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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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A week or two ago a commenter brought up Randal O’Toole, an ex-Cato Institute researcher who was kicked out for believing that single family zoning was a valid expression of property rights (or something). While I disagree with most of his shtick, it’s hard not to have a grudging affection someone who’s such an obstinate libertarian that even the other obstinate libertarians don’t want to hang out with him

O’Toole is probably more known for his work on transit, of which his focus on suburbs is kind of a subset. Famously, he’s deeply against public transit of almost all forms and strictly pro-car. Ironically, this is despite the fact that he personally is a train enthusiast and avid cyclist who claims to have never driven a car to work. His research is generally solid and numbers are legit, you can read a good summary of his transit ideas on the charmingly titled “Transit: The Urban Parasite.”

His broad claims are that transit both costs more and is more polluting “per-passenger miler,” or per person moved around, when compared to cars, and that transit ridership continues to fall even when we raise subsidies.

These stats seem basically true, but are they a natural free market outcome, or do they specifically reflect a choice landscape that emerged from the very fact that we spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the interstate highway system and countless smaller road projects, and that single family zoning, parking minimums, and resultant sprawl have purposely built an environment where much of transit is impractical and rendered uncompetitive?

These are massively relevant questions because all O’Toole’s criticisms of trains are not inherent to their engineering, but in very large part contingent on the way the investment in car infrastructure saps away their ridership. Trains are not more expensive and polluting because they lack the capacity to move around more people but because (and this is O’Toole’s argument) most seats are unfilled lately, so a lot of energy goes into moving only a few people. But if ridership was higher the numbers would be completely reversed!

Flush train cars blow actual cars out of the water on every metric we care about: affordability, environmental damage, and efficient use of space. Ranking urban planning based on its contingent worst performance rather than its societal potential feels like bizarrely short term thinking.

Nor should we assume the present situation is irreversible. The strength of O’Toole’s argument about trains becoming obsolete rests on emphasizing a decline in ridership in the last few years, a timeframe that of course did include a global pandemic, a pretty clear reason to invest in a car and stay away from crowds. Critic Jarrett Walker notes that:

When he tells us that ridership “peaked,” he’s confessing that he’s playing the “arbitrary starting year” game. To get the biggest possible failure story, he compares current ridership to a past year that he selected because ridership was especially high then. This is a standard way of exploiting the natural volatility of ridership to create exaggerated trends. Again, the Los Angeles Times article that got O’Toole going made a big deal out of how ridership is down since 1985 and 2006, without mentioning that ridership is up since 1989 and up since 2004 and 2011. Whether ridership is up or down depends on which past year you choose, which is to say, it’s about what story the writer wants to tell.

Likewise, O’Toole’s much cited constant cost overruns and astounding costs per mile of construction on transit projects aren’t written into stone; they’re in large part due to the enormous legal, compliance and consulting costs caused by hopelessly inefficient procurement processes, environmental rules (“the wealthy DC suburb of Chevy Chase have led a decades-long crusade against the light rail project, which will benefit the entire region, by claiming that a ‘tiny transparent invertebrate’ might be at risk”), and land use regulations - government restrictions that O’Toole himself has compared to communism! Further high but unproductive expenses are maintenance backlogs (catching up for previous years of underfunding) and security staff. But O’Toole himself argues that security costs could be massively reduced simply by making turnstiles more secure.

Looking at other countries with less institutional corrosion, the costs of building transit are significantly cheaper:

On a per mile basis, America’s transit rail projects are some of the most expensive in the world. In New York, the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.6 billion per mile, in San Francisco the Central Subway cost $920 million per mile, in Los Angeles the Purple Line cost $800 million per mile.

In contrast, Copenhagen built a project at just $323 million per mile, and Paris and Madrid did their projects for $160 million and $320 million per mile, respectively. These are massive differences in cost.

Furthermore, all of the above mentioned lines are profitable (though the Paris subway did record a year of loss in 2020). Which isn’t hard to imagine; if our transit system were 1/6th to 1/8th as expensive as it is now then we’d be profitable as well. O’Toole criticizes endlessly unsustainable transit subsidies, but ignores that absent America’s uniquely high costs, well-managed transit can actually be a boon to municipal coffers.

In contrast, he touts cars’ light subsidy footprint (up to 40% of costs but supposedly as low as a penny per passenger mile) - but of course these figures are depressed by outsourcing the costs of the actual vehicles to the users. [edit: updated from Walterodim pointing out we don't know how many people own new vs used cars] Experian records the average person paying $716 a month on new car payments and $525 on used car payments. Adding data from the AAA on insurance, fuel, and maintenance brings that up to $704 - $894 a month, or $8448 - $10,278 a year. O'Toole cites the total cost of cars in 2017 (with lower numbers than these 2023 costs) as worth $1.15 trillion, or “only” 6.8% of car owner’s incomes.

This is an enormous cost for normal people, and stealth deflates the actual costs of driving infrastructure when compared with transit. In contrast, most subways tickets can be bought for about $2.50, or $1200 yearly across a twice-a-day, five-day-a-week commute - nearly one tenth of the cost borne by the car owner.

Further stealth subsidies include municipal parking minimums that landlords pass on to the public in the form of higher rents, and that also unnecessarily burden business operations: “When the US Census Bureau surveyed owners and managers of multifamily rental housing to learn which governmental regulations made their operations most difficult, parking requirements were cited more frequently than any other regulation except property taxes”. Lest this seem like nitpicking, one pricing estimate, using conservative numbers, finds the total value of parking in the US exceeds the value of even the cars themselves, roughly doubling off-sheet privatized costs.

Tl;dr: Lest this seem overly critical, I actually hold a contrarian’s fondness for O’Toole and respect his work. Still, in every instance O’Toole seems to be taking transit systems that are specifically the worst possible example of their form, out of date, mismanaged, chronically underfunded, their customers drawn away by car infrastructure and their costs artificially inflated by regulations, and then compares them to suburban roadways bolstered by restrictive zoning and generous subsidies, with their costs artificially deflated by outsourcing far higher expenses onto consumers, and then pretends the free market has demonstrated the most efficient mode of travel.

I remember looking into this for stockholm and it's a similar picture. The subway and a part of the bus network is profitable but a substantial minority of the bus network is so poorly used that it makes the entire system unprofitable, even when it's both subsidised and pretty expensive post subsidy.

There is little to no discussion about this for some reason. It can't an equality issue because the poor areas are generally serviced by the subway or light rail and a measure to cut the really poorly performing lines could enable cutting rates for those that are profitable and thus actually helping the financially disadvantaged. The people living in the areas that aren't profitable generally use cars anyway so I dont understand why we're doing this. I believe a goal is that you should be able to take public transit anywhere but I think this is a bit stupid since ride sharing makes the occasional shorter taxi ride comparable or even cheaper than post subsidy PT if you're two passengers.

To be clear, the current situation is pretty good but there seems like there is low having fruit not being picked.

Part of the value of cars is that cars may be used for the long tail of rare, unusual, trips. In order for public transport to replace cars, it has to run routes in rarely used locations and at rarely used times, or it just can't replace cars. Saying "these rarely used lines make the system unprofitable" is really just another way to say "making public transit as useful as cars makes it unprofitable".

Sure, but if the cost of a cab ride approaches the cost of a ride on tax subsidised PT then the system is clearly out of balance.