US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in 'climate time bomb'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Unfortunately, the U.S. has gone all-in on car based infrastructure and that's a difficult thing to reverse. The best time to start improving public transport and active transport facilities is twenty years ago; the second best time to start is now.
No, you're measuring what you care about, not the actual goal.
More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go! If you have 4 lanes, and 20,000 people can commute to work, and with 8 lanes, 40,000 people can commute to work, that's a huge win for the people who wanted to use the highway! Think about this honestly — if you doubled the capacity of a subway, and twice as many people took it so it was just as crowded, you'd be thrilled.
You're going to be perpetually confused by infrastructure decisions if you measure a goal that nobody else is trying to solve for.
If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win. It's literally providing more value to people and acting as an economic multiplier. If you improve the bus system and more people use it that's also a win because it's providing more value to people.
If your plan doesn't start with here's all the ways the roads provide value and why individuals and businesses overwhelmingly prefer them to current alternatives and how we're taking that as table stakes for our new system, then of course people are gonna push back. Just because you think a trade-off is worth it or some perceived downside is fine for you doesn't mean it will be true for everyone.
This ignores the cost/benefit of constructing more car infrastructure in heavily urbanized areas and the cost of owning a car for transportation. It ceases to be an economic multiplier when you compare it to cheaper alternatives. You are also painting car infrastructure as some sort of panacea, but it costs households a lot of money (almost 1/5th of their total income[1]) to use a car for transportation.
Not only are cars expensive, but their expense is inversely correlated with income (poor people spend more money on cars). In the USA we spend much more on transportation than in EU countries[2]. From the standpoint of the average American family, car infrastructure is much costlier than the alternatives.
1. https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trend... 2. https://www.itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-uni...
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but no one wants to get to the 5 or 6 lane highway. They are using the highway to get to smaller 1-2 lane surface roads and parking areas with limited capacity. Eventually you will hit a bottleneck in surface roads or parking that you cannot improve easily or cheaply. The larger highways only serve to get people to the bottlenecks in the system faster.
It's unfortunate that low-density areas and the highways they depend on are subsidized by more productive uses of land. It's a tragedy that the people benefiting from that subsidy feel entitled to it and prevent society from developing the land in more sustainable ways.
Part of it is a chicken-and-egg problem though... even my city where I live is not immune. Those who live in less developed areas vote against public transportation solutions and stymie progress at every turn while voting for more roads/lanes. It appears rational: they can't get to the public transportation where they are since every amenity is incredibly far (due to cars and road infrastructure, wah wah). So who has to suffer more while we figure out the solution?
From a larger ecological perspective, we need to reduce car infrastructure. It's a significant contributor to climate change, air pollution, and unnecessary deaths every year and there are ways to avoid a good deal of those problems (or at least reduce them).
The real question is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"?
Edited to change "problem" to "question" - problems are things like "we need to get people to work, etc" and "how do we reduce pollution" not "I saw too many cars".
In my experience as an American who prefers public transport but lives in the Midwest, where public transport is essentially nonexistent: people have a skewed view of public transport thanks to horror stories about NYC subways and whatnot. So even if public transport were available, many people wouldn't take it because it would mean being around other people.
Meanwhile things like the San Diego Trolley has gone from 16 miles and 17 stops in 1981 to 47,000 people a weekday in 1996 and to almost 70 miles and 62 stations today, with ridership peaking at around 38 million a year in 2019 (and slowly recovering back up).
(Some of the original cars are still riding, down in Mendoza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrotranvía_Mendoza )
Something to note: that is a very successful light transit line and the total track is about the same as some people's daily commute.
There are some fundamental problems with cars crowding out alternatives (either due to cost or space). But saying that utilization is evidence that something is bad seems backwards to me.
When you have increased car usage, there's also a demand for car parking and once you start assigning a large amount of space for car parking, you end up pushing facilities further apart. This means that more journeys then become impractical except via cars and the problems increase.
