Image: Arizona Department of Transportation

Does walkable development really lead to worse traffic congestion? Opponents of urbanism often say so, citing impending traffic disaster to rally people against, say, a new mixed-use project proposed in their backyards. But new research provides some excellent evidence to counter those claims.

A recent study by the Arizona Department of Transportation [PDF] found that neighborhoods where houses are closer together actually have freer-flowing traffic.

Researchers compared some of greater Phoenix’s denser neighborhoods – South Scottsdale, Tempe, and East Phoenix — with a few of its more sprawling ones – Glendale, Gilbert, and North Scottsdale. Some interesting patterns emerged.

In the more compact neighborhoods, the average household owned 1.55 cars, compared to 1.92 in more suburban areas. Residents of higher-density neighborhoods also traveled shorter distances both to get to work and to run errands, the study found.

The average work trip was a little longer than seven miles for higher-density neighborhoods; in the more suburban neighborhoods, it was almost 11 miles. Residents of the three compact neighborhoods traveled just less than three miles to shop, while residents of sprawling locations traveled an average of more than four miles. All of this led the more urban dwellers to travel an average of nearly five fewer miles per day than their suburban counterparts.

The density divide also played an important role in transit use. Rates varied from as high as eight percent transit ridership in high-density neighborhoods to as low as one percent in the more sprawling areas.

All of this translated into a reduced strain on roadways in the places that had more people — running counter to one of the strongest objections to mixed-use development. Comparing one suburban corridor to two of the streets in the more dense neighborhoods, the study found that on the more urban streets, traffic congestion was “much lower,” or about half as high (measured by the ratio of the capacity of the roadway to the actual volume of cars on it).

How did more compact neighborhoods manage to have less congestion? It’s not just because residents there drive less overall. Two design characteristics also ease traffic, according to AZ DOT. Fine-grained street networks distributed traffic evenly across the higher-density neighborhoods, while every driver in the suburban neighborhoods was funneled onto the same big arterials. At the same time, improved pedestrian conditions in commercial centers made it easier for some drivers to park once and walk from destination to destination, taking cars off the road precisely in the areas that attract the most people.

The results of the Arizona study may not apply everywhere, due to the state’s extremely spread out pattern of development. The higher-density neighborhoods still only had between six and seven households per acre, compared with between three and four in the lower-density places. As the report notes, “By Eastern U.S. standards, all of these densities are effectively suburban in character.”

But the report controls for a host of factors, strengthening the conclusion that the different travel behaviors were really the result of design, rather than income, say, or the student population.

The Arizona Department of Transportation deserves credit — first of all, because this is a fantastic, thorough, well-timed study, but also for pointing out the important policy implications. The agency’s recommendations include a public awareness campaign about the benefits of mixed-use, compact development; better planning and public engagement tools; and providing incentives for smart planning.

The authors noted, for example, that outdated policies sabotage planning efforts that are beneficial for livability, public health, and the environment in the name of maintaining traffic flow. The supreme irony — in light of the study results — is that these policies ultimately fail the congestion test too:

Local planners and planning commissions are still using traditional traffic engineering approaches to assess the impact of development projects. By looking only at traffic congestion levels on adjacent links, ignoring through travel, and failing to account for the efficiencies of mixed-use development on lower vehicle trip rates and VMT, progressive projects are likely to be rejected or unreasonably downsized.

The DOT also concludes that congestion isn’t always a bad thing, that density is the key to successful transit, and that short blocks are critical for building vibrant, mixed-use places.

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Factoring in proximity to bike lanes, street connectivity, topography, and commuter cycling rates, the Bike Score algorithm rated Minneapolis America's most bikeable city. Image: Walk Score

The people behind Walk Score, the real estate rating service that goes by the slogan “Drive Less, Live More,” are out with a new rating system, based on hard data, that should prove useful to prospective city dwellers: Bike Score.

The company launched the Bike Score website today, using its new algorithm to rank the ten most bikeable cities in the country. (We covered their release of city rankings for transit last month.) Minneapolis ran away with the top prize with a 79 percent bikeability rating. San Francisco tied Portland for number two, despite the fact that hilliness was a factor. D.C. and New York also placed highly (while the NYC core rates very highly on Bike Score, the bike lane deserts outside the center city score quite low).

