The secret of European eco-friendliness? Maybe not. Photo: romerican/Flickr

Rosenthal attributes much of this difference to behavioral factors relating, it seems, to Europeans' unique tolerance of inconvenience. She writes:

But even as an American, if you go live in a nice apartment in Rome, as I did a few years back, your carbon footprint effortlessly plummets. It’s not that the Italians care more about the environment; I’d say they don’t. But the normal Italian poshy apartment in Rome doesn’t have a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or microwave or limitless hot water. The heat doesn’t turn on each fall until you’ve spent a couple of chilly weeks living in sweaters. The fridge is tiny. The average car is small. The Fiat 500 gets twice as much gas mileage as any hybrid SUV. And it’s not considered suffering. It’s living the dolce vita.

She later adds:

Also, in Europe, the construction of most cities preceded the invention of cars. The centuries-old streets in London or Barcelona or Rome simply can’t accommodate much traffic — it’s really a pain, but you learn to live with it. In contrast, most American cities, think Atlanta and Dallas, were designed for people with wheels.

What makes this particularly remarkable is that she opens the essay by discussing an experience she has in Stockholm, in which she insists on taking a taxi from the airport, which ends up being much slower and more expensive than the train.

Brad Plumer frames the piece as a fascinating read in light of the "lifestyle taboo," writing:

It's not considered the height of political savvy here in the United States to point out that European lifestyles are greener than our own. Don't expect that line in an Obama speech anytime soon. Too many facets of European life—the cramped apartments, the clotheslines for drying laundry—would likely strike suburbanites as inconvenient, burdensome, or even downright primitive...

Rosenthal wonders whether similar measures could fly in the United States: "I believe most people are pretty adaptable and that some of the necessary shifts in lifestyle are about changing habits, not giving up comfort or convenience." Maybe so, but this sort of talk still tends to be taboo in mainstream U.S. green circles. Josh Patashnik wrote a terrific piece for TNR last year on Arnold Schwarzenegger's brand of "pain-free environmentalism" in California—it's all just peachy to talk about swapping out coal-fired plants for solar-thermal stations, but ixnay on trying to rein in suburban growth or coax people into smaller homes.

I see several problems with Rosenthal's essay and with Brad's framing of it. One is that it's not really correct to attribute the huge gap in per capita emissions between America and Western Europe to the charming European habit of drying their clothes on clotheslines.

As Brad notes, power sources play a major role, whether one is talking about greater use of natural gas, the French nuclear industry, or Iceland's geothermal capacity.

Climate is extremely important. Western Europe is fairly temperate relative to much of America (and especially compared to the dirtiest parts of the country). In the same way, Californians are much greener than Texans, thanks to the moderate conditions along the heavily populated Pacific coast, which reduce the number of days on which home heating or cooling is needed.

But there are lifestyle issues involved, particularly where transportation and land use are concerned. And contrary to Rosenthal, it isn't that Europeans have opted for inconvenience. Rather, they have chosen different conveniences, as her Stockholm air train anecdote makes clear.

It is incorrect to say that an overabundance of land drove America to sprawl, and to drive. The Netherlands is dense of necessity, of course, but in Britain and France and Germany there is ample countryside, which might easily be home to sprawling subdivisions.

But Western Europeans have largely chosen not to encourage such growth, opting instead to tax gas at high rates, invest in transit, and protect center cities from the threat of urban freeways.

I think it is very difficult, objectively, to demonstrate that their choices have produced ways of life that are clearly less convenient than American lives. It is clear that Europeans tend to have better health outcomes than us, and they die in car accidents at much lower rates, and of course they're enjoying levels of wealth similar to our own while producing half as much carbon.

The obvious retort to this line of thinking is that perhaps that's all true, but like it or not America is now sprawling, and any effort to make the country greener by pursuing European land use and transportation options would be very difficult. In a similar vein, it is argued that attempts to push Americans into such a life via gas taxes or carbon prices would wind up being very painful.

But this is not quite right. As I have pointed out before, America will more or less need to build itself all over again by 2050 in order to accommodate population growth. Just because most of America is currently sprawling doesn't mean that most of the America built between now and mid-century has to look the same.

It's also not clear that increasing the push factor on households has to be especially painful. Taxes on drivers can be levied in a progressive fashion, if some revenues are used to fund transit options while others are refunded to lower and middle income households to help offset the added cost of driving.

Congestion tolling would mean higher government revenues and reduced driving, but it would benefit rich and poor alike. As with tax revenues, tolls could be used to provide a cushion against the increased cost for lower income families and increased investment in transit. Higher income households (which will tend to place a greater value on work hours lost to congestion) would enjoy a speedy ride into the office.

If the federal government worked to address limits on urban growth in green cities like New York and San Francisco -- limits which also serve to make housing in such places extremely expensive -- then America could grow denser and greener by improving access for middle-income households to some of the most dynamic metropolitan economies in the country.

Perhaps not all of the policy changes needed to reduce America's carbon footprint will be a walk in the park, but efforts to improve land use and transportation decisions are likely to be some of the most benefit-rich aspects of the climate change fight (as you'd think most people would realize, given the obvious pain of congestion, high gas prices, driving fatalities, and isolation among those unable to drive, among other things).

