Reason Magazine - Contributors

Politicians Love Transit, Just Not For Themselves

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:35:00 EDT

“You’ve got to use public transit,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared. “You can't keep on pointing to someone else and saying it's their responsibility.”

Imagine the credibility and public relations points Villaraigosa could have racked up uttering those words while commuting on a bus to City Hall. But instead of being the “eco-friendly transit-riding mayor” Villaraigosa rides an SUV to work.

Yet many Angelinos probably sympathize with the mayor. “Give me a first-rate transit system, and I’ll use it,” they might say. Until that system arrives, they support new transit proposals, like the $5 billion “subway to the sea,” while continuing to drive everywhere.

But what would it say about the practicality of mass transit if the mayor of the city with the nation’s best subway system also took an SUV to work?

After Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City, he invited reporters to follow him to work. The billionaire mayor didn’t slip into a limo—he piled into a subway car like a “regular Joe mayor.” Positive press gushed forth. Bloomberg was the real-deal, a green leader and blue-collar populist. One transit group dubbed him “the MetroCard Mayor.” Bloomberg bragged about taking transit, and urged others to follow.

Yet, after a five-week stakeout, New York Times reporters discovered that Bloomberg’s enthusiasm for transit has since fizzled. These days he only takes the subway to work about twice a week. That’s more transit travel than Villaraigosa, but not enough to meet the federal government’s definition of a transit commuter.

Even during transit days, Bloomberg doesn’t schlep to the nearest subway stop. Staffers drive him 22 blocks so he can hop aboard an express train, avoiding the hassle of making a transfer and shrinking his commute time by about a third. Avoiding transit is commonplace for those who run some of our nation’s other top-tier transit systems.

The Philadelphia Inquirer discovered that only four of 14 transit board members interviewed used that city’s system at least twice a week. And when asked by the Washington Post, only five out of 10 local transit board members said they rode their rail system even occasionally (two others refused to talk, so it’s probably safe to file them under “infrequent transit user”).

Villaraigosa’s actions make the obvious point that his words never would: Public transit doesn’t work for the vast majority of Angelinos, 95 percent of whom find another way to get to work. Still he and other public officials fuel a double fantasy.

First, they claim our existing public transit system is a better choice for motorists, at least those who aren’t serving as mayor.

Villaraigosa says he’d use transit more often, “But my problem is I have to go all over the city … It’s very tough because of my schedule.”

City Councilman Herb Wesson, a transportation committee member, says the same thing, "Given the type of work I do, it just doesn't work for me to take public transportation."

Don’t the rest of us also have busy schedules - jobs to get to, kids to pick up, and errands to run?

Why are we being urged to ditch our cars for a transit system that is ill-suited to serve city officials?

The second fantasy is that each new rail transit project represents a step toward building a New York-style transit system. New York’s subway system boasts 468 stations; LA’s 78 (if you generously count light rail stations too). The current piecemeal transit approach should get LA to New York’s level sometime in the middle of the next millennium, and the “build it all at once” strategy made fashionable by Denver is really just a replay of LA in 1980, when Prop A was supposed to fund 11 rail transit lines. What committing to rail really did was soak up funds that could have gone toward more sensible fixes: mainly improving and expanding bus service for the transit dependent poor

Bloomberg’s falling out with transit adds another disturbing wrinkle: Maybe even a system as extensive as New York’s couldn’t transform Villaraigosa into a transit-riding mayor. In Metro New York, 25 percent of commuters rely on transit, much more than LA’s 5 percent, but not in step with the popular view that “everyone” takes transit in New York.

Back when workers traveled in beelines from homes in the suburbs to offices in a city center, it was relatively easy to design successful transit systems. Today, old fixed-route systems don’t serve most travelers. Yet officials still prefer to fund snazzy rail lines over buses because for them transit’s primary use isn’t transportation but a backdrop for photo ops: Cut the ribbon, huddle around the others who fought for funding, smile, and then jump back into your SUV

Imagine how much transit might improve if public officials actually had to ride the systems they tout.

Ted Balaker is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation and author of The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think and What We Can Do About It (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). This column originally appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News.

How Traffic Jams Are Made In City Hall

sstaley@reason.org (Sam Staley) info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 05:36:00 EDT

If you want to know why so few people use mass transit, meet Sue, a college administrator in Minneapolis. If anyone would use transit, Sue would. She's single, she lives in a condominium, and she can afford any additional out-of-pocket expense. She could use her city's Hiawatha Line, a light rail route newly completed at a cost of $715 million. But she doesn't, although she feels guilty about it. That's because her car gets her where she needs to go. Faster.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the typical driver in America's metropolitan areas takes 21 minutes to get from home to work. If you take public transit, the average commute stretches to 36 minutes. That's 71 percent longer. Workers in the New York metropolitan area have the longest commute: There it takes an average of 52 minutes to get to work, even though the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut mass transit systems are among the most extensive in the nation.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is about average. The typical commuter takes 21 minutes to get to work by car or 32 minutes by public transit. Congestion can be pretty bad: The average driver in the Twin Cities spends 43 hours-more than an entire work week-stuck in traffic every year. According to the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University, that costs Twin Cities drivers almost $1 billion in wasted time and fuel. But mass transit takes even longer, and it isn't as flexible as a car when it comes to picking where and when you'd like to go. Is it any wonder Sue drives to work rather than taking the bus or train?

The U.S. Department of Transportation puts the yearly cost of congestion at $168 billion. But the planning gurus who are supposed to solve our transportation problems are in the grip of transitphilia and autophobia; their beliefs about how cities and transportation work are grounded more in nostalgia than in a realistic view of the world we live in now. The public policies they design and try to enforce make it harder for us to get to work, pick up our kids from school, or go shopping. They are deliberately fostering congestion. In the words of David Solow, head of the Metrolink commuter rail in Southern California, congestion is "actually good" because "it drives people out of their cars."

Keeping Minneapolis Congested

Every major urban area in the country has an official bureaucracy responsible for planning roads, highways, and mass transit. It has to; it's required by federal law.

Minneapolis has one of the more competent planning agencies. The Metropolitan Council-or Met Council, as locals call it-has at least acknowledged the importance of congestion and has tried a few innovative ways to address it. Unfortunately, its solutions will have minimal impact on the problem. It provides an instructive example of how poorly even our better regional planning agencies are addressing one of the most important policy problems they face.

The Met Council has some extraordinary powers. Established by the Minnesota legislature in 1967, it has legal responsibility for managing the Twin Cities' sewers, parks, transportation, aviation, and land use planning. But the primary focus of its huge organizational bureaucracy is transportation. Of its 3,718 employees, 73 percent do transportation-related work, spending three-quarters of the agency's annual budget.

The council says it aims to enhance "transportation choices" and to "improve the ability of Minnesotans to travel safely and efficiently through the region." So far, so good. The council goes even further: "To a growing number of metro area residents, traffic congestion ranks as the No. 1 livability issue. It affects the length of their daily commute, the times of day they choose to make trips, and the amount of time they sit in traffic, even where they choose to live and work."

But is the Met Council really focused on reducing congestion? Its stated goal isn't to solve the problem; it merely calls for "slowing the growth in traffic congestion and improving mobility" (emphasis added). In other words, traffic will continue to get worse, just not as much worse as it would if the council did nothing. The Met Council also has priorities besides congestion: reducing the number of people living in single-family homes, preserving open space, limiting sprawl-and increasing transit use.

During the next 10 years, the Met Council is planning to invest $4.2 billion in the highway system and $1.4 billion in transit facilities. In other words, the region's primary transportation planning agency has decided to spend 25 percent of its budget on mass transit. But transit accounts for just 2.5 percent of all trips in the region, whether they're for pleasure, taking kids to school, going to the supermarket, or commuting to the office. Less than 5 percent of the Minneapolis-St. Paul region's population uses public transit to get to work, and that share is declining: According to U.S. Census statistics, the number of passengers using mass transit increased slightly in absolute terms between 1990 and 2000, but its market share fell by 12 percent.

The Met Council hopes to double bus capacity by 2030 and greatly expand its light rail line and commuter train system. It also intends to boost transit use from 74.9 million passenger trips per year to 150 million by 2030, even though the current trend projects virtually no growth in use and even though transit lost market share from 1990 to 2000, according to the Census Bureau's decennial data. The Met Council expects 574,625 new jobs to be created in the area by 2030. But even though the vast majority of Minneapolis-St. Paul's population travels to work by car, the planners improbably expect per capita road use to decline.

The council does plan to expand the road system. It will add 300 additional lane-miles of freeway, or about 12 lane-miles per year. That works out to about three miles of a two-lane (in each direction) freeway each year. That's well below the expected growth in travel demand.

