Category: Environmental Issues

Why Building Metros is Necessary for the Green Transition Away from Cars

There’s controversy in Germany over building U- and S-Bahn extensions, in which environmentalists argue against them on the grounds that people can just take trams and the environmental benefits of urban rail are not high. For example, the Ariadne project prefers push factors (green regulations and taxes) to pull factors (building better alternatives), BUND opposes U- and S-Bahn expansion, and a report endorsed by Green politicians argued based on shoddy analysis leading to retraction that the embodied carbon emissions of tunneling exceeded any savings, which it estimated at only 714 t-CO2 per underground km built. Against this, it’s important to sanity-check car and public transport ridership to arrive at more solid figures.

To start with, virtually everyone travels by car or by public transport. There’s a notable exception for cycling, but cycling is typically done at short ranges, and the metro expansions under discussion here (all outside the Ring) are beyond that range. In Berlin, the modal split for cycling peaks in the 1-3 km range and is small past 10 km. Beyond the scale of a neighborhood or maybe a college town, cars and mass transit are substitutes for each other.

Nor does public transport expansion lead to hypermobility, in which overall trips grow longer as people commute from farther away and car use doesn’t decline or only weakly declines. If anything, the ratio of substitution for passenger-km rather than trips is that a p-km by metro substitutes for more than one p-km by cars, because metro-oriented cities can be denser and allow for shorter commute trips. Berliners average 3.3 4.6-km trips per day, or 15 km/day; Germany-wide, it’s 35.5 km/day (see table 11 of MiD). If anything, the presence of a large city core also shortens the average car trip by reducing exurb-to-exurb driving at low density.

Nor does polycentricity solve the problem. Indeed, ridership in polycentric regions is weaker than in monocentric ones. MiD has data by state and Verkehrsverbund in Germany, with modal splits by trips (all trips, not just work trips) and passenger-km, the latter measure having far less in the way of cycling and walking. From this, we have the following table:

GeographyTransit % (trips)Car % (trips)Transit % (p-km)Car % (p-km)
Berlin27244740
Brandenburg9512271
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern7521480
Saxony-Anhalt9481281
Saxony11561677
Thuringia9551679
Hamburg22294347
Bremen14333060
Schleswig-Holstein8561479
Lower Saxony8531577
Nordrhein-Westfalen10551874
Rheinland-Pfalz9571975
Saarland10651579
Hesse12521974
Baden-Württemberg9531775
Bavaria10561875
Munich (city)25293951
Frankfurt (city)24293852
Stuttgart (city)23363360
Munich (MVV)19413161
Hamburg (HVV)16332963
Hanover (Region)15422566
Rhine-Main (RMV)13492271
Rhine-Neckar (VRN)10511775
Rhine-Ruhr (VRR)12532073
Rhine-Sieg (VRS)12492270

Berlin is by all measures the most public transport-oriented and least car-oriented part of Germany. The source doesn’t explicitly break out VBB, but VBB comprises Berlin and Brandenburg, whose population ratio is 59:41, so we get a modal split by trips of 20% transit, 35% car; a similar computation for p-km is less certain since Brandenburgers, many of whom commute to Berlin, have longer trip lengths, but it’s likely Berlin and Brandenburg’s combined modal split is slightly better than those of MVV and HVV, both monocentric. Brandenburg, notably, has the highest modal split by p-km outside the city-states, owing to the Berlin commuters.

In contrast, the polycentric regions – Rhine-Neckar (Mannheim), Rhine-Ruhr (excluding Cologne), Rhine-Sieg (Cologne-Bonn), and to a large extent also Rhine-Main (Frankfurt) – all have weak modal splits. The cities themselves have healthy usage of public transport, judging by the data that’s available and by ridership on their Stadtbahn systems, but most of the Rhine-Ruhr’s population doesn’t live in Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, or Wuppertal, and this population drives.

The upshot is that rail development that strengthens city center at the expense of suburban job clusters should be considered a positive development for transitioning from cars to public transport. Job clusters outside city center do not reduce commuting, but instead make commuting more auto-oriented.

This, in turn, creates serious estimation problems for the diversion rate, which is why environmental benefit-cost analyses underrate the effect of urban rail construction. An expansion of a north-south line like U8 would not just increase the residential connectivity of Märkisches Viertel but also, on the margins, increase the commercial connectivity of Alexanderplatz and other central stations served by the line. This, in turn, should induce additional ridership on lines nowhere near Märkisches Viertel, for example, east-west lines like U5 and U2. At the neighborhood level, the construction of the line would create a lot of induced trips and not have a high diversion rate from cars. But at the city level, little examples of diversion as more work and non-work destinations cluster in Mitte would multiply, never enough for an easy comparison, and yet enough that, as we see, more people would be living and working here without driving, where otherwise they’d be driving between two Kreise elsewhere in Germany.

Taken all together, the diversion rate at the level of trips should be considered 100%: at large enough scale, every trip by public transport is a trip not done by car, perhaps in the city, perhaps elsewhere in the country. Every p-km by public transport is multiple p-km not done by car, since dense cities allow for shorter trips without the traffic congestion problems caused by trying to fit high density and also a high modal split for driving.

With that in mind, a calculation of a first-order diversion rate is in order. A daily trip by rail is a daily trip not done by car. The average trip length in Germany by all modes is 12 km, but this is weighed down by short walking and biking trips; the average daily driving rate per car is 26 km (see table 21 of MiD) when the car is in use, and is 10,000 km/year per car. If we take 10,000 v-km to be the diversion rate per 3 public transport trips, we get that, at the emissions intensity of 2017, a daily public transport trip represents an annual emissions reduction of 0.43 t-CO2. The Märkisches Viertel extension of U8, estimated to get 25,000 trips/day, would reduce Germany-wide emissions by 10,000 t/year, which is nearly an order of magnitude more than the carbon critique of Berlin U-Bahn expansion got. At the current 670€/t cost used in German benefit-cost analyses this is around a 2% rate of return on cost purely from the carbon savings, never mind anything else – and usually green policy uses a low discount rate due to the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions, 1.4% in the Stern review.

There’s no Such Thing as Overtourism

A post by Michael Sweeney on Bluesky asking which cities have overtourism got me thinking about the concept. People in the thread named tourist hotspots like Venice or New Orleans or Las Vegas; the normally excellent Max Dubler said, “Venice is certainly too far gone (it’s basically a theme park these days).” In truth, people are thinking about the concept exactly backward. The biggest global tourist draws are also cities with plenty of other economic activity, like London and Paris. If a region has only tourism then it often has social problems associated with being too reliant on one low-wage industry, but then the comparison should be to regions that also don’t have tourism at all, and then it looks less bad.

