Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Remember those wizards of counter-intuition, the Freakonomics guys? You know, the ones who told their audience that it’s safer to drive drunk than to walk drunk? Well, in his latest piece for NPR’s Marketplace, which ran with the headline “Save the Earth, Drive Your Car,” Stephen Dubner talks to Clemson University’s Eric Morris and arrives at the ridiculous conclusion that driving is greener than transit.

The intellectually dishonest argument rests on the per-passenger energy consumption of cars versus buses. Buses are potentially much more efficient than cars, Morris admits. But many buses are underutilized: The average bus carries just 10 passengers, while the average car carries 1.6. As a result, Morris says, those traveling by bus consume 20 percent more energy per passenger than people driving in cars. (American trains, he concedes, are two-thirds more efficient than cars on this measure, but he qualifies that by saying the “number is warped a bit by the New York City subway, which is just a monster of efficiency.”)

So let’s say you’re an average, environmentally-concerned Joe, and you take this segment to literally mean that you should, in fact, drive your car to “save the earth.” How would that affect the environment? Well, the decision to take transit would consume essentially no additional energy — you would be using the system that’s at your disposal. While driving a car would spew greenhouse gases into the air that would otherwise stay in your fuel tank. It is pretty clear which choice is better for the environment, and it’s the intuitive one.

Midway through the article, after slagging transit with their big, attention-grabbing counter-intuitive point, Dubner and Morris admit that getting more people to use existing transit is unequivocally good for the planet. What they actually want to warn people about is building new transit, which won’t work “in places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Memphis” because the routes will be under-used. This, too, is incredibly dishonest.

Places like Cleveland have weakened the transit systems they were endowed with by creating every possible incentive to drive. If anything, the “hidden side” of this issue that Morris and Dubner play up for its counter-intuitive shock value — energy consumed per passenger mile — just points to the disastrous environmental consequences of planning communities around driving. The low ridership on Cleveland’s passenger trains is testament to poor planning, not an indictment of transit. Check out the pedestrian environments around some of Cleveland’s rapid transit stations:

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Last week Salon ran a pretty horrendous piece on the future of transportation called “Oops — Wrong Future.”

Writer Michael Lind argued that the “case for infrastructure investment has suffered from the lack of a plausible vision of the next American infrastructure.” Things that are not “plausible,” according to Lind, include “renewable energy and mass transit.” He wrote:

The idea that the U.S. could transition quickly from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind power and solar power inspired many liberals to support artificially rigging markets in favor of renewable energy by methods like cap-and-trade and renewable energy standards that force working-class consumers, via utility, to buy expensive power from uneconomical wind, solar or biofuel sources. And for a brief moment in time, the center-left in the United States was entranced by the mirage of a continental high-speed rail system.

Okay, we’ll give you a second to consider that this was printed in one of the country’s leading, left-leaning online magazines.

“Rigging markets” is some pretty debatable rhetoric to describe renewable energy standards and cap-and-trade — a policy that is supported by the overwhelming majority of economists. (Billions of dollars in tax breaks for gas companies and subsidies for road building – some people might describe that as “rigging markets” in the opposite direction, but we digress.)

Unlike “uncritical,” “unrealistic” and “entranced” proponents of rail, Lind has a vision for the future that is very much like the present, or even the past. Brace yourselves, readers: In the future, the U.S. will have an endless supply of fossil fuel thanks to “environmentally responsible” shale gas exploration. Plus, in the future, rail and bus transit of all kinds will never be able to complete with Google’s self-driving cars.

Yes, Lind is a big fan of Google robocars. He goes on about their many benefits:

Robocars may be fatal for fixed-rail transportation, at least for passengers rather than freight. Google has been test driving self-driving cars in California and Nevada has become the first state to legalize driverless vehicles. No doubt it will take several decades for safety issues and legal arrangements to be worked out. But high-speed trains might find competition in high-speed convoys of robot cars on smart highways, allowed higher speeds once human error has been eliminated. And the price advantage of subway tickets over taxi fares in cities may vanish, when the taxis drive themselves. Point-to-point travel, within cities or between them, is inherently more convenient than train or subway journeys which require changing modes of transit in the course of a journey. Thanks to robocars, much cheaper point-to-point travel everywhere may eventually be cheap enough to relegate light rail and inter-city rail to the museum, along with the horse-drawn omnibus and the trans-atlantic blimp.

What Lind — and Salon — fail to mention is that his professional interests are very much entangled with the producer of those cars.

