Quick Note: California HSR Could Save $4 Billion on the Grapevine

California HSR’s just-released July progress report, as reported on bakersfield.com, contains the pleasant surprise that switching the alignment from the Tehachapis and Palmdale to the I-5 alignment on the Grapevine could save $4 billion.

Furthermore, the study indicating such cost savings “identified more than one feasible alignment over the mountain pass.” The Grapevine option was rejected in 2005 because the preliminary engineering found only one feasible alignment that crosses known faults at-grade and has a maximum tunnel length of 6 miles and maximum 3.5% grade, compared with hundreds through the Tehachapis. Therefore finding multiple alignments, such that even if further meter-scale geological studies discover new faults then some option will make it through, is likely to tilt the field back toward the Grapevine.

Robert Cruickshank is surprisingly pessimistic about the Grapevine, on the grounds that Palmdale is an important market to serve. In reality, Palmdale is a small commuter market – i.e. it has a strong peak and low revenue per rider – so giving it up is a small deal, probably fully canceled out by the gain of about 10 minutes’ trip time on the shorter Grapevine.

But most importantly, it’s most important to get an initial operable segment ready, and this means connecting the Central Valley to the LA Basin. As I’ve explained before, a major advantage of the Grapevine is that it allows connecting to the legacy Metrolink line at Santa Clarita rather than at Palmdale, avoiding tens of kilometers of sharp curves on the climb between the LA Basin and Antelope Valley.

I’m unable to find the progress report, so I don’t know to what extent “$4 billion in savings” literally means coming in $4 billion under budget. If it does, it means that theoretically, the money available suffices to build from Los Angeles to a point between Bakersfield and Fresno; Obama’s now-moribund $4 billion for HSR, matched 50:50, would be more than enough to build from Los Angeles to Fresno.

Update: here is the progress report. The relevant section is on page 27. It says only that “an alternative via the Grapevine may save between $1B and $4B in capital cost” – still unclear whether it means coming $1-4 billion under budget, or staying within budget while avoiding a $1-4 billion cost overrun on the Tehachapis.

It’s too bad the approximate amount remains unclear. The required budget is on the same order as the amount that may become available in the next two years depending on Congressional machinations, and so it’s important for California to know how much it should be asking for. For example, if it were made clear that an additional $2.5 billion in federal funding were enough to complete LA-Fresno, then Dianne Feinstein might try to include the full amount for high-speed rail in the transportation bill for 2012 rather than just $100 million.

Quick Note: ACS 2010

The Census Bureau has just released the American Community Survey numbers for 2010, using data calibrated to match with the 2010 census. At least, calibration is the best reason for why the ACS believes that New York went from 8,391,881 people in 2009 to 8,184,899 in 2010 (according to the new Factfinder). Because of such jarring discrepancies in results, people should under no circumstances directly compare numbers from the 2010 ACS with numbers from previous ACSes.

The best demographic survey in the US is still the 2009 ACS, which avoids the whopper claim that New York added more housing units than people at a time of skyrocketing rents, and should be used until it becomes completely outdated.

And even if 2010 census data is at all reliable, it’s still not directly comparable. Claims about absolute mode share or commute time are okay (the census after all only underestimated New York’s population by about 3%), but claims about change from 2009 are not. At best the 2010 ACS should be compared to the 2000 estimate base, and even that is strained – too much reliance on a census that doesn’t count everyone, insufficient reliance on years of rigorous statistical sampling.

Suburbanization of Poverty: What’s New?

The current trend toward suburbanization of poverty is worth examining. It is incontrovertible that on the whole, the American poor are moving to the suburbs. Simultaneously, city centers are gentrifying, seeing large increases in income, with an influx of rich and upper middle-class people. This could lead to a French-style geography in which the rich live in central cities and the poor outside them. It’s not my intention to doubt that this trend is happening; my question is whether it represents a break from the past.

On the one hand, the consequences of such a trend clearly do represent a break from the past. We’re already seeing demands from business-oriented groups for more transit investment, and a new focus on urbanism in elite magazines. However, this by itself does not mean that the reasons for this trend are at all new. In fact, in one way, we’ve really been seeing the same trend for fifty years, in which both the inner and the outer limits of poverty are pushed outward. What we saw last decade was just a tipping point in which the expansion of the gentrified core was by itself enough to offset the wealth loss coming from the expansion of the ghetto.

