Cycle of Suburban Development

The cycle goes like this:

You have a metro area. Metro areas are always expanding. Infill development is almost non-existent, because it's cheaper to build on the edge.

Suburban development runs like this: A developer buys a parcel of farmland, creates a subdivision plan, and creates 'paper' lots. They then sell to a builder, who takes the plan and does the actual construction: utilities first (sewer, water, electric) and then the houses. Roads get done after the foundations are poured. The the houses 'got vertical'.

The land buyer buys at a certain price per acre, and holds the land until it becomes valuable enough for suburban development. Rule of thumb is that the land cost is 20% of the house, so a $200k hour will sit on $40k of land. Assuming a quarter acre lot, that's $160k/acre.

Now, there are people who want more land (for farming or a quasi-rural lifestyle or for keeping horses).  They want about 5 acres, but can't afford afford it at $160k/acre. So they go even further out, paste the edge of the metro area, and buy farm land at $20k/acre from Farmer John.

Ten years later, the metro area has expanded, and the land prices have increased. So the farmer next door to Farmer John sells out, at $40k/acre. But since the land price has doubled, new residents can only afford half as much, so the new in-movers take 2.5 acres. Big enough for horses, but too small to plow.  Ten year after that, the land brokers start buying land at $80k. Ten years after that, developers buy that at $160k, and develop it as subdivisions.

So the land is a mix of farmland, 'hobby farms', horse property, and new subdivisions. In a few decades, the rest of the farmland will be subdivided and the 'hobby farms' developed as townhomes.

Regarding the equity of mass transit.

I would love a per ticket charge on every transit ticket to fund mass transit capital spending on buses and guide-way. The Highway Trust Fund has been a reliable slush fund to promote road building for the past 100 years. I'd love transit to have the same thing.

I'd also like mandatory mass transit parking on private property as a condition of zoning approval. Oh, and complete elimination from liability from vehicular manslaughter--that'd be cool. 

And exclusive 'transit-only' lanes, the way cars have. Fairs fair, right? And heck, I'd take as many dedicated lane miles as proportional to the number of person-miles traveled. If mass transit is 3% of the total, 3% of the lane miles seems fair.

 

Oh! And I'd like automobiles to shoulder their share of providing mobility for those unable to drive, either due to poverty or disability, that mandatory 'lifeline service' transit agencies get stuck with. The DOT can should that, right, out of gas-tax funds? Should be easy with Uber/Lyft, although mandatory ADA wheelchair compliance could be ticklish.

That's the dream--for transit to compete of a level playing field. 

 

Any talk of  about transit needing to 'compete with the automobile' is bullshit. 'Competition' implies a fair playing field. I'm not even asking for all the past-advantaging done for automobility to be considered, just for DOT's to shoulder the requirements we ask transit agencies to shoulder.

"We added a tiny amount of new highway capacity in comparison to the population growth and pent-up demand for it"

There is no reason we should be adding highway capacity in proportion to highway growth. Trying to build our way out of congestion is a dead paradigm [1]. Times have changed [2]. We know that GDP grows at a faster rate than population, and that GDP and VMT (vehicle miles traveled) are closely correlated. 

Keeping up
If we want to keep vehicle delay (roadway congestion) under control, we need to add lane miles at the same rate we add VMT. Seems plausible, given that GDP grows at the same rate as VMT. But only if we keep up--once congestion on a road reaches a certain level, people choose different routes, different times, and different modes. And then when we widen the road again, the people just change back, the 'triple convergence'. So once a road is congested, it will never be uncongested again.

Even if we double the size of the road?
Nope. People will just divert from other times, other routes, and other modes, to the new wider and faster route. And in the long-term, people will react to higher driving speeds by moving further away from things. When we first built the interstates, there was no congestion, and everyone moved out the central cities--until about 1970, when the 'Urban Transportation Problem' of roadway congestion happened, and people stopped moving, because there was too much congestion. And so we began to widen, and have never been able to stop.

Digging a Hole 
When you did a hole, the deeper the hole goes, the harder it gets, because each increment of depth you've already created is harder than the last--you did the easiest stuff first, when you started digging. Adding lane miles is like that. At first, we just paved the existing street. Then we eliminated on-street parking. Then we took the parkstrip. Then the sidewalk. Then the front-yards in front of houses. But at some point, to widen the road, you have to buy the whole house. And for the biggest roads, that's where we are at. TexDOT is proposing to take an entire subdivision (?!!) to widen it's central freeway. UDOT is going to take a row of houses along Foothill Boulevard, at $350k each.

Rising obligations
The second half of the problem is maintenance. Roads don't stay built--we have to maintain them. Every lane mile requires a certain amount of money to stay in good condition. The amount of money varies by the age of the road--costs are low at first, but rising, with a big lump sum every 45 years or so, when the road has to be 'rebuilt'.  The more roads we have, the more we have to maintain. [3].

So when we try to build our way out of congestion, we're taking on not only the cost of new roads, but the cost of maintaining all roads we've already built. GDP/capita is increasing as fast as VMT/capita, but not as fast as VMT/capita+maintenance per capita. [4]

The reality is actually worse, because the money from gas tax doesn't exactly track GDP. Gas tax revenue is a function of VMT and fuel efficiency. Fuel efficiency rose for decades, so the amount of gas tax collected per VMT fell over time, and we refused to raise it. (Why the Highway Trust Fund is broke, btw).  [5]

In conclusion, we can't build our way out of congestion, because the cost of keeping up with congestion grows faster than our ability to pay for it.

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[1] If you are non-metro area with slow population growth, you can do it! But you'll got broke paying for it, 30 years hence.  Check out Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns for more on that.

