Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

LET’S HEAR IT FOR TODD LITMAN

—

by

James A. Bacon
in

Here is a must read for those who have ANY lingering doubts about the negative impact of Large, Private Vehicles on humans obtaining a sustainable trajectory for civilization.

“Sustainable Transport and Liveable Community Planning”

http://www.planetizen.com/node/44451

Todd Litman lays out in two short pages — with a nice graphic and lots of links for followup reading – many of the externalities that flow from reliance on Large, Private Vehicles for Mobility and Access. It is tragic that most citizens of the US have no choice.

It is even more frightening that there is Agency, Enterprise, and Institutional stonewalling of any discussion of rational alternatives – such as Fundamental Transformation of human settlement patterns. That is one reason why an understanding of naive reality (See “Roadblock”) is so important. Also see THE NEXT BIG THING, forthcoming.

Those who read EMR’s work – e.g. THE PROBLEM WITH CARS, “Interstate Crime,” etc., know that EMR frequently cites Todd Litman. Litman is the founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. EMR met Litman at TRB (The National Academy of Science’s Transportation Research Board) years ago and follows his work with interest.

Yes, there are ramifications of Autonomobile impact that Litman still underestimates. However, Litman’s work – and Joe Passonneau’s exposition of the impact of the Interstate Defense Highway System construction cost limiting strategies, the unintended wealth transfers and their externality impacts – are lights at the end of a long dark tunnel constructed by the Autonomobile Industrial Complex.

Along with careful analysis of the Texas Transportation Institute data (as opposed to the spin put on it to please the Enterprises and Institutions that sponsor TTI) and a few others sources, Litman is a critical source of realistic perspectives on Mobility and Access.

It is good to see VTPI moving into the mainstream. Litman’s work is one of the reasons the Business-As-Usual types (stirred up by the Autonomobile Industrial Complex) are apoplectic over the US DOT / US HUD / US EPA focus on ‘liveability.’

Read and enjoy!

EMR

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7 responses to “LET’S HEAR IT FOR TODD LITMAN”

  1. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Well, Planetizen is hardly an unbiased source, and VPPI has some good factual data, but also a lot of agenda driven information.

    I have seen some full cost comparisons which outline outrageous costs for auto transport by throwing in every externality in the book and then ignoring the same externalities for other modes.

    Other comparisons focus only on energy costs and not the total cost, including capital costs, as if energy use were the only criterion.

    The piece cited by Litman for example, in table 2.2-7 lists Highway costs costs not paid for by users, which amount to 15.7 cents per mile, according to the table. the Table includes such things as parking and disposal of scrapped or abandoned vehicles.

    Since nearly everyone uses auto transport and since all of these costs are paid for somehow, one has to wonder who exactly is paying if not the users. such a presentation IMPLIES that non users are paying all thoses costs, which isn't the case.

    Parking is paid for by the users at home and the employer or merchant at trip end. In the case of Metro it is paid by the auto driver at both ends, and is in fact a net subsidy to Metro operations.

    When looking at these comparisons, it is never clear to me, for exsample, how the cost of parking should be applied to other modes. Paarking is as important to Metro as it is to Autos, so why allocate the cost only to autos? How do you handle the parking of Metro or VRE trains, as well as commuter buses?

    Table 2.2-11 lists fourteen elements of cost for autmobiles, but only some of them are filled in for bus or rail, cost of ownership for example.

    Surely a bus or train has some cost of ownership. (Table 2.2-11 is NOT Litman's data.)

    Then there is the fact that different reports come to wildly different conclusions. A university of California at Berkely report considers costs fromtthe state point of view, and it concludes that (public) cost for auto and high speed rail are about equal at $0.23 per passenger mile while air is buch lower at $0.13 per passengr mile.

    The UCB report figures fixed and variable cost for the Auto user at $0.086 per passenger mile and HSR at $0.06 per passenger mile which is much different from Litmans estimate of $0.52 per assenger mile.

