Streetsblog Capitol Hill

At some point over the past few years, a lot of my friends started moving to Silver Spring and Takoma Park and Falls Church. These inner-ring, transit-connected suburbs of DC are still far less compact and walkable than the neighborhoods my friends moved from. So they bought cars.

Why did they do this? They’re entering peak driving age, which is historically between 35 and 54. They have more money than they did in their early 20s. But mostly, they had kids. Of all my friends, I now have exactly one that is still proudly car-free with kids.

In light of the new U.S. PIRG and Frontier Group report on changing driving habits, led by young people, the question arises: Won’t those young people also drive more as they get older?

Reports of diminished interest in driving focus on two groups: baby boomers, the generation that came of age with the automobile and settled in car-dependent suburbs, who are now retiring and driving less; and millennials, the oldest of whom are in their early thirties now and the youngest of whom aren’t even old enough to drive.

Millennials’ shift away from automobile travel is well documented, especially in last year’s report, “Transportation and the New Generation,” by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group. That report found that between 2001 and 2009, annual driving by the 16-to-34 age cohort decreased 23 percent, from 10,300 miles to 7,900 miles per capita. The same age group also made 24 percent more trips by bike and 40 percent more trips by public transit.

With more people having children later in life, the vast majority of millennials are still childless. They also haven’t hit their prime earning years, which tend to be prime driving years.

That’s true, said U.S. PIRG’s Phineas Baxandall, co-author of the new report on driving trends, but the expected increase in driving by millennials had already been factored into the reports forecasts — all of which entail far less driving than government models predict. “Our scenarios all assume that millenials will drive more when they get older,” Baxandall told Streetsblog. “The real question isn’t, ‘Will millennials drive more as they get older?’ It’s, ‘Will they drive more than their parents as they get older?’”

There are persuasive reasons to think they won’t.
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When it comes to helping their residents get around without breaking the bank, California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, and New York are the top five states in the nation, while Nebraska, Alaska, Mississippi, Idaho, and North Dakota bring up the rear.

That’s according to a new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC ranked every state on their policies to reduce oil dependence, as well as their actual performance, based on per-capita spending on gasoline as a percentage of income.

Among the measures that NRDC rewarded for giving residents more freedom from fuel price volatility: 13 states are actively promoting smart growth policies, and five states have set targets to reduce overall vehicle miles traveled (VMT). NRDC also gave credit to states that had developed fuel efficiency standards or were taking action to encourage the use of alternative fuels.

The four top-ranked states have all set targets to reduce VMT or petroleum consumption, and three of the top five states are also among the top five in transit investment.

The lowest-ranking states, meanwhile, were all without any substantive policies to reduce fuel consumption or promote travel options besides driving. NRDC found a substantial overlap among states that had the worst fuel policies and the states where residents end up taking the biggest hits at the pump. Residents of Mississippi, West Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Oklahoma spend the highest percentage of their income on gas.

The point of the report, said NRDC Executive Director Peter Lenher, is not to shame the most oil-dependent states, but to provide inspiration and examples from the places that are leading the way toward a more resilient future.

“What’s really important here: we really can do something about how much people pay for their transportation,” said Lenher. “This should be viewed as a very hopeful study to show that policies make a difference in the lives of people.”

You check out all the rankings in the full NRDC report.

Out of thin air, House Speaker John Boehner sent an email yesterday with the subject line, “Labor Day Pain: Gas Prices Have Doubled on President Obama’s Watch.” As evidence of the “doubling” charge, Boehner links to his own website, where he claims, “The average price for a gallon of gasoline was $1.85 when President Obama took office.”

Technically, he’s right. There was a sudden and temporary drop in gas prices just at the end of President Bush’s term — probably because there was a massive global recession at the end of President Bush’s term.

