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.

Should Voters Have Full Information When Voting on Transport Projects?

Voters are asked to vote on all kinds of transportation projects. In part this is because of declining federal support for projects, and local tax increases require voter approval. Elected officials are also hesitant to promote new taxes to fund projects without clear direction from the electorate. Usually new taxes for transport spending are passed. Yet there are many referendums on specific projects where taxes are proposed for particular investment. Without making any claims about the value of any of the individual projects, it is worth considering when projects violate the spirit and letter of the votes taken. I highlighted some examples pertaining to value capture previously, including the downtown Los Angeles streetcar, which may double in cost and provide less service than promised to voters. Califonia's high speed rail has also been criticized for not adhering to the specific systems and costs spelled out in the statewide 20008 referendum to raise a share of the cost of the project. See Lisa Schweitzer's piece in the LA Times for some details.

This isn't just a problem for transit projects, either, though maybe it is a problem that is worse in California because of a variety of populist legislative requirements. Here is another Golden State example. Today's LA Times reports that the 405 toll road project is in trouble politically. There are a few causes described:

At a meeting this month, crowds packed an Orange County Transportation Authority board meeting to denounce the lanes, which have been supported by Caltrans. City leaders expressed worry that the project would push traffic onto their streets, or that motorists traveling in the toll lanes would find it too difficult to pull off the highway and patronize local businesses.
The political shift over toll lanes has several causes. Some of Orange County's toll roads have struggled to attract drivers and each of the major corridors has been forced to refinance its debt to avoid possible default.
There has also been the sticker shock: Riding the 91 Express Lanes can cost nearly $10 each way at the most congested hours, an investment even for Lexus drivers. If the 405 toll lanes are built, the priciest one-way toll would cost $9.91.
As for the 405, much of the anger stems from what Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach called a "bit of a bait and switch." When voters approved a countywide half-cent sales tax, they were told funds would go toward adding one general purpose lane in each direction at a cost of $1.25 billion.
Instead, the proposal before the OCTA would add one free lane and one toll lane in each direction — but it would also convert an existing carpool lane in each direction into a second toll lane, with the added $220-million price tag paid through bond sales that in turn would be paid off by tolls.

So the project as implemented is not what the voters approved. It is substantially different, in fact. I have written about credible commitment as a barrier to road pricing before, but what is happening with these experiments in direct democracy are a bit different. Rather than voters opposing new taxes or fees because they don't believe the revenues will be used as promised the votes for specific projects are not held as binding. 

There are many problems associated with these types of direct democracy for allocating scarce resources. When voters vote on a project, be it rail, transit, roads, etc., they should have complete information. Since transportation infrastructure projects tend to go over budget frequently, which affects the scope of the projects, it is difficult for voters to accurately assess their support or opposition. Also problematic is the absence of recourse the voters have. By pushing tax and spending decisions to the ballot box elected officials insulate themselves from the severe problems that tend to arise. After all, it was the voters who approved the project, not Rep. So and So. 

Issues of representation, credibility and voter information have not been well examined in the context of local transport finance. As the federal role in transport finance is declining in the US, we need to figure out better ways of raising money for and spending on the infrastructure that we want and need. The experience in California is not encouraging for experiments in direct democracy for transport investment.

Elon Musk Has a Very High Value of Time

Rich guy and transportation visionary Elon Musk wants to pay cash money to accelerate the widening of the 405 in Los Angeles. Here is a story in the LA Times about this. He has already paid $50,000 to the cause and is willing to spend more. How many hours does he expect to save and what is his value of time? Should rich people pay more for capital expenditures? My favorite part is that he jokes that it is easier and faster to launch a rocket than build a road:

Musk quips that it's easier getting rockets into orbit than navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne.

But the joke is on us as it is also cheaper to go to Mars than add a few lane miles. The 405 project will now cost about $1.1 billion according to the LA Times story, or about 50% more than the Mars Rover project.

In any event, Elon Musk should spend bit on a transport planning and policy course and learn all about induced demand. His investment in roads is not money well spent.

Lisa Schweitzer on Decentralized Transport Funding

Eric Jaffe at the Atlantic Cities wrote a great piece on the opportunities and challenges of decentralizing transport finance. I am quoted:

"I'd expect under a decentralized system we'd see more variation across metropolitan areas," says planner David King of Columbia University. "We don't necessarily have shared needs, or homogenous needs across the country, when it comes to what we need for transportation."
King and others in the decentralization camp note that the federal government frequently gets transport policy wrong. Financial and housing incentives used during the interstate construction era led, in large part, to the sprawl that's crippling metropolitan areas today. There's widespread feeling that federal involvement in transportation has resulted in more roads and rails than America needs, with the prospect of free federal money encouraging questionable projects — such as the Detroit People Mover years ago, and some streetcar lines more recently — that might not have been built with local funding alone.
....
"Decentralization of transport finance is happening, and we shouldn't fear it," says King. "It may or may not be better than what we have, but the current system is not sufficiently wonderful that we should fight to make sure it remains."

One of the people who has influenced my thinking on decentralized transport finance is USC's Lisa Schweitzer, who wrote a nice piece in Planners Network a couple of years ago.  From her piece:

For those who would like to see U.S. transit systems expand, the push towards devolving infrastructure finance entirely to states and regions puts the battle for transit funding into familiar territory: the states already provide about $12 billion to transit in U.S. cities, and transit agencies currently spend quite a bit on lobbyists in state houses across the country. Nonetheless, states are in no better budgetary condition than the federal government. 

Such devolution to states and regions may radically alter urban transit funding in significant ways, not all negative. As it is, federal transit spending has been concentrated among a handful of states as transit is primarily an urban service. Given the nature of gas taxes, the federal gas tax could go away and the states where transit is an important issue could (in theory) immediately pass an increase in their state gas tax commensurate to the federal tax, and consumers would pay the exact same amount at the pump. Gasoline buyers in places like California and New York are net donors to other states due to the large amount taxpayers in these states chip in to the federal funds, which then go to pay for roads in other locations. If California or New York or the if the federal gas tax went away, states could increase their state gas tax commensurate to the federal tax, and consumers would pay the same at the pump. If California or New York or other donor states made up for the loss of federal support with higher state taxes, they might actually be better off  loss of federal support with higher state taxes and kept their receipts, their transit operators might actually be better off with devolution.

She then explains that this isn't a certainty--or even likely--and discusses implications for transit.