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.

The Legacy of Prohibition

As a culture, America has minimal capacity for multifamily urbanism. We used to know how to do it, then we made it illegal for so long we lost the know-how. And the infrastructure, and the institutions. And so to do it again, we have to reinvent it all over again. We have to change the laws, build the infrastructure, develop the institutions. It's slow going.  It's like Prohibition, when we banned alcohol. Except that the ban has gone on so long that all the former brewers are dead or retired, and banks no longer know how to estimate the risk of breweries, so they won't fund them, and cities still won't permit them to locate within city limits. Oh, and anyone who buys a bottle of non-alcoholic juice gets a 10% discount from the Federal Government, and doesn't have to pay sales tax.  

Competing Urbanisms

Attached housing is a different way of living than detached housing. Shared systems means reliance on communal assets, and hence some governance method for managing those communal assets. If you are poor, and your neighbors are trashy, there is an insoluble communal action dilemma, a veritable prisoners dilemma. It only makes sense for you expend effort cleaning up the central lawn if everyone else does it. In cases like bungalow courts, the number of people involved is small enough that the small-group dynamics habits evolution has hardwired into humans can work it out. As the number of people increases, individual agency is diluted, no one is responsible, and you get The Projects.

*Arguably, attached townhomes would work...but most 'townhomes' are actually condos, from a legal/governance setting, with a condo board, so they have a method of managing communal assets.

Market Urbanism

Markets are efficient only through repeated transactions. Market attempts at mega-projects reliably fail, falling foul of the same problems as public mega-projects. Plans that need everything to go right inevitably fail. The larger the number of things that need to go right, the larger the number of critical failure points. Like evolution, markets are efficient providers because they are good as discarding inefficient participants. Iteration is essential.

Iteration is also essential if you ask the government to do anything. A government is subject to the same kind of errors as any market participant (and a few others to boot). So if you are going to ask your government to provide something, it can't be a one-off. It has to be something which is going to be provided again and again--something your government can practice at**.

Mega-projects are stupid. If something needs scale to be successful, chances of success are marginal*. If something can't be built incrementally, don't do it. Demonstration projects that relies on scaling up later (monorails monorails monorails) are doomed to failure. To forestall the inevitable failure of mega-projects, demand everything be phased: broken down into smaller segments. If none of the segments are independently viable, odds are that the project as a whole isn't either. 

*Simplicio points to social media of Facebook and Google as a counter-examples: But I'm old enough to remember the silent evidence: MySpace and AltaVista, and the whole cemetery of non-Google not-Facebook social media firms.

**There is no guarantee you government will get better at provision. There is no competition, and no way to discard the 'inefficient provider'. Providing better provision of public goods requires a public agency with a cultural commitment to self-improvement. (Go read Good to Great: The social sectors). 

How I'd do zoning: Nuisance

As time goes by, I like the idea of zoning less and less. It's a useful tool for planners, but it's really only useful for generating suburban sprawl. Rather, it's useful for real-estate speculation, as it ensure that the context around the new development is less likely to suddenly change: No pork rendering facility will suddenly occur next to the planned ranchettes. (This is largely a problem of suburbia, because only in the context of highway-enabled sprawl do land values change suddenly and systematically). 

So: How I propose to do zoning: Nuisance-based. Say, for example, there are three dimensions of nuisance: noise, shade and traffic. A 'noise' zone gets labeled by the maximum (peak) noise that can be generated at property edge: Airports would be in a 150 decibel zone, industrial in a 120 decibel zone, and cottage residential a 60 decibel zone. Some of the zones would be established by roadway proximity: An arterial highway generates 80 decibels.  Seems too difficult to map? Someone already did.

Shadow-zoning is also simply to explain: Nothing built on a lot can cast shadow on an adjacent lot. (Shadow on public ROW is ok). For urban locations, the rule could be 'no shadow on the lot behind you'. 

'Traffic' means traffic generation: How much traffic your expect to generate. That's easy to measure: Count the parking stalls. Uses with similar numbers of parking stalls are compatible. If the house next door can park two cars on the lot, a commercial building with two parking stalls is also acceptable. A 7-11 with four stalls in the parking lot would be a legal use, while a CVS with 20 would not be. Size of lot would be irrelevant--this is not a 'per 1000 SF' measure.  (Elsewise, Target would just buy up a big lot and generate huge amounts of traffic). 

