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Economists think about this all the time--see, for example, this video from David Friedman, but it's also one of the first things that are discussed in introductory Econ right after the perfect competition model. But I don't think this post does a great job of identifying such cases; the video I linked has what I consider to be better examples.
For the most part, it's up to each person to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs. Most people can determine how much they like drinking; an estimate of other people's preferences won't help you much. But... what does this have to do with diffusion? Generally, each person experiences the costs and benefits of their own drinking. If anything, the cost of drinking is more diffuse, since health care costs are often socialized even in the US, so non-drinkers will pay for drinkers' drinking-related health care.
Again, I'm confused as to what this has to do with your general thesis. Generally, both the benefits and the costs of more road space are relatively diffuse, at least in North America, since most people drive most of the time (edit: this depends on the road/project; for one road serving one area, what I said is wrong. For expanding many roads serving many areas, it's more correct, although there still will probably be some agents with more or less benefit and cost). If anything, since many more people drive than bike, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are spread around (sanity check: if the benefits were concentrated, it would be easy to privately fund roads; this almost never happens).
(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).
I can't tell what this has to do with costs or benefits being diffuse at all. It sounds like you're just dropping an argument for zoning into the post at random. A zoning law has a very clear, concentrated cost (someone who would like to build a different type of housing unit on their land) with diffuse benefits (spread across all of their neighbors). (edit for clarity: Zoning, like many policies, can have both concentrated and diffuse costs and benefits. I was trying to get at the point that there's nothing particularly concentrated or diffuse about the particular argument you mentioned).
First, I think your math is wildly off. 1.46 looks to be roughly the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, while 5 miles is, presumably, the distance of one commute. So 1.92 minutes is the risk due to your car making 1 commute, which means that these values are actually extremely similar.
But also, where are these numbers coming from? If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time (certainly the converse, where adding road capacity does not reduce congestion, has been consistently observed--see the ID argument just above; you don't seem to dispute that ID occurs, simply how to interpret it).
I really want to emphasize this point, though. By driving, you expose other people to danger while slightly reducing your own exposure to danger and increasing your convenience. This is a highly negative externality and deserves to be heavily "taxed" to discourage it, or you should be forced to negotiate. If the math does work out as you claim, it should cost an absolutely trivial amount for you alone to pay off all of the cyclists and pedestrians in the city to keep the roads.
Also, from a more dry utilitarian point of view, expected amount of time is not the only relevant variable. A small risk of dying increases the variance a lot, and is something that people definitely care about. In this case, downweighting the diffuse costs is entirely appropriate.
Thanks for this - this is the correct version of the ID argument against road building that I was struggling to put in ordinary language. In econospeak, the proponents of the new road promised a first-order benefit (shorter journey times for the high-value journeys which are already being made due to reduced traffic) and delivered a second-order benefit (marginal journeys which would not have been made now are, or journeys which would have been timed to avoid rush hour are now made during rush hour for a marginal improvement in convenience). Traffic congestion is pure social waste (in fact it is worse than pure social waste due to emissions of idling or slow-moving vehicles), but if you use efficiently-collected tolls to reduce congestion by keeping marginal drivers off the roads then you can deliver a social benefit from road building - most of which comes in the the form of increased toll revenue.
Interestingly, in cities with successful, widely-used public transport (which includes all European and 1st-world Asian capitals), you see induced demand effects on public transport as well. For whatever reason, the anti-transit-funding libertarian crowd don't normally raise the induced demand objection, and when they do the "unsuppressing suppressed demand is good" response normally is raised, loudly. Whether the transit case is really different depends on what you think about the social costs of overcrowding on roads vs. transit - it feels different because overcrowded tube trains get you where you are going roughly on time, but overcrowded roads cause severe delays.
Yep, congestion pricing plus non-driving alternatives is the correct solution to traffic, not building endless roads.
There's a great youtube video on ID applied to transit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc&ab_channel=OhTheUrbanity%21
They make similar points. In particular, it's much easier to both increase capacity (increase frequency of trains, signal priority, etc. which also improves the experience of riding rather than worsening it) and apply congestion pricing (since they already have ticketing systems). It also has a lot fewer externalities, and in the case of walking and cycling, has positive knock-on effects (people getting more exercise).
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I don't have time to watch the whole Friedman lecture but his first few examples are about market failures, which is a slightly different topic to what I was getting at. What I was trying to express (and didn't do a great job of) was that in discussions of policies, there are often costs that are not mentioned so we never get a full cost/benefit comparison. The specific examples are just examples of the "missing" costs and I wasn't trying to do a full accounting of all the costs/benefits in each example.
I used expected life-years lost for driving 5 miles, which is approximately 1.46/100m * (5 miles) * (50 years of life left), which multiplies to about 2 minutes. Urban driving reduces that by about half, so it really should be about 1 minute. The specific numbers are not important though; the public conversation was only ever about Vision Zero rather than trip times.
Also true! But the numbers matter. I don't think there are a lot of people in my neighborhood whose behavior will be changed by these particular road diets - as I mentioned downthread, there is already a dedicated bike path a block away, and also the neighborhood is hilly, which is a non-starter for most people to bike. I will state that in a full cost-benefit accounting, the road diet might make sense. No one did that analysis though; it was all one-sided statistics and aesthetic judgments.
One of the causes of market failures is diffuse costs or diffuse benefits. Some examples in the video include tariffs and drug regulation.
There are theoretically infinitely many costs and benefits to any policy (or if not, far more than could be feasibly thought of and estimated, especially once you start taking into account 2nd order effects, or 3rd order effects, etc). I don't think the process of choosing what to ignore is really related to whether the costs and benefits are diffuse or not, except to the extent that diffuse costs and benefits may be harder to see. For the most part, I think whether someone thinks of a diffuse cost or benefit is, like most other arguments, related to their bias or personal experience rather than anything else. Like with the travel time example, both of the things you mention are somewhat diffuse (exactly how diffuse depending on how many people cycle or walk vs driving, which depends on the policy itself, which makes it even more complicated). Someone advocating for reducing traffic volume is probably going to focus on cyclist and pedestrian deaths because (depending on how charitable we're being) deaths are more important than commute time and/or they have ideological preferences for bikes over cars.
If you want to say an argument is being unfairly ignored, I think you do have to show that it is at least plausibly of the correct scale to be relevant.
Ok, but then I think your interpretation is off: Both numbers apply to 1 single trip. Every other person who does the same drive will face the same delay and also increase risk by the same amount (glossing over any issues with induced demand, assuming marginal = average, etc).
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