Time to Whomp the Drivers!

Megan McCardle writes:

Megan McArdle: I think James Joyner is absolutely right here:

I’m now commuting into D.C. on a near-weekdaily basis. According to GoogleMaps, the office is 13.5 miles from the house. I can usually drive there in 45-60 minutes during off-peak hours, although it can sometimes take much longer if there’s an accident. I can park in the garage next to my office for the day for $12. Conversely, I can drive 15-20 minutes to a Metro station, pay $4 to park, wait as long as 15 minutes for a train, pay another $2.65 to get two blocks from the office 35-50 minutes later, followed by a 5-10 minute walk to the office.

So, in order to save $2.70 (plus a nominal amount of gasoline), it would cost me 30-75 minutes each day for the round trip, plus the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle. Given that I earn enough that $3 is poor compensation indeed for that much of my time, I drive unless there’s a really good reason not to.

And they’re about to raise the rates for Metro fares and parking, further skewing the calculus in the direction of “drive.”

The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.

Comments

[Cranky Observer]

Leaves out the utility from exercise. Back when I commuted by train in BigCity I walked 2 miles or so each way and was in much better shape for it.

Cranky

[Kimmitt]

13.5 miles is about an hour, maybe 90 minutes by bicycle if one is serious about it. Of course, one then has to add clothes-changing time, but still.

Alternately, one can bike 4 miles to the Metro station and pay nothing to park.

But he's right in a general sense -- mass transit can never compete on a marginal-cost basis; what it has to do is be so pervasive as to be competitive on an average-cost basis. It has to convince households that they need one fewer car.

[Bruce Garrett]

"The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes..."

Well the roads aren't free. As I understand it, the cost of their construction and upkeep is folded into the price of gasoline.

Back in 2001 I bought a small rowhouse within walking distance of work. That was possible for me because I got a job in the city, and this particular city (Baltimore) had a lot of affordable housing in the same neighborhood as my new job. (It's somewhat less affordable now, alas...) I cannot begin to tell you how great a joy it is, to be able to walk to my job (about twenty minutes) and also to grocery stores and other day-to-day necessities. Most weeks, my car just sits in front of my house 6 days out of 7.

Driving long distances, for many hours out of your life a year, in stress inducing commuter traffic, already makes driving unattractive. Weekend shopper traffic is equally ugly and stressful. But as long as where people work, where they shop, and where they live are kept in separate corners people will just keep driving, and keep absorbing the cost of it.

Making cities more livable, in my opinion, will go a lot further toward reducing automobile use then mass transit or higher gas taxes, or telecommuting days.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Free roads?

The politics of where to build roads is driven by the politics of where influential people want roads for their commutes, which is why too many Interstates run through cities rather than just connecting cities.

And does anyone on the planet think that the rest of the country is anything like Washington DC? The primary industry in DC is collecting and spending the money of others, so let them have inconvenient commutes.

[Ian Whitchurch]

This logic is also why higher gas prices have done little to drop petroleum demand.

[wab]

The US is obviously different, but in the UK car drivers pay way, way, way more tax than they get back in money spent on roads. In particular, they pay a massive carbon tax (via the so-called fuel duty), which the government is all too happy to agree is used to pay for all sorts of other services that have nothing to do with driving.

In the UK it is public transport users who have successfully externalised costs onto other people, because they get a large subsidy. This has had many negative side-effects, such as forcing house prices up away from London because London train commuters live further from London than they would if they had to pay the full cost of their daily commute. Indeed in my town, Cambridge, a lot of the people who work here are forced to live in neighbouring villages and commute (by car) into work because London commuters have priced them out.

And speaking as a person who cycles to work (because I was lucky enough to be able to buy a house before the London commuters move in en masse), I am one of those who does indeed get free use of the roads. Do economists think I should pay for that tarmac? Presumably yes. (Let's face it, economists just want to charge for everything, especially if the government has to give them a huge amount of money for consultancy work to determine the price.)

On Kimmitt's point that public transport has to be "so pervasive as to be competitive on an average-cost basis", you might find that public transport is never competitive on an average-cost basis. The Paris metro system is one of the best in the world and it is pretty bloody "pervasive", but it still receives a whacking great subsidy. And the Paris metro perfectly well illustrates what is wrong with public transport, namely that a few workers can hold an entire city hostage (which is why Paris metro drivers have just about the best pensions in France).

