Beware the Autocrats
By Joel Schwartz and Joel Kotkin
Real People Prefer Cars
By Joel Schwartz
Defenders of the automobile argue that it is the most convenient and flexible transportation mode yet invented, giving people a degree of social and economic opportunity and autonomy unprecedented in human history. Critics, however, have a different view, insisting Americans have an irrational love for their personal vehicles. They claim this results in a range of social and economic ills—pollution, congestion, long commutes, injuries, obesity, dependence on unstable oil-producing countries, burdensome road spending, high family transportation costs, and suburban sprawl. The reliance of Americans on automobiles is not a choice, they claim, but a necessity forced on people by public spending priorities and development patterns that require a set of wheels for most daily travel.
Is this accurate? The claim is not so hard to test. If Americans were being forced into suburbs and driving against their will, we would expect transportation and land use to look quite different in other countries with different policies. Yet people all over the world are choosing suburban lifestyles and automobile-based transportation as soon as they become wealthy enough to afford them. In Europe, for instance, automobiles currently account for 78 percent of all motorized travel, while public transit accounts for 16 percent—despite $5-per-gallon gasoline and high auto-related taxes, as well as widely available public transportation.
Transit’s share of European travel dropped 35 percent from 1970 to 2000, and continues to decline. As a proportion of person-miles traveled, public transportation declined 14 percent in London, 24 percent in Paris, 60 percent in Frankfurt, and 19 percent in Stockholm in just 15 years. Europe’s old central cities are now surrounded by suburbs that look very much like their American counterparts. In developing countries as well, people are choosing driving. Demand for automobiles is rising faster than income in the Third World, despite poor roads and high levels of traffic congestion.
People choose automobiles the world over because no other form of transportation comes anywhere close to providing comparable speed, flexibility, privacy, and convenience. Even in congested central cities, automobile travel is much faster than public transport. When comparing automobile and transit commutes within the same U.S. metropolitan areas, the average transit commute takes about 75 percent longer than the average automobile commute, even though each covers roughly the same distance on average. New York, with the densest population and best public transit in the U.S., also has the longest average commute time.
Automobile travel is much faster in Europe as well. For example, auto travel in French cities is, on average, 80 percent faster than trips by transit. Many Americans are under the impression that Europeans travel a great deal on trains. But in 2000, rail accounted for only 7 percent of all passenger-miles of motorized travel in Europe, and the largest portion of this took place on inter-city and commuter rail. The urban subways and trams that come to mind when thinking about how Europeans get around their cities actually accounted for only 1 percent of European passenger-miles in 2000.
Enabling wealth and happiness
Even without referring to other nations, the claim that Americans have had cars forced on them does not stand up to scrutiny. By 1930, Americans already owned an average of three automobiles for every four households. We embraced automobile travel long before there were interstate highways, and long before the postwar suburbanization of American metropolitan areas.
The critics have the facts exactly backwards. The automobile is a powerful enabling technology, allowing people the world over to satisfy what seem to be deep-seated human desires for space, privacy, mobility, autonomy, and choice. Auto travel has vastly increased humankind’s wealth and prosperity. Compared to other modes of travel, the speed and flexibility of cars gives people access to vastly wider choices in housing, jobs, and consumer goods, and gives employers a much wider pool of potential employees.
Not only do wealthier people choose automobiles—automobiles also help people become wealthier. A recent study of people in a welfare-to-work program in Los Angeles concluded that owning a car increased the likelihood that participants would land a job by 12 percent. A study of people without a high school degree in Portland, Oregon, concluded that vehicle ownership was associated with an 80 percent increase in the likelihood of being employed, and a $275 increase in average weekly wages. Researchers from the University of California estimate that boosting minority car ownership rates to the same level as whites would eliminate 45 percent of the black-white employment gap and 17 percent of the Latino-white employment gap.
Automobile travel is far cheaper than transit, with direct costs only about one fourth as much per passenger-mile of travel, even after accounting for the recent run-up in gasoline costs. As unpleasant as high gasoline prices are, they’ve added only two or three cents (about 10 to 15 percent) to the cost of each passenger-mile of automobile travel, while transit still plods along at a cost of more than 90 cents for each passenger-mile. Even after including anti-auto activists’ most extreme and implausible estimates for the health costs of air pollution and other negative side effects of automobile travel, automobiles still cost only about half as much as transit. The personal car also creates new social opportunities, allowing people to visit friends and relatives who would be too far away by other transport modes.
