Category: Transit

The House Transport Bill is anti-federalist, not anti-transit

Lisa Schweitzer9 Comments

Transit advocates should thank gridlock the transport bill from the House is more symbolic than anything. It’s not going to go anywhere, not because the bill has no supporters, but because nothing is going anywhere in DC these days.

The bill a does a bunch of really unfortunate things, but the one that has the average urbanist’s undies in a twist is that the bill cuts transit, walking, biking projects off from the Highway Trust Fund, to fend for themselves in the general budgetary process at the federal level.

The whinge from the urban blogosphere is already deafening, however. HOW DARE those mean House Republicans hate wonderful transit? What’s wrong with them? They must represent suburbs.

What House Republicans are disputing in this Bill isn’t whether cities should have adorable little trolley trains and wonderful bikes lanes and capacious sidewalks. What they dispute: that the feds, and not cities themselves, should pay for them.

You know the transit fanboys around the blogosphere are writing the outraged posts now full of Richard Florida factoids about about how important cities are to America, and how cities generate 86 percent of economic value in the US, and how most Americans (80 percent) live in cities and how all that means Federal transport policy should be federal transit policy. We’re important, in sum!

However, anti-federalists see those exact same factoids as reasons that cities can afford to build their own damn transit.

But, but, but! Transit revitalizes local business and increases property values!

Then local businesses and land owners can pay for it with all the new value they get. Why should they get windfalls from federal sources?

But but but controls on local property taxes don’t allow that.

Then why should federal taxpayers pay to provide something that the locals who benefit from it most don’t want to pay for themselves?

But, but, but! Transit clears the air, helps clear up traffic congestion, and prevents climate change!

If urban drivers are causing congestion and polluting urban air, how does taxing rural drivers and taking their money for urban projects make sense? If California has a problem with too much driving, nothing keeps you from raising the state gas tax. Tax your own drivers and build your own transit.

And the circular argument goes on and on. Disagreement about whether the federal government has a role to play, and what that role should be, in the provision of urban goods can’t be reconciled with assertions about how great particular urban goods are.

LaHood hasn’t helped matters. LaHood hasn’t really understood the role he was chosen for; he seems to assume he is still running for office, and his typical MO is to play to his urban choir with blather like livability rather than go out of his way to help those not in his choir understand why projects for motorists should get the ax when motorists’ tax dollars keep the HTF afloat. His predecessors were able to progressively open the Fund to redistribution from motorists to other modes largely by doing the opposite of what he’s done: by not drawing attention to themselves or to their agendas.

I’ve always though the Secretary of Transportation should ideally be a rather boring job. But LaHood is a politician, not an agency guy, and he’s over-politicized his job by screaming as loudly as he can and stomping his way into the spotlight as often as he can, both around transit and high speed rail. In so doing, he’s thrown his agency into the tsunami of the deepest political divides in Washington.

In fairness, this bill has been a long time simmering. Republicans have never loved paying for transit out of the HTF, but LaHood’s bombastic, self-promotional, New Sheriff In Town style has thrown gasoline on the low simmering fire.

Can a bankrupt city like Detroit (not) afford light rail?

Lisa Schweitzer

Tom Jankowski, all around fabulous guy, and one of the leading lights at Wayne State’s Institute of Gerontology  passes along this story from the Detroit Free Press about the cancellation of Detroit’s Light Rail construction program.

There’s a lot to discuss in this story, and in some ways it epitomizes the contemporary debates we are having over high speed rail and a second stimulus.

1. I’m going to risk getting criticized for indulging in “Ruin Porn” because we have a lot to learn from this particular policy, and if there is another city more mischaracterized among snobby urbanists than my beloved Los Angeles, I’ve yet to see it. Before we go too far in, we can start by saying there’s a lot to Detroit besides population and employment decline.

But there is still population and employment decline, and that’s what gets us to the first fundamental question: what is the marginal productivity of relatively expensive capital investments in mobility in places where you are facing long-term population decline?

