Felix Salmon

Traffic expands to fill the space available. This is known as Down’s Law of Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion, and has been known since 1962; new research shows that it’s true even more generally than previously suspected.

Increasing lane kilometers for one type of road diverts little traffic from other types of road. We find no evidence that the provision of public transportation affects VKT. We conclude that increased provision of roads or public transit is unlikely to relieve congestion.

Eric Jaffe draws a simple conclusion from all this:

Whenever a driver shifts onto public transportation, another one quickly grabs the open lane. That leaves just one solution to the traffic problem plaguing American cities: congestion pricing.

“We cannot think of any other solution,” says Gilles Duranton, the paper’s co-author. “As soon as you manage to create space on the road, by whatever means, people are going to use that space. Except when people have to pay for it, of course.”

I’m a fan of congestion pricing. But I’m also realistic about it, and the fact is that for all Jaffe’s enthusiasm, congestion pricing has its own Down’s-like characteristics. Jaffe raves about the “success” of congestion pricing in London and Stockholm, but the only chart he provides gives numbers for the trial period in Stockholm. If you go looking for recent data on traffic in London, Stockholm, or other cities with congestion charges, it can prove surprisingly difficult to find.

Here’s Jaffe, again, quoting Duranton:

“My feeling is, yes, people tend to be against it before they see it at work,” says Duranton. “They think it’s going to cost them more money, which directly it will, but they’re all very unclear about the benefits; i.e. traffic is way more fluid, way faster, and pollution is going down.”

There’s another way to look at this phenomenon, though. When congestion pricing is first introduced, people recoil against it — they expend quite a lot of effort to avoid the charge, and traffic goes down. Over time, however, it becomes just another part of the cost of driving, along with gas and insurance and parking tickets. As that happens, traffic goes back up again. Congestion-charge revenues go up too, of course, and those can be reinvested into public transport.

But traffic is like water — it wants to find its own level, which tends, in cities, to be maximum capacity. If you want to implement a system which keeps traffic below maximum capacity, then you need to apply significant pressure on drivers to keep them away from the roads. And that means not just implementing a congestion charge, but also regularly increasing the amount of the charge over time.

This is how the Singaporean congestion-charging system works. Think of a shutter-priority camera: you set the shutter speed, and then dial the aperture so that the exposure is correct. In Singapore, they set the amount of traffic they want, and then dial up the congestion charge until they get it. It’s much the same idea as the one behind SFPark: you set the number of empty parking spaces you want, and then dial up the parking-meter pricing until you get there.

But the point in all of these cases is that the charge has to be variable over time — specifically, it has to increase over time. Without those steady increases, drivers become inured to the congestion charge, and traffic will go back up to its former level.

As a result, drivers are pretty much never happy with congestion pricing. Either it’s painfully expensive and going up in price — expensive enough to keep them from driving — or else it doesn’t have much effect.

That doesn’t mean that congestion pricing isn’t good public policy. It is. But it’s always going to be unpopular with a powerful constituency. (Drivers, in nearly any city you care to mention, tend to have a disproportional amount of political clout.) Local politicians looking for a popular platform will run on reducing or abolishing the charge, or at the very least not increasing it. And so the old fight keeps on being fought over and over again: while increasing a charge isn’t as politically difficult as introducing one, it’s still tough.

This is something worth remembering when urbanists start waxing utopian on the subject of congestion pricing: once it’s introduced, the fight isn’t over. It’s never over. And if you leave a system long enough without increasing its price, its efficacy starts declining dramatically.

Emily Badger — you might remember her from her great article on slugging in DC — has a fantastic post on street-map design over at The Atlantic Cities.

Garrick and Marshall’s research into street network patterns began in Davis, California. Often cited as the most bike-friendly city in America, it has the country’s highest rate – more than 16 percent – of people commuting to work on two wheels. It turns out, though, that Davis also has one of the lowest traffic fatality rates in the country, a counterintuitive discovery for traffic engineers who consider biking a riskier alternative to driving.

Inspired by Davis, Garrick and Marshall compiled data on 230,000 crashes spanning 11 years in 24 medium-sized California cities. And they began to parse and classify street patterns in a kind of taxonomy. There are networks that look like square grids and others that resemble trees, with one trunk, many branches. There are networks that have tributaries, like a river, and others that have main roads radiating out from a central hub. There are hybrids of all these, and street blocks of different lengths, and networks that have 45 intersections per square mile (like Salt Lake City) and others that have as many as 550 (Portland, Ore).

In their California study, Garrick and Marshall eventually realized the safest cities had an element in common: They were all incorporated before 1930. Something about the way they were designed made them safer. The key wasn’t necessarily that large numbers of bikers produced safer cities, but that the design elements of cities that encouraged people to bike in places like Davis were the same ones that were yielding fewer traffic fatalities.

These cities were built the old way: along those monotonous grids.

When streets are built to a human scale, rather than being built for cars, those streets are friendlier and safer. More generally, the metric of intersections per square mile is an incredibly useful idea to keep in mind. It’s correlated with density, but it’s not the same thing at all. For instance, Badger reproduces these maps from the Federal Housing Authority, back in the 1930s: we’re seeing two plans, here, with identical housing density. But the one labeled BAD has ten intersections, while the one labeled GOOD has only seven. And of course the distance you need to travel to get from any random point to a given house is much shorter, on average, in the BAD map than it is in the GOOD one.