While auto travel confers enormous benefits, it also, as with most things in life, has undesirable side effects. Yet the history of automobiles is mainly a story of how Americans got more of what they wanted out of them, and less of what they did not want. Technology has drastically reduced vehicular air pollution, and continues to do so. Automobiles built during the past few years will be more than 90 percent cleaner over their useful lives than the average car currently on the road. Auto safety has also improved sharply: per mile of driving, the risk of dying in a car accident has declined more than 75 percent since 1960. Meanwhile, suburbanization facilitated by the automobile has allowed tens of millions of Americans to move to larger homes with trees and yards and in places with less crime, less noise, and more privacy.
The dominance of personal cars over other transportation modes is mainly the result of consumer choice, not subsidies or coercion. Automobile travel delivers huge net benefits to Americans that could not be obtained by any other means.
Joel Schwartz is a visiting fellow at AEI, and author of a longer study on this subject, “The Social Benefits and Costs of the Automobile,” in the book 21st Century Highways.
Transit For the Public, Not the Planners
By Joel Kotkin
America is a society built on mobility. With bold sailing ships, intricate canals, ambitious railways, and brilliantly engineered highways and airports, we have created the wealthiest large society in human history, and done so while spending increasingly less of our wealth on getting around. At the height of the rail era, notes Harvard scholar Ed Glaeser, transportation accounted for 9 percent of GDP, while today it represents 2 percent.
In this respect, our shift to ever more flexible and efficient engine-driven automobiles, trucks, and planes should be seen as a major technological feat. Yet instead of celebrating our successes, some policy, academic, and media elites are hectoring for a return to the centralized, rail-centric model of transit that prevailed in earlier centuries. Advocates speak approvingly of forcing American commuting patterns “back to the way we were.” They romanticize the densely packed cities dependent on public transit that prevailed several generations ago. Their backward-looking agenda leaves them at war against cars, and against suburbs where most of us choose to live.
The views of these fashionable public transport “visionaries” have little to do with the realities of how average Americans raise families, travel, and work. Many of them appear to have about as much comprehension of the aspirations and needs of middle America as they do of Inner Mongolians.
Take, for example, the current push for “light rail” systems, even in such unlikely places as Boise, Idaho. In a society that is spreading out and deconcentrating, where work is detaching from centralized employment centers, where family life and leisure are more and more personalized and custom-cut, this makes little sense. Yet scores of cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build such inflexible iron systems, and many more are considering doing so.
Such mistaken priorities threaten the future mobility of an amazingly vital society that by 2050 will add roughly one hundred million people. Already we have not built enough roads, which is why average travel times have increased from 22 to 26 minutes in recent decades. Although they still represent a small minority, workers commuting more than 45 minutes to their jobs have increased from 13 to 15 percent of the U.S. total. Road congestion clearly poses an economic threat as well, producing an estimated $520 in extra annual per capita costs in the nation’s 75 largest metro areas. Travel blockages also erode the quality of community and family life.
Clearly, increased investment in mobility will be necessary to alleviate these problems. Some of this should involve flexible forms of public transit—like buses and private jitneys. Other innovations like toll roads—increasingly popular in Europe and elsewhere—will make car travel and truck transport alike more efficient and sensible. We also need to reduce the “demand” for travel by harnessing the computer and telecom revolutions to cut back commuting, and by creating more self-sustaining communities across the broad American landscape. This makes far more sense than the current fashion of trying to boost the density of existing hub-and-spoke cities.
But it’s important we invest wisely in our future spending on transportation. The costs will be substantial, and misallocated resources could easily be wasted, or even counterproductive. Americans need to think boldly about our future transportation needs, and not just try to recreate the past, or coerce citizens into some preferred future.
Transport and culture
From earliest history, transportation systems have helped define and shape commerce, society, and civilization. The greater the mobility, the more fluid the exchange of ideas, people, and goods. The Roman Empire thrived in large measure because of its 51,000 miles of paved roads stretching from Jerusalem to the northern ends of Europe. And the present-day’s greatest continental empire—the United States—has similarly depended on bold innovation in transportation.
As the young American republic moved west, it began to build a national road system. Turnpikes, largely financed by the private sector, spiderwebbed across 27,800 miles by 1830. These roads, sometimes regulated by public officials, charged private tolls, and began to connect divergent parts of the country. The development of canals, funded by a mix of public and private sources, provided the next step forward. Like the Roman road system, the canals were critical to expanding American influence and affluence to such interior cities as Buffalo, Toledo, and Chicago.
The next phase—the development of railroads—greatly accelerated travel speeds, and enhanced urban concentration. The nature of rail transit, with its need for hubs and infrastructure, transformed America into a nation of dense cities, and ushered in the era of high-rise offices, giant corporations, and packed downtowns. The era of rail is held in awe by many planners and architects today. It created not only the traditional city center they admire, but also the first-ring suburbs that many New Urbanist thinkers adopt as their model.