Which places have the most tourism?

The most consistent on tourism count international travelers. Euromonitor periodically publishes rankings; the latest has Bangkok at #1 in the world, with 30 million arrivals in 2025. The rest of the top 10 are Hong Kong, London, Macau, Istanbul, Dubai, Mecca, Antalya, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur. Of the top 10, seven are large cities in their own right, one is a religious pilgrimage site, and only two have a tourism-dominant economy (Macau, Antalya).

In general, those dominant cities also outshine smaller places within the same country. France is #1 globally, with 102 million international arrivals; Ile-de-France is about even with its share of the national population. But then the UK only has 42 million, of which 23 million are to London. Antalya essentially splits Turkey’s tourism visits with Istanbul: Turkey has 61 million visits, with Istanbul taking 20 million of those and Antalya 19 million. Domestic tourism is harder to measure but follows the same pattern, with very large volumes to major cities like New York (not in the global top 10 by international arrivals because crossing a European border is counted but not crossing a US state line). San Francisco long had tourism as its largest industry, before tech overtook it this century.

Going down the list of cities by size, we start seeing ones like Barcelona, mentioned by Max in the same thread. But Barcelona, too, is not a purely tourist region, but also an industrial hub and one of the larger metropolitan areas in Europe; Catalonia has a partnership with Lombardy, Rhône-Alpes, and Baden-Württemberg, Four Motors for Europe, as these regions have extensive car manufacturing. Its industry is less famous than London and Paris’s in-your-face capital city wealth and (like all heavy manufacturing) does not agglomerate in city center, so tourists who visit Barcelona are less likely to see it than tourists who visit cities dominated by professional services, but it’s there and overall Catalonia remains an economic co-capital of Spain with the Community of Madrid.

It’s not a coincidence that tourism trips to cities usually involve cities with large non-tourist economies. The high-end shopping, the museums, the cultural attractions, and the famous squares of London, Paris, and New York were all built by local civil society, with the wealth that those cities generated from their broad economies, the first two due to their roles as dominant capitals, the last due to its industrial and professional services wealth. Going a few rungs down the wealth rankings, even countercultural centers are first built for locals, before tourists hear about them; Berghain and Kitkat exist because Berlin has had a large exhibitionist counterculture.

And in no case is there any real displacement. Places that develop tourism because their internal institutions are successful with foreigners – like the cultural attractions in every large city, or the historic and modern vistas, or the shopping – are still large cities with internal economies. Berghain and Kitkat are swarming with tourists, but beyond local disdain that something has become cringe, this isn’t displacing Berliners, who have plenty of clubs to go to with equally dodgy consent practices. At higher levels of prestige, museums are hardly displacing locals – New Yorkers go to the Met for regular outings if they want, and the place is crowded but not so crowded that city residents can’t get in.

What about places with only tourism?

There is still the issue of the truly tourism-dominated economies, the ones that aren’t just large cities that became famous among tourists. Antalya is the biggest one, globally; others are Orlando, Las Vegas, Hawaii, much of the Caribbean, Cancún, Phuket, various Greek islands, and Alicante. Venice and Nice are both very touristy, and can be put into this category as well, but caution is advised as both have industrial economies in their metropolitan areas away from the visited historic or coastal cores.

In some cases, this represents a transition from another economic activity. Venice was a shipbuilding and trading city that just never participated in the modern Industrial Revolution; people visit the Renaissance core. Phuket produced tin and rubber before it became a tourist economy. In other cases, the place owes its entire economic existence to tourism, like the Riviera, Las Vegas, or Florida, with various attempts to diversify not always succeeding.

Usually complaints about overtourism boil down to finding such places tacky. But economically, the locals aren’t necessarily hurting. Phuket had the highest human development index in Thailand earlier this century (it no longer does, which I think is corona-related), and is still one of the wealthiest provinces per capita. Florida is not the highest-opportunity part of the US, but other parts of the South without the same volume of tourism are worse.

Michael compares this situation with resource curse, the theory that natural resource wealth is negative for overall development. But the usual indicator for the resource curse, natural resources as a percentage of GDP, bakes in not just resource abundance but also poverty of the rest of the economy. After all, the US has plenty of resource wealth, which let it develop with lower land and energy prices and attract immigrants until it became a large industrial and tech economy, not really dependent on its farmland or oil wealth. It just isn’t seen as a high share of GDP because the rest of the economy has caught up. It’s the same with tourism: the regions that look bad because they’re dominated by tourism don’t have an overtourism problem but a problem with not enough economy in general.

Transit-Oriented Development and Rail Capacity

Hayden Clarkin, inspired by the ongoing YIMBYTown conference in New Haven, asks me about rail capacity on transit-oriented development, in a way that reminds me of Donald Shoup’s critique of trip generation tables from the 2000s, before he became an urbanist superstar. The prompt was,

Is it possible to measure or estimate the train capacity of a transit line? Ie: How do I find the capacity of the New Haven line based on daily train trips, etc? Trying to see how much housing can be built on existing rail lines without the need for adding more trains

To be clear, Hayden was not talking about the capacity of the line but about that of trains. So adding peak service beyond what exists and is programmed (with projects like Penn Station Access) is not part of the prompt. The answer is that,

  1. There isn’t really a single number (this is a trip generation question).
  2. Moreover, under the assumption of status quo service on commuter rail, development near stations would not be transit-oriented.

Trip generation refers to the formula connecting the expected car trips generated by new development. It, and its sibling parking generation, is used in transportation planning and zoning throughout the United States, to limit development based on what existing and planned highway capacity can carry. Shoup’s paper explains how the trip and parking generation formulas are fictional, fitting a linear curve between the size of new development and the induced number of car trips and parked cars out of extremely low correlations, sometimes with an R^2 of less than 0.1, in one case with a negative correlation between trip generation and development size.

I encourage urbanists and transportation advocates and analysts to read Shoup’s original paper. It’s this insight that led him to examine parking requirements in zoning codes more carefully, leading to his book The High Cost of Free Parking and then many years of advocacy for looser parking requirements.