Often people don't appreciate that there are alternatives. People will often claim that alternatives aren't practical such as cycling in cold or wet areas which is despite many European countries that provide counter examples. It's also a matter of habit and people will gradually get used to their commutes becoming longer and more stressful rather than evaluating whether driving is the best option. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel that the vehicle they drive is a key part of their personality or signals their social position.
In Sweden I saw separate pathways for bicycles complete with roadway lighting. Didn't see many people using them but at least they were there.
Time is the answer. Very rarely, covering typical US population density to the routes and schedules allow people to get from point a to b in a reasonable time. I once tried to hire a person to work for our company who thought she could take the bus. To get three miles, it would take her roughly 3 hours and require her to change busses five times. In the end, spending six hours on a bus or waiting for one just wasn't worth it to work eight hours.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
It’s not hard to understand why I’d choose to drive when there is an alternative (at least technically, if not practically).
Hell, I could walk my children to school (it's a mile away) in freezing weather through a blizzard, but will I? I could lie and say I would, but damn that heated seat feels nice ...
Under 50 outside, most folks just nope out, same with over 80 outside.
Heck, most people cannot walk three miles without breaking some sort of sweat in a temperate climate, so for work, you need to be presentable.
Also a three mile distance "as the bird flies" may be double that as the person walks or drives.
I could make up excuses, but I'm just kinda lazy.
probably twice as slow as driving, but 10x more enjoyable
3 hours to commute 3 miles is literally 1 mile an hour. about the speed of a baby's crawl
In the last two months alone, two people have been murdered on my local transit system, including a 13-year-old-kid shooting some dude for no reason [0][1].
This, combined with it taking at least three times as long to get literally anywhere, with many trips resulting in a detour to a central hub station or similar means the Uber is a far better value if you care at all about your time.
If you are trying to visit friends 10 minutes away, this is 20 minutes by car or (if you're lucky and the time windows line up) an hour out of your day by transit.
[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/02/boy-13-arrested-fatal-...
[1]: https://www.denverpost.com/2024/02/27/man-accused-of-longmon...
I still take the D line into Downtown Seattle when we go there, but will always have one or two situations on the bus where I regret the choice. It keeps me from using the bus more often.
Same way that no amount of "more people died in car accidents than on Boeing planes" would ever get people to agree that fixing the MCAS was not needed.
e.g. I'm less likely to be mugged or assaulted in a personal vehicle compared to public transit but I'm also more likely to have my vehicle broken into or stolen. Public transit is also _very_ different during typical commute times, compared to off hours.
I take the train or bus when it's the right combination of faster, easier, and cheaper. I drive when the alternative is slower, harder, or more expensive. Sometimes it's a coinflip.
No, "induced demand" is a variation on "if you build it, they will come".
e.g. Traffic is heavy to the new suburb, so you add lanes. But now people are willing to expand the new suburb, or to build houses even farther out because of the new highway. So you need to add even more lanes ...
I live in a small city. I work a 8 minute drive, or 20 minute bus ride from my home. In the summer, I frequently walk. During the school year, I have to drive to get my kid to school and other events.
For distance trips, I frequently go to NYC for personal trips. I live in upstate NY and can quickly use Amtrak to get to NYC. The problem is, even though NYC has great transit, I can get to any single point in NYC faster and likely cheaper from upstate than most arbitrary points within NYC. I only take the train for Manhattan or overnight trips.
If you live in suburbia, forget it. Cycling is dangerous, and walking is time consuming with poor infrastructure in most places.
If you design for the car, you need to design spaces for cars to park in, which increases distance between places, which worsen alternatives.
Coupled with parking minimum and inefficient urban planning, everything is too far apart. Traffic engineer design for convenience of cars with everything else an afterthought. It's either too dangerous or too inconvenient to walk and bike.
When you need to drive everywhere, that also increases demand for driving.
With cheap land and access to highways, this cause suburban sprawls and of course additional traffic. Given that jobs are found within the city, it's no surprise that we have traffic congestion.
