What City Observatory this week
1. Portland’s progress (or lack thereof) on climate. Portland likes to present itself as a climate leader, but the latest data on transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions shows that Portland is losing ground in a big way. Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 1,000 pounds per person since 2013, a major setback to city efforts to set an example of how to achieve globally agreed upon climate goals.
2. Lessons in the price elasticity of demand for transportation planners. Perhaps the most fundamental notion in economics is the idea that when the price of something goes up, people buy less of it. International comparisons, and the nation’s own experience with gas prices over the past two decades confirm that this applies to gasoline and driving. High gasoline prices are associated with lower levels of driving. The high and rising price of gas from 2004-2014 was associated with an unprecedented decline in per capita driving; a trend that was unfortunately reversed when oil prices collapsed in the second half of 2014 (triggering more driving, more SUV purchases, and not surprisingly, more crashes and road deaths. Prices exert a powerful effect on behavior; unfortunately many transportation planners ignore or deny the role that prices play in shaping urban transportation and land use. More fully reflecting back to users the costs associated with their choices would make it much easier to achieve our environmental and safety objectives.
Must read
1. The high cost of driving. One of our maxims at City Observatory is that that when it comes to driving, the price is wrong. The decision to rely heavily on private automobiles as our primary means of urban transport is shaped by the fact that car travel is dramatically under-priced and heavily subsidized. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compiles the total cost associated with car travel in the Bay State. It discovers that cars cost the average household $14,000 per year, with most of those costs due and payable whether or not one owns a car. Less than half of the cost of car transportation ($27.4 billion of the $64 billion) are the private costs of paid by drivers. Most of the cost is loaded on the public sector, and user fees (like gas taxes and vehicle registration fees) cover less than a third of the public sector’s costs of providing roads, parking, emergency services and other costs, as well as dealing with pollution and environmental consequences. Thus, most of the cost of car travel is hidden, and gets rolled up in all sorts of other bills, concealing from drivers (and citizens) the high cost of our auto-dependent transportation system.
2. Jane Jacobs & Robert Moses: the graphic novela. Sarah Mirk and Jackie Roche have collaborated to produce a short graphic novel relating some the lessons from Jane Jacob’s famous “Death and LIfe of Great America Cities.” Comic books, of course, need a super-villain, and real-life has supplied one, Robert Moses, New York’s master-builder and indeed, “The Power Broker.”
The extraordinary illustrations bring Jacobs, and some of her key insights to life (see the sidewalk ballet, below); if you haven’t read her books or Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, this will whet your appetite; if not it will remind you of the larger than life character of these two adversaries.
There’s a lot to like, and this is highly recommended, but we found one small annoyance, Mirk and Roche claim that Jacobs’ insights about the desirability of urban living have been “corrupted” by exploitative developers, who they blame for rising rents and gentrification. In our view, that misses the fact that the high and rising rents in dense walkable neighborhoods are really a product of their paucity, and of Jacob’s views neatly capturing what more and more American’s, especially younger generations are hungering for: more great urban places. But that’s a minor quibble:Â The whole thing is a visual delight, and is available on-line at the Nib; be sure to have a look.
3. You can’t spell “Hyperloop” without hype. Why bother with the difficult nitty gritty of existing technologies like buses and trains when you can engage in the magical thinking of the hyperloop? Never mind that the technology is utterly unproven and the costs are unknown, cities around the country are treating it as a viable if not preferred alternative for a range of transportation challenges. While most media coverage is of the fawning variety, Aaron Gordon of Jalopnik takes a refreshingly skeptical view of the technology in a piece entitled “Hyperloop is the Midwest’s Answer to a Question that No One is Asking.” Gordon takes a close look at a proposal to build a hyperloop between Cleveland and Chicago. Backers have produced a study claiming that it will produce hundreds of billions of dollars in increased property values and a range of other benefits. Like similar claims for sports stadiums, such studies are generally grossly inflated, and fail to consider the redistributive effects. Gordon looks for details, and finds them, lacking:
Despite the study’s 156-page length, it is extremely light on methodology or the assumptions baked into the calculations. In fact, any mention of study methodology or assumptions directs inquiring minds to an appendix. However, the feasibility study does not have an appendix…
New Knowledge
Maybe Uber and Lyft are increasing transit ridership. One of the most oft-voiced concerns about the growth of ride-hailing is the idea that it is cannibalizing ridership from transit systems. A new study from three economists looks at the connection between the growth of ride-hailing and transit ridership trends in cities across the country.
Like other studies they proxy for the extent of ride-hailing by looking at the data Uber and Lyft entered a particular market, and also use data on the number of google searches for the company’s brand names to estimate growth ride hailing. They then look to see whether entry is correlated with increases or decreases in transit ridership in the area.
In the aggregate, the authors found that transit ridership increased after Uber’s entry into the market. Their overall data, summarized below, show that transit ridership was essentially flat in the months preceding the entry of ride-hailing, and then tended to increase somewhat in the following months.
The effect varied according across markets and transit providers, with large markets seeing the greatest complementary impact (i.e. ride-hailing being associated with increases in transit ridership).
One challenge, as we’ve noted with other similar studies of ride-hailing, is that the number of months since entry into a market or the number of searches, is at best a crude proxy for ride hailing, and misses the distinct temporal and spatial concentration of ride hailing activity (mostly on weekend nights, and in downtowns and to and from airports). Ride-hailing is much more likely to affect transit ridership in some locations and at some times than others, and these studies don’t exploit these variations to understand impacts. As the authors note, this is a subject the deserves further exploration.
Jonathan Hall, Craig Palsson & Joseph Price, “Is Uber a substitute or complement for public transit?,” Journal of Urban Economics (108:36-50) 2019.
Hat-tip to Bloomerg’s Noah Smith for highlighting this study.
In the News
Joe Cortright’s Op-Ed, “Portland’s phony, failing climate policy,” was published in the December 14, 2020 Oregonian.
Oregon Public Broadcasting quoted City Observatory’s Joe Cortright as applauding Governor Kate Brown’s call for the Oregon Transportation Commission to closely examine using congestion pricing to address Portland’s transportation problems.
Happy Holidays!
City Observatory will be on holiday break through the end of the calendar year. We’ll return with our regular commentary and “The Week Observed” in January. To all, a joyous holiday season and a Happy New Year.
