Streetsblog New York City

Between 2001 and 2009, the share of trips that Americans made in cars dropped by more than four percent, with walking, bicycling and transit use picking up the slack, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Last year, 11.9 percent of all trips were on foot or by bike, while 4.2 percent of trips were on transit. Both figures signify major increases.

The National Household Travel Survey, the source of the new stats, is the gold-standard for transportation data. As Mobilizing the Region reported, while the Census only tracks how people get to work, the NHTS gathers data on all trips taken. It also distinguishes between, say, driving to a park-and-ride bus area and walking to the local bus stop.

The downside to the NHTS is how infrequently the survey is conducted, which makes it difficult to determine how much the 2009 data reflects a larger trend, and how much may be due to temporary changes brought on by fluctuating gas prices and the recession.

The high quality of NHTS data means that it can supplement NYC DOT's own numbers, which have shown a large rise in cycling over the same period. We've put in a request to the state DOT and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council to get access to city-level data once it becomes available. 

We tend to have a few good laughs when Randal O'Toole fires up his Cato computer and weighs in on transportation issues. It's hard to take seriously a man who thinks that having the government tax people to build something which it then gives away for free is the libertarian ideal.

But occasionally O'Toole provides an opportunity to discuss some interesting aspects of the transportation planning process and learn from his errors. And so we turn to his latest policy paper, which was released yesterday. Therein, he writes:

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.

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Victor Mendez, nominated by the White House to lead the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), spent more than an hour this morning with the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee -- but the most illuminating moment in the hearing came as the clock was running down.

Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE) asked the nominee a simple question: What does Mendez, a former Arizona state DOT director and ex-president of AASHTO, think of recent legislation codifying "complete streets" principles and expanding the "Safe Routes to School" program on childhood bike and pedestrian safety?

Mendez, whose legacy in Arizona centers on a massive Phoenix freeway project, wavered a bit. Both ideas "fit neatly into what I believe is Secretary LaHood's livability concept," Mendez replied, describing Safe Routes to School as a good thing for his state but not addressing "complete streets" directly.

Though Carper was openly dissatisfied with the answer, he moved on to an even simpler question: Given that previous hikes in auto fuel-efficiency standards have ultimately led to more driving (and increased congestion), does Mendez think that lowering carbon emissions from the transportation sector should be a goal of the upcoming climate change bill?

Theoretically, it should have been easy for Mendez to endorse that concept, especially on the same day that his future boss blogged on the benefits of transit. But if the future highways chief encouraged decreasing transportation emissions, then -- horrors! -- he might be open to the transit sector's plea for a share of the emissions allocations in the climate bill.

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