Road advocates often get worked up about the fact that public transportation systems, like MARTA, don’t pay entirely for themselves through user-fees (aka fares).  Currently, MARTA’s ridership fee covers about 32% of costs to run the transit system.  As many of you are aware, much of the remainder is paid for by a 1-cent sales tax in DeKalb and Fulton counties.

The common continuation of this critique usually points to roads and highways as a better model of user-fees (aka the gas tax) paying for a large majority of the transportation costs..  But a recent study just released by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) hope to disprove this point.

First, as the graph above shows, only around 50% of highway funding is currently off-set by user-fees.  And over the last 50 years that number has continued to fall, mainly because the gas tax isn’t adjusted for inflation.  And the future outlook looks even worse.  Not only do cars continue to become more fuel-efficient, and drivers end up paying less annually in gas taxes for the same number of miles driven, but people are driving less than in previous years.  Oh, and then there’s this lovely Catch-22…

On one hand, for a new or expanded highway to “pay for itself,” it must result in a significant overall increase in miles driven and fuel consumption. On the other hand, however, increasing the number of miles driven on a highway undercuts the most common rationale for highway construction: reducing congestion. Indeed, if a highway expansion project truly succeeds in reducing congestion, motorists will sit less in traffic and burn less fuel—reducing gasoline tax revenue.

So while we will continue to argue the pros/cons of all transportation options, it seems pretty clear that the pay-your-way argument doesn’t really pan out for ANY current transportation method. And if the current popular conception is to deem all forms of transit a “social program”, than roads and highways should also carry that label.

h/t: LandMatters

After seven decades of growth, the U.S. has now seen four consecutive years of declines in gasoline consumption and various experts believe the trend will continue for decades to come.

An article from the AP details how the recent decline gasoline consumption is not just about the global recession, but is due to many other factors, including more fuel-efficient cars, people driving less, ethanol mandates, and more expensive gasoline.  And the decline is expected to accelerate, even though projections put 17 million more cars on the road 10 years from now.  Why?

Starting with the 2012 model year, cars will have to hit a higher fuel economy target for the first time since 1990. Each carmaker’s fleet must average 30.1 mpg, up from 27.5. By the 2016 model year, that number must rise to 35.5 mpg. And, starting next year, SUVs and minivans, once classified as trucks, will count toward passenger vehicle targets.

…Gasoline prices are forecast to stay high as developing economies in Asia and the Middle East use more oil.

There are demographic factors at work, too. Baby boomers will drive less as they age. The surge of women entering the work force and commuting has leveled off in recent decades. And the era of Americans commuting ever farther distances appears to be over. One measure of this, vehicle miles traveled per licensed driver, began to flatten in the middle of the last decade after years of sharp growth.

h/t: Otis White

Chart above from page 128 of David JC MacKay’s book “Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air”. (Thanks to FJ for the link!)

Aside from the energy usage of all these other modes of transportation, this chart echos my earlier ad-hoc and not-to-be-trusted calculation that an electric car uses about 1/4 or 1/5 the energy of a gas-powered car.  It also shows that an electric car with one or two passengers uses more energy than a “full” electric train.  Of course, electric trains aren’t always going to be full, so the “per passenger” number is actually a bit higher.

So now that we have a bit better sense of how these modes of transport relate to each other, lets introduce lifestyle back into the equation.   Does living in an urban environment, taking the train, biking and walking, use more or less energy than using an electric car on a regular basis?  Because while biking and walking will always use minimal energy, a half-full train can ratchet up your daily energy consumption pretty quickly.

Basically, which will use less total energy: a small, walkable town on a mass transit line or a subdivision serviced by electric cars?

The AJC reported a couple days back that it was revealed at a Wednesday agency board briefing that the “cash-strapped” Georgia Department of Transportation would need to put aside $75 million of its $1.8 billion annual budget to pay for “cost overruns on projects it rushed to bid during the flush years of the construction boom.”

At the time, GDOT was under pressure from Governor Perdue’s “Flash Forward” program, which hoped to cram 18 years of construction projects into 6. Ah, the tempting illusions – or shall I say “delusions”? – of growth.

But that’s not all…

The $75 million is one payment of several. As of 2008, said Angela Whitworth, DOT’s director of finance, the overruns added up to about $250 million, but DOT has been paid them down to about $158 million. The agency plans to set aside $50 million in the next fiscal year and $25 million the year after that.

DOT is also paying $185 million annually in debt service for the original cost of the projects, according to DOT officials. Last year the agency spent $1 billion on road projects.

William Lind writes in The American Conservative that they should.  Here’s a snippet….

The perception that conservatives do not use public transportation is only one of the mistaken notions that has warped the Right’s position on transportation policy. Another is that the dominance of automobiles and highways is a free-market outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. Were we to drop back 100 years, we would find that Americans were highly mobile. Their mobility was based on a dense, nationwide network of rail transportation: intercity trains, streetcars, and interurbans (the latter two electrically powered). Almost all of these rail systems were privately owned, paid taxes, and were expected to make a profit. But they were wiped out by massive government subsidies to highways. Today’s situation, where “drive or die” is the reality for most Americans, is a product of almost a century of government intervention in the transportation market.

Another misperception is that public transportation does not serve conservative goals.

Read the rest of this entry »

This slightly insulting, charty map from GOOD juxtaposes state rankings for allowance of walking, biking, transiting and driving to work with obesity rates.  Click it to zoom-in and analyze the heck out of it.

Not surprisingly, the strongest correlations look to be that walking and biking to work make people thinner, while driving to the office makes people fatter.

Transit, on the other hand, seems to be a slightly more complex animal when it comes to any relation to obesity.  While it can be a good complement to walking and biking states, it can also contribute relatively little to overall health if it’s transit that people drive to and from (check out New Jersey on the map).

Transit that benefits overall health not only requires an actual train or bus and a supporting infrastructure, but also communities conducive to walking or biking to transit stops.

P.S. In the map above, GA ranks 49th in both people who walk or bike to work.

The Economist provides an interesting and different media perspective on the potential of a nationwide high-speed rail network in the U.S.

From the point-of-view of the freight rail companies, whose nationwide system The Economist calls “the world’s best”, the prospect of high-speed trains sharing the tracks they’ve held almost exclusive access to for decades, isn’t something to cheer about.

To sum up…

…the problem with America’s plans for high-speed rail is not their modesty. It is that even this limited ambition risks messing up the successful freight railways. Their owners worry that the plans will demand expensive train-control technology that freight traffic could do without. They fear a reduction in the capacity available to freight. Most of all they fret that the spending of federal money on upgrading their tracks will lead the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the industry watchdog, to impose tough conditions on them and, in effect, to reintroduce regulation of their operations. Attempts at re-regulation have been made in Congress in recent years, in response to rising freight rates. “The freight railroads feel they are under attack,” says Don Phillips, a rail expert in Virginia.

h/t: Thomas Wheatley