New York's Transit Crisis, a Vehicle Miles Traveled Tax, and the Rail Fetish
- Congestion pricing.* It’s fairly rare that I agree with Ryan Avent rather than with Megan McArdle, but the fact that the Ravitch Plan — which called for tolls on the East River and Harlem River bridges and a region-wde payroll tax — was ever taken seriously suggests to me that performance parking, at the very least, is a realistic possibility. The congestion charge as originally conceived might not fly, but some version of it, say variable tolls on the East River bridges, just might.
I’ve seen one excellent alternative to the Ravitch plan, from New York city Comptroller Bill Thompson, a mayoral aspirant. To my chagrin, Thompson opposes the East River tolls, but again, he’s a mayoral aspirant. He does, however, favor a clever car tax in lieu of the insane payroll tax. From the Daily News:
Thompson’s plan would stick all metro-area car owners with supersized-vehicle use taxes based on the weight of their car.
The sliding-scale tax would be in addition to the sliding-scale, weight-based state registration fee they already pay every two years. That means about $200 extra for cars and $400 or more for heavyweights like SUVs.
- The VMT.* Why does weight matter? It’s not so much the gas mileage issue as the impact of heavier vehicles on roads. A weight-based fee — and, for that matter, a vehicle miles traveled tax like the one floated by Ray LaHood — is a real user fee. Gas taxes don’t capture the fact that highly fuel-efficient vehicles still cause wear and tear on our shared public infrastructure, and they don’t adequately reflect the damage caused by “super-sized” vehicles. The White House has shot down LaHood’s excellent idea, and transit enthusiasts Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias were also, I’m sorry to say, opposed. This is despite the fact that Ezra acknowledges the central virtue of the VMT:
It’s also got a nice internal logic: LaHood is arguing for the tax in order to fund infrastructure — and in particular, highway — construction. The heaviest drivers — both in terms of frequency and car weight — exert the heaviest wear-and-tear on the roads. Why shouldn’t they pay?
Matt, in contrast, writes:
When it comes to pricing driving-related activities, it makes sense to charge people from things that actually impose costs on others—burning gasoline, and taking up space on crowded roads—not the mere act of driving.
My ideal would be a weight-based VMT. Oregon, an awesomely experimental state, is on the case.
So how about a gas tax? Jim Manzi has ably pointed out the flaws (actually, his NR piece is best, but I can’t find it online) in the arguments deployed by pro-gas-taxers, and I find his analysis very persuasive. A gas tax isn’t a panacea. I do think a higher gas tax is vastly preferable to CAFE standards, and I wonder if we’d be better placed if we thought of these measures as substitutes. Economist Johannes Van Biesebroeck argued along similar lines in this op-ed on how to most effectively aid the auto industry.
- The rail fetish.* I love trains. But if we’re going to spend money on trains, we should spend it on
(a) Freight trains, as Phil Longman vividly explains:
In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 83 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s carbon emission by 39 percent and oil consumption by 15 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 10 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.
(b) Existing mass transit and
© Cheap, incremental improvements. Ben Adler wrote a terrific item for The Next American City on HSR plans in California.
Many progressives and smart growth advocates have said that California struck a blow for progressive infrastructure construction. …
It’s useful to look at the $42 billion estimated for the high-speed rail project in terms of other public transit projects. The Second Avenue subway line in New York City is projected to cost $16.8 billion to build and will transport 600,000 people daily. That’s 210 million rides per year, many of which are currently carried out by some form of automobile: taxis, cars, or buses. The California high-speed rail line, on the other hand, hopes to have just 55 million trips by 2030. That’s one-third the annual riders for three times the price of construction. What California needs is a Second Avenue Subway equivalent; it may be a network of buses rather than trains, but that seems to me to be the model worth imitating.
And as Adler noted earlier today, it looks like we’re going to get a saner approach to HSR.
Jim Manzi’s arguments against a gas tax go double for a VMT though.
This chart (source) shows that weight is almost completely captured by mpg – taxing mpg de facto taxes weight; and taxing weight taxes mpg. I’d prefer the option where the government doesn’t have a subpoena-able device tracking my car – or where I don’t have to go to the DMV another time every year to get my government-allocation of driving miles checked by a bureaucrat.
I’m not against a VMT per se, I just don’t see the obvious advantages.
— Rortybomb · Feb 24, 08:42 PM · #
The VMT tax has some advantages, especially if it varies by vehicle weight (capturing wear and tear on roads, better suited for the long term if we switch to electric cars); on the other hand, a gas tax also has significant advantages (for example, it captures the negative externality of carbon emitted by gas guzzlers). Why is this an either-or proposition? Why not have both, and set them each at lower levels than you would if you were to adopt either one on its own?
— Dan Miller · Feb 24, 10:28 PM · #
The VMT tax has some advantages, especially if it varies by vehicle weight (capturing wear and tear on roads, better suited for the long term if we switch to electric cars)
I agree with this. However I think that the wear/tear from weight/travel is captured by the gas tax.
As for cars that get better gas mileage for their weight (like the electric car) – from a quick google search, around 2.5% of all cars/trucks sold in 2008 were broadly defined as hybrid. As a percent of total auto stock, it is going to be incredibly low.
Is it worth the tradeoff in paying the fixed costs in setting up a new taxing apparatus, along with the social cost of having to arrange everyone going to the DMV every year to pay those miles travel taxes, to capture an extra 20% marginal tax on that < 2% of drivers? I could see an efficiency gain if 30% of the auto stock was electric, but by what year would that even be projected to happen?
— Rortybomb · Feb 24, 10:48 PM · #
Where are you blogging these days rortybomb?
— Freddie · Feb 24, 10:51 PM · #
Your claim about the value of the 2nd Avenue subway over HSR is a bit bizarre: assuming the goal is to reduce carbon emissions (or even just reroute usage away from gasoline and towards domestically produced energy sources), the 55 million riders between LA and Vegas will be transferring about 1.5 billion passenger miles from automobile to mass transit. I doubt the average 2nd avenue subway rider travels 100 miles a day.
— Kartik · Feb 24, 11:16 PM · #
Kartik — easy explanation. My sole goal is not reducing carbon emissions. I’m also interested in increasing mobility for poor and working class people, and that is Ben’s priority as well — read his post.
— Reihan · Feb 25, 04:39 AM · #
Freddie – I’m still over at the blogspot ho-hum blog, but I just haven’t written anything much lately, hence killing the link in name. Evidently I’m dedicating my online time to writing comments on blogs that read like angry troll spam to me after I click submit. Oh well! I’m enjoying ordinary-gentlemen quite a bit, by the way.
— Rortybomb · Feb 25, 08:31 AM · #
Perhaps proposing the VMT is just another one of those tactics to scare people into taking a route they wouldn’t otherwise (raising the gas tax) just to avoid the more drastic but mostly imaginary alternative (do we really think we’re going to outfit every car with an untamperable VMT tracker in any less than 20 years?). And if that’s the case then I’m all for it :-P.
— anonymous · Mar 8, 05:52 AM · #