The net result? Without road improvements, highway congestion is expected to increase from 28 hours annually per traveler in 2001 to 40 hours in 2030. With the improvements, congestion should "moderate" to 37 hours in 2030. Congestion would be 32 percent higher than in 2001, rather than 42 percent higher without the improvements. "Just to keep pace with these [highway] needs," the council's 2030 Regional Development Framework says, "would add $4.7 billion to current plans for the next decade" above the currently planned spending.

For most regional planning agencies, automobility and congestion relief simply are not high on the priority list. Sometimes they aren't on the list at all. Portland, Oregon, distinguished itself among its peers when it made a conscious decision in the mid-1990s to let congestion approach gridlock because it feared that otherwise fewer people would use the transit system. The drive to reduce sprawl creates a conflict of interest, too, since congestion relief makes it easier to commute long distances.

To make "more effective use" of the road system, the Met Council believes it has to get people out of their cars. That's unfortunate, especially since the agency admits congestion is many residents' "No. 1 livability issue." The council is spending 25 percent of its transportation funds on a solution that, at most, might improve the quality of life for 5 percent of the population, and it will do nothing for people like Sue. Even transit users might not be better off, since they will be spending more time commuting than if they used a car. Drivers will definitely be worse off. They will be spending much more time stuck in traffic in 2030 than they did in 2006.

If Minneapolis has one of the best planning agencies, what are the others like?

Fiddling While Atlanta Burns Gas

According to the Texas Transportation Institute, Atlanta is the nation's fourth most traffic-clogged metropolitan area, measured by the amount of time stuck in traffic. Its residents crawl and wind through more than 5,000 congested lane-miles each day. Most of these congested roads are arterials and collectors-local roads that let residents navigate short trips around town or their neighborhood or that take them to major highway interchanges. An analysis by the Atlanta Regional Commission of 75 intersections found that 60 were "deficient"-that is, they performed below engineered standards-during the morning rush hour and 68 were deficient during the afternoon rush. The freeways are even worse off: Almost 60 percent of Atlanta's interstates are congested, twice the incidence for local roads.

The South isn't normally seen as a hotbed of progressive government, but the Atlanta Regional Commission was the nation's first government-supported multi-county planning commission. The Atlanta Chamber of Commerce hatched the idea in 1938, and it became official with an act of the Georgia General Assembly in 1947.

As clogged roads slowly choke Atlanta's economy and its quality of life, traffic reduction should be the commission's No. 1 priority. And the commission appears to take its role seriously. During the next 25 years, it plans to spend $57 billion on transportation projects even if the federal, state, or local governments don't cough up more money. (Presumably the funds would come from tolls or other user fees.) Its plan, however, assumes that vehicle miles traveled per person-a common measure of travel demand-will fall by 5 percent and that average travel time won't change. The plan anticipates "significant improvement in congestion and travel times" along the corridors targeted for investment, saving billions of dollars through improved efficiency and productivity.

The commission has some reason for optimism. Travel demand appears to have fallen in Atlanta from a peak of 35 vehicle miles traveled per person each day in 1998 to 31 vehicle miles in 2002. Total demand has increased-from 109 million vehicle miles traveled in 1998 to 113 million in 2002-but that's because population has grown so much. (The number of people living in the Atlanta area increased by more than 200,000 during the same four years.) Each person is driving slightly less, but since there are so many more people, the roads are getting more use than ever.

Naturally, congestion increased during this period too, reflecting the increase in travel demand without a similar investment in roadway capacity. Travel times to work also increased, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, rising 24 percent during the 1990s to 30 minutes in 2000. The commission reports that this was the largest increase in the nation.

So congestion is increasing, even though demand seems to be moderating. And local policy makers aren't expecting much more help from the federal, state, or local governments.

What's Atlanta's plan? Roadway expansion will get $8 billion. Car pool lanes will get another $5 billion, bringing the total pavement capacity building budget to $13 billion. The commission has slotted another $14 billion for nontransit operations and maintenance. These efforts will add 2,000 additional miles of arterial and collector roads and 300 miles of new freeway lanes. Another $3 billion is slated for improving the management of the road system.

Atlanta also believes that improving traffic signal timing to smooth out traffic flows, using meters on entrance ramps to prevent too many cars from entering the freeway at the same time, and similar measures that "manage" travel demand will reduce delays on local roads by 25 percent and increase freeway speeds by a similar magnitude. If those plans are implemented comprehensively and efficiently, that estimate may be plausible.

Meanwhile, $5 billion will be used to expand public transit, while $15 billion more will go toward maintenance and operations. A program expanding options for bicyclists, walkers, and others not using cars will get $2 billion. All in all, 38 percent of the regional planning budget is devoted to getting people out of their cars and onto buses and trains. Transit ridership, the commission boldly asserts, will increase "72 percent between now and 2030."

That conclusion is hard to swallow. Transit isn't fulfilling its promise in Atlanta now, and the trends in the city's census data aren't much different from what's happening in Minneapolis. Atlanta's regional work force is 2 million. Transit ridership increased to 75,272 workers in 2000 (an 8 percent increase), hardly making a dent in general commute patterns. And despite that modest uptick in absolute numbers, transit's market share fell from 4.7 percent of all commuting trips in 1990 to 3.7 percent in 2000.

Almost 2 million jobs will be added to the regional economy during the next 30 years. If Atlanta achieves its transit ridership goal, 129,467 people will be using mass transit in 2030. And even then, transit's commute share would fall. Put another way, Atlanta is investing almost 40 percent of its transportation budget on less than 4 percent of the market, and the latter number is shrinking.

This might be a worthy investment if the main beneficiaries were people too poor to afford cars or otherwise restricted from getting around. But the commission wants to compete with the automobile-to get working-class and middle-income commuters out of their cars and onto buses and trains.

Even our more skeptical analysis of the city's transit trends might be overly optimistic. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Transit Database, Atlanta's bus transit system logged 235 million passenger miles in 2003. That's down from 273 million miles reported in 2000. Atlanta's subway system reported 487 million passenger miles in 2003, down from 504 million reported in 2000. So transit use is falling even in absolute terms. For transit to turn around and increase market share would be unprecedented.

Atlanta's policy makers can still shift course. Traffic in the city has become so bad that in 2004 Gov. Sonny Perdue convened a task force that called for making congestion reduction the top priority for regional transportation planners. The Atlanta Regional Commission, along with the Georgia Department of Transportation and other agencies, recently agreed to set specific targets for reducing congestion in absolute terms, as measured by travel delay in peak periods, by 2030. Local officials appear receptive, but have not yet revealed how and to what extent they will follow the recommendations.

We'll see if the follow-through lives up to the promises. If it does, we can only hope the rest of the country's urban planners are paying attention. The myths that have held Atlanta back are hardly unique to that city.

City House, Country House

In 2005 the Urban Transportation Monitor, a biweekly industry newsletter, surveyed more than 600 transportation professionals to find out their thoughts on traffic congestion. About 19 percent responded. Of those, 45 percent thought the profession was "doing all it can do" to stop congestion. Half thought congestion was the result of too many people using their cars, and 45 percent attributed it primarily to the desire to live in low-density suburbs.

The preferred solutions were predictable: 51 percent thought mass transit should be improved or expanded, and 50 percent thought the government should manage demand better by getting people to telecommute or carpool. Only 29 percent believed increased highway capacity could be a cost-effective way to reduce congestion significantly. (The survey did not ask whether new capacity should be provided if it were privately funded.)

Many believed the problem is simply too many cars. Fifty-one percent said one of "the main reasons for the high level of congestion in many metropolitan areas" is the desire "of many to use cars for all their trips." Indeed, of the 11 options offered by the survey, that was the biggest vote getter. For traffic engineers, planners, and other transportation professionals, the solution to traffic jam is to keep us from using our automobiles.

The planning profession clings tenaciously to its foundational myths. Even as overwhelming evidence to the contrary piles up, planners keep claiming that cars are inefficient and socially destructive; that expanding road capacity isn't practical; and, most fundamentally, that the government can determine how we choose to travel by planning where and how we live.

That last assumption is the logical conclusion of a rather sophisticated (if largely incorrect) way of looking at human behavior. It's rooted in a common-sense observation: How we live influences how we travel. If we live on a farm, we are going to travel by car. Buses simply don't go out to farms to pick people up and take them into town for work or to buy groceries. Trains don't either. A neighbor might, but she would probably be driving a car and doing this as a service because you don't have a car. School buses are the exception that proves the rule. They pick up a large number of kids, but only because they're being delivered to one destination, the school building.

