Sent to the CCM list, edited slightly:

1. The damage to bike paths & sidewalks comes from mother nature (rain, snow, trees, earthquakes) or from vehicles (cars, laden hand trucks), not from people. Old buildings with soft stone stairs and high pedestrian flows sometimes have a bit of the tread worn down (look at Union Station), but that’s all.

Wear and tear caused by a vehicle traversing a stretch of road increases *exponentially* with the vehicle’s weight. Let’s see how this plays out:

Payton + bicycle = 160 lbs. ^4 = 655,360,000
Ahnuld + Bummer B2 + misc. crap in trunk (steroid syringes, old scripts, Grey Davis’ scalp) = 6,450 lbs ^4 = 1,730,768,006,250,000

Toll for Payton = $0.01
Toll for Ahnuld = $26,409.42

To see how this might work out with some real numbers behind it, take a look at http://www.reason.org/ps191.html#10 (and then look further to see their ideas on congestion pricing — loony libertarians, but the numbers seem somewhat solid)

2. An article I wrote a long time ago for Bike Traffic advocated a different way of thinking about gas taxes or the cost of driving: as citizens, we all have a right to move and a right to public space, but drivers use way, way more space than pedestrians or cyclists. So, things like congestion charges can be seen as a usage fee for the public space that they use. Or, think about the revenues that could be raised under a carbon dioxide trading scheme — where everyone on earth gets the same right to pollute, but we in the rich countries would have to pay poor countries that aren’t “fully using” their capacity to pollute. Pretty neat.

Gas Taxes and the Public Good
By Payton Chung

“The summer driving season” is once again upon us, and with its arrival come the inevitable complaint that gas prices, and thus gas taxes, are too high. Politicians respond by pointing out that gas taxes can’t be cut– otherwise, the sorry state of our road network would deteriorate faster, as most gas tax revenue is dedicated to ever-popular road construction and maintenance programs.

Problem is, thinking of gas taxes as a “user fee” which pays for road construction and maintenance digs the appropriate transportation movement into a hole. If bicyclists and transit riders and pedestrians don’t pay gas taxes, what right do we have to the road? And if drivers pay gas taxes, why should they have to pay congestion fees and tolls?

Perhaps re-framing the gas tax would help. Instead of recouping driving’s direct cost to the government–building and maintaining millions of miles of roads–gas taxes also help to recoup its indirect costs to government and, by extension, to society at large. Drivers use an inordinate amount of public resources: publicly owned space on the ground, airshed and other natural resources, and dollars for the maintenance of infrastructure.

General tax revenue has long provided publicly owned space for the common good, from common pastures to today’s parks. Streets that provide basic access have long been paid for out of general revenue, since only land with road access can be economically productive, and since all people should have the right to movement. However, the tentacles of automobile domination have stolen millions of acres of prime real estate from the tax rolls– highways, arterial roads, expressways–largely for the purpose of providing transportation which could easily be accomplished with less infrastructure-intensive modes.

Bicyclists and pedestrians, for example, take up a modicum of public space–and further, don’t demand much of the public spaces they’re provided. Neither mode wears down pavement quickly, neither mode creates much noise or air or water pollution. And as many shop-keepers will attest, heavy foot traffic is even better for commerce than heavy automobile traffic. Governments would do well to ensure free passage for pedestrians and bicyclists within cities.

Cars and trucks, on the other hand, don’t contribute much more to the city economically or socially — but they place far greater demands on the city’s public infrastructure. Their weight ruins roads in short order, their girth displaces productive human uses (as when parking lots replace homes and shops), their exhaust ruins the air. The road space squandered on “the non-movement of vehicles”–or, better yet, rendered unuseable by double parkers –are an economic waste for the city. They serve few people at a very great cost; they are, as William H. Whyte said, “a huge reservoir of space yet untapped by imagination.”

Cyclists’ use of public space — i.e., the streets — is usually what people fight about when they wrongly claim that cyclists don’t have a “right to the road.” Yet cyclists use that space so much more efficiently than cars (witness the yield of on-road bike parking) that such arguments should similarly be non-starters. After all, any tax levied proportional to cyclists’ public-space burden would either be laughably small (as above) or result in stiff penalties for road-hogging drivers.

3. Captain Pank wrote: “I think that that driver’s odometers should be hooked up to a system where their miles can be tracked and a tax levied upon how many miles the driver have driven (perhaps at which speed you drive too).”

This is called a Vehicle Miles Traveled tax, and I have some paper at home that estimated that a 8.5c/mile fee on driving in the Chicago region only during peak hours would raise $787 million annually and cut total miles driven by 12% (think one of every eight cars on the road gone, just like that). This would raise more cash and cut travel far more than an expressway-only toll three times as high, since it would keep people from shifting from expressways to arterials. Yet the same study found that a $7/day regional parking tax (levied only during the morning rush) would raise $3.3 billion a year!