I bring all of this up because Hayden is essentially asking a trip generation question but on trains, and the answer there cannot be any more definitive than for cars. It’s not really possible to control what proportion of residents of new housing in a suburb near a New York commuter rail stop will be taking the train. Under current commuter rail service, we should expect the overwhelming majority of new residents who work in Manhattan to take the train, and the overwhelming majority of new residents who work anywhere else to drive (essentially the only exception is short trips on commuter rail, for example people taking the train from suburbs past Stamford to Stamford; those are free from the point of view of train capacity). This is comparable mode choice to that in the trip and parking generation tables, driven by an assumption of no alternative to driving, which is correct in nearly all of the United States. However, figuring out the proportion of new residents who would be commuting to Manhattan and thus taking the train is a hard exercise, for all of the following reasons:

  • The great majority of suburbanites do not work in the city. For example, in the Western Connecticut and Greater Bridgeport Planning Regions, more or less coterminous with Fairfield County, 59.5% of residents work within one of these two regions, and only 7.4% work in Manhattan as of 2022 (and far fewer work in the Outer Boroughs – the highest number, in Queens, is 0.7%). This means that every new housing unit in the suburbs, even if it is guaranteed the occupant works in Manhattan, generates demand for more destinations within the suburb, such as retail and schools.
  • The decision of a city commuter to move to the suburbs is not driven by high city housing prices. The suburbs of New York are collectively more expensive to live in than the city, and usually the ones with good commuter rail service are more expensive than other suburbs. Rather, the decision is driven by preference for the suburbs. This means that it’s hard to control where the occupant of new suburban housing will work purely through TOD design characteristics such as proximity to the station, streets with sidewalks, or multifamily housing.
  • Among public transportation users, what time of day they go to work isn’t controllable. Most likely they’d commute at rush hour, because commuter rail is marginally usable off-peak, but it’s not guaranteed, and just figuring the proportion of new users who’d be working in Manhattan at rush hour is another complication.

All of the above factors also conspire to ensure that, under the status quo commuter rail service assumption, TOD in the suburbs is impossible except perhaps ones adjacent to the city. In a suburb like Westport, everyone is rich enough to afford one car per adult, and adding more housing near the station won’t lower prices by enough to change that. The quality of service for any trip other than a rush hour trip to Manhattan ranges from low to unusable, and so the new residents would be driving everywhere except their Manhattan job, even if they got housing in a multifamily building within walking distance of the train station.

This is a frustrating answer, so perhaps it’s better to ask what could be modified to ensure that TOD in the suburbs of New York became possible. For this, I believe two changes are required:

  • Improvements in commuter rail scheduling to appeal to the growing majority of off-peak commuters as well as to non-commute trips. I’ve written about this repeatedly as part of ETA but also the high-speed rail project for the Transit Costs Project.
  • Town center development near the train station to colocate local service functions there, including retail, a doctor’s office and similar services, a library, and a school, with the residential TOD located behind these functions.

The point of commercial and local service TOD is to concentrate destinations near the train station. This permits trip chaining by transit, where today it is only viable by car in those suburbs. This also encourages running more connecting bus service to the train station, initially on the strength of low-income retail workers who can’t afford a car, but then as bus-rail connections improve also for bus-rail commuters. The average income of a bus rider would remain well below that of a driver, but better service with timed connections to the train would mean the ridership would comprise a broader section of the working class rather than just the poor. Similarly, people who don’t drive on ideological or personal disability grounds could live in a certain degree of comfort in the residential TOD and walk, and this would improve service quality so that others who can drive but sometimes choose not to could live a similar lifestyle.

But even in this scenario of stronger TOD, it’s not really possible to control train capacity through zoning. We should expect this scenario to lead to much higher ridership without straining capacity, since capacity is determined by the peak and the above outline leads to a community with much higher off-peak rail usage for work and non-work trips, with a much lower share of its ridership occurring at rush hour (New York commuter rail is 67-69%, the SNCF part of the RER and Transilien are about 46%, due to frequency and TOD quality). But we still have no good way of controlling the modal choice, which is driven by personal decisions depending on local conditions of the suburb, and by office growth in the city versus in the suburbs.

Meme Weeding: Embodied Carbon

The greenhouse gases emitted by the production of concrete, called embodied carbon, are occasionally used as a green-NIMBY argument against building new things. A Berlin Green spokesperson coauthored a study opposing U-Bahn construction on the grounds that the concrete used in construction would raise emissions. More recently, I’ve seen American opponents of transit-oriented development in Manhattan, of all places, talk about the high embodied carbon of new high-rise buildings. Katja Diehl calls for a moratorium on new buildings on anti-concrete grounds, and a petition for the EU to shift regulations to be against new buildings and in favor of reuse on embodied carbon grounds got written up favorably by Kate Wagner in the Nation. Against all of this, I’ve found some numbers on the actual emissions involved in concrete production for new buildings, and they are so low as to be insignificant, 1.5 orders of magnitude less than transportation emissions. A decarbonization strategy should largely ignore embodied carbon concerns and embrace pro-growth sentiments: big buildings, big subway systems, big cities.

What is embodied carbon?

Embodied (sometimes called embedded) carbon is the carbon content emitted by the production of materials. The production of concrete emits greenhouses gases, mainly through two mechanisms: the chemical process used to produce cement emits CO2 by itself, and the energy used for production adds to the emissions of the electric grid.

What are the embodied carbon emissions of new buildings?

The embodied carbon content of concrete depends heavily on the local electricity grid as well as on the required strength of the material, with stronger requirements leading to higher emissions. The Climate Group commissioned a report on this in the British context, finding a wide range, but the average is around 250 kg of CO2-equivalent per m^3 of concrete, the 75th percentile is about 300, and the upper bound is 450. This is a cradle-to-gate figure, taking into account the existing conditions of the carbon intensivity of where concrete is produced and of the logistics system for getting it to the construction site. This is already with some reductions from a previous baseline (EC100; the UK average is around EC60), and further reductions are possible, through decarbonizing the logistics and production; the goal of the report is not to bury the concept of embodied carbon as I do but to propose ways to reduce construction industry emissions.

The question is now how to convert cubic meters of concrete into square meters of built-up area. I have not seen European figures for this, but I did find a 2012 report by the Building and Construction Authority. In Singapore, the sustainability index used is the concrete usage index (CUI), measured in meters (cubic meters per square meter). The example projects given in the study, all around 15 years old, have a CUI of 0.4-0.5 m, and it was pointed out to me on social media that in Toronto the average is 0.55 m.

250 kg/m^3 times 0.4 m equals 0.1 t-CO2 per m^2 of built-up area. A 100 m^2 apartment thus has an embodied carbon content of around 10 t-CO2. This is relative to a baseline in which there is already some concern for reducing construction emissions, both the CUI and the carbon content of concrete per m^3, but this is largely without techniques like mass timber or infra-lightweight concrete (ILC). In Singapore the techniques highlighted in the BCA report are fully compatible with the city’s high-rise character, and the example building with gold but not platinum certification has 25 stories.

Should we worry about construction emissions?

No.

