Responding to Mr. Brauer's request to specify subsidies for driving and transit:
As I suggested in a post earlier this week, the best and most comprehensive compendium of transportation costs of which I'm aware is accessible on the web site of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Try this web site and go to chapter 6 for some useful summaries. A bibliography also is available. http://www.vtpi.org/tca/ The compendium that you'll find evaluates transportation costs that fall into the following categories: Internal fixed costs: Vehicle ownership (e.g., purchase price, insurance) Internalized parking costs (off-street residential parking and long-term leased parking) Internal variable costs: Vehicle operation (e.g., fuel, oil, tires, tolls, short-term parking fees) Travel time Internalized accident costs External costs: Operating subsidies (e.g., for transit) Externalized accident costs (others that you hit) Externalized parking costs (off-street parking costs not borne by users) Congestion costs Road facility costs Land value (opportunity costs for land used for roads/parking) Traffic services (policing, traffic lights, emergency services, etc.) Transport diversity (value to society of options for non-drivers, lower-income people, etc) Air pollution Noise Resource externalities (e.g., externalized costs of producing petroleum products) Barrier effects (delays roads cause to nonmotorized travel) Land use impacts (Economic, social and environmental impacts due to low-density, automobile oriented development patterns) Water pollution Waste (external costs to dispose of vehicle wastes) The compendium distills the results of a large number of studies that attempt to estimate these costs for different modes of transportation in different ways. As one general result, the average cost of driving a car during urban peak conditions is about $1.30 per mile. Of this, about $0.45 is internal variable cost, and therefore (presuming the motorist is thinking about it) sets the price by which the motorist determines how much to drive (and, in the longer term, where to live and work). About $0.25 is internal fixed (which, if the motorist thinks about it, tends to promote MORE driving to make full use of the investment) and about $0.60 is externalized. To me, probably the two most significant external costs of driving are the two that are the most difficult to quantify: Land use impacts and resource externalities. As to land use impacts, the spread-out, monadic, anti-community development patterns that we get from our automobile fetish have profound consequences on our society in that they come deeply to affect how we see the world, our responsibilities as consumers of the planet, our responsibilities as citizens, and our capacity for empathy toward those creatures not a part of our monadic cell. As to resource externalities, it would be contentious, but I think no less true, to count among these externalities a very large proportion of our annual military expenditures and the extraordinary global costs -- in terms of destabilization, the undermining of self-determination and promotion of oppressive governments around the world, environmental destruction, and opportunity costs of resisting a more sustainable model for human society -- of our desperate and never-ending effort to maintain our access to as much of the globe's petroleum as we possibly can. On the surface, this seems far afield from Mr. Brauer's exhortation to keep the costs "as local as possible." But every mile we drive here in the Twin Cities generates an incremental portion of these vast costs. In the studies that actually include just a modest part of our military budget in external driving costs, the impact on the per-mile figure is substantial and begins to dwarf the numbers suggested above. That these costs are impossible to quantify with any precision does not make them any less real or any less relevant to our decisions as to the path of our society. Chuck Holtman Prospect Park ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 11:03:10 -0600 From: David Brauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Mpls] RE: Mass Transit and Congestion To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed On Mar 10, 2004, at 10:52 AM, Chuck Holtman wrote: > > > Driving is vastly underpriced (subsidized) and therefore vastly > overconsumed. Welfare Economics 101. The only cure for congestion is > the > proper pricing of driving. If driving is priced properly, over time, > development patterns reflect the actual costs of transportation and > become > more compact, and transit becomes steadily more cost-effective than a > single-occupancy-vehicle-based transportation system. > Perhaps this has already been discussed, but I'd like it distilled: Given that both driving and busing are subsidized, what is the subsidy for each? Probably should be expressed as a percent of cost. As local as you can make the figures. Thanks, David Brauer Kingfield ------------------------------ REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
