Are There National Transportation Priorities?

The Associated Press surveyed Americans about what they think of various taxing and spending plans for transportation. An excerpt from the piece:

Six in 10 people surveyed said the cost of good highways, railroads and airports is justified by their benefits. Among those who drive places multiple times per week, 62 percent say the benefits outweigh the costs. Among those who drive less than once a week or not at all, 55 percent say the costs are worthwhile.
Yet a majority of Americans bristle at the most commonly proposed ideas from public officials and industry. For example, 58 percent oppose raising federal gasoline taxes to fund transportation projects such as the repair, replacement or expansion of roads and bridges. Only 14 percent support an increase. And by a better than 2-to-1 margin, Americans oppose having private companies pay for the construction of new roads and bridges in exchange for the right to charge tolls. Moving to a usage tax based on how many miles a vehicle drives also draws more opposition than support — 40 percent oppose it, while 20 percent support it.

Joshua Shrank notes:

"Congress is actually reflecting what people want," said Joshua Schank, president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation, a transportation think tank. "People want to have a federal (transportation) program and they don't want to pay for it."

I agree that people want things and don't want to pay for them, but how do we reconcile the national attitudes with the broad local support for higher taxes for transportation projects? Here is a City Lab piece about local support for transit, and here is a Mineta Transportation Institute research project that highlights some of the factors affecting local support.

One way to think about national support for higher taxes to pay for transport is that the nation is large a diverse. If you run with particular crowds you get the notion that we, as a country, agree that transit is great, roads are the future, everybody loves bike lanes, there is no better use of money than high speed rail, we should start by fixing the stuff we have before we build anything new, etc. In truth we, as a country, don't agree on much when it comes to transportation. Transit investment is great in certain places. So are roads. We should fix the infrastructure we have first, but we should also shrink our transport networks (road and rail alike).

What we don't have in the United States is a clear national need for lots of new spending on passenger travel. Lots of transit investment is based on local economic development rather than transportation improvements, hence the new and weird "transit is supposed to be slow" defense. We don't want the federal government spending transport money on football stadiums, so I don't know why we want federal money spent on transit  just to prop up private real estate values. Lots of roads are being built simply because that's how things are done when the money flows. There isn't a national or local need for a lot of new facilities, though this obviously depends on what and where.

Transportation projects actually have a very good track record of generating local support for new taxes and spending. Partly this is because the projects reflect local preferences, to which local politicians really are responsive. We should consider that one reason, if not the main reason, national transport policy is so uncertain is that there simply aren't any truly national priorities that can build necessary coalitions of support. However, we do have lots of very important local priorities.

The Kansas City Experiment on Transport Infrastructure Investment

Kansas City (the Missouri one) presents an interesting natural experiment on the effect of transportation infrastructure investment and economic performance. There are two main investments occurring with each investment focused on a very different technology. First, the city is aggressively pursuing a streetcar system with the hope of encouraging downtown development. Second, Google is installing Google Fiber, an ultra high speed Internet service. These two strategies represent two very different approaches to economic development, and figuring out which approach has a greater (if any) effect on the local or regional economy can help guide future public and private investment decisions.

The streetcar project is a two mile, $102 million rail line mostly along Main Street. Last December voters of a special downtown streetcar district approved a 25 year property and sales tax increase to help fund the project:

Voters approved, 351 to 198, a 1-cent sales tax increase, and 344 to 206 property tax increases to help pay for a $100 million, two-mile streetcar system. It will run from River Market to Union Station, primarily on Main Street.
The tax increases, authorized for 25 years, will apply only within the defined boundaries of a downtown streetcar district. That covers roughly River Market, the Central Business District, the Crossroads and Crown Center.
Yet already, Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders is floating the possibility of a broader countywide transit tax that might alleviate some of the burden on downtown.
Wednesday’s results occurred in an unusual mail-in election and involved only registered voters living within the streetcar district.
The city hopes to begin construction next year and start running the streetcars in 2015.