    Even Litman notes that :
    "Different types of studies have different purposes, which affects their perspective, methodologies
    and scope."

    I'll say.

    That's wy I have a problem and dismiss out of hand any report with a title that sounds like "Automobiles Stink". it is just not that easy.

    But here is an example of where things really go tilt for me. Litman goes on and on about the costs of the automobile, but when you look at the chart in his executive summary yousee that transit is even more expensive than Automobiles and walking is even more expensive than transit.

    How do we get from Litman's own data to the idea that building (or tearing out and rebuilding) more compact, transit and walking friendly places will somehow be cheaper?

    As I see it, it cannot possibly happen, by Litmans own analysis.

    RH

  2. RH Avatar
    RH

    The other thing about Litman's data is that it shows the cheapest trasnport is the ride share passenger.

    This supports my previous argument that the cheapest, easiest, and most cost effective way to improve urban travel is to pay people to operate car pools.

    RH

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    So after all this, what does RH propose to reduce the use of large, private vehicles and thus reduce the demand for petroleum?

    All the research we have seen on jitneys and other shared vehicles concludes that they work:

    Where the riders cannot afford a vehicle of their own (e.g. Publicos in Puerto Rico) OR

    Where there on restrictions on vehicle occupancy (slug lines and car pooling on HOV lanes).

    Let us think about market solutions instead of command and control and restricting rights…

    The primary thing that gets people who can afford them out of large, private vehicles (the primary consumers of petroleum) voluntarily are settlement patterns (the distributions of origins and destinations of trips) that make the use of a large, private vehicle unattractive, unnecessary and / or inconvenient. AND there are alternatives for what Dr. Risse calls “high value trips.”

    That means vehicles that are shared at the same time (shared-vehicle systems) or sequentially. Let’s hear it for Zip Cars.

    Oh yes, before you dismiss Todd’s inclusion of parking in his calculations you need to read up on Don Shoup’s work. Recall it is the space to drive AND PARK large, private vehicles that disaggregate human settlement patterns. It is a matter of physics AND economics.

    CJC

  4. RH Avatar
    RH

    So after all this, what does RH propose to reduce the use of large, private vehicles and thus reduce the demand for petroleum?

    Reducing the demand for petroleum is not the only criteria. Phrasing the question this way is a fallacy known as false premise.

    I suggest you let the market sort it out. If people want large vehicles and are willing to pay the price (which includes the price of using petroleum) then so be it.

    If you want jitneys, you will probably need to undo laws designed to protect taxis, and let the market do its job. We don't have jitneys because we have commnad and contol instead of allowing people to have property rights and trade them.

    If that isn't enough and you want more jitneys, then subsidize them.

    If you want more carpools, then pay people to operate them.

    What you do not do (in my opinion), is put a large negative subsidy on what you don't want – Large Private Vehicles. The reason being that there is no reason why you should get what you want for nothing. You don't get to just slap a sin tax on everything you do not like.

    That does not mean that a pigovian tax which is carefully designed to neutralize a true external cost is not appropriate.

    Ideally it would be tied to largness, amount of use, etc. which is why I support higher fuel taxes: get to add market decisions all up and down the spectrum, and even including the size of homes.

    If it becomes too much of a drag on the economy, it is easy to adjust.

    voluntarily are settlement patterns (the distributions of origins and destinations of trips) that make the use of a large, private vehicle unattractive

    Except that as I have pointed out above and previously, that may not be the best or most economical answer. Making LPVs unnattractive is not a sufficient goal.

    Let's here it for Zip cars

    Yeah, or we could fix the insurance and liability laws to make it more attractive and safer to share car ownership. Imagine if it was easy for your neighbor to start his own one car zip car company.

    RH

  5. RH Avatar
    RH

    Oh yes, before you dismiss Todd’s inclusion of parking in his calculations you need to read up on Don Shoup’s work.

    ================================

    I did not dismiss it: I questioned its fair application to all modes.
    Metro DEPENDS on parking and would go broke without it.