Shorter distances mean that you’re more likely to walk or bike; they also make the neighborhood feel smaller. For many decades, suburbia was designed on the idea that Americans want to feel as though they’re far away from each other, but the fact is that we need community and linkages just as much as we need a space of our own.

A city with high density still feels inhuman if it has enormous blocks; it doesn’t matter how many people you squeeze into downtown Phoenix, it will never feel like a vibrant, high-density city. Even in New York, the distance between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue is far too big: the shorter blocks east of 5th Avenue, between, say, 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue, are much more pleasant, as are the small blocks in the Financial District.

It’s astonishing to me that Portland and Salt Lake City can differ, in terms of intersections per square mile, by a factor of more than 12. According to Wikipedia, Salt Lake City has a density of 1,666 people per square mile, compared to Portland’s 4,288. Which means that Portland has almost five times as many intersections per person as Salt Lake City does.

Which raises another question. Do street intersections make you liberal?

Matt Chaban manages to get a quote today which perfectly encapsulates the self-defeating nature of anti-bike activists. He lays out the basics of New York’s bike-share scheme — 600 stations, 10,000 bikes — and then quotes one friend and one foe. The friend is Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. Here’s the foe:

“DOT and Janette Sadik-Khan’s problem is they say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing, take it or leave it,’” said Sean Sweeney of the Soho Alliance, a frequent DOT critic. “Instead, it should be, ‘Here’s 20 racks, where would you like them?’” He expressed concern about whether the stations would be located on too-narrow sidewalks or in valuable parking spaces or other inopportune locations.

Still, he said it would be nice if done right. “I walk a lot, I’ll walk from 59th Street downtown,” Mr. Sweeney said. “Let’s say I don’t want to walk or take the subway, then a bike sounds nice. But it’s still a matter of giving over public space to a private company, so we have to be careful.” He added that no stations should be place in Soho.

I love the way that Sweeney starts by implying that he would be happy to place 20 racks around Soho, underscores that by saying that the scheme “sounds nice” — and then, at the end, drops the bomb that he’s already decided that the optimal number of racks in Soho is precisely zero. He can’t even pretend to be open to the idea for more than a couple of sentences.

Soho, for those of you who don’t know it, is a perennial traffic nightmare, for two reasons. One reason is Broome Street, a key approach to the Holland Tunnel — and it’s hard to do much about that. But the other reason is the curse of on-street parking. Soho is Exhibit A for anybody trying to demonstrate the high cost of free or underpriced on-street parking: there’s way too much space devoted to cars, both in terms of parking and in terms of open pavement, and a huge proportion of the cars driving in Soho are going around in circles looking for a parking spot.

The drivers of those cars are unhappy, and they make life miserable for pedestrians and cyclists, too. It’s a horrible state of affairs, especially given the numbers: according to a 2006 study, 54% of people on Prince Street came to the area by subway or bus, and an additional 35% by walking or bicycle. Only 9% drove to the area in a private car, while an additional 9% arrived by taxi or livery. (The numbers add up to a bit more than 100% because some people use two or more modes of transport.)

If Soho can’t have bike racks, there’s really no point in having a bike-sharing scheme at all. Soho is precisely where people want to go: it’s full of shops and restaurants and other destinations. But somehow the Soho Alliance has already decided that a bike rack is never as important as a “valuable parking space”.

Sweeney, then, is the embodiment of precisely the reason why the DOT can’t outsource rack placement decisions to community organizations: those organizations tend to be dominated by people who are going to be aggressively unhelpful on that front. There’s not a parking space in all of Soho which is so valuable that its street space wouldn’t be better off as a bike rack. If Sweeney can’t recognize that, he’s never going to be a useful person to consult on placement decisions.

Is there something fishy about the bonds used to finance the parking lots at Yankee Stadium? Of course there is. And you don’t need to look far before you see two big reasons why. The first is that the bonds were issued by the Empire State Development Corporation. That’s Empire State as in New York State, one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional states in the union. The second is that these are conduit bonds — an asset class which, as Nathaniel Popper explains, is only for the very brave:

Conduits have grown roughly three times faster than the general municipal market over the last five years, according to data from Thomson Reuters, a New York data firm; $84 billion of these bonds were issued last year alone…

Although conduits account for roughly 20% of all municipal bonds, they have been responsible for about 70% of all defaults in the municipal bond market in recent years, according to Income Securities Advisors, a Florida research firm. Over the last two years, the five municipal bond issuers with the most troubled bonds have all been conduit bond issuers.

Conduits constitute a brilliant boondoggle for everybody except the taxpayers who end up out of pocket. You want to build a parking lot next to Yankee Stadium? That’s probably not a great idea, as is evidenced by the fact that this season the lots are only 31% full on game days. Clearly Yankees fans are more than capable of attending games without needing to use anything like the 9,000 parking spots that Yankees management pushed for when they negotiated their new stadium. And parking lots are inherently ugly and unhappy things; Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz’s idea to build a hotel on some of that land instead is clearly a good one.

There’s no public interest in having all that space taken up with empty parking spots. So why on earth did New York State subsidize the construction of the lots by issuing $237 million of bonds whose interest payments are exempt from all state and federal income taxes? The people who bought those bonds financed a commercial venture and hoped to make a profit by doing so. If they did make a profit, there’s no reason at all for them not to pay income tax on that income.