[boomer]

> The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes

"Obviously" the goal is not to make it cheaper, faster, safer for people to use public transportation but to penalize the drivers. Than everyone will be equally unhappy which is exactly what we want!

[Eric Ralph]

Tolls are not a question of paying for the roads. It's just about efficient prices.

The fixed costs of roads are very high and the marginal private costs are v low (quite probably much lower than what is collected in what can be thought of as a usage fee built into the excise on gas).

So if there was no congestion, the use fee for a road should be low (I'll get to congestion in a minute). The rest of the road costs should be paid by some other less distorting means.

The economics also does not posit a necessary relationship between what is raised in road taxes or fees and what is spent on roads. How to raise required revenues at a minimum efficiency cost is one question; what the money should be spent on is another.

The interesting question is, given there is congestion, are road use prices (essentially the fuel excise tax) too low, or is it optimal to build bigger roads. It seems v likely that the answer is that tolls applied when the roads are congested might well be a v efficient tax. They would signal the marginal social cost (due to congestion) of driving.

Not really rocket science. When lines routinely form in front of a store, which routinely empties before the lines finish, well, most storekeepers would raise prices.

[Dan F]

This calculation is skewed in favor of driving. It ignores indirect, but significant monetary costs of driving, including maintenance, depreciation, and insurance, to say nothing of the gasoline, which is not trivial. But the time cost accounting is also wrong. Every minute I spend driving is not only non-productive, but more draining than the time I spend sitting on a bus. I can get some work done while riding a bus.

[Leszek Pawlowicz]

The IRS mileage deduction rate, which includes gas, depreciation, insurance, maintenance, but doesn't include some costs, is 50 cents a mile. But the IRS acknowledges that this certainly understates the costs of driving a car a mile; the AAA pegs it as about 50% higher for a newer car. So driving 27 miles will actually cost her roughly $13-18 more than what she states, in after-tax income. Not to mention the cost to society of pollution, global warming, military spending to maintain our oil supplies, etc..

Moral: It's easy to rationalize your lifestyle if you don't know what you're talking about.

[mk]

Further info here: http://www.rff.org/rff/Documents/RFF-DP-06-26-REV.pdf

[mk]

Sorry, let me elaborate. The link above points to a paper by Resources For the Future that outlines the externalities of driving, as well as a list of policy approaches for internalizing the externalities.

[Bloix]

Leeszek, those costs are total costs per mile of auto ownership - depreciation, insurance, etc. Assuming she's going to own the car anyway - which she will, as a suburbanite - the relevant figure is about 15 cents per mile for operating costs - gas & increased maintainance (although the DC commute, which is all lights and stop and go over rough streets, is very hard on a car and will rapidly increase her depreciation). So she's underestimating her costs by about $4 a day.

She's also grossly mispresenting the travel time on the metro. If her office is 2 blocks from her stop, then her walk is 3 minutes, not 10. Unless her parking is in her building, the difference in walk time is about 2 minutes. And during rush hour the trains run every 5 minutes or less, not every 15. And they are fast - I don't know where she lives but even the most distant stations are only 35 minutes from downtown. If you don't have a long walk at the work end, Metro is almost always faster during rush hour. She's overestimating the Metro travel time by half an hour or so.

Still, if she really lives a 20 minute drive from the closest metro to her home, and a 40 minute drive from the office, then maybe metro really doesn't work for her. A little economic geography - hell, a little jr high geometry - demonstrates that a subway cannot efficiently cover ever increasing concentric circles of low-density sprawl. (As you go out from the center, area increases as pi times the square of the distance - so a 10-mile radus circle has an area of 314 sguare miles.) Unlike the NY subway, the DC metro was never intended to provide transportation for everyone or even for a majority - it's much too small a system for that. It was designed only to get some drivers off the road.

PS -the idea that Megan McArdle earns enough from her blog to drive into DC and pay $12 parking every day makes me want to puke. Think of all the bloggers doing really good work for free and then look at this simpering idiot.

