Transportation

Is life really better in Red States (and cities)?

Posted on by Joe Cortright

The red state/blue state divide is a persistent feature of American politics. Political differences among states are also associated with important economic differences, and a similar patterns hold across and within metro areas. Big cities are more likely to be blue, and smaller towns and rural areas are red. The more densely populated portions of every metro area are also more likely to be blue. Understanding and eventually bridging these fissures is a major challenge for the nation.

In an article in last week’s New York Times, urbanist Richard Florida seems to have, if perhaps only inadvertently, given aid and comfort to the persistent myth that people are somehow worse off in big cities compared with smaller towns and suburbs.

It could be that this impression is amplified by the headline writer’s provocative question: “Is life better in America’s Red States?” While he doesn’t directly answer this question, Florida seems to imply that because housing is on average cheaper in red states, people who live there must be better off.

But is it the case that cheap housing is a reliable marker of economic well-being?

While it’s true that average home prices are higher in blue states, it’s important to consider why that is, and what it signifies. First and most importantly, blue state housing prices are driven higher because incomes and economic productivity are higher in bluer states and bluer cities. GDP per capita tends to be higher in metro areas that favored President Obama’s re-election by the widest margin, as shown here:

 

 

Note: if you hover over the orange trend line, you will see that the p-value is low and significant at the 1% threshold. (The p-value measures the statistical likelihood that the relationship between vote margin and productivity –measured by GDP per capita–is different from zero).  It measures correlation and tells us nothing about causality.    You can see the now familiar red-blue pattern on the attached map; the size of circles for each city corresponds to GDP per capita:  

The question then is, are higher housing prices in blue places an indication that the standard of living is lower?

Focusing on dollars per square foot misses the important fact that, unlike our stone age ancestors, we don’t rely on shelter solely as a means of warding off the cold, dark and wild beasts. We don’t value houses just as boxes—location matters. The reason the price of a square foot of land in Manhattan is worth as much as an acre of farmland in North Dakota has everything to do with the access it provides to a range of services, experiences and goods.

To an economist, if people are willing to pay a higher price for something—like housing in Manhattan or San Francisco or Honolulu—it’s a good indication that it has a higher value. A big part of the reason housing prices are higher in bigger cities than small ones is that we value the personal and economic opportunities that come from being close to lots of other people. As University of Chicago economist and Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas famously put it: “What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for, if not being near other people?”

Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City, has explored this theme in great depth. Increasingly, he argues, the biggest driver of city growth is the consumption advantages of living in cities, with close proximity to a wide range of goods, services, experiences, social interactions and cultural activities. This “consumer city” theory means that cities increase the well-being of their residents by facilitating all kinds of consumption. Indeed there are whole categories of goods, and especially services that are simply unavailable at any price outside major cities: think of everything from diverse ethnic restaurants to specialized medical care to cutting edge live art and music.

Provocative new work by Jessie Handbury shows once you adjust for the variety and quality of goods available in different places, the cost of living in big cities is actually lower than smaller cities. Her work looks at variations in the price and availability of food. It’s almost certain that differences in services are even more skewed in favor of city residents.

Moreover, looking just at differences in housing costs ignores important city advantages of density, proximity and convenience. Higher rents invariably provide city residents with better physical access to jobs, shopping, culture and social interaction. As Scott Bernstein and his colleagues at the Center for Neighborhood Technology have shown, savings in transportation costs in cities largely, and in some cases fully, offset differences in rents.

People who live in blue cities drive much less on average than those who live in red cities, and the savings in time and expense are substantial. My own work shows that residents of blue Portland Oregon drive about 20 percent less than in other large metro areas, saving them more than a billion dollars a year in transportation costs.

Florida makes one point that we all ought to pay attention to: as a nation we’d be much better off if we created more opportunities for people to live and work in blue cities. Because residents in big blue cities are so much more productive than otherwise identical workers in smaller red cities, we take a substantial hit to national economic productivity and growth. Enrico Moretti estimates GDP would be 13 percent or so higher if it weren’t for constrained population growth in these highly productive cities.

There’s an old adage that claims than an economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Assuming that difference in house prices per square foot across metropolitan areas accurately reflects cost of living differences is arguably wrong. Cheap houses entail high costs for other things—like transportation—and to believe cheap houses automatically equals better quality of life misses the huge and tangible differences in the price and availability of a whole range of goods, services and experiences that make life nicer.

The political message here ought to be the high prices for blue cities generally, and the growing market premium for housing in dense, urban neighborhoods particularly, is a signal that Americans want more cities, and more opportunities for urban living. It’s a fair criticism of blue cities to say that they haven’t done a good enough job of making it possible for more people to live there—and this has a lot to do with local land use planning. But it has also been amplified by decades of federal subsidies to sprawling low-density development.

