“But the early neoconservatives were right to defend mainstream liberalism against countercultural radicalism. Like today’s right, the ’60s and ’70s left was emotional, expressivist and anti-intellectual. (One of its bibles was Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book!”) Like today’s right, the ’70s left favored theatrical protest over discussion and debate. The prophets of the Age of Aquarius and the “population explosion” were every bit as apocalyptic as Glenn Beck. And just as today’s right-wing radicals play at Boston Tea Parties, so Abbie Hoffman dressed up as Uncle Sam. The teabaggers are the Yippies of the right.”
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Executive Editor JOEL KOTKIN on TruthDig regarding California’s Golden Age
“California may yet be a civilization that is too young to have produced its Thucydides or Edward Gibbon, but if it has, the leading candidate would be Kevin Starr. His eight-part “Dream” series on the evolution of the Golden State stands alone as the basic comprehensive work on California. Nothing else comes remotely close.”
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Play It Cool at the G-20, Mr. President
Barack Obama goes to this week’s Pittsburgh G-20 with what seems the weakest hand of any American president since Gerald Ford. In reality, he has a far stronger set of cards to play — he just needs to recognize it.
Our adversaries may like our new president, but they don’t fear him. And, on the surface, why should they? The national debt is rising faster than the vig for a compulsive, debt-ridden gambler. And our primary rivals, the Chinese, continue to put the squeeze on American producers by devaluing their currency, subsidizing exports and penalizing imports.
When the Chinese threaten to call in their debts, they can count on Timmy Geithner to kowtow like an obedient vassal. Some of Obama’s most important supporters — like Warren Buffett and The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman — have discovered what Friedman calls “the great advantages” of autocracy over our cockamamie, boisterous democracy.
From Virgil, Maecenas and the court of August to Hitler-admirers Henry Ford and George Bernard Shaw, as well as Stalin-fan Max Eastman, imperial scribes and money lenders have long demonstrated a weakness for even the worst autocrats. But our bedraggled democracy may have a lot more aces to play than many recognize.
Just look at the other players around the table. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, when not worrying about his (lack of) height, tells his countrymen to stop worrying about gross domestic product. Productivity, one presumes, doesn’t mean as much as a good baguette, long vacation or wet kiss from a former model.
Across the channel, Prime Minister Gordon Brown seems determined to take the Good Ship Brittania further underwater. According to Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, Britain, with the exception of London, is already well on its way to becoming “a second- or third-tier country.” And as my colleague Ryan Streeter points out, New Labour’s response to the economic crisis — basically raising taxes and doubling down on regulation — doesn’t seem a formula for a vibrant economy.
Germany, Italy, Spain and the rest of E.U. face equally daunting problems. These “progressive” role models suffer from unsustainably low birthrates, and many face a future more Islamic than European. Their “green” rhetoric may thrill some fans in the U.S., but these economies still run largely on oil and natural gas, which makes them ever more dependent on the autocrat of all — Russia.
And Japan, once considered the mega-tiger of the future by American policy wonks, is transforming itself into something of a post-modern pussycat. It won’t take immigrants even as its population begins to shrink. Largely dependent on exports, its new government does not like globalization and wants to expand its welfare state. Moreover, Japan seems to be wobbling toward a future as a quiescent vassal for the Greater Chinese East Asian sphere.
So how does America compare? Let’s start with the basics. The U.S. is the only major advanced country that enjoys a steady population increase. Yes, immigrants are driving much of that growth, but our newcomers are generally very different from the largely alienated and isolated Muslim communities now nesting in Europe. America’s Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Armenians, Caribbeans and Africans — and more pointedly Arabs and Iranians — do not constitute a hostile “them.” Instead they are the ones redefining us by adding new dimensions to what Nathan Glazer once described as “a permanently unfinished country.”
Of course, it helps to be the only serious global military presence in the world. A strong military represents an invaluable asset in a world dominated by autocrats and lunatics. That doesn’t mean Obama should swagger like a Viagra-enhanced neo-con. He just needs to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum: Speak softly, but keep a hold on that big stick.