[dug]

Bloix: she's quoting someone else. The indentation of the text is a hint.

[Kimmitt]

wab -- I meant prices for people making decisions to buy or not buy a car, not overall societal prices. Any societal price would have to factor in carbon footprints and (much more importantly) congestion.

Not that your point regarding public transit as a single point of power isn't well-taken. On the other hand, paying off the monopoly holders could serve as a nice second-best... and in the US, we just fire everybody if their union gets too uppity. Not the French approach. :)

[James Wimberley]

Psychologically, a 15 minute wait for a metro train feels unreasonable. In Strasbourg, when they built a shiny new tram system the city fathers correctly decided to pay the extra subsidy for a 5-minute service. At that frequency, you don't consult the timetable, you just go. So there has I think been a useful shift away from cars, even without a congestion charge.

In Lille, they have a driverless metro; the marginal costs of an extra train are so low that for much of the day the frequency is about 2 minutes, which doesn't feel like a wait at all. My daughter and her partner only need a car because of baby Cassie, not for getting to work.

[SERO]

Ms McArdle is quoting James Joyner on the relative dollar costs of public and private transport as if they based their decision on this more than "the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle."

According to the 2006 census, D.C. is 57% black.

[MattF]

Someone living an hour-long commute from downtown DC is not a good candidate for Metro use. Metro is aimed at getting inner-suburb commuters out of their cars, and for that, it works.

More specifically, a 15-20 minute drive to a Metro station means that she's either living in Virginia (maybe Fairfax/Loudon county?) or in the Maryland boondocks-- A 15 minute wait for a train during rush hour suggests the same thing, since fewer trains run to the far-out stations. Closer-in station have a 5 minute wait.

[Ken Houghton]

Being in the unusual position of having to defend Ms. McArdle, I repeat dug's point above: it's James Joyner, not Megan, who made those absurd assumptions, or who takes as much as 10 minutes to walk two blocks in DC, while stepping from HIS car directly into HIS office.

Megan's just stupid enough to (1) believe his assumptions, (2) not know how often the Metro runs, and (3) assume he is a typical Metro-eligible rider.

And, speaking as one who commutes to NYC, I have to say that DC clearly undercharges for parking, unless MISTER Joyner's office is subsidized.

[Barbara]

One can read on the metro, even standing up. One can get a walk to and from. And then, one never goes slowly insane from sitting in traffic stewing at the stupidity of one's fellow humans, both those who are in the cars on the same road and those who are spouting utter drivel on the radio.

[Julian Elson]

I've thought for a while that the primary way of funding wear-and-tear costs on roads should be a tax on tires, not gasoline, the idea being that abrasion between the road surface and the tire occur at somewhat similar rates, so wearing out a given tire produces a predictable amount of wear and tear on the road as well.

I'm not sure, though, that this is actually accurate from an engineering perspective -- that tires and roads actually do wear out at a proportional rate. This is an area where you actually need knowledge of technology, rather than just economic handwaving.

[c.l. ball]

Actually I agree with Joyner's overall point but his math sucks. The extra RT time for public tranport ranges from 100 minutes to -8 minutes, not 30-75.

I prefer to drive v. taking a bus/train when the drive is shorter time-wise or not significantly longer and puts me closer to my destination, because in my car I can pick the radio station or CD in relative quiet and I'm sitting in a more comfortable seat than on public transportation. If the price to take public transport was much cheaper and more efficient I would do it.

I've commuted from NJ to NYC by NJ transit bus and train rather than drive into NYC because parking there was (and is) very expensive,often located far from work, and I did not own a car. But it was a hassle -- buses and trains were often late (or early), crowded, so you had to stand for much of the trip, noisy, and cramped even if you had a seat.

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

Julian,
Trucks tear up the roads. Weight and speed are the drivers of road wear and tear. On multilane roads you will notice that the right hand lanes are beatup.
An 80,000 lb truck going 70-80mph will do a lot of damage to a road designed for a 60,000 lb truck going 60mph.
I always laugh when I hear some trucker complain about how the roads are beating up his truck.

[baileyman]

David Gordon Wilson of MIT has calculated the sum of automobile subsidy and externalized costs as on the order of $8 to $12 thousand annually per car.