 Local officials are extremely optimistic about the outcome:

“This is going to be a game changer for our city, especially our downtown,” City Councilwoman Jan Marcason said.
“It will be historic,” Mayor Sly James said. “This is only a beginning.”
Supporters emphasized that just running streetcars through two miles of downtown was never the goal. They hope Wednesday’s results springboard a more extensive system of streetcars running to the Plaza and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and along east-west corridors such as 12th Street or 18th Street.

To place downtown Kansas City in a bit of context, here is Strongtowns' Charles Marohn explaining current traffic and pedestrian conditions in Kansas City:


Looking at the Google project, here is a description of the service:

Google Fiber is a project to build an experimental broadband internet network infrastructure using fiber-optic communication[1] in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri; the location was chosen following a competitive selection process.[2] Over 1,100 communities applied to be the first recipient of the technology.[3] On March 30, 2011, Google announced that Kansas City, Kansas will be the first community where the new network would be deployed.[4]
After building an infrastructure of the network, in July 2012, Google announced pricing for Google Fiber. The service will offer three options. These include a free broadband internet option, a 1 Gbps internet option for $70 per month and a version that includes television service for $120 per month. The internet service includes 1 terabyte of Google Drive service and the television service includes a 2 terabyte DVR recorder in addition to the Google Drive service. The DVR will record up to eight live television shows simultaneously. The television options also includes a Nexus 7 tablet that will act as a remote control for the system. In addition, television service will also stream live program content on iPad and Android tablet computers. Neighborhoods that receive the service will be selected through demand from Kansas City area residents and Google has set up a website to pre-register for the service.[5]

Early anecdotes and media stories suggest that the Google Fiber service is already having an impact on the local economy. Here is one article, and here is another. From the latter:

Soon no one will snicker when Kansas City residents proudly refer to their city as the “Silicon Prairie.” As the Associated Press reports, the presence of Google’s (GOOG) high-speed fiber network has turned Kansas City into a major attraction for tech startups that want to take advantage of the fastest Internet connectivity in the United States. According to the AP, “several startup-friendly locations… have sprouted up in Kansas City in recent months” in residential buildings that give entrepreneurs room for “working on their ideas for the next high-tech startup.”

These news stories should not be treated as rigorous evidence any more than stories promoting streetcars. Yet it is the case that these two transportation infrastructure investments are both expected to be transformative for the local and regional economy. I have my own ideas about which one is more likely to prove a successful investment, but the Kansas City experiment should be closely followed to help inform what types of investment in new transport networks should be made in the upcoming decades.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/12/3962799/kc-streetcar-taxes-pass-overwhelmingly.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/12/3962799/kc-streetcar-taxes-pass-overwhelmingly.html#storylink=cpy

Bridge Collapse Causes Train Wreck

A train derailed in New Jersey after the bridge it was crossing collapsed. Here is a CNN story. At this point no one knows if the bridge collapse was the cause of the derailment (or was there something with the train that caused the collapse), but will this event serve as a reminder that we tolerate catastrophic failures of our infrastructure far more commonly than most people think? I am not confident that knowledge of potential failure will spur action, nor am I very confident that actual failure will change priorities to fix our infrastructure first. It seems most likely that we will continue to tolerate occasional failure even though everybody knows this is the wrong  way to go about things. Collective action problems are hard.

Future Transport Technologies

Siemens is getting ready to unveil their 'eHighway' technologies. See the above video for an explanation how hybrid trucks will connect to overhead powerlines for electric travel. Designboom has a post on these technologies here.

From Popular Science, a fellow says we (he?) can build a starship U.S.S. Enterprise in about 20 years. Here is his website. BTE Dan, as this fellow is known, suggests this project will cost $1 trillion and he has identified tax increases and budget cuts to pay for it (this will apparently be a U.S. project. Sorry Federation!).