One final addendum on Richard Florida’s political analysis: as troubling as the persistent red/blue divide is among states and cities, it’s probably wrong to attribute the 2014 election results to this dichotomy. The huge fall off in turnout, especially among younger voters compared to 2012, is clearly the big driver of November’s red tide. Not only was 2014 the lowest off-year election turnout—only 37 percent—in six decades, but the electorate skewed far older in 2014 than in 2012. Voters over 65 made up 22 percent of voters in 2014, up from 16 percent in 2012; voters under 30 made up 13 percent of the electorate down from 19 percent in 2012. The 2014 red surge wasn’t so much geographic as it was demographic.

How Should Portland Pay for Streets?

Posted on by Joe Cortright

For the past several months, Portland’s City Council has been wrestling with various proposals to raise additional funds to pay for maintaining and improving city streets. After considering a range of ideas, including fees on households and businesses, a progressive income tax, and a kind of Rube Goldberg income tax pro-rated to average gasoline consumption, the council has apparently thrown up its hands on designing its own solution.

The plan now is for the street fee solution to be laid at the feet of Portland voters in the form of a civic multiple choice test: Do you want to pay for streets with a monthly household street fee, a higher gas tax, a property tax, an income tax or something else entirely?

Given voter antipathy of taxes of any kind, it’s likely that “none of the above” would win in a landslide if it’s included as an option on the ballot (not likely).

All of these options have their own merits and problems, and it’s doubtful that there is a majority consensus for any one of them. How, how much, and who pays for streets is a key issue for every city. From an urbanist and public finance perspective, and as a guide to thinking about which—if any—of these approaches Portland should adopt, here are my eight suggested rules for paying for streets:

1. Don’t tax houses to subsidize cars. Despite mythology to the contrary, cars don’t come close to paying for the cost of the transportation system. The Tax Foundation estimates that only 30% of the cost of roads is covered by user fees like the gas tax. Not only do cars get a free ride when it comes to covering the cost of public services—unlike homes, they’re exempt from the property tax—but we tax houses and businesses to pay for car-related costs. Here are three quick examples: While half of storm runoff is from streets, driveways and parking lots, cars aren’t charged anything for stormwater—but houses are. A big share of the fire department’s calls involve responding to car crashes—and cars pay nothing toward fire department costs. Similarly, the police department spends a significant amount of its energy enforcing traffic laws—this cost is borne largely by property taxes—which houses pay, but cars don’t. If we need more money for streets, it ought to be charged on cars.

Adding a further charge on houses to subsidize car travel only worsens a situation  in which those who don’t own cars subsidize those who do. One in seven Portland households doesn’t own a car, and because they generally have lower incomes than car owners, fees tied to housing redistribute income from the poor to the rich.

2. End socialism for private car storage in the public right of way. Except for downtown and a few close-in neighborhoods, we allow cars to convert public property to private use for unlimited free car storage. Not asking those who use this public resource to contribute to the cost of its construction and upkeep makes no sense and ultimately subsidizes car ownership and driving. This subsidy makes traffic worse and unfortunately—but understandably—makes it harder and more expensive to build more housing in the city’s walkable, accessible neighborhoods. If, as parking expert Don Shoup has suggested, we asked those who use the streets for overnight car storage to pay for the privilege, we’d go a long way in reducing the city’s transportation budget shortfall—plus, we’d make the city more livable.  We should learn from the city’s success in reforming handicapped parking that getting the prices right makes the whole system work better.

3. Reward behavior that makes the transportation system work better for everyone. Paying for the transportation system isn’t just about raising revenue—it should be about providing strong incentives for people to live, work and travel in ways that make the transportation system work better and make the city more livable. Those who bike, walk, use transit, and who don’t own cars (or own fewer cars) actually make the street system work better for the people who do own and use cars. We ought to structure our user fee system to encourage these car-free modes of transportation, and provide a financial reward to those who drive less. The problem with a flat-household fee or an income tax is it provides no incentive for people to change their behavior in a way that creates benefits for everyone.

4. Prioritize maintenance. There’s a very strong argument that we shouldn’t let streets deteriorate to the point where they require costly replacement. Filling potholes and periodically re-surfacing existing streets to protect the huge investment we’ve already made should always be the top priority. Sadly, this kind of routine maintenance takes a back seat to politically sexier proposals to expand capacity. We need an ironclad “fix it first” philosophy. Also, we need to guard against “scope creep” in maintenance. There’s a tendency, once a “repair” project gets moving, to opt for the most expensive solution (see bridges: Sellwood, Columbia River Crossing). That’s great if your project gets funded, but a few gold-plated replacements drain money that could produce much more benefit if spread widely.  We need to insist on lean, cost-effective maintenance.