Compare people to car, we just need less space in general to move and you don't have the problem of car seating only the driver majority of the time instead of four or five people.
So yeah, geometry hates car.
If the busses are only every couple of hours, they might get packed, but the number of nearly empty busses driving around would amaze people.
Example: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58861#_idTextAnchor012 where busses beat personal vehicle but only slightly; compared to rail transit it's obscene.
But that's because the average transit bus has 8 passengers and gets 3.4 mpg! https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html
Even if you "fill" the bus to 40 people, it still is matched by a car with 5 people in it.
I don’t think anybody claims induced demand happens instantly and doesn’t have limits.
It won’t happen instantly, but over time, a new road to the middle of nowhere will lead to people moving there, increasing traffic.
Also, in the case of widening roads, part of induced demand is of people that used to leave early to avoid the traffic that now will leave home a bit later. That doesn’t increase demand for going from A to B, but does increase demand for going from A to B between 7 AM and 9 AM.
Another effect is that, all other things being equal, using more space for roads decreases population density and thus increases distance traveled, also increasing road usage.
Because these alternatives are usually kept subpar. In many areas of the world with good mass transit options, people don’t choose to drive (London, UK for ex.)
Not to mention, this isn't zero sum. Our roads and bridges can be in desperate need of repair (they are) and we can also need better public transportation and rail.
That is true only if you think wall papering the earth from top to bottom with human settlement is acceptable and that the natural world has no value. In short, we have already used up all the landmass we responsibly should use for people. Now, infill.
This sure sounds a lot like a pure opinion. Do you have anything to back up this claim?
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
Parking lots are awful, even in their own right, in that we agree.
I understand you might think everything humanity does is destructive, but it just doesn't comport with my experience.
I would encourage you to find some wilderness, and see for yourself whether the "natural world is threatened". I'm not denying that it doesn't happen, it's just not as widespread or universal as you seem to suggest.
Visit the US west and tell me "most of the natural world is threatened". In many parts it's wilderness as far as the eye can see.
If your settlement isn't dense enough to disturb nature, then it's not dense enough to make a dent in the national supply. That said, I cannot find the research right now, but I did read that human presence on a hiking trail in a national park effects wolf behaviour for a month as they are weary of the scent, so I definitely bet you are having a bigger impact than you know.
I own a home on a 100 acre wood. It's the only one, and yeah, it probably doesn't disturb the natural world very much, at least much less than the local ATV trail. But I know what it took to get building 5 miles from the nearest logging road, and I know that it's not feasible to do that for a million immigrants a year looking for a home. Cheap and plentiful homes means easier easy sprawl or dense infill.
PS - Willing the home to a local youth organisation to use for retreats and the rest of land is being stipulated to have no more development on it.
The most successful form of public transit in low-density areas is the school bus. They work well for bringing kids to school. They require roads. We’re not going to switch to rail.
There was a necessary precondition: "there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level".
That's the opposite of implying that one form of transportation works best everywhere.
FWIW, in some low density areas the most successful form of public transit is the ferry, which carries kids to school, people to work, food to the stores, and more.
However weather does play a large role, and during peak hours the crowds are quite daunting.
There's only very specific places where ferry is useful. You need multiple ports close to each other in calm water with high frequency traffic.
Dense cities are a different kind of time bomb. Replacing pipes and streets disrupts a lot more people and a lot of businesses for a shockingly long amount of time.
Dense cities also happen to be significantly more expensive in practically every way. The cost of housing in particular. Feels like a corollary to induced demand on roads. Although it’s worth noting in both cases that induced demand means more people are receiving value and benefit!
I dunno. I live in a city. It’s fine. But density doesn’t feel like a defacto good thing to me.
Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc.
Further, if you had better and reliable rapid transport links servicing spread out communities, it would negate the need to drive in many cases when commuting to economic hubs. But this requires a mindset shift.
