The state of American car manufacturers? Not as bad as we think?

The Economist online posted this story online about the state of American carmakers. Is this a comeback, or this is just business as usual?

DC’s Union Station Bike Facility

Here is rendering–it’s rather hard to find pictures online–you can see the whole plan at the DC DOT’s’ Bicycle Advisory page. My friend Scott brought it up at breakfast this morning, my last day in my beloved DC. The work was done by KGP Design Studio. Don Paine was the lead architect who is quoted in an NPR story as saying “the system to Washington is part of a larger shift toward “dispelling the notion that the car is an essential part of our daily lifestyle.”

The system will require a subscription, and it will be nice: it will have bike parking, lockers, and a repair shop. But it’s meant for 130 bikes at a go. Now, dangit, it’s nice and I’m happy they are putting these out and putting money into high-quality design, but 130 bikes is a 130 people, or a few more with child seats. I don’t mean to be difficult, but that’s a pretty marginal service for the money that went into this thing. The architect then says: ” This is a monumental paradigm shift for the typical American”. But a previous report on bike station users suggests that 30 percent of those users were previously drivers. I can’t find that original report, but at 130 people in DC’s case, that’s 40 people, versus the other 90 who are already bicyclists and receiving a new service. So we shifted 40 people, maybe. Is the planet really going to get cooler at this pace? Or should we be honest about what we are doing: making places nicer for multiple modes for select users? Is that particularly wrong?

Why do parents drive kids to school when they could walk?

UNC’s Noreen MacDonald has a very nice manuscript in the upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association:

From their abstract:

We found that 75% of parents driving their children less than 2 miles to school said they did this for convenience and to save time. Nearly half of parents driving their children less than 2 miles did not allow their child to walk to school without adult supervision. Accompanying a child on a walk to school greatly increases the time the household devotes to such a trip. Few Safe Routes to School programs effectively address issues of parental convenience and time constraints. [1]

So here we have it. The good thing about Noreen and her co-author is that they won’t allow the interpretation here to turn into some working-mom-blame (you think I kid; I have heard public health people say that moms entering the workforce have contributed to childhood obesity because more meals are prepared away from home and the children are outside walking less. This may be, but nobody’s blaming working fathers for this, now are they? Let’s think about how this problem is framed.)

One of the things about the manuscript that makes me wonder: 2 miles is a long way for a young kid to walk–so yeah, it’s going to take some time. I wonder if they were to go finer-scaled–five blocks or so away from school–whether they would get some new insights on why those parents are or are not walking their kids to school.

[1] N. C. McDonald and A. E. Aalborg. Why parents drive children to school: Implications for safe routes to school programs. Journal of the American Planning Association, 75(3):331–342, 2009.

Chevy on Ebay

So what do people think of Chevy’s decision to put cars on Ebay? I am extremely interested in how this works out, in they have both the “Buy it now” options and the “make offer” options. Does this just represent a new model of negotiating? Or is it a dumb move?

How much is too much to pay for mobility–Part II

One of the things that makes me wonder about people’s hysteria over congestion charging: why don’t these same people ever argue that it is wrong to charge for public transit?

Now, to be fair: transit enjoys a large out-of-pocket price advantage over owning a car, but in most places in the US, the car provides better service quality and higher mobility. And it’s no use arguing quality because much of that argument comes down to taste preferences. I prefer not driving because I once had a bad car accident and I never want that responsibility again. I’m incompetent. But that means as a transit rider and walker I’m intimately aware of the service quality problems even with good transit systems. And I’ve ridden systems around the world. No, you don’t have to drive with transit, but if it’s no fun sitting in traffic, chances are you’re still sitting, in air conditioning with some privacy if you are in your car. No such luck with congested transit, where you can be sweltering and hanging on a pole next to somebody you’d rather not share a sidewalk with less alone the same 16 cubic feet of air.

However, I digress. Service qualities aren’t the issue. The issue is why people think it’s unfair to expect people to pay for freeway service when they seldom think it’s unfair to expect people to pay for public transit.

Putting some numbers on the example further illustrates the point. A patron of Orange County’s SR91 HOT lanes pays on average $1600 a year in user fees if they use the facility 8 times a weekduring the very highest morning and afternoon peak charges; if they only use the lane for 6 trips a week and move to an hour off peak in either direction, they can reduce that amount to only about $800 a year . Peak-period, peak-direction freeway commuters are more likely than commuters in general to come from middle- and upper-income households; as such, the lowest income users who regularly commute in the SR91 Express Lanes come from households with average annual incomes of about$40,000.

By contrast, someone who buys a regular monthly pass for Los Angeles County-wide transit service pays $744 a year; a region-widepass costs $881 a year—about the same as the HOT lane charges. And that’s for one adult: two adults put the figure at $1488 because in transit there are no economies for multiple adults (whereas you can stick two adults in a car and drive on the SR91). A monthly pass for the New York MTA costs over $1,000 a year. Local bus and subway services for Boston MTBA patrons are about $720 a year, and commuter rail passes range in price from $720 to $3000 a year. These costs can get higher if a patron is unable to pay out in lump sums for monthly passes; what costs monthly pass riders $744 a year in Los Angeles costs weekly pass purchasers $884. These are not small charges when the poverty line sits at $18,000 for a family of three in the US; the cost of a NY MTA pass runs at 0.06 percent of total income there—much higher than some gas tax and toll schemes

My point here is not that it is cheaper to go by car: you’ve still got payments, maintenance, and insurance, etc. My point is that we worry about low-income motorists having to face charges but nobody seems to think anything of what we charge for transit. Yes, when transit fares go up, there is usually some discussion of what that means for impoverished riders, but charging for transit is routine while charging for freeways is seen as deviant. I find this weird. Of the major metropolitan areas, San Francisco is the only one I know of that has lifeline pricing for passes.

