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Federal, state, and local governments have ignored "induced demand" for 50 years and the result has been endless highway building. This is an effective subsidy

Federal, state, and local governments have ignored "induced demand" for 50 years and the result has been endless highway building. This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does. Most of the US is "car dependent" - ie you must have a car to reasonably participate in the city - yes there are buses but they are not as convenient as having a car, yes there are bike lanes but they are dangerous and sparse. I think the thing that we have to get through our heads is that sprawl is the result of many subsidies - NOT just peoples' preference to live that way. Take a look at any place where zoning hasn't required such high parking or low maximum densities; any place where government housing loan guarantees were equally available to dense developments as new single family home developments; or any place where governments have made reasonable attempt to add the cost of negative externalities of driving to fuel taxes. You'll see a lot less driving and a lot more walking, transit, and biking. For example - Canada or Spain. Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it. We've dug ourselves into a major hole with car dependence. Lots of cities are digging out and building density especially in their abandoned downtowns - this is doubly amazing considering how stacked the deck is against them.

hammock 11y ago
Just to be clear for all the readers, the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic. The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road. With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that. I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?
- jerf 11y ago
  Suppose you want to build a railway from TownA to TownB. It's ten miles and you can prove in every conceivable way that it will be profitable for both you and the two towns. You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical. Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact. All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
  - hydrogen18 11y ago
    > "Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you" Please explain this further.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Consider 2 outcomes. One is that the project moves forward with the owner getting x+y for their land. The other is that the project doesn't move forward and they are able to sell it for roughly x. There is at least a sense in which turning down y is irrational. Of course it doesn't have to be irrational, but if they believe they would be better off with y and are simply trying to get more, there is some degree of unreasonableness involved.
    - jerf 11y ago
      There are a ton of stories about people holding out for more money from developers trying to buy up swathes of land. Some of them hold out for so much (including the effective infinity of "simply will not sell") that it actually ends up more practical to build around them. This is the extreme, but here's some pictures of the results of that sort of thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=eminent+domain+holdouts https://www.google.com/search?q=eminent+domain+holdouts I'll say again those are the extremes, but it's a common local- or regional-interest story to read about someone holding out for more money because they're the last parcel needed for some development or something. Usually it's an easy "little guy sticking it to The Man" story for the local news human interest segments.
- pmorici 11y ago
  Historically trains, and street cars were privately funded and operated in a lot of US cities. For example in the early 1900's Baltimore was one of the largest cities in the US and had a massive street car network that was privately operated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MTA_Maryland#Baltimore_Transit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MTA_Maryland#Baltim...
- c3534l 11y ago
  Transportation is a classic externality. The costs of building infrastructure are direct, while the benefits diffuse. You tend only to see that sort of behavior by monopolies, like the examples you mentioned applying to companies that own very large swaths of land. You can sometimes see this behavior in R&D, too. Bell spent a lot of money on research and development because they knew as the only major telephone company they would be the only ones to benefit.
Shivetya 11y ago
Sprawl isn't simply because of subsidies, a lot of it has to with people changing jobs and ending up further from work or having work relocate and doing the same. Throw in trying to live closer to work in many towns is impractical because of cost. When it comes to mass transit in cities, quit blowing money on trains. For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options. It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance. we have no hole dug on our dependence on cars. The only hole is that a lot of road building and maintenance is politically driven as does not fix a problem but instead buy votes in politically sensitive areas.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  What's the solution, if not more trains or more frequent train service? Take a commute to the South Bay from my neighborhood: a little over 50 miles on three interstate highways (I-580, I-680, I-880), which takes 2+ hours during rush hours, due entirely to road congestion. How do you fix this? Bike lanes?
  - andys627 11y ago