Popper’s concerns about conduits in general go in spades for these parking-lot bonds:

“A lot of these are corporate bonds disguised as municipal bonds,” said Michael Lissack, a former municipal investment banker at Smith Barney who is now a critic of the industry. “How is this a good use of our tax expenditures? I would prefer to use that money seeing that kids get vaccinated or learn to read.”…

Frank Hoadley, who is in charge of selling traditional municipal bonds for the state of Wisconsin, said that the riskiness of conduit bonds has driven up borrowing costs for cities and states. He said Wisconsin paid $4 million more in annual interest than it would otherwise have had to on new bonds issued in January because of investor fears about the municipal market.

“Government issuers like Wisconsin are swept up in the smear that is tarnishing the whole municipal market because of conduit borrower problems,” said Hoadley, Wisconsin’s capital finance director.

The parking-lot project was particularly risky because it was structured with no equity. (Much like Goldman Sachs’s notorious Abacus deal, come to think.) All the money to build the lots came from tax-free bond investors, rather than the owner of the project, a tiny mom-and-pop nonprofit 100 miles from the Bronx which has a history of defaulting on tax-exempt bonds. Parking projections are notoriously error-prone at the best of times, but in this case the project was financed with a debt service ratio of just 1.2: the projections didn’t need to be far off before the lots ran into serious financial trouble.

The biggest winners in this story are the Yankees. They are luxuriating in the presence of endless parking infrastructure, they didn’t need to pay a penny for it, and they can offset the blame for misuse of public land by saying that it’s not their project and they don’t own the land. Even the bondholders will probably come out alright in the end. The losers are the general public, twice: first by dint of having to live with far too much parking provision, which serves no useful purpose in this urban environment, and second because of the tax break we gave the buyers of the bonds.

As a general rule, conduit bonds are always a bad idea. I’m no great fan of the tax exemption on muni bonds at the best of times — if the federal government wants to subsidize the states, there are much easier and more direct ways of doing that. But giving the tax exemption out for boondoggles like this is, well, mind-boggling. Let’s hope the latest wave of defaults helps speed their demise.

Charles Bagli has an interesting take on the news that UBS is considering moving back to Manhattan from Greenwich Stamford:

The move would be the latest sign that New York has regained its allure as a caldron for the young and creative.

Are investment bankers really “young and creative”? And if so, is that a good thing? My feeling is that they should be old and boring.

Still, even if Greenwich Stamford is more appealing to the old-and-boring set while Lower Manhattan is better for the young and creative, it makes all the sense in the world for UBS to be in Manhattan — and especially in Richard Rogers’s Tower 3 of the World Trade Center, the most architecturally interesting tower on the site.

For one thing, UBS will be closer to its clients, and the there’s also an “out of sight, out of mind” aspect to UBS. When I run down my mental list of big investment banks, I start downtown, with Goldman, Deutsche, and Citi, and then mentally move to midtown, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Barclays. I often forget about UBS, just because it’s so far away; if I do remember it, it’s only because of its small outpost on Park Avenue.

I actually really like the UBS trading floor in Greenwich, a huge column-free space with soaring white ceilings and none of the claustrophobia one finds on other trading floors in New York. But there’s a good reason why every other major investment bank is in Manhattan. If UBS’s investment bank is to be taken seriously, especially if it’s an independent entity, it needs to be here too.

Many congratulations to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is about to snare the most glamorous and high-profile anchor tenant possible for its flagship 1 World Trade Center property. But the Port Authority is getting more than just the whiff of high fashion here. Charles Bagli reports that Condé Nast is going to pay “an estimated $2 billion over 25 years” for 1 million square feet in the building: that’s a lot of money.

$2 billion for 1 million square feet is $2,000 per square foot. That’s an impressive average price of $80 per square foot per year. And even from day one, Condé’s getting no bargain here:

The publisher is expected to move about 5,000 employees to Floors 20 through 41 at 1 World Trade Center sometime in 2014, when its annual rent will start at a little more than $60 per square foot, or roughly the same amount it is paying today at 4 Times Square…

Its rent is somewhat higher than those in recent deals at 7 World Trade Center or the World Financial Center, according to real estate brokers.

It seems that Condé is agreeing to 2% annual rent increases here: you need an initial rent of $62.44 per foot in order to get to $2,000 over 25 years. That’s a good 20% over what Moody’s agreed to pay to anchor 7 World Trade Center next door, back in August 2007 before the financial crisis really hit.

It looks as though Condé is getting the bottom 22 floors of the building; one assumes that the 1.6 million square feet of office space in the 48 floors above Condé will go for even more, especially now that they come with added essence of Condé. And that means, in turn, that rents from 1 World Trade should pretty easily cover its $3.3 billion in construction costs.

What about the high maintenance and security costs for the building? Back in September, Joe Nocera wrote that the Port Authority would need to “charge $130 a square foot to break even on the building” — a number that the Port Authority itself said was far too high, and which didn’t make much sense to me, either. It’s unclear how much of the security costs are going to be borne by the Port Authority rather than the NYPD. But either way, there’s no reason to make Condé pay them.

I’m looking forward, then, to the World Trade Center site becoming a vibrant and exciting neighborhood, anchored by a buzzing skyscraper at its northwest corner — just across the street from Goldman Sachs — and by a beautiful transit hub a little further east. It’s taken far too long to get there from here. But better late than never, especially if the redevelopment is now starting to pay for itself.