5. Don’t play “bait and switch” by bonding revenue to pay for shiny, big projects. There’s an unfortunate and growing tendency for those in the transportation world to play bait-and-switch with maintenance needs. They’ll tell us about the big maintenance backlog to justify tax and fee increases. Then they bond two or three decades worth of future revenue to pay for a shiny new project; the Sellwood Bridge and the local share of the Portland-Milwaukie light rail have been funded largely by tying up the increase in state gas tax revenue,vehicle registration fees, and flexible federal funds for the next two decades. The state, which routinely financed construction on a pay-as-you-go basis, has also maxed out its credit card: in 2002 ODOT spent less than 2% of its state revenue on debt service; today, it spends 35%. Now it is pleading poverty on highway maintenance. Politically, this makes a huge amount of sense.  You get to build the projects today, and pass the costs into the future. Unfortunately, in practice it leads to a few gold-plated projects now, while jeopardizing the financial viability of the transportation system in the long run.

6. Promote fairness through the “user pays” principle. We all want the system to be “fair.” In the case of general taxes, we often put a priority on progressivity—that taxes ought to be geared toward ability to pay. But for something like transportation (as with water rates, sewer rates, or parking meter charges), fairness is best achieved by tying the cost to the amount of use, or what economists call the “benefit principle.” Charges tied to use are fair for two important reasons: higher income people tend to use (in this case, drive) more than others, and therefore will end up paying more. Also, charges tied to use enable people to lower the amount they pay by changing their behavior.

7. Don’t buy the phony safety card. We’ll hear all about the need to spend money to make our streets safer. The safety argument is an all-purpose smokescreen to justify almost any expenditure, no matter how distantly related to safety. (Ostensibly, the $3.5 billion Columbia River Crossing project was justified as a “safety” project, even though the I-5 bridge had a lower crash rate than the Fremont Bridge). Here’s the key fact of street safety: Smaller, slower streets are safer. Metro’s region-wide analysis of crash data showed that fast-moving, multi-lane arterials are by far the most dangerous streets in the region for cars, cyclists, and pedestrians . The more we get people out of cars, the more crashes and injuries decline. The most effective thing we can do to improve safety turns out to be the cheapest: implement features that slow and calm traffic, and make walking, cycling, and transit more attractive.

Correction:  Commissioner Steve Novick points out correctly  that his proposal contains a specific list of laudable safety projects that he proposes undertaking with street fee proceeds if his proposal is adopted.  These projects don’t fall into the “phony safety” category outlined above.  My apologies if this commentary implied otherwise.  Still, voters should consider two other things.  First, while the proposed list is a good one, it is “preliminary and subject to change” and isn’t binding on future city commissions, and the “safety” category is an elastic one.  Safety projects are defined as those that “reduce the likelihood of a person being killed or injured and address the perception of risk.”  Second, transportation money is very fungible.  Its always possible to re-arrange the budget to tell someone that this “new” money is only being used for good purposes.   The larger question is the overall priorities for the entire transportation budget.  If safety spending out of current revenues is reduced, the net gain could be less than advertised.(Revised, 10.20 PM January 8).

8. Don’t write off the gas tax yet. There’s a widely repeated shibboleth that more fuel-efficient vehicles have made the gas tax obsolete. Despite its shortcomings as a revenue source—chiefly that it bears no relationship to the time of day or roadway that drivers use—there’s nothing wrong with the gas tax as a way to finance street maintenance that a higher tax rate wouldn’t solve. While other methods like a vehicle-miles-traveled fee make a lot of sense, the reason they’re popular with the transportation crowd is because they would be set high enough to raise more money. And there’s the rub: people are opposed to the gas tax not because of what is taxed, but because of how much they have to pay. As an incremental solution to our maintenance funding shortfall, there’s a lot to like about a higher gas tax: it requires no new administrative structure, it’s crudely proportionate to use, and it provides some incentives for better use of streets. So when very serious people gravely intone that the gas tax is “obsolete” or “politically impossible”—you should know what they’re really saying is that people simply don’t want to pay more for streets.

Transportation and urban livability are closely intertwined. Over the past few decades it has become apparent that building our cities to cater to the needs of car traffic have produced lower levels of livability. There are good reasons to believe that throwing more money at the existing system of building and operating streets will do little to make city life better. How we choose to pay for our street system can play an important role in shaping the future of our city. As Portlanders weigh the different proposals for a street fee in the coming months, they should keep that thought at the top of their minds.

Metro’s “Why Bother” Climate Change Strategy

Posted on by Joe Cortright

If you’ve hung around enough espresso joints, you’ve probably heard someone order a “tall, non-fat decaf latte.” This is what baristas often call a “why bother?” That would also be a good alternate description for the Metro Climate Smart Communities Plan.

Framed in glowing rhetoric, the plan purports to be a two-decade long region-wide strategy for meeting our responsibility to address this serious global problem. But in reality it sets goals so low that they actually call for reducing the pace at which we’re reducing driving and greenhouse gas emissions.

This weak plan is all the more surprising given the area’s history. The Portland area has long prided itself on being a forward-looking first mover, when it comes to seriously addressing climate change. More than two decades ago the City of Portland became the nation’s first local government to adopt a greenhouse gas reduction plan.

