Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Ray Hyde’s Reading List

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James A. Bacon
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Here is some interesting reading, courtesy of Ray Hyde (the quote selections and accompanying commentary are mine, not his):

You Can Build Your Way out of Congestion! Tory Gattis, author of the Houston Strategies blog, summarizes a new Reason Foundation study that the construction of 104,000 lane miles at the cost of $533 billion dollars (2005) over the next 25 years would eliminate “all serious congestion” in America’s cities.

Concludes Gattis: “I suspect that the reason Houston is in so much better shape than most other metros is we never abandoned or slashed highway capacity expansion plans as many have, and they’ve fallen into a much deeper hole as a result. We’ve also stayed more realistic about what transit can and can’t do, and invested in more cost-effective transit solutions (like HOV express buses, vanpools, and carpools instead of commuter rail).”

However, Gattis does not discuss the concept of “induced demand,” in which the construction of new roadway capacity, by temporarily reducing travel times, induces people to move to more distant locations in the search of less expensive housing, thus generating more Vehicle Miles Traveled over time and more congestion. The 25-year period envisioned by the Reason study is more than enough time to change human settlement patterns, and congestion, for the worse.

The False Promise of Metro. Washingtonian Sam Smith, documents in his City Desk blog how the Washington Metro has contributed to congestion in the region: (a) falling far short of the ridership projections used to justify construction, and (b) driving out of business the local, privately owned bus companies that had served many of the same routes. “DC’s power-brokers — led then as now by real estate developers — weren’t really interested in transportation. They were more concerned with land speculation, with exploiting outer suburbia.”

Shades of Rail-to-Dulles. Who will pay for the extension of Metro to Dulles airport? The public. Who will make windfall profits? The landowners. Mechanisms exist for tapping some of that windfall to help finance the $4 billion project, as illuminated on this blog. Failure to do so amounts to legalized theft.

Why Charlotte Will Have Light Rail and Raleigh Won’t. According to North Carolina’s Innovation Online blog, Charlotte leaders planned their land use with light rail in mind, encouraging mixed uses and higher densities along the anticipated light rail routes. The resulting development was better able to support light rail. As a result, Charlotte will start up a 10-mile, $427 million light rail line in November 2007, while Raleigh has given up on its ambitions to run a commuter train through the Research Triangle and Durham.

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12 responses to “Ray Hyde’s Reading List”

  1. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Thank you, Jim. You see, I do study both sides of the issue, and I don’t necessarily swallow what either side has to say.

    I feel that Reason Foundation is one of misnamed, pseudo scientific PR outfits with a dog in the hunt, so what they say has to be read carefully and with an eye to other agendas.

    104,000 lane miles sounds like a huge number, and if you believe the induced travel theory, it won’t help much. And over 25 years $533 million dollars is likely to become 4 times that much money.

    Still, the report does point out one small part of the Texas Transportation studies that is usually glossed over: those cities that spend the most on roads see the smallest increases in congestion. And as a bonus, Houston has low housing costs, which is also do to minimum building restrictions. Downtown Houston is 75% streets, also, so it is a poster child for what mix of streets and density makes sense.

    I’ve said before that Metro has not provided all the promised benefits, but that does not mean it hasn’t provided some. We just need to understand what they are and aren’t, and spend money accordingly.

    An interesting thing about the Charlotte/Raliegh post are the prices. Compare $427 million for ten miles of light rail against $533 million for 104,000 lane miles.

    Another interesting thing is that the Charlotte post does not mention the issue Jim identifies: windfall profits to landowners. Whether you build rail first or design for density first, either way some landowners benefit, and others lose out or are prohibited from competing in a free market. This represents a hidden subsidy that makes rail transit possible.

  2. Virginia Centrist Avatar
    Virginia Centrist

    This is good stuff.

  3. Toomanytaxes Avatar
    Toomanytaxes

    Ditto Ray. Quite interesting material.