The best example for this is New York, whose regional income distribution is arguably more regularly donut-shaped than that of other Americans metro areas, with less of a favored/ill-favored quarter geography. Furthermore, in Manhattan, there is a sharp color line between the Upper East and West Sides and Harlem, which is relatively easy to discern if you’re a resident. Mad Men contains multiple citations establishing Manhattan north of 86th as a bad area, and based on the geography of the 1970s, Joel Garreau placed the boundary at East 86th and West 96th. By the 1990s, we see citations putting the line at West 110th Street; moreover the Upper West Side has joined up with Morningside Heights, itself gentrified, moving the color line up to about West 123rd. This is a decades-long trend, rather than a recent development. Conversely, the boundary between the poor South Bronx and the middle-class North Bronx has, too, moved north over the decades, and is still moving north as the black middle class leaves for greener pastures.

In general, a similar story played out in the first-ring suburbs of many Rust Belt cities, especially in ill-favored quarters: the places that people used to flee the city to are now cities that people flee.

This is not to say that nothing has changed. Harlem and the South Bronx of today are richer than Harlem and the South Bronx of 1980, leading some people to think that they (especially Harlem) have gentrified far more than they actually have. People are no longer abandoning the Bronx in droves. But in terms of relative geographical income across the metropolitan area, we’ve really just witnessed an expansion of the donut going back to at least the establishment of the first modern suburbs in Westchester and Long Island, nearly a hundred years ago.

What we see is therefore inconsistent with the usual story of suburbanization of poverty. The exurbs are not terribly rich, but the Rust Belt exurbs are a far cry from their housing bust-stricken Sunbelt counterparts. Poverty is suburbanizing from the inside out rather than from the outside in, just as wealth and the upwardly mobile middle class did fifty years ago.

Although this implies that suburbia is unsustainable, the way it implies it is different from the usual explanation. It’s not that the future is bad for low-density settlements and good for high-density ones. It’s that the American urban form and political geography, especially but not only in the suburbs, are fundamentally unsustainable, and require constant growth to persist. Greenfield sites have an inherent advantage with respect to pensions, debt, and fossilized community relations;the debt-fueled system of growth in the US encourages moving on to the next tract rather than maintaining what exists. Thus today’s boomburb is tomorrow’s decaying eyesore. This can only be countered in persistently favored quarters, but those by definition only hold a small proportion of the population; not everyone can live in the richest 15% of the region.

The thing to wonder then is not why suburbs are hollowing from the inside out, but why city centers are expanding and gentrifying so rapidly. One answer is that Jane Jacobs was right, and diverse city neighborhoods can resile from the shock of middle-class flight. Indeed, the only significant non-Jacobsian neighborhoods in the expanding cores tend to be projects, and those tend to significantly lag in gentrification (for example, see Stuyvesant Town – and that’s a project that was originally white-only, thus middle-class). On the other hand, the projects are protected by public ownership laws, regardless of urban form, so even if Jacobs was wrong, developers would only eye them after exhausting private buildings.

A second answer is that today’s gentrified cities are something like greenfield sites. It holds up well with the analogy between gentrification today and suburbanization a century ago. That said, this analogy is political and sociological rather than geographical or economic: cities still have to pay pensions, and the buildings that are now selling for a million dollars per apartment are often very old. On the third hand, the social networks of the newcomers are mostly independent from those of the older residents: for example, they rarely send their children to neighborhood public schools, or if they do, they organize a separate school in the same building as the established school; so on the social level they really are greenfield.

That said, in the future, the trend for suburbanization of poverty can accelerate and become different from what it has been since the 1940s, if it reinforces itself. Cities are getting closer to a tipping point of being richer than their suburbs, possibly even to the point of having better social services for the middle class. This is to some extent already occurring with crime, though we’ve seen an absolute decline more than a relative decline in central cities, and is occurring more slowly with schools. Although on the whole the trend among people who care about schools and crime is to move to the suburbs, if the suburbanization of poverty, coming about from movement of people with other concerns, gets to this tipping point, then a large mass of people will abandon much of suburbia in favor of the cities, as urbanist common wisdom holds that they already are.