A powerful military and better demographics represent just part of America’s strong hand. Compared with the E.U., Japan, China or even India, the U.S. remains phenomenally rich in resources.
Take our most basic need: food. The U.S. has the most arable land in the world and is its largest food exporter. Our $1.4 trillion food sector accounts for 12% of our economy, and prospects for expansion are enormous. By 2050, the population of the planet will be around 9 billion people — up from 6 billion today. More than 85% of the world’s population will reside in developing countries, most in cities, and they will constitute a gigantic future market.
Equally important, the U.S. is sitting on huge energy resources. Of course, renewable fuels should become a major, even dominant, factor, but in the short- and maybe mid-term, oil, gas and even coal will continue driving the economy. The Great Plains and even the Northeast, particularly Pennsylvania, have enough natural gas to become a junior Abu Dhabi.
Furthermore, despite its many weak links, our industrial base remains the most advanced in the world. If mindless “green” policies don’t force us to dismantle it, we could produce, through the use of new technology and a better-trained workforce, virtually everything we buy from the Chinese and the Europeans.
This is not to argue for strict protectionism. But right now we buy almost $4.50 from the China for every $1 we sell there. China’s trade with us is worth 13 times to its economy what our trade with them is worth to us.
Fundamentally, this means that the Chinese are more exposed to a potential trade war than we are. Without rising exports to the U.S., China’s leaders could face massive unemployment and internal unrest. For us, reducing Chinese imports means somewhat higher prices at
Wal-Mart — and perhaps more vigorous business with better partners such as Mexico, whose future prosperity is directly tied to ours.All this suggests that Obama has more leverage to demand better trade terms than some might think. There’s nothing in the Constitution that mandates that Americans be the world’s trade chumps. So you want trade war, President Hu? Give him a little Clint Eastwood. Make. My. Day. Then give them a wink or a chance to think about it.
How about the $1.5 trillion that the Chinese are holding? Well, they could call in their $1.5 trillion for yen or euros, ruining those economies by inflating their currencies. Polish zlotys? Iranian rials?
Of course, losing Chinese investors and cheap products would hurt in the short term, but it could prove beneficial in the long run. After all, during World War II, we learned to thrive without German machinery or Southeast Asian rubber. Best of all, a Chinese withdrawal could force Washington to live on a budget, just like the rest of us.
None of this suggests that Obama should discard his charm and morph into a svelte Dick Cheney. America’s preeminence rests on far more than missiles, resources, land or machines. The U.S. is more than a geographic place, or the home of a race, but, as Lincoln noted, the great human experiment about self-government and individual aspirations.
Whatever his faults — and there are plenty — Obama epitomizes this ideal with his very being. When he arrives in Pittsburgh, our president should play the American hand like the guy who knows he holds aces in the hole.
This article originally appeared at Forbes.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History
. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin Press early next year.
Photo: White House Photo/Pete Souza
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High Speed Rail in Springfield: “The Whole City Would Look Like Crap”
Not every local official is smitten with the romance of high-speed rail. Graphic evidence of this was provided by Springfield, Illinois mayor Tim Davlin, who expressed his concern that the proposed rail overpasses would slice the city in half. Davlin told the State Journal Register that the “Whole city would look like crap.” This is a problem faced not only by historic Springfield, the state’s capital and location of many Abraham Lincoln sites. Citizens and cities on the San Francisco peninsula are concerned that a proposed “Berlin Wall” will divide their communities if construction of an elevated high speed rail wall proceeds through their communities.
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Baseball Goes For Broke
Other than the banking business, is there an industry more dependent on government handouts, sweetheart tax breaks, and accounting gimmicks than major league baseball?
What other than a baseball depletion allowance explains the economics of a team like the New York Yankees, which is paying Alex Rodriguez $275 million over ten years while building a new $1.3 billion stadium and charging front row season tickets holders $800,000 for a box of four seats?
