John Cassidy, writing in the NY Review of Books, provides a fascinating look at the thinkers and thinking that are shaping the economic outlook and policies of Barack Obama (pointer via Mark Thoma).
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May 23rd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Dr. Florida,
Please see this article in Today’s Globe and Mail about Uran Transit:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080522.wreynolds0523/BNStory/energy
“Buying bulk people-movers is old paradigm. As U.S. environmental economist Randal O’Toole observed in this space the other day, light-rail service was a fad of the past generation that sought to replace heavy buses (average weight: 13,600 kilograms) with heavier rail cars (average weight: 45,360 kg). With few exceptions, the U.S. cities that opted for light rail – a term laden with irony – incurred far more cost than anticipated. Twenty-year projects always do. (The Boston transit authority, citing a single example, is $5-billion in debt.) And most light-rail systems carry fewer people – because light rail (on fixed routes) still requires the preservation of big buses (on flexible routes). You get the worst of alternative transit systems, and diminishing returns.”
“From an environmental perspective, highway construction makes a relatively good investment. Mr. O’Toole: Each mile of urban highway typically provides far more passenger miles of travel than a mile of light-rail transit line. The average mile of U.S. light-rail line, for instance, [provides] only 15 per cent as many passenger miles as the average lane mile of urban freeway. Yet all drivers know the anguish of driving at a crawl on expressways – alongside an exclusive, empty bus lane.”
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The article makes it sound as if Public Transit is a thing of the past and Highway construction is the new environmental solution.
Does this make any sense? Is Public Transit simply becoming too expensive?
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Randal O’Toole is a tool. He’s been spewing anti-urban transit crap for years. Few of his arguments actually stand up to examination. You can read some rebuttals to his arguments when he was in Vancouver on Stephen Rees’s blog
http://stephenrees.wordpress.com/2007/06/12/shooting-fish-in-a-barrel/.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
And Neil Reynolds deserves blame too, as his write-up of O’Toole introduces its own distortions. For example, his weight comparison is between standard-size buses and light rail vehicles that carry up to 175 people, and doesn’t mention that cars are the heaviest per-person of all (1450 kg for each car, on average). Similarly, the exhaust fumes from buses are far less than the amount of pollution from the same number of drivers in their own cars.
Ottawa is not a good starting point if you want to discuss transit on the national level, since their busway system is unlike any other city in the world. The similar-sized city of Calgary has a light rail system that sees noticeably higher ridership than Ottawa. (Applying American experience with light rail to Canada should be done with great care because of the differences in city layout, car ownership, and overall transit use.) As for Boston’s debt, much of it comes from remediation projects that were required because of the Big Dig — an ill-advised highways project.
As for the original economics article, it is a fascinating write-up. Many of these nudges are easy sells (who can really argue against clearer disclosure for credit cards or mortgages) but it’ll be interesting to see how Obama handles the pressure on the harder ones, like gas taxes.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Matt, Chris,
Thanks for the comments. Some colleagues were discussing this over lunch (environmental assessment people) and pointed out that the cost of road/parking construction for all the cars that need to go through a downtown core is more than the cost of public transit, in most cases (although, Ottawa being so small, could be different). This is not considering the pollution/noise created by cars with one passenger only!
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Everytime Randal O’Toole is mentioned someone spews forth some ignorant venom. Thus as soon as you read “The Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute are of course well known right wing ‘think tanks’.” you know it’s going to be an uninformed hatchet job. GG Chris.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Randy is a long-time Oregon crank and Libertarian– I think calling him an environmental economist is quite a stretch. He’s said all government planning is bad, although he’s backed off from that a bit. We sort of chuckle about him out here.
Randy’s tirades against light rail are amusing. So Boston is in debt, this debt is investment rather than operating in a deficit like the federal government. An economist would know the difference. Has he ever tried to drive in Boston? Can he imagine it without subways and trains? Actually, he lives at the beach, so he probably thinks they could all move to Cape Cod in solitude.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Whether knowingly or not, development policy in Charlotte is unfolding very much in line with the gentle “nudge” approach of Thaler and Sunskind. It originates from the unrelated source, I think, of an in-bred, Presbyterian pragmatism which understands the value of throwing bones to developers but does not give away too much. For example, 5 development teams, representing big name firms from around the country, submitted proposals for a sizable TOD project in our light rail corridor, but all withdrew the proposals as soon as the city leaders balked at giving away more than was warranted (in terms of tax increment financing and capital investments)…They decided instead to wait for the light rail to begin operating and let the market develop, perhaps because of the painful scrutiny the Charlotte Area Transit System was experiencing because of funding mishaps with the light rail project.
This accidental, non-insistent wait and see approach is paying off. Within a five-mile radius of downtown Charlotte, easily half of all new development is just along the light rail corridor (talk about investment!)…it’s two-thirds if you count the future extension of the corridor to the north-east. Near the same TOD area mentioned above a local developer is inviting teams of firms to offer proposals for the site in a competition for a “sustainable development” for a substantial area they managed to assemble…giving local firms the opportunity to develop and showcase their talents with respect to green design. The entire private sector is booming with creativity and energy with the simple “nudge” of getting people-movement on an abondoned rail line.
The lessons: Set the bar in terms of fairness, transparency and equity. Develop the choices, but don’t overdo it. The market will always respond. (A good lesson for our banks.)
May 24th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Fantastic article! Obama is on target with this policy. McCain’s policy relies on rhetoric and Clinton’s policy would apply a one-size-fit-all sledgehammer solution to a problem with many unique faces.
May 24th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
“I think calling him an environmental economist is quite a stretch.”
That’s because you don’t know anything about him. His education is in forest management, geology and economics and much of his writings, moreso his early ones, focus on the environment.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Robert,
Maybe I was a little snide. Randy has a background in forestry and did study economics. What I meant was I think his economics are flawed because he knows the answer before he knows the question. His constant attacks on urban planning and transportation assume that the problem is always government planning, and cost-benefit analysis treats all government spending as waste.
He and John Charles are both former Oregon environmentalists who have become Libertarians and gone a little overboard. They’re the ones called when the press wants “another viewpoint for balance.” I don’t think Charles is known as well nationally. I don’t dislike Libertarians, I just think their “free market is the answer to everything” analysis is naive.
Here’s his bio from the Cato website, which I think overstates his influence:
Randal O’Toole is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues. O’Toole’s research on national forest management, culminating in his 1988 book, Reforming the Forest Service, has had a major influence on Forest Service policy and on-the-ground management. His analysis of urban land-use and transportation issues, brought together in his 2001 book, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, has influenced decisions in cities across the country. In his most recent book, The Best-Laid Plans, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation.
May 27th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Another argument for getting away from cars: that a large proportion of Americans feel that commuting is the most unpleasant, wasted portion of their lives. Public transit offers all sorts of opportunities for interaction with other people. From the old man who told me his life story while we were waiting for a bus (it doesn’t just happen in Forest Gump) to the brewing romance in the air the day I took an Amtrak train on Valentine’s Day, to the man I once sat next to (again Amtrak) – such a railroad buff that his idea of a good Sunday outing was to ride the train to some nearby city and back. He was 90 years old and proudly told me he’d just bought a lifetime membership in a cog rail line that was being rehabbed in Telluride, Colorado (even though it would not become operational for another decade). Street life doesn’t happen just on streets.