The optimistic side says that it’s exactly these types of investments that create transit miracles and rejuvenate places like Detroit. We can’t afford not to do it.

The pessimistic side says that every dollar we spend in declining places is a dollar chasing riders who will never materialize. Better to help them with some level of transit service, with buses, than throwing good money after bad. Target intense, expensive investment dollars in growing places, like San Diego and Portland.

I’m of camp 2, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sympathetic to camp 1. It’s just that I’d rather see investments in human capital, which is mobile, in places like Detroit at this point, so that if the gamble fails and decline continues, we haven’t created a very expensive ghost system. (i.e., places like Detroit strike me as exemplars of where people-based rather than place-based economic development interventions make more sense.)

2. The reason the Feds backed away here concerns the operating deficit that nobody local seems willing to fill. And Detroit, like any number of US cities, is trundling towards outright default–in four months. What I don’t understand is why there is money to operate buses, supposedly, but not the light rail. Drivers are drivers; they cost money. Management and maintenance cost money. While I think that the operating cost savings that light rail advocates have always claimed for light rail are overstated, it’s not like buses are free. I’m having trouble understanding where the money for bus operations comes from if it wasn’t there for light rail operations.

3. Howver, assuming the Feds are right, the operating deficit problem here is one of the dangers of letting cities become so fiscally fragile that they can not run basic services like transit even with with a large capital subsidy from Federal sources. And the problem captures one of the whipsaws for making land and property taxes so utterly verboten in urban politics. As the story suggests, there were businesses and philanthropists lined up to put money in the plan. Businesses and nonprofits (like museums) are willing to do so because rail can bring customers, giving them a nice boost–both in terms of customers and in terms of the relative value of their landholdings proximate to the facility.

Our allergy to land taxation means that although some businesses are willing to pony up to cover capital investment, few want to be on the hook forever for operations. For systems that run on a deficit, like most transit services, that means you need other funding sources. You have fares for part of operations, but if you can’t go to the city’s general fund, where do you go? Voters are not fond of approving taxes for operating funds; they like project lists in exchange for new local taxes. So the major value added of service accrues to real estate, but our ability to recapture that value back into the system is extremely limited by voter preferences.

What’s a place like Detroit supposed to do?

The discussion on elders in transport continues

Lisa Schweitzer

Ed Stevens made such a great comment that I wanted to highlight it:

My own parents retired in place. They paid off the home where my 3 brothers and I were raised. While they might not necessarily still need a 5 bedroom home in there 70′s they also have no desire to move. They were also able to come up with new uses for some of the space. My childhood bedroom was converted into an office. Another of my brothers childhood bedroom was converted into the craft/computer room. The other two boys childhood bedrooms became guest bedrooms. When I ask them why they stay they say they know and like their neighbors. If they moved somewhere else they would need to make new friends and my mom fears that as they have get older that might be difficult. For similar reasons my parents don’t want to attend a different church or find new places to shop. While the current furniture is dated, it matches the house that also hasn’t been updated significantly from the 1970′s. Lastly the large house provides plenty of room for the kids and grandchildren to sleep when we go to visit them.

There is a great deal of wisdom in this comment. There comes a point in your life when you do wish to stay put–for a variety of perfectly understandable reasons.

Duranton and Turner on the fundamental law of traffic congestion in AER

Lisa Schweitzer5 Comments

This paper in AER is getting its kicking around the web from the transit fanboys and those outside the transport field who don’t get why managing congestion is treated as a goal for public transit. The commentariat is in umbrage: surely transit riders benefit from transit, yada, yada, and this result means nothing. Andrew Gelman gets a buy on his comments because he’s brilliant, I love his Bayes book, and I learn more from his blog than I learn from most books. Everybody else needs to chill.