The flip side is the experience of the Manhattanite. If someone lives in the densest neighborhood of an American city, cars are costly, frustrating, and inefficient. Most Manhattan residents can get to their destination far more efficiently using the subway, taking a bus, or walking. Because parking is so costly, they also can get around fairly efficiently using taxis.

So people in dense urban areas have more choices, and personal automobiles are inefficient ways to get around town. Congestion, in fact, leads people to use alternative modes of transportation. Many regional planners, like those in Atlanta, conclude that the way a region develops dictates how people are likely to travel and what transportation strategies are most feasible. And the way to influence development patterns, they believe, is to carefully plan where and how much to invest in the transportation system. But proximity to work is only one of many factors people consider when finding a home; other criteria, such as price, neighborhood safety, and proximity to good schools, are often deemed more important than living close to the office.

Of course, Atlanta is not Manhattan. In fact, it's virtually the opposite. At 1,783 people per square mile, Atlanta is the poster child for low-density residential development. The New York metropolitan area is three times as dense, with 5,309 people per square mile. Manhattan's density is even higher: more than 50,000 people per square mile.

According to the Atlanta commission, "Land use is an important determinant of how people choose to travel. No other variable impacts [mobility] to a greater extent. The Regional Development Plan policies help shape future growth and protect existing stable areas by encouraging appropriate land use, transportation, and environmental decisions."

To say this is an exaggeration would be charitable. While land use can influence travel behavior in small and crude ways, to claim that it is the biggest factor distorts the mainstream research on the subject. A 2004 study sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) cautioned against the tendency to "overemphasize vertically mixed uses such as ground-floor retail and upper-level residential." In particular, it noted that "outside of dense urban locations, building mixed-use products in today's marketplace can be a complex and risky proposition; few believe that being near a train station fundamentally changes this market reality."

This isn't to say that these developments can't generate more transit riders. The FTA study found that those living near rail stations were five to six times more likely to commute using transit than other residents. While those seem like dramatic effects, the majority of commuters near transit stations (often two-thirds or more) still use cars to get to work. Moreover, many of the people living in these transit areas were transit users already. They just moved so they could be closer to transit.

Put differently, if 5 percent of a region commutes using transit-about the national average-then 25 or 30 percent of those living in a transit-oriented development will commute using transit. This is consistent with case studies of transit use in San Francisco and Chicago. (Incidentally, those results invariably come from studies of predominantly heavy rail commuter systems, such as subways. Light rail and buses are more fashionable in planning circles these days, but they're also slower and carry fewer riders.)

To get such high use rates, densities have to be very high. The traditional American home with a private yard doesn't fit this model. The typical new house in the United States is built on about one-fifth of an acre. A study in San Francisco found that doubling densities from 10 units per acre to 20 units per acre would increase transit's commute share from 20 percent to 24 percent.

In short, even cramming four times more people into the typical U.S. subdivision of 4-5 units per acre would produce only a modest uptick in transit use. And it isn't an uptick for the region. It's an uptick for the neighborhood-those living within a quarter mile of a transit stop. There is virtually no effect beyond the immediate vicinity of the transit stop, regardless of density.

At these densities, Americans would literally have to give up any hope of having a decent-sized yard and most would have to live in townhouses. The land use pattern would have to fundamentally change, resembling the landscape more common in the carless 19th century than in the highly mobile and adaptable 21st century.

Forget, at least for the moment, whether the government should effect such a sweeping change. It almost certainly can't. In a forthcoming report, Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine) and Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute examine data from the National Personal Transportation Survey and find that doubling an urban area's density would, at most, reduce the total number of car trips by 10 percent to 20 percent. No U.S. urban area has managed to double its density or to reduce car travel by such magnitudes.

Real Solutions

Believe it or not, there are ways to reduce traffic congestion, even if most politicians and planners haven't been eager to adopt them. Here are five potent suggestions, ideally done not alone but in conjunction with one another:

Creative construction. Expanding capacity doesn't always mean adding lanes to congested roads, although that's often a good idea as well. In densely populated Southern California, portions of the highway network are elevated well above the ground, including the Harbor Transitway approaching downtown Los Angeles. In Texas, San Antonio and Austin have double-decker freeways as well. In 2006 Tampa opened its cross-town expressway, an elevated road built in the median of an existing four-lane highway.

If going up is a problem, you can also go down. Australia has done an effective job of using tunnels to connect highways while preserving neighborhoods, an excellent alternative to destroying businesses and homes.

Smarter management. Building new capacity can get you only so far. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that half of all congestion could be eliminated simply through better management of the existing road network. Among other approaches, this could mean metering freeway ramps, turning two-way streets into one-way streets, and improving traffic light coordination. According to the Institute of Transportation Engineers, better-coordinated lights can reduce stops by as much as 40 percent, thereby cutting gas consumption, emissions, and travel times.

Market pricing for roads. One especially fruitful idea is high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, which allow drivers who put the highest priority on quick commutes to pay a premium for uncongested lanes. These have been built in Denver, Houston, and-yes-Minneapolis, among other cities. In Atlanta several private companies have submitted plans to build new HOT lanes on their own dime. During rush hour, the congestion difference between the special lanes and the regular lanes can be the difference between going 15 miles per hour and doing 65.

Areas with lots of car pool lanes could convert those to HOT lanes, add some connectors, and create a congestion-free HOT network. Transit boosters, take note: It would be easy to tweak the arrangement to guarantee bus riders a speedy trip too.

Market pricing for parking. On 99 percent of our trips we park for free, thanks largely to the minimum parking requirements embedded in our zoning codes. Eliminating those requirements would allow market forces to reflect the true cost of parking. Instead of adhering to arbitrary regulations that often order more spaces than necessary, developers would have greater flexibility to build only the number of spaces that is needed. Workplaces would be more likely to adopt parking cash-out programs, which give employees who do not drive to work a share of the money that otherwise would have gone toward parking costs. Employees would be more likely to work from home.

Market pricing for parking would reduce traffic too. If drivers had to pay the full cost of parking, they might be less inclined to take certain trips, thus putting a dent in congestion. More important, when parking is scarce but free (or underpriced), drivers have an incentive to keep the spots as long as possible. When it is scarce but costs money, drivers are less likely to dally. One additional result: Other drivers have less need to circle around and around, hoping eventually to spot an empty space.

Traditional parking meters can be notoriously inconvenient, but they aren't the only way to pay for parking. Aspen, Colorado, uses a variety of new technologies, including personal in-vehicle meters. The town determines its parking rates by zones; prices are highest in the city center and drop the further you are from the core. Motorists simply park, type in the number of their parking zone, turn on the meter, and hang it from the rearview meter. A timer deducts the prepaid amount until the driver returns. No one has to hunt for loose change.

Privatization. We're much more likely to adopt ideas like the above when roads are built and managed by companies responding to market incentives, not by government officials responding to planning fads and political clout. Private companies can create and operate highways using toll revenues as a funding source. The government can also convert existing roads to privately managed systems to allow improvements and expansions of the existing network.

For a spectacularly successful example, consider the 407 Electronic Tollway outside Toronto. This innovative road isn't fully private, but it was built by a private company (the Canadian Highways International Corporation) and is now managed by another private company (407 International) that bought a 99-year lease from the government of Ontario. Yet another company, Hughes Electronics, equipped it with an electronic toll-collecting system that eliminates toll booths and the congestion they can cause.

Baby, You Can Drive Your Car

There is a fundamental disconnect between transportation planners and the typical American commuter. Most travelers believe the car is a good thing, a source of freedom and mobility. Giving up the flexibility of the private automobile reduces our quality of life; it's a step back, not a step forward. That's the main reason the use of mass transit is declining in the U.S., despite the billions of dollars poured annually into such systems.

Yet transportation planners believe public transit and sharing rides with strangers increases the typical American's quality of life. It doesn't, and our behavior reflects this. That's why the vast majority of us choose not to use public transit.

Back in Minneapolis, Sue may hop aboard the Hiawatha Line from time to time. But when even well-off, condo-dwelling rail fans like her continue to rely on their cars, the currently dominant school of transportation policy seems destined to create many more traffic jams than transit users.

Sam Staley (sam.staley@reason.org) is director of urban growth and land use policy at the Reason Foundation. Ted Balaker (ted.balaker@reason.org) is the Jacobs Fellow at the Reason Foundation. They are the authors of The Road More Traveled (Rowman & Littlefield), from which this article is adapted.

