oil wars, climate disruption (flood, wildfires, drought, heat-deaths, refugees, drought wars, species-disruption, methane release), medical costs from direct injury and death, noise pollution, respiratory disease, drainage/aquifer problems, bureaucracy, parking issues, court costs of fighting sprawlers, insurance, disposal, traffic congestion...

I spent a few years working in the capital programs section of a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in Pennsylvania You can look at the Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) of any MPO and see clearly that there is no regular programming for local road projects. The feds only pay for road & bridge construction and maintenance of roads in the state or federal system. State gas taxes pay for roads in the state and county systems. The majority of VMT can be clocked on these neighborhood streets and their arterials.

Spending for bike & ped projects was a paltry part of the budget if there was any at all. Most of that money came through the "competitive" grant programs like CMAQ and TE. The MPO i worked for was hardly unique in that regard. Again, just look at your local TIP.

Pointing out that most trips are taken in cars is like pointing out that people in Ohio favor Taco Bell over Del Taco. There's only one Del Taco in the whole state. Likewise, there is only one rapid transit system in the whole state and it barely extends beyond the boundaries of one municipality.

If you want to make reasonable comparisons look at the modal split in transit-rich places. 54% for transit in NYC. In a ped-rich environment like Center City Philadelphia 50% walk to work. 25% in the Philly as a whole use transit for their work trips. But focusing on JTW data paints an incredibly distorted picture when only 1/4 of all trips are work-based.

5 general tactics are used by denialists to sow confusion. They are conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.

Spot on, Mark. Lewis's blog appears to have been set up not to elucidate, inform or even to advocate. It was set up specifically to distract, discredit, and pollute a particular information environment by filling it with fake expertise, false assumptions and misinformation.

My favorite recent example -- I suppose this gets filed under "fake expertise" -- was a bizarro commentary they did on Richard Florida's weekly column in the Toronto Globe and Mail. They must have seen it excerpted here on Streetsblog last week and decided it required one of their authoritative, fact-based take-downs. Except they really didn't know anything about Richard Florida or the subject matter that was being discussed and they combined the two as a quote from the "Florida Globe and Mail."

It reminds me of the kind of mistake a teenager makes when he is caught in a lie.

Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one's viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions.

Examples of common topics in which denialists employ their tactics include: Creationism/Intelligent Design, Global Warming denialism, Holocaust denial, HIV/AIDS denialism, 9/11 conspiracies, Tobacco Carcinogenecity denialism (the first organized corporate campaign), anti-vaccination/mercury autism denialism and anti-animal testing/animal rights extremist denialism. Denialism spans the ideological spectrum, and is about tactics rather than politics or partisanship....

5 general tactics are used by denialists to sow confusion. They are conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.

Sound familiar, Lewis?

I think your critique of the muffler shops is valid - but that a personal preference based in aesthetics. Those place do provide jobs and contribute to the tax base after all, and they provide needed goods and services.

I agree that mass transit should be expanded, but I disagree that we've been dismantling it. Aaron's first chart shows that investment in mass transit has been steadily increasing.

Now you could argue that it hasn;t risen enough to keep pace with demand, and that may be valid - but we should also consider that mass transit cannot work everywhere. Where it can't work, we should make prudent policy decisions about how we spend money, and if that means decommissioning a transit system that no one uses - so be it.

Now, it's idiotic to decommission a system everyone uses, in fact, that's criminal.

I think Charles and Delucci have done a pretty good job of cataloging the costs side of the equation, my whole point is that we need to calculate the benefits side just as thoroughly so we understand what we give up and what we gain. And we need to understand that in a way that is divorced from aesthetic preferences - remember other people have the opposite preference.

I notice that instead of responding to a single point I make, you resort to ad hominem attacks. Doesn’t Streetsblog have a comment policy against allowing that? Oh, I guess it’s OK if you agree with them.

That’s alright, I’ll respond to the substance of your argument.

I have a better term than “denialist” – “scientist”. Science is not based on consensus. Consensus is the enemy of science because science seeks truth through repeatable, quantifiable observation.

Facts are the only thing important in science, and it doesn’t matter if one billion people believe something - only one person has to prove the opposite for it to mean nothing – fact is fact.

History is littered with scientific consensus overturned by one man, and instances where one man alone advanced scientific knowledge dramatically – see Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, or Hawking for starters.

Manmade global warming isn’t fact until it has been proven. And it hasn’t been proven. The evidence I provided in my earlier post refutes that notion.

Of course, the easiest refutation of manmade global warming is a simple question: if we can’t accurately predict the weather three days from now, how do you suppose we can predict the climate, something thousands of times more complex, 100 years from now?

I have a term for people like you too, Mark – clowns.

The answer to your first question is that I disagree that your study proved what you claim.