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The media loves drama, of course. As your high school English teacher explained it, if Hamlet doesn’t get pissed about his dad’s murder or if Atticus Finch doesn’t step up to defend a black man falsely accused — that is, if somebody doesn’t say no, you’ve got no story. So the vociferous opposition of a handful of people to a handful of bike lane projects in New York City has been dramatized, through a series of news stories and op-eds, into a full-blown citizens’ backlash against the complete streets movement.

The narrative potential of controversy, though, cannot fully explain the glaring disconnect between polls showing that most residents support bike lanes and press portrayals of the backlash as widespread. Advocate Aaron Naparstek, who knows more about the city’s transportation politics than most anyone, has posited one theory: that Bloomberg’s DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, the woman behind many of the positive changes to New York City streets in recent years, has infuriated members of the political class — powerful New Yorkers who, unlike most, rely on cars as transportation.

But as always, it also makes sense to follow the money. In 2010 alone, the automotive sector spent $13 billion on advertising, more than any other industry including telecom, and accounting for one out of every ten dollars doled out by advertisers in the U.S. Local media outlets are especially dependent on auto manufacturers and dealers for advertising revenue. At the same time, traditional news media continue to lose audience, and even while other types of media benefit from a rebound in ad spending, newspapers suffer persistent drops in ad revenues, plunging last year to a quarter-century low.

It’s hard not to notice that as papers like the New York Times have shrunk, cutting costs by shedding sections, plump Automotive sections hang tight and become even more critical to newspaper survival. Now, of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Times, the New York Post, or other papers act unethically in how they cover transportation issues, including bike lane brouhahas.

But across the country, those on the automotive beat have cozy relationships with the automakers, driving their loaner cars to lunches with industry spokespeople, and stories occasionally surface, like a recent one in which editors at The Detroit News caved to dealer pressure to more favorably review the new Chrysler 200 sedan, that hint at broader behind-the-scenes activity.

Most auto journalists take great care to avoid being stained by industry sway, as difficult as that must be. Still, it is naive to think that the media’s dependence on the auto industry doesn’t influence what stories are covered, what opinion pieces are published, and what necessary “balance” might be taken. The tone adopted by local New York City news outlets has hardly been one of hard objectivity.

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The success of state-level plans to increase gas taxes is tied to the media's portrayal of the proposals in question, with narratives tied to "crumbling infrastructure" and "economic progress" showing more success than those emphasizing long-term transportation budget gaps, according to a new report released by the University of Vermont's Transportation Research Center (TRC).

The TRC report examined six states where lawmakers debated raising gas taxes to close infrastructure budget gaps between 2006 and 2009. Three of the states ultimately approved gas tax increases (Oregon, Minnesota, and Vermont) -- two of them over the opposition of the governor, as seen in the third column of the above chart -- and three of the state (Massachusetts, Idaho, and New Hampshire) nixed the proposed tax increases.

While acknowledging that "there are many possible explanations for the success and failure of gasoline tax increases at the state level," TRC researcher Richard Watts attempted to categorize the "frames" used to depict the proposals in local media as well as the Associated Press wire service.

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The Transportation Enhancements program, which requires states to set aside 10 percent of their federal transport money for new bicycle and pedestrian facilities, among other projects, turns 19 years old this year. But you'd almost never know it after reading Saturday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in which the paper tallies -- with no shortage of alarm -- the federal money not being spent on new roads.

The Star-Telegram story, which soon got snapped up by the Associated Press, begins by challenging Dallas' Woodall Rogers Deck Park, a groundbreaking effort to cap the city's Woodall Rogers Freeway and create a 5.2-acre green space for the public. The park, aimed at creating a walkable link between Dallas' local districts, received $16.7 million in stimulus funding from the Obama administration.

From the Star-Telegram:

The Woodall Rodgers project is a glaring example of how, at a time when many Texans distrust their transportation leaders, huge chunks of federal and state money are being spent on projects that have little or nothing to do with directly improving traffic.

"Texans should be outraged by it, especially when they’re being asked to support tax increases for transportation," said Justin Keener, vice president for policy and communications at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a nonpartisan research institute in Austin.

The Star-Telegram reviewed 515 state projects awarded funds under the federal transportation enhancement program during the past 18 years and found projects large and small that had little to do with mobility.

As it happens, the "nonpartisan" Texas Public Policy Foundation makes no bones about its political alignment on its website, which outlines a mission of "limited government" and offers a litany of pro-industry critiques of the Democratic health care bills.