The staff of Walk Score is made up of a whole lot of bike commuters. No wonder they were excited to launch a new bikeability ranking. Photo courtesy of Walk Score

In other bikeability rating news, the League of American Bicyclists released its 2012 list of Bicycle Friendly Communities today. There’s a lot of overlap between the BFCs and the Bike Score winners, but they are compiled use vastly different methodologies. For one thing, you won’t find two of the League’s top three cycling cities on the Bike Score list because Bike Score, so far, only looks at cities with populations over 200,000. Sorry, Boulder and Davis.

Colorado and Montana did well in the League’s rankings this year. Missoula and Durango moved up to gold, and the Colorado towns of Gunnison and Aspen made it onto the list for the first year, rolling in at the silver level. Look for your city on their updated BFC list [PDF].

The League bases its BFC choices on somewhat subjective criteria. They look for the “five Es”: engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation & planning, and enforcement. Decisions are made by staff and external reviewers, in consultation with local stakeholders.

Bike Score, on the other hand, is based on pure numbers. Individual addresses are rated on a scale of 0-100 based on four factors:

• the availability of bike infrastructure (with on-street and off-street facilities weighted differently)
• the hilliness of the area (the one factor a city can’t control)
• amenities and road connectivity
• the number of bike commuters (because “biking is social” and there’s safety in numbers, explained Walk Score’s chief technology officer and co-founder Matt Lerner)

To then determine the score for the city, the individual address scores are used to compute scores for each block, and then the block-by-block scores are weighted by population density.

“For every location in the city, we add up the number of meters of bike lane, and there’s a distance-to-K function so the closer you have a meter of bike lane, the more valuable it is, and we don’t give you any credit after about a mile out,” said Lerner. “For every address, we do that calculation. It’s a new metric that is really about a specific location, not about the city overall. So what we’re really measuring is, for average person in that city, how good is biking.”

Note: The capability to score your own home isn’t available on the website yet, as it is for Transit Score and Walk Score, but Lerner says they hope to enable that soon so real estate agents can use Bike Score to advertise the homes they have for sale, as they do now with the other two. Walk Score has an Apartment Search function that allows renters to search by nearby amenities, distance to transit, commute time, price, number of bedrooms – and, of course, Walk Score. It interfaces with craigslist to show the complete ad all in one place with the walk/bike/transit information.

Right now you can plug in any address in the country and get a Walk Score for it, but even once Bike Score’s full functionality is rolled out, it won’t be so widespread. “With Bike Score we have to go out and get bike lane data from each city,” Lerner said, “so it’s more of a manual process.” They’re taking votes via Twitter for the next cities they should score.

Source: FRED

Everyone’s trying to figure out why, after decades of consistent growth, the amount Americans drive is leveling off and even declining. The decline started during the recession, to be sure, but was more dramatic than in previous recessions. As the economy began to get back on its feet, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) just barely ticked upward — and then fell again.

High gas prices probably have something to do with it. Young people embracing cities over suburban living — and valuing smartphones more than cars — might have something to do with it. It could be peak car – the theory that continued growth in driving simply can’t go on forever.

Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider found the trend notable enough to give it this headline over the weekend: “This Collapse In Automobile Usage Is Completely Unprecedented In The American Economy.”

Looking at VMT data now available on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Economic Research site, Weisenthal posted two charts that put the one above in a little bit of perspective. (Note that these look somewhat different from the first chart because they look at the change from year to year, not the absolute numbers.)

Source: Business Insider

The two lines — GDP and VMT — track pretty closely together until just now. The rate of change in GDP more or less holds steady, but the VMT line takes a major dip. This was what Weisenthal found so unbelievable: that the reduction in VMT could be decoupled from economic fluctuations. But then he remembered something else that’s seemingly decoupled from GDP these days: employment.

When the blue line dips, that means the "population not in the labor force" increases. Source: Business Insider

The graph shows a rough correlation between growth in the number of people out of the workforce and decline in VMT. Indeed, this has been called a “jobless recovery” so the growth in people commuting probably has not been as strong as the rise in GDP.

Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt tackled this issue in a post two months ago and concluded that VMT was dropping despite job growth, and in terms of absolute numbers, that seems to be true. The chart above adds complexity to the picture but doesn’t discount Angie’s conclusion. High gas prices are still causing people to leave the car in the garage and take transit. Decline in exurban growth and strengthening preferences for walkable development mean trips get shorter and can even be taken without the use of the automobile.

It remains to be seen what will happen when or if employment fully bounces back, but there’s reason to believe the downward trend in miles driven could have legs.

Neither Democratic nor Republican proposals will have any impact on gas prices, but that doesn't seem to matter in the political blame game. Photo: FuelEconomy.gov

Republicans are blaming President Obama for the “high” prices, saying his refusal to sign onto more oil drilling, weaker regulations, and the Keystone pipeline is costing Americans at the pump. Obama shot back with his plan to increase regulation of oil speculators. Neither plan will do much of anything about gas prices, but they make for good election-year candy.

The GOP has passed a raft of bills to increase oil drilling, even (especially!) in environmentally sensitive areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Rocky Mountains. We’ve covered on this blog several of those bills that were supposed to help pay for infrastructure.

Now Republicans have a new plan to lower gas prices by giving your kid asthma.

The Gasoline Regulations Act would water down the 40-year-old Clean Air Act requirement that pollution standards be decided purely on the science of public health. Instead, it would introduce a cost factor. It also mandates research on the economic impact of EPA regulations and delays the enactment of air quality rules until the study is complete. “This legislation raises the cost of gasoline to a new level,” NRDC’s Scott Slesinger said. “Americans would have to pay with both their money and their health.”

Under existing law, cost concerns can factor into how air quality problems are mitigated, but they can’t be a factor when determining how much pollution is unhealthy to breathe. That part, these days, is still left up to science. The Supreme Court upheld this standard in 2001, with none other than conservative mainstay Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion.

NRDC also claims “the bill won’t do a thing to lower gas prices,” and the organization’s C4 wing put out a video of bill sponsor Ed Whitfield admitting that fact (while other Republicans line up to say otherwise).

Meanwhile, President Obama announced his plan a couple weeks ago to rein in Wall Street oil speculators. The proposal would beef up the ability of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to oversee trading (to the tune of $52 million), increase penalties for market manipulation, and force traders to spend more of their own money on the deals.

Republicans are trying to remove regulations, not strengthen them, so the House is unlikely to go along with this plan. Then again, Democrats are unlikely to go along with the GOP Gas Act. And really, most bills and proposals introduced these days don’t go anywhere. According to GovTrack, only five percent of bills introduced are signed into law on a good year – and if you hadn’t noticed, this is not a good year.

“A lot of Beltway scorekeepers think Obama’s announcement is smart, simply because it produced headlines such as, ‘Obama Moves to Curb Oil Speculators,’” Matthew Philips wrote in BusinessWeek. “That may be, but it’s not clear the plan would actually lower the price of oil, because the demand to invest in it would remain.” He added that if investors can no longer invest in oil speculation, they might just go ahead and “start buying actual oil.”

None of these measures will do anything to impact gas prices, wrote USA Today’s Wendy Koch. “U.S. gas prices are largely determined by global crude oil prices,” she wrote, “which depend on a widening and shifting array of factors half a world away: economic sanctions on Iran; deepwater drilling off Brazil; spare oil capacity in Saudi Arabia; auto use in China; less nuclear power in Japan.”

“So oil rigs may be hopping in North Dakota,” she went on, “but what happens in the Strait of Hormuz will likely have more impact on prices at the local gas station — even though the U.S. doesn’t import a single gallon from Iran.”

Koch lists five factors that do impact prices at the pump:

• Global crude oil price increases – the price of crude determines 72 percent of the price of a gallon of gas
• Iran and other geopolitical uncertainties in places like Yemen, Syria, and Sudan
• Limited spare capacity (meaning even small changes in supply or demand can swing prices)
• Rising worldwide demand – it’s going down in the U.S. as we invest in more efficient technologies and driving levels off, but in emerging economies oil demand is booming
• Refinery closures and production costs

One element largely missing from the bipartisan outcry over skyrocketing gas prices is the pesky truth that gas prices are actually dropping. Not by a lot, but the average cost of a gallon of gas went down eight cents next month, and experts agree that it’s peaked for the year. But don’t expect reality dampen the bloated political rhetoric six months before the election.

