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My understanding is that this is a federal matter because it involves interstate roads which were built with federal funds.
I think that a workaround would be to just charge tolls on non-federal roads. The people driving from and to Manhattan tend not to do so just to enjoy the view of the Hudson from a federal highway. They want to reach a destination in Manhattan, and they need to use local roads to get to it. So just charge them to use the local roads instead.
On the subject itself, I am a bit of two minds. On the one hand, I get that putting prices on things is probably the most efficient way to allocate rare resources. On the other hand, there is something delightfully egalitarian about public roads. It does not matter if your car is worth 500$ or 500k$, when it comes to traffic -- and especially traffic jams -- everyone is equal. Well, somewhat equal. Of course, sitting in a hot, cramped, terrible car waiting for the traffic to move is different than riding in a nice, air-conditioned car with some stop and go traffic assistance system, and that is different from riding in the back of a limousine drinking champagne with an escort and an 8k TV screen while occasionally berating your driver on the intercom. Still, unless you can afford to ride a helicopter to work you are stuck here with the rest of us.
The interstate commerce nexus is pretty strong here, as is the Federal funding. Manhattan gets all sorts of Federal funding for both transit and roads. Even without Wickard v. Fillburn, it isn't practical to avoid it.
Not when there's a monopoly provider.
The fact that there's a monopoly provider is one part of it, but there's also the part where the service being provided has substantial negative externalities. I don't know what price leads to maximum utility when that's taken into account, but I imagine it's closer to the price in a monopoly market than the price in a competitive market. Heck, it might even be higher than that. Depends on the demand curve, of course.
On the other hand, with something like the public transit system which has much less (though of course not zero) negative externalities, I think what you said applies a lot more. I think there's even an argument for pricing it somewhat below-market because it can pull commuters away from driving, if you don't have something like a congestion charge already.
I could own a car and go wherever I want, whenever I want. It'll take me 10 minutes to get there and another 10 to get back. I can buy heavy things or more than I can carry on my own. A lot of times public transit doesn't get me to where I want to go (especially if it's another city, and in that case I'd need to get a hotel and hope their own system takes me to where I need to go) and sometimes what I'm transporting is not allowed on public transit. I can open the windows, turn on the A/C, I control the music, and I'll always have a place to sit.
Or I could take public transit, where it'll take me an hour one way (transit + walking + transfers), I'm limited to my physical strength (so no Costco runs), I'm more or less limited to where public transit goes, not even guaranteed a place on the vehicle during rush hour, I can't take certain things with me, and I can't stay out later than the last bus or I'll be stuck walking for multiple hours. Or I could take a taxi, but the cost of doing that particularly often is comparable to car ownership in the first place.
The reason people like cars is that personal vehicles of this nature are Good, Actually. We can argue about the size (though because a great variety of Westerners are landlords compared to those in hyper-dense areas or Europe, we tend to prefer trucks large enough to lend to the land's maintenance) but there's a reason even in extremely poor areas the dominant mode of transportation is not public... it's a 50cc gasoline-powered scooter.
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Claims of externalities are usually a way of putting one's finger on the scale, and this is a perfect example. You've decided driving is bad and transit is good, so you handwave into existence negative externalities for driving which are much greater than those of transit, and set their value to whatever works for your argument.
What specifically about mass transit do you think makes it come anywhere close to private auto transport in terms of negative externalities?
It might have lesser externalities, but it also has much lesser utility. Choosing where I go, and when, is the whole point of having a car. Not being able to choose my destination and being forced to adhere to another's schedule aren't externalities, they're just providing an inferior product. That before you address the issue of sharing space with strangers, which might be acceptable if society were high trust, but becomes intolerable in low-trust cities.
I'd rather have the better option, thank you.
That's perfectly fine, and I totally get why some people choose to drive. What I object to is not some people choosing to drive, but the cost of that driving being borne by people who don't choose to drive -- and even by others who choose to drive. It's like a smoker complaining that not smoking is not as good as the law letting you smoke wherever you want.
I get that a lot of people don't like sharing space with strangers, when crime and harassment are factors. I do think it's something that also really needs addressing on its own, but especially to make non-car transportation more attractive.
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I think you don't get the benefit of the default.
Ok, I guess first it's worth establishing what we're comparing driving to. I think it's fair to say some mix of public transport like trains, buses, and subways, as well as walking and cycling. If you take public transport you have to typically walk a little bit, as it won't go directly to your destination.
Also, I'm not trying to argue that driving a car isn't desirable for the occupants. Of course it's convenient, private, and comfortable. And I don't disagree with Urquan that a lot of people choose cars because they prefer the risk of an accident to the risk of being a victim of crime.
