06031 Urban Transit
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction. — E.F. Schumacher
The dominant transportation form in urban situations in the United States is the street grid, a method of city organization that goes all the way back to the Romans. It’s been so durable for a simple reason: it maximizes access to the available real estate,
The primary method of transportation in almost all urban areas of the United States is the personal automobile. As a result, over the past 50 years American cities decentralized. Most urban areas have several regional clusters where activities (economic, social, entertainment) co-locate. There usually is a central business district. Zoning, building code, and economic regulatory activities facilitate and often actively encourage sprawl.
And so it comes to pass that most people, whatever their method of travel or location, move about 30-40 minutes in one direction when commuting to work. That adds up to more than 350 hours per year — the equivalent of nearly 9 40-hour work-weeks, more than TWO FULL MONTHS OF WORK dedicated to commuting to work or school.
The space required for transportation systems has three components —
- the roads and routes,
- parking areas,
- terminals (bus stations, airports, etc.)
In most areas there are about four parking places for every automobile, two off-street and two on-street. In North America, roads and parking areas account for between THIRTY and SIXTY percent of the surface area in cities.
Depending on the area, the street grid may be overlaid with mass transit systems for buses, street cars, light and heavy rail systems.
Critics of mass transit systems often say that general taxes subsidize transit. They claim that the automobile pays its own way via fuel taxes. This is not true, because governments at all levels use general tax funds collected from the population at large, or from subgroups of the population, to support automobile transportation. Forty-three percent of the funds spent in the United States to build and maintain roads come from non-transit related sources (general taxes, property taxes, bond issues, etc.)
When we take into consideration all subsidies and externalities, some say the price of gasoline is actually $15/gallon. The difference between the pump price and this calculated price is the subsidy.
The intensity of your use of transportation is a calculation that involves the —
- methods of urban transportation you use,
- the frequency of your travels,
- the distance of your journeys.
The “more intense” transportation uses are (1) commuting and driving one person in an automobile that doesn’t get good miles per gallon and (2) traveling by airplane.
Less intense transportation uses are (1) not owning a car and riding a bus and (2) rarely making use of air travel.
The two months/year commuting time estimated above could be considered as two months of time invested in polluting the planet and forcing climate change. That’s a lot of work for not very good ends.
The critical design questions that we derive from this discussion are:
The location of your dwelling relative to the locations and situations of your travel has enormous impacts (for good and for ill.) on the environment and the quality of your life. The total amount of travel you do counts for life or for death for people, the planet, and the future.
The method of travel (automobile, public transit, walking, bicycle, air travel, intercity bus, train, etc.) has enormous impacts (for good and for ill) on the environment and the quality of your life. The methods of travel you use count for life or for death for people, the planet, and the future.
This will be true at every stage of your life and at every place that you live, for the rest of your life. At the end of your life, you will have a history of healing or of destroying. Your transportation choices will make a difference, for good or for ill, for yourself, for the planet, and for the future.
The primary problem with urban transit is that the government dominates our transportation system. The criteria for transportation decisions is not necessarily the actual transportation needs of a given locality but instead reflects the politics of the moment. He who has the gold makes the rules.
The toxic transportation decisions that our system of political criminality creates make the task of developing a society where it is easier to make good choices much more difficult.
For example, in most areas, it is almost impossible for an entrepreneur to wake up one morning and decide to go into business hauling people around for money. It sounds like a simple and beneficial act. That’s not the way the system works. Perhaps our hypothetical transit entrepreneur is actually a worker cooperative that wants to start a bus line that only operates along one particular highly traveled route.
In many areas, governments limit the number of licenses to transport people for hire. The first problem is the permit and that may cost a lot of money, since the only way to get a permit may be to buy an existing permit from someone else.
Sometimes governments require a “certificate of convenience and necessity”. Issuing such a certificate is a political hoop that our worker cooperators may not be able to approach because the purpose of that requirement is to restrict entry to a particular transportation marketplace.
There will be a long list of other miscellaneous duties, fees, licenses, obligations, requirements, etc. ad nauseam involved with launching a transit enterprise. One would think that these would-be transit worker cooperators wanted to do evil instead of something beneficial like create jobs and haul people around so they can get where they need to go.
This is not an argument against government involvement in transit. It is a statement that the issue is too important to just accept the status quo and the “Transit Is Too Expensive” mantra without seriously questioning that so-called authority. When the cost of entry declines to the point that anybody with a used van and some time on their hands can haul people around for money, then we'll know that we're getting somewhere in transit policy.
One reason transit is too expensive for private entrepreneurs is because the government levies to many transaction costs on the transportation marketplace. If we remove those politicized transaction costs and eliminate the unnecessary burdens the costs will go down. We need to allow for more spontaneous economic order in this critical space of human action. As we do that, we can then make sensible decisions about allocating government resources for mass transit. Once we see what the market will move on, government can fill in the gaps and provide necessary connections to make the system even more efficient and valuable.