If the rules of baseball included free enterprise, the Yankees would be playing on a diamond in Central Park, and skyboxes (which would not be deductible business expenses) would be limited to nearby apartment buildings.
What accounts for all the growth in baseball economics — the salaries, the extortionate ticket prices, the new stadiums — is that the game varies little from some nineteenth century oligopoly trust, not unlike J.P. Morgan’s railroads or Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills.
Let’s start with the basics: Since 1922, baseball has enjoyed anti-trust exemption, which means that league owners (best understood as robber barons) cannot move teams about willy-nilly. At the same time, the law makes it nearly impossible for competitors to establish rival competing franchises.
The Yankees coughed up $1.3 billion for their new Yankee Stadium (of which local and state government are in for about $520 million) with the knowledge that neither the Royals nor the Pirates are allowed to move their home games to the Bronx or Brooklyn.
The reason state and municipal governments — not just in New York, but all over the country — put taxpayer money into stadium white elephants is because voters identify more passionately with their professional teams than they do with their local politicians. Imagine the vote in New York if the choice was between Derek Jeter and Governor David Patterson?
Just because modern baseball is fixed with more precision than the 1919 World Series was does not mean that the game (or at least a number of its teams) will not someday go bankrupt.
Anti-trust exemptions, Tammany Hall municipal bond financings, and incestuous cable franchise awards may explain why teams like the New York Mets feel that they can spend $12 million a year on pitcher Oliver Perez. But it does not mean that they will be able to cover their obligations when the economy goes O-for-August (as once happened to Darryl Strawberry).
To best understand baseball economics, think of the sport as similar to the investment banking business: a few large market firms (that have monopoly pricing power and cozy government relations) and then a lot of boutique establishments betting the franchise on some out-of-the-money option (Milton Bradley, Alfonso Soriano, and Alex Rios come to mind). The 2009 payroll for the Yankees is $201 million; for the Florida Marlins, it’s $36 million.
To close the gap between rich and poor teams, municipalities from Philadelphia ($173 million) to Seattle ($392 million) have subsidized new stadiums, on the hope that sky-boxed, sellout crowds will allow team owners, usually mayoral pals, to pay for free agents. In turn, winning teams are to do for the local economy what the stimulus money may fail to achieve, namely, provide faith in the political system and interest cover for outstanding municipal bonds.
Keep in mind that the baseball season is shorter than that for gladiolas. Many teams are out of the playoffs by July 4th, which means that the big, revenue-paying crowds must be attracted in the first three months of the season…when Kansas City fans still believe that they have a chance. Not long ago a double header between the Reds and Pirates started and ended with about seventy-five, yes that’s 75, fans in the stadium.
Is it any wonder that the players union and many team managements, the Yankees included, turned a blind eye to steroids in order to pump up their products? In banking, executives went into sub-prime, hedge funds, and pyramid schemes to cover their bonuses. In baseball, the clear and the cream explain how the owners figured they would be able to afford the likes of Manny Ramirez.
No one quite knows the precise debt figures of major league baseball, but the liability side of the balance sheet looks something like this: the league itself funds money-losing teams with a revolving line of credit, drawn against anticipated television rights. That’s like borrowing against next year’s equity in a house that has yet to be built.
As for team debts, some franchises backload free agent contracts in order to defer liabilities until a new general manager may be on the job or the team has won a wild card game. Plus many teams have huge debts on new stadiums and skyrocketing payrolls. Even the Detroit Tigers, who play in a ghost town, run up $115 million per year.
By my calculations, the Tigers would have to attract an average of about 40,000 fans per game, paying $35 a ticket, just to break even. In 2008, they averaged 25,000 fans a game, and I bet a lot of the unemployed autoworkers who attended didn’t pay $35 a ticket. Some of the debt service for the new Detroit stadium needs to be covered with casino money from an Indian reservation. (Pete Rose’s problem was that he played in casinos but did not own one.)