Separately, there appears to be a movement to make transit free to all riders. This obviously boosts ridership, but also wins the politics of the situation.

[JRossi]

Slightly off subject, but doing some walking would be good for personal health as well as the environment. Physical inactivity/obesity are big problems. See Schroder New Eng J Med 357:1221-1228, free on the web.

[s9]

I've long been in favor of selling off the Interstate highway system to the highest bidder. I wonder if Halliburton could outbid the Chinese Red Army.

[s9]

I've long been in favor of selling off the Interstate highway system to the highest bidder. I wonder if Halliburton could outbid the Chinese Red Army.

[kharris]

As already noted, "...the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle" sort of stands out as, well, misplaced. We can argue over whether a dollar for one guy is the same as a dollar for another, but the convention is to equate dollars with dollars and move on. That is not the same thing as slipping in highly personal preferences, very likely shaped by habit, and claim to be making an argument about good public policy. I frankly think reading time on public transit is far superior to driving time in a personal vehicle. I like the fact that I'm safer (safer, by the way, can be fit into a public policy debate pretty cleanly). I can listen to music just as easily in a subway as in a car.

So an honest assessment of (Keerrrist, are we really listening to another, same old justification of?) the virtues of cars vs public transit), we'd leave out the "but I like the way I do things" part of the argument. You can pay for what you like. The policy decision should be about costs and safety and efficiency and the whales.

[Taylor]

you forgot to list one other important subsidy: the indirect subsidy provided by taxpayers via the department of defense. it is very *expensive* to ensure the free flow of oil from the rest of the world into the US. it would be an interesting analysis to determine how much of the defense budget is implicitly devoted to securing cheap oil.

let's assume the % of the defense budget devoted to securing oil supplies is 35% of the total discretionary DOD budget. that is roughly $150B per year. spread that $150B across the 8B barrels of oil the US consumes each year, and there is roughly a $25/bbl subsidy provided by the govt to our nation's travelers each year.

roughly 20 gallons of gasoline can be obtained from 1 bbl of oil. so the hidden subsidy provided by the DoD is perhaps as high as $1.25/gallon.

all of this reiterates the point that the true economic cost of a gallon of gasoline is far higher than the $2-3 we pay at the pump. a proper accounting would probably reveal that it's much closer to $10-15/bbl were you to add in the cost of carbon mitigation, road construction and securing access to resources.

so will someone please explain to me why a gasoline tax is political anathema? we ought to make the USERS of gasoline pay the true economic cost. not have this massive system of hidden subsidies which encourages over-consumption of a scarce resource and deters investment in a more efficient transportation network.

[Winston]

In California (where I've actually broken down and done the math for all levels of government), spending on road construction, maintenance running the DMV is really darn close to the total amount raised by vehicle and gasoline taxes. In 1993 the state was making a big profit on its road network, today (or actually in 2006) it is a small money loser because the car tax has been repealed and the state is spending more on transportation now. Based on this, I would expect to find that the D.C. area probably does subsidize motorists, but not to a large extent.
In general, gasoline taxes work well, but don't raise all the funds necessary to support the road network and are insensitive to peak period congestion. I think that congestion pricing is a good approach to raising the extra revenue needed because a higher gasoline tax would penalize long-distance drivers in uncongested locations and because congestion pricing has a direct congestion reducing effect. The best example of well-done congestion pricing in the U.S. is Orange County, CA's toll roads, which have tolls varying from around $1 to around $10 depending on day and time (tolls are lower on Fridays, for example, because traffic is lighter). Orange County's model is better than London's for U.S. cities because most don't have the extremely small dense central area with excellent public transit that London has (There are two exceptions to this, Manhattan and the San Francisco Financial district, which would benefit from a London style charge).

[jim]

I actually clicked through twice to Joyner's original post. He admits that there's probably nothing will wean him from his car, but he thinks that mass transit can be made more appealing to those poorer than him -- the "lower middle class" -- who will then switch from their cars to metro and leave the roads emptier for him. He doesn't see why urban planners don't want to encourage that.

There was an Onion piece a while ago about a guy who wanted everyone else to take mass transit. Life imitates The Onion.