This storyline -- that changing lifestyles to enhance walkability will be painful -- makes it harder to pass good metropolitan policies and easier for politicans to fall back on the lame argument that Americans simply won't tolerate anything other than the sprawling suburban patterns which have dominated new development in recent decades.

And by reinforcing the idea that some of the most promising and least painful policy changes that can be made are unlikely to "work" here in America, writers and politicians alike ensure that more of the hard job of cutting emissions will fall to the parts of the economy where there are no good alternative options, and where change will be painful for households.

Rosenthal's essay is odd yet revealing. She instinctually attributes European greenness to practices Americans would dub backward, while pretending that the very convenient and green transport options she finds are built, and presumably used, by Europeans based on some peculiarity in their culture that we lack.

But we could build trains! In any given legislative sessions bills are introduced that would move the country toward the level of convenience Rosenthal enjoyed in her train ride to the Stockholm airport. It's just that they don't pass, because "it's not considered the height of political savvy" to embrace those policies, because Americans seem to think that their American-ness will render such conveniences inconvenient.

"Trains won't work here," because "Americans love their cars," and so high quality rail lines aren't built, and so Americans continue to drive. And then we sit around wondering what it is about the European character that makes them enjoy using clotheslines so much.

Do federal gas taxes really charge "users" of the highway? (Photo: CAP)

The Interstate Highway System accomplished all of this [construction of the system] without any subsidies. Federal highway user fees paid for 90 percent of the cost of the system, and state highway user fees covered virtually all of the remaining 10 percent.

This brings up an interesting question: What is a user fee? Common sense would suggest that a user fee is a fee paid by a user of something in order to use that something. A common example might be a train fare. When one wants to ride a train, one purchases a ticket. One doesn't purchase a ticket if one doesn't want to ride the train, and one doesn't ride the train without a ticket. A ticket is specifically meant to extract a fee from a potential user, that that user might then be allowed to use the train.

So do gas taxes count as highway user fees? Well, one might pay gas taxes even if one never uses highways. You pay the gas tax on gas used to drive down local roads or private driveways, or to power lawnmowers and tractors that never even see publicly-funded blacktop.

And one can use highways without ever paying gas taxes. Anyone able to obtain a vehicle powered by natural gas or electric batteries or canola oil can ride on the federal highway system for thousands of miles and never pay one cent to do so.

So gas taxes are not user fees. Indeed, the lack of actual user fees is one reason American highways suffer from severe congestion problems; when you give away something valuable for free -- like scarce highway space -- it ends up seriously over-consumed.

As a thought experiment, let's consider a world in which federal gas taxes functioned more like a user fee. That is, let's imagine that when drivers fill up, they pay a federal gas tax only on the gasoline consumed while driving on federal highways. That's still not really a user fee, but it's a little closer.

Light vehicles traveled a total of around 2.8 trillion miles in 2007, of which about 23 percent were driven on interstate highways, according to the Department of Energy. If we divide the total number of miles driven on interstates by the weighted average fuel economy of cars and light trucks, we find that about 31 billion gallons of gas were consumed on highways in 2007. That's a lot!

Next, we know that the Federal Highway Administration budget is around $39 billion. If we assume that truck and diesel revenues are unchanged, then we have about $24 billion in highway funding to be covered by a tax on those 31 billion gallons of gas, for an estimated gasoline tax of about 80 cents per gallon.

That's an extremely rough estimate. In fact, the nation's light vehicle mileage includes some diesel-burning engines. If we adjusted the calculations to reflect that, the estimated tax rate would be higher. Highway fuel economy is also higher than the average figures, which means that the calculations above probably overstate the gallons of gas burned on highways. This, too, means that the estimated gas tax rate is too low.

An appropriate gas tax rate to cover the annual highway budget -- which many argue is far too small -- would be on the order of about $1 per gallon.

All in all, this should illustrate that if you set aside all the O'Toole hand waving about trust fund revenues shifted to other modes, you still wind up in a world where federal roads come nowhere near paying for themselves.

One final point: We learned last year that it doesn't take much of an increase in the price of gas to generate reductions in VMT and increases in transit use. If we adjusted the current price of a gallon of gas to reflect an appropriate federal gas tax, gas would be selling for nearly $3.50 per gallon, on average.

With gas at that price, travelers would drive less and use transit more often. During the gas price spike last year, we saw a number of transit systems enjoy high demand during peak periods, to the extent that fares might easily have been raised to reduce system overcrowding.

In other words, what transit systems can charge riders depends upon what the government is (or isn't) charging drivers. This is exactly what we'd expect; if Coke began heavily subsidizing its sodas, Pepsi would have to find a way to cut its prices or face going out of business.

What we see then is that there are two funding equilibria. If drivers pay a fair price for the use of roads, then highway revenues rise and transit fares can rise until both modes are full but not congested. This is the high revenue equilibrium.