Steep Streets

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) sstaley@reason.org (Sam Staley) — Tue, 02 May 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Almost as soon as he dreamed up a pricing scheme to manage the congestion on his city's streets, London Mayor Ken Livingstone began urging others to follow his lead. Charging for access to central London on weekdays has slashed congestion by a third, has quickened travel times, and hasn't stopped Livingstone from winning re-election. Inspired perhaps by that last point, U.S. mayors such as San Francisco's Gavin Newsom have expressed interest in the idea—but the British solution is unlikely to translate well across the pond.

Londoners must pay a whopping $14 a day to enter the "congestion zone," eight square miles in central London during weekdays between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. That's a pretty blunt traffic management tool: It ignores the fact that congestion ebbs and flows during the day, forcing motorists to pay the same amount whether they enter the zone during rush hour or at noon, for five minutes or for five hours.

Congestion pricing isn't a bad idea in itself, especially if it reduces surface congestion and weakens the bureaucratic love affair with expensive rail projects. But there are potential pitfalls, including the possibility of waste. While London officials have made good on their promise to use toll revenue only for transport purposes, American politicians have a habit of steering toll money into nebulous slush funds and turning transport bills into free-for-alls. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the most recent federal transportation bill is packed with nearly 6,500 pork projects.

Mistakes Will Be Made

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

In a September interview with USA Today, National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Michael Griffin agreed that most of what NASA has been doing for the last few decades--the shuttle program and the International Space Station--has been a mistake. Don't confuse that concession with fiscal conservatism: Just a week earlier, he'd announced a $104 billion plan to revisit the moon by 2018.

Ordinarily Americans are suspicious of politicians whose backbones have been replaced by opinion polls. Griffin embodies the opposite extreme. NASA announced its new spending spree while Congress was scrambling for money to put the Gulf Coast back together. Asked about the timing of the announcement, Griffin insisted that we "deal with our short-term problems while not sacrificing our long-term investments in our future."

As for those other "long-term investments" we've been underwriting, the expectations for what the space station can contribute to science keep shrinking, even as its cost swells past $100 billion--about a dozen times the original estimate. So don't be fooled by the apparent precision of the new moon shot's $104 billion price tag; no one has any idea what the real figure will be. The only safe bet is that it will be more expensive than advertised.�

Domestic Outsourcing

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

Many Americans get nervous when companies ship work overseas. But what if work goes abroad and comes back again?

Take South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation, home to the Lakota Sioux. Poverty is high, life expectancy is low, and unemployment stands at about 80 percent. One bright spot is a Native American�owned marketing and Web design company called Lakota Express, which has become an unexpected beneficiary of outsourcing.

In a typical set-up, American companies will employ Chinese firms to enter handwritten cards into electronic databases, then employ Lakota Express to vet the often imperfect work. The English skills of the Chinese can only take them so far with sloppy American handwriting, and Native Americans can pick up the slack without leaving the reservation.

The Associated Press reports that Lakota Express has trained more than 100 part-time employees and expects to handle more contracts soon. The Sioux aren't the only Native Americans benefiting from the domestic outsourcing boom; at four reservations in Utah, similar startups have created more than 150 jobs and are bringing in millions of dollars in revenue.�

First Woodshed on the Moon

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

With all the post-Katrina buck-passing, it's rather refreshing to hear a high ranking official admit fault. When he spoke with USA TODAY's editorial staff last week, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin didn't blame himself for his agency's woes, but he did something perhaps even more startling. He agreed that most of what NASA has been doing for the past few decades—the shuttle program and the International Space Station—has been a mistake.

But now, a year after space entrepreneur Burt Rutan's X Prize-winning flight on the privately-funded SpaceShipOne, Griffin still wants to lead our move to the stars. In fact, just last week he announced a $104 billion plan to return America to the moon by 2018. The same NASA that put people on the lunar surface 36 years ago is in the position of a little boy who's given up his mischievous ways and can now be trusted. That might have actually worked in the past, but not now.

Ordinarily, Americans are suspicious of politicians whose backbones have been replaced by opinion polls. But lately Griffin has embodied the opposite extreme. NASA announced its black sky spending spree while our nation searches for money to put the Gulf Coast back together again. When asked about the timing of the announcement, Griffin returned to more conventional political-speak, insisting that we "deal with our short-term problems while not sacrificing our long-term investments in our future."

But what about those other "long-term investments" that Americans have underwritten? You know, the ones Griffin himself just admitted were mistakes. The expectations for what the space station would contribute to science keeps shrinking, even as its price tag swells past the $100 million mark—about a dozen times early estimates. So don't be fooled by the apparent precision of NASA's $104 billion figure; no one has any idea what the real price will be. The only safe bet seems to be that it will be more expensive than advertised.

The shuttle program isn't cheap either. The University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Jr. estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since it began in 1971. And like the space station, its expectations have been ratcheted down over the years. What ever happened to those promises of weekly launches?

Even more tragic is that, since the first launch in 1982, the shuttle program has claimed the lives of 14 astronauts. Two years after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, shuttle Discovery's return to flight was shaken by the same problem that killed the seven Columbia astronauts. Luckily, the Discovery's crew returned to earth safely, but the recurring problem still prompted NASA to ground the shuttle program temporarily.

Take a longer view, and NASA's safety record doesn't inspire any more confidence. When I interviewed him earlier this year, X Prize winner Burt Rutan pointed out that after almost half a century of manned space flight, NASA still hasn't achieved the kind of safety breakthroughs his small team achieved in a just a few years. Take the "care-free re-entry" design. It allows Rutan's SpaceShipOne to align itself automatically for reentry, making it much safer to plunge back into the earth's atmosphere. Although Rutan's ship only returns from suborbital space, the design takes the traditionally complex process of reentry and makes it simple.

And when they're not swimming in tax dollars, inventors come to appreciate the value of simplicity. Take the hatch, for example. Private astronaut Brian Binnie explained to The Space Review's Eric Hedman that SpaceShipOne's hatch opens inward and has no moving parts. Binnie estimates that it costs a couple hundred bucks. Compare that to the multimillion dollar shuttle hatch which swings outward and requires complicated mechanisms to seal it for flight.

Yet after a 34-year slide, we're supposed to trust that NASA has gotten its act together. Griffin is excited about NASA's new craft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), whose design recalls the Apollo capsule. In fact, Griffin wants us to think of the CEV as "Apollo on steroids" (an odd choice of words given Congress' recent anti-roid rage). NASA may be going for the retro look, but space exploration isn't stuck in the 60s. Policy is growing friendlier to private space flight, technology continues to get better and cheaper, and something new has entered space—competition.

The day after Rutan and company won the original X Prize by reaching a suborbital altitude of 62 miles, hotel magnate Robert Bigelow offered $50 million to the first private craft that can go four times farther and reach orbit. The same day NASA grounded the shuttle program, Rutan and freewheeling billionaire Richard Branson announced the formation of a new company that will build suborbital spaceships for the burgeoning space-tourism industry. The day after Discovery touched down, Space Adventures, an Arlington-based company, announced plans to take tourists around the moon by as early as 2008.

How many cosmic hints does NASA need to realize that it might not be long before it's eclipsed by space entrepreneurs? If it wants to stay in the game, NASA should move from player to manager: Spell out the mission, offer a nice reward for its completion, and kick back until someone collects the dough. NASA could borrow from a suggestion made by the Aldridge Report, itself the result of a presidential commission, and offer, say, $1 billion "to the first organization to place humans on the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period."

Getting back to the moon for just $1 billion dollars would do more than save America from another money-swallowing black hole. It would help nurture the kind of bottom-up experimentation that led to rapid advancements in aviation, and it just might spare a future NASA administrator some embarrassment. After all, how would it look if NASA's CEV chugs its way to the moon only to find lunar tourists pointing, giggling, and sipping Tang mimosas?

Buckle Boondoggle

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

A cop stops you at a checkpoint. The officer peers inside. What's he looking for? A kidnapper? A terrorist? This week, chances are good the officer is looking for a less frightening perpetrator—the unbuckled motorist.

We are again in the midst of Click It or Ticket season, the time of year when law enforcement focuses extra-hard on forcing us to buckle up. Nationwide over 12,000 agencies participate in the federally-backed campaign, and checkpoints are just one part of the effort. Other elements include $26-million worth of tough-talking PSAs, steep fines, and lots of lobbying for "primary enforcement" laws, which allow cops to ticket those whose only offense is not buckling up.

Most of us have seen enough dummy smashing to be convinced that seat belts save lives. But what about seat belt laws? Do they save lives?

Illinois officials say yes. In 2003 the state switched to primary enforcement. A year later cops had written 43,000 additional tickets and there were 63 fewer automobile fatalities. Sounds like a success.