At least, they will try. The number of people who can live in a city is bounded by the product of household size and the number of available housing units, and the number of available housing units grows glacially in brownfield sites. Here, gentrified cities cannot imitate the properties of greenfield exurbs. As a result, we can expect to see an acceleration of the current trend of demand for cities translating into high housing prices rather than population growth. In such a scenario, cities will not become middle-class, but rather turn into enclaves of the rich and upper middle class. Of course there’s a natural limit on how high rents can go, especially in New York, Chicago, and other cities with large city proper populations, allowing the middle class to be comfortable in their suburban neighborhoods. But a transition to a French urban geography will be very rapid and self-reinforcing, and the rents will take every penny the upper middle class can afford.

Pedestrian Observations from Central London

As I got off the Underground, I was greeted by a fenced roadway without easy crossings. I found the way around a roundabout and started to walk toward the hotel where I was to meet my family, on the wrong side of the street. Although traffic was relatively light and the street was not very wide by New York standards, a fenced median required me to cross at one crosswalk, a Z-crossing with beg buttons and different pedestrian signal phasing for the two halves of the road. About five minutes after I first emerged above ground in London on foot, I realized: this city hates pedestrians.

Of course, the 20 mph zones, the naked streets, and the streets that are officially neither 20 mph nor naked but so narrow they might as well be are not, by themselves, hateful toward pedestrians. They’re rather pleasant. Even when they have beg buttons, which is often, those buttons can be ignored, as they routinely are in Providence. Beyond them, there’s a class of streets of about the same width as Manhattan streets, for example Portobello, which are busy and pedestrian-scaled. The issue is that the wider ones, the main streets, have completely abandoned any attempt at catering to pedestrians; they’re run by road engineers rather than by urban designers.

The failure of London is not a matter of preferring cars to cities, as is the case in American cities. The London Underground is quite nice, though it’s more because it charges exorbitant fares (see page 45 here, and realize that the graph seems to use a depreciated pound:Euro exchange rate) than because it’s particularly well-run. The commuter rail system is treated like modern rapid transit and is treated with lavish investment. There is an extensive bike share system, but with substandard bike lanes that tend to disappear into bus stops. None of this comes from a deliberate attempt to destroy alternative transportation; it’s just an unintended consequence of modernist planning.

In the view of the modernist planner, pedestrians and cars should always be strictly separated with fences if necessary, all crosswalks must be signalized, and it should be impossible to have any spontaneous crossings, or spontaneous anything for that matter. Ideally, crossings should be in pedestrian underpasses or overpasses, to eliminate all conflict. There can be delineated zones for pedestrians – side streets or some busy pedestrian malls, such as Covent Garden – but those should be placed away from the main streets.

In contrast, New York and Paris do things differently. Streets are wider both on average and at the minimum. Parking is done on the street, providing a buffer from traffic that’s wide enough to make me feel protected but porous enough that I can cross when I want to. Sidewalks are wide, crosswalks are frequent and let pedestrians cross in just one cycle, and increasingly protected bike lanes are cannibalizing road space that used to belong to cars. Of course, London’s main streets are wide enough that they could look like the delightful mess that is First Avenue if TfL wanted to. At a few places, they do look like New York streets, such as the aforementioned Portobello Road, with parked cars on one side. But for the most part, London treats its main streets, where most activity is, as arterial roads for cars.

This contrast between New York and London’s style of planning is jarring. New York’s grids are meticulously planned, without much variation except in the parts of Brooklyn and Queens where two separate grids meet. London is nothing like that – its street network is famously labyrinthine, and walking there with one’s roaming function turned off in order to save money requires hopping from one public map to another. But on the level of the individual street, this situation is reversed: London’s streets are meticulously traffic-engineered, while New York’s avenues are chaotic. It’s true even on the level of stereotypical cabbie behavior: for one, London’s cab drivers tend to obey traffic laws.

More fundamentally, it shows just why car-centric planning is so incompatible with urbanism: it tries to impose order on something that resists it. According to Christopher Alexander and the rest of the traditional urbanists, I’m supposed to shun the mechanistic design of New York (or Paris, which is as planned) and gravitate toward the traditionalism of London. In reality, my reaction is the exact opposite – on the micro level, New York is much more emergent and chaotic, and, at the level that is relevant to a local who doesn’t feel the need to constantly look up, vastly more human-scaled. London may appear to succeed on grand urban design principles on a map and in diagrams, but on little things that matter, it fails. It may have little pockets of success, and enough activity on the streets that I’m willing to spend 3 minutes crossing them when necessary, but it has nothing on its peer Western megacities.