The Duranton and Turner paper is significant for multiple reasons. First of all, transit fanboys have nobody to blame but themselves for the widely held perception that transit investment decreases congestion. It’s part of every “More rail, more rail, more rail” chant I’ve ever read in about 20+ years of professional life in transport planning. Why? Because if you didn’t promise those who don’t ride transit a benefit from the billions we spend on transit, they’d never hand over the billions to you. Outside of the few major transit markets in the US, transit riders themselves have never been a big enough constituency to hold their own in budget battles, which is one reason why they are at such a disadvantage in Federal budget talks.

Promising nonuser benefits has been the major marketing strategy of transit agencies for at least 40 years. Transit saves the air! It makes us skinny! It decreases congestion! And so on and so forth. Promises of this type, however, have the tendency to prompt empirically minded researchers like Matt Turner to get out their datasets and their instrumental variables and get all hypothesis testy on you.

Again: Gelman gets a buy because he readily admits he hasn’t been at the party for 20+ years, but it’s some serious gaslighting at this stage of the game, after transit advocates have spent decades schilling the investment based on nonuser benefits, to respond with “how silly those economists are! Transit provides mobility! Of course, that’s the benefit of transit!” Especially when ridership figures on many systems are so disappointing. That’s a pretty politically dangerous response for everybody who, unlike Gelman, doesn’t live in NYC because if we do cost-benefits on transit investment based on benefits to riders alone, we’d see a lot less investment. I assume that’s not what the fanboys want.

Anyway, so what’s interesting in the manuscript itself? Here’s the actual citation:

Duranton, Gilles, and Matthew A. Turner. 2011. “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities.” American Economic Review, 101(6): 2616–52.
DOI:10.1257/aer.101.6.2616

Here’s the abstract:

We investigate the effect of lane kilometers of roads on vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) in US cities. VKT increases proportionately to roadway lane kilometers for interstate highways and probably slightly less rapidly for other types of roads. The sources for this extra VKT are increases in driving by current residents, increases in commercial traffic, and migration. Increasing lane kilometers for one type of road diverts little traffic from other types of road. We find no evidence that the provision of public transportation affects VKT. We conclude that increased provision of roads or public transit is unlikely to relieve congestion. (JEL R41, R48)

So what? Anthony Downs (and other smart people) pointed out the theory of triple convergence quite some ago–that additional capacity on an unpriced system will erode until a congested re-occurs. In the absence of money prices, the only thing that disciplines demand on a facility are the time costs, and the time costs rise with…congestion. So one of the most misguided commenters asks: Where do all the extra drivers come from? The answer is easy:

a) population growth or
b) nowhere, since you don’t need additional bodies. You just need additional trips.

So if we provide a whole bunch of new supply, transit or otherwise, on a high-demand corridor, that supply will get used as the time costs are lower, and the out-of-pocket money costs of car ownership at that point are sunk and unrelated to trip time of day–until congestion starts in again. So if the congestion on the 405 clears up suddenly because we’ve provided commuter rail (I’ll just hold my breath until that happens), other drivers may opt on to the facility, or some of the drivers left may decide to sneak in a few more trips during the day.

There is a point when supply can become saturated: if you put a 50 lane road down in Des Moines, I doubt you’ll get gridlock. But that’s a flummery example. Nobody proposes such things.

Transit fanboys are reacting so strongly to the Duranton and Turner paper because for a very long time, people have argued Down’s triple convergence only in terms of highway supply. It was a rational for all those who said “You can’t build your way out of congestion” at the same time they argued for building more rail. The problem appears to be–and most people who understand economics have known this for awhile—that triple convergence holds regardless of whether the additional supply is highway or transit.

The problem that Duranton and Turner highlight concerns the highly counterfactual nature of most purported environmental benefits in public investment, not just transit. The promise that transit “clears the air” or “reduces congestion” or “reduces auto use!” contains an implicit caveat that few people acknowledge: transit is a cleaner mode than if we were to meet the additional travel demand with highway supply rather than transit supply. But it’s much snappier to say “Transit clears the air” than it is to say “Transit clears the air relative to what it would be had transit users driven cars.” These are benefits that occur from shifting future user behavior.

