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ChineseExposing Socialist Libertarians
I don’t remember paying for that… Image courtesy of kalavinka.
In spite of their name, freeways aren’t really free. No, in fact they are actually quite pricey to build, maintain, monitor, clean up, and expand. But when is the last time you reached into your wallet and handed out some cold hard cash to pay that price? I bet you can’t remember, because you never did such a thing. A hand reached into your wallet and took some money, but that hand wasn’t yours, no it was the frosty hand of the government.
That’s all fine and dandy, the government is always reaching into our wallets. In a few weeks the government will finish its job of taking a large percentage of my earnings from 2007. Federal, state, city, they’ve all got their grubby little hands in my pocketbook and there is very little I can do about it. Some people think this is the way it should be. They think the government knows best and that the government should have the power to take your money and distribute it for the betterment of the entire community. These people are called socialists. On the other end of the spectrum are people who think that the government is a bunch of morons, and that each individual should be free to do what they wish with their own money and lives. These people are called libertarians.
It would seem logical that someone who doesn’t like the government intervening in the lives of individuals would have a big problem with freeways. But as Alex Marshall notes in his article for Governing.com, that’s just not the case. Most libertarians, by and large, love highways and auto roads, even though they are funded by the cold hand of the government picking our pockets. At the same time, they despise mass transportation because, these days, it’s funded by the cold hand of the government picking our pockets. How is it that publicly funded mass transit is socialism but publicly funded auto roads are the pinnacle of American freedom and free market capitalism? It’s simple, these libertarians are actually not libertarians, they fall into another group: hypocrites.
In his article, Alex Marshall notes that in 2005 local, state, and federal governments spent over $150 billion on auto roads in the United States. A look at the statistics from the Federal Highway Administration confirms this. About 60% of this money, or $90 billion, came from “user fees” in the form of gasoline taxes which makes some libertarians feel better. But a tax is a tax, it’s the the government reaching to my pocket and doing what it wishes with my money. What if I don’t want my user fee to go to a road I don’t drive on? More importantly, if my only mobility option requires gas, is paying the user fee really a choice? But even if you’re Kool & The Gang with the concept of “user fees” and believe them to be somehow representative of a free market and not government intervention, there’s still another $60 billion to account for that comes from other sources. Marshall asked Robert Poole, who runs the transportation wing of the libertarian think tank The Reason Foundation, how he was able to balance his dislike of government intervention with his support of auto roads. Poole’s response: “I never thought about it that way.”
Well maybe it’s time for libertarians to start think about it in this way. Would our roads have been built in the same way by private enterprise? Hell no. There would be a lot less roads and a lot less sprawl, because chaotic networks and decentralization are not sustainable business practices, they are prone to waste and inefficiency. As I noted over at Streetsblog LA, I find it somewhat humorous how car-culture was born out of the success of the mass production, which enabled personal automobiles to be made cheaply and rapidly, but car-culture in and of itself rejected the advantages of mass production. Mass production was successful because it was a streamlined process that reduced inefficiencies by creating a pipeline that moved products from point A to point B on a fixed track during the process of assembly. This enabled more goods to be produced at a lower price than the old way, which involved an individual craftsman gathering parts and tools from here and there and putting them together in a far less streamlined and logical manner. This is fine when you’re producing just a few things, but becomes highly inefficient when producing millions of things.
Like the craftsmen of yore, private cars are good at moving a few people, but when it comes to moving millions of people they fail. Mass transit, on the other hand, like the assembly line, is a wonderfully efficient way of moving the masses. Unfortunately, government chose the inefficient mode and our built environment adapted to those inefficiencies and became just as inefficient. Decentralization, sprawl, and bottlenecks have created a production line where parts come from everywhere and anywhere in a chaotic mess that would spell the end of any factory. Had the government left the factory in control of the private owners, things would likely be more efficient. Robert Poole said it himself: “Where it’s possible, that infrastructure should be run in a business-like manner with users paying full cost.”