Another idea for a tax on driving is to set up pay-go car insurance. Instead of buying insurance separately, drivers would pay a surtax on gasoline (estimated at 20-30c/gallon) that would go into a common insurance fund. The nightmare of crashing with an uninsured car would disappear, bad drivers would still get penalized through the justice system, occasional drivers wouldn’t have to pay high fixed costs, and the higher cost of driving would discourage driving and thus make the roads safer for everyone.

4. The most obvious way to levy these taxes is via an I-Pass like system of transponders, not through toll booths. London does its charges via cameras. Remember the day after the London charge went into effect: “Tower Bridge, which critics feared could be damaged by the weight of extra traffic, carried hundreds of extra bicycles but unusually few cars.” (Andrew Clark, writing in The Guardian)

5. Just to underscore how expensive driving is for everyone, various studies attempting to estimate the “social cost of driving” (the cost that American society pays to drivers to clean up their pollution, secure their oil supplies, wipe up their blood after crashes, productivity lost to traffic jams, etc.) range from $3 to $7 per gallon of gas or $2,000 to $5,000 per car per year. (Cites available upon request.)

6. An alternate argument could be made that the social “cost of cycling” is either negligible or negative, largely due to the public health benefits of having a physically active population.

7. Past experience with tearing down freeways or otherwise removing road capacity does indeed point to something called “induced demand” (some studies peg it at 10-15%). A certain percentage of traffic will take a road more or less just because it’s there — because it makes doing the trip just convenient enough that it gets done. When the road disappears, so do the trips.

Anyways, as I like to point out, the Champs-Élysées carries as many cars a day (200,000) as Lake Shore Drive, and moves many more people (since millions throng its sidewalks or use subways along its length, and since carpooling is more common there). Yet ground-floor retail there is among the most valuable real estate in the world, while the most expensive real estate on LSD is high above it. Also, the Champs- Élysées can be crossed safely on foot along its length. Maybe we just need a better design, one that better balances cars with people.

8. Pedways are stupid. I was just in Atlanta, where they’re called “honky tubes” — a way for white office workers in downtown high- rises to avoid interacting with the dangerous (presumably black) people down below. Grade separated pedestrian paths were quite a fad in Modern architecture, and they can still be seen in areas like Illinois Center but were removed from other places, like UIC.

As much as I look forward to the opening of the Bloomingdale Trail and a Western Avenue subway, I still believe that most surface traffic belongs at surface level. In some very well monitored or busy locations, as at Rockefeller Center or maybe in downtown Toronto, they work okay, but otherwise they can be difficult to maintain and suck needed viability from the real public realm of the streets.

I would rather have great bike access from door to door on the entire street network, thanks to slow and light and courteous traffic everywhere (which better utilizes a street network already in place), than to have to go a mile out of my way just to reach “the bikeway” — a “separate and unequal facility.” (As one traffic guy I know says, “50,000 cars a day can’t be wrong — every street should be walkable and bikeable.”) Sure, I use paths when they go where I’m going, but not for the sake of them — and duplicating our entire street network just to have grade-separate bikeways (and how would you get up and down?) seems foolish.

Also, the CTA tracks currently in some place barely have room for trains to pass at speed, much less accommodate additional traffic in proximity to the third rail. The Green Bay Trail (the north shore equivalent of the IC) works fine as a rail with trail, but it’s kind of narrow. The SkyTrain through suburban Vancouver has a trail underneath it that’s kind of nice, although it does cross at grade..

The NYT’s Sewell Chan reports on a blue-chip group that has quietly been studying road pricing for Manhattan, led by a blue-chip civic group with “a working group that includes five engineering and construction firms, Parsons Brinckerhoff, STV Group, Washington Group International, Siemens and D M J M Harris; a consulting firm, Booz Allen & Hamilton; and two prominent advocacy groups, Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

Great policy and great coalition building — business leaders have a stake in making sure that traffic congestion doesn’t choke the city of its already tenuous livability — but without the integrated regional governance or land use directives from above possible in Britain or Singapore, the idea of a city taxing itself in the absence of concerted regional action strikes me as something that should be studied a bit more closely. Also, the coalition will have to grow ultimately to address the equity factor: right now, it’s the enviro and the biz elites in bed.

* Not too surprisingly, a King County, Wash. study by Larry Frank’s team at UBC finds that people walk if there’s something to walk to (particularly retail and transit) and a way to walk there. “The study showed that transit use and walking are ‘highly synergistic.’ Transit use was highest in locations where walking was most prevalent, and the choice to walk was highest where buses and trains were most convenient and efficient.”