Overall, it's nuanced, and that complexity is why voters (and NIMBYs) are reticent to embrace how we need to be living for now, and not how we used to live.
I grew up in rural America. It is not at all obvious to me that cities are more economic. If anything it’s the opposite. Doing any kind of infrastructure work is expensive, slow, and disruptive.
> Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc.
Maybe. Cost of housing is arguably our biggest and most important problem – and it’s increasingly wide spread.
But at no point in recent history have dense cities had cheaper housing. Building tall is expensive.
Though I would argue that while costs can be higher, the ROI is also realised faster, whereas the costs to service rural areas will take longer to achieve its benefit-cost ratio — and in fact it may never.
And that's not to say rural areas aren't important. They are! But we need to think more cleverly and collectively for how we can service them better for the social and economic benefit of all within a given region. No one needs to lose out at the expense of someone else, I don't believe it's a zero sum game.
And I hear you re cost of housing. The thing is at some stage there can be critical mass in that there's enough housing on the market that it negates huge inflation due to supply outpacing (not outstripping) demand. The thing is, this is one lever, and if we keep the emigration (domestic and foreign) faucet turned on and we don't mitigate it with other measures, housing costs go up. And we've got to ask, who is winning in that situation? It's not the people, but it is the speculators and investors...
Also, housing requires space for where the house is located, but cars will require space (parking) both at the main residence and also at every possible destination.
Even if you built that housing, let's say you are in Houston or some texan city with lots of space, it would fill up. Your traffic problems would be even worse of course. Luckily, a lot of cities are hemmed in by water/mountains, so the only way to build is up, but if you do build up (like in HK, which is a good example of a city that is hemmed in by water and mountains), your city doesn't necessarily get cheaper, you just get more people.
The USA has a fantastic organizational structure that allows changes like this to be experimented with in pockets of the country without a top down approach. If an approach can't be done at the city or State level, then it's not likely to get approved for spending at the Federal level as you add in more people who will never directly benefit from said system.
In the USA, the city of New York is seen as having the most extensive mass transit system, in particular the subway system. Problem is that it has massive budgetary shortfalls and doubles as a de facto homeless shelter. People don't take the NYC subway because they want to, they take it because they have no other choice.
If people want public transport to be a success in the USA, pick a city (any city!) and show that it can be done in a fiscally sustainable way with an end product that people actually want to use. Not just forced to use.
Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Suggesting that a road have tolls is the quickest way to lose. However, transit is put in another group, for some reason.
The NY State Thruway, the tolled highway that crosses the entire state, is entirely self-funded by tolls:
https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2022/03/28/tolls-not-tax...
Where I'm from, in New Zealand, roads are paid for from a budget that is funded primarily by fuel taxes and road user charges. So what you've said is not a universal truth.
- A lot of well off people who could flag a taxi or Uber still take the NYC subway because it is very convenient and has incredible coverage. All sorts of New Yorkers use it. Also, you can get from the airport to Manhattan just as fast if not faster on the LIRR, and at a fraction of the cost. (In the SF Bay Area on the other hand, the trains are pretty bad for getting to the airport!)
- Public transit is almost never intended to operate at a profit. They intentionally subsidize it, both for people with low income, and to make routes to suburbs where the route might not have the ridership to really justify it, but the planners think it is still important for political reasons (like if a district is paying for some transit service, everyone in the district should get some stations).
Fiscally sustainable does not have to mean turning a profit or refusing to take any external tax dollars for funding.
But it also can't be $3 billion over budget (on a $20 billion budget) every year with a fiscal timebomb about to go off when their COVID bailout expires: https://new.mta.info/budget/MTA-operating-budget-basics [1]
[1]: Same link from wayback machine from Dec 2023 in case the MTA changes it: https://web.archive.org/web/20231203043132/https://new.mta.i...
And yet tha vast majority of the US is nowhere near that density. The most dense areas already have public transit. Could those areas use some additional funding? Probably. Are there other issues than just funding? Definitely. Is the title misleading and presenting a false dilemma? Yes, the US is investing in both, not just one or the other.