Although, apparently in his world, competition isn’t part of the free-market, because he contradicts himself: “We aren’t going to have competing companies putting roads in where they like, and letting the chips fall where they may.”
Ahh… they hypocritical socialist libertarian.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Wonderful essay. Please submit it to the L.A. Times and the L.A. Weekly.
I submitted it to reddit, a libertarian got really defensive.
Gas taxes are also a very poor form of user fee: in a lot of cases, they tax drivers on existing roads in order to build new roads that will provide benefit to a fraction of them. The ribbon-cutting effect and the power of road-building lobbies ensure that maintenance of and improvements to existing facilities always get shafted.
The only way to do user fees is electronic tolling, with revenues protected and made corridor-specific.
Also, most libertarians struggle mightily with the idea of externalities.
Though I agree that the roads are clearly subsidized and that many libertarians have no real concept for how to deal with that, I’m not sure it’s fair to say that government chose the car. I think our entire society chose the car. Roads are not a creation of the car; they predated it by thousands of years. Obviously the interstate highway system is a product of the car, but there was a serious demand for it. It was not foisted on the public to sell cars; it was viewed as a necessary public good that private entities were incapable of coordinating or producing in the most efficient manner.
I also don’t think it’s fair to say that if we’d left everything to private business that it’d be fine or more efficient. There’s a lot of money to be made in real estate that’s opened up by roads, so building a road in a decentralized, suburban sprawl is always going to have a high risk/reward structure if you can grab up the real estate. Also, (as the above libertarian noted), we’d likely have a ton of competing toll roads that didn’t interact or interchange properly because it’s not always in the private businessman’s interest for his road to connect to the other guy’s road. Free markets are not a panacea, and in this case the logical result (toll roads everywhere), would’ve actually hampered the free market overall by reducing the effectiveness of transport and hampering the economy.
I mean, all I’m saying, and go ahead and think of me as a socialist for saying it, but we shouldn’t fetishize private market forces nor demonize government. Both have their weaknesses and strengths (and government is not inherently the enemy of the free market and vice versa) and finding the balance is really the heart of modern politics.
The logical result of what you’re talking about is not building more rail lines or subsidizing public transit (which I think is what you want), it’s the Bush Department of Transportation’s plan to turn every road into a toll road. That’s the true libertarian solution you’re sort of goading them into. The basic concept is that instead of just having a FastPass technology for bridges and things like that, you’d have a GPS version installed in every car and then at the end of the month, you’d get a bill in the mail so that you pay for every road you drove on for however much you drove on it, just like your gas or electric bill. Thus everyone “pays full cost” and it’s completely fair, except that this ignores hundreds of years of the road as a public good, really, the first public good. Subsidizing roads is as old as civilization.
In defense of libertarians I think that most of them understand this and would say “I’m against government entitlements and I want small government and blah, I just accept roads as one of the few things government should be involved with.” Obviously there’s some contradiction here because they think the free market can solve everything yet they’re unwilling to deal with its consequences in one of the most important and basic parts of their daily life.
I’ve rambled and I apologize and I hope I haven’t misstated your position and argued against a straw man. The few posts I’ve read on this topic here seem to indicate that you yourself are very inclined towards libertarian ideology but I could be misreading you.
It’s interesting that the rate of outright subsidy to highways (the non-user-fee based part, the 40% or so that comes from general funds) is not so far off from regional rail systems, which generally have good farebox recovery rates, like Metrolink, CalTrain, SD Trolley and BART.
Core urban transit tends to be more subsidized, but then again, cities tend to fix potholes in local streets out of non-user-fee funds like sales tax too.
So at the very worst, I think, even if us transit riders are mooching off the state, we’re not doing it any more than people who drive.