You’re probably not going to read all 3,700 words of William Alden’s huge article about the vicious financial circle in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where local-government cutbacks are hitting the bus service, with the knock-on effect that a lot of jobs are literally out of reach for people without cars. But it’s a great article, and a fine example of the kind of in-depth original reporting being done by HuffPo.

Alden’s story centers on Petty Schulz, a 53-year-old woman out of work for almost two years who doesn’t own a car. That was fine during the halcyon days of, say, 1999, when the American Public Transportation Association bestowed its Outstanding Achievement Award on Milwaukee County transit. But already the seeds of disaster were being sown: in 2000, when the county Board of Supervisors increased the pension multiplier which determines the percentage of final salary that an employee gets upon retirement, it made a contribution of just $600,000 to the pension fund — down from over $20 million five years earlier.

Today, the cutbacks in bus service have been so severe that even a job at the Milwaukee County Transit System required that Schulz have a car. And the cutbacks don’t just prevent the unemployed from getting new jobs, either: they also force the employed to give up good jobs and become unemployed when they can no longer make it to work.

Of course, the fewer people with work in Milwaukee, the less the city earns in taxes, the more depressed the local economy becomes, and the more the government has to cut back. This is why you can’t cut your way to growth. In the meantime, locals are left to calculate whether they can possibly afford a $25 cab ride each way to get to and from a job which pays $13 per hour. And to wonder how on earth their city can get out of its current predicament.

I’m beginning to think that John Cassidy must have a serious masochistic streak: he’s now back for a third round of smack-downs, after having drawn unanimous scorn for his first two attempts to demonize bike lanes.

Cassidy purports to take seriously the question of his negative externalities when he drives his Jaguar. But he gets it embarrassingly wrong:

In the case of motor vehicles, there are several negative spillovers, the most obvious of which is pollution and the associated climate threat…

A second issue is congestion…

This gets things completely backwards. The amount of pollution emitted by today’s cars is actually pretty low, while the amount of congestion they cause is enormous. I’d be happy to introduce Cassidy to Charlie Komanoff one day, the guy who’s actually done all the hard empirical math on this question. The pollution-related negative externalities associated with Cassidy’s drives into Manhattan are tiny, while the congestion-related ones are enormous — well over $100 per trip.

And Cassidy’s proposals for tackling congestion are weird indeed: carpool lanes? I have no idea how that’s meant to work on 52nd Street. Meanwhile, the one thing which does work — congestion pricing — is conspicuously absent from Cassidy’s list.

All of this rhetoric allows Cassidy to set up a classic straw man:

Some would say that reducing New York’s carbon footprint is of such importance that we need to utilize bike lanes and other techniques to further inconvenience car drivers.

Actually, John, amid all the thousands of words which have been directed at you since you embarked upon this bizarre crusade, no one said anything like that at all. Big cities like New York are already by far the carbon-friendliest places in America, as Cassidy’s colleague David Owen would be happy to explain to him.

But Cassidy drives blithely on:

I haven’t seen any cost-benefit analysis backing this up, and, frankly, I don’t think such concerns are driving the debate. If global warming disappeared tomorrow, the bike lobby would still demand more bike lanes.

Well, John, here’s a cost-benefit analysis for you. It’s a massive Excel file, It has almost nothing to do with global warming, and it’s completely compelling. The bike lobby has a solidly-grounded empirical basis for the advantages of building bike lanes. You, on the other hand, have an XJ6, an 8pm reservation on Grove Street, and an overgrown sense of entitlement.

Cassidy claims that he wants

some sort of efficiency test beyond the rule of two wheels good, four wheels bad. Do the putative gains in convenience, safety, and fuel-economy from a particular bike lane outweigh the costs to motorists (and other parties, such as taxpayers and local businesses)?

At this point it’s clear that Cassidy has no idea what this kind of analysis — which actually does get done — is involved in these things. He gets the benefits largely right, although I think that he massively underestimates the value and importance of safety gains. If you significantly reduce pedestrian fatalities, as the Prospect Park West bike lane has done, that in and of itself is reason to build it. As for the costs, there’s really very little evidence that motorists and taxpayers and local businesses bear any costs at all.

Cassidy’s in such a bizarro world here that he even wonders out loud whether the Prospect Park West bike lane might endanger pedestrians, when in fact it protects them. And when he forays into the issue of pedestrian safety — an issue which the pro-bike-lane crowd would happily make the sole deciding issue for every single lane — he decides that what’s important here is “the growing problem of cyclists terrorizing pedestrians”. Again, without any empirical evidence to back up his assertion that this problem is growing at all, and certainly without any recognition of the fact that cars are much deadlier in collisions with pedestrians than bikes could ever be.

Cassidy reckons, in his conclusion, that the question of whether to build bike lanes is not a question of a public-interest transportation facility against private-interest parking spots. Instead, he says, “it comes down to one private user versus another” — presumably the bikers on the lane, versus the car drivers who would otherwise be able to park in those spots. Well, that’s an easy balance to strike. When Cassidy plonks his Jag down on a West Village street and disappears off to dinner, he’s just using up space: he’s not serving any public interest at all, and he’s blocking that part of the road for anybody else who might want to use it. When a bicyclist travels down a bike lane, by contrast, she’s there and she’s gone. She uses up almost no space, and she immediately frees up the lane for the next cyclist to come along behind her.

