No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Congestion Is Our Friend?
Few planners are as outspoken about the need for urban congestion as Dom Nozzi, a senior planner in Gainesville, Florida. In Saturday’s Gainesville Sun, he writes about all the wonderful benefits congestion can produce:
1. A disincentive for sprawl
2. A reduction in pollution
3. A reduction in average car speeds
4. A healthier urban core
5. Political pressure for more transit and bike paths
6. Infill, mixed use, and higher density residential
Of course, most of these statements are wrong, but I’ll leave the proof (which I have presented in many places before) for the readers. But Nozzi never even mentions the fact that congestion costs commuters (according to the Texas Transportation Institute) $78 billion a year — and that doesn’t even count the cost to businesses, which is probably roughly comparable. Even if some of Nozzi’s “benefits” were real (can anyone who is not a deluded planner seriously believe that making people go slower is a benefit?), it is hard to conceive that they can be as large as the cost.
Anyway, after praising congestion, Nozzi suddenly remembers that most people hate it, so he backpedals, claiming that “I do not necessarily encourage congestion” (emphasis added). Many of his policies, such as densification and diverting highway funds to transit and bike paths, do encourage congestion, though that may not “necessarily” be his intention.
The best way to deal with congestion, Nozzi admits, is congestion tolls. But he presumes
drivers will resist such tolls (even though resistance to high-
“Smart growth advocates must start looking upon congestion as a friend,” says Nozzi. “Otherwise, they unintentionally ally themselves with the sprawl lobby.” In other words, even if motorists were willing and eager to pay tolls to avoid congestion, Nozzi would not be too eager to accommodate them.
Or maybe he would, at least if he had read the economic analysis that concludes congestion
tolls will do more to stop sprawl than urban-
Then Nozzi pulls out the old canard about how “congestion is a sign of a healthy community” because it proves that people want to be there. A few decades ago, Nozzi could have argued that air pollution was a sign of a healthy community because it proved that people had jobs and were going important places in their polluting cars. Could anyone take that seriously? New technologies, not social engineering, practically eliminated our air pollution problems, and new techniques such as electronic tolling and better traffic signal coordination can reduce congestion too.
Nozzi concludes by knocking “libertarians” (the quotation marks are his) for claiming that Americans “freely choose” to drive. He believes there are “enormous government subsidies” for driving. In fact, in 2005, the subsidies to the 4.4 trillion passenger miles of driving were $17.9 billion, or less than 0.4 cents per passenger mile. By comparison, the subsidies to the 47 billion passenger miles of transit were $29.4 billion, or 62 cents per passenger mile.
Subsidies to transit have outpaced subsidies to driving for decades, yet transit
still makes up only about 1 percent of passenger travel. Somehow, I suspect that
if 0.4-
Some libertarians have another idea: telecommute. That way, people can avoid both the congestion and Nozzi’s social engineering. Not everyone has that option, but the number who do is increasing each year faster than the growth in transit ridership.
The true libertarian view is to get rid of all subsidies and let the chips fall where they may. If people choose to move to downtowns, fine. If they choose to sprawl, fine. Just make sure they pay the full cost. Planners like Nozzi aren’t interested in that; they want to make sure people make the “right” choices, even if those choices mean wasting tens of billions of dollars a year in congestion.
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Reprinted from The Antiplanner