TL;DR: Private startups built subways rapidly in the 1910s and 20s. Government took over in the 1930s as startups lost steam, declined to invest via bond issues, plowed money into autos, and the long gaps in capital projects meant private expertise was repurposed and no longer available when needed.
Robert Moses acquired power because people wanted to GTFO of the city, either for the weekend or for good.
I’m a little older than the average HN person. I remember as a kid growing up in Queens, my dad sweeping the ash from the Greenpoint Incinerator off of his car in the mornings when the wind blew the right way.
The city was filthy, polluted and overcrowded. The subways were no exception.
It arguably made the problem tolerable for the people who worked in the city but lived in the suburbs which is certainly better for the city than those people both living and working elsewhere.
100%! And that’s a desire he exploited to build his empire at all costs. With the city so polluted and crowded, who can argue against a park (or a “parkway”)?
> Robert Moses acquired power because people wanted to GTFO of the city, either for the weekend or for good.
Well, no, he acquired power by (a) having a massive independent river of cash to spend and (b) using the state's power to insulate him from the city's power.
Yes, but before the triboro he used public opinion around parks and easy trips out of the city to force his building projects through. That’s what put him in position to build and run the triboro in the first place. But yes you’re right, the TBA and the fact that he wasn’t a city employee is what gave him the power to really go off the reservation.
The Robert Moses explanation makes a great narrative, but it doesn't explain why every other major city in the US made the same choices at around the same time.
It doesn’t need to, NYC really is different. Very few other major US cities had the density, space constraints, or existing transit infrastructure of NY. None of them had a Bob Moses, but they built roads for different reasons - in LA a cabal of auto and gas companies dismantled the streetcar. Also I’m not sure about “at the same time” - for example when Moses was at the height of his power in the 30s and 40s the interstate system didn’t even exist yet.
Not really, he was just following the trends of the time. If anything, New York is in a far better place with him than without. Sure, he did some bad things, but New York wouldn't be able to cope without his expressways and bridges.
Yes and no! For one thing he was creating the trends of the time, not following them. Carving up the city with expressways was a proactive choice, done specifically because Moses 1) could control them and 2) favored the needs of automobile owners over the city’s working class. Trains just smelled too much like communism. Building the expressways did an incredible amount of harm and destroyed neighborhoods at a stroke. But they also made it practical to get around the city in a car. Bob Moses is an extremely complicated figure - he was corrupt, power hungry, a servant of the wealthy, a monster in his personal life, would destroy anything or anyone in the name of personal power, but also he built a lot of parks and was genuinely loyal to Al Smith. He’s the reason the city is dotted with playgrounds, and also the reason that thousands of people were displaced from their homes or saw their neighborhoods cut off and destroyed.
Your summary misses an important point: I don't think you can totally discount the effect of "white flight" and the late 20th century perception of cities as being crime ridden places to avoid. The article references this indirectly as growth of car-centric suburbs, shrinking urban population, and the city's 1970s fiscal problems (caused in part by the loss of tax base from suburbanization).
>the late 20th century perception of cities as being crime ridden places to avoid
Of course, a lot of cities really were, to at least some degree, crime-ridden places to avoid. The reality is complicated and varies by city of course, but it's still pretty accurate as a sweeping generalization to say that a lot of cities in the 70s and 80s wouldn't have looked all that appealing to the sort of college-educated professional class who want to live in cities today.
As I was saying to someone the other day, with the exception of people in finance moving to Manhattan, very few of the people in my class in grad school went to live in a city when they graduated.
Violent crime was higher than today and there are theories as to the reason I am sure you are aware. However, I still say this was largely a matter of perception. The perceived issues can also be made closer to reality in a self a fulfilling sort of way when it is reenforced by the affluent avoiding the place, taking their tax base with them and leaving behind a higher concentration of less wealthy people in an area.
But as you also no doubt are aware, the trend reversed itself in the current century with cities being desirable again. Part of this is reduced crime. But part is that perception, which kept newly educated people away as you say, simply being lifted.
The most interesting part to me is the chart that shows the cost per mile over time. The cost per mile went up about 20% from 1940 to 1988 and then tripled from 1988 to 2017 and doubled again by 2019. What caused this increase?
So one thing that's deceptive about that graph is that the projects are far from equal in per-mile complexity. The 1988 Jamaica extensions service a relatively sparsely populated area, with ready access for construction vehicles (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica%E2%80%93179th_Street_s... ) - by contrast, the proposed Manhattan projects in 2019 require much more engineering to route around limited access, preserve above-ground activities, and ensure reinforcement given large skyscrapers above. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway#Construct...
But there are certainly likely other factors. One might imagine that as alternative modes of transportation (ridesharing, etc.) become more commonplace, prices would go down in a competitive marketplace. But one might also imagine that established construction firms might see things like ridesharing (or other decreases in construction costs) as damaging to their long-term stability; they may therefore do things like lobby the city for increased regulations that would cause the proposed project to drag out even longer and provide increased financial stability to the firm. (An alternate read on this is that the firms are finally catching up to increased standards for labor and health, and this was not priced in in the past... but that's a very optimistic read.)
Has corruption, graft and mismanagement increased so sharply over the last few decades? I don't picture, say, the NYC of Robert Moses as being particularly free of corruption and graft. And yet, they seem to have been able to build Subways much cheaper
Defined benefit pensions are sucking up a lot of resources, as well as fire code/ADA related costs. I’m sure labor costs much more than in decades before, not just in construction, but in permitting and planning.
As the years go on, projects with large liabilities have to go to extreme lengths to show they did their due diligence. Otherwise, it’s a ripe for a lawsuit that says “well you knew that risk existed and did nothing to prevent it” and pays out a few million taxpayer dollars.
My working theory is graft and corruption can coexist with effective management of projects.
I also have an impression that the US mostly stopped building infrastructure like subways which has various negative effects. Lack of experienced engineering oversight, lack of local engineering talent, no experienced workforce. Weak industrial capability and support. And milking to death any projects that do get through the approval process.
Wonder how much of it is not treating workers like disposable things? Look at pictures of work crews back in the 30s and you see workers eating lunch - completely unharnessed - on exposed beams 100s of feet in the air. Deaths were common on large projects.
Better worker safety certainly accounts for some increase in costs. But US infrastructure costs aren't only high compared to the past, they're high compared to other modern developed countries. I don't think Spain, for example, is keeping their costs relatively low by treating their construction workers as cannon-fodder.
China built its entire commuter train network in the last ~20 years from almost nothing and now have more track laid than any country by far while doing it for magnitudes less than the US.
If a country that was suffering a self-implied famine killing tens of millions just half a century ago could go from that to high speed rail across half a continent then maybe the foremost superpower for going on a century could think about building a high speed train line anywhere in this century.
Yes, I agree that seemed odd to ignore. The theory that loss of experience results in increasing costs sounds true, but I see nothing to back it up or any thought of alternate explanations. Like models that include economic impact I would expect to skyrocket the costs (in a total sense) when building in areas that get built up over time.
Why on earth would you want to encourage subway commuters to switch to ride sharing?! Ride sharing is a good intermediate solution, better than individual vehicles, but it still causes noise, pollution and traffic. We need to do everything we can to encourage people to avoid cars and adopt public transport
* Labor costs and construction material costs have grown faster than inflation.
* There are more amenities in subways (such as handicapped access in stations) now than 100 years ago, and new construction accounts for them from the beginning.