That’s why the California HSR advocates argue that their new $98 billion HSR investment is a bargain compared to the $127 billion of airport and highway expansion that nobody has actually proposed yet.

The point from Duranton and Turner: if your metro area has a problem with cars now—either related to congestion or to air quality—you are going to keep your problem, even if you build transit.

HOWEVER. And this is for the fanboys:

a) If you don’t have a problem yet with auto-related externalities, new transit supply may forestall those problems. Probably not forever, but you may buy yourself some time, and

b) Restated: if you already have a problem with auto-related externalities, new transit supply may help change the slope of how bad those problems get over time.

Transport London and its farebox ratio

Lisa Schweitzer

The BBC ran a story yesterday that Mayor Ken Livingstone promised to drop fares on Transport London by 5 percent by October 2012 if he is elected.

Boris Johnson, by contrast, has said that he will stick to the existing formula for raising fares, which is the retail price index plus 2 percent.

So that formula says it all; it’s a policy-level move to shift more of the burden onto the users themselves.

Sure enough, that’s what the Beeb’s numbers suggest, showing that users are covering about 54 percent of TCL’s costs–certainly not bad by any measure to US operators.

The other part of the story I don’t quite understand–they’re arguing over a surplus, which is not a word I’m used to seeing in transit finance, and I can’t quite figure out if there is an actual surplus or there isn’t–or there was, but central government austerity measures meant the agency used that surplus already.

What do you think of the approach? At least with a formula, transit riders would know what kind of fare increases to budget for, as I think US austerity measures are likely to pull back on federal support for transit very hard.

Where’s my transit revolution? Today’s infuriating commuting numbers from the ACS

Lisa Schweitzer5 Comments

Ok, so the answer to the question I pose is, inevitably: we haven’t spent enough on transit yet. However, the mode choice numbers in a report this morning from the American Community Survey discourage and, since I don’t take being discouraged very well, infuriate.

Let’s take a look at some of the graphics:

Voila Capture45

Blargh! WHAT? WE’RE TALKING FIVE DECADES OF TRANSIT INVESTMENT AND THE MODE SHARE AND COUNTS HAVEN’T CHANGED HARDLY AT ALL? WHA? WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT?! “Wah wah wah I don’t liiiiiiiiiike buses. I neeeeeeeed light rail plunked down all over hell and gone just like Europe. THEN I’ll stop driving.”

We’ve done our part. We’ve built rail line after rail line after rail line. We’ve been condemning sprawl since the 1980s, advocating for denser residential patterns since roughly the same time. Living in the suburbs in our popular media is treated as the moral equivalent of being fat or smoking. DAVID FREAKING BYRNE IS WRITING ABOUT HOW COOL IT IS TO BIKE IN CITIES FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD. We’ve romanticized places like New York and Portland. WHAT’S IT GONNA TAKE, PEOPLE?

With mode shares, the percentage taking transit masks the fact that more people are taking transit in 2009 than in 1960, but still. In reality, this time period reflects a changing geographic distribution of the US population where, yes, people left the precious central city for the suburbs (something that doesn’t seem to have hurt NYC-NJ transit one little bit, BTW), but people also left rural areas for metropolitan areas. These numbers should be shifting simply by virtue of that phenomenon.

So that graphic shows the commute counts. Maybe commutes just aren’t shifting and we’d see a different story from 1960 to 2010 if we had leisure travel here.

Voila Capture46

So transit operators should advocate for open borders because immigrants are good customers.

This last one may be too hard to see. The report is freely available (until the Republicans decide to shut down the Census), so go look at the report.

Voila Capture47

Thirty years ago in public transit, there was NYC, and then there was everybody else. Today, apparently, it’s still NYC and everybody else.