It’s increasingly apparent that climate change is a serious menace. Now, Portland’s elected regional government is working on a new effort to develop what it calls a “climate smart communities plan.”

Transportation is the region’s single largest source of greenhouse gases, so it makes sense to focus on transportation. Metro’s plan sets a number of targets to guide regional transportation planning that in theory might help the region reduce its carbon emissions from transportation over the next two decades. The key performance measure is “vehicle miles traveled,” or VMT– basically a count of how much driving we do in the region. Right now, the average Portland area resident drives about 19 miles per person per day. There are a lot of ways to measure the transportation system–bike mode share, number of bus hours, total number of transit passengers, counts of pedestrians. But if you have to pick one number that tells you how car-dependent and emissions heavy your transportation system is, it’s VMT. And by the rules of thumb prescribed by transportation engineers, VMT levels translate in a very straightforward way into the “need” for more roads capacity for cars. If VMT goes up, they’ll say, you need more roads. If it goes down, you’ll need less.

Over the past decade, Portland has made good progress in reducing VMT. Since 2006–when we drove about 20.1 miles per person per day, we’ve cut driving at an average annual rate of about 1.7 percent per year. Since 1996–a period that includes an era of much cheaper gas prices–driving has fallen about 1 percent per year. But that was all in the past when we were un-enlightened and pretty un-motivated about the threat of climate change. Now that we’re serious–and we’re “smart” about this issue– we’re really going to get aggressive, right? Not so much.

Metro’s plan is that we reduce driving by a grand total of an additional two miles per person per day between now and 2035, or from a current level of 19 miles per person per day to about 17 miles per person per day. That’s right–over the the next two decades metro’s climate smart plan calls for reducing driving at about 0.4% per year–about one-fourth as fast as we have been reducing driving over the past several years without a climate smart plan. In effect, Metro’s very feeble target for VMT reductions means that they are planning for a world where there’s a lot more private car driving–and demand for roads and expensive road projects–than even current, business-as-usual trends suggest.

Rather than reducing driving, this assumption is likely to lead to an investment strategy that enables or encourages more driving that would otherwise occur if we simply assumed that recent trends continue.

To get an idea of just how feeble this planned reduction is, consider the recent travel demand forecast prepared by the Washington State Department of Transportation. They predict that over the next two decades, per capita vehicle miles traveled will decline about 1.1 percent per year. Keep in mind, this isn’t some rabid environmentalist’s stretch goal: it’s the highway department’s prediction of driving trends, without any regard to climate change. (Even this rate of decline is still only about 60% as fast as the region has managed over the past decade).

WSDOT’s baseline prediction (a decline in per capita VMT of 1.1 percent per year) would suggest that the real trend for regional driving would be a decline to 17 miles per day by 2021, and a further decline to 14 miles per person per day by 2035.

Whatever this is, it should be apparent that it’s nothing resembling bold climate leadership; if anything it is technocratic foot-dragging, providing an opaque statistical rationalization for actually slowing the rate of progress we’ve already made as a region in addressing the problem of climate change.

And there’s one more thing the Metro largely plan overlooks. Reducing VMT doesn’t just reduce carbon emissions. It also saves the region’s households money. Lots of money. Cutting VMT by additional one mile per person per day would save the region’s households roughly $250 million per year, every year, in reduced fuel and auto costs. Setting a more aggressive target for VMT reductions would actually be good for the local economy–because it would mean local consumers have more money to spend on things other than cars and gasoline.

My colleagues working in the education field often talk of the “soft bigotry of low expectations”–that we don’t ask much of students from challenged schools, and that as a result, they have little incentive or motivation to dramatically improve their performance. The Portland region has a proud history of being a risk-taking pioneer in the environmental field, with its original goal of reducing greenhouse gases, implementing an urban growth boundary and cleaning up the Willamette. Arguably, this is the time to be bold. If it were serious, Metro could explore setting a goal of reducing driving to twelve or even ten miles per person per day by 2035. It’s likely that the public savings from lower road construction costs and the household savings from less spending on cars and gasoline would add up into billions of additional resources for the local economy–not to mention lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change may be the most profound existential challenge we’ve ever faced, but the proposed Metro plan sets the bar for progress so low as to be meaningless. There’s certainly nothing in this plan that expresses any ambition to do more than is already baked in the cake. In fact, it does a lot less than we’ve managed with no plan, and a lot less that our neighbors to the North predict will happen, even with no further policy intervention. Paradoxically, it may end up being used to plan for higher levels of driving than can reasonably be forecast to occur if we do nothing. There are a lot of phrases that could be used to describe such a plan, but “climate smart” isn’t one of them.

Why bother?