But if drivers don't have to pay a fair cost for the use of roads, then highway revenues will be low, roads will be congested, and transit systems will have too little ridership, such that transit systems will be unable to raise fares without losing riders to the already congested roads. This is the low revenue equilibrium, and it's a bad place to be -- inefficient use of all modes, costly road congestion, and a constant shortage of funding for needed infrastructure maintenance and investment.

That's where we are now.

When Congress finally gets around to crafting a transportation reauthorization, it would be nice if they recognized some of these dynamics. America needs smarter infrastructure investment rules, but it also needs smarter revenue-raising methods. If you get the money the right way, that makes it easier to spend the money the right way.

Jane Jacobs (center, in light dress) demonstrates at New York City's old Penn Station. Photo: Metropolis

These efforts are interesting because they manage to earn a degree of sympathy from urbanists themselves, who have grown increasingly tired of the decades required to navigate a transit line from planning stages to operation.

There is something very attractive about an individual who can drive the stakes and get the project built -- damn the politicians, and damn the NIMBYs.

But this is dangerous territory. In rehabilitating Moses and reconsidering Jacobs, it's important to be clear about where each was right, and where each went wrong.

There are many ways to interpret the clash between Moses and Jacobs: development versus preservation, city versus suburb, design for people versus design for automobiles, power versus powerlessness, and so on. To acknowledge that the balance has swung too far in one direction in one of these conflicts does not at all suggest that the balances are similarly out of whack on others.

Take, for example, one of Glaeser's principal intellectual standbys: that resistance to development slows the growth of housing supply, increasing housing costs. Glaeser says:

Jacobs underestimated the value of new construction—of building up.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities argues that at least one hundred homes per acre are necessary to support exciting stores and restaurants, but that two hundred homes per acre is a “danger mark.” After that point of roughly six-story buildings, Jacobs thought that neighborhoods risked sterile standardization. (The one public housing project that Jacobs blessed, at least initially, had only five stories.) But keeping great cities low means that far too few people can enjoy the benefits of city life. Jacobs herself had the strange idea that preventing new construction would keep cities affordable, but a single course in economics would have taught her the fallacy of that view. If booming demand collides against restricted supply, then prices will rise.

The best way to keep cities affordable is to allow private developers to build up and deliver space. Jacobs was right that high-rise public housing is a problem, as street crime is much more prevalent in high-rise, high-poverty neighborhoods. But in more prosperous, privately managed buildings, height is not a problem. If you love cities, as Jacobs certainly did, then presumably you should want the master builders to make them accessible to more people.

In this, Glaeser has a point. The opportunities to live in walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods are extremely limited, and so safe, walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods tend to be quite expensive. When regulations or NIMBYs block new developments, they limit access to this already limited supply, in the process hurting the causes of affordable housing and environmental sustainability.

On the other hand, it's difficult to understand the ferocity of urban anti-development forces without reference to the battles that hardened their views.

In Washington D.C., where I live, urbanists are routinely frustrated by neighborhood groups opposing new infill developments around Metro stations. These individuals are often outraged by the encroachment upon their neighborhoods and reluctant to listen to the arguments in favor of new walkable, transit-oriented developments around what is a very valuable piece of transit infrastructure. This is occasionally maddening.

But these neighborhood groups were often forged in the highway battles of the 1970s, when planners sought to run freeways through Washington neighborhoods to downtown. Where the highway and public housing builders were successful, neighborhoods were irreparably damaged. The stubbornness is a reaction to the insensitivity of earlier cohorts of urban planners. Had Moses and his ilk been less Moses-like, Glaeser would not find himself so frustrated by construction limits today.

It's also worth asking whether Glaeser's ire is best directed at urban neighborhoods, rather than suburban ones. If you love cities, and if you love the things that cities do well, perhaps you should take aim at the heavily regulated, extremely low-rise metropolitan periphery.

Consider this: The Bronx is home to about 1.4 million people who live on 42 square miles -- a remarkably dense area by American standards. Next door in Westchester County, about 950,000 people live on 433 square miles -- dense for America but much less dense than the Bronx.

In 2004, the Bronx permitted the construction of nearly 5,000 new housing units to Westchester's 1,800. The following year, the numbers were again 5,000 for the Bronx, and only 1,300 for Westchester.

Tiny, dense Bronx County seems to be doing a much better job accommodating new housing units, regulations and all. And this is no outlier. Queens packs more people onto less land than neighboring Nassau County, and suffers from New York's burdensome zoning regulations, and yet Queens managed to approve far more housing in recent years than Nassau County.

Glaeser could use some perspective. New York City packs more than 8 million people into 300 square miles, while the New York metropolitan area has 19 million people spread across over 6,000 square miles. If you doubled the density of the metro area outside the city, you'd make room for an additional 11 million people, while still keeping the metro population density below the level of the least dense New York City borough.

In other words, supply restrictions bind most in the suburbs. Were the suburbs developed on the scale Jacobs favored -- think about those five-story buildings -- the New York metro area might easily contain three times the housing units it currently has. That's a lot of downward pressure on prices.