That is not to say I avoided walking around London. On the contrary, I explored Central London during what little time I had to ditch my family. But the streets were not particularly inviting, and at some points it felt more like an adventure than like an ordinary walking trip. This never happened to me in New York or Paris or the (very few) other cities I’ve found to be walkable.

Travel Time to Work

The Census Bureau has a new publication about commuting in the US as of the 2009 American Community Survey. There isn’t much change from 2000 that’s mentioned, but one table of commute time piqued my interest. This is figure 8, on page 11, showing mean travel time to work by mode of transportation and time of departure to go to work.

It is well-known that commutes on transit take much more time than commutes in a car, but the breakdown based on time of departure defied my expectations. I thought transit trips take the least amount of time at rush hour, when frequencies are the highest, and the most amount of time late at night; car trips should be the opposite. Since people with very long commutes would leave earlier, perhaps around 7 to get to work at 9, the longest commutes by car should be for people leaving to go to work between 6 and 7 or between 7 and 8.

However, it turns out that by all modes, late-night commuters travel the longest. Trip-to-work time declines monotonically with departure time until the 9 am-noon category, where it’s at a minimum (my guess is that people in this category are disproportionately academics and other flex-time professionals who live close to work). This is close to expectation for transit, but for cars, it’s weird: why would people take longer to drive when the roads are clear than when they are congested?

I’d reject an explanation based on leaving very early to work. Insignificantly few people travel 3 hours to work. Instead, the only answer I can think of is that the groups of people who travel to work at rush hour and late at night are of different social classes, and this is reflected in commute times. Late-night commuters are usually low-paid service workers at gas stations, casinos, etc.; those also live on the wrong side of their metro area or in low-income exurbs, and need to drive considerable distances to the favored quarter.

Observe that the long late-night commute trend is the sharpest for carpoolers, who in general skew poor and nonwhite: eyeballing the graph, carpoolers who leave for work between midnight and 5 am travel twice as much time a those who leave between 9 am and noon, compared with a 50% time premium for single drivers (who are wealthier) and transit riders (who tend to work in CBDs, which are equally accessible from all directions).

Obviously, I’m going on partial data here; anyone with access to fuller data could potentially trivially refute my theory. If the theory is true, then two things will be observed in a fuller set of data. First, the late-night time premium will be the longest in large metro areas with favored and unfavored quarters, such as Los Angeles and Washington, and shortest in metro areas with less edge city-favored quarter development, such as New York. And second, if the departure time is broken into more granular categories, then the peak travel time will be at night rather than very early in the morning.

The Option of Profitable Transit

David Levinson’s post saying that transit should strive to restructure and be profitable stirred much discussion on neighboring blogs, including Human Transit (which broadly agrees with the idea if not the libertarian tone) and The Transport Politic (which does not), as well as multiple commenters who chimed in noting that it’s ridiculous to require transit to break even when cars get so many subsidies. While I agree with Levinson and Jarrett’s sentiments about core versus welfare services in principle, in practice the causes of transit losses are orthogonal to the subjects under discussion; the actual issues are somewhat related to what the commenters mention, but those commenters don’t go nearly far enough.

In the original post, Levinson proposes the following distinction:

Mass transit systems in the United States are collectively losing money hand over fist. Yet many individual routes (including bus routes) earn enough to pay their own operating (and even capital costs). But like bad mortgages contaminating the good, money-losing transit routes are bogging down the system.

We can divide individual systems into three sets of routes:

1. Those routes break-even or profit financially (at a given fare). This is the “core”.

2. Those lines which are necessary for the core routes to break-even, and collectively help the set of routes break-even. These are the “feeders”.

3. Those lines which lose money, and whose absence would not eliminate profitability on other routes. These money-losers are a welfare program. We might politely call them “equity” routes.

Jarrett, whose work has focused on priorities, not only agrees with the distinction but also downplays the importance of routes in category #2, and has often advocated that agencies let go of low-performing routes and concentrate on trunk frequency. While Jarrett is right and this distinction is critical when an agency needs to reduce its expenditure, it’s not going to make any agency profitable.