I think the other issue in the US is the opposite: below a certain density, it's hard for public transit to be effective. Once car-oriented development has sprawled out with suburbs and stroads, the distance between you and a transit-stop is gonna be higher, riders per mile of route will be lower, etc. And when housing prices push people to move further out from city centers (which is important not just for commuting to jobs but access to stores/schools/everything) the problem just gets worse.
If you can drive, you can spread out more and still get reasonable travel times. A lot of big cities in the U.S. were mostly built out after the invention of the car, so they are built with cars in mind. The older ones mostly have semi-decent public transit available.
I did see one exception. In Helsinki down by the harbor near the Estonian ferry, they are putting in 8-10 story apartment buildings. They are located on transit lines but does nothing but apartment buildings there. You have to take the tram to get to supermarket or medical facilities and the tram doesn't go that fast.
It seems to me that effective public transit would require running a public transit vehicle (buses, trams) so that you never need to wait more than 15 minutes at any stop. Still would be horribly inefficient because you'd be doing lots of vehicle changes but at least you can get everywhere eventually.
It's like you have a bunch of people at 1700 calories per day, and you are against growing more food cause there'd be induced demand for food - they'd just eat it all up, and ask for more.
And roads have other uses than moving people. Get rid of all passenger transport and we would still need roads to move all the goods and services on which we rely.
Trains are still a thing in the US. Trucks could be used just for the "last mile" of a product.
Public transportation is sold as light rail, trains, monorails, because those look cool and people like them. It's damn hard to sell busses, even if you end up building out much of the map as busses.
To be fair, busses are subject to a lot of the problems cars are (they get stuck in traffic, etc) whilst trains can zip past traffic jams on their own rails. And not everywhere does "bus rapid transit" right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh1IaVmu3Y8
Also, the way the US creates bus systems - each locality spending more or less depending on the location's shifting fortunes - means that no one can rely on buses in any long term and this indeed makes people not want to ride them.
Public transportation accounts for about 5.0% of commutes, with buses being the plurality (but not majority) mode at 2.3%, followed by subway at 1.9%, commuter rail at 0.6%, light rail at 0.2%, and ferry at 0.0% (yay rounding).
Being a driver or passenger in a car or light truck leads to a >10x higher rate of death over public transport. This includes non-crash related deaths.
https://www.modeshift.com/is-public-transportation-safer-tha...
https://www.nctr.usf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/JPT17.4_...
When I was younger (early 2000s) I remember taking the subway in NYC literally everywhere and at all hours. I remember being in one of the boroughs and having missed the last train I had to wait 3 or 4 hours for the next one, even in a sketchy train station somewhere in the Bronx it was no issue. 100s if not 1000s of trips on the subway (and path and light rail and NJ transit) with no real issues.
Last year while taking the subway (in central manhattan no less) I was harassed by a panhandler who wanted money. He was extremely aggressive about it and did not accept that I had no cash on me to give (I only had my small wallet with a some emergency $100 bills) eventually following me onto the train, fortunately I was able to exit the train before the doors closed with him staying on it.
I thought about what I have done in that situation if I was (literally or figuratively) backed into a corner, obviously I wouldn't be happy about it but I would have defended myself or my family if they were with me (I was fortunately alone that day).
Personally, the final straw for me with regards to NYC transit was when Daniel Penny was arrested. To not only be unsafe on the subway but to be arrested for defending yourself? Too much of a risk for me, I will drive or take uber exclusively from now on.
I don't understand why American society tolerates this kind of stuff. Watching movies like Easy Rider, you can see the opposite extreme of the society/the law treating any strangers and outsiders poorly, but I wonder if the current attitudes swung /too/ far in the opposite direction.
Regardless, given that's how most people are socialized, I am not surprised they don't like public services that are disproportionately used by the poor (I think most poor are totally fine, but they are more likely to be dysfunctional, and public transit in particular also selects for the dysfunctional).