Glaeser also goes astray in confusing the importance of building infrastructure with the importance of building a certain kind of infrastructure. He says:

Jacobs was right that cities are built for people, but they are also built around transportation systems. New York was America’s premier harbor, and the city grew up around the port. The meandering streets of lower Manhattan were laid down in a pedestrian age. Washington Square was urban sprawl in the age of the omnibus. The Upper East Side and Upper West Side were built up in the age of rail, when my great-grandfather would take the long elevated train ride downtown from Washington Heights. It was inevitable that cars would also require urban change. Either older cities would have to adapt, or the population would move entirely to the new car-based cities of the Sunbelt.

When Henry Ford made the car affordable, millions of Americans understandably wanted to drive. After all, the average commute by car in the United States is twenty-four minutes, whereas the average commute by public transit is forty-eight minutes. The automobile certainly created great challenges for every older city that was built at highway-less higher densities. No matter what Jacobs thought, there simply was not a car-less option for New York. For the city to continue growing and changing and leading the world, it needed to be retrofitted for the automobile. And that enormous task was given to Moses. Perhaps he did too much for the car. I am certainly on Jacobs’s side on the Lomex issue, and cannot possibly approve of the destruction of Tremont; but New York’s fall would have been far more precipitous if it had ignored the automobile altogether.

It is hard today to accept the allegation that Moses was responsible for New York’s demise. The troubles that New York experienced in the 1970s were hardly unusual. Except for Los Angeles, every one of the ten largest American cities in 1950 lost at least 10 percent of its population over the next thirty years. New York is exceptional not in its decline but in its resilience, and perhaps Moses deserves some credit for that. New York and Los Angeles are the only two of those ten big mid-century cities that have gained population over the past sixty years.

For a New Yorker, Glaeser has an odd sense of the attractive qualities of his home city. The people aren't there for the highway bridges. New York City in particular -- and Manhattan specifically -- are the least auto-friendly parts of the entire country, Moses or no. And yet, as Glaeser admits, they continue to grow. Maybe Moses saved New York, or maybe he risked its future unnecessarily by threatening to destroy the density that makes it so vibrant.

And meanwhile, we have counterexamples. London opted not to build any motorways through the heart of the city, and yet it has managed to remain one of only a handful of global financial and cultural capitals.

Glaeser fails to entertain the obvious hypothetical: What might have happened to New York if Moses had focused instead on transit and rail construction, rather than accommodation of the automobile?

Robert Moses. Photo: Cup of Cha

The difficult question, then, is not whether to make some accommodations for the automobile but how to do so. And it's not at all clear that Moses' approach was the right one, or indeed, even a very good one.

We have good evidence that Glaeser, and Moses, are wrong. To cite just one example, a 2006 paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow reads (emphasis mine):

Between 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population of central cities in the United States declined by 17 percent despite population growth of 72 percent in metropolitan areas as a whole. This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline. Using planned portions of the interstate highway system as a source of exogenous variation, empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. Estimates imply that aggregate central city population would have grown by about 8 percent had the interstate highway system not been built.

What New Yorkers were after wasn't the car, specifically; it was the promise of mobility offered by the car. But the job of city planners is to understand how to improve mobility across the entire city and region.

Given the density of New York, the space occupied by automobiles and parking structures, and the sheer cost of land in the city, construction of expensive, low capacity roadways seems like a poor decision.

Ed Glaeser is right when he says: "Successful cities need both the human interactions of Jane Jacobs and the enabling infrastructure of Robert Moses." But he seems unable to grasp that successful cities need city-oriented infrastructure, which actively facilitates those human interactions.

Most of the people who work in New York don't get there by driving, on Moses' highways or any other streets. They take transit, and many others can bike or walk thanks to the density that transit facilitates.

Moses didn't just get the means wrong, he also messed up the ends. And if present and future master builders don't learn better than he -- and Glaeser -- how infrastructure serves a city, they'll likely end up as loathed as Moses himself.

Photo: Penn State.

But there's not as much in the way of hard studies of the effects of land use as we might like -- mainly because it's been a non-issue, so far as most of the country is concerned, for much of recent history.

Aiming to address this (and acting under a congressional mandate), the Transportation Research Board recently completed a study that has now resulted in a very large report: "Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO Emissions."

The report is actually five mini-papers, and at nearly 200 pages long it makes for a lot of reading. But the findings reported in the introduction give an idea of what it's all about.

The authors conclude that compact development is likely to reduce VMT: "The effects of compact, mixed-use development on VMT are likely to be enhanced when this strategy is combined with other policy measures that make alternatives to driving relatively more convenient and affordable." No surprises there.

Finding No. 2 is: "The literature suggests that doubling residential density across a metropolitan area might lower household VMT by about 5 to 12 percent, and perhaps by as much as 25 percent, if coupled with higher employment concentrations, significant public transit improvements, mixed uses, and other supportive demand management measures."

They note that were you to move the residents of Atlanta to an area built like Boston, you'd lower the Atlantans' VMT per household by perhaps 25 percent.