You know who really gets this? Mitt Romney, that’s who. Don’t expect any reality-based commentary like this out of him these days, but back when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney “responded to price spikes by describing them as the natural result of global market pressures and by calling for increases in fuel efficiency,” according to Alec MacGillis, writing in The New Republic this spring. Under pressure to call for a gas tax holiday when prices were high in 2006, Romney thought better of it. MacGillis quotes Romney:

“I don’t think that now is the time, and I’m not sure there will be the right time, for us to encourage the use of more gasoline,” Romney said, according to the Quincy Patriot Ledger’s report at the time. “I’m very much in favor of people recognizing that these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay.”

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When gas prices go up, it can be a big motivator for people to start taking transit more frequently. But according to a study released by the American Public Transportation Association and Building America’s Future [PDF], even when gas prices start to go down, the newly converted keep riding transit.

The report, “Volatile Gas Prices Point to Increased Use of Public Transportation,” draws on independent research about “the elasticity of transit ridership” — economist-speak for how much a change in gas prices affects transit use. As APTA points out in their press release, the results indicate an unexpected relationship between gas prices and transit ridership:

 It showed that on average, nationwide public transportation systems will add nearly 200 million new trips this year even as gas prices fluctuate by as much as 50 cents per gallon.

The report carries significant implications for transportation policy as Congress continues its effort to pass a new transportation bill before the June 30 deadline. Early proposals out of the House forbade the use of Highway Trust Fund dollars to pay for transit, and while those proposals have disappeared for now, it still remains a popular viewpoint among many on the political right.

But with more Americans opting not to drive, this is precisely the wrong time to start shortchanging transit. As APTA and BAF note, “the nation’s public transportation infrastructure is not prepared to handle the long-term unpredictable nature of gas prices.”

“Americans view our transportation network as one system, which is why public transportation and our road network should continue to receive funding from the highway trust fund,” said Gary Thomas, chair of APTA and CEO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit, in a conference call with reporters yesterday. “We should fund, build, and plan it like one system, where our public transportation system makes our road network more efficient.”

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Disclaimer: The House and Senate, in the grand scheme of things, have plenty of time to hack together a short-term extension of transportation funding, or even to pass the Senate bill outright if they felt like it.

Sometimes, though, to the outside observer (even to the cross-eyed reporter) it sure does look like we could be headed for a shutdown of federal transportation programs, starting a half hour into this week’s rerun of Saturday Night Live.

A shutdown would mean the feds won’t be able to cut checks to states, cities, or other agencies working on federally-funded projects. Construction on those projects would stop. Some projects might even be canceled outright.

Accounts payable aren’t the only function that will expire at 12:01 on Sunday morning — accounts receivable will too. The federal gas tax, the primary revenue stream for the primary source of funds for all national transportation projects, is only authorized to exist through the end of Saturday. (That transportation policy and gas taxes expire on the same day started as a coincidence, but they’ve been tied together since September 30, 2011.)

Some politicos on the fringes seem to think this is kind of a good idea. Senator Jim DeMint, a Tea Party favorite, recently floated an amendment that would have rolled back the gas tax and drastically shrunk federal transportation programs. Pollsters are playing into the whole fantasy: A recent Rasmussen poll found that 48 percent of Americans would favor a temporary elimination of federal gas taxes “until prices come down.”

Set aside, for the moment, that failing to collect the gas tax would make it harder for the U.S. to make necessary adjustments (more transit, anyone?) in the face of growing worldwide demand for oil. Letting the gas tax expire probably won’t even give Americans a temporary reprieve. Here’s why.

As it turns out, the whole 18.4 cents per gallon tax isn’t slated to expire, just most of it — 14 cents per gallon, to be exact. A permanent 4.3 cent per gallon tax would stick around. Taxes on diesel and kerosene would also fall to 4.3 cents per gallon.

So would gas everywhere be 14 cents cheaper by the gallon starting Sunday morning? Not right away, and possibly not ever.

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It’s been almost a year since the Obama administration released its Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future, but more importantly, it’s been two weeks since Energy Secretary Steven Chu got chewed out for not caring enough about lowering gas prices. And Newt Gingrich, whose presidential campaign is slipping into irrelevancy, can still do some political damage with his claim that he could bring gas prices down to $2.50.

So, the administration is taking this opportunity to show off what it’s done to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil with its one-year progress report on the blueprint.