To be sure, the plug figures in major league baseball’s finances are the local and national television contracts, not to mention the intramural luxury tax that has rich teams helping out the poor. National television revenue amounts to about $400 million per year, much of which is shared with the teams. That’s another attraction of anti-trust exemption; it limits supply. Why share the pie with, say, a hundred owners?
Total revenue in the sport is about $6 billion, or an average of $200 million per major league team. Overall, baseball economics would work only if fans were prepared to spend $200 per game on warm beer and cold hot dogs, and renew cable television subscriptions to get games that have little meaning after July.
The model is also predicated on the assumption that corporations can write off $800,000 in season ticket subscriptions, that the Internet does not blow away TV ads, and that Mariners fans will show up in September to watch their $99 million team wallow 10 games out of first place.
If I had to bet on an MLB franchise going broke, my action would be on the Mets, who after all play in the House That Sub-prime Built, “Citi Field.”
Not only did the owners, the Wilpon family, bet the ranch with Bernie Madoff, but they also spent $850 million on the new ballpark, and $25 million (over four years) on the likes of second baseman Luis Castillo. Attendance is down about 20 percent from 2008, and that’s before the team collapsed in the standings or bankrupt ex-Met Lenny Dykstra started sleeping in his car.
Of course, baseball is no more exposed to the vagaries of the free market than is the banking business. Federally-funded banks, for example, can discount government-granted cable contracts, and pump money into the sport. Or a city like Washington can bailout another failing franchise, as it did with the Expos, and tax dollars can build a second $611 million stadium near the Potomac.
Anti-trust exempted owners can even mothball a few teams (as they tried to do to the Twins a few years back), and boost the revenue share in that manner. Think of Commissioner Bud Selig’s office as a variant on the Texas Railroad Commission.
Nevertheless, financial failure is nothing for baseball to dread. The only reason the Yankees could acquire Babe Ruth from the Red Sox in 1919 is because the Boston owner needed cash to invest in the Broadway show, “No, No, Nanette.” Maybe if they are squeezed, the Wilpons can swap Oliver Perez for some of their Madoff paper? At the very least they could get behind the sure hit, “Bye, Bye, Bernie.”
Matthew Stevenson was born in New York, but has lived in Switzerland since 1991. He is the author of, among other books, Letters of Transit: Essays on Travel, History, Politics, and Family Life Abroad
. His most recent book is An April Across America
. In addition to their availability on Amazon, they can be ordered at Odysseus Books, or located toll-free at 1-800-345-6665. He may be contacted at matthewstevenson@sunrise.ch.
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Executive Editor JOEL KOTKIN on the Victorville Daily Press regarding the High Desert
“In this week’s column, Kotkin discusses the larger philosophical debate taking place across the county over the future of ‘exurbs’ like the High Desert and communities on the outskirts of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Sacramento.”
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Contributing Editor MICHAEL LIND is quoted on the Associated Press regarding San Francisco
“‘San Francisco, in a weird way is the most conservative place in America,’ he says. ‘People went there for a particular ambiance and, even though it really is not what it was, they are desperate to hold on to it.’”
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Contributing Editor MICHAEL LIND on Later On regarding diversity in healthcare
“Now and then a moment occurs that clarifies the nature of American politics like a flash of lightning over a prairie landscape. Such a moment occurred on Sept. 9 during President Obama’s televised address to a joint session of Congress about healthcare. As the president explained that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for benefits under the plan he supported, Joe Wilson, a conservative Republican member of Congress from South Carolina, shocked the chamber and the television audience by shouting, ‘You lie!’”
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Losing Touch With the Changing Definition of “Community”
Mathew Taunton opens his review of “The Future of Community – Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated” (Note 1) with the observation that:
“Community is one of the most powerful words in the language, and perhaps because of this it is frequently misused. A profoundly emotive word, it is also a coercive one, and a key political buzzword in modern times. That community is being eroded in modern Britain is a matter of cross-party consensus, and it is also widely agreed that one of the state’s roles is to devise means of counteracting the decline of communities.”