* The underground infrastructure has become more crowded, which increases the number of pipes and the like that need to be relocated or avoided during construction.
* Planning and permitting requirements have increased, so you need to spend money showing, e.g., that you aren't harming any migratory fowl resting areas, or ensuring that you can expeditiously evacuate the station in case of an emergency.
* The agencies in charge have been doing worse and worse jobs at cost-control and project management.
The proposed price tag of the second phase of the 2nd Avenue subway is absolutely ludicrous--and so far, the MTA's justification [1] for the insane cost premiums is "fire codes." Seriously. For 10× over, say, Paris Metro construction costs. The public really needs to take MTA and the New York state government to task for allowing that sort of bullshit to stand.
How have labor costs gone up so much? Average subway workers haven’t recently started making a ton of money as far as I know, so is the money going to administration?
>An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
>The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
>“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
...
>A Dizzying Maze of Jobs
>The reasons for the M.T.A.’s high costs start with the sheer number of people employed.
>Mike Roach noticed it immediately upon entering the No. 7 line work site a few years ago. Mr. Roach, a California-based tunneling contractor, was not involved in the project but was invited to see it. He was stunned by how many people were operating the machine churning through soil to create the tunnel.
>“I actually started counting because I was so surprised, and I counted 25 or 26 people,” he said. “That’s three times what I’m used to.”
>The staffing of tunnel-boring machines came up repeatedly in interviews with contractors. The so-called T.B.M.s are massive contraptions, weighing over 1,000 tons and stretching up to 500 feet from cutting wheel to thrust system, but they largely run automatically. Other cities typically man the machine with fewer than 10 people.
>It is not just tunneling machines that are overstaffed, though. A dozen New York unions work on tunnel creation, station erection and system setup. Each negotiates with the construction companies over labor conditions, without the M.T.A.’s involvement. And each has secured rules that contractors say require more workers than necessary.
>The unions and vendors declined to release the labor deals, but The Times obtained them. Along with interviews with contractors, the documents reveal a dizzying maze of jobs, many of which do not exist on projects elsewhere.
>There are “nippers” to watch material being moved around and “hog house tenders” to supervise the break room. Each crane must have an “oiler,” a relic of a time when they needed frequent lubrication. Standby electricians and plumbers are to be on hand at all times, as is at least one “master mechanic.” Generators and elevators must have their own operators, even though they are automatic. An extra person is required to be present for all concrete pumping, steam fitting, sheet metal work and other tasks.
>In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world.
>That ratio does not include people who get lost in the sea of workers and get paid even though they have no apparent responsibility, as happened on East Side Access. The construction company running that project declined to comment.
We're talking construction costs, not operating costs, so the wages of a train driver have no effect here.
Note that labor costs include more than the wages of the people who work on a project. Employer taxes, such as social security obligations and Medicare charges, also factor into labor costs, as does employer-provided healthcare, disability insurance, and the like. If we're tracking from 1904, that's a lot of extra surcharges that weren't present 100 years ago that will get included in the labor column.
I should note that I didn't order the list in any particular order. The reason why 1940 costs are higher than 1904 is likely driven in larger part by labor costs than other considerations, whereas the more modern spike is probably driven mostly by incompetent management and cost-control (for example, failing to push back against featherbedding).
"Administration" is probably a better way to frame it. The New York state government and its associated spending is one of the single most undemocratic and corrupt institutions in the world. It has been so for over two centuries.
The article suggests that the knowledge and skill required to build tunnels efficiently have atrophied over time, I suppose as the people involved in the explosion of construction between 1904 - 1940 retire.
There's a documentary out there that details how NYC tunnel construction worked back then.
Basically almost war-like propaganda about how working on the tunnel was good for you and the country, how you are chicken if you don't go down in there, etc.
They got it done fast by literally throwing people at the tunnel and scooping out their remains.
Then they had the papers run propaganda to cover up incidents and recruit more bodies.
Incidentally, they basically had the human powered version of a TBM frame back then and still had people dying left and right.
Times are a little different now....a little hard to have people dying every hour on a construction job
Do you have evidence to show that the problem is Boring Company's unwillingness rather than hesitance by cities (perhaps under pressure from Boring Company's more established competitors) to bring in a relatively inexperienced partner for a major project like a new subway line?
Everything they have publicly bid for has been about deploying their Loop transit system. They have not bid on any contracts or subcontracts for tunneling operations, so far as I can find, and their FAQ page spends more time discussing the Loop system than it does their tunneling technology.
The Boring Company is a startup exploring a transformative sweet spot around very-inexpensive small simple autonomous-EV single-lane road tunnels, when constructed very rapidly at extremely large scale. If BC were to attempt a conventionally sized and outfitted subway tunnel, bid against established contractors, for one of the very few contracts available, presumably with a machine in direct competition with established TBM manufacturers... well, that would be quite a pivot.
That's pretty bullshit if you consider their USP is cheap tunneling. Then they should be just building cheap tunneling then trying to build custom public transit that allow only for electric cars with compatible self driving systems.
> Then they should be just building cheap tunneling then trying to build custom public transit
Cheap depends on context. Here, on R&D, creating excellent machines, mass produced, and reused with high duty cycle, embedded in a big high-productivity surrounding process, all amortized and enabled by scale. And also on tunnel characteristics, especially small diameter (many costs scale roughly with face area). These are not well matched to existing markets. The sweet spot really is in system design, not merely in fancy small TBM design. The scale permits the cost that permits the scale.
> custom public transit that allow only for electric cars with compatible self driving systems
Access could indeed be an interesting issue at some point. But at present, company focus is on dedicated mass transit shuttle bus/vans. More analogous to rail transit, than to highways.
It's not transformative. It does absolutely nothing to fix traffic/congestion. Because the real limitation is above ground where streets where people are being dropped off/parking/living/etc which have limited capacity and cascade into backups from local streets and onto highways. This just means there'll be back ups underground as well.
Unless people are going to start living underground. Then you start to remove the above ground choke points ;)
Given everything they’ve done on the increasingly bizarre LA tunnel, I think NYC is just fine without their input.
(In any case, the answer here isn’t a technical one, it’s political. And NYC/New York State lacks the political will or desire. A third party private company won’t solve that)
From the article, looks like the problem isn't political, but financial. It costs a lot, and there is a lack of expertise which only drives the cost up even more. So it would make sense to hire someone who wants to retain the expertise.
It costs a lot because of political reasons. There’s no technical reason why NYC subway construction should cost 10x what it does in Paris, and yet, it does.
Deteriorating infrastructure that drains all the resources is not a political reason, but quite practical. Though what caused that in the first place could be political in the past. I.e. bad planning and poor management. Today it's not political. Someone just has to deal with huge existing mess.
It's political today. These projects are given to friends of politicians at inflated prices and are used as sops to specific communities to stop them from kicking up a fuss or backing someone else. Here's the classic story of how costs can spiral without reason https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Yes, but the foundations of the skyscrapers (which can go as much as 250ft underground) are where you'd want to build the subway. So you can't. You either have to go deeper ($$$$) or around (longer, again $$$). Plus, you have to make sure you don't dig out too much in the wrong place and cause a building to fail.
Uh, no they aren't. Look closely at maps of the NYC subway: with very few exceptions, the lines run directly underneath the streets themselves. Even many of the curves to traverse to following a different street occurs underneath the street right-of-way or the underneath parks. I count just five places where the subway runs underneath a tall building, and I believe in all but one of those cases, it's the subway that predates the building.