[JonF]

Sometimes though mass transit really is better in the cost calculation. I live 23 miles from work. If I take the train the round trip costs $4 and takes one hour, from my front door to the office door (assuming the train is reasonably on time). I live one mile from the train station and the parking is free-- mass transit really should look into providing the latter everywhere if they want more ridership! (Note: I would not walk to the train station since the area where it's located is badly blighted and the climate here in S Florida is not conducive to walking or biking most of the year if you want to remain reasonably fresh and hygienic) Also, the office is c. 1/4 mile from the station so that's walkable although there's also a shuttle. Cost of driving the route round-trip is close to $10* (parking at the office is free) and takes about 45 minutes, assuming no traffic issues. I should note that major traffic delays are more common than seriously late trains. So I lose about 1/2 hour a day in exchange for $6 savings and less wear-and-tear on the car and my nerves-- an acceptable bargain, IMO. However I still do not take the train every day. Inevitably there's at least one day a week when I need my car for various errands during the work day and so must drive-- another issue to consider when debating mass transit.

* stop-and-go traffic at rush hour ensures that I do not get maximum gas mileage on the drive; on truly open freeway I do get better than 15 mpg.

[Doug K]

well, this is standard operating procedure for McMegan, surely ?
unexamined assumptions conflated with inaccurate accounting to produce MBA economics, a truly frightening sight. I cannot understand why anyone takes Jane seriously. (Yes I understand MM is only quoting Joyner, but she's quoting with approval and without noting any of problems in his assessment).

13.5 miles is about 40 minutes by road bicycle. Add 15 minutes to shower and change and you're still ahead of the game in cost and time.
Time to build more bike lanes is my conclusion.

[Ian Whitchurch]

Kharris,

I think the point being made by Sero about linking "...the privacy and autonomy I enjoy in my own vehicle" and "According to the 2006 census, D.C. is 57% black" is that our original correspondant may see an advantage of not having to mix socially with black people on public transport.

[prostratedragon]

Something from today's Salon on parking policies:

http://tinyurl.com/3c62nj

The trouble begins as capacity rules chase congestion:

"Before parking meters and residential parking permits, cities feared that they were running out of street parking. So municipalities began ordering businesses to provide parking and wrote zoning restrictions to ensure it. Columbus, Ohio, was first, requiring apartment buildings in 1923 to provide parking. In 1939, Fresno, Calif., decreed that hospitals and hotels must do the same. By the '50s, the parking trend exploded. In 1946, only 17 percent of cities had parking requirements. Five years later, 71 percent did.

"Today, those regulations could fill a book, and do. The American Planning Association's compendium of regulations, "Parking Standards," numbers 181 pages. It lists the minimum parking requirements for everything from abattoirs to zoos. It is a city planner's bible."

[piotr]

One thing makes me wonder: why most Americans equate geting sweaty from exercise with "unhygienic". Hence excuse not to walk or bike. (By the way, DC is rather flat, on a road bike 13.5 miles should take 40-50 minutes without big effort, which of course requires some bike routes. Good news: bicycles tend to be on time, and so far, there are few problems with congestion).

Seems to me that the feeling of some wetness on the skin is almost terrifying when it is not confined to the ritualistic environment of a gym.

[Diana]

I live in NYC and I agree that urban mass transit is much better than suburban mass transit. Anytime you want to get on the subway, you go. Timing your life around that train that only leaves once an hour outside of rush hour, as I've seen commuters do, is unpleasant, and after a two-hour commute each day basically makes your life suck.

[wcw]

Do not read The Megan.

Please.

[Cardinal Fang]

"13.5 miles is about 40 minutes by road bicycle," say Piotr and Doug.

No. No, it's not. Even supposing the cyclist could maintain a 20 mph pace for forty minutes, which very few cyclists can do, there are traffic lights in cities, and the cyclist has to stop at them.

Moreover, the commuting cyclist who did manage to ride 20 mph for 40 minutes in Washington DC would arrive at work soaking wet from the sweat.

I'm all in favor of cycling for transportation, and have been doing it for thirty years, but I prefer to face reality.

[SERO]

Gas in England today costs $7.47 per US gallon. London has the most extensive metro network in the world with 240 miles of track. The roads into the capital are horribly congested and the congestion charge applied for driving into its centre is $16.