But the most important point to make about transportation subsidies is this, I think: if a road is built, and you decide to drive on it (every day, to work, or whatever), you’re not just using that resource, you’re helping to use it up. Only so many cars can get through each lane every morning. But if you take transit, you’re making it work better, because mass transit can swallow transit magnificently. Every new transit rider makes transit less subsidized. Every new driver just gets society closer to needing to pony up for another freeway widening.
This is true, but auto-roadways are, and auto-roadways a very different animals from roads before the auto. It’s the whole concept behind Streetsblog and Streetsblog LA, the idea of taking our streets back. And even still many ancient roads, and pre-auto roads in the United States were private toll roads. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental auto-road (and Eisenhower’s inspiration for the Federal Interstate System) was built with private monies. Carl Fisher, the entrepreneur who developed the Lincoln auto roadway, hoped that road could be funded by private contributions and, oh! the auto industry. But guess what, Henry Ford refused to contribute because he thought the government should build the auto-roadways. Of course that makes great business sense for Ford, why pay for what you could get for free? He could afford to make and sell a lot more cars if he didn’t have to worry about also building the roads for them to drive on. If only the railroad companies had been as shrewd.
I appreciate what you’re saying, and I think you are correct in many ways. I think the reason the balance is so much harder to find in America is because we are country that was founded on very libertarian ideals, but at the same time we like many ideas of socialism. It creates this weird dichotomy where we want big government programs without big government. In other words, we want to have our cake and eat it too.
But see to me that’s not really a true libertarian solution because it ignores the fact that those roads were built with public funds. I mean sure, now it’s a dream because a market has been created and now corporations can swoop in and by these auto-roads which have built in demand, not have to pay for the capital construction costs, and make a mint because car-culture has people by the balls.
This is true. But we need to remember that the fabulous roads of the Romans were not only subsidized, they were likely built by enslaved people and their primary use was military.
This was my main point. Libertarians whine and cry about mass transit subsidies while ignoring that auto-roads have always been subsidized. And more importantly, mass transit in this country was once unsubsidized. That fact alone should have libertarians all over it.
Exactly. It’s an economy of scale, more people make mass transit more efficient. This is why mass transit is a poor idea for places with low populations and a great idea for places with high populations. Unfortunately car-culture has spread our “cities” (I hesitate to call them at anymore) so thin that even highly populous areas (Los Angeles) have many areas where density is too low to support the economy of scale. So it becomes a lose-lose situation where the density is not high enough to make mass transportation efficient but the population is high enough to make personal private transportation inefficient.
Where’s Rob Dawg when you don’t need him?
Where? Seeing as this startling expose of the massive subsidies autos receive is almost word for word the same essay including math errors I responded to a dozen years ago I was waiting to see if anyone else caught the 60% miscalculation.
Me from 2003:
The BTS charts are accidentally misleading being
summaries of the HF series documents in the OHIM from the FHWA.
Here are the totals for government expenditures and revenues all transport:
Year spent received
2000 $127,459 $128,745
2001 $129,990 $132,324
Here are the highways numbers:
Year spent received
1998 $ 69,227 $ 69,227
1999 $ 73,897 $ 73,898
2000 $ 81,006 $ 81,006
2001 $ 77,719 $ 93,350
So you see, more money is collected in highway user fees than is spent on
highways. You were mislead by the transit, deficit reduction and other
leakage. Happens all the time.
—-
Nothing appears to have changed.
So Rob, if drivers are paying more in fees than is spent on highways, why do we constantly have to pay for roads out of non-user-fee funds (like the about 80% of the 10-billionish “infrastructure” bonds the state passed a year or two ago that are going to freeways).
Yeah, some gas gets siphoned off to non-roadway stuff like transit–but overall, road building and maintenance is still a huge money sinkhole.
And that’s before we even talk about the biggest auto-subsidy of all–blowing a few trillion $$ trying to take over a country that happens to have oil under it.
I like to look at transportation issue as a supply and demand issue.