On top of that, every driver who decides to bicycle on one of the new lanes is one less driver for Cassidy to compete with in crosstown gridlock. By rights, he should be loving the way that bike lanes are reducing the number of cars on the road, rather than railing against them. But for all that he claims to be “wonky” in this post, it’s clear that he’s much more interested in coming up with any conceivable justification for his already-existing prejudices than he is in dispassionate analysis. The fact is, it’s the bicyclists who have all the data on their side. The car lobby just has inchoate rants.

There is nothing shameful or embarrassing about saving money, and restaurants wouldn’t pay Groupon lots of money for the privilege of using its service if they didn’t want lots of people to come in and claim a discount. But still, it’s undeniable: there’s a faint whiff of cheap associated with any coupon, to the point at which some restaurants are implementing built-in gratuities to try to stop people from tipping on the discounted amount. And I have friends who are adamant that they’ll never use a groupon or anything like it, for fear of the perceived stigma involved.

Enter Foursquare. The thing I like most about the Foursquare partnership with Amex, as explained by Dan Frommer, is that it’s completely invisible to your server and to your guests — in that respect it’s a bit like iDine, only even easier.

The obvious partner here, of course, is not Amex so much as Groupon itself. You buy your groupon online, and you don’t even need to print it out — the next time you check in to the merchant and pay the full amount for your meal or other service, you automagically find the amount of the refund on your credit card statement.

Technically, this whole system could probably work fine even without Foursquare’s cooperation: so long as you add Groupon as a friend on Foursquare, it’ll be able to see your checkin and take care of the rest of the process itself. But it’s always nice to see a little button come up on Foursquare saying you’ve activated a deal.

Between this and the other new features that Foursquare just announced in time for SXSW, I’m beginning to see how Foursquare could become the vital hyperlocal app. Now we just need them to change the search-results display, so that it shows results in order of distance rather than in order of popularity. That annoys me every time.

Emily Badger’s article on slugging in DC is a really fantastic piece of reporting. She doesn’t just explain not only the interesting phenomenon of people giving lifts to strangers so that they can drive in HOV lanes, she also puts it in its proper broader context, complete with useful hyperlinks:

Americans drive cars everywhere because gas relatively cheap (half what it costs in Europe), because only 6 percent of the interstate highway system requires tolls, because insurance rates are unrelated to how many miles people drive. We pay for the land we live on, but we expect the parking spot out front to come free of charge. The federal government has lately encouraged drivers with tax breaks to buy, variously: a new car, a hybrid or clean-diesel vehicle, a truck or SUV weighing more than 6,000 pounds, or any upgrade from a “clunker.” Then, regardless of what we drive, the IRS invites lucrative tax deductions for work travel, now at 50 cents a mile.

Go ahead, all the signs (and car ads) seem to suggest: Buy your own car — and ride in it alone!

You can embrace this or you can rail against it, but either way it’s a fact of life. And slugging is a Pareto-optimal way of improving it.

What if, instead of one bus with a capacity of 50 that came along every 30 minutes, five cars came along every few minutes, each with a capacity to carry five people? Looked at broadly, Oliphant says, slugging is a kind of public transit, because public subsidies pay to pave and restrict the HOV lanes on which slugging relies.

My favorite part of the piece is the way in which local government is trying to encourage slugging, but is doing so incredibly quietly, so that the sluggers themselves don’t notice.

Chris Hamilton, the Arlington County Commuter Services bureau chief, understands this better than anyone. Sitting in the 11th-floor office where he hosted Oliphant’s symposium two months earlier, he confesses that Arlington has been quietly funding LeBlanc’s website with an annual $10,000 grant. For 10 years. The site doesn’t disclose the connection, and Hamilton seldom does.

“It’s not public knowledge because we don’t want people to know; it works fine the way it is — that people think it’s just this little slugging community,” he says. “The slugging community has always had that idea about themselves, that this is their own thing, and they’ve created it, and they don’t need anybody else to muck it up.”

In terms of bang for the buck, quiet support of slugging initiatives is surely the cheapest and most effective way that government can improve its citizens’ commuting experience. And it still looks very cost-effective even if reasonably serious amounts of money start getting spent on building new HOV lanes. The big unanswered question though is whether it can be scaled or recreated elsewhere — it’s pretty much nonexistent outside the Bay Area and DC. Badger explains the social forces which make DC slugging work:

The homogeneity of Washington’s work force may play a role in this casual acceptance of strangers in cars. With so many federal employees and military personnel, people here even look alike, sporting uniform haircuts, black briefcases and government IDs. “If you’re a government employee or in the military, you’re taught ‘the group,’ not individualism,” suggests Donald Vankleeck, a civilian on his way to Bolling Air Force Base one morning in September at 80 miles an hour. “So it’s nothing to get in a stranger’s car. You may have been all over the world serving with people whose first names you never knew.”

I’m no expert on the cultural differences between various US metropolitan areas, but in principle I can’t see why this couldn’t work in, say, Charlotte. It clearly can’t work in a sprawling city like LA, since it relies on the existence of central hubs. But there are many US cities with poor public transportation and delineated office zones with parking spaces. It would be hard to get slugging up and running in any of them. But once it’s established, it can become a very popular and powerful force.

Aaron Naparstek has a masterful demolition of John Cassidy’s bizarre anti-bike-lane rant, but he somehow skips over the most wonderful bit of all:

I view the Bloomberg bike-lane policy as a classic case of regulatory capture by a small faddist minority intent on foisting its bipedalist views on a disinterested or actively reluctant populace.