People/professionals all vacation to places like Tulum (etc) where you can just walk through little slices of paradise on foot (or scooter) and reach everything you need without a car, then rave about how great it is, and then go back home and continue designing and building the worst imaginable human experience infrastructure.
Blows my mind. We could have cool little interconnected towns with diverse landscapes all connected by rail, bicycles, scooters, and walking... but nah.
All hail Walmart parking lots bigger than a football field.
Ha ha, and for what amounts to just one month where usage peaks.
If you were to try to serve the commuting audience there would be a lot more speed in public transport and some people would be left behind vs a stop every two blocks.
Trains would be heavy-rail below or above grade vs at grade light rail contesting with cars.
Public transport would cost a lot but be worth the price because of the speed, security, and convenience.
Public transit advocates in the US have a few objectives (in the POSIWID sense):
1. Job creation for construction workers
2. Job protection for train operators
3. Shelter for those who have no warm place to shelter
You can tell this is the case by the following actions by transit advocates:
1.
i. Efforts to increase funding for the same outcomes as before
i. Success metrics described are usually in terms of jobs created and small businesses contracted
2. Active opposition to Skytrain-style automated trains
3. Efforts to make public transit free
Most of the transit advocacy I see is based on the fact that US public transit systems need to, in general, be more rationale, and focus on supporting things like high-frequency all-day travel (and rush-hour-peak-direction-only transit is effectively a farce of transit), or more coherent bus routes or better integration between different systems to alleviate capacity bottlenecks (hi NYC Penn Station). And an awful lot of the-system-is-rotten-and-people-need-to-be-canned (I mean, when you have a front-row seat to the WMATA meltdown, it's hard not to have that sentiment).
$33.5b on highway expansion
$25.6b on transit and passenger rail
To get comparisons of what this gets you:
> Elevated Major Freeway / Interstate, 4 lanes 12’ wide each lane & 3’ shoulder, urban location in S.E. USA. $71.33 million per mile.
Comparable in SoCal is $200m/mi, I believe
2 miles of underground rail in SF is $4000m/mi
Therefore, you can get 20 miles of highway in urban California for about what you can get for a mile of rail. Given those numbers, the choice is out of our hands. We cannot pay for public transit. In fact, it's not clear that this is a net economic positive at these costs.
https://compassinternational.net/order-magnitude-road-highwa...
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/27/san-francisco-downtown-rai...
Source of motive power has nothing to do with the main issue with cars, which is the fact that there are no extra dimensions in which to physically fit them all.
In Europe, density is not a choice, they have to live on top of each other.
And if you don't have good public transportation or zoning laws that's due to your local government.
That is not true at all.
It depends what you're looking for.
When your bus is 30 minutes late for weeks, months, and years on end, you will look into getting a car.
When there are homeless people sleeping on buses, you will look into getting a car.
When there are mentally ill people threatening other passengers on buses, you will look into getting a car.
When there are drug addicts smoking weed or meth on buses, you will look into getting a car.
When there are sociopaths listening to music on their speakerphone or otherwise being very loud on buses every day, you will look into getting a car.
When you are assaulted or robbed at bus or metro stations, you will look into getting a car.
etc etc etc
It's not complicated.
you could build the rail first and hope the dense housing comes later, but that would saddle cities with an expensive rail network no one uses
even in the bay area we have decent rail solutions given the size of the area, and most people prefer to drive. because they live far enough from the station that driving to the station and then training, and the destination stations are far from the destinations
without all this investing in roads and highways will have the biggest direct impact to most americans
1: Except for the time we gave the railroads literally 10% of the land area of the country for a "rail network no one uses".
The very successful Japanese model is that railway companies buy land and develop it, and the railway adds value to that land.
But it's hard to compete when the government subsidizes and legally mandates roads and not railroads.
Driving to a train station, then later taking a bus or cab when I get off the train is ridiculous. I would rather just drive.