Also from Popular Science, a whole issue devoted to future air travel including electric planes and new supersonic aircraft. James Fallows' piece on China's aviation investment and planning is worth reading. The story begins:

When discussing any environmental issue in China, it’s always a struggle to decide which deserves more emphasis: how dire the situation is, or how hard Chinese authorities are trying to cope with it. China’s skies, waters and even sources of food are some of the most poisonously contaminated on Earth. Its efforts to curtail pollution and develop cleaner energy sources are some of the world’s most ambitious.
This tension also informs China’s plans for aviation. The immediate threat posed by airline emissions in China is less obviously dire than, say, the particulate pollution that so often makes big-city air opaque, or the heavy-metal tainting of food and groundwater supplies that has contributed to China’s current cancer epidemic. But airplane emissions are significant and will become more so, especially as aerospace grows faster than most other parts of China’s economy.
Demand for air travel has grown little in the Western world in the decade since the 9/11 attacks, but it has increased fourfold in China, and is growing in the rest of the developing world too. The U.S. and all the countries in Europe together have fewer than 10 new commercial airports now under construction; China is building perhaps 100 new ones and expanding many more. Boeing and Airbus base their major sales hopes for the coming generation of airliners in China. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is investing heavily in the aircraft that may eventually compete against them, Comac’s regional ARJ21 and long-haul C919.
Like so many aspects of China’s growth, all of this will have serious consequences for the environment. The world’s airliners produce about 2 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions and play at least twice as large a role in climate change because the effect of CO2 and some other greenhouse gases is greater at high altitude. Aviation’s share of global emissions has been rising, and China’s share in the aviation total has been rising faster still. If the current trend were to continue, efforts to reduce emissions elsewhere could be swamped by the sheer increase in air travel in the skies over China.

He covers a lot of ground about GPS technologies, algae fuels and  flight planning, all of which matter for US and European aviation.

The Problems of Transport Investment Summarized in One Sentence

This NY Times article about "instant bridges"  has a quote from a transportation official that neatly summarizes many of the problems with out current transport planning and investment systems:

“The highway department didn’t use to see the drivers as customers,” said Frank DePaola, administrator of the highway division for the department. “For a while there, the highway department was so focused on construction and road projects, it’s almost as if the contractors became their customers.”

This is a bridge replacement on a road, so referring to drivers is appropriate.  The idea that the clients being served are the contractors is problematic. The taxpayers, be they drivers, riders, cyclists, walkers,  or some combination of them all, are the ones who should be the priority. Considering that travel time savings are a major factor used to justify expensive projects it is a wonder that delay caused by really long construction periods is not a larger concern. This quote illustrates many of the issues raised though public choice theory.

Certainly there are some efforts underway to speed up construction times, such as Carmageddon last year. There are ways that the public can foster faster construction. One way is to charge rents for road space to the companies doing the construction. If a company has to take some capacity out of service for whatever reason, then they have to pay the value of the delay caused drivers. This will reduce construction times as the less time a road is out of service the lower the costs to the construction companies. If infrastructure were privatized rents for time out of service would be standard operating procedure. For example, Chicago Parking Meters, the company that owns the rights to Chicago's parking meters through 2084, must be paid by the city if any of the parking meters are taken out of service for any amount of time. (I'm not advocating privatization, just highlighting an example where this approach has been implemented.)

Considering how long infrastructure construction and maintenance takes, any policies that help speed up the process should be considered.

Russia's lost opportunity for road maintenance

Russia is losing 3% of its GDP because of the poor quality of its roadways according to the LA Times The country failed to invest in paving, maintaining and building roads during the oil rich boom years and now faces transportation problems.

Amazingly, transport costs within the country are now about 20 percent of the value of cargo. So much for declining transportation costs. In addition, the country only has about 40 percent of the estimated one million miles of roadways needed. Since Russia is a country with a shrinking population maybe by the time they can afford to build a lot of new roads they won't need so many miles. I'm curious how the quality of the transportation infrastructure affects the relative economic strength of metropolitan regions. How long can some of the small towns with sporadic transportation access to larger cities survive?