[2] Gas used to cost five cents a gallon. I suspect it was not the 'Freeway Revolts' that put an end to US roadbuilding, but rather the Arab Oil crisis (1973, 1978(?)). Check the spikes in 1973, and again in 1978. Oil prices jumped 20x in 10 years! Destroyed demand for driving as well as the major input into road construction.

[3] It's worse if we try to 'stretch' the road when the repairs come due. Water gets into the cracks of the roads, the freeze-thaw cycle levers the asphalt apart or washes out the dirt underneath the road.Then average annual cost of maintenance per lane mile increases.

[4] How do I know? It's a bit complicated, but I used Excel. I found some numbers on construction costs per lane mile, and cost of the annual maintenance costs of roads, on a per lane-mile basis (and co I had one column of GDP growing at a certain rate, one column of VMT growing at the same rate, one column of lane miles growing at the same rate. And a cost per lane mile, growing at the same rate as GDP and VMT. Then I added a cost for maintenance, based on the numbers I found, times the cumulative lane miles built. Then I summed the cost of new lane miles and the cost of lane mile maintenance. Then I graphed them, to see if GDP kept pace with the total cost of roads. It didn't. Over time, the cost of roads outstripped the increase in GDP. When this happened varied by what I used as my inputs, but the dynamics are inevitable: the combined growth in the cost of lane miles and the cost of lane-mile maintenance outgrew GDP.
  Mathematically, it would be something like X + .00025X > X

[5] Ah, the ever-reliable "Only because the Mass Transit Account!" argument. I'll address that elsewhere. Today, I'll simply note that:  I would love a per ticket charge on every transit ticket to fund mass transit capital spending on buses and guide-way. The Highway Trust Fund has been a reliable slush fund to promote road building for the past 100 years. I'd love transit to have the same thing.
I'd also like  mandatory mass transit parking with every new development, and exclusive 'transit-only' lanes, the way cars have. Fairs fair, right? Oh, and complete elimination from liability from manslaughter--that'd be cool. And heck, I'd take as many dedicated lane miles as proportional to the number of person-miles traveled. If mass transit is 3% of the total, 3% of the lane miles seems fir. 

Will the rural aged take Lyft?

Sparked by this article, which mentions the increasing number of car-less households in rural areas. 

If you are old, and drive infrequently, at what point does it make sense to just quite owning a car and rely on UBER instead?

Basically never.

If you own a car, the marginal cost of owning it is pretty small, especially if you don't drive it much. You are basically only paying for car insurance, and I have to imagine car insurance is quite low for old people. Metrics like accidents by cohort are probably pretty good--the rate per mile is (likely) high, but the mileage is low. And old people drive like old people--slow and careful--no high-G turns, no abrupt moves.

As a teenager, many of my friends inherited the 'grandma car': usually an old, low mileage, usually well maintained high-end sedan. Either grandpa had died, or grandma was so old that she no longer drove and needed to be chauffered regardless.

If you elderly mother dies, you can sell the car, and take the cash. But cash is fungible, and that has to be split with siblings, or dealt with by the tax authorities. So it's often easier, psychologically, to keep the car. So there is no reasons to even suggest that grandma sell the car while alive, especially when there is a grandchild who can simply 'borrow' it on a semi-permanent loan.

So if you are old and rural and car-less, when are you giving up your car? You aren't. So whence come these wonderous carless rural households? Hint - they aren't wondrous. The statistic on households without cars always peeves me, because it conflates two phenomena--that of car-free households, and that of car-less households. The former does no lack for a car, while the latter does.

Car-less, you live multi-modal: walk, bike, bus, train, scooter, lyft, uber, rides from friends (1) (helps if you are willing to provide some gas money, something Venmo now makes trivial). But most of those forms of transport are urban: the old walking cities and their streetcar suburbs. Once you get into FHA designed (non-market) suburbia, the options are more limited.

So anyone who has a car and can keep it, does. So the only people in rural areas which lack a car are thus not the 'car-free', but rather the 'car-less'--the rural poor, once freed by automobility, are now trapped by auto-dependence. Historically, there might have been a general store (2), scattered about. But now, there is only Wal-Mart. Which everyone needs to drive to, or be driven to. It's seems unfair that Wal-Mart is the place where all the bus-lines go, but it makes a certain amount of sense-without an existing main street or shopping district, where else to get one-stop shopping done?


(1) In rural areas, the traditional form of 'ride-sharing' is called hitch-hiking. It was how my uncles got to and from the family farm to a town where they could actually catch a bus.
(2) Dollar General a notable exception.

Rail to Logan?

North Carolina (barring Charlotte) lacks rail transit. But they do have state sponsored Amtrak, the Piedmont service. Makes me reflect on commuter rail and passenger rail. In Europe, the two represent a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Inter-regional passenger trains and commuter trains share the same track, just at different frequencies.

Utah has FrontRunner, running from Provo to Ogden. And it faces regular calls to extend FrontRunner, even unto Logan (Utah's other Metro region). Efforts to extend FrontRunner north haven't really worked out--simply not enough demand. But there might be enough demand for something less than the hourly commuter rail frequency, but something more like state sponsored Amtrak. There is an existing rail line between Ogden and Logan, it is very indirect, running an S-curve around the mountains.There is also an existing highway (HWY-91) that runs directly between Brigham City and Logan. So it would be very difficult for the train to compete with driving.But there might be a demand for passenger service regardless, for the non-driving population--Logan is home to Utah State University, with 27,000 students.

That said, that said, if it will be feasible for rail, it should be feasible for Commuter Express Buses.  And if it’s worth $100m in rail investment, it’s worth $100m of asphalt investment in dedicated lanes. (No implication that 100% of the lane need to be dedicated--just the most congested section).