    With respect to induced demand, there was an informative article in the WaPo the other day about people moving to Loudoun County, despite the added commute, for what I’ll call the “quality of life” that is available there. I’m sure that includes the amount of house for the dollar spent, access to open spaces, etc.

    As I’ve written on several occasions, I just don’t think that everyone wants to live in a condo in an urban area. A lot of other people cannot afford the higher prices/rents that are found in those areas. Therefore, IMHO, I think that we will continue to see sprawl in NoVA regardless of the availability of density unless overall growth is restricted.

    Also, rehashing one of my earlier comments, what would happen if the State were required to provide a Service Level Agreement with all new transportation facilities it finaced, both roads and rail? I suspect that many projects would show little, if any gain, for the money spent.

    Since I’m doing a bit of mind dump, let me toss out one more factor that I think is material. There is, obviously, a high level of distrust in local government officials on land use matters that is held my many people. This distrust taints many of those same individuals’ perceptions of transportation projects. In other words, quite a few of us believe that the real motivation behind transportation projects is to facilitate more development, such that any gain in transportation efficiency is quickly wiped out by the added growth. Thus, many people, who might otherwise support higher taxes for transportation improvements, actually oppose spending more because they expect to see no real gains and, probably, further deterioration. Again, I think that the use of Service Level Agreements by the State would address this issue. Of course, the risk is that the SLAs would only confirm that the new road or rail would not provide a bit of relief.

  4. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    It’s $533 Billion not Million to construct that many lane miles…

    What a difference a B makes…

  5. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Anonymous, thanks for bringing that to my attention. Error corrected.

  6. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    I thought that was odd, but I didn’t make the connection. Thanks.

    $42 million a mile for a glorified bus is still a lot of money. Especially if the bus is going to get the benefit of traffic light priority over the traffic it might otherwise have to compete with. And no telling what havot tht will make with traffic light timing.

    Here is what I can figure about induced demand. There is still considerable debate in the academic community about induced demand. This fact seems to be lost on the environmental groups that still take it as a proven issue and a Fundamental Truth.

    Meanwhile, among the academics, what seems to be evolving is a new set of facts that are mutually contraictory. Induced demand does occur but at a much smaller rate than in the original studies that made the concept so poular. Furthermore, the amount of induced demand on a single project depends on how much surrounding projects have been neglected. It is not possible to predict induced demand a priori, because it depends on many outside factors, including latent demand.

    In other words, we don’t know enough about it to argue truthfully one way or the other.

    TMT”

    “…I think that we will continue to see sprawl in NoVA regardless of the availability of density unless overall growth is restricted.”

    Two thoughts: isn’t this analogous to the induced demand principle? No matter how much property you cram into one space, the people will demand more. There might even be a backlash effect: the more you make density available and ordinary, by restricting growth in undeveloped areas, the more desirable the undeveloped areas become, and the harder to protect.

    “…restrict overall growth” How do you do that? Those people that are going to cause the growth have already happened, and they are going somewhere, unless we kill them. Is it time for “A Modest Proposal”?

    “There is, obviously, a high level of distrust in local government officials on land use matters that is held my many people.” I had a local official tell me to my face that his plan for my property was for someone wealthy to buy it, so that it could be placed in conservation easement.

    I still have not resolved how I feel about that, but distrust is not the right word.

    I had another tell me, in public, that if I didn’t like the rules, I could move. As it turned out, he moved out first, and to a place where the local rules he supported don’t apply.

    He seems to have lost sight of the fact that I can also complain mightily and work to have the rules (the same ones he couldn’t live with) changed. Or, as another publicly emloyed stuffed shirt put it “Zoning only works so long as the body politic has the will.”

    He was utterly correct of course, but he failed completely to see the import.

  7. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Off topic, but related by being on both sides of the issues, today WaPo has an article on zip cars. Following my previous head to head on this with Jim Bacon, I see I may have to eat my words.

    Maybe they will have a place in the sun, will have some effect.