It is refreshing to see a writer prepared to use ‘community’ and ‘coercive’ in the same sentence. Taunton reminds us that practically all urban architecture now attempts to force social solidarity into existence, and, by definition, condemns those who do not conform for daring to exercise their choice.
Unfortunately many of these attempts to coerce community into existence tend to repress or subvert the informal processes through which people interact of their own free will.
So why do so many influential people in the UK, the United States, and other countries of the New World, hold this ‘consensus’ that communities, like morality, are in decline, requiring government interventions to restore them to good health, within some reborn urban village?
In the past, communities were primarily place-based, if only because people could not travel very far or communicate over any great distance. But as civilizations have developed, this interaction between transport and communication has reshaped the prevailing structure and meaning of communities, as each reacts with each other. The printing presses of Renaissance Europe enabled the development of scientific and religious communities, as well as a host of “communities of ideas” both conservative and revolutionary.
Last century the establishment of national broadcast networks and television helped constitute national communities of listeners or viewers, which in turn reinforced the communities of “us” and “them” through the great global conflicts of that century.
The Internet has now created a whole new class of virtual communities or tribes. Many wage their tribal wars with considerable venom.
However, these internet tribes, too, simply build on the superior transportation technologies that have enabled us to physically flee to find more friendly groupings of associates, or to avoid the ‘neighbours from hell’. Of course, place remains important to communities based on activity – people continue to visit their golf course, football field, church, beach, or shopping mall. Modern transport has gifted us with ready access to them all.
Similarly, communications technology plays an important role in communities of shared interests or ideas – the blog site, the book club, talk-back radio, and the specialist channels on cable TV or YouTube.
However, rigidly place-based communities can also be coercive traps.
In the late sixties I wrote a paper at U.C Berkeley drawing on surveys that showed that “neighboring” was more intensive in mobile-home parks than in most suburbs or inner city areas, precisely because the residents felt that if they fell out with their neighbors they could always move on. Neighboring is not without risk.
Similarly, people in camping grounds felt free to share coffee, drinks and dinners around the barbecue, precisely because they know they need not meet again.
Many retirees have discovered the pleasures of the summer nomadic lifestyle spent driving from location to location in a well-appointed motor-home.
One retired couple (my American god-parents) were keen “rock-hounds” during the seventies and spent their summers driving their motor-home from one rock-rich territory to another, attending gatherings of rock-hounds along the way. They combined technological mobility, with place-based communities, and communities of common interests within the one retirement experience.
However, these contemporary communities, no matter how plentiful and rewarding, fail to meet the expectations of urban planners trapped within their general theory of architectural or spatial determinism. They remain convinced that urban form and places determine our behaviour. Yet in reality, our behaviour and preferences actually determine how and where we chose to live, work and play.
They may also be responding, in their reflexive way, to a genuine loss of sense of political community, a loss that may be more deeply felt that we think.
For the last forty or fifty years, through most of the New World jurisdictions, ‘reform’ of Local Government has meant ‘amalgamation’ on the presumption that ‘bigger is better’, probably because this coincided with the management theories of the sixties, which presumed conglomerates were the way of the future, and that all corporate mergers would benefit the shareholders and customers alike.
The track record of such local government ‘reform’ has given scant support to the theory. Forced amalgamations in particular have proved to be disastrous. And many of the voluntary ones – i.e. those driven from the bottom up – have fared little better.
These reform programs have generally been prepared to dilute or even ignore the traditional emphasis on ‘community of interest’ in favor of ‘economies of scale’ or the benefits of ‘regional integrated planning.’ In the end citizens have generally, and genuinely, lost contact with their Mayors and Councilors. They used to meet the Mayor in the street and have a chat about their concerns. Now they have to phone, leave voice messages and wait for the return call that never comes.
Political authority, now often housed in some distant place, is more remote than ever. You can’t meet it, let alone beat it.
Citizens may know their ward councilor but their ward councilors explain they are always outvoted by a majority who has no interest in any ward but their own. This is why large councils are actually less effective at delivering satisfaction than small ones. A small council is likely to be serving a single community of interest. But if one neighborhood wants to build a municipal swimming pool, all those who live more than an hour’s drive away understandably wonder why they should pay for a pool they will never use.
