Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Subsidize It, and They Will Come

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by

James A. Bacon
in

by James A. Bacon

There is a particular intersection near where I live in Henrico County — Patterson Avenue and Parham Road — that gets really jammed up during rush hour and sets my teeth to grinding. I hate it. I curse it. I give its traffic signals the finger. (Yes, I do have incipient road rage issues.) But I suppose I really have no grounds to complain. According to Wendell Cox, writing in New Geography, Richmond is the least congested of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. No one else comes close.

Cox derived his ranking from a composite of three major traffic congestion indexes: INRIX, Tom Tom and the Urban Mobility Report. One thrust of his blog post is to argue that traffic congestion is correlated with density: The greater the density of a metropolitan region, the greater the traffic congestion.

Adapted from Wendell Cox
Adapted from Wendell Cox

I can’t argue with Cox on this. There is a correlation between density and congestion. And Richmond (the blue dot) is a case in point. We have a relatively low-density metro. He acknowledges that other factors affect congestion as well. One of them, which he does not mention, is simply the size of the metro region. The most congested metros tend to be the largest.

Cox advances yet another explanation: the unwillingness or inability of congested metros to add new transportation highway capacity. Unlike my Smart Growth colleagues, I agree that it is theoretically possible for a region to build its way out of congestion. Theoretically. If money were no object. If Martians came along and beamed down billions of dollars in gold ingots. Of course, in the real world, money is always an issue. My argument is that building highways willy nilly is fiscally unsustainable. If the people who used those roads and highways actually had to pay for them through tolls, not many projects would get built. People always want new roads if someone else will pay for them. If they have to pay themselves, not so much. They’ll find better things to do with their money.

The same holds true of mass transit. People are happy to build new heavy rail, light rail and street cars if they can find someone else to subsidize them. If riders had to pay the full freight, none of them would get built.

The fact is, we subsidize the construction of more transportation capacity than we really need. We hate congestion but we hate it less than paying our fair share of what it costs to make the congestion go away. At some point, the congestion crisis will get so intense that people will be willing to pay out of their own pocket — in other words, when they’re willing to pay the tolls and/or fares — what it takes to build and operate the new capacity. That’s the point at which we should expand the system, not before.

By the way, the Washington metro region is No. 7 on Cox’s composite list of most congested metros, and Hampton Roads is No. 24.

An aside. Cox makes an interesting argument that less congestion offers a competitive economic advantage. “Because traffic congestion increases travel times, it necessarily reduces the share of a metropolitan area’s (labor market) jobs that can be reached by the average employee. A considerable body of research associates greater access (measured in time) with improved economic performance and job creation.” Sounds great. Here in Richmond, we’re waiting…

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3 responses to “Subsidize It, and They Will Come”

  1. NewVirginia Avatar
    NewVirginia

    Cox’s initial point is correct, but his conclusion has some glaring blind spots. Traffic congestion correlates with density, but that should be obvious. More people in a given area means more traffic – and people max out the use of the roads before shifting modes. But he paints it as if this is a bad thing. There are a couple reasons this might not be true.

    First, he measures traffic congestion rather than access. The two are very very different. Most people perceive the inconvenience of traffic in terms of how fast they can drive on a road, which is ridiculous. They ought to evaluate it in terms of their increased or decreased access to possible destinations. So yes, ten minutes of driving in Manhattan might barely get you a mile. But that mile driving radius gets you access to a million people, several million jobs, and tens of thousands of retail stores and restaurants. And you can access a lot via car if you can just commute during rush hour via transit or walking. Contrast that with suburban Richmond. Ten minutes of driving in Chesterfield County might get you geographically farther in any one direction (including time on side streets to get to destinations), but that only gives you access to one or two hundred thousand people, and not nearly the concentration of jobs or amenities. Cities create value by being markets and markets that can provide access to more people result in more value creation (with lots of other factors affecting it obviously). Part of that access also involves being able to use different modes based on the different circumstances of the trip. This mapping application, which is fantastic, gives a better idea of how much access cities are creating for their people and how traffic affects that: http://www.flaviogortana.com/isoscope/.

    Second, Cox fails to mention that, while traffic may correlate somewhat with density, it correlates even better with economic growth or decline. And that sort of invalidates his argument about a lack of traffic being a major draw. It is a draw – in the same sense that an empty room at a party is attractive if one room is overcrowded. But the whole reason you are at the party is to talk to people, so there is a reason the most crowded room tends to get more crowded over time until a group can form that’s large enough to spin off another conversation. The areas with the most traffic also tend to be the areas with the highest median incomes. Traffic is a sign that people have things to do and places to go. As it is, you can drive full speed at rush hour through central Detroit, dense as it is (or could be).

    Third, from a fiscal perspective, more traffic, if it can be controlled by traffic management systems, means more efficient use of the roads. This is generally true at the metro area level that Cox is analyzing since most roads are far below capacity most of the time (it’s not necessarily true for a particular road after it reaches the congestion point). Areas that have very low traffic congestion are probably paying far too much for their roads given their (probably poor) economic power.

  2. James A. Bacon Avatar
    James A. Bacon

    Thank you, Luke, I would have made the same points if I had had the time. But you stated them more clearly than I could have, so our readers are far better off.

  3. larryg Avatar
    larryg

    re: ” The greater the density of a metropolitan region, the greater the traffic congestion”

    I thought there was a claim that if density was done “right” that less car use would result?

    no?

    re: build your way out of congestion.

    that seems totally in conflict with the idea that land is valuable for uses other than transporting cars.

    if you’re talking about “backfitting” a city by buying up developed or developable tax-generating land to convert to non-revenue-producing uses – it seems to be ungodly expensive…

    The Inter County Connector in Md did that and the result for a road that cost more than 100 million per mile… and pretty much maxed out the Maryland Transportation agency… which now depends on other tolls roads to help pay off the cost of the ICC.

    Finally – the big bugaboo for any/all roads is peak hour – do we REALLY want to build roads to handle peak hour?

    What do the airlines do about peak-hour demand?

    shouldn’t we be thinking in terms of how much unused highway capacity we have at non-peak hour as well as how much we say we need at peak-hour?

    From my perspective, I support – both public and private approaches to charging more for peak hour service… whether it’s for METRO or Airlines or electricity or cell phones, or just about anything.

    it’s a basic free-market principle and it’s an appropriate counter to “subsidies”.

    if you think about the entire reason why we have peak hours – in anything – it’s economic… and economics should be based on the value of something verses the cost to provide it – always and in my mind – highway capacity is no different from airlines … or subways… it’s the same but for some reason we continue to cling to the idea that roads should be “free”.

    Now… I’ll just wait for that famous fiscal conservative DJ – to launch into another “leftist” tirade about tolls… and free roads..

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