An aggressively YIMBY construction schedule, say with 10 dwellings built annually per 1,000 people, say averaging 100 m^2, emits around 0.1 t/capita annually: 0.1 t/m^2 * 100 m^2/unit * 0.01 unit/capita. All figures have ranges (and if anything, 100 is high for the places that build this much urban infill housing), but factor-of-1.5 ranges don’t erase an order of magnitude analysis. The emissions produced by construction, even if it were raised to some of the highest per capita rates found in the developed world – in fact higher rates than any national average I know of – would be about two orders of magnitude lower than present-day first-world emissions. They’d be 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than transportation emissions; in Germany, transport is 22% of national emissions and rising, as all other sources are in decline whereas transport is flat.

There’s a lot of confusion about this because some studies talk about buildings in general providing a high share of emissions. The Bloomberg-era PlaNYC spoke of buildings as the top source of emissions in New York, and likewise the Nation cites WeForum saying buildings are 37% of global emissions, citing a UN report that includes buildings’ operating emissions (its topline figure is 10 Gt in operating emissions, which is 27% of global emissions in 2022). But the construction emissions are insignificantly low. This means that aggressive replacement of older buildings by newer, more energy-efficient ones is an unmixed blessing, exactly the opposite of the conclusion of the green movement.

Instead of worrying about a source of emissions measured per capita in the tens of kilograms per year rather than in the tons, environmental advocates need to prioritize the most important source of greenhouse gases. The largest in developed countries is transportation, with electricity production usually coming second, always falling over the years while transport remains flat. In cold countries, heating is a significant source of emissions as well, to be reduced through building large, energy-efficient apartment buildings and through heat pump installation.

Regulations on new construction’s embodied carbon are likely a net negative for the environment. The most significant social policy concerning housing as far as environmental impact is concerned is to encourage people to live in urban apartment buildings near train stations. Any regulation that makes this harder – for example, making demolitions of small buildings to make room for big ones harder, or demanding that new buildings meet embodied carbon standards – makes this goal harder. This can be understandable occasionally if the goal of the regulation is not environmental, for example labor regulations for construction workers. It is not understandable if the goal is environmental, as the concern over embodied carbon is. People are entitled to their opinion that small is beautiful as a matter of aesthetic judgment, but they are not entitled to alternative facts that small is environmentally friendly.

Large Cars are a Positional Good

Americans have, over the last generation, gotten ever larger cars, to the point that the market is dominated by crossovers, pickup trucks, and SUVs and barely has sedans. Europe is not far behind, with the sedan market having collapsed and half of new sales comprising SUVs. Considerable resources are spent on these larger cars, which are more expensive to purchase, maintain, and refuel. The benefits at this point, however, are rather positional. The benefit of larger cars at this point is not about the comfort or performance of the car, but about being larger than other road users. Streets for All’s Michael Schneider described it as an arms race; this arms race that wastes resources and produces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, without benefits even to individuals writ large, precisely the kind of problem that government regulation can solve.

The benefits of larger cars

The usual benefit drivers cite for why they want a larger car is comfort. The increase in car size from (say) the Fiat 500 or the Beetle or the 1970s Civic to modern midsize cars like the Accord and Camry has led to obvious improvements in comfort: four doors rather than two, ample front and rear passenger legroom, more trunk space.

And beyond this point, the relationship between car size and comfort saturates. Luxury sedans are still larger than midsize ones, but not by much; where the 500 had a curb weight of about 500 kg, the modern Accord is 1.4 t and the Camry is 1.6 t, barely less than a C-Class at 1.7 t and not much less than a 2.1 t 7 Series. A family car does not need to be larger than this, and when I talk to people about their vehicle purchases, at least the ones who tell me they’re getting SUVs do not cite comfort, not in the 2010s-20s.

The main selling point of luxury cars is performance. It’s this high-performance segment that Tesla competes with – electric cars have better performance specs, and where the older automakers tried to base their electric car offerings on preexisting platforms (like the Leaf, based on the Tiida), Tesla instead started by building high-performance luxury cars and expanded from there. But here there is no benefit to size – the Model 3 is around 1.7 t curb weight, and that includes batteries, which together weigh nearly half a ton.

Larger cars can also haul more goods, but the SUVs and pickups are expressly designed not to do that. The F-150’s bed has decreased with every new generation of the car; the Kei truck, specialized to have a large bed relative to the rest of the car, looks so weird to Americans that Massachusetts at one point banned it for being unsafe, while Americans on social media mocked the users as trying to prove an environmental point. The minivan, specialized to carry seven to eight passengers, has been unfashionable for at least a generation, losing out to the similarly large but lower-capacity SUV.

Instead, what I do hear from people telling me why they want a big car is purely positional: “I get to see over the other cars,” or alternatively “I can’t be the shortest car on the road because then I can’t see anything.” People are also recorded modifying their cars to be taller for the same reasons. The visibility in question does not improve if all cars get bigger; only the relative size matters. In the case of car accidents, this is even worse: in a collision between two cars the larger one is safer for the occupants, but making all the cars larger doesn’t improve traffic safety, and makes it much worse for pedestrians, and there’s some evidence of risk compensation by drivers of larger cars increasing the overall number of crashes.

The discourse on social benefits tends to exclude individual ones; thus, it’s easy to say that something that provides tangible individual benefits (such as larger dwellings) does not provide social ones. But this is something different. A purely private good does not provide positive externalities or improve the usual indicators that are usually the realm of public policy, like public health, but it improves the living standards of the owner, without negative externalities. But here, the benefit of the SUV or pickup truck to the user is purely the arms race on the road; the improvement in the quality of life of the owner is entirely about externalizing a fixed or even rising risk of car crashes to other road users. There isn’t even a social benefit here in the sense of the sum total of private individual benefits.

The costs of larger cars

While larger cars do not improve societal well-being on average, they have high individual and social costs.

The social costs are easier to explain: those cars emit much more pollution and greenhouse gases. The Camry has a fuel economy of maybe 37 miles per gallon (6.35 l/100 km) in the US; the F-150 gets less than half that, around 17.5 mpg (13.4 l/100 km). The fuel consumption ratio, 2.1, is somehow larger than the mass ratio – the F-150 doesn’t weigh 3.4 t but rather not much more than 2 t depending on model. Air pollution emissions are, for modern cars with modern petrol engines, proportional to greenhouse gas emissions; a car with twice the fuel consumption is going to also emit twice the particulate matter.

Then there is the danger of crashes. The United States has seen an increase in traffic fatalities lately, especially for pedestrians. The pedestrian fatality rate, in turn, comes from the form of pickups and larger SUVs: they have larger hoods, which hit pedestrians in the chest or (for children) the head rather than in the legs, and which also reduce visibility. Here it’s not an issue of mass but one of hood shape, but these come from the same fundemantal issue of an arms race to be larger and taller than the other cars, to the exclusion of spending on personal comfort.

