Mass transit
When I was a kid, you could buy a gallon of gasoline for under a dollar. Those day are long since past, with gas prices hovering near $3/gallon and $4 on the horizon.
Surprisingly, American drivers don’t seem to mind. Our collective memory is so short that whenever gas drops by a few cents we forget that it just went up by a quarter. $2.89 gas doesn’t hurt so bad once you’ve purchased $3.25 gas for a few weeks.
The trouble is that we’re not doing anything substantial to provide options to drivers. I live in Milwaukee and currently have two choices to get to work: drive 15 minutes by car or ride the bus for nearly an hour. Not surprisingly, I choose the former. (Actually, I am working on a third option involving my bicycle, but that’s for another post).
What we need are some new options.
As the price of gas climbs, the economics of mass transit changes. The number of commuters who would ride metro train when gas is at $4/gallon is much higher than the number of riders at $2/gallon. The trouble is, gas prices can rise much faster than we can build mass transit alternatives. It’s time that we made some forward-looking predictions and planned for the extremely likely occurrence of gasoline prices continuing to rise.
The primary reason mass transit development is so hard is that it has high up-front costs. Building a light rail system requires planning and capital investment. (Two skills that most state and federal legislators lack). The critical flaw in calculating the cost of a mass transit system is that we don’t give it a fair comparison. In the 1950s and 60s, the booming post-war economy invested billions of dollars building the interstate highway system. Due to our collective memory problem (remember?) we assume the cost of highways to be zero. Worse, the highway system is so ingrained in our culture that we mindlessly shovel billions of dollars each year to keep it running.
And our highway system is dying. This year, highway congestion will cost $100 billion in lost productivity. This problem will only get worse as demand increases with limited change in supply. Are these costs factored into the economic analysis of mass transit? Hardly.
We need to start building mass transit solutions now. This year. Today. We need express bus lanes, metro and regional rail. We need to proactively plan (gasp!) for increased gas prices and increased demand. We simply cannot wait for $5/gallon gas to come around because by then it will be too late.
Filed under Milwaukee, climate change, economics, politics : Comments (4) : Sep 27th, 2007 by tadfad
September 27th, 2007 at 17:45
$5 Gas…is it really that far off? I think not. My guess is about 2 years. Looking forward to the bike post.
http://actionstalk.com
September 27th, 2007 at 21:28
[...] I write this post in response to a post on tadfad.com about Public Transit I am sitting on the northbound redline train of Chicago’s elevated [...]
September 27th, 2007 at 21:35
Tad and readers, I posted a response to your Mass Transit post on my blog @ http://actionstalk.com check it out.
September 28th, 2007 at 00:56
Thanks for this post, Tad. Another reason we need to improve mass transit: millions of Americans MUST ride it because they cannot afford to use or even own a car. Inadequate mass transit is a significant and often overlooked barrier to poor people finding and maintaining employment.