The answer to your second question is that I do want a cost benefit analysis. I have seen Delucci’s study. I find it odd that you refer to it as a cost-benefit analysis since Delucci says:

“1.3.4 Benefits versus costs
In this project, we estimate the dollar social cost but not the dollar social benefit of motor-vehicle use.”

That’s exactly what I criticized your study for.

Don’t get me wrong, I think both you and Delucci have done great jobs of calculating the true costs of automobiles (in fact, I believe that your study stops short of some of the environmental costs, and I commend you for that because they are very difficult to calculate - but if you had a reasonable methodology, I think you should give it a shot), and in the comment I posted a link to, I said so.

The problem is that this is only half of the equation if we want to use the information to make policy decisions.

My example about the fire department is valid – you are tallying costs that all roads including local roads and the services that maintain them, but you’re not tallying all of the benefits that local roads enable. You’re counting costs without counting benefits.

That’s fine, you performed a cost analysis, but my point is still valid, and I find your example about your bike ride interesting because it undermines your point in the study.

Local roads are paid for by everyone precisely because they benefit everyone, but your study doesn’t add that to the revenues that pay for the roads.

But I agree with you that we should build more trains – in DC we have local opposition to two Metro expansions that is ridiculous. They need to expand our system, and to be honest, they need to consider a lot more expansion than they currently are. As a daily rider, I can tell you that this would make my life 1000 times easier.

The bulk of the article spends time arguing that highways are socialism (which they are), and that they would be better substituted with transit socialism.

We must remember that before the construction of the National Highway System under Eisenhower, transit operators were private, and profitable, as were passenger railway services.

It could be argued that removing government construction of freeways could allow for the eventual return of private mass transit, where its superior cost effectiveness will be much more obvious.

The benefits side of your cost-benefits ledger is, to say the least, problematic given that it was tallied up before the advent of permanently expensive gasoline and permanently devalued suburban real estate. I'd also quibble over the economic "benefits" of the muffler shops, big box stores and millions of acres of asphalt parking lot required to run a mono-modal automobile-oriented transportation system and included in your analysis as a positive.

The benefits of transit and transit-oriented development are substantial. Installing a transit line has, historically, been one of the best ways to ensure higher property values and an increased tax base. The same cannot be said for the muffler shops, big boxes and parking tarmacs we've scattered across our American landscape.

Unfortunately, in most places around the U.S., we haven't been able to measure these potential transit benefits For the most part, we've spent the last 60 years dismantling and degrading our mass transit systems and evacuating the middle and upper class from our urban centers.

Bottom line is that actual American people (as opposed to highway lobbyists) increasingly desire the freedom to choose from various transportation options. We've got too many people trapped in a failing, expensive, automobile-oriented system. Widening highways and building clean cars isn't going to solve that problem.

In your first comment (#11), you said, "It doesn’t take a math whiz to see that WAY more money gets taken in from cars than is given back to cars." Since that proposition is precisely what I investigated -- and disproved -- in my 1994 NY and 1995 NJ studies, I wrote a comment (#17) about them. I don't understand how, in your subsequent comment (#20), you now justify calling those studies "inappropriate." To me it smacks of seeing my hand is a full house and saying you were really playing gin rummy.

Do you really want a cost-benefit analysis of driving instead? No problem. Plow into Mark Delucchi's magisterial 20-volume Annualized Social Cost of Motor-Vehicle Use in the United States, Based on 1990-1991 Data, available here, and get a taste of the enormous crash costs, pollution costs, climate-damage costs, military-"protection" costs, etc. not included in my NY and NJ reports (which were restricted to fiscal costs). You'll also get a taste of genuine intellectual rigor.

Your tedious fire-dept example is undermined by the fact that emergency vehicles don't require multiple lanes of asphalt. And most don't log many miles on gas-tax-funded state and federal highways anyway.

You asked, "how far can you ride a bicycle in NYC without riding on local roads, and what kinds of direct taxes do bicyclists pay to support them the way cars do?" That's the wrong question. The pertinent question is how far can you ride a bicycle in NYC without riding on roads paid for by drivers' user fees? Well, last Sunday I rode 60 miles from lower Manhattan into northern Westchester County, entirely on local roads paid for by general revenues, including my NYC property and sales taxes. I'll confess that I did return by train, some of whose service is financed by NYC bridge and tunnel tolls. Then again, that same train service benefits drivers by mitigating highway gridlock. A win-win.

But Derkins can't conceal two increasingly obvious facts: that car sales are plummeting, and that transit and biking are on the rise. As the peak oil crisis develops, and gas prices rise toward double digits, the constituency for car infrastructure will only shrink. The more it shrinks, the more hysterical people like Derkins will become.

The only case to be made for roads is that they accommodate bikes and buses. But we're beginning to talk about a much different kind of road, aren't we? Bus and bike lanes will be much more prominent features of the roads of the future.