This bias towards larger and larger local bodies – enhanced by the rapid population growth in many peripheral areas and regional towns – has been given a massive boost in recent times by ‘Smart Growth’ planning theory. This approach necessitates large areas of regional governance so that people cannot escape from the planned densification that most independent areas would likely reject.
The Metro planners also often seek to extend their boundaries into the rural areas so as to prevent people and businesses locating where they prefer. Instead it is all determined by where the planners say people and business should go – for their own good, of course.
It may well be that when the central planners try to create “place-based communities” they are responding to a genuine problem, but have chosen the wrong tool-box to fix it. Community can not be imposed from above and large government is clearly the wrong way to nurture it.
A better approach may be to create a new system of local governance controlled by smaller, truly local councils, based on identifiable communities of interest, which are able to freely associate with other organizations if they believe it will provide services and infrastructure beyond their financial means.
We should learn to define the services we need, and then match them to the appropriate organization, rather than trying to find the one or two magic sizes that can cope with all our needs.
We no longer need to accept being re-organized from above; the internet allows even smaller units access to sophisticated information. We have a wonderful opportunity to take control of our destiny through a new world of local government in which the people themselves decide on their common communities of interest and set up novel and innovative joint-management entities where economic efficiency and common sense demand such arrangements.
Note 1: The Times Literary Supplement, July 31, Mathew Taunton’s review of a collection of essays “The Future of Community – Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated”, by Clements, Donald, Earnshaw and Williams, Editors.
Owen McShane is Director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, New Zealand.
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Traffic Congestion, Time, Money & Productivity
It is an old saying, but true as ever: “Time is money.” A company that can produce quality products in less time than its competitors is likely to be more profitable and productive. An urban area where employees travel less time to get to work is likely to be more productive than one where travel times are longer, all things being equal. Productivity is a principal aim of economic policy. Productivity means greater economic growth, greater job creation and less poverty.
Congestion Costs: This is why such serious attention is paid to the Texas Transportation Institute’s (TTI) Annual Mobility Report, which estimates the costs of traffic congestion, principally the value of lost time as well as excess fuel costs. The fundamental premise, long a principle of transportation planning and policy, holds that more time spent traveling costs money, to employers, employees and shippers.
Mobility & Productivity: Groundbreaking Research: Yet, until fairly recently, very little research was available to document the connection between travel times and the productivity of urban areas. The pioneering work has now been done by Remy Prud’homme and Chang-Woon Lee at the University of Paris. From reviewing French and Korean urban areas, they showed that productivity improves as the number of jobs that can be reached by employees in a particular period of time (such as 30 minutes) increases.
Focused US Research: US reports on mobility’s role in reducing poverty came to similar conclusions. A middle 1990s report for the Federal Transit Administration found that low income households in inner city Boston were at a particular disadvantage in obtaining jobs in the fast growing suburbs because transit service was either spotty or non-existent. Margy Waller and Mark Allen Hughes noted in a report for the Progressive Policy Institute that “In most cases, the shortest distance between a poor person and a job is along a line driven in a car”. Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll at the University of California found that access to an automobile nearly halved the difference between African American unemployment and that of non-Hispanic Whites.
New, Comprehensive US Research: But it was only last month that the Prud’homme-Chang research was broadly replicated in the United States. The Reason Foundation published “Gridlock and Growth: The Effect of Traffic Congestion on Regional Economic Performance” by David Hartgen and M. Gregory Fields, which looked at job accessibility in 8 US urban areas (Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle, ). Hartgen and Fields chose a 25 minute commute period (the approximate national average one-way work trip) to evaluate accessibility and found, generally, that each 10 percent increase in the number of jobs accessible in that period resulted in a 1 percent increase in productivity, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product of the urban area. They also found that if free-flow traffic conditions could be established, considerable improvements in urban productivity would be achieved, because employees could get to more jobs in less time. At the same time, they show that traffic congestion will worsen considerably by 2030 under present plans as adopted by metropolitan planning organizations.