  8. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    I’m relieved that at least some folks realized that the $533 was Billion. Do folks understand that estimating the costs of anything but especially roads over a 25 year span.. USING today’s dollars is totally BOGUS?

    This is exactly what VDOT has been doing with their estimates and the reason why they had to remove hundreds of projects from their six year plan? Try that trick.. next time you want to save up for a car or a home.. using today’s dollars as the basis for how much you need to save.

    Do another calculation. Divide 533 Billion by the 104,000 lane miles which will yield an average cost of about 5 million dollars per mile. This is what it costs to build one mile of non-interstate rural road. In other words, it’s about the cheapest cost per mile that would be possible for building any road. Most rural interstates START at 10 million a mile and urban interstates can easily exceed 100 million per mile.

    So, it appears to me that the Reason Foundation STARTS with suspect data and then proceeds to use that as a premise for the rest of their analysis. I don’t know about others but it fails my smell test.

    I don’t dislike the Reason Foundation but any study that I read that starts off with questionable data as a premise for the rest of their analysis… lacks credibility. If I can find holes in the simply stuff.. why should I trust the more complicated stuff?

    And at the end of the day – have the Reason Foundation folks CONTRIBUTED to a Better Understanding of the problem and where genuine opportunities for change might exist or have they further muddied the waters?

    That’s the thing that bothers me the most. What folks want and need is relevant, on-target information about realities and what we get is a deluge of agenda-driven drivel.

    Virginia, to it’s credit, has an EXCELLENT agency that performs very creditable anaylsis. It’s called JLARC – Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee. http://jlarc.state.va.us/

    Their stuff is credible and relevant in my opinion and the most important thing they point out is that money alone will not improve any program that is not cost-effective to start with and the ability to judge cost-effectiveness requires performance-based objective data as a starting point to support further analysis.

    The Reason guys could take some pointers from JLARC.

  9. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    I wanted to point out another aspect of transportation and funding and MPOs (which the Reason articles delt with) that really is central to any discussions of transportation, VDOT, Metro, VRE, et al.

    MPOs (Metropolitan Policy Organizations) are misnamed and as such.. little known and understood by most folks as the organizations that handles almost ALL transportation decisions and funding in metro areas (usually urban and suburban rather than rural). In the Wash Metro Area that organization is known as the TPB (Transportation Planning Board) and it’s part of MWCOG (Metro Wash Council of Governments).

    If you want to know the reality (as opposed to wishful thinking), go to http://www.mwcog.org/transportation/ and one will see very relevant info with regard to transportation planning in the Wash Metro Area.

    There are two very important plans that the TPB produces and maintains:

    TIP – Transportation Improvement Program
    CLRP – Constrained Long-Range Plan

    Both of them contain transportation projects along with their estimated costs.

    The primary difference is that the TIP is usually a 6 yr window and is treated as a “build” plan and the CLRP is a 20 year (prospective) window and is used to designate projects that at some point COULD be incorporated and inserted in the the TIP.

    Federal law REQUIRES that BOTH plans be financially constrained. What that means is that they cannot have projects for which no funding has been identified. (By the way, Fed Law also requires that both plans do not exceed air quality targets for the region – and if the area itself exceeds those target then road projects can be halted).

    Both plans are also supposed to be adjusted for inflation.

    Why is this important?

    It’s because if you think about it… if the costs go up.. and the funding does not… then projects would have to be removed.

    The point here is that in a perfect world.. you have all of your identified funding in hand and would proceed immediately to build everything in that plan.

    In the real world.. you cannot.. and everything that does not get built right away becomes “more expensive” with each additional year of delay.

    As my home county Spotsylvania belately found out when voters approved a $200 million bond referendum, they were financially unable to raise that amount of money over 5 years much less in one year without a 30+ cent increase in the tax rate. So the $200 million is not actually the price of the improvements but rather the inflation adjusted value which translates into about 1/2 of the projects they planned to build.

    The next step in the process is instructive and that is which projects to build and what process they will use to make that decision.