Better land use results in reductions in energy use and carbon emissions, the authors report, from both direct and indirect causes. (Direct causes would be a reduction in VMT; indirect include things like longer vehicle lifetimes from reduced use and the greater efficiency of smaller or multi-family housing units.)

But one of the crucial pieces of data included in the report is this:

As many as 57 million new housing units are projected to accommodate population growth and replacement housing needs by 2030, growing to between 62 and 105 million units by 2050 - a substantial net addition to the housing stock of 105.2 million in 2000.

Critics of smart growth efforts or rail and transit investments often wave off the potential gains from building differently by noting that so much of the current housing stock is of the sprawling, single-family home, auto-oriented sort. Convincing the people who currently live in such places to give that up for something different, they say, is sure to be an extremely difficult sell.

But that's not the issue. No one is suggesting we rip down all of suburbia. Rather we, or at least I, am pointing out that between now and mid-century, the country will very nearly have to build itself all over again to accommodate population growth. In addition to the 100 million homes now in America, somewhere between 62 and 105 million more will be built.

The critical question is what the balance of that new construction will look like. The TRB report suggests that if 75 percent of this new construction is of a more compact variety, that emissions could be reduced 10 percent or more from the baseline scenario (and that is not taking into consideration the deployment of cleaner electricity generation and other potential sources of savings).

Ed Glaeser argued -- and this is kind of hard to believe -- that land use shifts from building high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston would not provide much in the way of benefits, since, he guessed, only 100,000 or so people in each city would move from the suburbs to the central city. But this entirely misses the point.

Houston and Dallas may each double their current housing stock between now and 2050. Where are those homes going to go, with what climate impacts? That's the critical question.

Demographic shifts and changes in energy prices are sure to encourage some households that are currently living at low densities to move to more compact developments, and that's a good thing. But that's not the main reason to begin focusing on the significant available savings from smarter land use decisions.

The main reason is the growth that America will continue to face. It's difficult to imagine that the nation can double its housing stock while building in a sprawling fashion without facing major environmental costs and economic difficulties. Land use patterns will need to change. And as this report documents, there will be considerable advantages to facilitating that change.

Ballston Metro station, Arlington Co. Photo: Point Images/Flickr

The future looked as though it belonged to Fairfax County, and Arlington's decision to target development around its new Metro stations seemed quixotic and anachronistic.

But now, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, Arlington seems to have been extraordinarily foresighted in its decision to grow around Metro. From 2000 to 2008, Arlington's population grew by 10 percent -- all of it infill development, and a remarkable achievement for an inner suburb.

Even more remarkably, this growth has led to a negligible impact on local traffic. Daniel Malouff, author of the BeyondDC blog, reported this week on a meeting with Arlington's Department of Transportation, at which officials recounted some numbers that had emerged from research on the effects of county development choices.

Among the remarkable statistics:

1. Auto traffic counts in the Pentagon City area are level today compared with counts from 1975. Despite all the development that has occurred there in that time frame, including construction of one of the region’s largest and busiest shopping malls, there has been no measurable increase in traffic congestion.

2. [One thousand] units of urban-format TOD housing generates fewer auto trips per day than a single suburban-format McDonalds or 7-11. You can build 1,000,000 square feet of residential TOD and generate less congestion than 2,000 square feet of auto-oriented retail.

Arlington has very nearly maximized the development potential of available land around Metro stations, but it's looking to create new transit access for its communities by building a streetcar line along one of the county's busier thoroughfares (and running along its busiest bus routes). Already, denser, walkable, and mixed-used developments are replacing older strip malls on the planned line.

And of course, Fairfax County has been busily working to reverse its approach to transit and development, its streets and highways having bogged down under the weight of constant congestion.

Back when Metro was originally built, Fairfax did not attempt to lobby for routing through population centers, opting instead for a cheaper alignment along the median of I-66 (for the Orange Line), and along existing rail right of way (for the Blue Line). Stations were almost exclusively surrounding by parking; riders would nearly all arrive by car.

These decisions have proven difficult to reverse engineer, but Fairfax County has been trying. Along the I-66 corridor, the county is encouraging such transit-oriented development as can be accommodated. In Springfield (on the Blue Line), a large, walkable redevelopment plan has been slowly making its way forward despite the difficult economic situation.

But the biggest shift is occuring elsewhere. Fairfax County and the state of Virginia recently won federal funding for a new extension of the Metrorail system, to be run through the densest portion of the county at Tysons Corner.

The Silver Line will be used as a framework around which to completely remake Tysons into a dense, walkable downtown. The area may ultimately be home to over 100,000 people, and an employment center to rival downtown Washington.

The rest of the country will be watching. Tysons represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reengineer a suburban employment and retail center into a pedestrian friendly mini-city, fit for residents as well as workers.

Of course, the opportunities to make these kinds of changes are extremely limited. Very few heavy rail systems have been built in the past half century. Commuter rail and light rail systems are increasingly common in growing cities, but federal funding has simply not been made available for new lines on the necessary scale, and the federal government has not made transit-oriented development a priority in choosing where and how to allocate transportation dollars.

This is an inexcusable missed opportunity given transit-oriented development's record of accommodating population growth without contributing to new congestion. Hopefully it is one Congress will address when it gets around to crafting a new transportation bill.