Those social costs are not the tradeoff of some individual benefit. There is a benefit to the driver of the larger car, but there is no benefit to the driver of the average car on a road with larger cars. Instead, the driver of said average car incurs significant individual costs, coming from the need to buy, maintain, and refuel a larger machine. The low fuel economy costs the drivers money; most of the costs are external, but not all. The purchase price of a larger car is larger, because it is a larger piece of machinery, requiring more workers and more capital to put together; Edmunds’ price range for the F-150 is 50-100% higher than that for the Accord or Camry. Consumers routinely spend more money for better products, but here the product is not better except positionally.

The way forward

Government regulations to curb the arms race can directly limit or tax the size of cars, or instead go after their negative externalities. The latter should be preferred; in particular, a tax on car size would create a situation in which people can pay for a road that is safer for them and more dangerous for others, which is likely to lead to both much more aggressive driving by the largest cars on the road and to populist demands for large cars for everyone.

Specific taxes on large cars may still be appropriate in specific circumstances, like parking; Paris charges SUVs more for parking, justified by the fact that these vehicles don’t fit in the usual street parking spots, which are designed for the typical European car and not for the largest ones.

But outside the issue of parking, it’s better to be tighter about regulations and taxes on pollution, and about accidents. In the United States, it’s necessary to get rid of the system in which cars are perennially underinsured, with most states requiring liability coverage of $50,000 (Cid’s car accident, which was medium-term disabling but not fatal, incurred around $1 million in bills, and the insurance value of human life in the United States is $7.5 million). On both sides of the Atlantic, it’s necessary to tax or regulate pollution more seriously; the EU is ramping up fines on automakers that produce excessively polluting vehicles, but Robert Habeck, who is rather rigid on issues like nuclear power and the Autobahn speed limit, wants to suspend those fines since German automakers lag in electric cars.

On the matter of safety, it’s best to require cars to meet high standards of visibility and pedestrian safety in crashes, measured for example by survival rates at typical city speeds like 30 and 50 km/h. A car that fails these standards should not be on the road, just as cars are tested for occupant safety. If it means that the high, deep hood characteristic of the pickup truck no longer meets regulations, then fine; safety regulators should not compromise just because some antisocial drivers are acculturated to playing Carmageddon on real roads.

The key here is that regulations on emissions and personal injury liability suppress investment in larger cars, and that is good. There are other forms of capital investment in the economy competing for funding, which are not purely positional, for example housing, where German investment has been lagging due to high interest rates. Externalities are a real market failure and sometimes they get to the point that the product is, at scale, a net negative for society.

Quick Note: High-Speed Rail and Decarbonization

I keep seeing European advocates for decarbonizing transportation downplay the importance of big infrastructure, especially high-speed rail. To that end, I’d like to proffer one argument for why high-speed rail decarbonizes transportation even when it induces new trips. Namely: induced leisure trips come at the expense of higher-carbon travel to other destinations. In the 2010s discussion on High Speed 2, for example, induced trips were counted as raising greenhouse gas emissions (while having economic benefits elsewhere), and with this understanding I think that that is wrong. This becomes especially important with the growing focus on flight shaming in Europe. A 1,000 km high-speed rail link doesn’t just compete with flying on the same corridor, but also with flying to a different destination, which may be much farther away, and thus its effect on decarbonizing transport is much larger than a model of corridor-scale competition with cars and planes predicts.

Aviation emissions

A common argument for high-speed rail in the 2000s was that it would displace on-corridor flights, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the American version, this argument awkwardly coexisted with a separate argument for high-speed rail, namely that it would decongest airports and allow more flight slots to faraway destinations. In the 2010s and in this decade, this contradictory thinking fell away – the United States hasn’t built anything, China builds for non-environmentalist reasons, Europe gave up on cross-border rail construction and its activists became more interested in trams-and-bikes urbanism. This is also reflected in research: for all of the hype about high-speed rail as a substitute for aviation, researchers like Giulio Mattioli point out that aviation emissions are dominated by long-distance flights, with <500 km flights comprising only 5% of aviation fuel burn and >4,000 km ones comprising 39%. Activist response to policies like France’s ban on flights competing with <2.5 hour TGVs has been to mock it as the gimmick that it is.

For this and other reasons, on-corridor competition with air travel is no longer considered an important issue. This is now being taken in the direction of arguing against 300 km/h lines; the thinking is that high speed is only really needed to compete with flights, whereas competing with cars requires something else. But that argument misses the importance of off-corridor competition. Passengers don’t just choose what mode to take on a fixed corridor; they also choose where to travel, and transport options matter to that choice.

The limits of ridership models

Ridership models tend to be local. SNCF uses a gravity model, in which the ridership between a pair of cities with populations P_A, P_B, of distance d, is said to be proportional to about P_a^{0.8}P_b^{0.8}/d^2. I’ve used the same in my modeling, which predicts Tokyo-to-province ridership rather well but then severely underpredicts Taiwanese ridership.

The issue is that the model is local: if I live in Berlin and want to go to Munich, the model looks only at what’s between Berlin and Munich, and doesn’t consider that I can go to other cities instead if they’re more convenient to get to. One consequence of this is that the model probably overpredicts ridership in larger milieus than in smaller ones for this reason (the Tokyo resident can go to Osaka but also to Tohoku, etc.). But an equal consequence is that off-corridor competition is global.

The limits of leisure travel

Leisure travel is discretionary, and limited by vacation time. Building new high-speed lines does not mean that the country is offering workers more vacation days. The upshot is that every new line competes off-corridor with other lines, but also with other modes. A tightly integrated national high-speed rail system offers domestic tourism by rail, competing not just with flying on longer corridors like Berlin-Cologne, where the trains take four hours and are unreliable, but also with flying to places that the train doesn’t get to.

This has implications to a Europe-wide system as well. Right now, flights from Northern Europe to Southern Europe are on corridors where rail travel is only viable if you are an environmental martyr, really like 14-hour train trips, or ideally both. High-speed rail would by itself not compete on most of these corridors – those Spanish coastal cities are too far from Northern Europe for a mode other than flying, for one. But it would offer reasonable service to other places in Southern Europe with warm climate. Speeding up the Paris-Nice TGV means Parisians would choose to travel to Nice more and to islands less. Building high-speed rail approaches connecting to the base tunnels across the Alps means Germans, especially Southern Germans, could just go to large Italian cities instead of flying to islands or to Turkey. Even business travel may be affected, through replacement of flights to other continents.

