http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/03/americas-cities-are-still-too-afraid-make-driving-unappealing/8564/
By Emily Badger, March 6, 2014
The morning I wrote this I took public transportation to work. I hopped
on the bus around the corner from my house, then the train for a few
stops farther. I took mass transit because it was convenient, because my
card was already preloaded with the cash that diverts from my paycheck,
and because the ride gave me 20 minutes to start the day browsing
Twitter.
Baked into this decision, however, were a number of other nearly
subliminal calculations about the alternatives not taken. I did not
drive the car (yes, my household has a car) because downtown Washington,
D.C., is a hot mess at rush hour, and because parking near the office
costs the equivalent of a fancy hamburger a day. I did not bike because
it was snowing. (
Again.) And I did not walk because the distance was too far.
My commuting choices — just like everyone's — are the sum of the
advantages of one transportation mode weighed against the downsides of
all other options. Or, more succinctly: my feelings about the bus are
mediated by what I'm thinking about my car.
At a macro level, this decision-process implies that there are two ways
to shift more commuters out of single-occupancy vehicles and into other
modes of transportation, whether that's biking,
carpooling, walking, or
transit. We can incentivize transit by making all of those other
options more attractive. Or we can disincentivize driving by making it
less so. What's become increasingly apparent in the United States is
that we'll only get so far playing to the first strategy without
incorporating the second.
"One of the things I keep looking at is cities like Boulder, Davis
[California], and Portland — places well-known for walking and biking,"
says Daniel Piatkowski, a recent graduate of the design and planning
doctoral program at the University of Colorado at Denver. I met him
earlier this year at the Transportation Research Board annual
conference, where he was presenting on what he's simply come to describe
as the
"carrots" and "sticks" that might be deployed to get people out of their cars.
"We're still not seeing any really significant mode shifts, despite
decades of investment," he says, still talking about the cycling
capitals of Portland and Boulder. "The crucial component that's missing
is that we're not implementing any policies that disincentivize
driving."
We can quibble over how to define "really significant" mode shifts. In
Portland, the share of commuters who get to work by bike is about
6 percent, well above the national average (roughly
half a percent). But Piatkowski's latter point is unquestionably true:
relative to European cities, it is exceptionally hard in U.S. communities to implement real disincentives to driving.
There are ways to do it. We could reduce parking availability or raise parking rates. We could implement
congestion pricing.
We could roll back subsidies for gas and highways and public parking
garages. We could tie auto-insurance rates or infrastructure taxes to
how much
people actually drive.
All of these "sticks," to use Piatkowski's term, would have a real
impact on how people chose to get around. And that impact would no doubt
be larger than what we get from building new bike lanes, sidewalks, or
bus stops.
But these are the options we almost never choose. For his research,
Piatkowski looked at four cities that won grants each worth $25 million
to increase biking and walking as part of a federal
Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program.
Unanimously, those cities spent almost all of their money on "carrots."
Piatkowski couldn't even find much literature on the impact of driving
disincentives in the United States because so few are implemented.
"On a scale of getting to a place that is like Zurich or Freiberg, one
of these really epic walkable, transit-friendly, bikeable places," he
says. "We're just so far away from that."
• • • • •
Piatkowski and his research collaborator, Wesley Marshall, aren't
arguing that cities shouldn't deploy carrots like striping bike lanes or
improving bus service or paving shaded sidewalks for pedestrians. After
all, driving disincentives won't be all that effective if commuters
don't have viable alternatives. More likely, these would just harm
low-income commuters by increasing the burdens of driving without
decreasing the burdens of alternative transportation.
The question is really how far we can get down the path of least
resistance, pursuing only the politically easy tactics. If the goal at
the end of the day is changing behavior, how much can you really achieve
by showing people a nice new bike lane?
"It's going to be marginal," says Marshall, an assistant professor in
the College of Engineering and Applied Science at UC-Denver. "You can't
expect to put in a bike lane and for it to be a magical elixir in most
of the country."
That's not always the case. Carrot-like improvements to transit in New York City have
significantly changed behavior
because disincentives to drive are already built into the environment.
New York is expensive and crowded, which means that parking is costly
and congestion is bad. But elsewhere — in cities where driving is
systematically subsidized in so many ways — the disincentives would have
to come from more explicit policy.
In the absence of such policies, Arlington County, Virginia, offers a
good case study for the upper bounds of what's possible with incentives
alone. The county's commuter services office runs one of the most
advanced travel demand management programs in the country, just across
the Potomac from Washington, D.C.
"The stuff we focus on is much more mundane, ground-level tactics,"
says Chris Hamilton, chief of the county's Commuter Services Bureau.
"The
Bike Arlington guys are just trying to help so many adults over the hump of riding a bike for the first time again."
The county runs commuter stores and bike clinics. It teaches people how
to swipe transit cards and find the bus. It works with building
managers to coax them into putting bike lockers in the basement, and
transit screens in the lobby. It prods local employers to subsidize
transit cards and bike-share memberships.
Through all of this work, Hamilton's office calculates that 42,000
trips a day in the county that would otherwise take place in a
single-occupancy vehicle now occur in other modes instead.
Three-quarters of those trips are taken by mass transit. All of that has
come through lowering the barriers or increasing the appeal of
alternative transportation.
That's an impressive number. But when asked if he wouldn't rather the
county just tax the heck out of parking, Hamilton laughs. He knows that
would make his job much easier. "We wouldn't have to do any of this," he
says.
A creative city might be able to make a disincentive feel like an incentive. Piatkowski points to a
"parking cash-out" law in California that requires employers to give workers a cash allowance to not use parking.
"The stick then becomes missing out on the reward," Piatkowski says.
But why not just wield disincentives as what they honestly are?
"Behavior change" sounds vaguely manipulative (whether we're talking
about behavior involving automobiles or
thermostats). But in this context, the disincentives are really about removing subsidies and distortions from the market. Parking
isn't really free.
Gas taxes
don't actually cover the costs of maintaining our roads. So why is it
so hard to disincentivize driving at the same time that we incentivize
the alternatives, at least until they're in some better kind of
equilibrium?
"Because we're afraid," Hamilton says. "Because we don't have the guts
to pull the levers on what we want. We know that we want a walkable,
bikeable, transit community. We're building it. But we're afraid to push
the disincentive lever too hard."