    RH

  6. RH Avatar
    RH

    One of the problems we face is putting boundaries on the system.

    It is one thing to design an optimum transportation system for the existing settlement and transportation pattern, and esign it to expand in the way we know has happened in the past.

    But as Litman points out USDOT and other agencies have signed up for and bought into the idea that the transportation system itself is a tool we can use the get the kind of settlement pattern we want.

    This adds a whole bunch of new and generally vaguely defined criteria such as proote walkability, enhance sustainability, increase transportation options, enhance community revitalization but preserve rural landscape, enhance economic cometitiveness, etc. etc.

    Eventually you have moved the system boundaries out so far that you have set yourself an impossible task. Litman does a generally good job of describing each of the more mechanical subtasks of creating a system level cost benefit, but more work needs to be done on the boundary conditions.

    For example, he says:

    1.)Other impacts, such as changes in walking conditions and greenhouse gas emissions, are more difficult to quantify, and so are often dismissed by decision-makers as intangibles, with the implication that they are less important than tangible impacts.

    He is arguing here precisely what Larry so often argues against, which is that intangibles must be priced.

    He also says:

    2.)Calling congestion a problem implies that it must be fixed, but describing it as a cost recognizes that a certain amount of congestion may be acceptable compared with the costs involved in eliminating it.

    Which is precisely the argument I have had so often with Larry, if only you replace the word congestion with pollution.

    But then he introduces the fudge factor:
    3.)For example, low estimates of
    pollution costs reduce the justification for control measures, resulting in more emissions.

    The precautionary principle applies a high standard of protection to damages that are
    potentially catastrophic.

    And it is easy to see that 3.) is the opposite of 1.) and 2.) If you ae going to estimate intangibles, then you have to include the intangible that amounts to a low probablity of a high risk event, according to argument 1.

    And having done that, if you select a high cost of pollution, Argument 2 says that in doing so you accept the fact that some of your pollution control costs will be wasted.

    Finally Litman says

    It is relatively easy to
    increase the speed at which people move around, much harder to introduce changes that
    enable us to spend less time gaining access to the facilities that we need.”

    Which means more expensive. The goal is to save money and other resources such asenergy while giving people as much freedom as possible. There is no reason to spend MORE money to build a certain way to reduce travel as long as it is less expensive to travel.

    RH

  7. RH Avatar
    RH

    It is good to see VTPI moving into the mainstream. Litman’s work is one of the reasons the Business-As-Usual types (stirred up by the Autonomobile Industrial Complex) are apoplectic over the US DOT / US HUD / US EPA focus on ‘liveability.’

    There are several issues here. As I noted above, these "liveability" issues are pretty hard to nail down. They are major intangibles, which need to be priced, somehoq, as Litman points out.

    The larger implication is that it is possible and desireable to subsidize all that social engineering through the transportation funding. If DOT wants to focus on liveablity, they had better come up with funding to support it.

    I would argue that setting goals which are vague, difficult, and expensive is not exactly stepping into the mainstream: it is more like setting yourself up for failure.

    A mainstream systems or pricing engineer would first try to trim down the system boundary to something manageable.

    Onthe other hand, hedonic pricing cuold be developed for at least some of these traits. [What does a three bedroom 2500 foot Cape sell for in a a walkable neighborhood vs not]. You could very well go to the trouble and expense of pricing all those intangibles and getting them included properly in your model, only to find out it is a wash.

    Another possibility is that the answer comes back, and in order to achieve all those goals it is really expensive. If you actually come up with the money, then what you are saying is that THIS priority is more valuable than any other priority we could have spent the money on.

    The more money this is going to take, the more people with other priorities are going to disagree with you.

    And of course, the liveability part that sets me off is the part about preserving rural landsape and restoring economic vitality to urban areas.

    In other words, urban areas get all the money while rural areas stagnate, and what was that about fair allocation of costs?

    Remember what Litman said about opportunity costs?

    RH

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