Two weeks ago, Chu said something in a Congressional hearing that vaguely hinted that reducing gas prices so Americans could continue to guzzle fuel in SUVs was not actually his top priority. Here’s how it went: Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-MS) was grilling Chu about what the department was doing to lower gas prices. Nunnelee wasn’t impressed by Chu’s talk of developing “cost-effective” alternatives, like new battery technologies and natural gas – he wanted relief from high prices now.

Nunnelee started to ask, “But is the overall goal to get our price —”, but didn’t finish the sentence before Chu replied, “No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy.”

It’s the “no” that killed Chu. The point he was making is unassailable – that the administration is looking far beyond day-to-day price fluctuations and toward real economic and environmental sustainability. But all conservatives heard was the “no” and went around proclaiming that President Obama’s energy secretary is still trying to “figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” as he advocated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal before assuming his current position. (He has since repudiated that idea.)

The revised blueprint comes at the perfect time to bring home what Chu actually meant in his comments to Nunnelee. But it’s not all the rosy picture environmentalists might have wished for.

The first thing the report highlights is the fact that domestic oil production has increased every year Obama has been in office, reaching the highest level since 2003. Then it goes on to boast about the administration’s advances in natural gas, much of which is extracted through an extremely dangerous and dirty process known as fracking. All this means oil imports are down to 45 percent of U.S. consumption, from 57 percent when Obama took office. That’s not so exciting when you realize what it’s being replaced with.

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Meet Darren Flenoy, a Bay Area security guard who lives 40 miles from work. Gas costs him about $500 a month. His car payment is another $500. On top of that, he spends $80 per month on insurance and $180 on tolls.

In total, Darren’s commute costs him half of his monthly income. He must work seven days a week to make ends meet.

Then there’s Ro, a 23-year-old recent college graduate who lives with her parents in Vallejo, California. To reach her job in San Francisco, she must commute 20 miles in her 1994 Nissan Pathfinder to a BART station.

Gas costs her $20 to $30 dollars per day. Sometimes in order to make ends meet, she skips lunch.

There are thousands — millions — of Americans with stories just like theirs. A Georgia mother who commutes two hours daily. A college student who uses student loans to pay for gas. A contractor whose unpredictable gas expenses force him to reduce staff.

These people and others are sharing their stories on a blog called The Energy Trap. The premise of the project, run by the New America Foundation’s Lisa Margonelli, is that because many Americans have so few choices outside of automobile travel, they are effectively “trapped” in a vicious cycle where they must own a car to hold a job, but the cost of their commute consumes much of their income. For an average American household with an annual income of $50,000, car ownership costs about $8,000 a year — more than they will pay in taxes or spend on healthcare.

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Now that we’ve made it through Hurricane Irene, in many cases with less damage than expected, we can turn our attention to the real question: what does this mean for gas prices?

From Lexington, Kentucky to Palm Springs, California, consumers have seen some jump in gas prices over the past week. Some say it may have had to do with the fact that one of the 10 East Coast oil refineries shut down temporarily due to the storm.

But don’t blame Irene for all of it. Some of the jump was just market jitters after Fed Chair Ben Bernanke’s speech last week. And a predictable spike in demand during the upcoming Labor Day weekend could push prices higher, according to Stephen Schork, publisher of the industry newsletter the Schork Report, quoted by CNNMoney.

Indeed, writes Eric Jaffe in Infrastructurist, Irene likely won’t have much impact at all:

After Hurricane Ike, in 2008, fuel costs crept toward $5 a gallon in places. But Ike hit the Gulf Coast, where fuel production is several times greater than it is among East Coast refineries. In addition, the supplies that do exist will go further than normal after Irene, since demand plummeted this weekend in the typically high-traffic Northeast.

CNN even speculates that lagging demand could send fuel prices downward.

Meanwhile, Streetsblog readers have commented that a few days with fewer cars (at least in some places) has been a nice change of pace, and Noah hopes that the event will remind people that it’s important to have multiple transportation options. If Irene serves to do that, her impact on transportation would be a heck of a lot more significant than a momentary blip in the price of regular.