That's not the point. Digging a massive hole in the ground directly next to a skyscraper's foundation changes the physical properties of that foundation, and requires some very complicated engineering to get around it.
That and all the Manhattan Schist that needs to be excavated. New York certainly isn't built on mud.
Won't happen (yet), because it goes against everything Musk.
At the risk of downvotes... Here's my work-in-progress theory (v0.1):
Musk isn't a tech genius, (or maybe he is, but irrelevant) he's a regulation genius. (Which allows him to also be an effective fundraiser, but again, irrelevant.)
Musk's MO is to enter a niche, mostly uncontested and unregulated area of an otherwise over-regulated market. Then make a whole lot of noise about why this niche is so different and special and going to be so groundbreaking, which is really just cover for "why existing regulations shouldn't apply to me." Then as regulations (and subsidies) for that niche market are created, make sure that they favor his company (which already has a beachhead), while still being a barrier to market for any new-comers hoping to ride his coat-tails. Continue until level of regulation roughly matches the rest of the (non-niche) industry, ensuring niche status while becoming a competitor in the overall (non-niche) market. This happens as everyone realizes the final product, as finished, probably wasn't special enough to be excluded from the (non-niche) market regulations.
See: (in decreasing rank of success)
PayPal-> Banking
SpaceX-> Rockets/Aerospace
Tesla-> Cars
Giga-factory/ Tesla assembly automation -> manufacturing
Boring Company-> Subsurface Construction
Solar City-> Power Utility
Not-a-flamethrower -> flame thrower market???
Scuba rescue tank-> pedo scuba rescue market???
There are obviously some places this fits and others it doesn't. There's also some level of genius in how batteries/electric cars/solar/power-grid play off of one another, but nothing non-obvious. I suspect he wanted to make an earlier play in ride-sharing, but Uber beat him to it, with a similar strategy. This is now delayed until self-driving (re)allows for the regulatory advantage.
But the intended overall playbook starts to become obvious.
Back to Boring Company: I suspect skirting the existing regulations isn't going quite as well as desired because:
1- people realize his technology isn't all that special, even if it is (self-imposed) niche. (This is a failure in how
hyperloop played out.)
2a- Subsurface engineering regulations aren't all that interesting, at least as far as looking for creative ways around them
2b- the regulations that are there have a pretty good (non-arbitrary and simple) engineering purpose. (Which is another way of saying the existing market is not actually over regulated)
3a- nimby politics plays a major role
3b- local governments (clients) don't have the power and/or money to override regulation politics
To answer: the Boring Company can't go and bid on bigger projects (yet) because then they would completely burn their niche status, which would admit to the world it's just another subsurface drilling company, and should be treated as such. They have to delay until their personalized regulatory system has been built, acknowledged, and subsidized. Then you can go after the regular projects that don't justify a special regulatory framework.
> Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took advantage of the disastrous finances of the BMT and IRT, ravaged by the Depression and the ban on fare increases, to acquire both companies
> With the subways now in municipal hands, a doubling of the fare was finally negotiated. Years of deferred maintenance by the cash-strapped private companies had become increasingly evident. But by then, fare hikes only exacerbated the problem of declining ridership.
So the government destroyed the system through price controls. Odd that City Lab doesn't explore that angle further.
Price regulation continues to be a problem with the subway. Fares on the MTA are half those of the London Underground. New York relies heavily on subsidies to cover operating costs, while the London Underground covers its operating costs through fares: https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/sep/29/.... That makes the MTA much more sensitive to changing political winds, as opposed to the Underground, which can pay its ongoing maintenance costs regardless of what the politicians are doing.
I dont see any problem with subsiziding MTA fares by collecting funds through other taxes. The more people use the system the better.
Based on my limited research on this topic, the root cause of the problem is the labor cost and inefficiency of MTA workers. I think everything else is noise. Here is great quote from NYT article on this subject:
“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
Peak pricing is an interesting thought that hadn't occurred to me. Seems like a good way to increase rates in a somewhat progressive way. Presumably rush hour commuters could afford more than others.
Restaurants aren't going to change their hours, hospitals aren't going to change their shifts, what motivation does an employer have to make changes? It doesn't cost employers anything so they are unlikely to care and jobs aren't exactly elastic goods either.
Restaurants don't need to change their hours - they need their employees in before the rush hour and working during it because that is when people are going to be there. You 7:45 coffee on the way to work was made by someone who got in at 6:00 am to setup the coffee pot. Hospitals aren't going to change their shifts (unless staff demands it - they might), but a large number of people going in at rush hour are not doing shift work where they need to be in at a particular time. I can adjust my schedule a lot if I want, fares (and traffic) can be motivation to doso.
Because professionals working full-time jobs and commuting at rush hour can typically afford the higher fare, while people working part-time/odd jobs/commuting to interviews/not working at all probably aren't the ones taking the rush hour trains.
Sure, there are some working poor who need to be in the office 9-5, but the majority of people working full time regular hours aren't poor. And for people who can't afford the increase, you just introduce an exception (if you make under $40,000 per year you don't pay the increased fare, or something like that)
You realise there’s a lot of people between wealthy professionals and part-time/odd job workers right? A secretary has to be on time, so does a cashier. I’m not sure what good peak pricing would do, apart from push them to less carbon-efficient forms of transport?
As long as the lines are still running at max capacity, you are still taking the same number of vehicles off the road. If you extend the period of max-capacity, you taking more cars off the road.
The question is if the benefit of more revenue and environmental savings warrants making the secretaries an cashiers adapt to less efficient schedules (eg come in earlier, stay later)
Increasing capacity can only be done with money, which needs to come from somewhere - most likely a tax increase elsewhere that will hit not only those same poor people, but also their neighbors who walk to work.
Peak fares to encourage people to work non-peak hours if possible can shift demand enough to mean you don't need build more transit now saving a lot of money now. Eventually there is no substitution for building more, but better utilization can ease that somewhat.
I agree that it is sad, but it is a real consideration. Nearly every environmental proposal has the potential increase hardship on low earners. Most commonly, this comes in the form of higher costs for consumer products, utilities, and housing.
There are are a lot of similarities with road congestion pricing going into effect in San Diego and NYC, and planned for LA and SF. Who will bear the greater burden, high earners who can easily pay the fee or low earners with rigid schedules.
MTA doesn’t even have variable pricing for distance. It’s a pretty poorly designed system qua system. It has good coverage. Everything else is substandard internationally.
Peak and especially distance based pricing are fundamentally regressive and unjust tax schemes that penalize the poor. Subway fares are already regressive in that they represent a larger share of income in poorer people than in the rich, making it distance based so that people who can't afford to live in the core are charged more makes the problem 10x worse.
Just because you may have a larger income than others doesn't mean you should pay more money to equal a lower income person's cost percentage of income wise, that's unjust in itself.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't, either. There's nuance to every situation, particularly when we're discussing the means by which some people quite literally survive, vs. luxury or leisure goods and services.
Distance pricing seems to work just fine here in Japan, although I did't dig into the data on public transit, just based on my personal experience.
Fares in Osaka or Tokyo are ~$2 per 3-4 stations from your departure point. Riding to Kyoto from downtown Osaka (40km) is ~$8 and 8 stops across two lines. The prices overall are low (IMO), and Japan has lower wage inequality than the US (IIRC).
It’s not an unjust or regressive tax scheme to charge more for greater service. This is incorrectly repurposing the language of taxation to the reality of transit fares.