    Increase cost of "sprawl" and car ownership - increase price of parking, add tolls, increase property tax for "sprawl". Decrease price of more dense, transit oriented (ie development where walking or taking the bus is just as convenient as driving a car) - get rid of parking minimums, make FHA loans available on condos, add bike lanes, add transit.
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      So, essentially, make my life and home even more expensive, pushing me further and further out into a cheaper area, making my (still car-centric) commute even longer? I'd love it if you could wave a magic wand and simply "make" bikeable-to-work housing in the Bay Area more affordable, but good luck with that.
      - 11y ago
c3534l 11y ago
Yes, but a good public transportation system usually requires heavy government support and sponsorship. The subsidies to suburban, sprawling neighborhoods are much more difficult to see than the direct costs associated with building and maintaining public transportation. The perceived quality of public transportation also have a big impact. It's a very difficult thing to do politically, so I'm more surprised by the areas that have managed to create good transit than places that have failed to do so.
hueving 11y ago
>Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it. That cuts both ways. There are very few subway systems in the world that are self-sustaining. You can't just say to not subsidize one way of life while demanding people subsidize another.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  Why? It's perfectly fine to beleive that one is more harmful in various ways than another.
  - hueving 11y ago
    The argument being used is pointing out that roads are only sustainable financially because everyone is subsidizing them. The same applies for many subway systems and other forms of public transit.
    - ant6n 11y ago
      Transit is only not sustainable because too few people are using them.
      - hueving 11y ago
        Then why are the only two in the world that bring in more money than they take in Japan? Surely people in other countries heavily depend on them.
        ant6n 11y ago
        Firstly, there are more transit operators that are considered profitable outside of Japan (for example Hong Kong, Singapore). Secondly, it depends a lot on accounting. Consider that in Europe, most infrastructure doesn't get built until it has a positive cost-benefit ratio. Since transit does get build, it's overall positive economic impact apparently outweighs the cost - so overall they do 'bring in' more money than they take. Thirdly, if you require a strict sense of 'bringing in more money than they take' as a specific organization building the infrastructure then charging for the access, I have to tell you that there are relatively few roads that 'make money'. In fact it's basically only some highways, and bridges -- high capacity trunk lines, and lines across choke points. This ignores the cost of large feeder networks, which are generally paid for by taxes. In North America, municipal taxes. This gets interesting when people who don't have cars subsidize single occupancy drivers via municipal taxes. If you ignore feeder networks for transit, for example ignoring the cost of bus feeders, and only considering the cost of major trunk lines relative to the income of the whole system, then I'd say many subway systems in the world 'bring in more money than they take'.
cpursley 11y ago
I've been saying this for years: federal interstates have contributed to sprawl by effectively subsidizing both land and driving. It creates all sorts of disincentives.
WildUtah 11y ago
"This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does." To be fair, the subsidies are not mostly in highway building. Suburban feeder style streets (4-8 lanes with lights, turn lanes) get bigger subsidies and drive more sprawl. But even those are a smallish factor. The big subsidy is free and cheap parking. Most American cities require that businesses and new homes provide enough parking for everyone who ever wants to come to park free. That's a subsidy equivalent to about $10-30k per car per year, depending on your local real estate costs. The outright majority of space in real estate development in the USA is devoted to satisfying this centralized Soviet style command-and-control mandate. Countries with the most free market real estate development in the free world, like Japan, still build freeways. In fact, Japan has a silly amount of freeways because you don't even need or want a car usually. Those countries are different because they require a lot less parking. So the induced demand and highway subsidy question is not the most central to the car dependence and sprawl question. Parking mandates are much more important to the way life is actually lived in America.
pjc50 11y ago
Sprawl in the US, and the lack of public transport, is influenced by the legacy of racism. There are still plenty of people who will oppose public transport on this basis.
- andys627 11y ago
  This is a huge issue IMHO. It's interesting to see comparisons of different transit solutions by how many people they get to switch modes. For example buses usually are very cheap but get few people to switch. Streetcars on the same route are much more expensive but get lots of people to switch.
  - sampo 11y ago
    > Streetcars on the same route are much more expensive but get lots of people to switch. This is also observed in countries in Europe that don't have similar history in racism as the US. The perceived comfort is better in trams. (Also me personally, I get motion sickness if I read in a bus, but in a tram I can read just fine.)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hammock 11y ago