The group's leadership is stocked with veteran advisers to Republican Gov. Rick Perry (TX), and chairman of the board Wendy Lee Gramm is a former Enron lobbyist who aided her husband Phil Gramm, a former Texas GOP senator, in his late-1990s push to de-regulate Wall Street.

Yet aside from Gramm's group, the Star-Telegram story includes no sources criticizing Texas transportation enhancements, which have received $997 million since the program began in 1991.

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When the Washington Post devoted an entire transportation column to the "best and worst" of 2009 -- its content written by interest groups with a stake in adding more lanes for more cars -- Streetsblog Network member blog Greater Greater Washington (GGW) took the initiative and sent in its own retrospective.

And in a show of good faith, the Post gave equal time to GGW creator David Alpert and Stewart Schwartz of the D.C. region's Coalition for Smarter Growth. The Alpert-Schwartz list, printed on Sunday, is worth a read even for those outside of the Washington metro area, if only as an example of savvy watchdogging by transit and livability advocates.

In a lean season for in-depth transportation debate, the Virginia gubernatorial contest -- won this week by Republican Bob McDonnell -- became a proving ground for nationally relevant questions about how to manage the infrastructure of congestion-plagued but still-growing metro areas.

Which makes Robert McCartney's Washington Post Metro column today worth a read, even for those outside of the D.C. area. McCartney begins with the premise that Northern Virginia, which chose McDonnell after trending Democratic for more than a decade, has earned some "payback" from the governor-elect.

What's the first item on McCartney's list? Sadly, it's "Find money for roads." He seems to be using the "road" frame even to refer to transit projects:

McDonnell should lock in dedicated funding for the Metrorail system and ensure that the Silver Line is built to Dulles Airport and beyond. He should add the proposed high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes on interstates 395 and 95. He should do something for I-66, too, although admittedly our region is sharply divided on whether to widen it inside the Beltway.

In fact, the region is just as sharply divided over whether to add HOT lanes to those two highway, a project that was put on hold in August and faces legal threats from local residents.

As David Alpert has observed, there's a big difference between constructing new HOT lanes (which ultimately encourages more congestion and has yet to pay for itself) and converting existing lanes to variable tolling (which has shown it can make money). McCartney's column makes no attempt to acknowledge that distinction.

On the subject of Metrorail, the nation's only transit system without a dedicated revenue stream, McDonnell's transport plan is mum about the importance of making sure the federal government follows through on its recent authorization of $150 million in annual matching funds.

Meanwhile, the White House budget for next year did not include money for Metrorail -- Congress later added the money, but the bill has yet to be signed into law. McCartney's urging that the governor-elect "lock in" dedicated transit money is a sound one, but it makes one wonder why the Post waited until after Election Day to press the issue.

The latest edition of the Texas Transportation Institute's influential urban mobility report was released today, prompting a flurry of mainstream media coverage focused largely on a faux-ironic theme that would do Alanis Morrissette proud -- the bad economy is giving us less traffic!

The TTI found a one-hour drop in the annual traffic delays suffered by the average urban American in 2007, a result attributed to the run-up in fuel prices and the beginning of the economic slowdown. The Wall Street Journal deemed the one-hour reprieve "The Upside of Recession," while LA Weekly dubbed Southern California's congestion decrease a "Recession Bonus."

Other coverage of the TTI report emphasized a different breed of cold comfort, playing up the congestion rankings that were given to major cities. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution resorted to surveying drivers on their local roads' drop from second-worst to third-worst in the nation (surprisingly, no one was celebrating), while D.C.-area outlets seemed to take morbid pride in their ascension to the No. 2 spot.

If only the TTI report had a solution to urban traffic woes that had a measurable impact on congestion! Oh, wait. As the chart above shows, transit service saved the nation's cities 645 million hours of delay in 2007. That's more than double the number of hours saved by all five most prominent road "operational improvements" combined -- with HOV lanes being the most notable of those latter options.

The report's authors devote an entire section to solutions to congestion, recommending "a balanced and diversified approach" tailored to the needs of each area. Promoting "denser developments with a mix of jobs, shops and homes, so that more people can walk, bike or take transit" is featured on the list.

But unfortunately, the value of transit and denser urban development got only sporadic mention in most coverage of the TTI report. The Oregonian was one of the exceptions; its reporter drew a line between Portland's less grim traffic situation and its planning priorities. Here's an excerpt:

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