryin', limousine liberals from San Francisco really aren't so hypocritical when it comes to energy consumption. According to the Mercury News, via Planetizen, the Bay Area is urbanizing after a period of suburban growth. The urban San Francisco has its highest population ever, 80% of new housing units in San Jose were in high-density buildings. Naturally, the "planners" didn't anticipate the trend:

Given the run of bad national and state economic news, "it surprised me a little bit," said Michael Bills, a senior planner in the San Jose planning division. "I figured it was going to start to taper off, and it certainly did not."

These urban areas are going to be served more by state-run mass transit versus the corporatized road/car model. While I'm generally against planning and government intervention, it's not really that much of a stretch to believe that moving from a bizarre hybrid system to a more completely nationalized system might be a step in the right direction, since the completely nationalized system appears to hew more closely to the style of living that would be dictated by a market allocation of land and transportation.

San Francisco also has some pretty interesting urban development plants. The Transbay develpment calls for a dozen skyscrapers (including two with 101 floors) in San Francisco proper. While these are great for the environment, geopolitics, and libertarian causes in general, a potentially more interesting project is the redevelopment of Treasure Island. The plans call for a couple of skyscrapers, along with a plot of farmland, solar panels and wind turbines, and a natural waste treatment ecosystem to make the 0.9 square-mile island virtually self-sufficient. Popular Science did a fascinating article in January covering the ecological and environmental aspect of the plan, but financial and logistical details are harder to come by. The SF Chronicle has an article that covers a few of the financial details, and unfortunately it looks like the project is receiving a fair amount of subsidies in city bonds and infrastructural development. This isn't surprising considering the competitive disadvantage that not taking state subsidies puts you at, but it does seem possible that in the future government plans will become so unsustainable that it can be economically viable to go without. As for cars on the island, while the emphasis will be on an unspecified "robust network of transportation choices" and pedestrian paths, it does appear that the island will have roads. Construction on the Transbay supertall towers is set to begin in 2009, and residents of the new Treasure Island developments are expected to be able to move in in 2013.

Libertarians for statism

I was reading a blog I just found about/called Market Urbanism, and in it the author links to an article in Governing Magazine about the hypocrisy of libertarian think-tanks advocating tax dollars be spent on public roads. It's the first time I've ever seen something in print about this sort of vulgar libertarianism when it comes to transportation (something I've written about a few times). The author calls out the Reason Foundation and its founder Robert Poole for their especially egregious violations of free market principle, and this paragraph just about sums up my thoughts on why American so-called libertarians love socialized roads:

Many of the authors of these studies are a rotating castof writers who pop up again and again, including Randal O'Toole and Wendell Cox. They "extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles" wrote fellow libertarian and New York Times columnist John Tierney in a 2004 article on the subject. Tierney calls them, including himself, "the autonomists." That is, libertarians who have embraced highway spending, although they focus more on the individually-bought car, not the government-built road it requires.

The article isn't all good, though. Even though the author correctly recognizes that America's "automobile-based landscape of suburbs, single-family homes, office parks, mega churches and shopping malls" is a government machination, he still reminds us that "[o]ur national road system would never have been built if every street were required to pay for itself." Yeah, that's exactly the point! Our "national road system" is the problem, and the author's implication is that not only would there be no "national road system," but that roads are indeed synonymous with transportation. But just because we wouldn't have trillion-dollar pavement stretching across the continent doesn't mean we wouldn't be able to get across the continent – or, more importantly, wherever it is that we want to go.

Nature's best friend: the city

From Wired, here's a very informative map of per-capita carbon emissions in the United States. If you want total carbon emissions (not per capita), they have another. The maps are essentially inverted – the places that use the most amount of total energy are the most densely populated, yet they emit much less carbon per person. Even cities that we don't think of as very urban – like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and all cities in Texas – do very well in per-capita carbon emissions. In the original article, they show a close-up of the LA metro area, and it actually says that some parts have negative carbon emissions. I don't really understand how that's possible, but the point – that they have a carbon footprint about an order of magnitude smaller – is well taken.

There are a few reasons why cities are so much more efficient than other types of living. For one, people occupy smaller houses, and those houses are often stacked on top of each other, allowing more insulation, which reduces heating and cooling costs. Their transportation carbon footprint is much lower, since car ownership is less prevalent, and ground-based mass transit is remarkably energy efficient. This applies to all goods consumed in cities: since many distribution systems are based at least somewhat on a hub-and-spoke model, being in the "hub" allows goods to get to you much faster, using less energy. Furthermore (and this may account for the negative carbon emissions of the most densely-populated centers), the amount of nature that has to be destroyed is much lower, and many natural landscapes (forests, plains, etc.) act as carbon sinks, removing carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into oxygen.