Yes, you read that right: the New York populace, it seems, is basically comprised of cars, to the point at which bipeds are “a small faddist minority”.

Now it so happens that I’ve met Mr Cassidy a few times and he’s always looked perfectly bipedal to me. And for all that he enjoys parking his Jaguar XJ6 on Manhattan streets — he’s just written 1,250 words on the subject, after all — I’m quite sure that he always gets out and saunters happily among the other New York pedestrians as he makes his way to his dinner in the West Village.

It can hardly have escaped Cassidy’s notice, on his regular peregrinations from car to restaurant and back, that New York’s streets are positively bustling with bipedal life. There’s good reason for this: New York is a very dense city, in which 8 million or so bipeds — birds not included — cram themselves into a rather small area. His Jaguar XJ6 takes up about 100 square feet of street space; if everybody in Manhattan was so greedy, we’d turn the city into something more akin to Manhattan, Kansas.

And so New Yorkers turn to other modes of transportation. Primarily, we walk, taking up very little space while doing so. When we don’t walk, we cram lots of people into efficient vehicles like subways or buses. And sometimes we bike, since doing so makes a great deal of sense in a pretty flat city where space is at a premium.

Driving a car, on the other hand, is an enormously expensive thing to do, with most of the costs being borne by people other than the driver. Yet here’s Cassidy, the economics correspondent of the New Yorker:

From an economic perspective I also question whether the blanketing of the city with bike lanes—more than two hundred miles in the past three years—meets an objective cost-benefit criterion. Beyond a certain point, given the limited number of bicyclists in the city, the benefits of extra bike lanes must run into diminishing returns, and the costs to motorists (and pedestrians) of implementing the policies must increase. Have we reached that point? I would say so.

Well yes. If indeed the limited number of bicyclists in the city was a given, then Cassidy might have a point here. But it’s not. Bike lanes attract bikes no less effectively than roads attract cars and the number of cyclists in New York has been growing just as fast as the city can create new lanes for them. See if you can follow Cassidy’s logic here, because I can’t:

From San Francisco to London, local governments are introducing bike lanes, bike parks, bike-rental schemes, and other policies designed to encourage two-wheel motion. Generally speaking, I don’t have a problem with this movement: indeed, I support it. But the way it has been implemented, particularly in New York, irks me to no end…

Thanks to these four-wheel friends, I have discovered virtually every neighborhood of the city and its environs, and I would put my knowledge of New York’s geography and topography up against most native residents…

Let us have some bike lanes on heavily used and clearly defined routes to and from the city—and on popular biking routes within the city and the boroughs. But until and unless there is a referendum on the subject—or a much more expansive public debate, at least—it is time to call a halt to Sadik-Khan and her faceless road swipers.

The message here is that cars can and should be able to go anywhere in the city they like — that’s part of what makes them so great. Bikes, on the other hand, should be confined to a few “heavily used and clearly defined routes”, which would probably run parallel to existing subway lines. If you want to use a bicycle to explore the city, then you’re just going to have to take your chances in traffic, like Cassidy did in the 1980s.

In those days, there were few cyclists on the roads, and part of the thrill was avoiding cabs and other vehicles that would suddenly swing into your lane, apparently oblivious to your presence. When I got back to my apartment on East 12th Street, I was sometimes shaking.

Sorry, John, but the purpose of biking is not to “thrill” you so much that you end up shaking. And you surely know, even if you’re loathe to admit it, that traffic expands to fill the roads available: if you build more road space, you don’t reduce congestion, you just increase the number of cars. And similarly, if you reduce the amount of road space, you don’t increase congestion so much as you reduce the number of private cars. Which is a feature, not a bug.

Cassidy is convinced that the addition of bike lanes has increased the time he spends stuck in traffic, or looking for his beloved free on-street parking. (As Naparstek notes, his argument can basically be boiled down to “Street space should not be set aside for bike lanes. It should be set aside for free parking for my Jaguar XJ6″.) But the fact is that impatient motorists will always want to blame someone else for traffic, when, clearly, they themselves are the main culprit in that regard.

Cassidy has no problem with the vast number of parked cars which take up precious road space in New York because he regularly aspires to transcending his bipedal nature and becoming one of them himself. But if you replace those parked cars with a healthy, efficient and effective means of getting New Yorkers safely around town, then watch him roar. Jaguars — whether they have four wheels or four paws — are good at that.

Update: Adam Sternbergh piles on too, and Cassidy responds to us all.

New York taxis are a textbook example of gains going to capital rather than to labor. They’re generally owned by one person — the person with the capital — and driven by another — the person with the labor. And the person with the capital has made out very well of late. When the stock market peaked in October 2007, medallions were trading at $425,000 apiece. (All data from this page.) By the time the market had plunged by more than half in February 2009, medallions had risen in value to $552,000. And they’ve only gone up in value since: in December 2010, the average medallion changed hands for $624,000; last Wednesday, a new all-time record was set for a corporate medallion which sold for $880,000.

Meanwhile, drivers earn nothing like that kind of money. Getting reliable statistics for taxi-driver income is not easy, but it seems to average out somewhere around $130 per shift — which is actually less than the the amount the drivers pay to lease the taxi. And remember that the owner leases out the car for two shifts per day, while the driver can only work one shift.