Just to be clear for all the readers, the alternative to falling into the induced demand trap by building more roads, is to improve public transportation infrastructure. Such improvement has been shown, perhaps counterintuitively, to have the biggest effect on road traffic. The shorter your commute via public transportation, the less traffic on the road. With respect to the subsidization effort, there is very little transportation infrastructure in developed countries that is not subsidized in some way - though I'd like to see a discussion of that. I can think of mining towns, logging roads, private university campuses, Disney World...what else?

jerf 11y ago
Suppose you want to build a railway from TownA to TownB. It's ten miles and you can prove in every conceivable way that it will be profitable for both you and the two towns. You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical. Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact. All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.
- hydrogen18 11y ago
  > "Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you" Please explain this further.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Consider 2 outcomes. One is that the project moves forward with the owner getting x+y for their land. The other is that the project doesn't move forward and they are able to sell it for roughly x. There is at least a sense in which turning down y is irrational. Of course it doesn't have to be irrational, but if they believe they would be better off with y and are simply trying to get more, there is some degree of unreasonableness involved.
  - jerf 11y ago
    There are a ton of stories about people holding out for more money from developers trying to buy up swathes of land. Some of them hold out for so much (including the effective infinity of "simply will not sell") that it actually ends up more practical to build around them. This is the extreme, but here's some pictures of the results of that sort of thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=eminent+domain+holdouts https://www.google.com/search?q=eminent+domain+holdouts I'll say again those are the extremes, but it's a common local- or regional-interest story to read about someone holding out for more money because they're the last parcel needed for some development or something. Usually it's an easy "little guy sticking it to The Man" story for the local news human interest segments.
pmorici 11y ago
Historically trains, and street cars were privately funded and operated in a lot of US cities. For example in the early 1900's Baltimore was one of the largest cities in the US and had a massive street car network that was privately operated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MTA_Maryland#Baltimore_Transit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MTA_Maryland#Baltim...
c3534l 11y ago
Transportation is a classic externality. The costs of building infrastructure are direct, while the benefits diffuse. You tend only to see that sort of behavior by monopolies, like the examples you mentioned applying to companies that own very large swaths of land. You can sometimes see this behavior in R&D, too. Bell spent a lot of money on research and development because they knew as the only major telephone company they would be the only ones to benefit.

Shivetya 11y ago

Sprawl isn't simply because of subsidies, a lot of it has to with people changing jobs and ending up further from work or having work relocate and doing the same. Throw in trying to live closer to work in many towns is impractical because of cost. When it comes to mass transit in cities, quit blowing money on trains. For some odd reason politicians and many people are hung up on light rail and it has the worst cost structure of all mass transit options. It isn't flexible and its cost per mile is staggering let alone the cost of maintenance. we have no hole dug on our dependence on cars. The only hole is that a lot of road building and maintenance is politically driven as does not fix a problem but instead buy votes in politically sensitive areas.

ryandrake 11y ago
What's the solution, if not more trains or more frequent train service? Take a commute to the South Bay from my neighborhood: a little over 50 miles on three interstate highways (I-580, I-680, I-880), which takes 2+ hours during rush hours, due entirely to road congestion. How do you fix this? Bike lanes?
- andys627 11y ago
  Increase cost of "sprawl" and car ownership - increase price of parking, add tolls, increase property tax for "sprawl". Decrease price of more dense, transit oriented (ie development where walking or taking the bus is just as convenient as driving a car) - get rid of parking minimums, make FHA loans available on condos, add bike lanes, add transit.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    So, essentially, make my life and home even more expensive, pushing me further and further out into a cheaper area, making my (still car-centric) commute even longer? I'd love it if you could wave a magic wand and simply "make" bikeable-to-work housing in the Bay Area more affordable, but good luck with that.
    - 11y ago

c3534l 11y ago

Yes, but a good public transportation system usually requires heavy government support and sponsorship. The subsidies to suburban, sprawling neighborhoods are much more difficult to see than the direct costs associated with building and maintaining public transportation. The perceived quality of public transportation also have a big impact. It's a very difficult thing to do politically, so I'm more surprised by the areas that have managed to create good transit than places that have failed to do so.