It is certainly correct that having fixed fares across time and distance is a government subsidy which arguably may even effectively target poor riders.
The lack of a subsidy is fundamentally not the same as a tax.
But when a subsidy distorts the market to the point where it causes inefficiencies in the market, those inefficiencies can undermine the value or effectiveness of the subsidy, sometimes altogether.
I.e. lack of peek pricing causing massive ridership spikes at specific hours overloading the system and making it break down.
A theoretically better system might be one with a fixed monthly fare credit for low income riders, while also having peek pricing. This shifts demand to keep the system running more smoothly while also making transit more affordable for lower income riders.
But then, why not ask the question, if we’re giving money to low income riders, why give rebates only to low income people who ride the train? Why have a low income subsidy specifically for subway ridership versus any of a dozen other things people fundamentally need. Why micromanage to that level?
I'm not against welfare agencies subsidizing the poor. If we are subsidizing the poor that should be from a different budget: as far as the transit system is concerned rich or poor use the same resources so the income to the transit system should be the same even if it comes from a different pot.
I always liked the social implications of flat fares - poor people tend to have to live farther away so distance pricing, and especially peak pricing, basically makes life harder for people who already have a hard life.
I think that the whole narrative around trains needing to justify their cost based on fares is ridiculous. Few people ride trains for the experience of riding a train. They ride to go somewhere, and do something, and the real value of the fate exists outside the transportation system.
I think Japan, and HK got it right by letting train companies act as real estate developers and build out the areas around stations. That gives them enormous profitability since they can charge rent, commissions for the stuff that people actually care about - what’s at the destination - and literally funnel people in the millions to their shopping centers, office complexes, and apartments.
People are probably reading too much into flat vs. variable fares. Historically, you probably tended to have flat fares on transit systems in no small part because it was so much simpler when people mostly paid using tokens (or transit passes, in which case flat or variable didn't matter).
This is becoming less relevant with the increased prevalence of contactless pay as you go systems. (Although the newer systems tend to be more complex for irregular users like tourists.)
Yes! With modern systems, if you want to give poor riders reduced fares you can… give poor riders reduced fares. It's not hard. Just program the contactless system to do it. There are no real arguments for using flat fares in NYC besides tradition (which is not nothing). No one designing a system today would choose it for a system the size of NYC's.
Flat fares are much better for customers who need to understand what they will pay. The ability to automatically change me an extra fare where I go on is nice only when I know and have budgeted for that fare. Flat fare, pay $x and go it easy to understand. Every time I need to pay I need to decide if the transit system is really worth it for the trip.
Now in a system the size of NYC you probably should do something, the person only riding a couple miles shouldn't pay as much as the person riding many miles (I'm not sure how you can get in NYC). However a simple easy to understand system of fares is important and very hard to design. Part of that needs to be a guaranteed maximum you will pay in a month - with the idea that a significant portion of users will hit that maximum - when you know you will hit the maximum you are more likely to take transit in off-peak times even though you have a perfectly good car.
Eh, but identifying the poor riders opens a door to a system to game, a sprawling bureaucracy to manage all that, and the social stigma/hit to dignity of being seen in such a program... I like the simplicity of a flat fare since the overhead of doing so is so low.
Emm how about increasing the capacity? For gods sake why would do such a thing like “peak procing” to a public transportation system :). Not everything is a optimization honework assignment. This is real life some unfortunate people who have less income than you have go to places too.
Number of people during peak hours is enough deterrent itself. You dont need to introduce extra cost.
Shall we introduce peak pricing to fire trucks as well?
If only there was a way to decide on what local governments should do based on certain topics. In most cities where public transport is in the hands of the local government, the direction things should take is decided by voting and governments that fuck up public transport, are voted out. This is how it works on a city level in many european cities at least.
I grew up in a third world country in SE Asia and moved to the US for college. One thing that astounds me about public workers in US is that they are super rude and entitled, while seemingly having poor work ethics.
I take MTA subway every week day and at least once a weekend. On weekends, you'll see workers repairing or doing maintenance on tracks because .... Hurricane Sandy (circa 2012) apparently destroyed the infrastructure. I mean I moved to NYC in 2016 and that maintenance has been going on every weekend since then (probably it started even before 2016). Some of the trains will not run or will skip over some local stops and it really inconveniences millions of commuters every weekend. The trains are supposed to slowly move around the areas worker are 'in action' (I read somewhere that it's because a few worker died by being hit by moving train, so they now require trains to move very slowly while blaring horns to warn workers ahead; I still felt that's unnecessary unless there's a clear distinction between which line workers operate on and as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines. Anyway, enough about that). While the trains move slowly, I see a lot of workers simply just sitting around or doing nothing.
The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising. I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand around and chat.
No wonder these public projects take years to finish and have budget overrun. No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other developing regions are working harder.
Our German au pair was astounded that every project that requires shutting down a lane on a road has two guys waving people through the remaining lane. Apparently in Germany they just use portable traffic signals.
A lot of times in those instances the guys are only there for the peak hours or when the site is active. The light lets them leave the site with only the single lane open and not require overnight staffing.
Some of the reasons are:
- When the site is active they often have a need to hold traffic or otherwise alter the traffic pattern to move equipment around. An excavator swinging an arm through the travel lane, loading a dump truck with debris that might fly around a bit, etc.
- The two guys are more efficient than the portable light at moving traffic volumes, since they can extend/shorten cycles as they see fit, and don't have to add in a big extra margin for the last, slowest possible vehicle to get through the work zone. They can see when it's cleared and let traffic through the other direction immediately.
In Germany we simply have driver education which is a bit more extensive complex than driving around a block once and making a single T-turn, then putting the car into park at the end. Sorry for sounding a bit snarky, but the consequences of leaving out a proper education, including driving etiquette, should be obvious.
It took me next to nothing to get a license in the US. In Germany, it took me months with a minimum set of mandatory lessons required by law - theoretical and practical.
I also don't think the argument about needing a driving license asap on the country side works because it is the same in Germany. Only major cities truly allow you the be car-free. Public transport elsewhere can at least be spotty if not outright disastrous and comparable to the US.
While I generally agree with you, the concept of people acting as "human safeties" isn't unknown to us Germans - look up "Bahnübergangsposten" or watch any railroad construction site. There will always be one human with a manual horn to alert the crew whenever a train passes by.
Usually because the lane is only being shut for a few hours, and it would cost more and take more work to set up a portable traffic signal. In Ontario, if the roadworks take more than a day, there's usually a traffic signal set up.
Interesting anecdote: I was driving through North Dakota this summer and hit resurfacing roadworks. It was the first time I've ever seen it, but rather than setting up hundreds of cones and directing traffic through them, then re-arranging the cones to do the other lane, they just had a flagman on each side and a pilot vehicle guiding 10–20 vehicles at a time through the work zone. No cones at all. I'm sure that project was completed in half the usual time.
> The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising. I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand around and chat.
This looks bad, and some of the time it is just inefficiency, but in many cases there may be a series of tasks, dependent on each other, some of which require a lot of laborers and some that don't.
It's often better to employ a welder for the day than to stop work entirely when you don't have one milling around on site waiting for their next task.
The same queuing problem exists all over in computing as well and is similarly poorly addressed often as not. Japanese car companies and more generally lean engineering is all about fixing this. I highly doubt worker assignments are anywhere near optimal and are probably mostly whatever the job foreman feels like is right.