What happened next—the rise of the automobile, the expansion of suburbia to further fringes, and the central importance of airports after the arrival of plane travel—is, by contrast, considered a disaster by many planners, architects, and academics. By shifting the locus of human settlement and economic development away from the city and toward the highways and the airport on the periphery, the new transportation technologies undermined the traditional central core. But they also greatly reduced the costs of transportation, and dramatically increased the lifestyle choices of average Americans.
Last century the new pattern became most evident in Los Angeles, which would soon become one of the nation’s largest cities. As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the national average, and ten times as likely as a Chicago resident. Between 1924 and 1933, when L.A. was America’s fastest growing major city, streetcar usage fell roughly 50 percent. Virtually everywhere in the advanced industrial world at this time, streetcars were falling into disfavor with commuters, who vastly preferred car travel.
During World War II, tires, gasoline, and cars were hard to buy, but following a wartime peak for public transportation in 1946, transit use began to decline nationwide. Transit ridership tumbled from 17.2 billion in 1950 to 11.5 billion in 1955. Many of America’s new, fastest growing cities in the Sunbelt and West developed without much reliance on public transit. By 2000, in most of the nation’s large urbanized areas, barely 5 percent of the population used public transit. Nine out of ten Americans drove to work. Carpooling, although declining, accounted for more than twice as much travel as transit use.
The efficiency and consumer choices of America’s increasingly sprawling metro areas don’t impress planners hearkening back to the rail-stamped cities of the past, though. Places like Phoenix and Houston can be economic dynamos, admit critics. But they are seen as lacking the aesthetic qualities and “civic life” associated in their minds with places that boast more centralized downtowns and stronger public-transit links. Yet one would be hard pressed from the evidence to say that a Phoenix or a Houston has a less vibrant civic culture than cities like Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago. Those more traditional cities—whatever their particular charms—have all been losing population, particularly families, which indicates a serious deficit in livability and civic health beneath the surface.
The startling response of Houston—a city that rose up almost instantly and accommodated 150,000 largely poor and minority evacuees as an act of mercy after Hurricane Katrina—suggests the very opposite of a city with a “dead civic life.” Likewise, most Phoenicians report high levels of contentment in their sprawling town, a metropolis that, like Houston, stands close to the top in the nation in attracting new voluntary migrants, both foreign and domestic.
Cars beat trains, period
The recent surge in energy prices, however, has given new vigor to the anti-auto, anti-suburban critics. “Let the Gloating Begin,” they say, predicting a general catastrophe for the suburbs. Urban boosters are expressing renewed hope for a massive return to public transit and densely packed center cities.
However, earlier energy price surges—which were far steeper during the 1970s, for instance, than today—did not drive Americans back into cities or subway cars. People didn’t react by moving into the city or jumping on mass transit in appreciable numbers; the 1970s were the one decade in the last century when overall urban population actually dropped. Rather, suburbanization proceeded apace, both demographically and economically. Americans adjusted to higher prices in other ways, like shifting to thriftier auto models. Car mileage improved from an average of 13 miles per gallon to 22.
Today, there again seems to be strengthened interest in fuel efficient cars. But driving itself (not to mention living patterns) will probably not change much over time. Even with a 24 percent jump in gas prices between 2004 and 2005, vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. basically remained unchanged, according to U.S. government data. America’s homes and jobs have spread out massively over the last generation, and this will not change in the future. In fact, it is likely to accelerate.
Contrary to romantic conspiracy theories, it wasn’t conniving oil companies, or road builders, or developers, or Madison Avenue sharks, or dullard traffic engineers who created the demand for the suburbs and put us in our cars. Instead, America’s vast suburbs were a product of deep and very natural human longings—which in America even ordinary working-class citizens were suddenly in a position to fulfill, thanks to the nation’s unprecedented economic success.
Yes, people like walking districts and restored Main Streets and bike trails, but they also seek the freedom of work choices and life opportunities that cars make possible. They want to be able to pick up their kids, go to church, and shop when and where they choose. And they want to live in places that are quiet, safe, private, and peaceful—things that have never been common in center cities.
As a result, the long-term outlook for traditional public transit—no matter how much public money is spent on new light rail systems—is not particularly bright. Transit’s share of the nation’s total travel has continued to drop. One reason: transit riders are far more likely to suffer long commutes than those who drive. Contrary to media accounts, residents of suburbs and exurbs actually have the country’s shortest commutes, while the areas with the longest average commutes—like New York and Chicago—are dense cities with extensive transit systems and centralized business districts. In contrast, places like Houston have far shorter average commutes.
