towards market-informed transportation

Towards Market Transportation(in 6 minutes)

Market Urbanist

✤ Market Urbanism examines how market forces and property rights, when left unfettered, enable complex, yet vibrant and economically robust communities and regions to emerge through the “spontaneous order” of the land use and transportation marketplace. When left to market forces, as opposed to intervention, our land use patterns and transportation systems results in society that is economically and environmentally more efficient and just.

The Standard View

✤ Cars

✤ Independent, Free, Market-based

✤ Mass Transit

✤ Compromised, Subsidized, Government-run

I have a different story

✤ Cars

✤ Hidden Subsidies

✤ Mass Transit

✤ Explicit Subsidies

Hidden Subsidies - Two examples

1. Road Construction & Maintenance

2. Parking Mandates

Hidden Subsidies:Road Construction & Maintenance

✤ “Fuel taxes are user fees, akin to tolls. The fuel tax is admittedly quite imperfect as a user fee, since we don’t pay different tax rates for the use of different roads or different prices for the use of congested versus uncongested roads. “

Paying for what you get:Fuel Taxes✤ “New Hampshire's gasoline tax

stands at 19.6 cents per gallon, which ranks 39th highest nationally.” - Tax Foundation

✤ HB644 increases this to 33 cents per gallon as of 2013.

✤ “Under our central parameter values, the second-best optimal gasoline tax is $1.01/gal for the US.” - Parry and Small (2002)

$0 $0.38 $0.75 $1.13 $1.50

Current

2013

“Optimal”

Federal New Hampshire

Paying for what you get:Fuel Taxes✤ A study in Texas found that no

Texas road pays for itself in gas taxes, that most paid considerably less than half their infrastructure costs

✤ In Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 would require a gas tax of $2.22 per gallon to recover its costs.

Paying for what you get:Tolling

Paying for what you get:Dynamic Pricing for Parking✤ “SFpark will raise meter prices

so that demand is reduced to equal the existing parking supply. During peak periods, meters will be priced high enough to ensure some parking is always available. During off-peak times, meter prices will go down, so that most spots are used.”

Justifying market pricing

✤ “[A market-based parking] scheme in Old Town Pasadena, California, not only reduced congestion but improved access to, and total spending in, the shopping and entertainment district.”

✤ Likewise, HOT Toll lanes can serve more cars by maintaining full speeds

Hidden Subsidies:Parking Mandates

Hidden Subsidies:Parking Mandates

Say you’re looking for a home.In the modern world, you’ve decided to live without a car

Or rather, mostly

So why have a Garage?

Because it’s Mandated

Because it’s Mandated

Rather than:

✤ Garage

✤ Car cost

✤ Gas

✤ Insurance

✤ Maintenance

✤ Bus/Subway/Train Fare

✤ Occasional car share

Lifestyle Options are Skewed:

✤ Garage

✤ Car cost

✤ Gas

✤ Insurance

✤ Maintenance

✤ Garage

✤ Bus/Subway/Train Fare

✤ Occasional car share

Lifestyle Options are Skewed:

✤ Garage

✤ Car cost

✤ Gas

✤ Insurance

✤ Maintenance

✤ Garage

✤ Bus/Subway/Train Fare

✤ Car share

$25k+(of $100 - 400k home)

✤ “In [cash-out programs], rather than pay for employees’ parking spaces as a benefit, employers give workers a cash amount roughly equivalent to the value of the subsidy, to spend however they want.”

✤ “[Companies] who tried the system found that when employees faced an explicit cash parking cost to weigh against the benefit of driving, the number driving to work fell by 13 percent on average.”

Let the People Choose

Society is a product ofthese decisions

✤ More drive

✤ More need parking

✤ People live farther apart

✤ Therefore still more drive

Shine a Light on Parking Mandates

✤ Repeal them, see what happens

✤ Most still need a car and will be willing to pay for a place to store it.

✤ But for those less reliant, they will demand the lower-cost garage-free option

Transit is subsidized...

0% 25% 50% 75% 100%

Puget Sound (Seattle)

Washington, DC

New York Subway

Paris, France

Farebox Recovery

But it need not be

0% 25% 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200%

Taipei, Taiwan

Osaka, Japan

Hong Kong, China

Tokyo, Japan

Farebox Recovery

?

Examples

✤ Houston - supposedly free-market planning

✤ 2.25 parking spaces per housing unit

✤ Massive regulatory support of automotive travel

✤ Seattle - surprisingly libertarian

✤ No mandates downtown - market parking ratios from 0.67 to 0.9