It appears that oil has reached a new all-time high in real terms. Given that gas prices normally peak during the summer season, the stage could be set for some ugly pump prices this year, although expensive oil may not be the most painful part of the current commodity price boom for consumers (an honor which may go to the exploding cost of grain).
With oil so expensive, commuters may wish they had better transportation options. Some of them may even begin to wonder whether we might want to improve our investments in mass transit. This is important, as momentum seems to be building for a round of big investments in infrastructure. In 2009, a new administration will oversee the approval of a replacement or reauthorization of the nation's surface transportation funding program. As Noam Scheiber reported this week in The New Republic, the economists advising Barack Obama see a big role in economic growth for infrastructure investment, which helps to explain his emphasis on the subject. And frankly, we simply cannot afford to delay much more on such spending.
At The Atlantic, Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes highlight the problem. Basically, a handful of large metropolitan areas constitute the key nodes in our economy and in our transportation network. Those nodes are burdened by epidemic congestion, which generates huge economic losses every year. Last year, the federal government spent around $50 billion on highways, and yet an estimated $78 billion in economic costs were sustained by commuters and businesses due to congestion.
I believe congestion plays a much larger role in the current reshaping of central cities than higher fuel costs. Many people and businesses are moving inward not to avoid expensive gas, but to eliminate costly losses of valuable time. There is a lesson in this behavior for policy makers: commuters are sick and tired of congestion. Policy choices should take advantage of that by investing in an infrastructure that's cost-effective and clean.
Imagine someone who commutes daily from suburban Fairfax County, for example, to downtown Washington, D.C. In particular, consider the tolls such a commuter might pay if the roads used every day are priced to eliminate congestion. We have some sense of what that might involve, given estimates for high-occupancy toll lanes proposed around the Washington area. In general, our hypothetical commuter could probably expect to pay at least $6-10 each way, though the amount could easily be much higher than that during peak travel times. Those payments are far larger than the marginal increase in commuting expense due to a $1 increase in per-gallon gasoline costs.
Congestion is an incredible problem, but it's important to recognize that smart investments in new infrastructure can help to eliminate congestion while also reducing emissions and commuter exposure to fuel costs. That doesn't have to be the case, however. If new infrastructure primarily comes in the form of new lane miles, then congestion reduction will only be temporary; eventually, developers will respond to the new investments by building along the new capacity -- that is, outward. In the space of a few years, the congestion benefits will be erased, and with no reduction in vehicle miles traveled or emissions, since increased efficiency may well be canceled out by longer commutes. Critically, exposure to higher fuel costs will remain.
If, however, congestion is addressed by the implementation of congestion pricing, along with significant investments in high-capacity rail service, both inter- and intracity, then efforts to clear the nation's arteries will also yield reductions in emissions and miles traveled, and the addition of automobile alternatives will make it easier for commuters to substitute away from driving when gas costs soar.
We're going to spend a lot of money on infrastructure in the near future. It is critical that we use that money to maximum good effect. New highways will bring little to no long-term return on investment. If we're going to spend, we should spend smart.
More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar
Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!
Comments
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inflector Posted 7:28 am
04 Mar 2008
Rail as it was designed in 1850 is really obsolete.
What we need is a new infrastructure that supports both public and private vehicles and that uses the energy efficiency of rails metal on metal and reduced frontal profile for lower drag and that allows completely automatic driving so we save tens of thousands of lives each year. We also need to reduce the mass that needs to be accelerated and decelerated by reducing the size of the cars themselves. Think PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) adapted for both short and long-haul use.
There is no reason we shouldn't be able to go vertical as well to carry the equivalent of a 10 lane highway in the footprint of a single lane.
Further, we should have constant speed highways to completely avoid all congestion. The technology is relatively easy for this.
The technology to do this has been around for 20 years or more.
- Curtis
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:57 am
04 Mar 2008
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Pangolin Posted 9:12 am
04 Mar 2008
Note to America: you're broke.
You don't have any money and looking at this stack of past due bills I think it's a bad idea to lend you any more. Didn't you waste the last trillion dollars we lent you on that drunken spree in Iraq and you didn't even bring home the gasoline like you said you would.
If we don't spend the nations last dime on some efficiency improvements we're screwed. We need those more-work-for-less-fuel doodads installed everywhere they'll show a profit in energy values.
Worrying about the dollar value of these things is a lost cause as last I checked the dollar had gone south looking for winter.
Have a nice day. Don't check the stock market.
Put the Carbon Back
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Sam Wells Posted 9:21 am
04 Mar 2008
I've written and blogged about this many times. Dallas and LA tried rail transit and the congestion got worse. The issue with old city mass rail transit is simply to keep them from falling apart!