Some groups have this down to a science for their particular industry (say, Apple supply chain logistics) and others aren't even aware of the issue and pass it off as expected.
It would be an interesting study to get queuing theory people, lean experts, or some such qualified group to look into public construction and maintenance projects to simulate and analyze optimal vs. actual. No question this would be very hard to do because unions hate this kind of thing and people don't like being measured over their shoulders and the basic implication that they're "lazy" or inefficient or whatever. (it's hard to measure and improve worker output while actually making the worker happier too because there tends to be a Stanford Prison Experiment vibe where you get managers nitpicking lunch breaks and the basic pleasantries of working instead of bulk errors like allocating skill sets)
You may be surprised, but much work on British railway lines is done by private companies contracted by the government, and overseen by a public agency. There are several companies that compete for the work.
It could be fairly straightforward to compare the efficiency of the same task in both countries.
>but in many cases there may be a series of tasks, dependent on each other, some of which require a lot of laborers and some that don't.
You say that as though the policies and procedures by which worn is done haven't intentionally been made inefficient to create work for the workers.
I once sat on a train for 3hr waiting for a railroad employee to show up with a chainsaw and cut a downed tree of the track. There was another employee in a service truck equipped for brush clearing a couple miles away at the station waiting for his wife who was stuck on the same train. He couldn't clock in and deal with the downed tree, because rules. This story is fairly well known among people who ride that rail line so some here may recognize it.
In the US, because the government is not profit-driven, results rarely matter. So workers are seldom penalized for poor performance. So you end up with shitty workers. There are lots of people with great work ethic in the US, they're just mostly in private industry.
I don’t buy the whole “it doesn’t matter because it is the government”-thing. In the two bigger european cities I lived in service quality and government efficiency were usually very interesting voter topics. And local governments who didn’t manage to increase or at least uphold service quality would usually end up losing in the future.
So the thing that doesn’t seem to work in the US is the “hold them accountable”-part. Maybe public transport quality just isn’t an issue the typical US voter considers their business?
Its is not that it is not an issue. People in the US just do not vote. Compare the participation rates in your country vs the US. Majority of the people who vote are also uninformed I would say.
But isn’t it a bit hypocritical to first not vote, then complain about how things are paning out and then conclude that things in the hands of governments never work?
Democracy lives from everybody’s attendance — if you stay at home you got no right to complain.
Sadly even a strong faith in the invisible hand-shaped market-god doesn’t change that, because quasi monopolies like railway infrastructure and the invisible hand-shaped market-god never mix as well as promised for some weird reason.
If someone abstains from voting because they find all the choices equally unqualified, I don't think that eliminates the person's right to complain nor does it diminish the validity of their complaints.
My guess is that it has to do with low worker motivation, both from lack of individual incentives and organizational inertia. My friends in government jobs know what their promotions will be for the next 30 years and there is no allowance for variability based on personal performance. This prevents nepotism and corruption, but also means that leadership is based on seniority, not competence.
It would be interesting to see how successful governments manage promotion of talent.
My guess is that it has to do with the poor state of democracy in the United States. Local elections are dominated by moneyed special interest groups, many people don't vote in them, and those that do, often vote down the party line.
Result: It's difficult to run government services well, when we do such a poor job of picking good people to run the government.
I agree with your conclusion, but I'm not so confident "moneyed" special interest groups are the issue. I could speculate it has more to do with voter interest priorities in general.
Take California DMV for example. The DMV is led by state governor appointees. No governor will be voted in or out office based on DMV improvement performance. Running government services well hardly ranks in voters minds
The influence of the car industry in actively undermining alternatives through favorable regulation, direct handouts and access to the administrations by indirect bribes and revolving door delayed favors should not be underestimated.
Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. I'm putting in 'so-called' as in practice they still receive close to as much in subsidies as the state-run enterprises they replaced, but now only serve cherry picked parts, most often with lower quality, and divest the required upkeep investments in infrastructure into separate businesses that are completely reliant on public funding.
There is a real myth about the effectiveness of private enterprise vs public enterprise.
Large private companies are not more efficient than a comparably sized public endeavor. Small companies can be, but that is systemically only true if you ignore the waste of 99% of the 'competitors' that are perpetually failing.
Doesn't Germany have proportionally an even bigger car industry?
> Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. [...]
Most public transport used to be private in the 19th century and was nationalized as a combination of cash cow and for military purposes.
You mean, exactly the same as in any other large enterprise, private or public?
If you think everyone in the private sector is 'profit-driven', and you don't mean 'personal gain driven', which is the larger the company the less likely to be aligned with or incentivized by the benefit to the enterprise, I'm guessing you never spend time in such environments.
In the UK, there are various accepted ways of safe work on a railway, followed by both public and private sector employees and contractors.
One of them has a lookout at each end, who alerts the workers whenever a train approaches. Work stops until the train has passed, because the distraction caused by operating loud and heavy machinery is ao high. (The train only sounds the horn once, unless the driver fails to see an acknowledgement from the lookout.)
However, this isn't really practical on a busy line like a metro, so they'd much prefer to work overnight with the line closed if possible.
It's also possible to fence off the work area from live tracks, but installing the fence is then the disruptive work.
> as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines.
That attitude is completely at odds with the European approach to worker safety.
(I cannot comment on whether either point applies to the USA.)
This style of working (where working lines are in physical proximity to workers) was called "Red zone" (where "Green zone" would be if the workers are not in proximity to a working line because the line was closed to traffic) and now is called "Open line" working.
It is unavoidably dangerous, and planners are supposed to choose it only when other options aren't practical, but in reality they often pick "Open line" for convenience. For example maybe the workers would prefer to do this on Tuesday midday, so we plan it as "Open line" and schedule it for Tuesday 1145, rather than for 0400 on Thursday when we can just shut the line to do it safely. This gets people killed, but because it doesn't reliably kill the specific people you scheduled most of the time it feels OK to them and to you.
This is also why unions aren't enough to implement safety. Unions represent workers and the workers feel like convenience is more valuable than safety. A 1-in-1000 chance to die, for five minutes extra coffee break is a good deal, until you're the 1-in-1000 and then it sucks. In the UK signaller unions fought very hard to continue working 12 hour shifts instead of maximum 8 hours. Because working 3x 12 hour shifts and then the rest of the week off is _convenient_ even though it was excessively dangerous if anything goes wrong.
> No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other developing regions are working harder.
"better work ethics"? I prefer "unfair competition and dumping enabled by sometimes outright slavery".
That's the problem with most of the current free-trade agreements, they do not contain anything to protect the respective weaker parts getting exploited. As a result, scandals about child work and slavery conditions (e.g. in China) are commonplace, while at the same time European/US people lost millions upon millions of jobs because there was no way they could compete with what is essentially dumping.
I don't understand why this comment was voted into the negative, but I suspect that it has something to do with the world view of the people who oppose taxes on a fundamental level.
To those of you, I ask - why?
New York's flat non-distance based fare is one of the great democratic institutions of the city. Whether you live in Flushing, Rego Park or Gramercy; whether you ride one stop or make four transfers - you pay the same fare. The only way this can work is if those of us with more wealth take care of those of us with less. What seems wrong about this?
You want people to live in inefficient places, it's not doable for everybody to live in the nearest location. All that does is skyrocket housing prices, and drive out people with lower paid jobs.
That's the idea. You drive people with low paid jobs out of living in places they can't afford without mooching off of their neighbors. They move closer, get a smaller apartment, people build more densely, or they get a job elsewhere, or they eat the true cost of travel, less want to do it, wages increase somewhat.