So now May is upon us, it’s Bike Month, and we’ve got 31 days to hit our target of $30,000. Five readers won subscriptions to “Yes!” magazine in our first round of prize-giving, and thanks to the generous folks at Planet Bike, we have some fantastic accoutrements to give away to three lucky donors. Each package includes:

• SuperFlash taillight and Blaze 1-watt headlight
• K.O.K.O. Rack – tubular aluminum rear rack
• Fenders of your choice
• Protege 5.0 five-function computer
• BRT Strap – LED safety Light
• Planet Bike socks
• Courtesy bell, brass

Here’s most of the package in one place (note: not to scale)…

Reader contributions are an indispensable source of support for Streetsblog and enable us to produce in-depth coverage of the livable streets beat, from local neighborhoods to City Hall to Congress. Please give and help us put together the articles and videos you see on our site every day.

Happy Bike Month everyone. Thanks for reading and supporting Streetsblog.

– Ben

And lucky for you, we’ve made the process easier. Rather than determining your contribution based on how generous (or hungry) you’re feeling at the moment, we’ve figured out a rational and precise way to pick a dollar figure.

• Start with $1 for every time you’ve wondered what’s going on with the transportation bill, clicked over to Streetsblog, and found out.
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• Add the amount of your choice to support Streetsblog’s tireless coverage of transportation and land use issues and policy.

That’s it! Add it up, click here to donate that amount. And a few lucky contributors will win a one year subscription to YES! magazine.

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Yours for safe and sustainable streets,

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Keith Parker

President and CEO, VIA Transit, San Antonio (formerly director of the Charlotte Area Transit System, CATS)

San Antonio's Keith Parker has developed a specialty: making transit work in car-centric cities. Photo: San Antonio Business Journal

When San Antonio decided it was time to embrace rail, the city turned to Keith Parker. Formerly the head of the Charlotte Area Transit System, Parker knows what it takes to make transit work in a car-centric city, as the overwhelming success of Charlotte’s LYNX attests.

LYNX smashed ridership expectations and spurred a wave of transit-oriented development. Its success has inspired nearby cities like Durham to get serious about transit, and it is increasingly seen as a national model.

Now San Antonio is looking to emulate that performance. Currently, this central Texas city is the country’s largest with a bus-only transit system. But San Antonio is making up for lost time, having approved plans for 39 miles of light rail and 57 miles of bus rapid transit. The first bus rapid transit line is expected to operate by the end of this year. And the city is planning a three-mile streetcar line through downtown.

Parker, who took the top job at VIA in 2009, is direct about his goals. He told the San Antonio Business Journal shortly after his arrival in the city: “Any community that has not gotten a firm hold on how to deal with congestion, air quality and getting to and from jobs, school and recreational areas is going to get left behind.”

And he’s finding creative ways to get it done. We gave Parker kudos last year for his ingenious move to grab streetcar funds from a fund that would otherwise be used to advance sprawl development in Texas’ unincorporated areas. We also like the program he started in Charlotte to lure people out of their cars and into transit; “Just Try Us” offered a free one-week pass to selected zip codes.

Mike McKeever

Director, Sacramento Area Council of Governments

Mike McKeever, the man behind California's Sustainable Communities Planning Act. Photo: California Forward

Mike McKeever is a planner who believes in community involvement. When the Sacramento region was developing its land use plan just over 10 years ago, his agency invested in three complementary data and mapping tools that help make the wonky business of regional land use planning accessible to regular people. These tools — a planning geek’s dream — used GIS visualization and data projections to present possible land use scenarios to local residents in a brilliantly streamlined and accessible way.

So imagine this: At a public meeting, a visual showing five proposed land use scenarios appears on the screen. The Sacramento Area Council of Governments cross references each scenario with projections for key indicators like traffic volumes and rents, allowing residents to choose their preference wholly informed of the costs and benefits. (These tools are now recommended to communities around the country by the Federal Highway Administration.)

