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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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(1) Convince people to abandon existing driving infrastructure.

Extremely simple, just increase taxes on cars to capture their externalities.

(2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US.

This is the hardest one, but is not limited to transit. If we solve this one we solve a ton of our other problems. I'm convinced that the lack of pay/prestige in public service is the issue - we should have less jobs that are much more highly paid.

(3) Improve the strength of our institutions and management

Not sure how this is related?

(4) Move forward transit spending to update all outdated systems.

Even with current systems, if people use public transit it's massively beneficial and efficient compared to cars.

in terms of reveled preference I do think it's quite possible American really do prefer car-centric neighborhoods. And those that do rightfully bear (at least part) of the cost of the preference.

People also like smoking cigarettes, and we took that away too. Seatbelts etc etc.

I'd argue that car owners bear very little of the cost of the preference, as it hits the urban poor who can't afford a good car the hardest. You get into a poverty trap where you can't afford a good car, have to spend money on repairs constantly, lose jobs, and generally have a bad life.

This is the hardest one, but is not limited to transit. If we solve this one we solve a ton of our other problems. I'm convinced that the lack of pay/prestige in public service is the issue - we should have less jobs that are much more highly paid.

We have accomplished this, it's called privatization and it works well. The people who manage renewable energy projects in the United States are efficient and well paid because they are competitively bidding on these projects in a market with several other players. Offer enough tax credits for an impossible project to be completed and you will be amazed as the impossible becomes possible.

Yeah at this point I’m on board with a platform to just shop out most government functions to the private sector. It already happens through consulting/tech firms constantly, but it’s horribly inefficient.

In appraisal districts in the US for instance a lot of districts have 3-5 full time employees, but they literally just ship the entire job out to an appraisal firm. These peoples entire job is to find a firm once every four years, and they almost always just continue to use the same one. Yet they get full time pay and benefits. It’s absurd when you really get a look at what’s going on.

(2) Figure out how to contain the high costs of projects in the US.

This is the hardest one, but is not limited to transit. If we solve this one we solve a ton of our other problems. I'm convinced that the lack of pay/prestige in public service is the issue - we should have less jobs that are much more highly paid.

Agreed, while cutting project costs is definitely the most challenging battle, it's also one that encompasses so many things beyond trains - our inability to build housing, energy infrastructure, etc, to meet Americans needs and decrease costs. It should definitely be one of the top public policy priorities. And it's not like it's a mystery where to start; there's a lot of low hanging fruit from streamlining environmental review, permitting, and procurement processes.

The same groups which want public transit want strong environmental review and lots of veto points ("community input") in permitting.

It seems that environmental groups and regulations are losing their hallowed status in the left intelligentsia as others have mentioned. Exciting times to be alive.

I think this was true for a while but nowadays the yimbyist-transit crowd have developed a growing consensus around opposing things like zoning and environmental road blocks to construction. The mouthpiece for this crowd are people like Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who talk about "supply-side progressivism" and fighting veto-points.

Yimby's are like libertarians. There are dozens of them!

I'm familiar with the unmitigated disaster that is the California high speed rail project. As best I know this "growing consensus" has not produced actionable cost-effective American rail projects. Billions are poured into contractors to perform various reviews, hardly any low speed track is laid.

Yes, trains are more expensive than they need to be, because of the reasons I listed in the comment you’re replying to and in my OP. The “growing consensus” isn’t among policymakers and politicians but among urbanist advocates. Like him or not, if Noah Smith were transit god king these projects would likely happen much more cheaply.

Zoning is not "environmental review" or "community inputs". They want some carveouts from roadblocks they favor for things they like, but they haven't actually turned against the roadblocks in general.

just increase taxes on cars to capture their externalities.

I'm not really arguing against doing this, I just don't think this seems very politically viable as a "solution."

Improve the strength of our institutions and management

Sorry if this was unclear. I meant to express the idea that in general public transit management and planing is the US is clearly worse than counterparts in other places. It's not clear to me that improving this does not require clearing substantial hurdles with deeply entrenched interests.

Even with current systems

Yes, but I'm arguing that increasing adoption will likely require substantial improvements, not that increasing adoption is bad?

Can't afford a good car

I am sympathetic to this argument, like I said I find many of the Urbanist arguments appealing. I do think that some of the cost comparisons are a bit tricky though. Realistically, someone on the edge of poverty should not be paying the Experian number quoted by OP. When I was driving around in a 20+ year old Honda Civic my lifetime total cost was about 1/3 of the IRS standard mileage rate at the time, including fuel, insurance, maintenance, and repairs. Driving certainly can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be as expensive as the average diver in the US spends.

Extremely simple, just increase taxes on cars to capture their externalities.

For this to have any effect, you'd have to do it without doing the same for public transit, otherwise you've just increased taxes across the board.

Even with current systems, if people use public transit it's massively beneficial and efficient compared to cars.

It is not. On a per-passenger-mile basis it is less efficient. And that's without accounting for circuity, which means it's wasting more passenger piles.

Trains are less efficient not because they aren't capable of better per-passenger-mile metrics than cars, but because trains use the same amount of energy no matter how many people ride them, and right now not that many people ride the train, so a lot of energy goes into moving around not that many people. The more that people use the train the more efficient it becomes (easily beating cars long before reaching peak capacity), so while I am not personally advocating for higher car taxes, to the extent that they shifted consumers towards trains they would be solving the problem of efficiency/reducing externalities per passenger mile in real time.

Trains are less efficient not because they aren't capable of better per-passenger-mile metrics than cars, but because trains use the same amount of energy no matter how many people ride them, and right now not that many people ride the train, so a lot of energy goes into moving around not that many people

Yes, but we have to deal with the trains we have, not hypothetical full ones.

Sure, but that was why I added in the stats noting that ridership doesn't just decline, it bounces around and can be increased as well as decreased

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