Yesterday’s Car Subsidies Are Still Shaping Today’s Landscape

I won’t even deny Barro’s argument that if you eliminated all transportation subsidies tomorrow, cars would probably win out.  However, I think this is all moot if you don’t consider the context of transportation and land use subsidies, which have historically favored automobiles by a large margin. There was a significant amount of post-war growth attributable to government mandates – highways, sprawl, single-use zoning, to name a few.

The important thing to remember is that because of this massive infusion of subsidies, we built our cities around the car, sprouting land uses that effectively put transit at a cruel disadvantage. This inequity persists today – clear evidence that the pace of land use changes are monumentally slower than the speed at which we implement transportation investments. As a result, it would be difficult for transit to catch up, even if we matched the real value of historical subsidies for automobiles.

I think there’s something to be said about demand here. Tract developers and highway advocates say people want single-family low-density living environments, as if there’s pure market demand for it. However, much of this demand is latent, having no basis for existence had the government not meddled in suburbanization and land use affairs as a matter of public policy.