Militarized and Other New Capital Cities

The news of the ongoing construction of Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital in Borneo to replace Jakarta, got me thinking about other moves by various countries to create new capitals from scratch, to avoid having to deal with the urbanity of the existing capital. On this issue, Nusantara joins Brasilia, Islamabad, (at the subnational level) Chandigarh, and, most ominously, Naypyidaw and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital (NAC). The last two, unlike Nusantara, are built for explicitly military purposes, with the military considering the people to be its main adversary rather than any external enemy. Such capitals always waste money that could be spent on improving literally anything else – health, education, transportation, water, electricity, business climate, anti-poverty grants. In the less militarized cases, like Brasilia, these are just waste; in the more militarized cases, these showcase that the state is run by parasites.

Non-militarized cases

The move to Nusantara is being justified on the grounds that Jakarta is sinking. In truth, it’s better to view this as a continuation of the Transmigrasi program that the state has engaged in for decades. The zeitgeist was one of concerns about overpopulation leading to either forced sterilization of the poor or a program of settlement by the core population in peripheral regions; in Indonesia, this took the form of encouraging Javans to settle elsewhere in the country, where in practice they formed an overclass and sidelined the preexisting population. Nusantara, in a mostly undeveloped part of Borneo, needs to be viewed within this program, rather than as a tragic response to climate change.

Brasilia, similarly, was built on developmentalist grounds: the Brazilian elite wanted to develop the interior of the country, viewing the rainforest and savanna as low-value land to be mined and farmed. As this process predates the military dictatorship (1964-85; Brasilia was founded 1960), this is not really a matter of militarization. Rather, it’s better viewed as developmental failure – the resources invested in the new city could have gone to more productive uses, and the value of that land for farming and mining turned out not to be much.

The environmental impacts of the program of developing the interior were wholly negative. In Brazil, half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions are land use changes and another quarter are from the agriculture sector, leading Brazil to emit 10.7 t/capita in greenhouse gases. In Germany, the figure is 8.1 t/capita, with a large industrial sector and an infamously still substantial coal sector, and on these lower emissions, Germany produces close to four times Brazil’s GDP per capita. The environmental impact of Nusantara is likely to be the same in direction as Brazil’s program, and to the extent it’s likely to be smaller in magnitude, it’s because it’s a smaller endeavor than Brazil’s entire program of developing the interior, in which Brasilia was just one component.

Militarized cases

The worst are not Brasilia, or likely Nusantara, but rather Naypyidaw and the NAC. I’ve been asked to provide some resources on social media, going over what’s involved in both projects.

Naypyidaw

The military junta that ran Myanmar between 1962 and 2011 (with significant tightening in 1988) and has run it since 2021, and exercised significant power between 2011 and 2011, built the new capital, officially since 2005, unofficially since a few years earlier, at a remote location 320 kilometers from Yangon and 240 from Mandalay. After the 1988 protests and the crackdown establishing the military government that 1990s-2000s human rights advocates knew and hated, the regime made changes to Yangon to suppress future protests, evicting 500,000 people from city center in the process. Where normally such efforts mostly target poor people in order to create the illusion of a poverty-free city center and facilitate urban renewal, in Yangon the evictions targeted the middle class, which was sympathetic to the protest movement and had communities that had sheltered protesters. But even the new Yangon was not good enough for the generals, and so they shifted to Naypyidaw.

Part of the reason was that Yangon was too multiethnic, in a part of the country that was majority-Mon until the 20th century, while Naypyidaw could be more comfortably Bamar. But the main reason was security needs. The adversary in this case is not any foreign government – a city built in 2005 by a government that might worry about American-led regime change would look at what was going on in Iraq and opt to maintain its capital in a large, dense central city to facilitate insurgency and make it easy to hide among the civilian population. Naypyidaw instead does the exact opposite – it’s easy for a superior military force to take. Rather, its threat model is a popular uprising, and thus the modernist planning with separation of uses exists to prevent the broad public from being able to stage an insurgency. There is extensive regime propaganda in the city, such as national museums telling uncritical histories, but no major religious sites, since those might shelter protesters, as happened in 1988.

The urbanism of Naypyidaw is, essentially, a giant military camp. It is designed with strict separation of uses and large roads between different complexes for movement between them; people are not expected to walk between places. The Guardian calls it a post-apocalyptic suburbia, but I don’t think that’s quite right. In an auto-oriented American city, there’s nowhere to walk, but everyone owns a car and the development forms make it convenient to drive to one’s work and regular non-work destinations. Dubai, criticized vociferously among urbanists for its tackiness and auto-oriented character, is a place where one can drive or be driven to shopping malls and towers within a close distance. Naypyidaw doesn’t have any of this and doesn’t seem to even try; it’s a collection of sites, designed for no need but that of control by the military of a population that does not want to be controlled by it. It’s a monument not to modernist urbanism, though it tries to affect that, but rather to destruction of value by an unwanted government.

New Administrative Capital

The situation in Egypt, to be clear, is a lot less brutal than in Burma. At the same time, Egypt is several times richer, which creates more value that can be extracted and given over to cronies. This can be seen in the construction of the NAC, to replace Cairo.

The immediate history of the NAC is that in 2011, Egypt famously had the Arab Spring revolution overthrowing Hosni Mubarak; in the subsequent election, the only preexisting organized political force, the Muslim Brotherhood, won the election, leading Mohamed Morsi to take office as president starting in 2012. The election was free and the state of civil liberties improved, but the Muslim Brotherhood was making moves to consolidate power, leading to fears among human rights and democracy protesters of new authoritarianism, which led to a protest movement in 2013 called Tamarod, demanding new elections; later in the same year, the military reacted to the protests by launching a coup, removing Morsi from power and restoring the military elements of the prior regime, including a pardon of Mubarak, who was on trial for corruption. Eventually, the chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, won a rigged presidential election in 2014, and has been president ever since. Much of the focus of the protest movements was street protests in Cairo, where Tahrir Square became a global metonym for democracy protests (for example, in Israel, where people basically never draw any positive inspiration from Arab political trends). This created a need among Sisi and his inner circle for a new capital in the desert, built to forestall any future Tahrir.

The capital could not even be named New Cairo, because there’s already a New Cairo, an eastern suburb of Cairo built expressly in order to decentralize the capital; Cairo is a huge, dense city. For a while, it was mocked as New New Cairo, for its location even farther east of New Cairo; by now, it has the formal name New Administrative Capital, with construction having begun in 2016.

The NAC is designed around digital surveillance of the population, and showcasing that Egypt can develop the desert, and maybe decongesting Cairo. It has pretenses of being the next Dubai, but where Dubai invites global starchitects to buy prestige, the NAC is instead giving contracts to domestic elites (as was also the case for Naypyidaw); the military directly owns 51% of the agency developing the NAC and the state ministry of housing only 49%, and the contracts are designed to enrich people who are politically connected to the government.

