6 ms·

To Create Jobs, Build Public Transit, Not Highways

28 points by prat 17y ago

yummyfajitas 17y ago
The article gives the exact reason it is not being spent on public transit: Second, all those buses, trains and subways need people to operate them and maintain the infrastructure. The stimulus is based on moral hazard. States spend federal money on projects that they don't feel are worth spending their own money on. Spending on mass transit would force states to spend more of their own money on projects they feel are not worth it.
- sparky 17y ago
  I don't follow your first point, would you mind breaking it down? Governments are scared of a lot of things, but swelling their own ranks by creating more civil service jobs usually isn't one of them, is it? There is definitely some serious game theory afoot; states have a perverse incentive to not spend on important things, lest they not receive federal money to cover those things. It is similar to the perverse incentive in large companies and government to spend one's entire budget at all costs, lest you get allocated less next time.
  - dantheman 17y ago
    The big problem is that most cities, states, and the US are bankrupt. The amount of money they are in debt is ridiculous and way out of proportion to the services they provide and the taxes that they can collect. For instance the city of cambridge, MA has over 1.2 Billion dollars of debt/unfunded liabilities for 70,000 people. http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/30/cambridge-massachusetts-opeb-pensions-ratings-opinions-contributors-peter-schweich.html http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/30/cambridge-massachusetts-ope...
    - ajross 17y ago
      I have an idea: how about we give them a big chunk of money? :) Seriously, this point doesn't work. No state is going to turn down a transit project, certainly not because of the operating costs (most of which are funded in these kinds of bills -- it's not a one-time check). And in any case, in most urban environments transit is required to pay its own operating costs. Where do you think that bus fare goes anyway?
      - dantheman 17y ago
        The MBTA is bankrupt; it has over 5 Billion dollars in debt. The transit fare for the subway is the same as NYC but in Boston we don't get 24 hour service, nor the scope of service.
        ajross 17y ago
        And yet the MBTA employees are being, y'know, paid. It's in debt because of infrastructure investment. And the proposal in the linked article is to subsidize that investment. I don't see how your point does anything but support the linked article.
        dantheman 17y ago
        The majority of the MBTA budget is paid for by sales taxes. It has $1,037M for operating expenses. Revenue Sources: State Sales Tax $756M Fares $430M Municipal Assessments $143M Parking, Real Estate Tenants, etc. $37.4M Real Estate Sales and Misc. $20.8M Advertising $11.0M Federal government $8.0M Interest $3.8M Utility reimbursement from tenants $2.8M Total $1,413M http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Transportation_Authority#Fares_and_fare_collection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Transportatio...
      - yummyfajitas 17y ago
        Fares often pay only a fraction of the cost of mass transit. For example, my local light rail costs about $8/ride. The fare is only $1.90. (Sorry, the source is the dead tree version of one of my local rags.)
patrickgzill 17y ago
Monorail, monorail!
maxklein 17y ago
In the U.S.A, public transit is not feasable. I was in Texas a while back - compared to Europe, things are just way too far apart to make trains or subways feasable. I also lived in China for a while, and in China you mostly travel by bus. And it is my experience that the Bus is very inconvenient transportation mechanism. If it does not make sense to build a local train transportation network, then build the highways, because the people will use cars.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  How fast can you drive? Even on the open highway in Texas, it's probably unreasonable to assume you'll be doing more than 90 mph. A train could easily do 200 mph over the same terrain and probably push 300 mph if we put in the effort. If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive?
  - davidw 17y ago
    > If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive? Because once you got there, you'd need a car again. Texas is a bad example though. I think public transportation can work just fine if you look at where it's being applied. It's insane, for instance, that the BART stuff in the bay area (which is fairly densely populated) doesn't go down and around through San Jose.
    - DanielStraight 17y ago
      Why would you want a car there when you could, from anywhere, hop on a train or bus and get where you're going without having to worry about parking in the city?
      - davidw 17y ago
        I don't know Houston very well but a cursory look at Google Maps indicates that it's extremely spread out, which would make what you describe difficult.
solutionyogi 17y ago
The basic premise, the government can create jobs out of thin air, is flawed. Rest is gravy.
- kbob 17y ago
  Jobs are created out of debt, not thin air. The gov't does indeed have the ability to create more debt and more jobs. We're betting that the stimulus' net effect on the economy is more growth than the debt's interest, so it'll be more productive to borrow, spend, and repay than not to. You'll note that the private sector does this all the time. Student loans are a perfect example: create a professor's job today for a higher salary tomorrow.
- gjm11 17y ago
  Looks to me like that's a conclusion, not a premise. What actual assumption that Smart Growth America et al actually made are you disagreeing with, and on what grounds?
- notauser 17y ago
  That depends on what it spends money on. Infrastructure spending _may_ increase efficiency such that the increased tax burden is less than the efficiency gains enjoyed by tax payers. In this situation the government has indeed created jobs by expanding the economy. Of course if they pick the wrong projects then efficiency won't rise as fast as the impact of taxation, the economy will shrink, and jobs will be lost. This isn't a special characteristic of governments though - companies (and individuals) can torpedo themselves in the same way (investment ROI is too low), albeit usually on a smaller scale.
kbob 17y ago
It looks like the study just analyzed the direct employment effects of the construction projects -- how many ditch diggers, bus drivers, etc. would get paychecks either from the project or from the system the project creates. The headline numbers, 16,000 job-months for transit, 8,000 job-months for highways (per billion dollars spent), show how small the direct employment is -- 16,000 job-months is about $60 million, or 6% of the investment. The real question, which is apparently unaddressed, is which transportation infrastructure produces a greater benefit for the regional economy. The economic differences there will likely dwarf the direct effects. But the Wired article doesn't even go there. There's a statement that transit "allows people to get to work", implying that highways don't, but that's all. But that's okay. We know cars are evil and transit is good, so there must be numbers out there somewhere to show it.
- gjm11 17y ago
  I think the point about "allowing people to get to work" is that people with no car (a much larger proportion of the jobless than of the employed, presumably) have more limited employment options, and improving public transit gives them access to more jobs. It seems a pretty good guess to me, at least, that public transit does more to give more people access to more jobs than highways costing the same amount.
iterationx 17y ago
Building transit doesn't fix the trade imbalance.
- furyg3 17y ago
  Irrelevant... neither does building public roads.
  - iterationx 17y ago
    Exactly, building infrastructure doesn't improve our trade imbalance, that's my point. China loans the US money and pegs the yuan to the dollar so we can buy their goods. That's not a sustainable model. Building transit doesn't affect this model.
- trevelyan 17y ago
  Actually, as long as the US is importing oil it does in part.
  - iterationx 17y ago
    We need to export more goods, not import.
    - jsankey 17y ago
      Or import less. If the transit was more energy efficient, or just less reliant on oil, it could have some impact.