The four biggest myths about cities – #1 Cities aren’t safe for children

Posted on by Joe Cortright

If your impression of cities came entirely from watching the evening news, you might think that cities are saddled with ever-increasing traffic congestion and rising crime rates. From talking to your Great Aunt Ida at Thanksgiving, you’d think that New York was more dangerous for children than the suburbs and that Los Angeles was still covered in a cloud of smog.

But the truth is quite different. A look at the facts shows that cities are cleaner, safer, quicker, and healthier than ever.

Urban crime has fallen sharply over the past two decades, and many of the nation’s biggest cities, like New York, are statistically the safest.

And while the thought of raising kids in the city makes some parents quake with fear for the personal safety of their children, there’s growing evidence that city living is safer and healthier for kids than growing up in the suburbs. This week and next, I’ll be taking a look at some of the most common, and most mistaken views about cities.

Up first: Safety.

KidFountain

The Myth: Cities are dangerous places to live, especially for children

The Reality: Cities are actually quite safe while suburbs and rural areas are more dangerous

For decades, the common perception about cities is that they were dangerous, dirty, and crowded. A look at the facts tells a different story: our cities are cleaner, safer, quicker, and healthier than ever. Urban neighborhoods are some of the safest places to raise a family.

For an entire generation of Americans, safety and serenity meant living on a quiet, wide suburban street, where trips by car were a necessity to avoid the vulnerability of pedestrian travel.

Most of us still feel pretty safe getting into our cars, but traffic crashes are actually the leading cause of “non-intentional” death (i.e. not from disease) in the United States – and people who live in suburbs and rural areas are much more likely to die in car crashes. For those under 25, car crashes are the leading cause of death.

A University of Pennsylvania study looked at the geographic location of nearly 1.3 million injury deaths in the United States over two decades. It found that, on average, death rates from injuries were about 22 percent higher in the least dense counties than in the most dense counties.

Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between sprawling metropolitan areas, where people have to drive further on an everyday basis, and death rates from car crashes. Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, shows that each additional mile driven per capita daily in a metropolitan area was associated with five additional car crash deaths per million in population. Comparing two metropolitan areas with populations of 2 million, a metro area where people drove 30 miles per person per day would be expected to have 100 more car crash fatalities annually than a metro area where people drove only 20 miles per person per day.

OK, so cities have fewer car crashes than the suburbs, but won’t we all die of lung cancer from all the smog? Next week, I’ll take on the myth that urban neighborhoods are choked by air pollution.

Photo courtesy of Wolfy (Pete) Hanson on Flickr

The four biggest myths about cities – #4: Traffic is getting worse

Posted on by Joe Cortright

Fast_Lane

The Myth: Traffic congestion is getting worse

The Reality: Congestion has declined almost everywhere

It’s a common movie trope – a busy commuter rushes out of his downtown office at 5pm, hoping to get only to enter a citywide traffic jam. In reality, traffic congestion across the country has been in steady decline thanks to Americans choosing to drive fewer miles every year and increasingly biking, walking and taking transit for many of their trips—especially in cities.

Using data from GPS devices in millions of vehicles, Inrix tracks highway travel times in the nation’s large metropolitan areas (when they aren’t fear mongering about the costs of congestion). In its past two annual reports, Inrix pointed out that time lost to congestion has fallen dramatically in the United States. In 2011, congestion levels declined 30 percent nationally, and they declined a further 22 percent in 2012. Their travel time index measures the additional time that a typical peak hour trip takes compared to the same trip taken during free-flowing road conditions. A travel time index of 12 means that a trip that takes 20 minutes during free flowing travel conditions takes 12 percent longer—about 22 and a half minutes—during the peak travel period. Traffic congestion, as measured by the travel time index has fallen by about forty percent, from between 11 and 12 in 2010 to about 7 in 2013.

The distance we’re driving has decreased as well. Americans have cut their driving from a peak of 27.5 miles per person per day in 2005, to about 25.5 miles per person per day now.

traffic_chart

Cities are remarkably effective at reducing commute times – the closer you live to work, the less time you spend in the car.

You can learn more about traffic congestion and the dreaded “Carmageddon” in the Questioning Congestion Costs card deck.

Congestion and crime are dropping, kids in cities are safer and healthier than their suburban counterparts, and urban air quality is better than it’s been in decades. The sooner we can shed these outdated myths about city living, the sooner we’ll be on a path to building better places for Americans to live.

Photo courtesy of Neil Kremer on Flickr.

Boo! The annual Carmaggedon scare is upon us.

Posted on by CityObservatory Guest

A new report detailing the “costs” of congestion twists the data to become little more than talking points for the highway lobby.

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For transportation geeks, Halloween came early this year.

A new report claims that traffic congestion is costing us $124 billion a year and is “draining” our economy.  But just as those ghoul and zombie trick-or-treaters are actually the annoying but harmless kids from the neighborhood, the claimed cost of congestion is just an annual prank aimed chiefly at scaring the bejeezus out of the gullible.