* In an article on how “the hot construction market has fueled NYC’s hybrid inclusionary-linkage program”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/realestate/23cov.html, the Times mentions that churches in Brooklyn are looking to the linkage fees to do “air rights housing deals”:http://www.cnu.org/about/index.cfm?formAction=project_view&templateInstanceID=789, a concept CNU awarded in the 2004 Charter Awards:

bq. [D]eals are being considered by churches in central Brooklyn that “flourished in one era and now have a lot of underutilized property” — rectories or schools. If they build affordable housing on their property and finance it by selling air rights, they will also help their members. “Their angst was that their congregants were being priced out of their neighborhoods…” [said Michael D. Lappin, president and chief executive of the Community Preservation Corporation].

* Two notable citations for TDM publicity go to (1) GetDowntown, the Ann Arbor downtown chamber of commerce’s TDM program, for its May “Curb Your Car Month”:http://www.getdowntown.org/cycm (i.e., commuter challenge month) slogan of “go on a low-car diet” and (2) Cleveland’s RTA for this ad message:

* The NY Times editorial page on Monday “called for higher gas taxes”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/opinion/24mon1.htm. Higher revenues would be used to expand low-income tax breaks, scrap gas guzzlers, fund new mass transit, and sponsor clean energy research, and markets would react to higher pump prices by pushing price pressure upstream to producers. (How’s that for alliteration?)

bq. The government must capitalize on the end of the era of perpetually cheap gas, and it must do so in a way that makes America less vulnerable to all manner of threats — terrorist, environmental and economic. The best solution is to increase the federal gasoline tax, in order to keep the price of gas near its post-Katrina highs of $3-plus a gallon. That would put a dent in gas-guzzling behavior, as has already been seen in the dramatic drop in the sale of sport-utility vehicles… “We know that the days of unlimited, inexpensive gasoline are over,” William Clay Ford Jr., chairman and chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, said last week. So be it. Cheap gas is no longer compatible with a secure nation, a healthy environment or a healthy economy – if ever it was. The real question is whether we should continue paying the extra dollar or two per gallon in the form of profits to the Saudis and other producers, or in the form of taxes to the United States Treasury, where the money could be used to build true energy independence.

This month’s _Washington Monthly_ comes with a stunningly bad feature by Margy Waller, suggesting a huge new federal entitlement to help America buy more of what it hardly needs: cars. Hence, a letter to the editor:

The illustrations accompanying October’s “Auto-Mobility” by Margy Waller say it all: long lines of cars stretching out to the horizon, all stuck in traffic. This points to the most obvious problem with Waller’s foolish thesis: her new fleet of cars, like those of Houstonians fleeing Hurricane Rita, will end up stranded in traffic jams. 3.5% more cars might not sound like much, but her proposal would put too many of those cars right where and when they’re least wanted: in major cities at rush hour. Our cities simply cannot fit any more cars, and the postwar solution — to abandon or bulldoze cities in favor of plentiful parking in the suburbs — has cost our nation dearly.

Even more perversely, the Great Car Giveaway would further increase the already staggering social costs that drivers impose on American society, both drivers and non-drivers alike: most obviously, air and water pollution, death and injury from crashes, and the military and monetary costs of securing oil from overseas. These costs are highest in and around cities, where, again, Waller’s proposal would have its greatest impact. These costs also disproportionately fall onto the poor, who tend to drive old clunkers with poor mileage, absent or failing safety systems, and high maintenance costs.

Perhaps most twistedly, her proposal further penalizes those who quaintly use truly economical (and sustainable) ways to get to work, like walking or cycling, or who telecommute. These millions of workers currently do not benefit from existing commuting tax subsidies, even though we place zero burden on our groaning road network or on our polluted skies.

Moreover, the duplicitous proposal has little merit on its face. America already has more cars than licensed drivers. Subsidizing transportation for only the 4% of Americans who are truly transit dependent (many living in cities) would cost much less. Meanwhile, Waller conveniently forgets that the federal government already subsidizes free workplace parking (by deducting employee parking as a pre-tax benefit) to the tune to $85 billion annually, writing off one of the largest costs of car ownership.

Rather than buying cars (or clothes, or toothpaste) for the working poor, our nation might consider giving them the cash to do it themselves. A $100 billion Earned Income Tax Credit expansion, or a FICA payroll tax rebate, would work wonders for low-income Americans. Funding that through higher taxes on pollution, or by rescinding the parking credit — in other words, a green tax shift — would also work wonders for our planet.

Edit: Alan Berube, William G. Gale, and Tracy Kornblatt of Brookings say that the “most advantageous tax policies”:http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/200506_taxpolicies.htm to help the urban working poor would fall along my lines: tax credits for child care, saving, health insurance, and homeownership. The last is particularly crucial: shifting from a deduction, which favors the upper class and benefits those with million-dollar second homes, to a capped credit which non-itemizers like me can take advantage of.

Edit 2: Spotted something somewhere online that had Waller clarifying that the credit would go to anyone who reported commuting expenses, even if they were less than the credit. Still, doesn’t that exclude telecommuters or those running home based businesses? The EITC does a pretty damn good job of helping the working poor already; no need to add yet more lines to the tax code.