It’s pretty clear to me what’s happening here. The medallion owners hold the power, and will charge whatever they can to drivers. If anything happens (a fare hike, say) which improves drivers’ income, then the rents just get jacked up: there’s a lot of demand for taxi-driving jobs, and so essentially the owners just rent out their taxis to the drivers willing to pay the highest shift fee and therefore take home the lowest income.

When someone like Melissa Plaut, then, starts complaining about a proposed rule change on the grounds that it will reduce drivers’ income, I think that she’s missing the bigger picture. It’s the owners who reduce drivers’ income, by charging them as much money for the privilege of driving a cab as they can possibly get away with.

Meanwhile, it’s the mayor’s job to try to create a system where yellow cabs and livery cabs coexist to maximize the welfare of New Yorkers — the general population first, and the drivers second. The medallion owners come a distant third.

Somehow, annoyingly, the medallion owners always end up the winners here, and that doesn’t seem fair to me. None of them were hurting when medallions were fluctuating in value between $200,000 and $250,000 in the years from 1998 through 2003. And for the past eight years or so they’ve been laughing all the way to the bank.

If drivers have an issue with their income, then, they should take up their beef with the medallion owners. But instead, every time that the city proposes something to improve the taxi system more generally — like issuing more medallions, or putting credit-card readers in cabs, or putting meters in livery cars — the drivers reflexively side with the owners. Anything which might hurt medallion owners, they assume, will automatically hurt drivers as well.

Which I’d agree with, if it weren’t for the fact that drivers have signally failed to participate in the good fortune of the owners over the past decade. It’s time I think for the mayor to start putting in protections for cab drivers, which might get an important constituency on his side when it comes to making these kind of changes. Even if doing so annoys a handful of politically-powerful medallion owners.

Update: Plaut responds in the comments.

In cases like that of the Chicago parking meters, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the privatization argument. But New Jersey Transit parking spaces aren’t Chicago parking meters, and so I’m entirely in agreement with Yonah Freemark that privatizing NJ Transit’s parking lots is a very bad idea.

Frankly, all you need to know about the plan in order to hate it is its name — it’s called the System Parking Amenity and Capacity Enhancement Strategy. But there are three more substantive reasons to dislike it.

Firstly, press coverage of the scheme has revealed nothing about the state’s willingness to cap or guide the amount charged for parking in these lots. Indeed, the official RFQ states that “it is currently contemplated that this transaction will include an opportunity to adjust parking rates in accordance with market demand” — and the stated aim of the privatization is to raise as much money as possible. As a result, the successful bidder is likely to give themselves a lot of freedom to hike parking rates in the future.

The problem is that right now no one knows what the revenue-maximizing market rates might be. If New Jersey thinks that a revenue-maximizing strategy is the way to go, it should try to implement such a strategy itself first, just to get an idea of how much revenue it could generate that way. Otherwise, there’s a serious risk that it will sell of the lots for a fraction of their actual worth.

Secondly, the plan comes on the heels of the price of rail tickets being hiked by 25% in May. If the cost of traveling by train and the price of parking at train stations both rise substantially, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen to the number of people taking mass transit as opposed to simply driving to their final destination. While the headline revenues from the privatization contract might look attractive, no one seems to be thinking about the hidden costs to both the state and its citizens in terms of extra congestion.

New Jersey Future’s Jay Corbalis makes this point another way, saying that privatizing NJ Transit’s parking lots only makes sense in the context of broader congestion pricing, where the cost of the driving-only alternative rises commensurately:

“By privatizing parking facilities, this proposal will have the effect of further raising costs for many NJ Transit riders,” Corbalis said. “If New Jersey wants to move toward a user fee-based system to pay for transportation, it should apply the same approach to roads and bridges as it does for mass transit.”

Finally, there’s the likelihood that the best and highest value for all that land currently being given over to parking spaces is probably not parking at all. Instead, it’s new residential and commercial development, centered on the transit services already there. (See San Francisco for an example of this in work.) The term of art for this is transit-oriented development, or TOD, and the RFQ is well aware of it:

Many of NJ TRANSIT’s parking facilities are key properties that have the potential for TOD and certain Concession Assets are currently under active consideration for TOD. Consequently, Prospective Proposers are advised that NJ TRANSIT is strongly interested in ensuring that TOD opportunities are not negatively impacted by the award of this Concession. To that end, Prospective Proposers will be encouraged in the RFP stage to submit TOD proposals as an option in their responses…

The selection of a Concessionaire will be based entirely on the proposals for the Concession Assets submitted pursuant to the RFP; however if the selected Concessionaire has submitted a TOD proposal that is deemed advantageous to NJ TRANSIT, NJ TRANSIT may, but shall not be obligated to, negotiate an independent and exclusive development agreement with the Concessionaire.

If NJ Transit will pick the winning bidder entirely on the basis of what they want to do in terms of parking, then it’s almost certainly not going to pick someone who’s ideally qualified to build new development on those parking spaces. More to the point, if NJ Transit does not negotiate an independent development agreement with the concessionaire, then the chances are that the land will simply remain a parking lot for decades to come, since the concessionaire at that point has the right and indeed the obligation to continue to run that land in exactly that manner. While it’s possible that NJ Transit might be able to team up with a third-party developer to buy out the concessionaire’s parking rights, that’s a very expensive and complicated way of doing things.