And that's the rub. Our country went on a building spree and we forgot to invest in the old bridges, rail lines, and stuff mysteriously called "infrastructure." A bridge in Minnesota fell into the water not too long ago. About 70 percent of our bridges are beyond their useful life or have structural problems. Folks, we have to maintain what we have today before we have these Jetson visions of the future.
-sam
Onward through the fog
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elbarto Posted 10:23 am
04 Mar 2008
Every form of transport except walking and cycling uses far more energy to simply move the transportation device than to achieve its objective.
A single occupant car uses approximately 0.5% of the energy contained in the fuel to move the occupant from A to B. ~20% is used to move the car and the rest goes out the tailpipe as hot gas. I don't have numbers for trains and buses but they won't be orders of magnitude better than cars.
In my view, mechanized transport should be largely abandoned. It's very energy inefficient in achieving it's objective.
A properly designed city could comfortably house all of it's people in 1/20th of it's area.
Tear up the burbs and all that dead asphalt and convert it to farmland. Ban all motorised traffic within 2 miles of the CBD. Rip up the asphalt, turn it into green space.
In this city folks don't need expensive energy intensive transport infrastructure (not even trains or buses) to get to work. They walk or cycle from their zero carbon buildings.
In fact in such a city almost anything that people need or want could be obtained within a 20 minute walk. For bulky items like a sofa or fridge, people would use an electric taxi-cart even a pedal powered towing service.
Sure, for extra-city and intercity transport you needs trains etc. But intercity transport is only a small fraction of most people lives so it can be done sustainably.
We have become energy dinosaurs:
http://edro.wordpress.com/energy-dinosaurs/
kooky site, but makes a good point about energy use.
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Ryan Avent Posted 11:33 am
04 Mar 2008
Jon, I'm not sure quite what you're getting at. There are plenty of different configurations imaginable, but I have to say it's more likely we'll see significant expansions of mass transit and intercity rail within the next ten years then market penetration by personal electric vehicles. Another related point: transit oriented development--dense growth around rail nodes--can make a lot of trips walkable. That's one of the chief benefits.
And Sam, you've trotted out two tired old transit fallacies. Yes, a mile of transit costs more than a mile of highway. So what? One lane of rail carries at least six times the capacity of a lane of highway, at a fraction of the energy and emissions cost. And if you wonder why transit doesn't eliminate congestion where it's built, you have to look at the funding disparity between highways and transit, and you have to look at the economics of driving. Roads get billions more than transit, and drivers are heavily subsidized. We should be surprised that the pittance given to transit didn't solve all our problems?
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Delay And Deny Posted 6:37 pm
04 Mar 2008
Dense cities are the principle transportation problem in the network. Land use laws, such as those in Washington, prevent the natural dispersement of low density housing and commercial districts...i.e., small towns.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 8:25 pm
04 Mar 2008
Suburban development causes traffic jams by squeezing the vast bulk of traffic onto a few main arteries that enter/exit the city all at concentrated times/capacities during the rush hours.
In centralizied cities, the trafiic is actually more spread out, since the bulk of the people aren't tryin' to get on a relatively small number of roads all at the same time in an attempt to enter/leave the city.
What we should do is encourage development (or rather re-development), that uses high-density and mixed uses so people can have living, work, shopping, entertainment, and recreation all within a relatively short distance of each other.
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:01 am
05 Mar 2008
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Tasermons Partner Posted 2:17 am
05 Mar 2008
Not if the rail stations are within walking/biking distance, or are connected to a suburban bus system.
Even if they aren't, those cars would take up just as much space at their final destinations anyway, and this way, at least they wouldn't haveta drive as far/much to get there.
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Colin Wright Posted 2:40 am
05 Mar 2008
Though his recent piece on paying for the transition on the Oil Drum seems a little dubious to me. (Why tax imports and risk global recession when we can divert war money to infrastructure rebuilding?)
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:53 am
05 Mar 2008
By the way Tasermons (and may I complement you on your use of apostrophes?), the bicycleness of the paths to the train would have to be radically upgraded in most towns, it seems to me -- to get back to my Montclair example, there's a pretty heavily trafficked road in the middle of town that is difficult for pedestrians to cross, I never even tried to bike there.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 9:48 am
05 Mar 2008
Really waht's needed is a combination of mass transit, bicycle and pedestrian friendly development (and re-development) all linked together, as you stated.
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ronwagn Posted 11:25 am
06 Mar 2008
Another problem is that people are not allowed to make a living of giving rides. Reduced problems with licensing would be a great help. Also the ability of people to sign a waiver so as not to bankrupt the driver if something happens.
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