Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [41]
Those who are skeptical of the need for a fundamental reconsideration of transportation planning should take note of something we experienced a few years ago. In a large working session on the design of Playa Vista, an urban infill project in Los Angeles, the traffic engineer was presenting a report of current and projected congestion around the development. From our seat by the window, we had an unobstructed rush-hour view of a street he had diagnosed as highly congested and in need of widening. Why, then, was traffic flowing smoothly, with hardly any stacking at the traffic light? When we asked, the traffic engineer offered an answer that should be recorded permanently in the annals of the profession: “The computer model that we use does not necessarily bear any relationship to reality.”
But the real question is why so many drivers choose to sit for hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic without seeking alternatives. Is it a manifestation of some deep-seated self-loathing, or are people just stupid? The answer is that people are actually quite smart, and their decision to submit themselves to the misery of suburban commuting is a sophisticated response to a set of circumstances that are as troubling as their result. Automobile use is the intelligent choice for most Americans because it is what economists refer to as a “free good”: the consumer pays only a fraction of its true cost. The authors Stanley Hart and Alvin Spivak have explained that:
We learn in first-year economics what happens when products or services become “free” goods. The market functions chaotically; demand goes through the roof. In most American cities, parking spaces, roads and freeways are free goods. Local government services to the motorist and to the trucking industry—traffic engineering, traffic control, traffic lights, police and fire protection, street repair and maintenance—are all free goods.bd
THE AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDY
To what extent is automobile use a “free” good? According to Hart and Spivak, government subsidies for highways and parking alone amount to between 8 and 10 percent of our gross national product, the equivalent of a fuel tax of approximately $3.50 per gallon. If this tax were to account for “soft” costs such as pollution cleanup and emergency medical treatment, it would be as high as $9.00 per gallon. The cost of these subsidies—approximately $5,000 per car per year—is passed directly on to the American citizen in the form of increased prices for products or, more often, as income, property, and sales taxes. This means that the hidden costs of driving are paid by everyone: not just drivers, but also those too old or too poor to drive a car. And these people suffer doubly, as the very transit systems they count on for mobility have gone out of business, unable to compete with the heavily subsidized highways.be
Even more irksome is the fact that spending on transit creates twice as many new jobs as spending on highways. Every billion dollars reallocated from road-building to transit creates seven thousand jobs.5 Congress’s recent $41 billion highway bill, had it been allocated to transit, would have employed an additional quarter-million people nationwide.
Because they do not pay the full price of driving, most car owners choose to drive as much as possible. They are making the correct economic decision, but not in a free-market economy. As Hart and Spivak note, an appropriate analogy is Stalin’s Gosplan, a Soviet agency that set arbitrary “correct” prices for many consumer goods, irrespective of their cost of production, with unsurprising results. In the American version of Gosplan, gasoline costs one quarter of what it did in 1929 (in real dollars).bf One need look no further for a reason why American cities continue to sprawl into the countryside. In Europe, where gasoline costs about four times the American price, long-distance automotive commuting is the exclusive privilege of the wealthy, and there is relatively little suburban sprawl.
The American Gosplan pertains to shipping as well. In the