What emerged from that project was Sacramento’s influential smart growth plan, the Sacramento Region Blueprint. The plan was groundbreaking in that it linked preferred land use outcomes to transportation spending, promoting “compact, mixed-use development and more transit choices as an alternative to low density development.”

Sacramento’s Blueprint served as the basis for California’s Sustainable Communities Planning Act, also known as SB 375, tying transportation and land use decisions to emissions reduction targets. Now the law of the land across the state, this legislation makes regions responsible for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from passenger vehicles. And it does it through a common-sense, cost-saving approach: focusing growth where people already live and work.

Some construction interests are reducing their financial support for the Republican Party after this week's transportation bill fiasco, according to the New York Times. Photo: MSNBC

Now some of the groups that have traditionally been the party’s biggest supporters are crying foul. An article in yesterday’s New York Times featured several major Republican campaign donors who feel burned by a number of recent actions advanced by the party’s right wing — the most painful of which was the failure to pass a transportation bill.

“The majority of the work is supposed to go out in spring and get done by the fall,” Jeff Shoaf, a government relations official at Associated General Contractors, told the paper. The group donated $1 million to candidates in 2010, according to the report, and about 80 percent of that to Republicans. “Instead of spending 60 or 70 percent of their budgets, they’re going to cut back to 50 or 40 percent to make sure they have some cash in the fall,” he said.

Reporter Jonathan Weisman writes:

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders [passed yesterday] in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing.

Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative political action committee the Club for Growth, was unapologetic. “Free market is not always the same as pro-business,” he told the Times.

As of this morning, Speaker John Boehner was supposedly trying to round up votes for another five-year bill. It looks like he couldn’t find them, according to Fox News reporter Chad Pergram, so now the House may take up something more like the Senate’s 18-month bill:

The five-year bill that Boehner tried and failed to get his GOP colleagues to pass yesterday preserved dedicated funding for transit, but it didn’t really solve any of the other contentious issues with the previous bills (except, thankfully, for the double-decker horse trailer issue.) It kept oil drilling, which Democrats oppose, and didn’t lower the $260 billion price tag, which conservatives bristle at.

Perhaps the bill’s downfall, however, was leadership’s commitment to keeping it earmark-free. Though many analysts would call that a noble route, it leaves members without specific projects in their districts that they can use to sell the bill to their constituents. Ironically, without some local pork thrown in, a federal transportation bill looks like a big hunk of Washington pork to many members of Boehner’s caucus.

No one in House leadership wants to vote for the Senate bill, but that appears to be their only option, as yet another internal proposal dies. The House could try to pass an 18-month or two-year extension, but Politico reports that such a measure would have a “rocky road to passage.” It would basically implement the Senate bill’s funding levels (or close to it) but without a way of paying for it, leaving the Highway Trust Fund vulnerable to insolvency before the extension even expired.

One way or another, it looks like an 18-month bill — basically a glorified extension — has a path to passage now.

Last week, Majority Leader Harry Reid finalized his “manager’s amendment,” combining all the major components of the Senate transpo bill and adding several smaller amendments. One such amendment — the Cardin-Cochran amendment protecting access to bike-ped funding for cities and towns — had received the support of a number of transportation advocates, and today Transportation for America announced that it is mobilizing support for the entire Senate bill.

Before the bill can be voted on, Reid’s amendment has to pass. And before Reid’s amendment can be voted on, it must receive 60 or more “ayes” in a cloture vote. That cloture vote will be held tomorrow.

Some experts, speaking anonymously since this is all speculation for now, believe that Reid’s amendment will pass. Certain Republicans, like James Inhofe and Richard Shelby, have invested a great deal of time and effort in co-authoring portions of the bill and would rather not see their work lose out to delay tactics. Other Republicans, like Scott Brown and Susan Collins, are moderates who have more to more to gain by voting in a bipartisan manner than by sticking to the party line. Still others, like the retiring Olympia Snowe, simply have nothing to lose and would rather vote for something than for nothing.

Those five senators plus all the Democrats add up to 58 votes, so Reid would still need two more. Given the bipartisan manner in which the bill was written, that shouldn’t be hard, right?