Maybe we can finally lay the whole “drive till you qualify” myth to rest now.

You probably already suspected that driving farther and farther outside the city limits until you found a house you could afford was not the smartest way to go about buying a home. You may have been tipped off by the fact that the word “drive” was in that not-so-sage piece of advice.

Well, your suspicions are confirmed. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has long been a champion of what they call the H+T (Housing + Transportation) index. They say that instead of measuring affordability strictly by housing costs (typically determined to be “affordable” if housing eats up less than 30 percent of household income), we should look at a combined index and determine affordability as a home where housing costs plus transportation costs make up less than 45 percent of income.

To make this real for the people of the national capital region, CNT teamed up with Washington, D.C.’s forward-looking Office of Planning to analyze how the H+T index changes notions of affordability in the D.C. area. Their report, “H+T in D.C.: Housing + Transportation Affordability in Washington, D.C.” [PDF]

In her foreward, Planning Director Harriet Tregoning (who, incidentally, got hit by a car on her bike last week) says that she wanted to go deeper than the CNT’s previous research, which used 2000 census data. She wanted to know what had happened during the “turbulent period” between 2006 and 2008.

“During that time some outer jurisdictions experienced drops in the median home sales price of 41 percent, while the District’s median sales price dropped by only 2 percent,” she wrote. “This happened while real gas prices grew by 18 percent.”

In any given location, transportation costs vary inversely to housing costs – meaning that in walkable, compact neighborhoods where transit access is convenient and housing prices are high, transportation costs are low – in some cases, low enough to offset the higher cost of housing.

It becomes apparent that “affordable” housing in the farthest-reaching areas of the region is much less so when transportation costs are added. Average H+T burdens in Spotsylvania, Charles, and Calvert counties are largely over 45 percent of AMI [area median income], and even exceed 55 percent of AMI in areas. Conversely, the District of Columbia, Prince George’s County, Arlington County, and Alexandria present some of the most affordable areas in the region. Here, even where housing costs are relatively high, average H+T burdens are largely less than 45 percent of AMI.

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Members of Congress of all stripes are trying to show that they’re concerned and responsive to the financial strain caused by high gas prices. Some are recommending more oil drilling. Some want to end subsidies to oil companies. Today, members of the Congressional Livable Communities Task Force suggested that providing more diverse transportation options to more people might help.

“Here in Washington, DC, when gas prices spike, people have choices,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), chair of the Task Force. “They can take a bus, Metro, bike, Capital Bike-share, walk, cab, drive. It’s a wide range of [choices] and it actually minimizes some of the sticker shock. But unfortunately, about half the American population doesn’t have an environment they live in that provides those choices. Too much of America is dependent on a pattern that imagines that we will always have an unlimited supply of inexpensive gasoline, and government policies in housing and road transportation reinforce that.”

Blumenauer and other members of the Task Force introduced a report this morning called “Freedom From Oil: Policy Solutions From the Livable Communities Task Force.” It’s an impressive product from a Congressional task force, many of which exist in name only. The more than two dozen members of the Livable Communities Task Force, all House Democrats, strive to make the federal government a better partner with communities to promote “cost-effective, environmentally friendly solutions to infrastructure problems” and “coordinate transportation, housing, and environmental policies and investments.”

The lawmakers of the Task Force said increasing oil drilling in the U.S. will never have an appreciable effect on world oil prices, because the price of oil is determined globally and the U.S. supply won’t be sufficient to make a significant difference.

“Here’s the harsh reality: The United States is never going to have control over world oil supplies or gas prices through drilling,” said Task Force member Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA). “We simply don’t have the oil supplies, no matter how much we drill. What we do have is the ability to control prices by lowering our consumption and giving American families new transportation choices.”

Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from Northern Virginia, boasted about Arlington’s livability program, including contiguous bike trails, bike racks, and transit-oriented development. “It’s the only way to effectively work against this monopolistic control that for too long the oil companies have had over America’s policies and priorities,” Moran said.

The Freedom From Oil policy recommendations are:

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