Tag Archives: transit

Why Buses Are Inferior

Posted on by
1

by Michael Lewyn

Critics of rail often argue that buses are superior; they are cheaper, more flexible and (sometimes) run almost as fast.  But in a recent blog post, Houston planning student Maggie Colson explains why trains are better than buses, even if the train isn’t much faster:

The train system was much easier to maneuver than the bus system. I found the bus system to be more complicated because you had to find the correct bus stop with the bus number labeled on it. In addition, you could easily end up going in the wrong direction – the buses did not have the directions labeled like the trains. On the bus you also had to know where you needed to get off. Unlike the train system, the bus did not stop at every stop and instead you had to push a button to request for the bus to stop. While this is not necessarily an issue once you know the route, trying to navigate for the first time was stressful. Without the use of my smartphone, I would not have found or gotten off at the correct bus stops.

In other words, with buses you really have to know what you are doing.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Cars Are Expensive (And Other Things The Census Taught Me)

Posted on by
Reply

by Michael Lewyn

I just learned that national tables from the 2013 American Household Survey (AHS) are public. These tables contained a variety of information that I thought was at least mildly interesting. To name a few items:

  • Cars are really expensive—even when gas is cheap. The average household spent $800 per month on car-related costs. (Table S-04C). Only $200 of this sum was on gasoline—which means that even if gas was free, cars would still cost $600 per month. About half of household spending was for car payments, 15 percent was for insurance, and the rest was split between parking and maintenance.
  • Single family housing dominates the landscape. Sixty-four percent of all occupied housing units (and 62 percent of units built over the last several years) are detached single-family houses (Table C-01). This is especially true for owner-occupied units: even in central cities, 79 percent of owner-occupied units are detached houses (Table C-01-00).
  • Most single-family housing is not dense enough to support public transit. The average owner-occupied housing unit takes up 0.3 acres, as does the average housing unit built in the last several years. Thus, most blocks probably contain about three or four units per acre; basic bus service requires at least seven units per acre to be economically viable. (Table C-02). Continue reading →

Don’t blame the Koch Brothers (for low gas taxes)

Posted on by
Reply

After a variety of conservative groups (including some funded by the Koch brothers) sent a letter to Congress opposing gas tax increases, the liberal and urbanist blogospheres were chock full of stories like this one, complaining that Congress can’t reach a transportation deal because (in the words of grist.org)  “of the right-wing and Koch network’s coordinated national attack on transit.”  There is certainly an element of truth in these stories; indeed, conservatives don’t like tax increases and are often not particularly supportive of public transit.

But this narrative misses a huge fact: It’s not just the far Right (or even the not-so-far Right) that hates tax increases, especially gasoline tax increases. For example, a 2013 Gallup poll asked respondents if they “would support a state law that would increase the gas tax by up to 20 cents a gallon, with the new gas money going to improve roads and bridges and build more mass transportation in your state.” Only 29 percent of respondents would support the new tax. It wasn’t just conservatives or residents of conservative areas who were against the tax either; only 40 percent of Democrats, and only 32 percent of northeasterners, supported the tax hike.  Even in Massachusetts, voters recently voted to eliminate a law indexing the gas tax for inflation.

In sum, if you think we need to spend more money on transportation, don’t blame a cabal of conservatives, blame the American people, who believe (rightly or wrongly)  they can have good roads and good transit without paying more money for them.  We have met the enemy and he (or she) is us.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Critiquing the “Twenty Percent” Argument

Posted on by
Reply

(Cross-posted from www.planetizen.com)

I just received a email newsletter raising the decades-old argument that public transit gets too much federal support because transit gets 20 percent of federal funding for surface transportation, but its share of trips and transportation mileage is far lower.

One obvious retort to this argument is environmental: highway spending, by encouraging automobile travel to car-dependent places, increases vehicle miles traveled (VMT), thus increasing pollution—not just greenhouse gas pollution, but also more heavily regulated types of pollution such as carbon monoxide and particulate matter. To the extent that highway spending increases such social harms, one dollar of spending may be one dollar too much, let alone the tens of billions of dollars currently devoted to roads.

In addition, highway spending can create other negative side effects: for example, where jobs track new highways but public transit does not, a “spatial mismatch” exists between the pre-highway population and jobs; population was located in more urban areas, but the highway has shifted jobs into outer suburbs and exurbs. To the extent people react to this spatial mismatch by buying cars and driving more, they have suffered additional costs caused by government action. To the extent people too poor to buy cars cannot reach work, they have suffered an even more severe cost: the loss of job opportunities.

Furthermore, the “20 percent” argument overlooks both the impact of past spending and the existence of current non-transportation policies that effectively subsidize highways and sprawl.

