Mr. Anderson asks: "So does anyone have a plan for reducing congestion?"
I do: 1. Convene truly independent, learned, multi-disciplinary, civic-minded experts to determine the full social costs of transportation modes. (For fossil-fuel based modes, this would include, along with myriad other costs, the costs to maintain access to/control of global fossil fuel sources as well as the opportunity costs of our continued squandering on goods and infrastructure that will become obsolete as fossil fuels are depleted and indeed obstruct our movement to a different set of social arrangements.) 2. Price transportation at a level that forces each transportation user to pay the full social cost of his/her transportation choice. For cars, a gas tax would be adminstratively the simplest and probably the best tool; for transit, at the farebox. (If this creates problems for lower-income people, use targeted subsidies; don't subsidize the system for everyone.) That's it. Once we as a society and as individuals recognize the true cost of our transportation system (the gas tax, for example, would be at $10/gallon or beyond, and would increase over time), our whole system would turn around. We would live more compactly, produce more locally, waste less, save hundreds of billions a year in "national security" expenditures that could be used to actually improve quality of life, and, yes, reduce congestion. There'd be a period of great dislocation, but much less than we'll see if we continue our willful blindness until Minnesota is a desert and we're fighting eight "water wars" around the globe. But, since we live in a nation of automobile socialism and only progressives advocate for the operation of the free market, this solution is not one we are likely to see explored. Chuck Holtman Prospect Park Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 17:16:36 -0500 From: "Anderson & Turpin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: [Mpls] Freeway woes To: <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Jane Strauss wrote: I keep wonderign how long it will take for politicos and others to figure out that you can't build your way out of congestion. The more traffic lanes there are, and the less conveneint, reasonably priced, transit, the more folks will drive. Mark Anderson: I have three responses to this: 1) The fact that mass transit advocates have repeated ad nauseum that you can't build your way out of congestion doesn't make it so. I have seen no evidence that this is true. Everyone always brings up Houston and Atlanta as proof. But the fact that those fast-growing cities still have congestion proves nothing -- where would they be if they hadn't built the highways? Much slower-growing I imagine, since traffic would no doubt be in permanent grid-lock. Like where the Twin Cities would be now if it had grown as fast as Atlanta, with the miniscule amount it's put into new roads. 2) What makes you think that the politicos believe that we can build our way out of congestion? If only it were so. How many highway miles have been built in the last 20 years, as the Metro population increased by over 50%? If we had kept up with our infrastructure for those 20 years, rush hour might not have expanded to most of the day in Minneapolis. 3) I'd love to hear a real plan for mass transit, so we can truly see how much it really costs. The real question is, "can we build our way out of congestion with mass transit?" I doubt it. On the MNDOT web site, it says that we drive about 39.7 million miles each day in the Metro. On the Metro Transit web site, is says that there are 19,300 LRT riders each day, and the line is 12 miles long. I'll give the LRT the benefit of the doubt, and assume the average ride is 5/6 of the line, or 10 miles. That means they have 193,000 people miles each day. The Hiawatha line cost $715 million. To seriously dent the car traffic in a growing region like the Twin Cities, they better plan on replacing 1/2 the current car miles, which would be 19.85 million miles. At the same rate as we paid for the Hiawatha line, we'd need to spend 19.85 million/193,000 * $715 million = $73.5 billion. Anybody have that kind of money hiding in their couch cushions? Now I would agree that Hiawatha was a stupid over-priced place to put our first train, so there would be a lot of places with better value to have LRT. But to replace so much auto traffic, we'll need to put the trains in a lot less efficient places than even Hiawatha. Plus of course we'd need to knock down a lot of houses, which is verboten to a lot of mass transit advocates. And usually one needs at least 50% more train miles to replace x miles of auto miles, since the train rarely goes exactly where its customers want to go. For those of you who think that it's the bus routes that must be dramatically expanded to replace all the cars, congratulations! That at least makes more sense than putting tracks all over the place. But I'd sure like to see a plan for that too. I suspect you'd have to spend $billions per year improving service just to entice 1/4 of the folks out of their cars. So does anyone have a plan for reducing congestion? All I know is that traffic has worsened dramatically in the Southwest Metro for the last twenty years, which is where I mostly drive. The population has boomed, but there have been zero new highways added in that area during that time. I think it's logical to see a connection there. I believe new roads would help a lot. But then I don't buy into the dogma of the mass transit people. Mark V Anderson Bancroft REMINDERS: 1. 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