I used to travel, in Philadelphia, from a Main Line-adjacent community, on a bus to 69th Street Station, and then on the Market-Frankford Line, and then switched to the Broad Street line, all the way up to Temple U. for a $10/hr job, on a $1.30 token plus a $.60 transfer, each way. That's outrageous. I was mooching off the system, and my employer was mooching off the system as well. If they made me pay higher fares, well, I could afford it. What's an extra $3.80 when you're making $10/hr? At that wage, it was a small fraction of the time spent commuting.
Encouraging people to live attached to a subway and then incentivizing their usage of it, regardless of distance in almost any circumstance, is a huge transit efficiency boon for the economy.
If you price people out of the trains so they start driving cars again or even taking busses you are suddenly losing a huge amount of volumetric efficiency in your transit system.
Optimal cities can get almost everyone anywhere either walking, biking, or riding train all the time. Any requirement for road bound vehicles is an infrastructure failure of city planning. There are exceptional circumstances (moving heavy items that can't be carried) but they should be just that - exceptional, and rare.
> Encouraging people to live attached to a subway and then incentivizing their usage of it, regardless of distance in almost any circumstance, is a huge transit efficiency boon for the economy.
Discouraging people from working where they live is the worst inefficiency you can create.
In Buenos Aires you can ride the entire subway track for 0.30$, which is about 1.5 hours of subway. Without subsidies, the subway would cost at least 1$ a ride.
The hourly rate of a great part of the city workers is below 3$ and do not have full day employment.
What do these numbers mean? That a worker can get a 3.5$ an hour for 3 hours a day on the other side of the city will do it because it will cost him 0.6$ a trip. But if he had to pay 2$, that worker might not do it.
He doesn't have the choice now: he pays a tax when he buys food that forces him to take long trips to make a difference in the subway.
Overall result:
Economic efficiency: bad, because it costs more to do it this way
Welfare: bad, because it increases commute times, and reduces wages
Transit & demographics: bad because it concentrates people on the expensive side of town and increase transit exponentially
You are assuming that there are jobs anywhere in the city!! No there are no jobs in most places even in NYC. Most jobs are concentrated in and around manhattan.
> So the government destroyed the system through price controls. Odd that City Lab doesn't explore that angle further.
It isn’t odd because City Lab is generally in favor of leftist economic and urban policy. Exploring price controls might call into question their fundamental bias. Price controls are anti-market and typically so is City Lab.
Transport in quasi monopolist areas is one of these fields where markets regularily fail, to deliver the promised results as railway privatizations have shown. At least from a German perspective the single thing that did the most good for the mobility market were the actions of the national anti-trust institution, that brought us affordable inter-city buslines. The railway service is the typical mess. Privatization improved the service quality to some degree, but made infrastructure debt way worse, because the goal of the company isn’t to give us mobility, but to give their shareholders profits. So instead of maintaining bridges, they let them rot and collapse and then they ask the state to jump in and build a new one. The good old strategy: privatization of gains and socialization of losses.
Railways are one of these fields where markets regularily fail to deliver because you are in monopoly region and building another railway system to get some competition is unfeasable.
I don’t really see this as very ideological btw. I just have never seen a public transport market that developed much in favour of the general population without government intervention. So anecdotal evidence etc.
Railways can be privatized if you keep the infrastructure (rails) public. Public railway infrastructure then charge the rail companies for usage of the rails. This should work in theory.
About affordable inter-city buslines, I feel that the new companies (uber like) that handle buses brought much more affordability than any law before.
What happens then is that you get lots of service between big cities, but smaller cities and towns lose service. Unless there are subsidies, prices will also increase.
In Germany at least, rail is viewed as a public good that should provide mobility to people in both big cities and more rural areas. Making it available outside the most heavily trafficked routes at a reasonable price is incompatible with privatization, again unless heavy subsidies are involved.
Fuel taxes cover less than a third of road costs in the US. Gas taxes are really unpopular and generally have been allowed to dwindle away by inflation.
"What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?"
The fact that tax revenue from cars & trucks pay for the cost of their infrastructure is true regardless. IF you want to analyze externalities, please by all means, take a tally of all positive and negative and show me the balance.
I can't find that info about funding sources in the urban.org article, or what "sales tax" is generated from specifically. The article does say that HTF is not fully self-funded. If something comes from general revenues/tax, that means that all taxpayers are paying for it, whether or not they use a car.
If this is in fact the case, I don't think it's a bad thing. The problem in that case comes from double standards, where the ground-level understanding of how society operates includes costs incurred by individuals/businesses which effectively disappear into a vacuum rather than being directly paid/passed onto customers, yet is used as evidence of the completely natural and inherent utility of cars over alternatives.
For a different doc more directly about who pays for roads, I've found this one useful. Made by a so-so thinktank, but seems well-sourced and rigorous.
I don't know that I'd call it a double standard though- a far greater percentage of the population benefits from road transport than subway. Unless it's handheld and it fits in a bag, goods and services are almost exclusively delivered by road vehicle. And even if a messenger is using the subway to deliver a package, it most likely was on a truck at some point before that.
I think we both agree that cars have some significant utility to them, although having utility doesn't mean that any amount of cost is acceptable. This is my problem with "cars pay for themselves, therefore other forms of transit should pay for themselves", which I have seen evidence against (see linked pdf) and nothing conclusively for. The meaningful discussion to have is what we want to support as a society, like your argument.
Trucks on last mile delivery are invaluable for some deliveries, as you mention, but then... why else does any other vehicle need to use most streets? Is it reasonable for someone who orders a truck to pay 33% of the cost of that truck on the road? What about 0%, or 100%? Which is best?
In cases where alternatives to trucks or cars are less costly overall in some situation, or additional efficiency can be achieved with batching, how much of that is ignored because of these accidentally created incentives? Not even mentioning the indirect cost to communities (walkability, clean air, autonomy of disabled people).
I don't have the answers, but I think these are good questions to be asking. For the specifics of policies, we need to base that on data ofc.
Well one thing for sure, internet warriors are always willing to give up cars or have others give them up but the simple reality is that cars and access to them is a requirement for many even in the city environment.
simply put, living in town is not financially or socially viable for many and the freedom afforded by auto ownership is not giving the value is vastly underestimated by those who would restrict their use by others.
as with most lifestyle conversations it is far easier to score internet points with altruistic comments let alone being part of the clique. about as useful as hashtag diplomacy
It’s not a “politically constructed reality.” It’s a reality constructed reality. Roads offer a relatively cheap and easy way of taking advantage of cheap, plentiful land in the US. There’s definitely subsidies we could get rid of (force property taxes to cover the costs of roads in the suburbs), but even if you did that I suspect most people would still opt to live in cheaper and bigger houses outside the city. (Especially if you got rid of corresponding subsidies in cities.)
> Force property taxes to cover the costs of roads in the suburbs
That's what excise taxes are for. For example, in my town, we spend $1.2m on highway maintenance, and $450k in snow removal, while collecting $2.4m in vehicle excise taxes.
There is also about $60k in fines income, but it doesn't break down exactly how much of that is vehicular.
If roads were used ONLY for delivery trucks most would be dirt tracks: trucks would be 4 wheel drive with a winch on front. this would be cheaper than paving roads.