At this point, it's difficult to know exactly what the government's "cash for clunkers" program is supposed to accomplish.

To add to Elana's post yesterday on the "myths" circulating about the program, let me offer a few thoughts on how best to think about whether the program has provided actual net benefits.

The first thing to consider is what would have happened in the absence of the program. Vehicle sales rose fairly strongly in July, and this will no doubt be attributed to the "clunkers" rebates.

But during the recession, sales hit historic lows. Replacement rates for vehicles sank to unsustainable levels, suggesting quite a bit of pent up demand in the economy.

With economic recovery and continued improvement in credit markets, sales were sure to begin rising, with or without a government subsidy.

"Cash for clunkers" may have altered the timing of purchases, but in all likelihood most of these buyers were going to be in the market soon anyway.

What about the efficiency savings generated by the program? To generate its 0.5 percent of oil consumption savings estimate, the study Elana cites used the following assumptions:

The projection assumes some 250,000 "clunkers" with an average 15 miles per gallon efficiency are traded in for vehicles rated at an average 25 mpg, and travel an average 10,000 miles per year.

Given that far less than a 10 mile per gallon improvement is required to get a $3,500 voucher for a car or any voucher on an SUV or truck, it's not clear that this is an appropriate number to use. And even when efficiencies do improve significantly, the increase in mileage can't be solely attributed to the program.

Moreover, most of the clunkers being traded in this summer will have been purchased at a time when oil prices were lower than they are at present. Real oil prices in 2003 were half their current level; those in 1998 were one-fifth of prices now.

So in all likelihood, efficiencies for new vehicle purchases would be, on average, higher than those of trade-ins even without the program.

Where the program has succeeded in creating new sales, the environmental benefits are even sketchier than Elana relates. Once the energy emissions from producing a new automobile to replace a functioning old one are taken into account, the meager savings from the program may vanish entirely.

In assessing "cash for clunkers," we should also compare it with potential alternative policies. Money for the program might instead have been used to close budget holes at transit agencies, limiting service cuts, or to fund other green measures like weatherization programs.

As economic stimulus, the plan likely performed poorly relative to alternatives. As mentioned above, it is questionable whether the program generated many new sales.

Those currently in the market for a new car are probably not among the hardest hit by the recession and will be less likely to use a marginal dollar. That means that the subsidy provided by "cash for clunkers" may simply be replacing private spending rather than facilitating spending that wouldn't otherwise take place.

Unemployment benefits, on the other hand, overwhelmingly add to consumption; recipients would be spending less, in absolute terms, without the benefit.

Perhaps with more stringent efficiency requirements -- particularly for truck purchases -- the policy would have performed better. As it stands, "cash for clunkers" primarily served to give people who didn't need the help money to buy cars they were going to buy anyway.

The scene of the June 22 Washington D.C. Metro crash. Photo: AP

The proceedings got off to an appropriately somber start, as California Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) used his opening statement to explain that this spring's stimulus package contained billions for a Mag-Lev rail line from Orange County to Las Vegas.

This, of course, is completely false, and the quip was entirely unrelated to the rest of his remarks. I'm sure Issa's constituents will be glad to know that he's taking transportation issues seriously.

Testimony was heard from a number of experts, and from Patrick Tuite, a rider on one of the trains in the collision, who provided a riveting account of the accident. But not much in the way of new information emerged.

The facts of the incident remain as previously understood. A recently replaced portion of track circuitry intended to detect the presence of trains on the tracks and facilitate the automatic train control system malfunctioned intermittently after installation, including around the time of the accident. The operator of the striking train attempted to engage the brakes before impact, but to no avail.

The National Transportation Safety Board continues to investigate the matter and may not have a final report on it for some time. In the meantime, trains on the Metro system continue to operate in manual mode, and on reduced speeds and a single track at the site of the accident (creating major headaches for riders on the system, which is a critical piece of metropolitan infrastructure).

Three broad themes emerged in testimony. The first concerned funding problems, at Metro specifically and for transit generally. Former congressman Tom Davis spoke at length about the funding difficulties at Metro, which have contributed to a $6 billion capital needs shortfall (in his estimation; Metro's John Catoe noted that identified needs run to over $11 billion at this time).

Metro's idiosyncrasies greatly complicate its funding. Unlike any other transit system in the country, there is no dedicated revenue source; all appropriations are ad hoc. This is particularly problematic as the system stretches across two states and the District of Columbia.

To make matters worse, Metro is overseen by the subcommittee on the District of Columbia rather than through the transportation committee. Federal appropriations for the system must travel a different route than money directed toward every other system in the country.

In an effort to overcome some of these difficulties, Congress has passed a law matching $1.5 billion in revenue from newly established local dedicated funding streams, to the tune of $150 million a year for 10 years. That's an improvement, but it obviously only begins to close the system's capital needs gap.

And so other testifying experts, most notably American Public Transportation Association president William Millar, argued forcefully for passage of a new transportation funding act, which would include adequate resources for the nation's transit systems. Unfortunately, Mr Millar may have to wait until 2011.

