Category Archives: Transportation Bill

The easy oil is almost gone

CC image from StuffEyeSee

CC image from StuffEyeSee

So says the Department of Defense:

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.

The implications for urban planning and transportation are huge.  Part of the big push for a VMT tax instead of merely raising the gas tax stems from the macro-level supply and demand issues.  Seeing crude oil prices spike would almost certainly lead to a drop in consumer demand for gasoline, thus lowering gas tax revenues.   Add in mandated improvements in fuel efficiency for cars and light trucks, and the long-term stability of the gas tax as a funding source doesn’t seem that robust.

Certainly, there are many other potential implications, but this long-term funding issue ought to be front and center in the current debate over how to fund transportation.

More High Speed Notes

Freakonomics blogger Eric Morris seeks to “start the debate” on high speed rail with his buddy Ed Glaeser, except that I don’t usually seek to start debates with authoritative titles like “the bottom line on high speed rail.”  Yesterday, Stephen Dubner did him one better by categorically denying peak oil – which kind of misses the point of what the broadest definition of peak oil means.

I’ll give the folks over at Reason this – they’re far more honest with their headlines.

Sam Staley, Reason‘s transportation guy, has a post up criticizing high speed rail’s role as a job creating stimulus program.  Given where politicians on both sides of the aisle set the bar with their hyperbole, this isn’t saying too much.  Staley writes:

In April, President Barack Obama claimed “my high speed rail proposal will lead to innovations in the way we travel” and new rail lines “will generate many thousands of construction jobs over several years, as well as permanent jobs for rail employees and increased economic activity in the destinations these trains serve.”

Even House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who voted against the stimulus bill, now wildly praises rail’s job-creation potential, writing, “It is estimated that creating a high-speed railway through Virginia will generate as many as 185,500 jobs, as much as $21.2 billion in economic development, and pull nearly 6.5 million cars off the road annually. Providing a high-speed rail service from Washington, D.C. to Richmond will drive economic development throughout our region for many years to come.”

Now, the political realities of the day mean that everyone wants to talk about creating jobs, whether you’re the President or a member of the minority party with a chance to bring home some money to your district.    The numbers on jobs are grossly inflated, enough so that they don’t pass the smell test.

Both Staley and Morris, despite my disagreement with their conclusions, raise interesting points about alternative avenues of investment.  Staley harps of freight rail while Morris angles for more investment in urban mass transit. What both miss, however, is that high speed passenger rail improvements are complimentary programs to improved freight rail and urban mass transit.

Given the (apparent) early favorable returns for ‘high speed’ rail projects that fall just a bit short of TGV-esque speeds, the kinds of improvements to existing freight rail corridors (grade separation, signaling improvements, etc) will benefit passenger trains and freight trains alike.  Since railroads are mostly privately owned, they don’t have a lot of incentive to undertake expensive infrastructure upgrades for modest increases in speed, even though they’ll gain a great deal from them.   Throw in a little incentive from the government, however (in exchange for improved passenger rail operations), and you’ve got a different situation.

Likewise, passenger rail can deliver people directly to city centers and other walkable places.  Eric Morris argues that that money should be spent on urban mass transit – but a cursory look at urban mass transit needs shows that the overall needs are so great, it’s kinda useless to split hairs at this point.  We need money for both inter and intra city transport infrastructure.

Rail stations are the kind of focal points that make great trip generators for mass transit systems.  However, Staley points out the catch-22 of this argument – while Morris wants more transit, Staley uses the lack of transit as an argument against rail:

Consider a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco, or Chicago to St. Louis, for a typical high-speed train traveler. You’ll likely have to drive to the train station and pay to park. Once arriving in downtown St. Louis or San Francisco, you will likely have to take a taxi or rent a car to get to your hotel or meeting place (which is likely to be outside the central business district). The reliable, diverse, and nimble transit system that many advocates envision surrounding high-speed rail stations simply doesn’t exist in most cities today, limiting the appeal of trains.

When determining whether to build the chicken or the egg first, why not start and do both at the same time?

Hmmmmm.  If only we had some sort of national transportation law to guide us on this…

Counter-intuitive traffic

Perhaps the most confusing element in convincing the public about certain traffic improvements is the fact that traffic often behaves counter-intuitively.  We often think of traffic like water – if you remove some capacity from a stream, that water has to go somewhere.   In fact, traffic often behaves more like a gas – it expands to fill the volume given.  Conversely, when space is restricted, the same amount of gas will still fill that volume.

Obviously, this is a gross oversimplifaction of things.  The context of each situation matters a great deal, but for the most part, traffic fills the space available to it.

With that in mind, there are a couple of nice pieces circulating about traffic and how we deal with it:

Streetfilms visits the closures of Broadway at Herald Square in New York, noting how this particular closure has both increased available pedestrian space as well as improved traffic flow by vastly simplifying complex turning movements.

In a similar vein, Tom Vanderbilt (of Traffic fame) has a great piece up at Slate concerning the rise of the roundabout and some of the counter-intuitive effects they have.  Vanderbilt notes the disconnect between our common perceptions about roundabouts and the reality.  For example, we think they’re unsafe when they’re actually more safe.  We also think they’re slow (which they often are) yet they manage to move more traffic through the intersection in the same period of time – slower top speed, but faster average speed.

Ryan Avent has a couple of interesting posts on the potential for charging for roads based on vehicle miles traveled, rather than gallons of gas consumed.

The first concerns tolling technology.  The University of Minnesota has a cheap and easily installed device that could track miles traveled using mostly existing technology from on board car computers and SMS text messaging – thus using cell phone services rather than GPS based technology.  Such a device would seem to be both more cost-effective than GPS based systems and would also ameliorate some of the big brother privacy concerns with a VMT tax.

Discussion in the comments quickly returned to the idea of why a VMT tax is even necessary – why not just increase the gas tax? Avent’s second post takes this question on:

Several things to note. First, as I mentioned in the original post, this technology might also make it easier to do congestion tolling, which would be of enormous economic and environmental benefit. Second, I think we should increase the gas tax, whether or not we adopt a VMT. Oil dependency is pretty obviously a nefarious economic force, and I think it’s worth encouraging drivers to get off the black stuff. I’m also clearly in favor of carbon pricing, which would have a small but positive impact on gas prices.

Third, increasing gas taxes isn’t a very good way to pay for long-term infrastructure expenses, because higher gas taxes make people use less gas. So you increase the tax, and then people substitute away from the tax, reducing revenue, and then you can increase the tax again, and consumers will substitute away even more and revenues fall again, and so on. Higher taxes encourage efficiency, then a move to hybrids, and then a move to electrics, at which point you no longer have any tax revenue.

All good points.  Raising the gas tax now will help bridge the gap we have in transportation financing, as well as provide some much needed incentives to continue the shift towards both driving less and doing so in more fuel-efficient vehicles.  But this obviously is not a long term solution, and that’s where a VMT tax comes into play.

The devil, of course, is in the details.  Using VMT as a revenue stream is a great idea in the abstract, but that presumes heavier, road-damaging trucks will be taxed more than light cars.  As Ryan notes, linking such a mechanism with the ability to charge tolls is also an intruiging idea, as not every vehicle mile is equal.

Nevertheless, this will be the front line for the new transportation bill.  Without a stable funding source, financing infrastructure improvements will be difficult.

Also on the Avent watch – Ryan has a nice smackdown at Streetsblog of some conservative think tank dreck on the transportation front.