All this disincentive to drive has had no lasting effect. People will drive at almost any price.

cf. J.G.Ballard, the Professor piloting his Spaceprius, or anytime you've been in a car as it enters a 'blighted area' and heard the simultaneous clunk from the previously unlocked doors.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

All those aircraft carrier groups around the Persian Gulf promoting democracy, freedom, goodness, and the ability of Megan to keep her privacy and autonomy when commuting ain't cheap. These costs should be factored in too.

[c.l. ball]

One thing makes me wonder: why most Americans equate geting sweaty from exercise with "unhygienic".

Most Americans equate sweaty and unwashed w/ smelly, not unhygienic. I don't want to spend 8 hours next to someone who biked :45 in 80 degree, humid weather.

Sweaty heading too or from work also equals expensive: sweaty means a permanently stained collar, even on darker shirt, after a few wears. Walking two blocks in DC in the summer -- or Bangkok on the Potomac -- means sweaty unless you walking really slowly and in the shade.

Some of this could be solved if we had public showers, but even this would only deal with some of it -- if you have to take a 3 and a 5 year-old to daycare before going to work, you might face a very long cycle dragging 100 lbs behind you. And many people are loathe to tow their kids in rush-hour traffic. Public transport and cyclists don't mix well. Bus drivers have limited visibility, stop frequently, and some tend to yield to no one (most Manhattan bus drivers yield to nothing -- pedestrians, cars, cyclists.)

Even worse, many buildings ban bicycles because they don't have the storage space inside, and they clog the elevators (as do, I would note, idiots who keep their back-packs on their backs; I miss the NYU's elevator operators' cry of 'Back-packs down; they're taking up space').

[c.l. ball]

>"13.5 miles is about 40 minutes by road
>bicycle," say Piotr and Doug.
>
>No. No, it's not. Even supposing the cyclist
>could maintain a 20 mph pace for forty
>minutes, which very few cyclists can do,
>there are traffic lights in cities, and the
>cyclist has to stop at them.

Fang is correct. A cyclist commuting in rush-hour traffic would be lucky to average 12 mph, making a 13.5 mile commute over an hour. Most people are not going to commute on a road cycle but on a commuter cycle or mountain bike for which 15 mph over *unobstructed* flats is on the high end given the gear ratios.

Why no road cycle in rush hour? Your side and rearward visibility is diminished given you posture on properly fitted road cycle; many road cycles don't have brakes on the top bars, so you better be hunched over the bars if you want to stop or slow down. They are more expensive (often over $1,000 v. under) than commuter or intro mountain bikes, so you're not going to want to leave the roadie sitting outside all day, as most locations will force you to do.

[JonF]

Re: One thing makes me wonder: why most Americans equate geting sweaty from exercise with "unhygienic".

????
I have to say this is a weird attitude. While it's Ok to get sweaty when exercizing or working outdoors, most of us like to be cleaned and well-groomed on more formal occasion, and if you work indoors (at an office, for example) that's at least a semi-formal occasion when your clothing should be clean and neat and dry and your hair reasonably well groomed. Standards have come down a bit it is true (most of us no longer have to wear suit and tie) but our HR departments and supervisors would take major issue with us were to arrive for the work day dripping and malodorous with sweat, attired in gym shorts and some ragged tank top. I fail to see why this should be a mystery, or passed off as an American peculiarity. Surely Europeans also dress up and groom themselves on occasion too?
By the way a couple years back we had one car for two of us, and my job was just five miles away, so I would get dropped off with bike in the morning and would ride home-- I didn't mind arriving home at the end of the day a bit dishevelled and the ride was good for me, not to mention a nice way to burn off the work day. But riding to work was simply not an option. Along with the sweat issues, it was also too risky to ride in the early morning (pre-dawn) traffic.

[Ed]

What does the Metro-averse rider do when waiting for and riding on the train -- sit or stand quietly staring off into space?

There are these new technologies called the book and the newspaper that can be read while waiting and riding.

And for the more adventurous, there are even wilder almost science fictiony things called cell phones, PDAs, laptops, etc., that can be used as well.

It's all true. I've done it myself.