    This is the same quandry that VDOT has state-wide and Wash Metro has for their region.

    This is why most every legislator in the Va Gen Assembly agrees with the statement that we cannot build our way out of congestion – and I guess to be honest, we probably COULD if we raised taxes high enough to do so but the increase would be so high that there would be a taxpayer revolt and those who voted for it would be gone.. and new people elected to kill the tax increase.

  10. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    I agree with what you say about Reason Foundation. They are not making any points when they come up with stuff that smells bad. I feel the same way about some other organizations, like PEC. There is plenty of unfounded and poorly reasoned agenda driven drivel on both sides. The only thing they did do correctly was point out that frequently overlooked portion of the Texas studies.

    It appears that the air quality laws will soon become a major contributor to sprawl, how’s that for a paradox?

    Even if you could build you way totally out of congestion you wouldn’t do it because it isn’t cost effective. The question is how do you balance the costs of congestion with the costs of construction and maintenance? Where is the process for doing that?

    Sure, if the powers raise the taxes to fund construction, youcna throw them out. And if they don’t raise the funds and instead saddle you with excess costs in congestion, you can still throw them out.

    Given the responsiveness of government and government officials to actual voters as opposed to contributors, that seems like a cumbersome and expensive process for deciding what to do and how to balance congestion against construction.

  11. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    Let’s see. Do you think most politicians are afraid of being thrown out because of congestion or raising taxes?

    I’m betting the latter… until I actually see someone thrown out because of congestion issues.

    I think most folks view congestion like the weather… they don’t like bad weather.. but you’re going to have it.

    What most people really want is more “smart” cost-effective improvements in areas where it is clear.. something as simple as a sign or signal timing… or longer left-turn lanes when it is clear they are getting overun…. etc.

    When drivers see that the highway folks are NOT focused on optimizing the existing network FIRST, most don’t want to give them more money for fear they’ll even further ignore efforts to optimize the network and instead go off and enjoy their new highway construction projects.

    A good example of not being focused on congestion mitigation is the 128 million dollar “smart traffic” signs where in Hampton Roads.. their advertised “delay” is routinely 1/2 actual times – as locals well know.
    http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/13/1324.asp

    VDOT has been told repeatedly about this.. and their response is “these things are hard to calibrate”. So we have 128 million dollars spent on something that VDOT clearly does not give a rats butt about… The actual purpose of why the signs were bought is clearly something that VDOT management does not feel much if any accountability for.

    Seems to me that if they are unable to operate a simple sign that informs drivers of delays… I can see where the average guy would not about to give them more tax money because they would doubt seriously that they would do any better at building cost-effective congestion-relief projects.

  12. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    The signs seem to be a waste, except they lead you to believe the government does have a heart after all.

    I’ve seen the signs advertising delays when there are none, not advertising when there are delays, and I’ve seen them light up after I was already sitting for 30 minutes.

    Not that they are much help when there is no alternative route. And they seem to put them on the limited access roads where even if there is an alternative, you can’t get off to reach it.

    And then there is the classic: when there is a delay, throw open the car pool lanes. Not only does this mean that everybody is late, it signals the poolers that relief is transitory, and it signals the non-poolers that their belief the car pool lanes are a wast is actually correct. Dumb.

    I figure that wasting money in congestion is worse than wasting money on un-needed roads. At least with un-needed roads I can console myself that SOME people are using them, and induced traffic says they will eventually fill up. But, when I’m wasting money on congestion, I get less than nothing.

    At least my Hybrid has enough sense to shut down.

    Let’s see what happens with Erhlich in Maryland. His decision to go ahead with the ICC was enormously unpopular.

    Like I said, whether he stays or goes its a bad way to decide if the ICC decision was correct, and a really bad way to improve the likeliehood that we won’t go through a similar 30 year debacle again. By now, they could have paved the highway and fueled the vehicles that run on it with the energy wasted on the paper used to argue the merits.

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