In Transportation Costs, "It's the System, Stupid"
The coronavirus pandemic has put public transit systems all over North America on life support. Ridership has plummeted, and the amount or status of aid from higher levels of government is more often than not uncertain. Deep cuts in service are being felt in places where riders are dependent on transit to get around. This has revived, in some quarters, the political debate about the value of spending on public transit, including a common, but false, trope that transit is inherently dependent on heavy subsidies, unable to recoup or justify its own costs. And that, therefore, it should be treated as a social service for the most disadvantaged who cannot afford or access reliable car travel.
It's in that context that stumbling upon the below infographic (via former Vancouver head planner Brent Toderian) recently made an impression on me. It's by a Vancouver-based, self-described "data journalism project" called Moving Forward, and they've attempted to quantify the full social cost of each of four means of getting around: driving, walking, bicycling, and riding a bus.
Originally published as part of Moving Forward, an independent journalism project produced by Discourse Media. Data and analysis by George Poulos.
I do have a quibble with this infographic: It should say "For every $1 that [driving / walking / etc.] costs you" rather than "If [driving / walking / etc.] costs you $1, so that it can't be read as implying that the personal up-front costs of walking, biking, busing, and driving for a given trip are all the same. They clearly aren't.
That said, there is a really important point made here. I try to impress this point on people who complain about how heavily "subsidized" transit supposedly is (because of low farebox recovery): the total cost of a system in which everyone drives is far higher than the total cost of a system in which other forms of transportation are attractive alternatives.
You can find out more detail about Moving Forward’s methodology and assumptions by visiting their website. I don’t want to get into those weeds here. I also don’t want you to focus on the exact numbers, but more on the broader point that there is a huge disparity between the individual and social costs of these activities, and we’re going to briefly summarize why that is.
Who Pays Which Costs?
In some ways this should be the most obvious thing in the world: let's take inventory of the raw resources required to move, say, 30 people a distance of 5 miles in their own 3,000 pound vehicles, one or two people (usually one) to a vehicle. You need an energy source—usually gasoline, although electric vehicles and alternative fuels exist. You need metal to build the cars, rubber for the tires, asphalt for the road (and parking at the origin and destination), and the raw land on which the road and parking lots sit.
“This isn’t just about choice. It’s about who pays for the choice.”
Now let's inventory the raw resources required to move the same 30 people in a single bus or train car. It's not even close to as much, on a per capita basis. Less land, less fuel, less of every physical resource.
It's not hard to see that a multi-ton metal cage for each individual is an incredibly resource-intensive way to travel!
Then you add to the resource question the negative externalities of driving. There are the inevitable crashes, some leading to deaths and injuries, whose costs are not covered by the gas tax or even the transportation budget, but rather fall on the health care, insurance, and legal systems. There is air pollution from particulates (tailpipe emissions, but also things like brake dust that remain a factor even with electric vehicles) that can exacerbate conditions such as asthma. And there are atmospheric carbon emissions as well. We don't fully know how high those costs will end up being, and any attempt to come up with a dollar amount like the one from Moving Forward is guaranteed to make many simplifying assumptions. But suffice it to say the external costs—all of the above of which are much lower for mass transit, and almost nonexistent for walking and rolling—range from substantial to staggering.
And we haven't even gotten into the chicken-egg problem of land use patterns. If you really want to get into the weeds of a systems analysis, you have to acknowledge that cars have shaped the geometry of our cities in ways that, in a feedback loop, affect the relative costs of using cars and other means of transportation.
Office buildings along I-95 west of Boston (left) versus Boston’s North End neighborhood (right), created using Two Maps, One Scale. Note how much of the land is “non-place” in the left photo compared to the right.
Car dependence is self-reinforcing, as it leads us to build cities that are spread out and fragmented. We must make room for parking for those vehicles, and room on the roads for them. But once we've done that, we've also deterred people from walking and biking—now their destinations are farther apart and more treacherous to travel between. This affects transit as well, since every transit user is a pedestrian between their bus stop and their final destination. So now more of those people hop in cars.
This requires even wider roads, larger interchanges, extra turn lanes. These roads are unpleasant, so we add noise and exhaust buffers between the road and adjacent buildings (think of a row of trees and a high wall separating a suburban subdivision from an arterial road). The extra pavement we've built requires more land set aside for stormwater drainage, etc. Fewer people than before oppose these additions, because the only constituency obviously harmed by them are those who wish to walk places. Who are fewer and fewer every day. Chicken, meet egg.
Accommodating a city where everyone travels by car, and many of them long distances, begins to require vast swaths of non-place, as I wrote in Visualizing Place vs. Non-Place. Parking alone is now arguably the dominant land use in North American cities, the one that determines the form everything else takes. It's hard to recognize how much of our land is devoted to places nobody would ever choose to linger, and that are not directly producing any value, when you're busy driving around those places.
But all of this land waste has a cost: we've diluted and denuded our places.
And that dilution is a vicious cycle. The costs of spreading your city so thin on the landscape are astronomical—read our study of Lafayette, Louisiana, "The Real Reason Your City Has No Money," if you're not convinced of that. But you also need to do more driving, and the amount of subsidy required to make transit minimally useful in such an environment has skyrocketed. Transit is cost-effective when it can attract a critical mass of riders who want to go from roughly the same place (say, 1/4-mile radius) to roughly the same place (1/4 mile radius) at roughly the same time. When everything is spread out, this becomes harder to achieve.
Click to view larger. Originally published as part of Moving Forward, an independent journalism project produced by Discourse Media. Data and analysis by George Poulos.
Americans mistake the high sticker price of transit (including government operating subsidies) for something inherent to transit, when in fact, it's that we're trying to operate transit systems in cities not remotely built for them. If we committed to a different kind of transportation system, it would mean evolving toward a different kind of city simultaneously.
People struggle with this because thinking about the costs of a system, versus the costs of a single action, product, or service, is not intuitive. Most of us fixate on simple sticker prices: your bus fare and the explicit government budget of the bus system, versus your gas, insurance, car payment, maintenance, and the explicit government budget for roads.
But sticker prices don't tell us the story, for the reasons outlined above. The infographic gets at something closer to the true picture, despite all of its (no doubt) simplifications in arriving at dollars-and-cents figures.
When it comes to transportation costs, with apologies to James Carville, "It's the system, stupid."
So What if It Is the System?
Why does this discussion matter? Well, in part because many mistake the pump price of gasoline, which is low, for the cost of cities built around driving, which is astronomical.
But it also matters because many (not all) transit advocates play into this confusion by moralizing too much about individual choices, instead of talking about the costs of the system. Are you a bad person if you drive a car, in an environment where everything around you is designed to make it easiest to drive a car? Of course not.
Change isn't going to happen by attacking cars or car culture or individual people's moral frameworks for just figuring out how they're going to get from place to place. And it will alienate nearly everybody along the way.
Change might happen by having discussions prompted by things like that infographic above, and—perhaps most importantly—but getting people to ask a different question: "What kind of place do you really want to live in?" with all factors considered. How we get to that place from the place we're at now is a more difficult question, but we can at least then discuss where to start.
Cover image by Weston MacKinnon on Unsplash
Designing streets to encourage safe behavior is a powerful tool for creating lasting prosperity. But when cars are designed to encourage unsafe behavior, it threatens to undo that progress.