And you don't need a license or collision coverage to use them.

[Cardinal Fang]

And yet, people in other countries manage to ride their bikes to work and to the store, without drowning in sweat or suffering social disapproval. Check out the Amsterdam cyclists on this page:http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/

In Amsterdam everyone rides. They ride in suits or skirts, with briefcases, carrying small children, adult passengers and dogs. Those men riding in suits carrying briefcases probably aren't changing when they get to work.

[John Drake]

If you car pool then you get to read, and even a two-person arrangement really cuts costs. However most people don’t want to car pool because their schedules vary and you might not have someone close to you who works in your office. The solution is a system of automatic routing using the cell phone network so everyone if effect becomes a potential taxi. All other systems cost too much and will ultimately fail. We must use our installed transportation more efficiently. It’s just silly to have most of the automobile fleet standing idle all day.

As for the DC Metro, I found it a horrible experience coming in from Fairfax even on an irregular basis. My daughter started out as a big supporter of public transportation until she rode the DC Metro everyday for four months. That did it. At a minimum we should outlaw strikes and reduce the wages of Metro employees. Ditto for BART, another white elephant of a transportation system.

[J Thomas]

The idea of a central dispatcher for whoever wants to provide taxi services sounds interesting. Presumably you'd want them to suggest their route and then match them up with people who're going nearby.

Presumably it would also handle the money transfer, that would be a big convenience.

And ID, if one of the participants turns up missing you'd want to know who the other one was.

A system like that could be a big improvement. It might drive the current taxicab companies out of business unless it turned out too inconvenient. And of course it would mostly be available to people with cellphones, secure money transfers, and valid ID. We'd need traditional taxis for the rest.

[John Drake]

Cell phones with GPS capability (all new cell phones) would locate the passenger and driver to the router. If you want to go from point A to point B you send a message to the router. The router (a computer system) finds a car nearby already on its way to somewhere near point B. The routing system can also give the driver a credit, which could be either monetary or a ride credit (for the times the driver wants to be a passenger). The router knows the true identity of both the driver and the passenger who have been vetted and both carry ID cards to show each other at the pick up point. The passenger would know the number of people in the drive car because the system would tell him that. He might want to reject cars with more than one occupant. Think of the possibilities with an iphone device. The router could transmit a picture to the passenger and driver as well as other ID. The router could also present choices to the parties. For example women might want only other women as drivers or passengers. Knowing a lot about the other party will build confidence. No one is forced to participate in this system, and you have the right to refuse the other party for any reason. The driver's insurance might go up, but I think that's a manageable cost.

The big obstacles to implementing such a system would come from the taxi industry, city and regional governments (they wouldn’t want to lose revenue for public transportation systems) and liability issues. The advantage of such a system comes from the minimum need for additional capital investment. The whole idea is to use our presently existing automobile fleet (which is immense) more efficiently. Moreover you can try the system in small test markets to see how it works and what the problems are.

BTW riding subway systems (Paris anyway) might be a health hazard. See Science Daily “Subway Dust May Trigger Lung Damage”

[JonF]

Re: And yet, people in other countries manage to ride their bikes to work and to the store, without drowning in sweat or suffering social disapproval.

The climate in Amsterdam is rather different from the climate in S Florida where I live. Here it's a rare day that isn't unpleasantly humid in the morning, even in the winter. When I went to college in Ann Arbor I commuted by bike (three miles one way) except in the dead of winter when snow and ice made biking too dangerous. But that was autumn and spring in Michigan (and of course the dress code was College Grunge not Business Casual). Sometimes the extra body heat generated was even a blessing. Moreover Ann Arbor is a very bike friendly city, well-provided with bike lanes and its drivers whether they like it or not know that they must tolerate cyclists. Look, I love to bike, but as a means of commuting it has serious practical drawbacks, involving not just the side effects on our grooming and apparel, but also safety, limited distance, and inability to carry any sort of substantial cargo. We should be working on better mass transit for commuters, not telling everyone to hop on a bike.

[Wouter]

Those who live in warm areas or too far from work to cycle may want to consider a motorized bicycle or a scooter. They are more efficient than a car, can travel at decent speed and eliminate the sweating issue.