But so much for logic. Cities large and small continue to fantasize about, and spend large sums on, new public transport systems that planners imagine will lure drivers out of their cars and revitalize inner cities. Unfortunately, experience shows that light rail lines rarely attract more than a tiny fraction of drivers; the majority of riders tend to come from other forms of public transit. The federal funding system, with its bias toward supporting big capital investments, has so encouraged rail projects as to lead many cities where rail makes no sense at all to apply for funds anyway, simply out of fear that they might be left out.
New rail systems from San Jose to St. Louis have proven major disappointments. Strong early riderships have time and again faded as experience accumulates. Even Portland, the poster child for public transit boosters, has seen its average commute times rise over the past decade and a half at one of the highest rates among American cities. Overall, the share of public transit use in the Portland region has not increased demonstrably over the past decade, despite heavy investment and draconian planning efforts to push residents out of private cars.
Nor have the downtowns of cities with expensive new rail systems seen the kind of resurgence transit boosters promise. Portland has not halted the flow of jobs and people out of its downtown. In fact, 90 percent of all new office space absorption in that city is now taking place outside the downtown core.
Public transit that makes sense
In most cases, bus systems could have achieved as much as the new rail systems, at less cost, and with far greater long-run flexibility. Buses are what the vast majority of transit users rely on, especially the poor, the young, minorities, and recent immigrants. Public transit authorities should concentrate instead on serving these groups—the “transit-dependent,” more than two thirds of whom have no car. Buses are well suited to the needs of the transit-dependent, because they can serve many more neighborhoods than a rail system. Their disadvantage is that they are less effective at attracting yuppie riders with disposable income to downtown, and that they are often slow, sharing congested roads and stopping frequently.
One viable option, now widely used in Latin America, is to develop what is known as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT systems are designed to speed up bus operations by using exclusive bus lanes, special boarding methods, traffic signal preference, skip-stop schedules, and advanced fare collection systems. The capital costs of BRT are roughly half those of light rail. And BRT offers many more options for riders, because buses can travel on regular streets, and routes can be relocated and adapted quickly as neighborhoods change.
Public investment in Bus Rapid Transit might provide low-income workers with access to more job opportunities by expanding the distance over which it is viable for them to commute. Allowing private jitneys to operate flexible transport fleets on city streets is another way transit-dependent citizens might be better served. In most U.S. cities, however, private jitney services are illegal. Jitneys were allowed in Miami from 1989 to 1991, attracting tens of thousands of passengers until union and political pressures from public transit agencies led to a shutdown. Houston currently allows private jitneys, with restrictions.
As for the vast majority of commuters, who are likely to stay in their cars for most travel for reasons of convenience, speed, and cost, the best approach may be to figure out ways to cut the need for travel. This would be best realized not by cramming more people into dense neighborhoods (beyond those who prefer that lifestyle) but rather by working with the strong modern trend toward decentralization. This would involve bringing more businesses, amenities, and cultural institutions to the suburban fringe where the majority of people have said quite clearly they want to live.
Another powerful solution could be increased telecommuting. It’s been a quarter century since Alvin Toffler, in his landmark book, The Third Wave, envisioned the rise of the “electronic cottage” with tremendous positive impacts on everything from the family and community stability to air pollution and traffic congestion, and many Americans have already taken up his dream. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of Americans working full time at home increased by 23 percent, to over 4 million. An additional 20 million Americans work at home part time. The fraction of American workers working from home at least once a week is expected to reach 27 percent by 2008, twice the 2000 level.
Telecommuters already outnumber transit commuters in most American cities. They outnumber light rail commuters in places like Denver and Dallas by 47:1 and 30:1, respectively. Accommodated correctly, telecommuting could provide a major solution, at low public cost, to a host of problems.
If America is to accommodate the strong population and economic growth that lies in our near future, and still remain a highly mobile society, innovative thinking will be necessary. We must get beyond the notion of some mythical golden age. Forcing people to march back to an idealized early twentieth century pattern of dense, transit-dependent urbanity is not the solution.
Ultimately, our goal as a nation should be to create a more mobile society, one that allows ever greater choices for people to live how they wish, whether in a dense city, a decentralized suburb, the countryside, or some hybrid. Today, a false dichotomy is being foisted on the public which suggests their only options are either long highway commutes from anonymous exurbs, or being packed together in dense developments next to mass transit stations. Those are not choices we have to be limited to—if we will show the courage to say no to those who wish to drive us relentlessly back to a vanished past.
Joel Kotkin is an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and co-author with Sarah Priestnall of a new study for the Reason Public Policy Institute on the future of mobility.