Car-roads and highways have a limited capacity - they can only hold so many cars. In other words, the supply of car-space on roads is pretty much fixed. Once demand exceeds supply, you get traffic jams.
Sidewalks also have a finite capacity, but are vastly underutilized. We have a huge untapped economy of sidewalk space for moving people from one place to another.
The problem with sidewalk space is that you can only walk so far. Enter rapid transit. Subways and other dedicated right-of-way transit options leverage the sidewalk economy, making it possible for people to opt out of the scarcity of the auto-road economy.
Kinda geeky, I know, but here’s my point. In the long term, the transit+sidewalk economy is a vastly better investment than is the auto-road economy. Rail scales far better than road. For the price of a good rail line, you can reliably move tens of thousands of people per hour in a fairly tiny amount of space. Compare this to an additional freeway lane, which takes about the same space, but will transport only a fraction of the amount of people per hour.
First, user fees are currently not enough. What has traditionally happened was when the gas tax was raised it was over raised and we ran catchup for a few years. We “skipped” the last possibly two rounds of raising the gas tax. I think we need about 16 cents per gallon more. I’d like that to be 11 cents State and 5 cents Federal.
Second, road building and mantainence has become a moving target. I’m not commenting on whether the new standards are good/bad but do question why the money should be coming from use fees. Say sound walls along sections that were fine for decades until subdivisions convinced the local council to allow building so close to a freeway.
Third, transit has a lot of externalities that get covered by roads user fees despite transit not paying any of those fees. They might pay the excise tax on tires but I don’t think so. You might think this is just an accounting issue, pay with one hand, charge with the other but it leads to some pretty stupid/expensive choices like when Santa Monica had to pay tens of millions to repair curbs when they purchased heavier buses.
Finally there’s a weird twist in roads funding analysis. You aren’t allowed to include economic multipliers in your cost benefit analysis. Thus you end up with shopping centers and big boxes getting “free” roads from the city when we all know that is an accounting juggle and not the true cost. Likewise, dedications of development constructed and subsequently donated roads are clearly a user fee buried in the purchase/lease price by store and homebuyers but those don’t involve cash flowing through the HTF so they don’t get counted. BTW you are required to include economic multipliers when analyzing transit projects.
Why is everyone so excited about electronic tolling but only for autos? Sauce goose, gander? Personally i think it is worth examining but I suspect many here would be uncomfortable with the larger implications. Ultimately making the cenurbs more expensive places to live is going to drive people to the exurbs and thus do transit no favors.
[...] Freeways Aren’t Free (Metro Rider) [...]
So making it more expensive to live outside of the city will force more people to live outside of the city? That makes no sense to me.
Tony, like all the rest it is a lot more complex than that. Demand tolling and congestion charges and cost weighted charges will make it more expensive to drive in the city. The first thought for transit advocacy might be great but the math doesn’t work that way. The jobs will leave with the people and the critical mass necessary for transit viability will be negatively impacted.
These charges if applied as suggested make it cheaper to stay out of the city. Not a good demographic policy.
Rob, there’s plenty of congestion in many exurban areas that could be charged out the wazoo; it’s just that those areas don’t have the physical layout to accommodate any mode other than the private automobile. Proper road pricing would actually make these areas less desirable than more transit- and pedestrian-accessible areas.
Also, I think you’re forgetting that congestion is already costly in terms of time and reliability, which drives the outward push you describe. (Westside businesses are routinely moving back-office work to the Valley and South Bay now because there’s no point in keeping any but the highest-level people on the Westside if no alternatives to a slow-moving 405 are in the offing.) At least from testimony given to the Transportation Research Board’s Congestion Pricing Committee, quite a few commercial transportation operators support congestion pricing in principle (crude implementations like the London/NYC cordons are a different story, though) because it could allow them to locate relatively close to city centers–which are, after all, the most accessible parts of any urban area–without suffering the delays and unreliability normally associated with such locations.