But there is a second possibility that is worrying some other experts: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could delay the Senate’s transportation bill on purpose to protect the reputation of House Speaker John Boehner. By thwarting Reid’s cloture vote, the logic goes, McConnell buys time for Boehner to bring something — anything — to the floor of the House and maintain the illusion of control, even if it’s only a temporary extension. McConnell and others have also painted Reid as an extreme partisan for trying to prevent Republicans from amending his bill, and it’s possible that the tactic might peel away some Democrats who want to distance themselves from Reid.

And yet, delaying the Senate bill any longer may imperil its chances of passage, and McConnell may end up with his own loyalty crisis on his hands.

The cloture vote goes down tomorrow, after which the picture should be somewhat clearer. Stay tuned.

John Boehner faced resistance from within his own party to his radical transportation proposal. Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak

The news mainly resurrects a host of old questions: How big will the House proposal be, and how long will it last? How will the House bill affect local planning efforts, and how much support will bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure receive? Just like this time last month, it’s anyone’s guess, but this being the Tea Party House, the bill is almost definitely going to get smaller.

The House is expected to scale back its initial five-year, $260 billion proposal to something more closely resembling the Senate’s two-year, $109 billion proposal. Five- or six-year transportation bills have been the norm for decades, but since the last long-term bill expired in 2009, efforts to pass a new one have failed — whether proposed by a Democratic majority or the current Republican one. (Whether a two-year bill may actually create a competing precedent is the subject of today’s Transportation Experts Blog at the National Journal.)

This might not be such a bad thing, surmises Steve Heminger, executive director of the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission. “Maybe what we have here,” Heminger said at a media conference call convened by T4America, “is an emerging consensus to buy a little time, get past the presidential election, then use that time wisely and think big again.” A two-year bill, then, would really serve as an extension of the current law while “planting the seeds,” in Heminger’s words, for a longer-term bill that would “invest in the network the way we need to.”

Speaking on the same call, John Robert Smith, president of Reconnecting America, said of the House’s decision to revamp their approach, “I think as bad as the bill started, you’re seeing Republicans and Democrats coming together to solve problems they’ve heard about from local governments and citizens of their home districts.” Smith specifically mentioned the Nadler-Blumenauer-LaTourette amendment, which would restore bike-ped funding, as one such instance.

Meanwhile, the Senate will get back to debating its own bill this week, beginning with two amendments that have nothing to do with the underlying bill: one that would effectively dismantle President Obama’s compromise measure on health insurance coverage for contraception, and one that would cut all aid to Egypt until the American pro-democracy organizers held there are released.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had tried to keep these amendments at bay, and indeed a majority of Senators agreed with him. However, he fell short of the 60 votes needed to proceed to more relevant amendments, like the Cardin-Cochran proposal to let metro areas access federal bike-ped funding.

These non-germane amendments may simply be there for the sake of argument, as Senator James Inhofe has indicated. The Senate bill is still expected to pass with the same bipartisan support it enjoyed in committee.

The possibility exists, however, that while the Senate bill would keep spending at current levels, the House bill might call for cuts to transportation spending. Such a move would go counter to the advice of blue-ribbon panels, industry groups, and the policy goals of the Obama administration. It would also surely put a squeeze on transit agencies that are already struggling to stave off service cuts.

Michael Steel, a spokesperson for Speaker John Boehner, told the National Journal today:

Given Senate Democrats’ unwillingness to pursue a longer-term infrastructure and energy plan, House Republican leaders are considering a revamped approach that would retain the speaker’s vision of linking infrastructure to expanded American energy production, and allow Republicans to stay on offense on energy and jobs.

According to one Hill staffer, if the GOP are blaming Democrats for refusing to cooperate, it likely means they didn’t have the support they needed within their own party to win a simple majority. The source said the bill was facing negative reactions from the transportation industry and advocates, as well as more spending-averse representatives from the far right wing.

Whatever the House GOP offers in its place will not kick transit funding out of the highway trust fund, the source said. That would fix a huge flaw in the bill, but as T4America points out, there are many more shortcomings that need to be addressed.

Boehner already had to delay floor debate on his transportation bill before the President’s Day recess began. Streetsblog will have more on this story as it develops.

I balked at the suggestion. Surely, better drivers’ education would make roads less dangerous, and someone with a genuine phobia of cars might suffer in our auto-centric world. But we’d also all be a good deal safer if more drivers held a bit more fear.