Most of the time, efficiency in energy equates with efficiency in economics, as the system will use fewer inputs to achieve the same output. However, we'll never know, since the most polluting industries (transportation and energy production) have had their market signals removed by government policies and regulation, ensuring the perpetuation of the very anti-market status quo.

Cato's great libertarian idea

I was stumbling around the shadier corridors of the internets and I stumbled upon this jarringly mindless comment from someone at the Cato Institute, the supposedly libertarian think-tank:

"Too many American cities are spending far too much money on expensive rail transit projects, which are used for only 1 to 2 percent of local travel, and far too little on highway projects which are used for 95 to 99 percent of local travel," Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, said in an e-mail interview.

So, Cato's "libertarian" position on the matter: the government subsidized and supported roads and cars and we now have lots of roads and cars, therefore the government ought to continue to to build and maintain highway projects to maintain continuity. Wow – this could take the prize for vulgar libertarianism.

Mass transit ridership increase

Something I hear often when I try to convince people that the prevalence of the automobile has everything to do with its below-market cost is that it wouldn't matter how much it costs, people like riding in cars. Today, though, comes a study by the American Public Transportation Association (reported by Yahoo, here's the original report) that shows that mass transit ridership has increased about 2% in the US over the last year, and about 4.5% in Canada over the same period. Population growth, I believe, is lower than this, which indicates an overall increase in mass transit ridership over the same time period as the cost of gasoline has risen about 20%.

Though I'm not up for it right now, it would be interesting to calculate the total cost of travel by car (which surely rose by much less than 20%, given that gasoline is only one of the costs), and then calculate the price elasticity of demand for car travel. Unlike most, I'd be willing to bed that its elasticity is closer to 1 than to 0.

Ronald Bailey on global warming

After reading about libertarian science journalist Ron Bailey's recent conversion to the man-made global warming camp, I asked myself the question that I often ask myself when reading about libertarians and global warming: why the hell wouldn't you believe in it? It's obvious to most conservatives and libertarians that communism and central planning would produce horrific environmental tragedies: the tragedy of the commons would destroy communally-owned property, and the state wouldn't have proper incentives or knowledge to maintain the environment that it controls. However, they fail to apply that logic to the American economy. Though we might indeed be one of the freest economies in the world, it would be absurd to say that the economy is totally free. In fact, the sectors of the economy which emit the most carbon – transportation, energy production, and "buildings" – are incredibly subsidized and regulated, often with environmentally damaging results.

Since at least the beginning of the 20th century, various levels of government have decided that America's mode of transportation should be almost exclusively the automobile. Before World War II, in cities, the majority of urban commuters' journeys were made via mass transit (mass transit, but rarely public transit). This all changed when local governments began instituting low density zoning regulations and building tax-payer funded roads free for public consumption, and when state and federal governments began ponying up the cash for extensive highway systems. Given that low density development, roads, and police officers patrolling roads are all complementary goods for the automobile, it's no wonder the technology took off. Throughout Americans cities and suburbs, medium or high density development is all but impossible in a lot of places, and this is an obvious prerequisite for profitable mass transit. Today, the largest public works project in the nation's history is the Interstate Highway System, governments still don't cover anywhere near the full cost of their roads with gas taxes, and the overwhelming majority of the trips made by Americans are made in cars (definitely over 90%). Due to the intense network effects associated with transit and land use, it's no surprise that the entire transportation industry has been co-opted by the state, and that it is impossible to run a profitable transit firm that doesn't rely heavily on government subsidies (as do all auto manufacturers and even privatized highways).

Now, this is clearly a problem from an economic point of view, but more relevantly, it's a huge problem from an environmental point of view. The direct effects of road travel are pretty large: over 25% of all carbon emissions in the US come directly out of the tailpipes of cars and trucks. The indirect effects are even larger: low density development encourages larger living spaces, which require more materials to construct and more energy to heat. They are also less efficiently heated/cooled than stacked spaces (i.e., tall buildings) due to the fact that they're surrounded by the elements, whereas an apartment on the 25th floor of a 50-story building is much better insulated.

So, I come away from that article wondering primarily why free market adherents are so blinded to government intervention in transportation (a complementary good to...everything) to the point that they can't fathom that our supposedly free market system could ever result in a poor outcome. But secondly, how come Ron Bailey doesn't see this, and instead decides that the way to deal with the issue is a carbon tax? Or does he recognize that it's a problem of government intervention, and believes simply (and perhaps correctly) that these state policies are too ingrained to change? (How do you explain to the American people that the American dream of owning your own single-family home in the suburbs and two SUVs parked in the driveway is a sham?)