Form-based zoning beats the pants off Euclidian (use-based) zoning, but it's mostly useful for infilling single-family neighborhoods. Mixed-use areas are going to need something better. 

 

Doom Loop

So, let me posit an argument: As long as the accessibility supplied by highway outstrips the dis-accessibility of congestion, urban areas can keep expanding. As long as the supply of urban land keeps growing at the same rate as demand, land prices remain low. When this ceases, the price of existing urbanized land begins to rise. As those values rise, fewer and fewer people are able to buy, and the rents from that land ownership accrues to fewer and fewer people. This rents enable the purchase of more land, so there is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Over time, fewer and fewer people own their houses.

Now, this cycle has two possible outcomes: Socialism or Communism. In the Communism case, you get violent revolution by a oppressed proletariat renter class. The US is largely immune, because we have a functional democracy, and can enact 'regime change' non-violently.*

In the socialism case, governments recognize housing has outstripped private ownership for the majority of the population, and start producing 'social housing', where the government owns/rents the land. This is basically where Europe went with post-war welfare states (Britain, Germany). Britain sold off all of it's social housing under Thatcher, permitting people to buy it. It created a one-off surge of Tory home-owners. But now the same problem has re-occurred: The population needs housing, the land is owned by rentier land-lands, and the rent is too damn high.

Fools (conservative and liberal) would like to believe that this dynamic can be fixed by making it easy to buy homes: downpayment assistance, subsidized mortgage rates, mortgage interest tax deductions, home owners property tax deductions. It's foolish because it ignores the underlying dynamic: A fixed supply of land driving increasing land rents.

It's also grossly inegalitarian; it disproportionately benefits the wealthy. Having money (enough to become a landowner) should not be reward by a government handout. Arguably, if it reaches enough people, it's re-distributive. But what share is that? And how shall it be measured? Using the home ownership rate is almost criminal in its duplicity: It reflect people who could buy homes in the last 50 years, not people who can buy houses now.

To my mind, the solution is Georgist: The value of land is not created by private action, but by public investment in transportation. Those outlays should be recouped, in proportion to the degree of value they have created.









*Assuming we have fair boundaries, rather than 'pocket burroughs' owned by one party through gerrymandering....

Urban Phase Shift?

One of the comments on this article was so great I had to repost it:

When I took my Urban Economics course from Barton Smith, one of the observations Smith told us in class was that whenever prices for major goods and services in an urbanized area keep going up (and housing is certainly a big part of most people's budgets), eventually prices will reach a point where they will become a market signal to everyone that the urbanized area needs to stop growing. Population growth will either come to a halt, or people will start leaving until prices fall to an equilibrium where people can afford to live there again. - Neil Meyer 

I think it gets to the core of why city promoters like transportation improvements--without affordable housing, cities can't grow. Affordable housing includes both rents and access costs. As rents in one area rise, people can offset that by moving to nearby areas with lower rents (and higher access costs).
In pre-industrial (and third world slums) the only access available is by walking, and so some truly hideous densities result.

It's theoretically feasible that a city might stop growing***. But most cities don't--instead, they invest in transportation improvements. NYC built it's first subways in the name of "De-Congestion".

One of the ideas I'm kicking round is an urban scaling induced 'phase shift' in the effectiveness of transportation improvements. Namely, total metro population drives average metropolitan density. (As you get bigger, you naturally get denser). At small sizes and low densities, auto-mobility works: Land is cheap, parking is available, walking anywhere is madness. And it keeps working, as long as your addition of automobile capacity keeps up with congestion.

However, while travel is an 'derived demand' in terms of the number of trips made, it's a 'induced demand' in terms of the length of trips made. If you make traveling cheap and easy, people go further.* Urban form is 'set' by the dominant transportation mode at the time of construction**. So places developed under conditions of auto-mobility tend to be low-density with segregated land-uses. The large amount of travel required to get around for basic needs is 'baked-in' at that point.