Writes Stephen Smith:

Rather than taking on entrenched suburban interests, we’re just adding another layer of government dependents, this time of the monied corporate variety (bidders include KKR, Morgan Stanley, Carlyle, and JP Morgan). The land on which transit parking lots sit is uniquely positioned to be converted into dense development, and the only thing worse than sitting on the land would be for the agencies to sign away their rights to change that within the foreseeable future.

None of this is particularly surprising, coming from the government of tunnel-killer Chris Christie. But it’s very depressing, all the same.

How should bike-share services pay for themselves? Up until now, the main model has been sponsorship and advertising. But CityRyde has a bright idea: why not sell carbon offsets?

The idea’s pretty simple: as bike-share use rises, the amount of carbon-emitting vehicle use falls. So bike shares save carbon; CityRyde even has a methodology to determine exactly how much. (One thing I’d like to see, though: virtually all bike-share programs involve trucking bikes from the center of town back into the periphery, not to mention transporting broken bikes to be fixed. So somewhere in the methodology there should be an accounting for the amount of carbon emitted by the bike-share program itself.)

In any case, if the bike-share program sold carbon offsets to companies which want to claim to be carbon-neutral and to individuals wanting to offset their carbon emissions, that could raise some revenue: CityRyde co-founder Jason Meinzer told me his rule of thumb is that you could bring in between $25 and $100 per bike per year that way. For a scheme with 50,000 bikes in New York City, that would equate to between $1.25 million and $5 million per year: hardly chump change.

Meinzer didn’t share with me exactly how he got his numbers, though, so I ran a smell test. Let’s say each bike travels 15 miles per day, 350 days per year: that’s 5,250 miles per year. A lot of bike rides are simply for pleasure, and others—especially in a city like New York—replace walking or taking mass transport. Those are activities with negligible marginal carbon emissions.

But let’s say that 1/3 of bike journeys would otherwise have been taken in a car of some description. That means that each bike saves 1,750 passenger-miles in cars. If one car carries the same number of people as two bikes, on average, then that’s 875 car miles saved. At 1.2 pounds of CO2 per mile, that’s basically half a ton of CO2 emissions saved per bike per year. And while the market in carbon offsets is far from transparent, my feeling is that you’d be lucky to get $5 per ton, which would equate to $2.50 per bike per year. That’s a full order of magnitude lower than Meinzer’s lower estimate.

Meinzer’s methodology is a lot more sophisticated than that, and I’ll update this post if he wants to share his own math. But at $5 per ton, selling carbon offsets would gross only about $125,000 a year—which, by the time you subtract the cost of measuring the carbon saved and administering the sales, leaves you with little or nothing in net revenue. So while it’s an intriguing idea, I’m not yet convinced it’s a practical one.

Update: Meinzer says that he does account for the carbon costs of the program, in the “Project Emissions” and “Leakage” sections of his methodology; I don’t see it myself. And he explains that he gets his much higher estimate for total revenues from selling carbon offsets at a much higher price:

Our credits most certainly will be sold at a premium due to the novel co-benefits associated with their generation even outside of the carbon mitigated; e.g. health and social (and remember some credits sold for as high as $111 last year). This has been validated by the carbon brokers we’ve been working with over the years. Moreover, outside of the “price-point” per carbon a key angle we are taking to obtain an even higher premium on our credits is via creative bundling; by lumping the carbon credits w/ the sponsorship and advertising. Case in point – Blue Cross Blue Shield donated $1.5 million to have their name tied to the existing 1,000-bike Minneapolisbike share. Had they been able to purchase the offsets stemming from that program the donation would have been MUCH higher. This argument is reinforced by the fact that this donor in particular clearly has a key interest in health, and so the aforementioned co-benefits of our credits would prove even more attractive given the health-benefits of biking. Most big names companies are already offsetting their carbon emissions each year anyways for a variety of reasons, even outside of a regulatory mandate.

Mark Perry is convinced that the recent uptick in vehicle miles is a good sign, economically speaking; Calculated Risk is not as convinced. Both, however, are working on the assumption that vehicle miles are an excellent proxy for economic activity as a whole, and that the more they rise, the better the economy is doing.

Perry’s chart, in particular, would seem to back that up:

The way in which vehicle miles fell steadily over the course of the recession is startling. But look at CR’s chart:

And suddenly recessions don’t seem as big of a deal: vehicle miles simply tend to rise over time, except for during oil spikes.

It’s worth remembering here that the recession started in December 2007, while oil prices were still rising; they didn’t reach their all-time (nominal) high until July 2008. Given that gas prices lag oil prices, a large part of the fall in miles can probably simply be attributed to high gas prices, rather than to the recession — especially since, as Nate Silver notes, “the cost of gas twelve months ago has historically been a much better predictor of driving behavior than the cost of gas today.”

More generally, vehicle miles are a cost of economic activity, and to the extent that they can be minimized through various kinds of efficiency gains, they should be. Things which are good for a vibrant economy — mass transit systems, telecommuting, e-commerce, walkable neighborhoods — tend to mitigate against driving, while — to take the extreme counterexample — I’d guess that people who have been foreclosed upon tend to spend a lot more time in their cars.

My feeling is that what we’re seeing in the latest driving numbers is no more than the fact that gas prices were low a year ago. I do hold out some hope that we’re decreasing our national reliance on autos, if only a little bit; it would be sad if any economic recovery had to be associated with a concomitant rise in driving. As America moves back into the cities from the crumbling suburbs, is that really too much to hope?

(HT: AR)