There's more than one way to approach transportation reform. One is to believe that an ideal transportation policy promotes the use of modes that are environmentally sustainable and which foster livable cities, while those that perpetuate overdependence on automobiles do neither.
Then there is another camp, which approaches transportation from a micro, rather than macro, perspective. In this camp, America's transportation choices are seen as a market where providers compete across the various modes for the privilege of meeting each individual's transportation needs. A good transportation policy, in this view, is one that makes such a market function as efficiently as possible, keeping costs low for travelers and profits high enough for providers to ensure continued service without excessive government subsidy or regulation.
Here, the user-pays-user-benefits principle is sacrosanct, and fiscal self-sufficiency is paramount. It's transportation reform for the libertarian set, who are just as likely as many liberals to categorize current transportation policy as deeply flawed -- though they are just as likely to disagree about how.
That's why the Mobility Choice Coalition -- convened by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security -- hosts roundtable discussions about the issue of transportation reform as seen from the second camp. The most recent one was last Thursday. Previous roundtables, which Streetsblog has covered in the past, have covered the viability of private transit, the comparative advantages of bus vs. rail transit, and the idea of incorporating the cost of foreign oil wars into the price of highway travel.
"One of the key issues for us is pricing, really, across the board," Anne Korin, the roundtable's moderator, told Streetsblog. "Get the pricing right, and a lot of stuff will follow." When one mode is priced unnaturally low, the market isn't operating as efficiently as it could.
But pricing isn't the whole story. Congress, you may have heard, is working on a new surface transportation bill, and there's plenty of federal spending that has to happen before changes to pricing can be instituted. Korin can already see her message at work there.
"You definitely saw, in response to transportation language in both chambers, a huge emphasis on the user-pays principle," Korin said. "First the response to H.R. 7 [which used energy royalties to pay for transportation spending], and the Senate bill which dips into general funds [for everything]. Either way, we think it's very, very important to maintain the user-pays principle, and that message has gotten a good hearing."
Last Thursday's discussion began with a list of priorities for transportation policy reform, but it was clear from the outset that there are still deep divisions among cost-minded transportation thinkers. Those divisions often occur around whether gas tax revenue -- or vehicle-miles-traveled fees once they're implemented -- and tolls should be used exclusively for roads or whether they can be used to fund infrastructure for other modes as well, which some see as undermining the user-pays principle.
Former Virginia Secretary of Transportation Shirley Ybarra, now of the Reason Foundation, said, "America needs a large increase in highway investment," but opined that too much existing roadway revenue is being spent on what she called "other stuff." Rather than breaking down the funding silos for each mode, Ybarra advocated the complete separation of those silos, and the insistence that each mode be entirely user funded. "Mica was on the right track" when he tried to separate transit from the Highway Trust Fund, she said -- that is, until "transit went off the deep end."
The "other stuff" line got under the skin of Bill Lind, head of the American Conservative's Center for Public Transportation, who objected to the notion that all transit systems are alike, and even more so to the notion that they are all equally undeserving of federal funds. Lind couldn't even make it all the way through the remarks given by Ed Braddy from the anti-smart growth American Dream Coalition, only the third speaker of the day. (He stormed out in the middle of Braddy's talk.)
To Braddy's eyes, a nation where 90 percent of households own at least one automobile is no more alarming than the widespread ownership of cellular phones, laptop computers, and washing machines. "I don't see dependency," Braddy said. "I see utility and quality of life."
Rather than having highways cross-subsidize transit, Braddy, like Korin, is a proponent of Mobility Vouchers, a mode-neutral subsidy to low-income earners, giving them extra cash to spend on their choice of transit, car-sharing, van-pooling, or any other form of transportation. This would presumably eliminate some equity issues raised by hiking transit fares on underutilized lines, and the free market would take it from there -- and, sure, that extra cash could go toward the lease or purchase of an automobile, too.
Furthermore, he elaborated, transit is a messy, smelly, potentially dangerous way to get around, as evidenced by a montage of newspaper headlines describing indecent behavior on buses and subways. (That's where Lind couldn't take it anymore. "Where are the headlines about people killed in car accidents?" he bellowed on his way out. After all, almost 33,000 people died on America's roads last year. His point is well taken.)
"We at the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation absolutely and unequivocally support federal dollars, including from the Highway Trust Fund, for mass transit," Lind's colleague Glen Bottoms told me later in an email. (Perhaps illustrating Braddy's equation of cars with other useful technology, Lind possesses neither an email address nor a computer.) "The mantra that the gas tax is a user fee is merely a guise for the highway lobby to justify consuming all available transportation dollars."
Conspicuously absent from much of the discussion about transit was Korin's initial point about pricing: If one mode is indeed underpriced, what would happen to modal split if prices suddenly reflected true costs? Finally, Darnell Grisby, director of policy development and research for the American Public Transportation Association, made the point that just as there are benefits to transit that aren't quantified as such, the lack of transit carries unquantified costs.
However, instead of a "hear, hear," Grisby received push-back from the American Bus Association's Daniel Hoff, who likened taxation of road travel to cover hidden costs to taxation of McDonald's to cover the cost of widespread obesity. (Mercifully, Grisby and Korin were able to steer the discussion away from food policy.)
There was more disagreement than agreement among the market conservatives assembled at the Mobility Choice roundtable, but there was widespread agreement, if not consensus, that federal transportation money should be directed away from transit and non-motorized transportation, either by simply funneling it all back into highways or getting Washington out of transportation funding altogether. Highway construction and maintenance could be left to state-instituted taxes and tolls, and transit would exist only where profitable for the systems' private owners and operators.
If it sounds familiar, it should -- these are the kinds of proposals that were repeatedly defeated in this year's House and Senate amendment vote-a-thons. If this is the loudest alternative message to the traditional environmental/climate change/public health arguments for transportation reform, and it's truly gaining traction in Congress, as Korin suggests, it will only serve to increase the intransigence on both sides.
"Change is coming and I don't think it will be the vision that Ed Braddy or Shirley Ybarra contemptuously articulate," Glen Bottoms assured me. "Nothing is more powerful than the status quo and the forces that benefit from the status quo. They will fight tenaciously to preserve their place at the trough. Maybe this is why the debate is so sharp and, in many cases, divorced from reality -- and civility."