By the way, I've visited Derkins' blog -- what is it called? I can't remember. He and his partner make a big point of saying they're in favor of all kinds of transportation. But they're really just car apologists. And judging from the above, also global-warming denialists.

I’m not trying to compare the methodologies of individual calculations in this paper against each other. I have problems with the entire paper’s methodology, and I simply called out a couple of quick examples. You’re correct that it’s a bit flippant and confusing.

First of all, this paper suffers from the same problems I called out above with Charles.

Second, there are credibility issues with any paper that accepts manmade global warming as a proven fact when deriving all of it’s conclusions. At last count, 31,000 scientists signed an Oregon Institute of Science petition a couple of months ago rejecting the manmade global warming hypothesis. That’s over 17 times the number of scientists who are on the entire IPCC telling us we’re doomed. And that’s being generous to their side because several of the IPCC scientists have resigned or publicly come out against the IPCC’s conclusions. The IPCC, the very people who have been scaremongering us, also announced last month that we’re about to go through a decade of cooling?

If manmade global warming exists, why hasn’t there been any in the last decade? any in the last decade and why is none expected in the next decade? With steadily increasing CO2, this doesn’t make sense – the temperature should be steadily increasing. The use of global warming as accepted fact in the face of an obviously huge and continuing debate is irresponsible and calls the conclusions that this report makes into question.

You say: “As a public we make collective decisions.”

Those decisions should be based on sound research, not biased facts and figures.

To respond to your aside – I didn’t call China Stalinist, a colleague did. However, what part of arresting internet dissenters (might be dangerous for Streetsblog) so no one will speak out against you while the Olympics are in town, commanding one third of your economy to simply shut down to avoid traffic, conscripting vast armies to clean up pollution to put on a happy face, or completely reconstructing your city to make it appear more prosperous to foreign eyes is not Stalinist. Those examples are the very definition of Stalinism.

I’m familiar with the studies you cite, and I provided critique on them a couple of months ago here.

The basic problem with these studies is that you are doing a cost-revenue analysis, which is inappropriate. Highways and roads don’t exist to generate direct revenues. They are a public good, and exist to provide a service to everyone.

The appropriate analysis would be cost-benefit, which these studies don’t perform. And if you do a cost-benefit analysis, the benefits of roads far outweigh the costs. Your studies tally all of the indirect costs and none of the hidden or indirect revenues.

In my critique of Charles’ study, I gave a short example of indirect revenues, using the NYC fire department as a test case. Here is the excerpt:

“If you look at Manhattan, there are an average of 701 “serious incidents” every year in that borough. The average property value per square mile in 1992 was $1.84 Billion. (I couldn’t find data old enough to go exactly with your study timeframe, so I took the average number of serious incidents for all years and the average property value per square mile in 2000 minus the average value per square mile for 1990 divided by ten – times two and added to the 1990 value for the two years until your report to get the average property value per square mile in 1992) If we assume that each block is a tenth of a mile, and each fire only endangers one one-hundredth of that block – which I consider to be a conservative estimate – then each of those fires endangers $1.84 million in property. Thus, the responses by fire department vehicles in 1992 saved $1.28 Billion in property. That saved property was taxed by the city and state, and led to revenues that aren’t accounted for. That’s a huge revenue, and it only covers one borough in NYC.”

“You may say that this is too attenuated and therefore outside the scope of your research, but I disagree. This is a direct revenue to city and state coffers that automobiles and their infrastructure make possible.”

“You’re also not considering the business and corporate taxes paid by businesses that are dependent on automobiles. Any food delivery, UPS or FEDEX, even grocery stores all derive their revenue, which in turn pays these taxes, from automobile use. So, in my opinion this data is heavily skewed to make the automobile appear more costly. The problem with the way you have it set up is that a lot of indirect costs that aren’t contemplated by the direct taxes, tolls and fees are accounted for (police, fire, DMV, etc..), but these indirect revenues are not.”

Another problem I have with Charles’ study is that it mixes apples and oranges. Local roads are not meant to be covered by gas taxes – those taxes cover highways only, and my point is that we bring in plenty of money to cover those costs with the tax. But by lumping in local roads, which gas taxes aren’t meant to cover, with highways, you get to stack the deck and claim that auto users only cover 65 cents on the dollar. That’s not true. The taxes that we pay bring in more than enough revenue to pay for the categories of construction and maintenance that they are levied to cover.

If you want to consider local roads, that’s fine, but again you need to consider indirect benefits, and you also need to consider that those roads are constructed and maintained through property taxes because everyone benefits from them – how do emergency vehicles get to your house, or goods get to your store without them? For that matter, how far can you ride a bicycle in NYC without riding on local roads, and what kinds of direct taxes do bicyclists pay to support them the way cars do? None.