28 points by prat 17y ago

The article gives the exact reason it is not being spent on public transit: Second, all those buses, trains and subways need people to operate them and maintain the infrastructure. The stimulus is based on moral hazard. States spend federal money on projects that they don't feel are worth spending their own money on. Spending on mass transit would force states to spend more of their own money on projects they feel are not worth it.

sparky 17y ago
I don't follow your first point, would you mind breaking it down? Governments are scared of a lot of things, but swelling their own ranks by creating more civil service jobs usually isn't one of them, is it? There is definitely some serious game theory afoot; states have a perverse incentive to not spend on important things, lest they not receive federal money to cover those things. It is similar to the perverse incentive in large companies and government to spend one's entire budget at all costs, lest you get allocated less next time.
- dantheman 17y ago
  The big problem is that most cities, states, and the US are bankrupt. The amount of money they are in debt is ridiculous and way out of proportion to the services they provide and the taxes that they can collect. For instance the city of cambridge, MA has over 1.2 Billion dollars of debt/unfunded liabilities for 70,000 people. http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/30/cambridge-massachusetts-opeb-pensions-ratings-opinions-contributors-peter-schweich.html http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/30/cambridge-massachusetts-ope...
  - ajross 17y ago
    I have an idea: how about we give them a big chunk of money? :) Seriously, this point doesn't work. No state is going to turn down a transit project, certainly not because of the operating costs (most of which are funded in these kinds of bills -- it's not a one-time check). And in any case, in most urban environments transit is required to pay its own operating costs. Where do you think that bus fare goes anyway?
    - dantheman 17y ago
      The MBTA is bankrupt; it has over 5 Billion dollars in debt. The transit fare for the subway is the same as NYC but in Boston we don't get 24 hour service, nor the scope of service.
      - ajross 17y ago
        And yet the MBTA employees are being, y'know, paid. It's in debt because of infrastructure investment. And the proposal in the linked article is to subsidize that investment. I don't see how your point does anything but support the linked article.
        dantheman 17y ago
        The majority of the MBTA budget is paid for by sales taxes. It has $1,037M for operating expenses. Revenue Sources: State Sales Tax $756M Fares $430M Municipal Assessments $143M Parking, Real Estate Tenants, etc. $37.4M Real Estate Sales and Misc. $20.8M Advertising $11.0M Federal government $8.0M Interest $3.8M Utility reimbursement from tenants $2.8M Total $1,413M http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Transportation_Authority#Fares_and_fare_collection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Transportatio...
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      Fares often pay only a fraction of the cost of mass transit. For example, my local light rail costs about $8/ride. The fare is only $1.90. (Sorry, the source is the dead tree version of one of my local rags.)

