Short hop air service: the flying cars of the present

Today's LA Times has a story on a new air service specializing in short hop travel. I wrote about the possibility of this type of service being a viable transportation choice for my Master's degree and I'm pleased to see it has come to fruition. The service is advantageous for many trips within a metro area that could only be reasonably taken by car. In LA, there are two factors that make this service appealing. First, the metro area is huge. You can drive for 100 miles and still be in the urbanized region. Second, congestion can be terrible. In the story the author notes that a journey from John Wayne airport in Orange County to Santa Monica airport took 1.5 hours by car and only 35 minutes by plane. You can imagine that there are many people who value their time highly enough that the $95 ticket for the flight is worth the cost.

This service takes advantage of the fact that 85% of people live within 20 minutes of an airport. That's a lot of potential terminals. I suspect that this will have a niche market, much like helicopter service to the airports in Manhattan, but there is more interest in this as a potential mode than you might initially expect. James Fallows wrote a book about it, and NASA has been pursuing personal aircraft vehicles as a transportation technology of the future. As our physical infrastructure gets increasingly degraded and congested, looking to the sky is a great idea for many trips. I'm all for anything that gets us closer to flying cars, though the environmental problems of air travel still need to be worked out.

Highway Trust Fund shortfall and the future of transportation finance

As gas tax revenues have declined because of slackened demand for gasoline and diesel, the Highway Trust Fund has seen it's fortunes decline. It now has a potential shortfall which will limit the amount of money transferred to the states for their local road projects that are dependent on federal dollars. There are many policy questions to contemplate about the future of the Trust Fund, and there is no time like a crisis to change the status quo.

Perhaps the first policy question is what exactly should the federal role in transportation finance be? Federal monies pay up to 90 percent of federally aided road work, but often these investments are made towards new facilities and infrastructure rather than maintenance. New road projects, porky as they are, make for great ribbon cutting experiences. Bridge maintenance doesn't have the same gravity with voters even though maintenance is critical and underfunded. In the absence of federal funding for road projects I suspect that far fewer new highways would be built, and I think that's okay. I don't think that maintenance would improve at all, however, if the onus for funding was local or state.

One solution to the trust fund shortfall identified in the NY Times article is to transfer money that is reserved for transit to highway projects. While federal transit subsidies distort the types of transit investments, for instance light rail would not be nearly as popular with transit agencies if they had to pay for it themselves, transit needs shoring up. Any transfer of funds from transit to highways is going to be difficult to reverse and would harm transit at a time when it has the potential to make some gains as a mode choice.

The last policy point is that the delicate state of finances for the trust fund is not going to get better at any point in the future. The trust fund is best suited for times when gas prices are low and fuel efficiency is terrible. When people drive a lot and use a lot of gas per mile they contribute a lot to the fund. As people drive less and economy increases the per mile and overall contribution declines (though there is a rebound effect where people increase their driving as economy increases because the price of driving declines on a per mile basis). In an efficient system these changes would be offset by reduced need for new investment. However, politically new investment is desirable-and John McCain can't change the desire for pork projects no matter how hard he tries-and future declines in the trust fund will have to be made up somehow. It seems to me that user fees of some sort will have to be implemented. At the very least, a transition to a new fuel offers opportunities to revisit our highway finance system. The trust fund won't last forever.

Signs of gentrification and local transportation choices

Curbed New York has been keeping tabs on gentrifying neighborhoods. Their metric used to indicate that a neighborhood is gentrifying is the presence of Smart cars. This is a novel way to estimate whether a neighborhood is received new investment, but it's not clear if the Smart cars are a sign of new people moving in who already had Smart cars or if the existing residents are investing in their community through these autos.
Obviously the Curbed coverage is tongue in cheek, but there may be something to the idea that certain types of neighborhoods will feature unusually high clusters of certain cars. Evidence of this type of clustering (such as Matt Kahn's work on neighborhoods that feature high numbers of Prius in the Bay Area) suggests that social factors are at play for transportation decisions.

A Parking Ticket Obituary

This past spring a man died in Brooklyn, which isn't necessarily newsworthy on it's own, but he happened to die shortly before the alternate side parking rules were suspended for the summer. This meant that he didn't have to move his car, and no one thought anything of it not moving since the street spaces were often used for long periods of time. But in July the parking rules were again enforced and the tickets started piling up on his windshield. The collection of tickets was a sad announcement to his neighbors that he had passed, like some type of weird obituary written by his car.

Saving gas in Beverly Hills is more expensive than saving gas anywhere else

I received my last "Beverly Hills In Focus" magazine today as I am soon moving to New York. In the magazine there was a page about Beverly Hills being Green, and it featured a number of gas saving tips. The tips are different than the ones you'd expect in other areas, however. The first tip reads:

"Use the most energy-conserving vehicle you own as much as possible. You may even want to rent a fuel-efficient car for long trips and vacations."

It's nice to live in a city where people have enough cars they can choose which one to drive based on many different factors, including the relative efficiency. I don't see any fewer Mercedes and BMWs, though. Anyhoo, that tip sounds like a great idea, so I looked at a local car rental service to see what their rates were (I was actually wondering how much a Ferrari was for a day.). The Prius, which you would probably think was a great option if you were renting a car to save gas, was almost $300 a day! There is no way to drive a Prius enough miles in a day to make that up. Say you get a 20 mpg premium in a Prius, and you drive an average of 20 miles per hour (all city driving), your maximum potential driving distance is 480 miles, or 24 gallons of fuel saved with the Prius. That's still only $100 for gas, far short of the additional cost of the rental (a standard car costs about $60).

There must be a premium placedby visitors (maybe residents?) on looking the part in this city. While this may be obvious for boob jobs and Aston Martins, it does seem strange to include the standard rental car market. So if you want to save gas, rent a Prius. If you want to save money, rent a less efficient car.

Streetcar revivals and local transit finance

The NY Times has an article about the revival of streetcars in some downtown areas. What is remarkable about these projects is that they are largely locally financed. In contrast, most light rail and other major transit infrastructure are dependent on federal money.

I suspect that locally financed transit projects will be somewhat more efficient from an economic point of view in that rent seeking behavior will lessened. It is also welcome that these transit systems are designed to serve small areas, which is more in line with how people use transit-mostly for short trips.

The Cato Institute will object to any type of subsidy, but in the case of local transit investment this is a better financing model than waiting for even larger subsidies. In addition, with local finance the economic benefits of the investment are captured where the money is raised. This is part of a larger shift in transportation planning towards quality of life issues, and having a good transit system that allows people to get around their neighborhood without a car can be a justified investment for managing growth.

Jack Nicholson saw the hydrogen car future in 1978

In many ways the transportation problems that seem to be treated as new and suddenly important problems have long histories. Part of those histories is that the solutions being discussed today have also been around a long time (electric cars, hydrogen, more trains and buses).

Here is Jack Nicholson driving around in a 1978 Chevy that's been converted to run on hydrogen. This illustrates that technological solutions are often hampered by political hurdles rather than engineering ones. Had we spent the past 30 years promoting hydrogen, we'd certainly be much farther along in switching to cheap, clean fuel for transportation. Instead, thanks to political decisions that skew the market towards status quo we are grappling with how to move forward now in order to avert a potential crisis. How public policy should encourage innovation and new technological shifts in transportation is a major question that needs much more research.