In the first half of the 20th century, government at all levels spent liberally on highway, but streetcars (the leading mode of public transit in most of the United States) were a private industry, which meant that government’s job was to tax and regulate it. So in many places, roads got not only the money devoted to roads, but also the implicit subsidy that government created by taxing and regulating the competition. And over the course of the 20th century, transit received far less than 20 percent of government transportation spending. Continue reading →

Americans Are More Multimodal than Some Might Think

Posted on by
Reply

Because most Americans drive to work on any given day, one might think that they don’t use any other mode of transportation, ever.  But a recent review of federal transportation surveys shows otherwise.   In fact, 65 percent of American commuters take at least one non-car trip per week, and 48 percent take three or more.

(cross posted from cnu.org)

Mission Accomplished? Not Yet.

Posted on by
Reply

(cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Over the past few years, I’ve read a lot of articles and blog posts proclaiming that cities are back: that millenials want to drive less and live in cities, and that suburbs as we know them may even be dying.

I agree that many consumers demand more walkable development, both in cities and in suburbs. But even in relatively prosperous, safe cities, the political obstacles to meeting this demand are enormous. To name a few:

*Zoning. The increased desirability of urban life means that in many central cities and walkable inner suburbs, there is simply not enough housing to go around. But zoning law is generally designed to limit density (i.e. neighborhood population), which means that if a landowner wants to build new housing, it will usually have to apply to the city for a rezoning. However, rezonings tend to be politically difficult, because people who live in a neighborhood tend to like it the way it is- otherwise they would be living somewhere else. So as long as zoning is designed to limit density and accommodate present residents at the expense of future residents, urban cores will never be able to accommodate consumer demand. (I note that this is equally true for already built-out suburbs- so in many regions, the only easy place to build new housing is at the fringe of suburbia).

*Transit. Many Americans may wish they could drive less- but if their residences and jobs aren’t in places with good public transit, they may never get the chance. The highway lobby of road-builders and suburban developers has plenty of money to give to politicians, while there isn’t really much of a transit lobby (beyond bureaucrats who can’t give campaign contributions, and environmentalists who are more interested in other issues). So whenever economic growth flattens, public transit is one of the first things to be cut back; after the 2008-10 financial crisis, nearly every American city areduced transit service. (To see a few examples, just google ‘transit cutbacks.’) And even in relatively good times, transit is politically vulnerable because, unlike highways, transit often lacks a reliable source of funding.  For example,Seattle plans to eliminate 28 bus routes this fall to make up for weak sales tax revenues, and to eliminate even more routes in 2015.

*Street design. Many commercial streets are designed for high-speed traffic– for example, the eight-lane street near my former apartment in Jacksonville, Florida. Because a pedestrian is more likely to be killed by a car going 40 mph than by one going 20 mph, such streets are not particularly safe for pedestrians. In theory, these streets could be retrofitted. For example, a city could effectively slow traffic by widening sidewalks and medians, thus reducing the number of traffic lanes. However, these changes would cost money and be politically controversial.

Continue reading →

Transit, Density and Congestion

Posted on by
Reply

(cross-posted from planetizen.com)

A few weeks ago, Wendell Cox wrote a blog post asserting that the most dense metros tend to have the highest levels of congestion. Assuming for the sake of argument that his methodology for measuring congestion makes sense, it does not necessarily follow that sprawl equals low congestion, or that transit-oriented development equals high congestion.

Cox focuses on metrowide density. But there are different kinds of density; some regions, such as Los Angeles, have high regionwide density but so-so transit systems, car-oriented street design, and a not-too-dense central city. Others, such as Boston, combine a very dense, transit-oriented core with not-so-dense suburbs. Regions in the first group tend to have low transit ridership, thus effectively combining density and sprawl. In addition, large regions are likely to have higher congestion than small regions, even leaving aside density.

So I thought I would take a look at Cox’s data and ask a slightly different question: do transit-oriented places have more congestion than one might expect for their size, or less?

Exhibit A is New York City: the region with the highest transit ridership in the United States. Since New York is the largest region in the nation, one might expect it to have high levels of congestion. But according to Cox, New York is only fourth in congestion. Thus, it appears that a highly dense core, when combined with less-dense suburbs, will have levels of congestion lower than one might expect based on population.

Five other large regions (Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington) have highly transit-oriented central cities: that is, cities where over 25 percent of residents use transit to get to work. All of these cities have fairly high central-core density; all but one (Washington) that is, over 10,000 people per square mile within the city limits, and Washington is pretty close to the 10,000/square mile mark.* In fact, five of these cities (all but Washington) are the five most dense principal cities (that is, largest city in their metropolitan area) in the United States.

Philadelphia has the fifth highest regional population, but only the thirteenth highest level of congestion. Thus, Philadelphia clearly outperforms its population in addressing traffic congestion—that is, it has less congestion than one might expect from its size.

Chicago has the third highest regional population, but only the 12th highest level of congestion. Thus, Chicago again outperforms expectations.

On the other hand, two other transit-oriented regions do not outperform. Boston has the tenth highest population but the eighth highest level of congestion, and San Francisco has the eleventh highest population but the third highest level of congestion. (Washington ranks no. 7 in both).

On balance, transit-oriented regions do not seem to have more traffic congestion, controlling for size, than the nation as a whole.

*Washington has 61 square miles and 602,000 people, according to the 2010 Census.