Stealing a page from the Texas Transportation Institute, which has been flogging this same scare tactic for the past thirty years, a new report entitled “The future economic and environmental costs of gridlock in 2030,” claims that congestion will impose huge economic costs on the world’s cities.  Sponsored by Inrix and written by British economic consultancy Cebr, the report says traffic congestion now costs the US $124 billion and that this will grow to $186 billion by 2030.  And in case those numbers aren’t big and scary enough for you, the press release announcing the study adds together twenty years of estimates for the US and other countries in order to be able to push the total cost into the trillions.

The report has had its predictable impact on the media:

Money magazine shouted:  Traffic Costs You Even More Than You Think—and It’s Getting Worse

MSN chimed in with “Car-maggedon-the $4.4 trillion traffic problem”

Forbes uncritically echoed the study’s headline claim: “Traffic congestion costs Americans $124 billion a year”

These traffic horror stories are of course hardy perennials. Prompted by a similar report five years ago, Time wrote “America:  Still Stuck in Traffic” warning that traffic problems would only get worse.

But the truth is that there’s little evidence that congestion is costly, and if anything, traffic and congestion-related time losses are declining.

Congestion cost claims are based on a discredited methodology that takes some useful data and twists in in ways that produce seriously misleading conclusions. The Inrix/Cber report uses a “travel time index” to compute how much longer trips take in peak hours than non-busy times, and then claims that the number of additional hours that those trips take—valued at a certain number of dollars—represent a “drain” on the nation’s economy.

tombstone img

But this study is flimsier than a cardboard tombstone. Like earlier scare stories, it is riddled with flaws. The details are spelled out in a new CitySubjects card deck at City Observatory.com.  Here are the highlights:

  • The travel time index used to compute costs treats the inability to drive faster than the speed limit due to congestion as a “cost” to commuters.
  • The report predicts a trivial increase in congestion between now and 2030—delay in the average daily commute will be about 25 seconds longer than it is today.
  • Predictions of increases in driving and congestion have repeatedly been proven wrong.
  • Driving is down: the US experienced “peak car” in 2005, and the average number of miles driven per American has fallen seven percent since then from 27.6 miles to 25.6 miles per day.
  • Inrix’s own data shows that time lost to congestion in the United States has fallen 40 percent since 2010.
  • Time lost to traffic congestion is so small for most travelers that it isn’t noticed and has little economic value.
  • Building enough capacity to eliminate rush hour congestion would be virtually impossible and cost many times more than the supposed value of time lost to congestion.

Sadly, while the Inrix report generates plenty of heat, it sheds very little light on the true nature of our transportation system’s performance and how it contributes to—or detracts from—our economy.

But we know how the Inrix/Cber report will be used: as talking points for the highway lobby to plead for additional public subsidies for expanding road capacity.  Decades of experience have shown us that investments in additional roadway simply trigger more demand—and no matter how fast we run on the highway construction treadmill, we still end up with congestion, plus more expensive roads to maintain, and generally, greater levels of sprawl.  The result is so well understood that its come to be called “The fundamental law of road congestion.”

One of the ironies here is that this year’s report is sponsored by the company Inrix, which operates the technology to track traffic speeds in real time, providing everyone who owns a mobile device with clever, helpful maps showing current traffic levels color-coded for delay. These maps helps us cope with congestion; and the data they’ve gathered show we’ve actually made huge progress in reducing it in the past few years.  It’s a shame they aren’t sharing that good news, instead of trying to scare us.

 

 

Top photo courtesy of Jackie at Flickr Creative Commons

Parking: The Price is Wrong

Posted on by Joe Cortright

One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordability, especially in the more desirable urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest and most prosperous metropolitna areas.  As we’ve frequently pointed out at City Observatory, much of this affordability problem is self-inflicted, due to the severe limits that local zoning codes put on new development.  In sharp contrast, to the high cost of housing is the low, and mostly zero price we charge for parking in the public right-of-way.  This under-pricing of parking is a central and unacknowledged problem in urban transportation: The price is wrong. Underlying traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and the shortage of great urban places is the key fact that we charge the wrong price for using roads.

the-carey-price-is-wrong_design

Nowhere are the effects of mispriced roads more apparent than on-street parking. Only for car storage do we regularly allow people to convert a scarce and valuable public space to exclusively private use without paying for the privilege. In neighborhoods that don’t charge for on-street parking, we have have a system that can only be described as socialism for private car storage. The public sector pays for the entire cost of building and maintaining roads, and even in dense urban settings with high demand, we allow cars to occupy those without paying a cent.

As chronicled in painstaking detail by the godfather of parking wonks, UCLA professor Don Shoup, free parking encourages additional driving, reduces the vitality of urban neighborhoods, makes it harder for local retailers to survive and needlessly drives up the cost of housing. A growing number of urbanists are coming to embrace Shoup’s viewpoint, spelled out in his 700-page tome “The High Cost of Free Parking,” but many of us still cling to the outdated illusion that parking is and should forever be “free.”