I don’t see happy things ahead in terms of changing these numbers, especially with big systems like BART reducing frequencies, even with higher gas prices.

Blargh. Bad way to start my day.

The 1-mile per hour transit ride

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

I live 4 miles from downtown. I went to dinner downtown with some of my colleagues. I turned down a ride as nobody was going in my direction.

I left my cell phone in the office. This was a terrible tragedy.

Went to Union Station, got on the purple line, went from Union Station to Wilshire/Western. I got off, waited 30 minutes for Metro Rapid bus.

Onboard, the changable message sign does not flash the next stop. No, it flashes super-useful information, like the date.

The bus driver, who is supposed to verbally announce the stops, doesn’t. I miss Crenshaw and Wilshire and finally realize this when I see La Brea pass. Damn! I pull the cord. It’s an express, so it finally lets me off at Fairfax.

Now, in theory, that’s my fault. But having the date instead of the next stop is truly useless in every possible regard. Oh, there’s the date. How splendid. I can now write checks on the bus and be sure I have used the proper date.

I get out and cross the street to get on a Metro 720 bus eastbound. I wait 20 minutes for that.

I ask the driver as I get on: “Do you stop at Wilshire and Crenshaw?” “Yah” he grunts.

How jolly.

Again, no next stop information on the changeable message sign, which helpfully shows me the date and time. He doesn’t announce it either.

So I stand in the center aisle hunched over looking at the street signs in the dark as they whiz by.

Aha! Wilshire and Crenshaw is the next stop. I reach to pull the cord, but somebody is reaching faster than me, and they get to it first.

The bell rings. The sign says “Stop requested: please use rear door exist.”

Alrighty! I can use the rear-door exit. It’s my favorite, in fact.

But, alas, the driver slows down for the stop at Crenshaw, sees the light is green, and then accelerates past the stop without stopping or opening his doors.

Me and 4 other people yell “WTF?”

The next stop is Wilshire and Western, where I first alighted the 720 an hour ago to trundle along the same stretch of Wilshire BLVD twice.

Third time is the charm. After another 20 minute wait, another 720 comes, and I pull the cord immediately.

He stops! It’s magical.

We get out. I walk over to the Metro 710 sign. A nice lady says to me: “That doesn’t run at night. You have to take the 210.” There is not a single map of the route posted. There is not a single schedule posted. Were it not for that woman, I would have had no way of knowing that the 710 doesn’t run at that time of night because waiting an hour for a bus is not unusual in my experience.

During this time, I have not seen a single taxi.

So I go stand at the 210 station. It is pitch black except for headlights on Wilshire and some sad streetlights.

I wait for 45 minutes. I see a taxi coming, but the 210 is right behind.

Eh, I think. I’ll save the 10 bucks and take the bus. I let the taxi go by.

I look up. The 210 bus now says “Not in Service.”

I utter words you can not put on a family blog and I turn around and walk 1.7 miles from Wilshire/Crenshaw home, to Crenshaw on Washington, at 10 o’clock at night.

As I turn the corner from Crenshaw& Washington, 500 yards from my house, a taxi turns around and says “Honey, let me give you a ride. You don’t need to walk in this neighborhood at night.”

My travel time: approximately 4 hours.

David King on the Co-Development of Subways and Real Estate in JTLU

Lisa Schweitzer

The Journal of Transport and Land Use always has good things in it, and this time out is no exception. I’ll pull out two papers to discuss this week.

The first is from fellow UCLA alumni and now assistant professor at Columbia University, David King. His manuscript is

King, D., 2011, Developing Densely: Estimating the Effect of Subway Growth on New York City Land Uses The Journal of Transport and Land Use, 4(2), pp. 19-32.