Not really. Rail is paved to high standards, roads to the same standards are more expensive yet. If I were to replace my driveway with a rail I wouldn't use the same high standards that the main line gets and so my costs would be much less (of course since there is no rail down my little street that would be pointless). Mainline rail is expensive, but so is highway paving.
No, rail is always more expensive, even at the lowest spec'ed design loads. It becomes more cost effective the heavier the loading, not lighter. But AREMA ensures it's pretty much always more expensive.
Overlaying an already properly designed road can be super cheap, but it requires the original road to have been properly designed. Whatever that cost might have been.
This is wrong in every way possible. The entire concept of road surface preservation revolves around a sufficiently resilient but elastic (non-brittle) impermeable coating. Equally important is a well drained base.
The whole point is to keep the water away from the dirt, and when it's not possible, minimize (distribute) loads from the tires across as large as area as possible.
They tested alternatives extensively in the 50's, driving trucks in circles on different test tracks for literally weeks and months at a time. As poorly planned as some people believe the interstate system to be, the government didn't throw billions of dollars at it blindly.
True, but irrelevant: there are very few delivery trucks in the scheme of things, if that is your only use for roads a dirt track is good enough. 4 wheel drive and a winch are a must of course to get around on them. Some of the particularly bad one would be paved - though more as a bridge over streams.
Remember I carefully excluded everything except delivery from roads - this is horribly unrealistic. You can call it a strawman.
It's entirely false even as a strawman. 18-wheeler delivery trucks carrying 80,000 lbs of cargo (or even 1000 pounds of sensitive equipment) are not going cross country on dirt roads. Trying to maintain unpaved surfaces for that kind of usage pattern would cost exponentially more than paving the roads and providing for proper drainage.
Trucking is responsible for transporting roughly 12 billion tons of cargo annually, with an estimated value of $9 trillion dollars. As a total share of goods transported by value, trucking makes up about 70%, and 60% by weight. The trucking industry employs 10 million people (3.5 million of which are drivers), and directly contributes to about 5% of GDP, to say nothing of the share of GDP which indirectly depends on trucking, which would be roughly... all of it.
The United States' $20 trillion GDP is entirely dependent on a functioning and well maintained highway system, and it is absolutely irreplaceable as a means of economically and rapidly transporting goods throughout the country.
In that context, the roads that regular everyday taxpayers get to drive are basically free and paid for, because most of them would have needed to be built anyway for the basic provisioning of goods and services, health & safety, building materials and as a right-of-way for water, sewer, electrical, data, and communications infrastructure.
I strongly disagree. The question was do cars and trucks cover the cost of infrastructure. The answer is that they clearly do. When I see someone claim otherwise, I'll just pipe in with the truth.
If you want to talk about externalities, you have to have a clear-eyed analysis of both positive and negative externalities. It's a very difficult analysis, because they both total in the trillions of dollars. I'd welcome a well researched scientific paper on the subject.
Cars do not pay their own way. Tabs, gas taxes, and tickets do not cover even a third of spending on road construction, maintenance, and highway patrol... And that's ignoring the high cost of 'free' parking.
But since they are very visible, very direct taxes (And in addition to them, you have to pay for gasoline itself, insurance, parking, etc), drivers who have not done the math mistakenly believe that they aren't being subsidized.
I just did the math, and showed my work. Cars and trucks pay hundreds of billions in taxes annually, which more than covers the cost of creating and maintaining the infrastructure.
1. When Eisenhower founded the national highway system, roads were built to provide for the common defense, and to provide the economic foundation upon which practically our entire economy is based (see trucking figures I quote above). At a cost of $500 billion (that's inflation adjusted) [1] I believe it was the single greatest investment ever made in human history in - terms of total dollar return on investment.
2. State & Federal funding of highways currently totals approximately $175 billion per year. I think inflation adjusted that has been fairly steady of the last half century. It's one of the few things where government spending has actually remained constant. [2] Income from fuel taxes has been reducing over the last decade, while income from sales & excise tax has been increasing.
It's reasonable to project that for the last several decades that infrastructure costs have been more than covered by vehicular income, and will continue to be covered for the forseeable future. Setting policy for today and tomorrow should be based on the facts of today and tomorrow.
It would be claiming more than I need, to state that vehicular direct revenue has always exceeded direct expenses, when we can at least clearly state this was true for the last decade, and the next. Economically speaking, it would be extremely costly to reduce the utilization rates for infrastructure we have already paid for, for example, in terms of infrastructure cost per passenger-mile.
One aspect which will eventually need reform is gas taxes will continue to drop with the spread of EVs, so a new form of usage-based billing will need to be developed -- hopefully one that doesn't involve a national tracking system, but I digress. It's fortunate that roads are so profitable that we haven't needed to raise the Federal fuel tax rate in over a decade, and have ample time to develop a solution.
3. The cost of 'free parking' is a relative rounding error in the $175 billion/yr we're talking about. Don't confuse the theoretical economic value of selling parking, or the potential value of re-purposing the space, with what it cost to build it.
There may be a subsidy here, even possibly a large one, but that's not based on the cost of building the spot, but more the perceived theoretical value in renting it. Again, we've gotten into externalties and strayed away from the basic cost analysis.
In reality, most parking costs are paid for by the parking consumer in one way or another. For example, at the mall, while you might not pay a fee to park, the store's rent includes the cost of building and maintaining the parking, and the prices of the goods at that store cover that rent. At your place of employment, you might not pay to park out back, but rest assured that the profit margin of the business includes the rent on the building, leaving less room in the P&L for salary. Again, whether the parking "benefit" is taxed as income to the employee is a different discussion as to whether roads pay for themselves.
4. You're getting into externalities here, without considering the positive ones. Police use the roads to prevent and respond to crime, which includes vehicular crime. Don't underestimate how much money is collected by governments through fines, fees, and forfeitures. In D.C. it works out to over $200 per person. Yes, it turns out, highways are overall very lucrative for the police. [3]
Maybe true, although I haven't found that number (1/3) anywhere. But 20-30% of fuel taxes already go to non-roadway transit spending. Some states only spend ~20% of fuel taxes on roads.
And a dozen or so States have increased fuel taxes in the last 5 years, so maybe the trend is starting to reverse.
For public transit, they are very large compared to road subsidies. In New York it’s $0.35 per passenger mile: https://iurd.berkeley.edu/wp/2010-04.pdf. Direct road subsidies are about $0.02 per passenger mile. Nationally, road spending is 3-5x higher than transit spending, but accounts for 50x more passenger miles.
Even when you add in externalities (climate change, etc.) road subsidies are about $0.10-0.20 per passenger mile. (Of course, electricity on the east coast isn’t generated from renewable sources, so you have to add pollution externalities to the subway too.)
Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them. There are pollution externalities, but those can be addressed by mandating electric cars without changing the basic structure of everyone having private vehicles.
That ignores the real cost of roads in cities is lost revenue from all that land. Ignoring of course how people would get around the city without roads.
NYC for example has over 6,000 miles of road * a very conservative 60 feet ignoring sidewalks is ~40,000 acres or 20% of the city. Central Park by comparison is only 842 acres. As Property taxes add up to ~55 Billion per year that’s (55/.8*.2) ~= 13.8 billion in lost revenue per year.
There are of course options to build more roads underground, but then they start costing as much as subway systems.
Roads which could in theory be built underground at extreme expense. Losing that land is cost effective, but that does not mean it's free, just a hidden opportunity cost. Further, subway systems also increase property values, that’s rarely considered part of the equation.
> Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them.
