ANTI-ROAD IDEOLOGY:USEPA & allies ignore benefits exaggerate costs

Read the USEPA in its Transp Partners webpage: “By relying on cars to get around, our roadways become congested, adding stress to our lives. Building bigger roads seems like the obvious answer, but it’s an expensive, short-term fix. Increasing capacity encourages driving, adds pollution to the air, creates congestion and puts pressure on officials to build even bigger roads at taxpayer expense. Adding lanes of traffic subtracts from our quality of life.....” (www.epa.gov/tp)

Nowhere in thousands of words generated by USEPA and its allied activists is there the slightest acknowledgement that 200 million motor vehicles, a capital investment voluntarily undertaken by Americans of some $2 trillion, provides benefits to users and society, or that investment in new roads for a changing, innnovative society and economy is ever justified. Although words like education, study, and research are used by the USEPA and STPP their thinking is constrained and shaped by an extreme anti-roads dogma. For the anti-roads faithful, research and study consists mainly of finding new stories, new data and new dramatizations to bolster anti-car/road beliefs that are held with religious conviction. Their writing consists of constant repackaging of several tenaciously asserted themes:

(1) that new highways are principally to blame for “sprawl” — an absurdly monocausal explanation for a complex process of urban development heavily influenced by housing preferences as expressed in the real estate market, by growth in the number of households, the difficulties of living and doing business in old inner areas, widespread local sentiment against having town houses and apartments as neighbors, restrictive zonings etc To the extent subsidized transp is a factor in encouraging ‘sprawl’, sure, let’s cut the subsidies (by substituting tolls for taxes for major new roads) and by making rail pay its way with fares. But the anti-roads ideology opposes roads whether tolled or not and supports all rail, however large the subsidies. (See opposition to toll roads and congestion pricing — dismissed with the adjective ‘inequitable’ — by groups supported by USEPA.)

(2) that new highways seriously worsen air quality — when in fact the air quality implications are a complex matter of offsetting tendencies, better traffic flow generally reducing emissions per vehicle-mile while in heavily congested areas extra vehicle-miles may indeed be induced by extra laneage. But failing to build new roads will not improve air quality. That will best be achieved by cracking down on high polluting vehicles and encouraging new vehicles to be low-emitters. Private autos are so dominant the means of American transp that mode shift will have negligible impact on total emissions and health. To the extent cars are unhealthy the only practical solution is to reengineer them to make them healthier.

(3) building extra road lanes is pointless because the provision of extra road capacity induces extra traffic — the argument with perhaps the greatest public resonance. Middle of the political road officials such as Republican governors Pataki (NY) and Whitman (NJ) appear to have bought this argument, but it is none the less a load of codswallop for their having done so.

Even where congestion remains about the same after road capacity is enlarged the extra traffic being carried means more people get trip value. Noone is dragooning people into making those trips. They must see value in them in excess of the monetary and frustration costs they incur, or they wouldn’t be making them. Now of course if the roads are tax-financed there will be excessive trip-making, but that’s an argument for tolls on new capacity, not for refusing to allow new capacity to be built.

Mark Hansen of Berkeley whose studies of road enhancement effects in California are constantly citied by the anti-road gang — findings derived from the circumstances of two of the country’s most heavily congested areas where he finds very high induced travel — writes “our findings do not demonstrate that adding road capacity is a bad idea... it is not obvious that induced demand detracts from the social value of road improvements.” (TRB circular 481 p14)

Demand is demand

Demand is demand is demand. Its legitimacy doesn’t depend on whether it is classified by an analyst as “induced” or not. In circumstances where an electric power system is heavily overloaded, there will be blackouts, and voltage dips that damage equipment, and customers will tend to invest less in electric powered equipment and make less demands on the system than they would if supply were plentiful. Similarly where telephone service is heavily overloaded and service is poor and there is often difficulty getting a line people will find other ways of communicating. In those circumstances provision of increased electricity capacity and increased telephone capacity will certainly unleash a latent demand for electric power or for telephone service. The extra capacity will “induce” extra demand, but only by the puritan standards of communist economic thought is that demand illegitimate.

Robert Dunphy comments in the same TRB paper (p20) that while road critics such as the USEPA/STPP say that solving the transp problem by adding new highway is like dealing with overweight by unbuckling your belt a few notches, limiting highways may be like refusing to buy new shoes for the kids because the better fitting shoes would only encourage their feet to grow. Maybe the feet (the traffic) are only going to grow anyway, and the pain and damage of not having better fitting shoes (roads) is greater than the damage of trying to stop the feet (traffic) growing?

Analysis by Kevin Heanue of induced demand from enhanced capacity versus other factors in Milwaukee WI shows the other factors are responsible for between 78% and 94% of increased traffic. Improvements to roads are associated with 6% to 22% of the extra traffic, depending on assumptions chosen. (TRB 481, p42)

Patrick DeCorla-Souza at USDOT has developed a Spreadsheet Model for Induced Traffic Estimation (SMITE.) A paper for the forthcoming TRB annual conference (“Estimating Induced Travel, Emissions and Benefits,” Paper 990216) models different elasticities of traffic induction, different costs of air emissions and the mobility benefits that the EPA crowd like to pretend don’t exist.

“For policymakers faced with the controversial issue of induced travel, the critical issue is NOT whether highway capacity additions result in induced travel but whether user mobility benefits will be worth any increases in emissions and other public, social and environmental costs to be incurred.”

Souza takes a hypothetical 8-mi freeway adds 2-lanes to it at a cost of $3m/lane-mi for $48m outlay and SMITE models the results of the enhancement on fwy conditions and a parallel arterial after high congestion before-conditions (112k v/d, induced traffic 13%) and low congestion before (80k v/d, 5% induced traffic). He discounts 20 years of user benefits through time savings of $9/person-hour. He models time savings and HC, NOx, CO emissions and assigns them high social costs based on Calif enviro standards.

His conclusion — that on a typical urban highway improvement the value of mobility benefits greatly outweighs total costs even when there are high levels of induced traffic and when social costs are boosted up by attributing high costs to air emissions:

“The results... suggest that, while the magnitude of induced travel increases with increasing levels of initial congestion, user mobility benefits also increase, due to larger reduction in congestion delays.” (Contact TRB pubs for Circ 481 aarcher@nas.edu; Patrick DeCorla-Souza 202 366 4076)

Question: Will SMITE smite USEPA/STPP’s anti-roads campaign? Probably not because they’re remarkably resistant to any evidence that casts doubt on their dogmas, but it does represent an extremely helpful objective quantification of the issues which they raise that can undercut the simplistic nostrums of environmental fanatics, and influence the rational middle ground.