The number of routes in the US that break even financially is minimal. It’s easy enough to come up with routes that cover their avoidable costs, but transit has enough fixed costs that retreating to them is not going to be enough. For a New York example, see this spreadsheet, due to Cap’n Transit: although multiple bus routes are portrayed as profitable, once one checks the more detailed spreadsheet the Cap’n links to, it turns out that when including both direct and indirect operating costs, the best-performing route, the M86, drops from an operating ratio of 172% to one of 91%. Moreover, the best-performing routes do not form a trunk system, but are for the most part short-hop crosstown buses, with very high ridership per kilometer of route length. Most networks that actually are profitable consist of buses feeding into the Lincoln Tunnel, a choke point that has an exclusive bus lane in the morning rush hour.

Since in some other parts of the world urban transit is in fact profitable, we need to address causes other than the existence of lesser-used routes. I propose that instead of classifying American lines into profitable and unprofitable ones, a division in which one category is going to be very lonely, we classify whole networks according to what makes them lose so much money. I believe the following list of causes is relatively uncontroversial for good transit advocates:

1. High labor costs, predominantly overstaffing, but at some agencies (for example, Muni) also very high salaries.

2. Poor design, e.g. of intermodal transfers.

3. Low fares on some networks, which exist predominantly to provide minimal mobility of last resort rather than core transportation.

4. Bad regulations, especially when it comes to regional rail.

5. An auto-oriented policy.

Cause #5 is the elephant in the room. It’s not just ongoing auto subsidies and such mandates as Euclidean zoning and free parking. It’s also a decades-long history promoting auto-centric development, as a result of which uses are too widespread and low-intensity for transit to be of much use on most trips. Even edge cities are too dense sometimes; if you can find Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy’s sadly now behind paywall article Edgeless Cities, read it for a quick explanation of the limitations of the relatively intense but auto-centric development form of Tysons Corner or White Plains.

The best analogy I can give here is a growing industry or industrial zone. Early on in a country’s development, it will want industrial policy: subsidies, tax breaks, protectionism. The US railroads got it, most Japanese exporters got it, Samsung and Hyundai got it. As a country becomes richer and its economy becomes more mature, those industries become profitable and suddenly start advocating free trade and free markets, even for themselves, and whine loudly at the suggestion that rich regions or industries should subsidize poor ones.

There are plenty of routes in the US that, while unprofitable now, could be made profitable with better management and operating practices. This is usually what I write about. Those are causes #1, 2, and 4. Cause #3 applies to some but not the most relevant agencies; fares in large US cities tend to be average or high by international standards, though perhaps lower than the revenue-maximizing fares. Altogether, fixing what are essentially issues of competence is going to raise transit use, possibly to acceptable levels. But it will not turn New York into Tokyo, Boston into Taipei, or Providence into Zurich.

Passenger-Miles Are Overrated

One of the pushbacks I got about my post on road boondoggles is that I didn’t control for passenger-miles of travel, and the number for car subsidies is much lower when one divides it by the appropriate number of trillions. This is not the first time I hear people talk about passenger-miles as a measure of inherent worth, but it doesn’t make it any better.

Passenger-miles don’t vote. They’re not a unit of deservedness of subsidy. They’re one unit of transportation consumption. They’re like tons of staple as a unit of food production, or calories as a unit of consumption. We don’t subsidize food based on cents per calorie.

Even as a unit of consumption, there are flaws in passenger-miles as a concept, when it comes to intermodal comparisons. The reason: at equal de facto mobility, transit riders travel shorter distances than drivers. It’s very obvious when comparing total passenger-miles in transit cities and car cities (see e.g. page 36 here). Transit is slower than driving on uncongested roads, but has higher capacity than any road. In addition, transit is at its best at high frequency, which requires high intensity of uses, whereas cars are the opposite. The result is that transit cities are denser than car cities – in other words, need less passenger-miles.

What passenger-miles are more useful for is measuring intercity transportation. At intercity distance, mode choice has less influence over travel distance (though, even then, HSR and driving are shorter-range than flying, and thus passenger-miles can overstate the importance of flying over ground transportation). It is also a proxy for revenue, whereas on urban transit the fare is either flat or weakly dependent on distance. As a result, intercity railroads usually cite passenger-miles or passenger-km, and urban transit operators usually cite passengers.

But when it comes to local transportation, it doesn’t work very well. A country’s mode share expressed in passenger-miles is lower than that expressed in passengers, and this is going to make transit and especially walking look much less significant than they actually are.

Who’s Migrating to the Sunbelt?