Rob, there’s plenty of congestion in many exurban areas that could be charged out the wazoo; it’s just that those areas don’t have the physical layout to accommodate any mode other than the private automobile. Proper road pricing would actually make these areas less desirable than more transit- and pedestrian-accessible areas.
Partly. A lot of those exurban problems are either recent choke points or neglected transportation children. It becomes very difficult to ignore either concern in a direct charge environment. You can’t levy a congestion charge on the Ventura River Bridge and spend the money on the Montalvo Station.
Also, I think you’re forgetting that congestion is already costly in terms of time and reliability,
I thought I was being kind by ignoring this aspect. We already charge people in congestion with lower gas mileage and time penalties. Not enough? Why?
… which drives the outward push you describe. (Westside businesses are routinely moving back-office work to the Valley and South Bay now because there’s no point in keeping any but the highest-level people on the Westside if no alternatives to a slow-moving 405 are in the offing.)
Man, when double decking starts making sense you know you are 6 sigma into the weirdzone.
It won’t happen and I don’t want it to happen but the CA-23 should connect to PCH. Worse, it should also connect to Tejon.
At least from testimony given to the Transportation Research Board’s Congestion Pricing Committee, quite a few commercial transportation operators support congestion pricing in principle…
I have no problem with congestion pricing either. It needn’t even be purely revenue neutral. TRB has a split personality as chartered. You know this. Oh sidenote, bad news (for some), my kid is going to UCLA not USC. Consolation; my niece has become a rising star from the USC Arch Dept. Anyway, internalizing costs is never a bad idea. The problem with the TRB is their academic hypocrisy over what’s best and what’s possible.
…(crude implementations like the London/NYC cordons are a different story, though)
Especially when Red Ken just renamed the penalty charge as a global warming mitigation.
…because it could allow them to locate relatively close to city centers–which are, after all, the most accessible parts of any urban area–without suffering the delays and unreliability normally associated with such locations.
That’s not their agenda or destination. They can timeshift for maximum return unlike most traffic. They don’t want anything to do with city centers.
I thought I was being kind by ignoring this aspect. We already charge people in congestion with lower gas mileage and time penalties. Not enough? Why?
You realize that congestion charging is designed to reduce congestion, right? The whole point is that the time and gas mileage penalties fall dramatically.
Wrong. An awful lot of commercial carriers are in the business of distributing goods within urban areas. A relatively central location minimizes average trip length–which, in an environment of $4+ diesel, is vitally important.
Also, timeshifting doesn’t work for everyone. I know you can’t stand Anthony Downs, but he’s shown that there are pretty significant returns to scale from working 8 to 5. (One of the reasons that the LA/LB ports haven’t moved to 24-hour operations is that nobody except the railroads and maybe Wal-Mart wants to accept freight at 3 AM.) By the same token, there are significant returns to scale from geographic clustering, which is why employment decentralizes much more slowly than population.
I got in a fairly entertaining debate on reddit about my essay, you can check it out here.
One thing I brought up in my debate with that guy was the amount of government regulation and intervention the car-culture brings into the lives of individuals, a stark contrast to a libertarians desire. As I’ve said before, to be mobile in the car-culture you have to be tested, registered, and licensed by the government. You have to be of a certain age. You have to yield to all sorts of laws and rules that dictate how you are allowed to move about. The commenter on reddit saw this as acceptable because “A car is the single most potentially deadly thing a person can legally own. An out-of-control car can take out the better part of a building and kill dozens of people. And since the owner\operator is going to be among those dead, there’s no way of punishing the guilty afterwards.”
How true, how true.
This has got to be the most prescient op-ed I have read in months. Baby, them freeways aren’t free.
They’re there to get you to the mall and back, and they do that by design, not by accident.
Wrong. An awful lot of commercial carriers are in the business of distributing goods within urban areas. A relatively central location minimizes average trip length–which, in an environment of $4+ diesel, is vitally important.