Your whole point depends on the fact that almost everyone uses roads and of course everyone uses roads when there are no great alternatives. If things were structured differently, the same could probably be said for other transit options.
Bike lanes. for instance, are ridiculously cheap from every perspective, have none of the externality costs you mention, but no one can bike safely as of now and therefore much fewer choose to do so than the infrastructure could support.
No, it’s based on cost divided by usage. It’s not like there is a ton of underutilization of the NYC Subway and per-person per-mile costs would go down with economies of scale. Rail is just really expensive.
Biking is cheap only if your time is worth nothing. It’s also untenable given the climate of most of the US (much wider temperature variation than in Europe where biking is more common), and the physical fitness of your average American.
How much would an equivalent amount of road capacity cost in NYC?
(For the sake of argument, ignore the fact that such an insane amount of road capacity is probably physically impossible in NYC without knocking down half the city)
You're not taking into account the fact that rail transit is primarily in cities, where costs are high. You can't compare cost per passenger-mile for roads in upstate NY and subways in Manhattan.
> Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them.
[citation needed]. You haven't said that fraction of road costs are covered by subsidies (e.g., by property taxes). I suspect it's a substantial fraction.
Price controls is an unfairly simple way to say that the company signed a long-term contract in which the city covered 2/3rds of the construction costs and set the fare at a maximum of 5 cents for most rides for the next 49 years.
When the company tried to raise the fare to 7 cents, they were disallowed by the courts because they couldn't prove the 5 cents fare was confiscatory.
I understand the city could raise the fare to benefit the company, but that isn't their obligation.
I would assume you're libertarian from the point you've made, and am curious whether you believe it was right for the contract to be enforced as it was agreed upon.
So, the contract should be viewed as a suicide pact? The results of the decisions by the politicos speak for themselves: money poured into duplicative infrastructure, starvation of existing infrastructure, stagnation.
Passenger rail service in the US suffered a similar fate when the federal government called in its chips to move personnel and supplies all over the place during the command economy years of WWII. Yes, the rails received substantial subsidies in land grants, etc, to get started. Yes, there was agreement to serve the public interest in this way because of that. Yes, this was a big blow to passenger rail.
It's simply what happens when you have a military industrial complex and people are more scared of being nuked or invaded by Russians than their infrastructures being taken over by privates (hospitals, schools, transport etc. etc.)
Fares of MTA are higher than those of ATM in Milan, the service in Milan is excellent and it covers the operating costs through fares.
They are so good that have also built and now maintain the subway of the city of Copenhagen and over 100 buses and train lines in the province of Milan.
Prices are super regulated and recently fares have gone down for long distance commuters and slightly up only for casual passengers (one way tickets, tourists fares)
The company makes profits that go back to the city which in the end benefit the citizens
I have always wondered what the 'actual' expenses were on the per-mile cost of rail transit. I had the curious experience of trying to get the information out of the VTA for their light rail project and they suggested I get a court order. I was very confused by that, its tax money they are spending and California has open government laws.
That is an excellent report, the numbers I would like to see is from ground breaking to ribbon cutting, what are the actual expenditures and to whom. Something like:
vendor a ($1M) - geotechnical services consisting of ...
TLDR; It is 16X more expensive than in 1904 to build a mile of subway adjusting for inflation. It costs $4B for each mile now!! This should be extremely surprising as we generally expect tech to improve and become cheaper over time. It is being speculated that cost rises as we lose all knowledge of how to do this efficiently because of huge gaps instead of doing continuous construction. This is why we need Elon Musk and Boring Company.
What the US really needed, and could have been using for 30+ years now, was a reorganization away from a military industrial complex war machine for 600 billion a year to a civilian engineering corps to build up the country and provide a guaranteed jobs program for an order of magnitude less money.
I can't imagine how much nicer this country would have been with ~8 trillion invested in infrastructure over blowing up mud huts in deserts with "collateral" causalities in the millions while destabilizing third world nations into our next terrorist threat to point that 600 billion dollar tumor at next.
We should have seen everything from public development of high rise high density apartments in high-demand urban cores to high speed rail networks connecting major metro areas across state lines to dozens of recent-gen nuclear plants funded from the federal level down. We got none of that except a burgeoning debt and thousands with lifelong PTSD and crippling injuries from a war machine to make defense contractors rich burning taxpayer money.
I'll extend this even further: what if, after several years of all of this civilian engineering/infrastructure work being done, tons of expertise would have been built up...Then "sell" that expertise - either as a country to other countries, or as workers create their own smaller firms to look for work in other countries. Other countries would ideally hire American workers - because tons of expertise in infrastructure building - then these other countries could build up their own infrastructures, and so on, and so on....I can even imagine that our workers helping other countries (to build themselves up) might actually avoid some conflicts in the world - thereby avoiding needing such a heavy, expensive military in the first place. Ok, perhaps my premise is a little naive or idealistic...but I'm sure it would work in some pockets, and at least we (and a few other countries) would have some decent infrastructure remaining. So far, for all of our heavy, expensive, and excessive military spending, what do we have to show for it - mountains of debt, more people in the world hating Americans, our own people victims to PTSD?? President Eisenhower was correct.
China already adopted and is widely benefiting from this strategy. Their massive civil engineering corps first built up their "ghost cities" that are now populated, more high speed rail than the rest of the world, and brought the country from famine in the 70s to some of the most technically advanced development anywhere.
In the last 10 years that engineering machine got turned to foreign investments, right now China is building thousands of miles of high speed rail and skyscrapers throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. Thus getting foreign nations indebted to them not for "protection" like the US tried but for their economic lifeblood.
Its going to pay off lavishly throughout this century for the CCP. They will have billions in their debt for their engineering expertise in helping modernize all these foreign economies and not all of it will be strictly fiscal debt. They will be dependent on Chinese engineering because all the intellectual capital is held there. All the US will have to show are millions of insurgents crying death to the nation. The marginal advantage of accumulated expertise for China will be the ability to build civilizations up (to serve their own interests) while the US is only good at tearing them down (to still serve their own interests).
City growth cannot be endless. Everything has an end. It is the same thing for Paris. With the "Grand Paris", we try to build new subways, but it is tremendously expensive.
Nowhere on Earth is close to peak density. Concepts like Shimizu Pyramid exist demonstraing high class living with densities over 100k / km². Transit infrastructure has already been developed to handle volumes as high as the millions of persons per hour.
We are also nowhere close to peak density efficiency, since the widespread refinement of high-density building would drop the price per person way below the current aggregate costs of living considering the whole of infrastructure and housing almost anywhere.
There is a strong cultural barrier to the development of higher densities though that associate it with poverty. Thats the real challenge to overcome, because that culture operates like the anti-nuclear sentiment to stymie development and stunt the growth of innovations in the domain of urban planning.
The chart about cost hides how dramatic the cost difference is and it bothers me. Note the increment of .25 billion to .5 billion on the y axis without the design reflecting that shift
> The real estate industry was one of the most important constituencies supporting the development of the subway system in the early years. Developers enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the subway, which was extended into empty fields that were then swiftly and profitably blanketed with apartment houses whose residents then filled the trains. With the construction of the IND, that bargain began to break down—they saw new subways as more of a tax burden than a generator of big speculative profits.
That's a fascinating little tidbit. When the developers were able to negotiate with the subway firms on an equal basis, they saw them as assets and partners; but when they were no longer able to (because a government is never an equal partner: it can change the law any time it wishes), they just saw them as an imposition.
reply