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Notes -
Small Costs, Widely Distributed
Often when someone is making a policy argument, they will ignore the costs or downsides to their preferred policy. This is of course quite normal as part of persuasion and rhetoric, but I want to draw attention to a few examples of this where the arguer at least ought to make an attempt at neutrality.
Alcohol consumption: Public health officials look just at health outcomes, which are sometimes negative. But alcohol has clear benefits to the drinker (as /u/Difficult_Ad_3879 mentions). Even beyond the personal happiness derived from drinking, it is socially useful as a costly signal proving trustworthiness1. If a social group or an organization can use alcohol as a tool for establishing the trustworthiness of its members, it can reduce internal transaction costs since members don't have to monitor each other as much. This increases economic efficiency. How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.
Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.
How suburban sprawl hurts the poor: This Vox article summarizes the sentiment that suburban sprawl is bad because it makes it harder for poor people to get around. And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around3. I'm not talking strictly about dry metrics like crime rate either; at a more basic level, the qualities that cause a person to be poor basically mean they don't produce as much value from their life as richer people do. As a consequence it's not as valuable to have such peope in one's community as it is to have more competent and value-producing people who tend to be richer. The zoning restrictions and bad public transit are just people expressing their preferences to be around people who are more worth being around.
Traffic safety and value of time: The discourse around traffic safety almost always ignores people's time and life value in the calculus. Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes). That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger. So for my family we're losing expected life-years due to the road diet. Potentially even worse is the effect of car seats. Anyone who has had small kids in their life knows how much difficulty car seats add to the logistics of your life. They're gigantic (good luck having three kids if you have a sedan) and any time someone else could help carry a child somewhere in their car they have to have a car seat available on every leg. This actually figures into potential parents' choices and causes some people, on the margin, to not have a child. Someone did the math4, and the loss in children born due to the car seat requirement is about 140x times greater than the children's lives saved due to the extra safety.
One theme here is that the unmentioned costs of policy positions tend to be diffused across large numbers of people, while the benefits tend to be concentrated.
Another theme, maybe more important, is that opponents tend to not want to bring up the costs because they're socially undesirable things to talk about, even if they have significant real-world effects. A really strong theme here is that the unmentioned costs apply to higher-status people, while the benefits to the proposed changes apply to lower-status people. This applies to alcohol, trans recognition, and suburban sprawl (and maybe not induced traffic demand).
Notes:
1Between cheap and costly signals: the evolution of partially honest communication
2Induced Demand Threads
Against Induced Demand
stucchio on housing
There were several more threads on the topic of cars, urbanism, YIMBYs, and induced demand which I can't find anymore. I think Zorba posted at some point about getting access to more land area through highways.
Trans People Don't Exist (essay by ymeskhout)
3Why are people poor? (Cato)
4Car Seats as Contraception. Quote from the abstract: "We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980".
Economists think about this all the time--see, for example, this video from David Friedman, but it's also one of the first things that are discussed in introductory Econ right after the perfect competition model. But I don't think this post does a great job of identifying such cases; the video I linked has what I consider to be better examples.
For the most part, it's up to each person to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs. Most people can determine how much they like drinking; an estimate of other people's preferences won't help you much. But... what does this have to do with diffusion? Generally, each person experiences the costs and benefits of their own drinking. If anything, the cost of drinking is more diffuse, since health care costs are often socialized even in the US, so non-drinkers will pay for drinkers' drinking-related health care.
Again, I'm confused as to what this has to do with your general thesis. Generally, both the benefits and the costs of more road space are relatively diffuse, at least in North America, since most people drive most of the time (edit: this depends on the road/project; for one road serving one area, what I said is wrong. For expanding many roads serving many areas, it's more correct, although there still will probably be some agents with more or less benefit and cost). If anything, since many more people drive than bike, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are spread around (sanity check: if the benefits were concentrated, it would be easy to privately fund roads; this almost never happens).
(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).
I can't tell what this has to do with costs or benefits being diffuse at all. It sounds like you're just dropping an argument for zoning into the post at random. A zoning law has a very clear, concentrated cost (someone who would like to build a different type of housing unit on their land) with diffuse benefits (spread across all of their neighbors). (edit for clarity: Zoning, like many policies, can have both concentrated and diffuse costs and benefits. I was trying to get at the point that there's nothing particularly concentrated or diffuse about the particular argument you mentioned).
First, I think your math is wildly off. 1.46 looks to be roughly the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, while 5 miles is, presumably, the distance of one commute. So 1.92 minutes is the risk due to your car making 1 commute, which means that these values are actually extremely similar.
But also, where are these numbers coming from? If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time (certainly the converse, where adding road capacity does not reduce congestion, has been consistently observed--see the ID argument just above; you don't seem to dispute that ID occurs, simply how to interpret it).
I really want to emphasize this point, though. By driving, you expose other people to danger while slightly reducing your own exposure to danger and increasing your convenience. This is a highly negative externality and deserves to be heavily "taxed" to discourage it, or you should be forced to negotiate. If the math does work out as you claim, it should cost an absolutely trivial amount for you alone to pay off all of the cyclists and pedestrians in the city to keep the roads.
Also, from a more dry utilitarian point of view, expected amount of time is not the only relevant variable. A small risk of dying increases the variance a lot, and is something that people definitely care about. In this case, downweighting the diffuse costs is entirely appropriate.
I don't have time to watch the whole Friedman lecture but his first few examples are about market failures, which is a slightly different topic to what I was getting at. What I was trying to express (and didn't do a great job of) was that in discussions of policies, there are often costs that are not mentioned so we never get a full cost/benefit comparison. The specific examples are just examples of the "missing" costs and I wasn't trying to do a full accounting of all the costs/benefits in each example.
I used expected life-years lost for driving 5 miles, which is approximately 1.46/100m * (5 miles) * (50 years of life left), which multiplies to about 2 minutes. Urban driving reduces that by about half, so it really should be about 1 minute. The specific numbers are not important though; the public conversation was only ever about Vision Zero rather than trip times.
Also true! But the numbers matter. I don't think there are a lot of people in my neighborhood whose behavior will be changed by these particular road diets - as I mentioned downthread, there is already a dedicated bike path a block away, and also the neighborhood is hilly, which is a non-starter for most people to bike. I will state that in a full cost-benefit accounting, the road diet might make sense. No one did that analysis though; it was all one-sided statistics and aesthetic judgments.
One of the causes of market failures is diffuse costs or diffuse benefits. Some examples in the video include tariffs and drug regulation.
There are theoretically infinitely many costs and benefits to any policy (or if not, far more than could be feasibly thought of and estimated, especially once you start taking into account 2nd order effects, or 3rd order effects, etc). I don't think the process of choosing what to ignore is really related to whether the costs and benefits are diffuse or not, except to the extent that diffuse costs and benefits may be harder to see. For the most part, I think whether someone thinks of a diffuse cost or benefit is, like most other arguments, related to their bias or personal experience rather than anything else. Like with the travel time example, both of the things you mention are somewhat diffuse (exactly how diffuse depending on how many people cycle or walk vs driving, which depends on the policy itself, which makes it even more complicated). Someone advocating for reducing traffic volume is probably going to focus on cyclist and pedestrian deaths because (depending on how charitable we're being) deaths are more important than commute time and/or they have ideological preferences for bikes over cars.
If you want to say an argument is being unfairly ignored, I think you do have to show that it is at least plausibly of the correct scale to be relevant.
Ok, but then I think your interpretation is off: Both numbers apply to 1 single trip. Every other person who does the same drive will face the same delay and also increase risk by the same amount (glossing over any issues with induced demand, assuming marginal = average, etc).
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