Transportation infrastructure is like the weather. Everyone talks about it and many are dissatisfied with it. But it is unclear what can or should be done to improve it.
Thus, a recent report, “Twin Cities Traffic Congestion: It’s No Accident”, from the Center for the American Experiment, is a useful addition to the debate, one that will raise the level of discussion even if it doesn’t convince everyone of every argument it makes.
A key argument in the report is that the Metropolitan Council, a regional government planning agency, has followed a flawed strategy for dealing with Twin Cities metro-area traffic congestion. The Met Council has emphasized light rail systems, which are expensive relative to rider-miles; it has shunned old-fashioned road building. This policy, report author Randal O’Toole argues, has wasted more driver time and worsened congestion. It could have been better if the same money had been used in different ways — say to add roads or expand capacity on existing roads.
O’Toole’s permanent job is as a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian-oriented D.C. think tank. That may lead many predisposed Minnesota liberals to reject his arguments out of hand. That would be a mistake. On some issues, such as congestion pricing, O’Toole isn’t far from positions long-held by the Citizen’s League, an organization that usually commands great respect among the state’s DFLers.
Let’s go back to some basics. Transportation infrastructure has some elements of a “public good.” This is something that provides spillover benefits to society as a whole that the entity supplying it on its own cannot capture. Since the entity supplying such a good bears all the costs, but does not capture all the benefits, economic incentives are such that a free market won’t supply an amount of the good that is optimal for efficient use of resources. So, typically, government steps in.
A “pure” public good has two characteristics: It is “non-rival” and “non-excludable.” A tornado warning siren system is an example. One person hearing the siren it does not keep another person from also doing so. And if the system is audible to some, you cannot keep others in the same area from also hearing it. That’s non-rival and non-excludable.
Transportation infrastructure has some element of this. Obviously, the BNSF railroad can keep people who do not pay from getting freight on their trains. And if a boxcar is filled with farm tractors, it cannot handle steel beams on the same car. Freight railroading is excludable and rival.
Ditto for much public transportation. An operator can keep you off a bus or LRT car if you do not pay and if you sit in a seat or stand in an aisle you take up space that someone else cannot use. Similarly, the more cars that get on a freeway during rush hour, the more limited the freedom of use of that freeway becomes to the individual drivers.
But in these cases this is not the whole story. A 100 car train can carry the same weight and volume as 500 semi-trucks. If that number of trucks are taken off the road net, all the remaining drivers benefit from less congestion.
A Metro Transit articulated express bus driving up the shoulder of 35E from beyond Burnsville may have 100 people who could otherwise be alone in cars. Having that number of cars off 35E during rush hour benefits everyone still in a car. So there again is a spillover benefit. When there are spillover benefits, some government action is needed to reach a societally optimal level of production of the good.
Some ancient civilizations recognized spillover benefits and spent public resources on roads, often with a partial justification that they were needed to move armies quickly to defend the civilization. The Romans built roads and bridges, some still standing, along with aqueducts and sewers. The Incas did not even have the wheel and did not ride animals, but their road from Cuzco to Quito still takes one’s breath away and allowed communication faster than a letter would go today.
In our country, early infrastructure was often public-private partnerships. The Erie Canal and turnpike roads depended on state legislative authorization and were, at least potentially, subject to regulation of the rates they charged. In the case of the Erie and many other canals, state money went in directly along with that of private investors.
This model of government granting monopolies on routes and subsidizing construction dominated the period of railroad expansion after the Civil War. As streetcars came into dense urban areas, first pulled by horses and then powered with electricity, private ownership and funding dominated, although lines depended on route authorizations from local government. And in some cases, municipal money went into the new electric lines.
It became obvious that there were spillover benefits to the general economy of a rapidly expanding rail net as there also was from broad streetcar service. The electrification also had the spillover benefit of removing millions of tons of horse manure from city streets.
Little was spent on roads until the automobile. If farmers in Rock County wanted to get their wheat to an elevator in Luverne or Magnolia, then their township government could spend to make rudimentary grades and simple bridges. A county might link Slayton and Iona or Lanesboro and Preston. There were a few state roads and fragmentary national ones. Then Lt. Dwight Eisenhower led a troop of soldiers in traversing the country on the Lincoln Highway in 1919. The travail of that experiment and his personal observation later of how Hitler’s Germany was so much smarter in building its autobahns made President Ike the champion of enormous appropriations for the U.S. interstate system more than 30 years later.
The streetcar system was established with a rush and disappeared almost as quickly five decades later. Rail-transit advocates today paint that as a golden era when anyone could get anywhere cheaply and conveniently. They tend to ignore how slow some of the service was, particularly through the centers of cities, and the degree to which streetcars imposed an external cost of snarled traffic on automobiles and even buses.
One hears a sad tale of how near-magical systems were bought up by evil General Motors that wanted to destroy them and put GM diesel bus systems in their place. But this ignores the facts that the popularity of the car had fundamentally altered demands for streetcar transportation. When post-WWII inflation made nickel fares woefully inadequate, municipal authorities often refused to let the private companies prune routes or raise fares. The alternative was selling out to GM one step before bankruptcy.
So what does this all have to do with the Green Line, I-94 or any other issue in 2017? The Center for the American Experiment charges that the Green Line through St. Paul reduced University Avenue’s auto carrying capacity and thus increased congestion on I-94, while carrying relatively few people on the new line itself.
It also charges that the Metro Council is fixated on LRT and that the hundreds of millions that go into planning and building new such lines would benefit society more if simply used to build more freeway capacity. They make a good critique, even if you don’t buy the total argument.
But they pay little attention to equity issues. Public transportation does not affect all people equally, regardless of income. A suburbanite who parks at a park-and-ride off of Cliff Avenue to ride an express bus into the central St. Paul has alternatives. But a poor person from Frogtown without a car who gets a job in Maplewood doesn’t. Lack of effective public transportation in this example makes labor markets less efficient and imposes a much greater burden on the poor than on the rich or middle class.
Engineers and economists point out that express bus projects like the Snelling Avenue A line usually produce greater benefits in transit services per dollar spent than does light rail. But rail remains the crown jewel in many urban planners’ dreams.
Technology also changes alternatives. I-94 could be a tollway. But the transaction costs of charging tolls on a road with many exits and entrances are huge. Reduce access points and you cut these costs, but you also reduce the value of the service.
With GPS and cellphone-tracking technology, however, we will soon be at a point where every vehicle could be charged a toll for every single foot driven down myriad routes — this number of cents per mile on Raymond Avenue, that amount per mile on Energy Park and yet another rate for MN 280. Higher rates can be charged for high usage hour so that I don’t time my jaunt out to Oakdale to get tractor paint during rush hour. And weigh-in-motion scales combined with real time logging of truck positions and speed will allow charging trucks for the true marginal dost of their being on the road. And real time monitoring of exhaust emissions on each vehicle is not that far away.
When we are able to identify the full cost to society from each alternative way for a person to get somewhere, choosing whether another LRT line should be built versus another lane on 35W will be easier. In the meantime, we need to discuss and move forward using the information at hand.