Or is it more like a jokester who jumps in front of a parade and pretends to lead it? In the 20 years preceding the law, the state's highway fatality rate dropped by nearly half. Take a wider view and the progress is even more impressive. In 1924 America, there were about 24 deaths for every 100 vehicle million miles traveled. By 1984, when New York became the first state to pass a seat belt law, the nation's highway fatality rate had already fallen 90 percent to about 2.5. Today it stands at about 1.5.

Click It supporters say tougher seat belt laws will help make highways even safer, but the nationwide trend toward safer streets has continued with or without them. Take New Hampshire, the only state without an adult seat belt law. It might seem like the "Live free or die" state has chosen death, but drivers there actually enjoy the nation's fourth safest roads. Neither of the two safest states have primary enforcement, and of the top 20 safest states, 10 have primary enforcement and 10 do not.

Of the states with the most dangerous roads, many do not have primary enforcement, but here higher fatality rates have much to do with the fact that these states also tend to be rural. Risks common to rural driving—such as narrow roads, sharp curves, and steep drop-offs from pavement to the shoulder—make for treacherous travel. And when accidents occur in these remote locations, it's difficult to get ambulances to the scene in time to save lives.

Many factors make driving dangerous. Naturally, public officials like to highlight what we're doing wrong, but they could do a lot more good by tending to the highway safety aspects they've been neglecting. Getting to accident sites quickly saves lives, yet many local governments allow their emergency medical service to grow sluggish and complacent. Properly maintained roads make driving safer, yet our roadway system managed only a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Reversing the trend of ever worsening traffic congestion would also help. Congestion makes drivers desperate, and desperate drivers do stupid things that endanger all of us.

And that's the central folly of seat belt laws. They don't protect safe drivers from dangerous drivers; they protect careless people from themselves. Beltlessness does not cause accidents and—except in extremely rare circumstances—one driver's decision to go beltless does not make anyone else less safe. Most importantly, running down seatbelt scofflaws keeps officers away from more important public safety duties.

It takes time for an officer to pull over a beltless driver, check license, registration, insurance, and then write up a ticket and deliver a finger wagging. A recently ticketed Californian told me that the process took about 15 minutes—not too much of a diversion on its own, but law enforcement's opportunity costs add up.

In just two days, officers in the Mid-Atlantic organized over 1,200 seat belt checkpoints and roving patrols. In Weslaco, TX cops have even taken to seatbelt sting operations, three shifts per day, four officers per shift—quite a lot of manpower for a town of 30,000. As this video clip shows, officers in plain clothes hang around traffic stops and report unsuspecting seat belt law violators to their colleagues on the road. One officer proudly reports that this effort yields about 200 tickets per day.

Beyond all the safety talk, why do authorities bother? There's the lure of federal cash—typically the payoff for bowing to federal regulations. This year the Bush administration is backing a bill that would give more transportation funding to states that pass primary enforcement laws and achieve 90 percent seat belt use.

But local governments need not covet federal funds to warm up to tougher seat belt laws. With fines as high as $200, all that ticket writing makes for quite a nice revenue stream all by itself. Officially it's (wink, wink) all about saving lives, but money has a way of sidetracking the pursuit of safety. Take red light cameras, which are supposed to reduce side-angle collisions. Like primary enforcement seat belt laws, they are growing in popularity. But there's evidence that some cameras are positioned, not to maximize safety, but to maximize revenue. Also like seat belt laws, it's unclear how well red light cameras work. Some studies have found that the reduction in side-angle collisions has been offset by increases in rear-end accidents. But with so much cash a-flowin' will local officials be able to examine the issue with cool objectivity and side with safety regardless of the fiscal impact?

Yet most people don't get riled up about seatbelt laws. Even those who usually grit their teeth at nanny state policies often don't mind having Nanny on the highway. And it's easy to see why. Those who refuse to belt themselves in stick the rest of us with higher insurance and health care costs. Since the government forces responsible people to pay for the actions of the irresponsible, forcing the irresponsible to shape up becomes easier to justify.

But if we were bent on using policy to lower such costs, the beltless driver wouldn't be our first target. Even with the government's recent admission that obesity-related deaths have been overstated, those who eat too much and move too little likely cost our nation much more than those who refuse to buckle up. Yet most of us would object to stationing cops at chubby checkpoints.

The problem isn't the 20 percent of Americans who refuse to buckle up; it's a system that forces everyone to subsidize everyone else. The solution is making everyone pay his own way. If we don't figure out how to fix this particular tragedy of the commons, we'll likely continue down the Nanny State path of more checkpoints, stiffer fines, and more stringent laws. Then again the Nanny State may have already morphed into the Therapeutic State. Most of us think of the seat belt as a strip of fabric, but the DOT recently explained that they're actually "vaccines" that protect us from the "disease" of auto fatalities. Perhaps future checkpoints will be manned by men in white coats.

High on Helium

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

A year after the helium plant near Amarillo, Texas, started selling the stuff to private buyers, local officials say that levies on the sales have generated enough revenue to justify a cut in tax rates. Residents can thank the Helium Privatization Act of 1996, which authorized the government to sell off its long-derided stockpile of the gas.

The Helium Reserve Program began in 1925, when the War Department longed to create a fleet of fighter blimps. The government eventually concluded that slow, melon-shaped vehicles are not well suited for warfare. Nonetheless, in 1960 the program ballooned to include refining and storage facilities, which grew to hold 32 billion cubic feet of helium.

Under the law, the Bureau of Land Management must sell off the entire stockpile between 2005 and 2015. The total proceeds are expected to be $1.8 billion, ranking this among the largest federal privatizations.�

"It's Mainly Just for Fun"

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Lots of hard work. Big burst of publicity. Lots of hard work. That's been the pattern for Burt Rutan.

He is the model of persistent performance, averaging more than one new aircraft design per year for over 30 years. Then, last October 4, Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites grabbed the world's attention. They became the first private operation to send a man into suborbital space twice within two weeks, using the same vehicle. Rutan and company nabbed the $10 million Ansari X-Prize, and proved that entrepreneurial creativity could extend beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Now it'll take more hard work—both scientific and political—to make space tourism a reality.

Ted Balaker, Jacobs Fellow at the Reason Foundation, interviewed Burt Rutan last week.

REASON: After the X-Prize you enjoyed a huge amount of media attention. Do you think this burst of positive publicity will help improve the regulatory climate in which the private space flight industry operates?

Burt Rutan : Well, first of all we're working the regulatory climate very hard. We just had a two and a half hour meeting with an FAA administrator a couple of weeks ago, and we have a very specific regulatory plan for this new industry that we call private space flight. And it's a very specific plan on what's appropriate for, not just research testing, but also for the certification of things that will fly ticket-buying passengers.

I think that it is good that the public know what's going on. For example, FAA is having difficulty staffing their airplane certification staff with their budgets now, and for them to build additional staff to certify, not just airplanes but spaceliners, that's going to need, I think, public support in order to help their funding for this. So I think in general if you look back before May of last year, even though we developed some 36 different manned airplanes, we had never invited the press and the public to a research test flight. But starting in May of last year we had CNN, and we had print media out for one of our test flights. And then of course the big one was June 21st for the first manned private space flight where we invited the world's press and we had hundreds of print and broadcast media, and I think some 90 broadcast media video cameras.

REASON: There was that excellent documentary.

BR: Oh yeah, and the fact that we filmed in house for two and a half years and then made the deal with Discovery. They did a very good job with Black Sky. They've shown Black Sky at least three times now and it's a full three hours, so we look back on that and realize that this was the right thing to do. It's not the right thing to do to bring in the public and the media for most research testing, but we realize that it is the right thing to do now, and answering your question, it really will be positive in terms of meeting the goals that we need for regulatory [policy]. It will be very positive, the fact that the public is not only knowledgeable, but is strongly behind us.

REASON: And you mentioned how you're trying to hash out a new kind of policy. What would you like that policy to look like?

BR: We've asked for a research airplane–like environment while a developer is doing his research testing in order to allow innovation, allow the test to be run with efficiency. And then we actually are asking for more regulation than the new legislation edicts. We do feel that the FAA needs to be accepting or proving the safety of the ship as it pertains to the passengers that get flown. Whereas their focus has been on only protecting the non-involved public who live on the ground below. We think that the industry will prosper only if there is some acceptance of [responsibility for] the safety of the ship as it pertains to the passengers.

REASON: What's the best balance to strike there? Because obviously informed adults already do all sorts of risky things from catching crabs off the Alaskan coast, to taking adventure vacations, or even just smoking three packs of cigarettes per day.