hueving 11y ago

>Every time one of these articles comes up on here there are lots of Bay Area folks saying "but I like to drive my own car". That is fine, but don't make everyone else subsidize it. That cuts both ways. There are very few subway systems in the world that are self-sustaining. You can't just say to not subsidize one way of life while demanding people subsidize another.

throwaway2048 11y ago
Why? It's perfectly fine to beleive that one is more harmful in various ways than another.
- hueving 11y ago
  The argument being used is pointing out that roads are only sustainable financially because everyone is subsidizing them. The same applies for many subway systems and other forms of public transit.
  - ant6n 11y ago
    Transit is only not sustainable because too few people are using them.
    - hueving 11y ago
      Then why are the only two in the world that bring in more money than they take in Japan? Surely people in other countries heavily depend on them.
      - ant6n 11y ago
        Firstly, there are more transit operators that are considered profitable outside of Japan (for example Hong Kong, Singapore). Secondly, it depends a lot on accounting. Consider that in Europe, most infrastructure doesn't get built until it has a positive cost-benefit ratio. Since transit does get build, it's overall positive economic impact apparently outweighs the cost - so overall they do 'bring in' more money than they take. Thirdly, if you require a strict sense of 'bringing in more money than they take' as a specific organization building the infrastructure then charging for the access, I have to tell you that there are relatively few roads that 'make money'. In fact it's basically only some highways, and bridges -- high capacity trunk lines, and lines across choke points. This ignores the cost of large feeder networks, which are generally paid for by taxes. In North America, municipal taxes. This gets interesting when people who don't have cars subsidize single occupancy drivers via municipal taxes. If you ignore feeder networks for transit, for example ignoring the cost of bus feeders, and only considering the cost of major trunk lines relative to the income of the whole system, then I'd say many subway systems in the world 'bring in more money than they take'.

cpursley 11y ago

I've been saying this for years: federal interstates have contributed to sprawl by effectively subsidizing both land and driving. It creates all sorts of disincentives.

WildUtah 11y ago

"This is an effective subsidy for "sprawl" and is a huge driver of why the US built environment looks the way it does." To be fair, the subsidies are not mostly in highway building. Suburban feeder style streets (4-8 lanes with lights, turn lanes) get bigger subsidies and drive more sprawl. But even those are a smallish factor. The big subsidy is free and cheap parking. Most American cities require that businesses and new homes provide enough parking for everyone who ever wants to come to park free. That's a subsidy equivalent to about $10-30k per car per year, depending on your local real estate costs. The outright majority of space in real estate development in the USA is devoted to satisfying this centralized Soviet style command-and-control mandate. Countries with the most free market real estate development in the free world, like Japan, still build freeways. In fact, Japan has a silly amount of freeways because you don't even need or want a car usually. Those countries are different because they require a lot less parking. So the induced demand and highway subsidy question is not the most central to the car dependence and sprawl question. Parking mandates are much more important to the way life is actually lived in America.

pjc50 11y ago

Sprawl in the US, and the lack of public transport, is influenced by the legacy of racism. There are still plenty of people who will oppose public transport on this basis.

andys627 11y ago
This is a huge issue IMHO. It's interesting to see comparisons of different transit solutions by how many people they get to switch modes. For example buses usually are very cheap but get few people to switch. Streetcars on the same route are much more expensive but get lots of people to switch.
- sampo 11y ago
  > Streetcars on the same route are much more expensive but get lots of people to switch. This is also observed in countries in Europe that don't have similar history in racism as the US. The perceived comfort is better in trams. (Also me personally, I get motion sickness if I read in a bus, but in a tram I can read just fine.)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]