Here’s one of the very few recent studies on the cost incidence of transit fares.

Nuworsoo C, Golub A, Deakin E. Analyzing equity impacts of transit fare changes: Case study ofAlameda-Contra Costa Transit, California [Internet]. Evaluation and Program Planning. In Press, Corrected Proof, Available: here

So how much is too much user charge for mobility?

I’ve subjected you to numerous rants about transport finance–including the fact that I think we over-invest in this sector–along with a question that haunts me…viz: who pays if transport system users don’t?

I sat down and frittered around with some numbers. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy derived some estimates for the out-of-pocket cost burdens for all major US taxes. I entered their data into a spreadsheet and then compared the estimated total burden for low-income households (which includes existing excise taxes) with estimates of a) system-wide HOT lane proposal for Washington, DC and b) a comprehensive, zone-based toll estimated for Paris designed to cut traffic by 25% (a big-ish toll, about $6 per zone). This is the result. The expected increase in total burden from HOT lanes is pretty small; the zone-based toll, however, is pretty large. c) and d) show the estimates of emissions charges compared to total tax burden. Those are really pretty marginal in the larger scheme of things.

Keep in mind these are just out-of-pocket costs. When you add in the benefits of congestion and emissions reductions, some estimates find progressive social welfare gains from pricing, even before you count revenue allocations. London’s cordon toll is pretty high and covers a fairly large swath of the urban environment. But the measured reductions in emissions following the cordon has resulted in sizable and steeply progressive air quality benefits for lower income areas of London.

So if we price the freeway, will the poor suffer? There is no easy answer to this question.

Car-Free Downtowns: Green-ness and/or Economics or Both?

Kat Martindale sent me a link to this story about Sydney’s bid to take cars out of the CBD. Like the Times Square plan, this makes perfect sense from an economics standpoint: the land is too valuable to have space taken up through space-intensive modes like cars. Other very large, very congested cities who don’t regulate often go the same way through individual market sorting, with people taking to foot, bicycle, and scooter to slither through the cars sitting in gridlock.

Oddly, we may not know ultimately the environmental effect of these car-free zones. WHAT? ARE YOU STUPID, Dr. Schweitzer??? Anything that gets rid of cars is good, right? Well, we don’t know that these types of car-free zones actually get rid of cars and trucks, or whether the zones simply divert vehicles elsewhere, re-routing them and thus adding to VMT, idling, or just slower speeds–all of which can add emissions as easily as they can subtract them. Eliminating car trips isn’t as simple as disallowing them in various parts of the city. There will be local benefits to air quality and a bunch of other things, but we don’t know what happens for global or regional emissions.

There’s a nice manuscript, by researchers I respect immensely, on how Paris’ car suppression strategies have had mixed results for air quality:

Bouf, Dominique and David A. Hensher, The dark side of making transit irresistible: The example of France, Transport Policy, Volume 14, Issue 6, November 2007, Pages 523-532, ISSN 0967-070X, DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2007.09.002.

Link in ScienceDirect.

Auto recycling, Africa Style

The LA Times yesterday ran an interesting story on auto recycling in Ghana. When there is a crash, no matter how badly the cars are damaged, these workers bring the cars back to life. There are occupational and environmental health issues with the workshop, but it serves as compelling contrast to the scrappage program announced for the UK in the past week to save the auto industry. David Levinson over at the Transportationist discusses the latter scheme.

Hydrogen cars driving through California

This is a bit dated by now, but it’s a slow news and thought day today. The 2009 Hydrogen Road Rally is taking 12 vehicles from Chula Vista (why there, one wonders?) to Vancouver, BC. These are hydrogen-electric vehicles, and what’s nice is that people along the roadway can actually go for a little spin the new vehicles. Much more interesting than simply looking at them in car shows.

New electric car unveiled for California 2010

CODA, a new car start-up, announced yesterday that it will be rolling 200 electric cars for purchase in California in 2010. The mix of backers for the car are a solid group of companies with proven experience in the battery game. This is a 220-volt plug-in with a projected six-hour charge time with a range of 90 to 120 miles. You can see a photo here. Definitely not for assistant proffies given that it carries a $45K price tag.

As a follow-up, the autosphere has been abuzz about what the GM bankruptcy means for the Chevy Volt. As I groused the other day, the car companie’s struggles give it a number of reasons for why it might delay or kill off the line. However, government ownership of GM under the Obama presidency might give them them a reason to hang tough with the $40K Volt even as it takes awhile to materialize. Keith Johnson at the Wall Street Blog takes up the issue as does Katherine Harmon with Scientific American. The latter link includes GM’s departing Bob Lusk’s appearance on David Letterman, with the production model and requisite blondes in dresses of dubious taste.

GM Bankruptcy

I opened my Facebook this morning to see a few environmentalists crowing about GM’s bankruptcy. If nothing else, this is uncharitable, as the company plans to lay off 21,000 more people. Way to combat the idea that environmentalists are a bunch of Birkenstock-wearing privileged bobos who don’t care about working class people, folks. At least there was some protection for workers’ retirement benefits in the restructuring.

But more to the point, crowing is also inaccurate. The car company will retain its four signature lines–Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet. It is cutting its Saturn and Hummer lines, or more accurately, selling them. It isn’t as though its cars on the road will vanish magically simply because of its economic hardship. If anything, this is probably bad news for the environment because these kinds of economic hardships give companies more evidence to argue against new, potentially capital-intensive changes needed to implement technology standards like the ones environmentalists were celebrating a few days ago or new engine technologies.

If this stuff were as easy as striking a strident normative stance , the planet would be sustainable already.