BR: Yeah, well for decades informed adults have taken treks to the top of Everest, even though more than 10 percent of those who've reached the summit have died on the mountain.

Now I don't object to that. I think that's fine. There should be freedoms. That people know that they have a one in 10 chance of dying by doing this and they still want to do it anyway, I'm the first one to say, hey, let them. However, I don't feel that that's the right thing to develop and sustain [for] a private space flight industry. Our goals are much more aggressive than that. Our goals are to have the same level of safety that the early airliners enjoyed, and a lot of people don't realize, but those early airliners 1927, 28, 29, 1930, 31, and so on, those were the first regularly scheduled commercial airliners. They were dangerous as hell compared to airlines today, however they were a hundred times safer than all of manned space flight. Not 10 times, 100 times safer.

Now I don't believe that it's right to say, listen, we'll let people take risks and we'll go and build the kind of systems that have been used historically for manned space flight, and somehow solve the affordability problem, and that's the only problem. We strongly feel that the biggest problem is the safety problem, not the affordability problem. If you fly dozens of people every day, you'll get affordability with almost any kind of system. The safety problem is the biggie, and that's why we think the most significant thing that came out of the SpaceShipOne program was not just showing that the little guy can fly above a hundred kilometers, without government assistance, and government technology, and government funds.

The real thing that we did here is to develop three new breakthroughs, and each one of them is going to have enormous effects on safety. The “care-free reentry” [in which the craft realigns itself automatically] is just one of those, so we think this is the right way to go and we think that we can get that level of early airline safety if we adequately do our flight tests ahead of time. We are developing a process that will not be debilitating like doing a Part 25 airline certification. That's where we're headed and I think it's the right thing to do.

REASON: Do you see the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act as a step in the right direction?

BR: Well, it didn't address the problem that I'm discussing, getting an FAA acceptance of the safety of passengers. It doesn't address that. However, everything else in it is positive, there's nothing negative in it. It does address asking FAA to develop an experimental research category for launch licenses. However, it's not specific and we think it needs to be more specific to force FAA to regulate these tests more like airplane research rather than like they did our program.

The license process for our program actually decreased safety and it involved an enormous amount of monitoring. It forced our people to defend the product where our safety policy is to never defend it, but always question the safety. We have to get that changed.

REASON: How did the process compromise safety?

BR: We have, I think the count now is 39, new types—new airplanes from scratch, in 30 years. We have yet to injure a pilot. We've had things like landing gear failure, but we've never had a real accident. And that's a record that no one has come close to, and we maintain that a major reason we have a superb record is our safety policy, that we always require of, not just people building it, but those designing, flying, and testing it. But to never, ever put themselves in a position where they defend the safety. Once they do, you're screwed.

We always want them in a mode in which they question the safety. If you're always questioning it, you can turn around and find something better and immediately incorporate it. For example, if you had turned in last week a report to a government agency in which you've told them the product, as it is, is safe, if you discover something better next week, you have two choices.

One, you can go an write an addendum to that report and essentially tell the government, that, gee, I was wrong last week, it wasn't the safest that it can be, and now it is because I've discovered this new thing. And then you'll find yourself debating that with them and losing your credibility with them. We make changes almost every day when we're in a research mode. So you can see you get into this big back and forth in which they see you making changes after you defend the safety to them. Now the solution there is to never tell anybody that it's safe, but always question it, which then allows you to immediately incorporate safety features and go on. And, instead of firing somebody who designed something unsafe, you reward whoever found a better way and congratulate him.

The other choice that people have is they'll see something safer and they'll realize they just told the government that it was safe last week. And then they make the decision that, well, you know, last week's configuration—it's safe enough. Another thing too is that we're a small company. We don't have a big safety department that works with the government regulators. We have the people that are there testing the product and we can only afford to have the team that's there. And now we get our team, instead of focusing on the job of making it as safe as possible, they're distracted to write reports and provide data for the government.

Another thing too is it forced us into flying trajectories and glide paths back over the airport that weren't the safest ones to fly because they, the government, was only interested in the best safety for people on the ground. Now if you look at it, for many decades, you go back to the 40s and you find that all the research flight testing done up here in this desert, there's been hundreds of accidents with research airplanes, but nobody's ever been hurt on the ground. So why would you compromise the safety of the test pilot in order to make it more safe for people on the ground?

REASON: Let me read you something from a recent interview in Wired magazine with [then NASA Administrator] Sean O'Keefe. He's addressing the SpaceShipOne launch, and says yes it was amazing, “but let's put this in a relative context. Mike Melville went half the altitude that Alan Shepard did, for a fraction of the amount of time, did it 40 years later, and flew in a plastic airplane fueled by laughing gas. From a technical standpoint, this was a modest objective, except for one major point: They did it themselves. It's like a bunch of guys doing this in their garage.”

BR: And what he didn't say is that we developed three new breakthrough technologies which will allow us immediately to launch a commercial spaceline industry in which people can fly at the same safety level of the early airlines. What Alan Shepard flew in was an expendable booster with a parachute recovery, and for 44 years of NASA manned space flight, they have not made significant improvements in concepts that will allow safe access to space.

REASON: For those interested in space policy, it seems like there were two camps when the question was—what's the biggest barrier to private space exploration? Some people said it was a regulatory, government-imposed barrier, and others said it was a perception barrier, that people could not imagine a small group of people doing what you did. How do you see it?

BR: People may interpret the regulatory barrier as the government won't let you fly something that is safe enough to fly. That's what people may think the regulatory barrier is, and I want to make it very clear that that's not my opinion at all, and this is true with airplanes, too. The regulations for light planes, which is called Part 23, there isn't anything there [that doesn't let] you fly something that otherwise should be safe. In fact, if you make an airplane that just barely makes Part 23, it'll be a lousy airplane that in my opinion is not very safe.

But it's a process that [involves] working with na�ve, and sometimes inexperienced, regulators who won't make a quick decision, so it drags your program out. I don't see anything in the regulatory rules that's restrictive. I think it's too early to regulate because they don't know what new ideas will come out. For example, if you assume that something is like a V-2 Rocket or something is like a Mercury Redstone, you can regulate that, and they have been regulating things like that for 10 years under the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. However, for them to apply those rules for something that flies to space like an airplane does not work. So they can't sit down and write regulatory rules for things that will happen in the future because you can't know what's going to happen in the future.

I have a solution for that, and that's what I'm working on right now. The developer himself [should] define the testing that is needed for his system to show that it is safe, and he negotiates that test plan with the FAA, and they approve the fact that he did it. I think that it's the only way to do it. You can't regulate spaceships like you can airplanes because every one of them is different.

REASON: Let's talk about the possible job creation effect of the private space flight industry. Because you look at, for example, the Wright brothers. They couldn't have anticipated professions like airport manager or flight attendant, and yet today the aviation industry employs millions of Americans.

BR: When people think of the Wright brothers they think of 1903. I think a more important thing to look at when you make the point you're making is 1908 to 1911, early 1912. We're talking about only a three and a half year time period that started when only 10 people had flown, and ended three and a half years later when thousands of pilots flew hundreds of airplanes in 39 countries.

Those people were doing it just for fun because they weren't developing airliners yet, developing the World War I airplanes yet, or even the mail planes yet. What happened later were the applications, but people wanted to fly. People the world around wanted to fly with a barnstormer, people wanted to go to air shows and see them do loop-the-loop. You know, this is all kind of fun.

Go back to 1977 when you could first buy an Apple computer. This was a big deal that people could have computers, but the personal computer was mainly for fun. Most people used them for games, and balancing our checkbook with a personal computer really wasn't why we bought personal computers. I mean, people said, well that's why we need them, but if you think about it, until we had the Internet, we didn't know what computers were really for. Now it's our communication, it's our commerce, it's our—everything.

I like to think that's what suborbital space tourism is; it's going to be a big industry. Just like personal computers. But it's mainly just for fun.

You've got to have thousands, tens of thousands, of people enjoying it in order to figure out what to do with it. We never would have invented the use of the Internet, the communication, and the commerce, and everything if you had just a few dozen people with computers. So I look at this suborbital phase that we'll go through, and I think we'll always have suborbital space flight, but I think the main thing is, is that people are going to flat enjoy it. And it's going to be absolutely thrilling. They're going to be floating their bodies around big cabins. It's not going to be just like the SpaceShipOne flights. There's going to be a lot more things you can do for the experience.

To answer your question, I think it's going to be a huge industry. And it's going to be competitive very early in the game, and ticket sales will come down to the point where hundreds of thousands of people will fly.

REASON: And I think the concept of fun you mentioned is hugely important and at NASA it's very different—they can't justify something on the basis of fun.