From the abstract:
Abstract:In the early twentieth century, New York City’s population, developed land area, and subway network size all increased dramatically. The rapid expansion of the transit system and land development present intriguing questions as to whether land development led subway
growth or if subway expansion was a precursor to real estate development. The research described in this article uses Granger causality models based on parcel-level data to explore the co-development of the subway system and residential and commercial land uses, and attempts to determine whether subway stations were a leading indicator of residential and commercial development or if subway station expansion followed residential and commercial construction. The results of this study suggest that the subway network developed in an orderly fashion and grew densest in areas where there was growth in commercial development. There is no evidence that subway growth preceded residential development throughout the city. These results suggest that subway stations opened in areas already well-served by the system and that network growth often followed residential and commercial development. ăe subway network acted as an agent of decentralization away from lower Manhattan as routes and stations were sought in areas with established ridership demand.

This is a wonderfully written paper, and I can’t claim any particular objectively because I think David is the shizzle. However, it’s worth chatting about the paper in some depth.

In this introduction, King notes three factors that reinforced the idea that the subway followed people rather the other way around:

1. The subways were developed by private transit companies with public financing. These companies were not real estate developers: they relied on fares alone for their business. I strongly suspect that this is the biggest single factor in the story he has to tell. If you are a private company, you don’t pour capital investment into places unless you are pretty clear that there are going to be passengers. Contrast this behavior with the behavior of pork-barrel, get-my-slice-of-the-capital-funding-pie-no-matter-how-few-passengers-there-are temptations of public funding for capital improvements.

2. There was no real zoning prior to the 1960s, so developers could cram as many units as they could pencil out into the parcels they owned.

3. Land values were on the rise, which would reinforce #2, and which drove manufacturing off Manhattan in favor of offices–so that we today can stroll around Manhattan and oooh and aaaah at its sustainable urban form populated by, among others, billionaire I-bankers holding the reigns of a capitalist machine that is currently eating the entire universe. But they live in apartments and walk more than everybody else, so they must be The Better Environmental People.

Anyhoozily, I am not the world’s biggest fan of Granger models, but King’s application of them is clever here. To make a long story short, the models look for a first period change in a variable that correlates with a second period change in different variables. King sets up the analysis to look at both possible directions: subway supply change lagged against real estate development (the subway following the people hypothesis) and the alternative, development lagged against subway supply (the people follow the subway hypothesis).

He tests against both commercial and residential development, and he finds that there is no support for the belief that the subways were speculative–that is, that they came before the development. Instead, subways followed development, and commercial real estate most importantly.

One quibble is that I wish he’d left Staten Island in the analysis. He drops it because it’s not a part of the subway network, but I think that makes for an interesting control. Another swing at the questions King brings up concerns whether there is a change in the rate of development once the station appears.

David King blogs about transportation over at Getting From Here To There.

Brookings’ Transit Access and Zero Vehicle Households

Lisa Schweitzer

I got this in the mail from Brookings this morning:

This Thursday, August 18, the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program will release a report that analyzes how well public transit systems serve households that do not own cars and so have few other transportation options.

Transit Access and Zero Vehicle Households uncovers, for the first time, the fact that 700,000 households across the country have no access to cars or transit and so are severely constrained in getting to jobs and commercial centers. This presents a significant challenge to metros working to grow their economies, which, in turn, presents a challenge to our nation’s economic future.

The report will go live on the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program website at 10 AM ET on 8/18. Accompanying the new report will be individual profiles showing how the country’s 100 largest metros perform individually in this area.

Also on Thursday, we will be launching an online interactive mapping tool that uses Bing maps technology to analyze transit data for all 100 metropolitan areas. This tool will give users a wealth of information on how well transit systems perform.

If you have any questions in advance of this release, please feel free to contact Rachel Harvey, 202.797.6073, rharvey@brookings.edu, or John Fairbanks, 202.797.6087, jfairbanks@brookings.edu.

Heaven help them if there is the vaguest hint that transit in NYC could improve its service in any way, shape, or form given the histrionics that greeted their last report…