The second broad theme was the safety record of Metro specifically and transit generally relative to competing modes of transportation. Millar noted that a transit journey is roughly 20 times safer than an equivalent automobile trip.

Passenger fatalities in the June 22 accident were the system's first in over 20 years. Transit accidents make news because they're large and rare, but annual deaths in automobiles are several orders of magnitude higher than in rail systems.

And finally, there was extensive discussion of rail safety procedures generally. Oversight of safety systems was a hot topic, as was replacement of equipment -- particularly relevant in this case given the track failure, but also the age and poor crash performance of the forward car in the striking train.

An interesting note on this score came from Brian Bilbray (R-CA) who argued that the move toward increased automation of train systems might be counterproductive.

In particular, he suggested that using automatic train controls with manual back-up was unhelpful, as operators tend to tune out while trains are in automatic mode. Rather, a system of manual operation with automated back-up might improve safety.

Amusingly, he compared the operating procedures in transit vehicles to those in the B-2 bomber. Of course, if transit systems had the budget per vehicle of the B-2 program, the issue of aging capital equipment might not have arisen in the first place.

In all, it seems the Metro crash will lead to some valuable changes in operating procedures, and it has already resulted in the speedy direction of promised funds to the system. But the accident mainly provides an opportunity to reflect on how safe transit systems actually are, and how the nation's inability to fund those systems adequately -- and build new ones -- is an unfortunate and significant policy failure.

Cato Institute fellow Randal O'Toole testified in the Senate today. Photo: Cato

O'Toole aside, the witnesses largely agreed in their recommendations: New transit investments are absolutely necessary for economic and environmental reasons, but most of the benefits from such investments will be missed without tight integration between transportation investment and land use planning.

It was a message almost perfectly tailored to rebut O'Toole before he ever spoke.

As is his habit, O'Toole began by noting that 40 years' worth of transit investments have not produced significant reductions in driving or greenhouse gas emissions. A good talking point, perhaps -- but as previous testimony had made clear, this was largely due to 40 years' worth of disregard for the importance of land use rules.

O'Toole continued by criticizing smart growth in his home state of Oregon, declaring that efforts to change land use patterns were failures and falsely alleging that transit ridership in Portland has declined since 2000. He cited his own analyses, which attempt to demonstrate that transit is actually dirtier than personal automobile use. And he railed against the evil of transit subsidies, a market-distorting abomination in his view.

The performance earned dismal reviews. One by one, the other witnesses pointed out that failure to adequately examine land use effects rendered O'Toole's analyses worthless.

Mode choice isn't just about direct energy use, they explained; it's about how increased driving or transit use affects development patterns and broader economic activity. Moreover, increased transit use improves the efficiency of driving by reducing congestion.

Mayor Cabaldon pointed out that a one percent increase in transit ridership in his city corresponded to a 10 percent decline in congestion, saving millions of dollars in lost time and wasted fuel.

Neither were the witnesses the only ones to hit back at the Cato fellow. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) icily noted that the last transportation bill included some $200 billion for highways. "That's a subsidy," he said.

Replogle piled on, noting that the failure to toll crowded roads appropriately or charge for "free" parking constituted yet another massive subsidy to drivers, encouraging auto-oriented land use patterns.

O'Toole fired back, arguing that those touting the benefits of transit investment overwhelmingly cited New York City. In his view, it appeared, transit is vital to New York but irrelevant to all other metropolitan areas in the country.

This seemed to irk Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), whose Northern Virginia constituency is part of a Washington metro area in which over 1.2 million trips are taken on transit every weekday. He countered O'Toole's negative assessment of transit's success rate in shifting land use patterns, citing Arlington County. There, an effort to build densely around Metro's Orange Line has led to population and jobs growth and massive private investment, all without an appreciable increase in congestion.

Ultimately, O'Toole was left complaining that attempts to build private transit systems were illegal -- illegal -- in most cities in America. He was seemingly oblivious to the irony: that sprawl, which O'Toole considers a perfect expression of consumer demand, has flourished thanks to the fact that for decades it has been illegal to build dense, walkable neighborhoods in most of America's big cities.

O'Toole was without friends in a room of leaders that finally seemed to grasp how planning had gone wrong in the last half century. At this moment -- with vehicle miles traveled falling, with central city population growth rates increasing as suburban growth rates fall, and with central city housing prices showing resilience as exurban neighborhoods continue to experience rapid decline -- Cato's myth of sprawl as the American dream seems more hollow than ever.

Happily, legislators -- at least those who attended today's hearing -- increasingly seem disposed to acknowledge reality.

Current spending levels, to say nothing of the increases proposed in the bill, will be impossible to sustain in the absence of a new source of revenue. This is a huge obstacle to passage.

As currently written, STAA would significantly strengthen the Office of Intermodalism and work toward making DOT planning "mode neutral" -- that is, not operating under the assumption that highways will always get first priority in planning and funding.