BR: No, and they don't understand the concept of taking risks in order to find breakthroughs. I hate to say that because we send billions to them for what we think is research but they don't do research, they only do development. They won't reach out and look for new concepts.

The same thing is happening with this Bush initiative, the Crew Exploration Vehicle. NASA's going to award multi-billion dollar contracts in September for the primes, and the primes are going to go out and they're going to fight to make sure that they win the next phase after spending billions, and because of that, they're not going to try new, innovative stuff. They're just going to just build some new capsules, and they're going to get launched by expendable boosters, and they won't go out and solve the safety problems that are preventing us from having resort hotels in orbit.

Railroading the Poor

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

The chief argument for public transit is that it's necessary for those who can't afford cars. But many cities tailor their transit services to those who need them the least. The desire to entice rich people--commonly called "choice" riders--is a big reason why pricey light-rail lines have broken ground in so many cities, and why more than two dozen cities are angling for federal funds to build more.

Rail is much less flexible than a bus system and can cost five to 50 times as much. Add competitive contracting, which reduces operating costs by more than a third, and buses can be an even better deal. So public officials justify the hefty price tag for light rail by claiming that it's the only way to get affluent motorists out of their cars.

But there's nothing inherently unappealing about the bus. As long as it's fast, convenient, and comfortable, commuters will hop onboard. Instead, rail lines often replace bus lines, and this means the poor must endure more transfers as they go from bus to rail and back. And since light rail costs so much more than buses, devoting money to rail will improve mobility far less than devoting the same amount to buses.

Bus riders in Los Angeles are particularly familiar with this sad story. Beginning in 1986, local policy makers began to divert funds from a fairly successful bus ridership program toward rail construction. Eventually, the Bus Riders Union, a grassroots organization that represents residents who depend on mass transit, cried foul. It has been locked in a legal battle with L.A.'s Metropolitan Transportation Authority for nearly a decade.

Yet rail remains the favored child. After Los Angeles' latest light-rail project, the Gold Line, fell well short of ridership projections, local officials forged ahead with plans for a $900 million extension.�

Winner for Best Gaseous Emissions

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Politicians really want you to buy a hybrid car. They'll give you tax breaks if you do; some cities will give you free parking, and the biggest fad is granting hybrids access to carpool lanes, even if there is only one person in the car. In fact, a new bill before Congress would allow any state to give this privilege to hybrid drivers. But all these public displays of hybrid affection are unnecessary—especially because Oscar night is nearly upon us.

Oscar night is also Leo's night, for, this time around, Leonardo DiCaprio is not just a club-hopping heartthrob milking the success of last decade's blockbuster. He is once again front and center, the top target for paparazzi, and a good bet to nab the Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Aviator. He also happens to be the very proud owner of a hybrid car.

The sight of one hunky celebrity rolling up to the red carpet in a Toyota Prius is, no doubt, more powerful than a dozen Congressmen grinning for cameras at a bill signing ceremony. And even those who are unmoved by Leo's celebrity wallop will likely get weak kneed after they see other flashy hybrid owners like Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt, and Edward Norton. (Eavesdropping cameras recently "caught" Pitt and Norton comparing notes on hybrid gas mileage.)

As celebs look for new ways to display their caring side, the hybrid car might become our decade's version of the AIDS ribbon. And, of course, all these celebrity endorsements are hybrid manufacturers' equivalent of Oscar Gold. Come Monday, dealerships that sell hybrids should plan on opening early and staying late. Consumers should prepare themselves for shortages and waiting lists.

Actually, dealerships and consumers have already been beset by shortages and waiting lists. Over the past five years hybrid sales have shot up nearly 90 percent, and auto manufactures reacted swiftly, offering more and more hybrid models. Even without special carpool privileges, Americans love hybrids. And why not?

Hybrid owners save money at the pump. Thanks to recent improvements hybrid performance is on par with regular cars, and unlike the first generation of hybrids, many of today's models don't skimp on roominess. And then there are the intangibles.

Hybrid owners feed good about helping the environment, and unlike some anonymous act of enviro-consciousness, the hybrid owner's green credentials are always in pubic view. In fact, there will probably always be a market for hybrids that look like hybrids. Marketing consultant Art Spinella notes that hybrid buyers in focus groups fixate on the Prius "because of its unique design and will candidly admit that they expect to receive some acclaim from friends, relatives, co-workers for their concern about the environment and/or fuel efficiency."

So if Americans are already in love with hybrids, why the political push for special perks? It might be as simple as politicos not wanting to get left out of the hybrid love-a-thon. They love hybrids too, and they want voters to know that.

But when consumers turn hybrid love into action, sales go up. What happens when politicos act on their hybrid love? Could it actually make things worse? It did in Virginia.

Last year the state opened carpool lanes to single occupant hybrids, and recently a task force of transportation officials found that the influx of hybrids clogged the carpool lanes, leaving them nearly as congested as the regular lanes. As hybrids continue to grow in popularity, officials expect the problem to get even worse.

Here hybrids may have ironically hobbled environmental improvement. Cars stuck in traffic burn more fuel and emit more emissions than those driving in free flow conditions. And if the presence of hybrids is the tipping point that drags a lane into gridlock, their eco-friendliness is beside the point. As long as most of the cars on the road are gas burners, the result will be more pollution and more gas wasted.

A single law managed to compromise hybrids' environmental benefits, increase gridlock, and decrease the incentive to carpool. No wonder the task force urged lawmakers to undo the legislation.

Undaunted, states like Massachusetts, Minnesota, Georgia and California are anxious to follow Virginia's lead. In the Golden State, half of the carpool lanes are already at or near capacity, but leaders insist the plan won't increase congestion. If hybrids do end up clogging carpool lanes, just end the policy, right? That's easier said than done, for interest groups, once given a special privilege, tend to fight hard to hold onto it. When lowered vehicle occupancy requirements for carpool lanes (for example, from HOV3 to HOV2) bring gridlock, officials have a tough time bringing back the old standard because all those 2-person carpoolers rather like the new policy.

Simply crafting a more restrictive policy from the get-go invites different troubles. Unlike Virginia's more open-ended approach, California lawmakers would grant carpool access only to the most fuel-efficient hybrids—those that get at least 45 mpg.

Problem solved. Or is it?

Hybrids' actual mileage is often lower than advertised. Consider Honda's Civic hybrid. The EPA says it gets 48 mpg. But when Consumer Reports tested it in real world driving conditions it got only 36 mpg. Would the Civic hybrid make the cut?

More restrictions also mean more headaches for law enforcement. The more straightforward Virginia law would seem to be easier to enforce, yet even there cops have had to spend more time grabbing carpool violators—not exactly their most important duty. Frustrated officials even turned to the rather desperate move of sticking multiple offenders with $1,000 fines.

California officials hope slapping stickers on "authorized" hybrids will decrease enforcement hassles. But since the new wave of hybrids look identical to non-hybrids, those stickers had better be pretty big. Otherwise, there will be plenty of officers squinting their way through their patrols.

We should step back and reexamine our hybrid love. Hybrids are indeed lovable, but regular cars deserve love, too. It's like those who fixate on the Oscar-winning actor and forget about the other nominees whose performances, though perhaps not quite as great, were still good. Regular cars might not be environmental superstars like hybrids, but many have achieved regular, old stardom.

There is, for example, only about seven miles-per-gallon difference between the hybrid and the regular Civic. Today's cars are about 98 percent cleaner than those built during the 1960s, and dozens of popular car models have earned the PZEV (Partial Zero Emission Vehicle) designation, which means that compared to most cars they emit at least 90 percent less hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. Joe Nordbeck, a U.C. Riverside environmental researcher, has tested PZEVs for years. He says their emission levels are "almost below detection level."

Spreading the love more evenly wouldn't just give credit where credit is due, it would also produce greater environmental progress. Most pollution comes not from new cars, most of which are already extremely clean, but from a small percentage of older, dirtier cars often called "gross" polluters.

The meatiest air quality improvements will come from targeting these gross polluters (perhaps with remote sensing technology), not from convincing new car drivers to become new hybrid car drivers. Even the natural process of fleet turnover, in which drivers trade old cars for new, will clean the air more thoroughly than lavishing hybrid owners with special perks.

And air quality was improving even before hybrids. The EPA notes that during recent decades—though vehicle miles traveled increased 155 percent—pollution has been cut nearly in half. And since we're just now beginning to feel the effects of more stringent air quality standards and better technology, the air we breathe in the future will be even cleaner.