For the most part, the pitfalls of poorly priced parking go unrecognized and unexamined — we get stuck in congestion and complain about the shortage of parking. But we don’t typically recognize how the wrong price is the root cause of these problems.

Every once in a while though, there’s an event that shines a bright light on the consequences of parking socialism, and demonstrates how getting the prices right can fix things in a hurry. The most recent example is Portland Oregon’s reform of its handicapped parking system.

For years, the rampant abuse of Portland’s generous handicapped parking system was obvious and well-known. On downtown streets, a blue handicapped placard traditionally entitled users to park for free, as long as they liked. In Oregon, all that is required to get a handicapped permit is a note from one’s doctor and a trip to the DMV. As casual visitors to downtown have observed, entire blocks were occupied from early morning until night by rows of cars, each with a deep blue handicapped placard hanging in its rear view mirror.  In an apparent epidemic of frailty, the number of handicapped permits in use in downtown Portland almost doubled between 2007 and 2012. In September 2013, handicapped placard users occupied fully 1,000 of the central city’s 8,000 metered on street spaces.  Portland’s situation is hardly unique, the City of San Francisco reports that 20 percent of its on-street parking spaces are occupied by vehicles with handicapped parking permits.

In July 2014, that all changed. Led by Commissioner Steve Novick (full disclosure: Steve is a long time friend), the city limited free parking to wheelchair users who possessed a special permit. Those with generic handicapped placards can still largely ignore maximum time limits, but they have to pay for the space they use. The city even created special “scratch off” parking tags so that users wouldn’t have to walk to meters to pay:  you can see all the details of the new system here.

Overnight, the parking landscape in downtown Portland changed. Spaces occupied by placard users dropped 70%. Getting the price right freed up 720 parking spots for other, paying users, expanding the effective supply of parking by nearly 10%. The results of the change are described in a report prepared by the Portland Bureau of Transportation.

Press reports of the days following the policy reported an eery abundance of vacant on-street parking spaces.

Two weeks after Portland began charging drivers with disabled placards to park in the city’s metered spots, enforcement officer J.C. Udey says he doesn’t recognize his downtown beat. The days of patrolling block after block — after block — lined with the same cars displaying blue placards appear to be over. “It’s open spaces,” he said. “We have so much more parking.”

Brad Gonzalez of Gresham, who was shopping at the Portland Apple Store on Monday, said he couldn’t remember the last time he found a curbside parking spot in downtown so easily. “I found one right away near the store,” Gonzalez said. “It used to be about circling the block and getting lucky, and getting frustrated. Most of the spots were taken by cars with disabled parking signs. It was obvious that there was a lot of abuse.”

The change is even more remarkable in the heart of the central business district. I looked at the six most central parking beats in the city—for those familiar with Portland, an area bounded by Burnside Street on the north, the Willamette River on the east, Jefferson and Market Streets on the south, and 10th and 11th Avenues on the west. (These are beats 1,2,3,4,6 and 11). This area contains a total of about 1,850 on-street metered parking spaces. A year ago, 450 spaces–nearly a quarter of them–were occupied by vehicles with handicapped placards. That’s fallen to 105 placard users–a reduction of 75 percent from the free-parking era. This is the equivalent of adding about 350 parking spaces to the supply of street parking in the heart of downtown Portland.

Freeing up on-street parking spaces makes the transportation system work better: people don’t circle endlessly searching for a “free” parking space; paying customers eager to make purchases can park closer to their destinations, and local governments can use meter revenue to make improvements to the neighborhood that make it more pleasant for residents.

The city’s new report doesn’t spell out how much additional revenue the city stands to make as a result of the change.  A good rough estimate would be that the city nets about $10 per meter per business day; if so, it would clear an additional $1.4 million per year (700 meters times $10 times 200 business days). Parking meter revenues help pay for street maintenance and improvements, which the city says are badly under-funded—so this change will help reduce that gap.

Portland’s Bureau of Transportation is currently undertaking an effort to study and recommend new parking tools policies for city neighborhoods. Hopefully they recognize the lessons from pricing handicap spaces downtown and apply sensible pricing schemes in other areas to make the city’s neighborhoods even greater.

The larger lesson here should be abundantly clear: charging users for something approaching the value of the public space that they are using produces a transportation system that works better for everyone. When we get the prices right, or even closer to right, good things happen. We can’t solve our parking problems until we admit that when it comes to city streets, the price is wrong.   

Parking: The Price is Wrong

Posted on by Joe Cortright

There is a central and unacknowledged problem in urban transportation: The price is wrong. Underlying traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and the shortage of great urban places is the key fact that we charge the wrong price for using roads.

the-carey-price-is-wrong_design

Nowhere are the effects of mispriced roads more apparent than on-street parking. Only for car storage do we regularly allow people to convert a scarce and valuable public space to exclusively private use without paying for the privilege. In neighborhoods that don’t charge for on-street parking, we have have a system that can only be described as socialism for private car storage. The public sector pays for the entire cost of building and maintaining roads, and even in dense urban settings with high demand, we allow cars to occupy those without paying a cent.

