a California debate on roads
Topics: Transportation
18 Oct 2005
From: Ervan Darnell
Just yesterday (after having sent my piece on building more roads), I
heard an episode of a local talk radio show interviewing California
officials (from the highway department, Caltrans, and from BART). I
have another theory for why the roads are in such bad shape: only
anti-market bureaucrats are ever willing to take a government job and
the system is just blinded to any possibility that makes sense.
Building more roads was not among the solutions they offered. Some of
the things they did offer:
1) HOT lanes -- tolls for the carpool lane. In theory, this makes
sense. But their implementation of it was still to allow carpools to go
for free. In other words, there is no additional incentive to carpool
(versus now). Indeed there is less because the HOV lanes are already
congested, and this plan will make it worse. Nor will the toll money be
dedicated to buliding more roads. One problem with the current
HOV/carpool lanes is that *anyone*, including children beneath driving
age, count as a carpool, and there a variety of other exceptions for PC
causes. How about fixing that so the HOV lanes actually flow? While I
dread giving the government another tax to abuse, the better answer is
toll all of the lanes at the true maintenance cost + some reasonable
extra that is dedicated to building new roads. Or, at least split the
difference and toll the second-to-left lane.
2) Dedicated bus lanes on 4-lane (each way) highways -- In other words,
remove 1/4 of the total capacity in the interest of making things
better. This is classic government arrogance: change the laws to favor
its own service provider. In principle this might help if tolls were
adjusted accordingly, but absent that it's senseless.
3) Socialist housing planning -- force people to build new houses next
to BART. This is another example of the government bending the rules to
subsidize its own service provider. If BART is such a good deal,
people will live next to it naturally (and it is worth something). But
forcing people to live where they don't wish to is a funny way of
burying the costs (by putting people in bad neighborhoods, away from
good schools, further from family, whatever).
4) outlawing new single-family homes -- One of the guests said how good
urban growth boundaries in the Bay Area were solving traffic problems.
This is doubly wrong. First, those boundaries are typically on close-in
cities. Thus, they pushing housing further away by removing near
spaces, presumably a bad thing in the "planners" ' minds as it leads to
more miles driven. Second, it isn't clear at all what the relation is
between growth and congestion. If you do nothing but force more people
into less space, they'll still all drive and congestion will go up, not
down. Plus, growth means distributed shopping and entertainment venues,
which means less congestion, not more. The "planners" seem to have some
naive fantasy of everyone walking to work and having all of their
friends in the same building. And, of course, there is the biggie:
their solution to congestion is simply to ban housing, making it ever
more expensive. This will ultimately work, but only by raising the
misery index high enough that people leave. I wouldn't call that a
solution. If they really wanted to stop urban growth the answer is to
oppose zoning and remove Sacramento's power to grab property taxes. The
former prevents "mixed use" and high density, and raises the frictional
cost of paying off the city council for every development so high as to
discourage changes in land use. The property-tax screw-up makes it not
in cities' interest to build high-density housing. But they aren't
going to suggest either of things because they mean less government,
while the "planners" want more.
-----
There was one interesting tidbit from the BART representative that
underscores my previous point: He said that the rise in gas prices did
not increase BART usage, but increasing congestion did. In other
words, people are time sensitive but not cost sensitive on their
commute. That almost surely means we are not spending enough on the roads.
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