So to start, let's compare the space requirements. Every bit of land in a city has a value -- if you use it for something transportation-related, you can't use it for something else. As a thought experiment, if you had to surround every building with a 50ft wide no-mans-land buffer, it would clearly make any city or town larger and therefore add time to every trip through it, without adding any value (with the exception perhaps reducing noise pollution if you live next to a club). Proximity creates value.
Walking often requires sidewalks -- one could imagine a city with no sidewalks, but typically we don't want roads inches away from front doors and storefronts anyway, so it doesn't really take up much extra space. That said, if your roads are narrow enough, you can leave these out (example of random residential Tokyo street).
Buses require depots to store them, as well as stops. Clicking around google maps for any major city with a good bus system shows that these take up minimal space, about as much as a Walmart + parking, if that.
Commuter trains probably require the biggest footprint of any public transport. 860,000 people commute into London on the train daily (2006 figure). If they all drove instead *and carpooled 2 people per car), assuming a 2.4m x 4.8m parking space (old, smaller standard), you'd need 4953600 m^2 of parking, or 2.2 km^2 of just parking spaces. And since a parking lot needs a substantial amount of space for the cars to drive around, it would probably be more like 3 or 4 km^2. For a train station footprint, let's take Waterloo station, (the biggest), which as far as I can estimate would be about 0.25 km across if it were compressed into a square, for 0.0625 km^2. There are 14 terminal train stations in London -- if they were all the same size, they would take up 0.875 km^2. But many are smaller, and a train station is not just bare warehouse for trains, it has shops and places to eat as well. There are also lots of smaller train stations which are just a blip on the train line that barely takes up more space than the train itself.
And finally, a subway takes up very little useful space, of course. For driving, the Big Dig in Boston would be comparable.
Now, when providing car parking, you can build up, or down! But since car parking takes up so much space per-user, parking structures often have to be paid in order for them to make economic sense, or they're subsidized by the city. I have little objection to car parking when the driver pays enough that it doesn't need subsidies. Often, though, planing laws just mandate that each business provides a certain number of parking spaces. We all pay for this both in the form of things being further apart, as discussed above, as well as businesses having to pay taxes on land area only used for cars, that they then pass on to us.
I want to emphasize -- I don't think cars are the devil. I do think that bending over backwards to accommodate driving at the expense of other forms of transportation, and the general livability of cities, is a problem.
Another externality is accident deaths. Cars kill more than other forms of transportation -- and not just the people in the car. If we take what the DOT estimated for the value of human life in 2023, $13.2 million, times 0.54 deaths per 100,000,000 million passenger miles for passenger vehicles from the previous link, that's $7.128 million per 100m passenger miles. We could cut that in half if we want to say that half the car deaths are due to the own fault of the driver and so shouldn't count as an externality. This is probably over-estimating because there are a lot of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, but under-estimating in cases where there is more than 1 occupant of the car. (It's easy to get into the weeds quickly) This is $3.064 million per 100m passenger miles, or $0.03 per passenger mile. Every 33 mile trip statistically does around $1 in economic damage solely from the possibility of causing an accident. Just looking at the graph of accidents, the externality from other types of transit is less than 1/10 of that. As for walking and cycling, I'm assuming that deaths caused to others is generally negligible -- it would be hard to kill someone with a bike crash even if you were trying.
Other externalities, such as noise, are messier to compare. Obviously walking and cycling are very quiet, subways are too if you're not actually down near them. Trains and buses can make more noise than cars, but there's the factor that they're not on literally every street, and they're not constantly passing by. Train horns can carry a long way though. Subjectively, I've found cities with lots of cars to be substantially louder than cities that don't prioritize them.
Pollution is similar. For trains and buses, I'm not sure. Trains do probably generate a lot of brake dust, and diesel trains pollute. It may depend on electrification, etc. Electric cars are apparently about as bad as gas ones due to tire wear and braking though, so I imagine buses and trains may be the same, though electric trains aren't heavier than diesel ones since they get their power from overhead lines. Biking and walking create negligible pollution, unless you count the visual pollution of lycra-clad cyclists.
Anyway, that's my impression of the externalities of different modes of transport, back of the envelope. It makes sense to drive everywhere, if you don't count what driving does to everyone else. Just like it makes sense to catch as many fish as you want without considering if the stock can support it.
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I mean, I guess if you only count people who can afford cars in the first place, then yes. And ignore the fact that because we dedicate so much tax money to roads and not public transit, people who kinda can’t afford cars have to buy them anyway, and it takes up a big chunk of their income compared to more well-off folks. And that poor people often have to live next to the noisy, polluting traffic where rents are cheap, shouldering the brunt of the negative externalities.
I get that you’re not trying to make a rigorous argument here, but I really see it from a different perspective.
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