As chronicled in painstaking detail by the godfather of parking wonks, UCLA professor Don Shoup, free parking encourages additional driving, reduces the vitality of urban neighborhoods, makes it harder for local retailers to survive and needlessly drives up the cost of housing. A growing number of urbanists are coming to embrace Shoup’s viewpoint, spelled out in his 700-page tome “The High Cost of Free Parking,” but many of us still cling to the outdated illusion that parking is and should forever be “free.”

For the most part, the pitfalls of poorly priced parking go unrecognized and unexamined — we get stuck in congestion and complain about the shortage of parking. But we don’t typically recognize how the wrong price is the root cause of these problems.

Every once in a while though, there’s an event that shines a bright light on the consequences of parking socialism, and demonstrates how getting the prices right can fix things in a hurry. The most recent example is Portland Oregon’s reform of its handicapped parking system.

For years, the rampant abuse of Portland’s generous handicapped parking system was obvious and well-known. On downtown streets, a blue handicapped placard traditionally entitled users to park for free, as long as they liked. In Oregon, all that is required to get a handicapped permit is a note from one’s doctor and a trip to the DMV. As casual visitors to downtown have observed, entire blocks were occupied from early morning until night by rows of cars, each with a deep blue handicapped placard hanging in its rear view mirror.  In an apparent epidemic of frailty, the number of handicapped permits in use in downtown Portland almost doubled between 2007 and 2012. In September 2013, handicapped placard users occupied fully 1,000 of the central city’s 8,000 metered on street spaces.

In July, that all changed. Led by Commissioner Steve Novick (full disclosure: Steve is a long time friend), the city limited free parking to wheelchair users who possessed a special permit. Those with generic handicapped placards can still largely ignore maximum time limits, but they have to pay for the space they use. The city even created special “scratch off” parking tags so that users wouldn’t have to walk to meters to pay:  you can see all the details of the new system here.

Overnight, the parking landscape in downtown Portland changed. Spaces occupied by placard users dropped 70%. Getting the price right freed up 720 parking spots for other, paying users, expanding the effective supply of parking by nearly 10%. The results of the change are described in a new report released by the Portland Bureau of Transportation.

Press reports of the days following the policy reported an eery abundance of vacant on-street parking spaces.

Two weeks after Portland began charging drivers with disabled placards to park in the city’s metered spots, enforcement officer J.C. Udey says he doesn’t recognize his downtown beat. The days of patrolling block after block — after block — lined with the same cars displaying blue placards appear to be over. “It’s open spaces,” he said. “We have so much more parking.”

Brad Gonzalez of Gresham, who was shopping at the Portland Apple Store on Monday, said he couldn’t remember the last time he found a curbside parking spot in downtown so easily. “I found one right away near the store,” Gonzalez said. “It used to be about circling the block and getting lucky, and getting frustrated. Most of the spots were taken by cars with disabled parking signs. It was obvious that there was a lot of abuse.”

The change is even more remarkable in the heart of the central business district. I looked at the six most central parking beats in the city—for those familiar with Portland, an area bounded by Burnside Street on the north, the Willamette River on the east, Jefferson and Market Streets on the south, and 10th and 11th Avenues on the west. (These are beats 1,2,3,4,6 and 11). This area contains a total of about 1,850 on-street metered parking spaces. A year ago, 450 spaces–nearly a quarter of them–were occupied by vehicles with handicapped placards. That’s fallen to 105 placard users–a reduction of 75 percent from the free-parking era. This is the equivalent of adding about 350 parking spaces to the supply of street parking in the heart of downtown Portland.

Freeing up on-street parking spaces makes the transportation system work better: people don’t circle endlessly searching for a “free” parking space; paying customers eager to make purchases can park closer to their destinations, and local governments can use meter revenue to make improvements to the neighborhood that make it more pleasant for residents.

The city’s new report doesn’t spell out how much additional revenue the city stands to make as a result of the change.  A good rough estimate would be that the city nets about $10 per meter per business day; if so, it would clear an additional $1.4 million per year (700 meters times $10 times 200 business days). Parking meter revenues help pay for street maintenance and improvements, which the city says are badly under-funded—so this change will help reduce that gap.

Portland’s Bureau of Transportation is currently undertaking an effort to study and recommend new parking tools policies for city neighborhoods. Hopefully they recognize the lessons from pricing handicap spaces downtown and apply sensible pricing schemes in other areas to make the city’s neighborhoods even greater.

The larger lesson here should be abundantly clear: charging users for something approaching the value of the public space that they are using produces a transportation system that works better for everyone. When we get the prices right, or even closer to right, good things happen. We can’t solve our parking problems until we admit that when it comes to city streets, the price is wrong.