It’s well-known that people have been moving from coastal US states to the Sunbelt for many years now. But who’s moving? Is it the upper middle class fleeing higher taxes or searching for cheaper houses, or perhaps the poor fleeing high costs of living? Put another way, is the above-average growth in per capita income in many Northeastern and West Coast metropolitan areas a matter of actual growth, or simply of pushing the poor out to the Sunbelt, whose per-capita income growth is often anemic?

All data in this post is courtesy of Aaron Renn’s Telestrian service, which cribs numbers from the IRS, Census Bureau, and other sources and presents them in a reasonably searchable manner. The IRS keeps track of intranational migration in the form of tax exemptions, which allows us to figure out the migration trends in terms of people (exemptions), households (returns), and income (adjusted gross income). This way we can figure out if the people moving out of a region are richer or poorer than the average. Although the IRS misses a lot of people and much income, it is still the best available source in the US for migration statistics. The more accurate American Community Survey tabulates very coarse migration statistics.

Observe also that the IRS data is given per year, which allows us to look at zoomed-in trends. For example, here is California’s migration with each state as well as the rest of the world from 2000 to 2009. Here is somewhat worse-presented data for New York State. It turns out that migration marginally increased California’s per capita income, and had practically no effect on New York’s; in other words, their growth is real, and doesn’t come from pushing the poor away.

More precisely, we have the following observations:

– In both California and New York, the difference in income between immigrants and emigrants is very small; immigrants are slightly richer in California, $27,098 vs. $26,209, and slightly poorer in New York, $29,876 vs. $30,810.

– Overall both immigrants and emigrants are slightly poorer than the statewide per capita income. However, the effect is very small: according to the IRS, California’s per capita income in 2009 was $28,569 and New York’s was $31,617. Were it not for migration – that is, if people had lived in 2009 where they’d lived in 2000 but still earned the same income – California’s per capita income would’ve been $28,243, i.e. 1% lower, and New York’s would’ve been $31,689, i.e. 0.1% higher.

– The richest migration occurs between high-cost coastal states, especially between New York and California, while migration between those states and the Sunbelt is much poorer.

– The poorest large group of immigrants in both states is international immigrants. In both cases they were about 9% of total immigrants, so they can’t have dominated the numbers too much. Thus Jane Jacobs’ story that great cities take in poor immigrants and churn out a middle class, considered on the state level, is only partially confirmed by this data.

– Emigration to the Sunbelt’s bubble states – from California to Arizona and Nevada and from New York to Florida – was predominantly a 2005-7 phenomenon, and decreased markedly after the bubble crashed.

– Emigration to other Sunbelt states was more of a mixed bag. Georgia and North Carolina, both partial bubble states, also look like partial bubble states in the migration numbers, with emigration from New York and California peaking in 2005-8, but less prominently than with the proper bubble states. Emigration from California to Texas looks like that to a bubble state, despite Texas’s strong economy through the recession; but emigration from New York to Texas and from both states to Colorado remains steady.

– The biggest difference between immigrants and emigrants is not income but household size – emigrating households were much bigger (1.95 vs. 1.7 in California), but still much smaller than the statewide average (2.23 according to the IRS, much lower than the actual average but comparable with the above numbers). This is only partially consistent with the explanation that those regions attract singles and DINKs and turn away families.

The story I started this investigation with is that New York and California predominantly turn away the middle class, which would be seen in middle-class emigration and low-income immigration; my recollection, coming from merely eyeballing the data, had been that immigrants were much poorer. This should be consistent with the breakdown of the cost of living in dense city regions: housing is unaffordable if your ideal of how to live is having a car and a single-family detached house that’s less than an hour away from work; if you’re flexible about car ownership and don’t mind small apartments, then New York and California are quite affordable.

But what we actually see is that both immigration and emigration between those states and the rest of the world is middle-class. The people moving to the Sunbelt really are being priced out. It’s hard to distinguish pricing out from cashing in on high housing prices, but the lower-income characteristic of this emigration suggests the former. The upshot is that policies reducing the cost of housing could stem this tide while at the same time having no effect on poverty and the need for social services. While it’s heinous to try to price out the poor, as the richer parts of the Bay Area and many other regions do, this is not what is being done here.