It would create an Office of Livability, focused entirely on seeking balance in mode choice by boosting transit ridership, bicycling, and walking. The bill seeks to streamline the process by which new transit projects apply for funding, and it allows federal officials to consider likely changes in land-use from transit construction in considering whether a project deserves funding.

STAA aims to empower metropolitan planning organizations. It seeks to depoliticize funding decisions and support private investment in infrastructure by creating national and metropolitan infrastructure development banks. It lays the groundwork for significant new investments in high-speed rail in America (though it cuts the definition of high-speed to 110 miles per hour or higher).

The bill includes a push to support "complete streets" and a national bike route network. It establishes increased transit ridership and reduced carbon emissions as explicit goals. And of course, the bill is targeted to allocate a lot more money than in previous reauthorizations, with a lot more money for transit (though transit's share increases only modestly).

But as Elana noted yesterday, what's missing from the bill is as telling as what's included. The 775-page length may suggest excessive comprehensiveness, but in fact much of the bill is little more than placeholders. "[To be supplied]" is in ample supply, as is "[$]." Ideally, actual numbers would follow immediately after the dollar sign.

These blanks hint at the challenge chairman Oberstar and fellow committee members John Mica (R-FL), Pete DeFazio (D-OR), and John Duncan (R-TN) will have in getting their bill through the legislative process any time soon. Time is scarce; Congress already has some substantial legislative challenges on its hands, and it may have to address the looming shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund before the August recess.

Political capital is also wanting. With most legislative eyes on health care and the Waxman-Markey energy and climate bill, there may not be enough chits available to strike the necessary deals on this transportation bill.

This is especially true given the money issue. STAA, as written, simply does not address the fact that current spending levels, to say nothing of the increases proposed in the bill, will be impossible to sustain in the absence of a new source of revenue. This is a huge obstacle to passage, and a major reason for the administration's requested 18-month delay for the bill.

With the economy still in recession, the federal deficit approaching $2 trillion, a $1 trillion or so health bill in the works, and GOP legislators going all out to attack the climate bill under consideration as representing a major new energy tax, this is not a convenient time to be discussing transportation tax increases. If the funding issue cannot be resolved, and there is every indication that neither the administration nor a number of high priority legislators are anxious to solve it, then the reauthorization bill will probably not pass.

All hope for this particular bill is not yet lost, but a number of very difficult questions will have to be answered to turn this blueprint into a bold new transportation law.

Is this spaghetti bowl turning a profit? Photo: Infrastructurist

The source of his blindness on the issue seems to be due to his belief that roads pay for themselves, and that congestion exists only because governments shift gas tax revenue to pay for transit and other smart growth projects. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In the first place, gas tax revenue comes nowhere near paying for roads. Federal gasoline tax revenues cover barely half of the annual budget of the Federal Highway Administration. Add in diesel tax revenues and you’re still short. And that’s just the federal budget picture.

Taking into account all gas tax revenues and road spending generates an even starker picture. The Texas Department of Transportation recently developed an asset value index, intended to gauge the cost-effectiveness of a road over the whole of its life cycle. They discovered that most roads don’t come close to paying for themselves. In one typical road analysis, it was determined that a real gas tax rate of $2.22 per gallon would be necessary, simply to break even. No stretch of road in the whole of the state covered its costs.

But that’s not all we should consider. On top of the cost of the actual road, drivers impose costs on other motorists, pedestrians, and society as a whole. Carbon emissions from driving impose an annual cost of about $20 billion on society. Costs from congestion total nearly $80 billion per year in lost time and wasted fuel. And the annual cost of automobile crashes (which claim nearly 40,000 lives per year) is around $220 billion. In the absence of driving alternatives, all of those numbers would be higher still.

But of course, O’Toole thinks that the reason we suffer from so much congestion is because we are diverting money to transit rather than building more roads. This is completely incorrect, and a basic failure to grasp economic analysis. Road space is scarce -- that is, not unlimited. It therefore has a positive value, which should be reflected in a market price. If it isn’t -- if prices are fixed at zero (as is the case with most roads) -- then a shortage will result. This is well understood; if the president attempted to fix the price of any other good at a below market rate, libertarians would cry foul and immediately argue that shortages would result. Yet when free roads produce congestion, they conclude that the best solution is to spend taxpayer money on more roads.

O’Toole makes a great show of the fact that transit ridership is low, but the implication of this factoid is not what O’Toole would have you believe. For decades, roads have received massive government subsidies, and drivers have not been forced to pay the true cost of their driving. In the meantime, backdoor subsidies to driving have been rampant. An example -- most communities have rules establishing minimum parking requirements for new construction. Cheap and plentiful parking is a significant subsidy to driving, and such parking requirements make it difficult or impossible to build more compact and walkable streetscapes.

Transit use has lately been on the rise as congestion and fuel costs have exploded. Cities with transit systems have benefited enormously from the availability of a substitute to driving, and those without have suffered from their inelastic dependence on cars in an environment of increasing costs. The simple truth is that government has intervened heavily to create the road network so beloved by libertarians, and the country continues to bear heavy costs as a result. Any clear-eyed examination of costs and benefits will indicate that the time to rebalance investments away from highways and toward transit is long overdue.