patrickgzill 17y ago

Monorail, monorail!

maxklein 17y ago

In the U.S.A, public transit is not feasable. I was in Texas a while back - compared to Europe, things are just way too far apart to make trains or subways feasable. I also lived in China for a while, and in China you mostly travel by bus. And it is my experience that the Bus is very inconvenient transportation mechanism. If it does not make sense to build a local train transportation network, then build the highways, because the people will use cars.

DanielStraight 17y ago
How fast can you drive? Even on the open highway in Texas, it's probably unreasonable to assume you'll be doing more than 90 mph. A train could easily do 200 mph over the same terrain and probably push 300 mph if we put in the effort. If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive?
- davidw 17y ago
  > If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive? Because once you got there, you'd need a car again. Texas is a bad example though. I think public transportation can work just fine if you look at where it's being applied. It's insane, for instance, that the BART stuff in the bay area (which is fairly densely populated) doesn't go down and around through San Jose.
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    Why would you want a car there when you could, from anywhere, hop on a train or bus and get where you're going without having to worry about parking in the city?
    - davidw 17y ago
      I don't know Houston very well but a cursory look at Google Maps indicates that it's extremely spread out, which would make what you describe difficult.

solutionyogi 17y ago

The basic premise, the government can create jobs out of thin air, is flawed. Rest is gravy.

kbob 17y ago
Jobs are created out of debt, not thin air. The gov't does indeed have the ability to create more debt and more jobs. We're betting that the stimulus' net effect on the economy is more growth than the debt's interest, so it'll be more productive to borrow, spend, and repay than not to. You'll note that the private sector does this all the time. Student loans are a perfect example: create a professor's job today for a higher salary tomorrow.
gjm11 17y ago
Looks to me like that's a conclusion, not a premise. What actual assumption that Smart Growth America et al actually made are you disagreeing with, and on what grounds?
notauser 17y ago
That depends on what it spends money on. Infrastructure spending _may_ increase efficiency such that the increased tax burden is less than the efficiency gains enjoyed by tax payers. In this situation the government has indeed created jobs by expanding the economy. Of course if they pick the wrong projects then efficiency won't rise as fast as the impact of taxation, the economy will shrink, and jobs will be lost. This isn't a special characteristic of governments though - companies (and individuals) can torpedo themselves in the same way (investment ROI is too low), albeit usually on a smaller scale.

kbob 17y ago

It looks like the study just analyzed the direct employment effects of the construction projects -- how many ditch diggers, bus drivers, etc. would get paychecks either from the project or from the system the project creates. The headline numbers, 16,000 job-months for transit, 8,000 job-months for highways (per billion dollars spent), show how small the direct employment is -- 16,000 job-months is about $60 million, or 6% of the investment. The real question, which is apparently unaddressed, is which transportation infrastructure produces a greater benefit for the regional economy. The economic differences there will likely dwarf the direct effects. But the Wired article doesn't even go there. There's a statement that transit "allows people to get to work", implying that highways don't, but that's all. But that's okay. We know cars are evil and transit is good, so there must be numbers out there somewhere to show it.

gjm11 17y ago
I think the point about "allowing people to get to work" is that people with no car (a much larger proportion of the jobless than of the employed, presumably) have more limited employment options, and improving public transit gives them access to more jobs. It seems a pretty good guess to me, at least, that public transit does more to give more people access to more jobs than highways costing the same amount.

iterationx 17y ago

Building transit doesn't fix the trade imbalance.

furyg3 17y ago
Irrelevant... neither does building public roads.
- iterationx 17y ago
  Exactly, building infrastructure doesn't improve our trade imbalance, that's my point. China loans the US money and pegs the yuan to the dollar so we can buy their goods. That's not a sustainable model. Building transit doesn't affect this model.
trevelyan 17y ago
Actually, as long as the US is importing oil it does in part.
- iterationx 17y ago
  We need to export more goods, not import.
  - jsankey 17y ago
    Or import less. If the transit was more energy efficient, or just less reliant on oil, it could have some impact.