The violence levels involved are, again, much lower than in Burma. But precisely because Egypt’s economy is solidly middle-income, it’s frustrating to see vast sums wasted on a military prestige project. Cairo’s congestion and overcrowding have a well-known solution, in the form of building a rapid transit network to facilitate non-car commutes, and connect not just the existing built-up area to the urban core but also to-be-built areas adjacent to it. It’s a metro area of 22 million people, about the same size as New York, but only has a three-line, 100 km metro network. These 100 km should be closer to 1,000.

To be clear, there is some development of the Cairo Metro. Line 3 is being extended as we speak, with a new section having opened this month. Overall, the third phase of the line, 17 km long, cost 40.7 billion Egyptian pounds per a statement in 2012, which in contemporary dollars is $2.6 billion in exchange rate terms and $9 billion in 2021 PPP terms. On Google Earth, it looks like 9 km of the line are underground and 8 km are elevated or at-grade; this more than $500 million/km cost is not even fully-underground. This is a line where the main contractor is Orascom – this isn’t a case of outsourcing the state to Japan, China, or both, and therefore building at high costs, as is common in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. Rather, this is entirely domestic waste. Most likely, the same contractors that are profiteering off of public money through the construction of the NAC are also profiteering off of public money for what little infrastructure the military government deigns to build in the capital that people actually live in.

The Future of Congestion Pricing in New York

New York just passed congestion pricing, to begin operation on June 30th. The magazine Vital City published an issue dedicated to this policy two days ago; among the articles about it is one by me, about public transportation investments. People should read the entire article; here I’d like to both give more context and discuss some of the other articles in the issue. Much of this comes from what I said to editor Josh Greenman when discussing the pitch for the piece, and how I interpret the other pieces in the same context. The most basic point, for me, is that what matters is if the overall quality of public transit in and around New York is seen to improve in the next 5-10 years. In particular, if congestion pricing is paired with one specific thing (such as a new subway line) and it improves but the rest of the system is seen to decline, then it will not help, and instead people will be cynical about government actions like this and come to oppose further programs and even call for repealing the congestion tax.

The other articles in the issue

There are 10 articles in this issue. One is my own. Another is by Josh, explaining the background to congestion pricing and setting up the other nine articles. The other eight were written by John Surico, Sam Schwartz, Becca Baird-Remba, Austin Celestin, Howard Yaruss, Nicole Gelinas, Vishaan Chakrabarti, and Henry Grabar, and I recommend that people read all of them, for different perspectives.

The general themes the nine of us have covered, not all equally, include,

  • How to use congestion pricing to improve transportation alternatives (me on transit investment, Yaruss on transit fare cuts, Nicole and Chakrabarti on active transportation, Henry on removing parking to improve pedestrian safety).
  • The unpopularity of congestion pricing and what it portends (Surico about polling, Becca about business group opposition, Schwartz on political risk, Yaruss again on why the fare cut is wise); of note, none of the authors are coming out against congestion pricing, just warning that it will need to deliver tangible benefits to remain popular, and Surico is making the point that in London and Stockholm, congestion pricing was unpopular until it took effect, after which it was popular enough that new center-right leadership did not repeal it.
  • Environmental justice issues (Becca and Celestin): my article points out that traffic levels fell within the London congestion zone but not outside it, and Becca and Celestin both point out that the projections in New York are for traffic levels outside the zone not to improve and possibly to worsen, in particular in asthma-stricken Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Celestin going more deeply into this point and correctly lamenting that not enough transit improvements are intended to go into these areas. The only things I can add to this are that for environmental justice, two good investment targets include a 125th Street subway tunnel extending Second Avenue Subway and battery-electric buses at depots to reduce pollution.
  • Problems with toll evasion (Schwartz and Yaruss): there’s a growing trend of intentional defacement of license plates by the cars’ own drivers, to make them unreadable by traffic camera and avoid paying tolls, which could complicate revenue collection under congestion pricing.

The need for broad success

When discussing my article with Josh, before I wrote it, we talked about the idea of connecting congestion pricing to specific improvements. My lane would be specific transit improvements, like new lines, elevator access at existing stations, and so on, and similarly, Nicole, Henry, Chakrabarti, and Yaruss proposed their own points. But at the same time, it’s not possible to just make one thing work and say “this was funded by congestion pricing.” The entire system has to both be better and look better, the latter since visible revenue collection by the state like congestion pricing or new taxes are always on the chopping block for populist politicians if the state is too unpopular.

The example I gave Josh when we talked was the TGV. The TGV is a clear success as transportation; it is also, unlike congestion pricing, politically safe, in the sense that nobody seriously proposes eliminating it or slowing it down, and the only controversy is about the construction of new, financially marginal lines augmenting the core lilnes. However, the success of the TGV has not prevented populists and people who generally mistrust the state from claiming that things are actually bad; in France, they are often animated by New Left nostalgia for when they could ride slow, cheap trains everywhere, and since they were young then, the long trip times and wait times didn’t matter to them. Such nostalgics complain that regional trains, connecting city pairs where the train has not been competitive with cars since mass motorization and only survived so long as people were too poor to afford cars, are getting worse. Even though ridership in France is up, this specific use case (which by the 1980s was already moribund) is down, leading to mistrust. Unfortunately, while the TGV is politically safe in France, this corner case is used by German rail advocates to argue against the construction of a connected high-speed rail network here, as those corner case trains are better in Germany (while still not carrying much traffic).

The most important conclusion of the story of the TGV is that France needs to keep its high-speed system but adopt German operations, just as Germany needs to adopt French high-speed rail. But in the case of New York, the important lesson to extract is that if the MTA does one thing that I or Nicole or Henry or Chakrabarti or Yaruss called for while neglecting the broad system, people will not be happy. If the MTA builds subway lines with the projected $1 billion a year in revenue, politicians will say “this subway line has been built with congestion pricing revenue,” and then riders will see declines in reliability, frequency, speed, and cleanliness elsewhere and learn to be cynical of the state and oppose further support for the state’s transit operations.

The MTA could split the difference among what we propose. As I mentioned above, I find Celestin’s points about environmental justice compelling, and want to see improvements including new subways in at-risk areas, bus depot electrification to reduce pollution, and commuter rail improvements making it usable by city residents and not just suburbanites (Celestin mentions frequency; to that I’ll add fare integration). Nicole, Henry, and Chakrabarti are proposing street space reallocation, which doesn’t cost much money, but does cost political capital and requires the public to be broadly trusting of the state’s promises on transportation. The problem with doing an all-of-the-above program is that at the end of the day, projected congestion pricing revenue is $1 billion a year and the MTA capital program is $11 billion a year; the new revenue is secondary, and my usual bête noire, construction costs, is primary.