Hartgen and Lee looked at five sample work destinations in each urban area, the central business district, the airport, a university, a mall and a major suburb. The results by sub region were surprising:
“Contrary to conventional planning wisdom, the research suggests that regional economies might be more dependent on access to major suburbs, malls and universities than on access to downtowns or airports. Not only are models of productivity somewhat stronger for these sites than for CBD accessibility, but access to them has a stronger effect on regional productivity.”
The research indicates that achieving free flow traffic conditions to major suburbs, universities and malls would increase gross domestic products by from 6 to 30 percent. The gain in central business districts would be between 4 and 10 percent, while airports showed the least potential for adding to urban productivity, at 2 to 8 percent. These productivity gains are far from unachievable. Hartgen and Fields find that there is more than enough transportation funding in each of the urban areas to remove severe traffic congestion by 2030. These conclusions find fault with the growing emphasis by many in Washington to force people out of cars and into transit. Transit is simply not viable for the non-downtown markets, which have the greatest potential for improving job creation and economic growth.
Hartgen and Fields also show that achieving free flow operations in the studied urban areas would generally produce more in increased tax revenues by 2030 than the costs associated with reducing it.
American Urban Areas: Superior Productivity and Mobility: American urban areas are among the most mobile in the world. When compared to international urban areas of similar size, work trip travel times in the United States tend to be less. That is one of the reasons that US metropolitan areas are the most productive in the world.
For example, the Japanese megacity of Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto has somewhat fewer people than the New York consolidated (metropolitan) area and slightly more than the Los Angeles-Riverside consolidated area. Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto has perhaps the world’s second most heavily patronized transit system (after Tokyo), which carries at least 50% as many riders on its rail lines alone as all of the transit systems in the United States. Yet, in Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto, workers spend 20 percent more time traveling between work and home each year as New Yorkers. They spend 40 percent more time commuting than workers in Los Angeles, despite its having the worst traffic congestion in the nation. The difference between Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto and New York and Los Angeles lies in the fact that in the two American metropolitan areas, most workers travel to work by car, to destinations throughout the areas (Note 1).
Naïve Proponents of Poverty: However, not everyone understands that time is money. Some members of the US Senate and House of Representatives and Washington special interests would seek to restrict highway funding, making traffic congestion even worse. They would seek to reduce the number of miles that Americans travel by car in an attempt to achieve marginal greenhouse gas emission reductions (that is before the higher greenhouse gas emissions that occur in slower, more congested traffic is factored in). Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has indicated a desire to coerce people out of their cars.
Transit: Inherently Less Productive and Expensive: One common claim is that transit will provide alternative mobility. However, transit trips tend to be twice as long as car trips and no transit vision has ever been put forward that would replicate the efficiency of the automobile. There is good reason for this, since such a transit system would cost on the order of a metropolitan area’s entire income, each year, to operate and amortize. And, transit is expensive. The recent compact cities policy lobbying paper, Moving Cooler, shows that transit is far from a cost effective means for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, costing 20 times the maximum $50 per ton guideline as established by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
None of this is to deny the inestimable value of transit in serving the nation’s largest downtown areas (such as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco). However these locations are commercial hyper-density aberrations in much larger low-density seas and are exceptional among America’s more diffuse metropolitan areas. Rather, the problem is overselling transit in markets that it cannot competitively serve. Disinvesting in highways (forcing people into transit) makes no more sense than to require the injection of blood clots into the bloodstreams of patients under the guise of improving the health and livability of patients.
It’s the Economy, Stupid: The United States has had enough recent experience with rising unemployment and falling economic performance. It hardly needs public policies that would increase travel time, reduce productivity and increase poverty, no matter how fervently and sincerely held are the misconceptions of the proponents. Hartgen and Fields have provided an invaluable work that could not have come at a better time.
Note 1: Calculated from United States Bureau of the Census American Community Survey and Japan Statistics Bureau data.
Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.
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