Americans are right to love their hybrids. Let's just hope their political leaders can resist messing with a good thing. And if lawmakers simply cannot stop themselves from doing something to boost hybrid sales, they should consider more productive activities—like hosting an Oscar party.

Uncle Sam's Christmas Special

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST

For most of us, this is the time of year we remember that it's better to give than to receive. Yet the federal government recently offered a less generous motto: Taking is best of all.

New laws that take effect just after the holiday season allow Uncle Sam to take more money come tax time. The extra money comes from those who donate their cars to charity, but discover that the amount they can deduct has shrunk dramatically. The truly humbug twist is who will get hurt by the grab—charities that generate income from donated cars and the needy people they help. More than 4,000 organizations help everyone from battered women to single moms to disabled veterans, but Americans will soon have less incentive to support such efforts.

Beginning January 1 those who donate a car worth over $500 will be able to deduct only the amount the charity gets in resale, not the previously accepted Kelley Blue Book value. So if your old Chevy's blue book value is $2000, but the charity you give it to sells it for $600, you can only claim a $600 deduction. And if repairs were necessary, their cost must also be subtracted, and the deduction shrinks again. Since most donated cars are sold at auctions, they already sell for less than if they were hawked on a used car lot. Faced with dwindling deductions, more would-be donors will likely opt to keep their cars, sell them or trade them in.

The Salvation Army expects income at some of its busiest programs to drop 25 percent, and Christian Auto Repairmen Serving (CARS) expects a 30 percent drop in income. CARS sells donated autos and uses the money to provide cars to single moms and others in need of reliable transportation.

The new laws also dump new costs onto charities, most of which already operate on shoestring budgets. Charities that accept cars must now contact the donor within 30 days after they resell it, providing a receipt which the donor uses to claim his deduction. To meet such requirements charities must maintain databases of cars, donors and sales. CARS worries that the new regulations will double its postage costs, and the Salvation Army predicts that the added paperwork will hamper its activities even more than the lower deductions.

So if these charities do so much good work, why the change in policy?

Amid the flurry of car giving, Uncle Sam simply felt shortchanged. The government found evidence that people who donate their cars to charity were inflating their cars' value and claiming larger deductions. But is it really news that taxpayers fudge on their deductions? Why single out this one?

We must assume that the government targeted this kind of giving precisely because Americans have given away so many cars. In 2000, 733,000 Americans claimed deductions for donated cars; even if some fudging was involved, that's nearly three quarters of a million cars going to good causes.

This puts the government in the strange but not unaccustomed position of punishing success. Automobile donation has been a tremendous boon to entrepreneurial charities who realized that many potential donors who were hesitant to write a check would be willing to donate a used car. It's highly probable that not all those donors are motivated by the most noble intentions (not that it's the government's job to be examining the motives of generous citizens), but so what if some of them are just looking for a tax break? People give to charities for all sorts of reasons (out of altruism, to avoid hassles like selling a car, to get a fat deduction, to see their names etched in a library wall, etc). Even if the motivation of the giver isn't as "pure" as some people would like, that is not a good reason to get in the way of a good result (more money going to the needy).

In any event, if the IRS is going to apply this tax standard to charitable donation of cars, why stop there? In the example of the $2,000 Chevy above, there may have been many reasons—not least of them an unsavvy resale by the charity itself—why the car only brought a $600 windfall. Given the inefficiencies that crop up in any organization (a topic about which the federal government knows a thing or two), shouldn't the same rules apply to cash donations? Suppose instead you gave the Salvation Army $2,000 in cash. Rather than being able to claim that money as a tax deduction, shouldn't you have to wait until the organization gets back to you with a full accounting of every penny? After accounting for all waste, inattention, and missed opportunities involved in trying to redeem sinners, it could well turn out the Salvation Army really only got about $1,500 worth of value out of your contribution. That's $500 you're trying to scam out of your government, you big Scrooge! And don't forget inflation: With the dollar plummeting around the world, we should probably knock another couple hundred dollars off your deduction; after all, that's value the charity didn't actually receive. And then there's the opportunity cost of giving to the Salvation Army, rather than some other organization that might be doing more valuable work for the nation (and come to think of it, shouldn't there be a federal bureaucracy that "weights" charitable donations according to how much good the respective charities actually do?); just to be fair, let's cut another few c-notes off this big "donation" you say you gave. And hold your horses there, Big Spender: Just why are you giving this money in December anyway, rather than, say, a nice round month like February? "Playing the float," are we—collecting interest on the Salvation Army's money all year long, only to throw a few shekels to charity at the end of the year? And then there's the whole feeling-good-about-yourself thing: Giving to charity provided you with a sense of well-being for which therapists charge $300 to $500 an hour; you should be paying for that happiness, not trying to write it off your taxes.

Heck, your donation's starting to look pretty paltry. Maybe we should just skip the tax deduction entirely. In fact, at the rate we're going, maybe you should be paying some additional tax to cover your "charitable" shenanigans.

Well, maybe that won't happen. But looking not just at charitable donations but at how those donations are redeemed, and even the motives of the donors, is a lousy precedent. The great used-car swindle may just be the tip of the iceberg. It places a higher value on the scraps of extra tax revenue the IRS will bring in than on the fortunes charities will lose in the process. The feds must be kicking themselves that they couldn't make this change in time for Christmas.

Shaqsourcing

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 00:00:00 EDT

By now we're all hip to outsourcing's ways: a local economic fixture moves thousands of miles away just to improve its bottom line. Los Angeles has been hit by another high profile case of outsourcing, and in this case, the economic fixture sold Lakers tickets and jerseys. Still, Shaquille O'Neal's move to the Miami Heat teaches us more about the realities of outsourcing than a thousand campaign stump speeches.

Whether you're an NBA star or a CEO, outsourcing is indeed about keeping more money in your pocket. And since living in Miami is about 17 percent cheaper than living in Los Angeles, Shaq can improve his finances even while making the same salary. The demographic resource Sperling's BestPlaces comes up with that figure, noting for instance, that compared to LA, Miami has a lower sales tax and no state or local income tax. State policy also socks it to LA. According to the Tax Foundation, California has the nation's second worst business tax climate, while Florida has one of the best.

Of course, the calculation athletes and CEOs make isn't all about tax rates. LA's size shows that many businesses have already decided to call it home, and this often gives other businesses an incentive to favor headquartering in the City of Angles. If you're in the film industry, it's better to be where the action is than stuck in the sticks. And if Shaq ever itches to supplement his income by returning to acting (perhaps to reprise his role as the "rappin' genie with attitude" in Kazaam II), it would be easier to do in LA than Miami.

LA's huge market also makes endorsements sweeter, and the city offers glitz and excitement like few other cities can.

So big cities like LA may think that the momentum of their past cachet will carry them to future success. (No need to fret about taxes and regulations when you still have Kobe.) But as other regions become more economically and culturally exciting (Miami's even got a possibly pregnant J-Lo), economic policy becomes more important. Salary caps have limited what owners will pay, so players have become increasingly savvy about tax rates. And tax rates are a big reason why Shaq's $28 million dollar salary in Miami would feel like $23 million in LA. Similar number crunching has prompted many businesses to flee LA and California.

And don't let the presidential campaign fool you. This very American economic tug-o-war is more representative of outsourcing than John Kerry's wails about "Benedict Arnold CEOs" who ship jobs to foreign lands. A recent Labor Department report points out that outsourcing within our borders is more common than the much more publicized, offshore version. The report analyses mass layoffs from January to March and finds that "in more than seven out of 10 cases, the work activities were reassigned to places elsewhere in the U.S."

In other words, usually those who take our jobs are the same people who take our pro athletes—other Americans. Like other nations, America's cities and states compete for capital and jobs all the time, and many well-established business hubs are now feeling the heat.

An Inc. magazine analysis finds that—although South Florida did well—the places that attract jobs best aren't the perennially hip cities, but less fabulous locales like Southern New Jersey and Riverside, which was recently mocked into changing its area code. A New York luxury fabric manufacturer recently moved to South Carolina for the same reasons companies move to South Asia. "You have lower overhead, lower taxes, lower occupancy costs, lower labor costs, lower everything," gushes the CEO.

Some may find domestic outsourcing more palatable, but to an outsourced worker, whether the job goes across the nation or across the world, it is just as lost. (Although outsourcing, like trade or technological advancement, ends up creating more jobs than it destroys.)

Some jobs leave town because the natural evolution of the market allows them to be done somewhere else, while others get chased out by costly regulations. So should politicians scorn job-moving CEOs or the laws that drive up the cost of doing business? The dozens of anti-outsourcing proposals percolating in our state and federal legislatures provide us with the predictably bleak answer.