But bringing local roads into this argument isn’t appropriate anyway because the subject of Aaron’s post is highway spending, not local road spending.

This study in Aaron’s post touts a $2 return for every dollar invested in mass transit – but that is not an economic benefit in the traditional sense – it is a savings. If we’re looking at savings, similar studies have found that every dollar of highway investment nets between $5.40
and $8.75 worth of cost savings.

The second study (full version
and here) also talks about the economic benefits of increased productivity and the net social rate of return.

Industry productivity growth rate is leveled at 6% (it was much higher with more highway construction – up to 31%) – that feeds in to our GDP, which is currently $14 Trillion, the question would be what share of this does the 6% productivity growth represent, but since derived from a model simulating the entire economy, I would feel pretty confident saying that this will far outweigh the $2 return for $1 investment benefit mass transit provides – not that it matters since the cost to cost comparison already shows highways to be more beneficial by a factor of between 2-4.

For net social rate of return we also get 10% - this means we get a rate of return on investment of 10% for every dollar on top of the savings and increased productivity.

This far outweighs what we get for mass transit, and if we’re talking about investments in expectations of returns, we should be looking at these kinds of numbers - not stacking the deck against cars and highways. If you’d like to see more studies that derive this same conclusion, you can go
and here.

My grinding axe may be loud, but Streetsblog is running the mill that owns all the grinding machines.

That's not surprising, given that the vast majority of Americans live in areas of highway monopoly. I would be more interested to see a breakdown of commuting in only those areas where highways compete with a developed transit system. I would guess that highways will still carry more people in most cases, but I would be very surprised if 1 to 20 were still an accurate ratio.

Of course more Americans currently use automobiles than transit. Given the history of public spending and the systematic dismantling and under-funding of transit in most US cities, why would one expect anything else?

Still, as noted in the US PIRG report, transit ridership is currently increasing at a far faster than vehicle travel. And when you go out and actually talk to Americans, you find that approximately three out of four of them now believe that transit and building communities that require less driving are the best solutions for traffic congestion.

Like Lewis, your argument depends on failing to include a significant and very real set of expenditures that the public pays to keep America's highway and road systems up and running -- little things like law enforcement and traffic safety, off-street parking, pollution, and military costs related to the use of Persian Gulf oil.

I know that the highway lobby would like to focus on the most narrow set of capital and operating costs. But when you get out into the real world you find that towns, cities and states across the country are struggling with all of these other costs as well. They are grappling with not being able to afford the police and ambulances needed to clean up car crashes, crumbling municipal parking garages, protecting town water systems from highway waste, and hundreds billions of military dollars (not to mention the blood of their own sons) being poured into the world's oil-producing regions.

Delucchi does a good, even-handed job of evaluating and accounting for public costs. He also lays out four different models in case someone chooses not to account for some of the more indirect costs of automobile dependence, like climate destruction and oil war.

http://pubs.its.ucdavis.edu/download_pdf.php?id=1139

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To add to Lewis’s point, if we go to the data used to create the much-vaunted Figure 8 in Baxandall’s March 2008 report, we do in fact see that, not only have federal, state and local governments invested nine times more funding in highway capital projects than in mass transit capital expenditure, but 2004 (the most recent year for which all data are available) public spending for capital projects and operations & maintenance outweighed public outlays for mass transit 3 to 1. What we also see – and here’s the ugly truth – is that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2004 Americans who drive to work outnumber their mass transit-riding countrymen 20 to 1.
 
How about -- starting now – everyone goes to the data instead of drawing inferences from the conclusions of others? When did tertiary sources become acceptable to use in scholarly debate?
 
And Fritz -- If you have an issue with something I write, take it up on the comment board of my article.

I agree that you can't speak for New York. But I can. I researched and wrote the definitive analysis of Empire State revenues from driving and expenditures for driving that found that driver taxes, tolls, tickets etc. account for only 65 cents of every dollar spent on road building, maintaining, policing, adjudicating, etc. And though Subsidies for Traffic dates from 1994, little appears to have changed since. My year-later study of New Jersey driving fees and spending, Crossroads, found a similar tilt.

If you want to speak with authority on taxation and driving in Virginia, why don't you do a comparable study of that state? (BTW, the link you gave only went to a generic state budget portal and didn't show road data.) When you do, be sure to include expenditures on local roads. In NY and NJ, these are funded primarily by property taxes rather than gas taxes or other user fees, which helps explain why the annual net taxpayer subsidy for driving exceeded $2 billion in New York State and $700 million in New Jersey in my two studies.

Oh, by the way, those dollars spent on transit and bike/walk help speed your car commute by enhancing non-highway alternatives to driving. But don't tell anyone, they wouldn't hear it over the din of your grinding axe.