Let me close by linking without much comment to the same data for Texas. The IRS recorded a total income of $475,109,477 in 2009 and a total population of 19,235,926, i.e. a per capita income of $24,699. As in California, immigrants are a little poorer than emigrants and both are a little poorer than the average. Controlling for this effect as above would raise per capita income to $25,002, a 1.2% rise.

Quick Note: Comfort

While reading a thesis about tilting trains, I saw a comparison of passenger comfort on different modes of transportation. This includes the following graph (p. 30), which the thesis sources to a study of motion sickness in US children and teenagers:

The scale is originally 0-3: this study polled a sample aged 9-18 and asked whether they feel nauseous on any of the above modes, where 0 is “never” and 3 “always.”

Selective Application of Smeed’s Law

A few months ago, in response to the Raquel Nelson case, author Tom Vanderbilt found an FHWA study from 2005 that finds that on wide, busy roads, pedestrian death rates are higher on marked crosswalks than on unmarked ones. The study itself is worth reading; its explanation of the finding is that,

These results may be somewhat expected. Wide, multilane streets are difficult for many pedestrians to cross, particularly if there is an insufficient number of adequate gaps in traffic due to heavy traffic volume and high vehicle speed. Furthermore, while marked crosswalks in themselves may not increase measurable unsafe pedestrian or motorist behavior (based on the Knoblauch et al. and Knoblauch and Raymond studies) one possible explanation is that installing a marked crosswalk may increase the number of at-risk pedestrians (particularly children and older adults) who choose to cross at the uncontrolled location instead of at the nearest traffic signal.

An even greater percentage of older adults (81.3 percent) and young children (76.0 percent) chose to cross in marked crosswalks on multilane roads compared to two-lane roads. Thus, installing a marked crosswalk at an already undesirable crossing location (e.g., wide, high-volume street) may increase the chance of a pedestrian crash occurring at such a site if a few at-risk pedestrians are encouraged to cross where other adequate crossing facilities are not provided. This explanation might be evidenced by the many calls to traffic engineers from citizens who state, “Please install a marked crosswalk so that we can cross the dangerous street near our house.” Unfortunately, simply installing a marked crosswalk without other more substantial crossing facilities often does not result in the majority of motorists stopping and yielding to pedestrians, contrary to the expectations of many pedestrians.

This is a rather standard application of Smeed’s law and similar rules governing traffic, whose one-line form is that traffic fatalities are determined primarily by psychology. This is not a problem; the problem is why such issues are only ever brought up in case of pedestrian fatalities.

In 1949, R. J. Smeed found a simple explanation for traffic fatalities: they depend less-than-linearly on the number of cars on the road. In the 1980s John Adams revised this to a more accurate rule based on VMT rather than the number of cars, and based on a constant decline in per-VMT accidents over time. Safety improvements do not bend or break the general trend. Quoting Adams again, the introduction of seat belts caused no reduction in traffic fatalities, and on the contrary caused pedestrian fatalities to temporarily inch up, as drivers felt safer and drove more recklessly. The only way to reduce the number of car accident victims is to reduce traffic.

And yet, government reaction is consistently on the side of accepting Smeed’s law when it implies there’s no need to improve pedestrian facilities, and rejecting it when its implication is bad for cars or good for pedestrians and cyclists. Local governments in the US routinely argue that safety is at stake when they want to upgrade a road with grade crossings into a full freeway. The FHWA helpfully adds that intersections are responsible to half of all car crashes and “FHWA will identify the most common and severe problems and compile information on the applications and design of innovative infrastructure configurations and treatments.”

In reality, all building freeways does is create more traffic, and cause more people to die in crashes. The average per-VMT death rate in the US has declined by 3.3% per year, but in the years following the Interstate Highway Act, it was practically flat – in other words, building freeways did nothing to accelerate the trend for reduction in per-VMT accident deaths. Although an individual freeway is undoubtedly safer than an individual road with intersections, the road network has to be viewed as a system: increase safety in one area and people will drive more recklessly elsewhere.

This systemwide view is clearly present in the case of pedestrians: the FHWA isn’t claiming that crosswalks are inherently unsafe, only that they cause more at-risk pedestrians to cross. In other words, the problem is that they cause too many of the wrong kind of pedestrians to cross. The implication is never used for roads. Traffic is never treated as variable, and if people shoot down freeway upgrades on the grounds that they’ll induce more traffic, it’s always on environmental or community grounds rather than on safety grounds.