Despite advances in traffic and car safety, driving remains the most perilous thing most of us do each day.  And though the average American is more likely to be killed with a car than with a gun, on the whole, drivers have little anxiety about driving.  Hubris is just one of several reasons why. The propensity of drivers to overestimate their ability has been well documented, especially by Tom Vanderbilt. In Traffic, he explains how the false sense of control and ease driving provides, along with humans’ inability to self-assess, allows most drivers to rate themselves “above average.” The dangerous outcome is a “narcissism” that encourages aggressive driving.

“Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain,” Emerson wrote. Do the thing several times a day, and it becomes banal.  Though how much and how fast we drive are key determinants of crash risk, driving everywhere, no matter how short the trip, and speeding, no matter how little time is saved, have been normalized. This normalization is what makes crashes, when they happen, so difficult to process. One grief counselor described how a client, struggling to grasp his brother’s death in a crash, sat in her office “week after week saying, ‘He just went to get milk.’”

There are other reasons why we view our chances of crashing as remote. Scant media coverage of crashes, unless somehow anomalous and spectacular — a plane landing on a New Jersey highway, killing five, a nineteen-vehicle pile-up in Florida — helps encourage our sense of invulnerability. The efficiency of modern crash response makes everyday disasters less visible and reduces rubbernecking, which can snarl traffic and be dangerous but serves a purpose. Seeing is believing.

But who wants to see it?  Who wants to dwell on the dangers, when there seems little choice but to drive to get to shops, to work, to school?  The companies who sell us cars and insurance understand this well. A few use fear to sell coverage. (Allstate’s black-humored “Mayhem” campaign, for example, catalogs the threats posed by other vehicles, pedestrians, animals, acts of God — reinforcing fear of everything but our own behavior.) Most insurers instead facilitate our denial. In Liberty Mutual ads, F/X magic returns crushed and crumpled cars to pristine newness, intimating that the right insurance makes “accidents” go away. Nationwide uses hilarity to chase away fear; its current commercial shows a rollover as downright hysterical! Not one drop of coffee — or blood — is spilled.

The cars on the market today offer more safety equipment than ever; advances such as blind spot and pedestrian detection systems are added each model year.  While this is reason to celebrate, a car with these technologies can also make its owner feel free to drive more recklessly. Wider public perception of safety is also inflated by the automakers’ relentless advertising around these innovations, despite, as the Highway Loss Data Institute recently demonstrated, that they can take three decades to make their way across the national fleet.

Other automotive engineering efforts would seem to work against safety improvements, even setting aside — and it’s a big set-aside — distracting infotainment technologies. The car companies toil to make vehicle interiors as quiet and road conditions as unintrusive as possible. Their overriding goal: have drivers feel safe, feel in control. With excessive speed a major contributor to crashes, however, it might be better to feel potholes and thus drive more slowly, to sense our speed and take turns more cautiously.

A telling experience came for me at General Motors’ Milford Proving Grounds a few years ago. During a test drive for journalists, my turn came to try out a new crossover on a wet-slick course. I was supposed to initiate a skid, so that the automatic stability control would kick in and help right the vehicle. But I drove too slowly—I was too nervous—and the vehicle didn’t skid.  The second time, I sped up, skidded, and the ASC kicked in, proving that it was a potential lifesaver. But so was my fear.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former investment banker and marketing executive, is co-author, with anthropologist Catherine Lutz, of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives.

On January 6, 1983, the icon of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan, signed legislation to raise the gas tax for the first time in more than two decades, devoting a portion of the revenue to transit.

We’ve been reading about this moment a lot, as the current GOP leadership in the House tries to undo Reagan’s legacy by eviscerating dedicated transit funding.

In this ABC News clip, you can see that Reagan touted the measure, a five cent gas tax increase, as an economic catalyst. It would raise $5.5 billion for transportation investment and result in 320,000 new jobs, the administration said. The measure even reserved one cent per gallon for transit, all for the cost of about $30 a year for the average driver.

Sounds like a win-win, right? After some initial resistance to the idea, Reagan eventually came around to that perspective, even if some special interest groups (truckers) didn’t.

What a difference 29 years makes.