We both are cheating. I said “city centers” where I believe congestion and use charges would be both the greatest and most variable. You said “urban areas” which indeed are the termini for the vast majority of commercial transport.
In support of my position “Urban Area” doesn’t seem a particularly useful metric given the near universal necessity to use UA roads to get anywhere while avoiding the center city lane miles is both possible and likely desireable.
Rob Dawg:
Uh … your little presentation only shows that in 2001 some source of highway dollars was not spent.
Calculating the costs of the automobile network is tricky to do. However, nearly any way you slice it, user fees do not come close to paying for the total cost of maintaining and expanding the auto transportation network.
So I don’t think you’ve debunked anything, homie.
Fred is making an argument that, if anything, private railways were just what libertarians claim to want. The association of automobiles with “freedom”, “consumer choice”, and “the marketplace” are, in fact, total fictions. Our automobile system is as socialist as the trains were in East Berlin.
In a polycentric region like Los Angeles, there are numerous areas that would have high and highly variable congestion charges in a full marginal cost pricing regime. The traffic control architecture around here is sufficiently sophisticated that installing RFID-based tolling on most of Los Angeles County’s freeways and arterials would be much easier than it’s proving to be in New York; the primary barriers would be political and institutional, and those can be hashed out with enough time and alcohol. (A good start would be repealing the various transportation-linked sales taxes, which have just about zero “nexus” and are punishingly regressive to boot.)
As far as freight distributors and other region-focused industrial users go, location near the center of their region–which usually is the original CBD–is ideal. For Los Angeles this would be the DTLA-Vernon-Commerce corridor, which despite crumbling buildings and streets still has sky-high occupancy rates. Would the Fruit Market or the Flower Market, which primarily sell to Southern California, make sense anywhere else but Downtown? The Fashion District?
Peter McFerrin:
This is a little off-topic, but your remark regarding the technical challenges of congestion pricing in New York do not seem to me to be entirely accurate.
As far as I have been able to discern (from regularly reading Streetsblog), the main hurdles to congestion pricing in New York are not technical.
Pro-congestion charging groups face some stiff political opposition. The same sort of opposition this type of proposal would face in L.A.
Regarding your statement about retail sales tax - these taxes ARE, in fact, heavily tied to transportation. Where transportation subsidies go (generally), retail sales follow. Witness the big box store - conveniently located next to a highway exit. Witness the withering of more traditional downtown cores - as automobile throughput is built into every local road, shunting customers onto the highway system.
Whenever we talk about charging road users, it’s always about raising gas taxes and congestion charging. But drivers aren’t really the only users–businesses that expect people to drive to them, either as employees or customers, are also users–and they actually have a lot more choice than the regular schmucks who actually do the traveling. I recommend a tax/fee on commercial parking places.
It really doesn’t matter how much you want to use transit to get to work (or how much you’d really rather drive, for that matter); your employer pretty much makes the choice of mode for you when they decide where to set up shop.
Btw, for a genuine free-market (and pro-transit) view of transportation, I recommend the “Transit Sleuth” blog at:
http://adronbhall.com/blogs/my_transportation_obsession
[...] of Americuz “free-market transportation” system is a laugh riot. Terence buddy, read this and then go eat your slice of pizza and be quiet, cuz I’m not buying it. [...]
Free is the most expensive form of attainment ever.
This, has always been so true.
“The problem with sidewalk space is that you can only walk so far. Enter rapid transit. Subways and other dedicated right-of-way transit options leverage the sidewalk economy, making it possible for people to opt out of the scarcity of the auto-road economy.”
I dig that thought btw. Very interesting a good way to think of transit as a “sidewalk/transit” economy.
[...] a response by MetroRiderLA’s Fred Camino: In spite of their name, freeways aren’t really free. No, in fact they are actually quite pricey [...]
Please see if http://www.lewrockwell.com will post this!
I bet they will…