Quick Note: Different Anti-Growth Green Advocacies

Jerusalem Demsas has been on a roll in the last two years, and her reporting on housing advocacy in Minneapolis (gift link) is a great example of how to combine original reporting with analysis coming from understanding of the issue at hand. In short, she talks to pro- and anti-development people in the area, both of which groups identify with environmentalism and environmental advocacy, and hears out their concerns. She has a long quote by Jake Anbinder, who wrote his thesis on postwar American left-NIMBYism and its origins, which are a lot more good-faith than mid-2010s YIMBYs assumed; he points out how they were reacting to postwar growth by embracing what today would be called degrowth ideology.

I bring this up because Germany is full of anti-growth left-NIMBYism, with similar ideology to what she describes from her reporting in Minneapolis, but it has different transportation politics, in ways that matter. The positioning of German left-NIMBYs is not pro-car; it has pro-car outcomes, but superficially they generally support transportation alternatives, and in some cases they do in substance as well.

In the US, the left-NIMBYs are drivers. Jerusalem cites them opposing bike lanes, complaining that bike lanes are only for young childless white gentrifiers, and saying that soon electric cars will solve all of the problems of decarbonizing transportation anyway. I saw some of this myself while advocating for rail improvements in certain quarters in New England: people who are every stereotype of traditional environmental left-NIMBYism were asking us about parking at train stations and were indifferent to any operating improvements, because they don’t even visit the city enough to think about train frequency and speed.

In Germany, many are drivers, especially outside the cities, but they don’t have pro-car politics. The Berlin Greens, a thoroughly NIMBY party, are best known in the city for supporting removal of parking and moving lanes to make room for bike lanes. This is not unique to Berlin or even to Germany – the same New Left urban mayors who do little to build more housing implement extensive road diets and dedicated lanes for buses, streetcars, and bikes.

These same European left-NIMBYs are not at all pro-public transportation in general. They generally oppose high-speed rail: the French greens, EELV, oppose the construction of new high-speed lines and call for reducing the speed on existing ones to 200 km/h, on the grounds that higher speeds require higher electricity consumption. In Germany, they usually also oppose the construction of new subway and S-Bahn tunnels. Their reasons include the embedded carbon emissions of tunneling, a belief that the public transport belongs on the street (where it also takes room away from cars) and not away from the street, and the undesirability (to them) of improving job access in city center in preference to the rest of the city. However, they usually consistently support more traditional forms of rail, especially the streetcar and improvements to regional rail outside major cities. For example, the NIMBYs in Munich who unsuccessfully fought the second S-Bahn trunk line, whence the expression Organisation vor Elektronic vor Beton (the Swiss original omits Organisation and also is very much “before” and not “instead of”), called for improvements in frequency on lines going around city center, in preference to more capacity toward city center.

I’m not sure why this difference works like this. I suspect it’s that American boomer middle-class environmental NIMBYism is rooted in people who suburbanized in the postwar era or grew up in postwar suburbs, and find the idea of driving natural. The same ideology in Europe centers urban neighborhood-scale activism more, perhaps because European cities retained the middle class much better than their American ones, perhaps because mass motorization came to Europe slightly later. It also centers small towns and cities, connected to one another by regional rail; the underlying quality of public transportation here is that environmentalists who can afford better do rely on it even when it’s not very good, which hourly regional trains are not, whereas in the United States it’s so far gone that public transportation ridership comprises New Yorkers, commuters bound for downtown jobs in various secondary cities, and paupers.

Quick Note: Anti-Green Identity Politics

In Northern Europe right now, there’s a growing backlash to perceived injury to people’s prosperity inflicted by the green movement. In Germany this is seen in campaigning this year by the opposition and even by FDP not against the senior party in government but against the Greens. In the UK, the (partial) cancellation of High Speed 2 involved not just cost concerns but also rhetoric complaining about a war on cars and shifting of high-speed rail money to building new motorway interchanges.

I bring this up for a few reasons. First, to point out a trend. And second, because the Berlin instantiation of the trend is a nice example of what I talked about a month ago about conspiracism.

The trend is that the Green Party in Germany is viewed as Public Enemy #1 by much of the center-right and the entire extreme right, the latter using the slogan “Hang the Greens” at some hate marches from the summer. This is obvious in state-level political campaigning: where in North-Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein the unpopularity of the Scholz cabinet over its weak response to the Ukraine war led to CDU-Green coalitions last year (the Greens at the time enjoying high popularity over their pro-Ukraine stance), elections this year have produced CDU-SPD coalitions in Berlin and Hesse, in both cases CDU choosing SPD as a governing partner after having explicitly campaigned against the Greens.

This is not really out of any serious critique of the Green Party or its policy. American neoliberals routinely try to steelman this as having something to do with the party’s opposition to nuclear power, but this doesn’t feature into any of the negative media coverage and barely into any CDU rhetoric. It went into full swing with the heat pump law, debated in early summer.

In Berlin the situation has been especially perverse lately. One of the points made by CDU in the election campaign was that the red-red-green coalition failed to expand city infrastructure as promised. It ran on more room for cars rather than pedestrianization, but also U-Bahn construction; when the coalition agreement was announced, Green political operatives and environmental organizations on Twitter were the most aghast at the prospects of a massive U-Bahn expansion proposed by BVG and redevelopment of Tempelhofer Feld.

And then this month the Berlin government, having not made progress on U-Bahn expansion, announced that it would trial a maglev line. There hasn’t been very good coverage of this in formal English-language media, but here and here are writeups. The proposal is, of course, total vaporware, as is the projected cost of 80 million € for a test line of five to seven kilometers.

This has to be understood, I think, in the context of the concept of openness to new technology (“Technologieoffenheit”), which is usually an FDP slogan but seems to describe what’s going on here as well. In the name of openness to new tech, FDP loves raising doubts about proven technology and assert that perhaps something new will solve all problems better. Hydrogen train experiments are part of it (naturally, they failed). Normally this constant FUD is something I associate with people who are out of power or who are perpetually junior partners to power, like FDP, or until recently the Greens. People in power prefer to do things, and CDU thinks it’s the natural party of government.

And yet, there isn’t really any advance in government in Berlin. The U8 extension to Märkisches Viertel is in the coalition agreement but isn’t moving; every few months there’s a story in the media in which politicians say it’s time to do it, but so far there are no advances in the design, to the point that even the end point of the line is uncertain. And now the government, with all of its anti-green fervor – fervor that given Berlin politics includes support for subway construction – is not so much formally canceling it as just neglecting it, looking at shiny new technologies that are not at all appropriate for urban rail just because they’re not regular subways or regular commuter trains, which don’t have that identity politics load here.