This is problematic, if the metropolitan area keeps expanding.

from: https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch6en/conc6en/cellular_automata.html

As the number of zones increases, the average distance from one zone to another also increases. Which means, all else equal, the amount of travel required to get to all the places you want to go also rises. Simply because things are scattered about: home in one place, work in another, groceries in a third, kids-school in a fourth, soccer in another, ballet-practice in another, dentist in yet another.

The big problem is that the increase in average distance between all of these things is non-linear. Every additional 'zone' you add to a city, the average distance rises more than it did for the last zone.
Even if the road lane miles per capita (and associated costs) remain constant, the amount of travel doesn't. As travel demand outstrips supply, congestion results.

Some cities try to fix this increasing congestion with massive increases in road-building. Failure is inevitable. Exponential increases in travel require exponential increases in road capacity, imposing exponential costs on a linearly growing population.

And so at some point, every city gets the 'rapid transit bug'. And it has to be rapid transit, because only rapid transit makes it possible to avoid congestion. Non-rapid transit, such as regular buses and streetcars, are undeniably cheaper to build than rapid transit (sometimes by an order of magnitude).

But that doesn't matter. Rapid transit is premium transit*****. It's transit for choice riders (people who could drive, but choose not to). And to get people to make that choice, it has to be better (in some way) that the driving alternative.

Non-rapid transit suffers from congestion. It's less convenient, less reliable, and less comfortable than  your personal automobile. You don't have a 'locker' to store things in, and hauling groceries is difficult. Thus, it can almost never compete with a private automobile (excepting when parking costs/hassles are enormous).****

Rapid transit is better than the personal automobile when it is a) faster, b) cheaper, and c) more reliable. 'a' only happens when congestion is fierce; transit vehicles make repeated stops. 'b' seems simple, but for most people a car is a 'stock' of mobility they can draw upon even with no money, while transit is a 'pay-per-use' thing, so it seems expensive, even if it is less expensive in aggregate. Again, 'c' is reliant on congestion to work.

In summary: Auto-mobility works until it doesn't. It stops working because average travel distances increase exponentially as the metro area expands, while population increases linearly. This makes it impossible to keep expanding roadway capacity to match demand. (Some try; all fail). As travel demand outstrips supply, congestion results.

The total amount of delay drivers experience is exponentially proportional to the amount of congestion (from: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/congestion_report/chapter2.htm) The AADT/C ratio is the ratio of traffic to capacity.

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***This may be one of the reasons for competing cities, closer together. When a city reaches maximum walkable density, it makes a great deal of sense to go elsewhere. Of course, large cities have huge advantages in terms of access to resources and agglomeration economies, which (typically) more than offset the cost of congestion. I expect the only time you'd really see such a switch is for 'Twin cities' like Minneapolis-St. Paul, or the Texas MetroPlex.

*The reverse is also true. As congestion increases, trip length should start falling.

**The trouble being that urban form is fixed at date of construction, and is very difficult to retrofit for alternative transportation modes. Adding highways to NYC came at enormous financial and social cots. Retrofitting auto-dependent cities will likely be painful/costly as well.

****Which is why buses to downtowns, Universities and hospitals work--they are all places with terrible parking.

*****The political quid-pro-quo of rapid transit for dependent riders is that "Hey, you too can ride the premium transit!". The flip side to that is that the high cost of rapid transit means less of it is provided--its goes fewer places. Typically, bus operations get cut to pay for capital improvements, which leaves the transit-dependent population worse off.

In Defense of Land Use Regulation

Arguably, any public regulation of land, by limiting the either the use or potential use a land-owner can make of the land. Yet a total lack of regulation of land is neither fair nor reasonable, as things which happen on your neighbors property directly affect yours. The oldest case would likely be mandatory building set-backs so as to provide fire-breaks. More recent cases would be 'public nuisances'; if your neighbor begins to use their garage as a concert space, the whole neighborhood suffers from the sound, while receiving none of the benefit. *

*I joined the 'Market Urbanism' group on Facebook, because I'm interested in congestion pricing and dynamic pricing for parking. Instead, I find myself engaged in debates about the virtues/values of land-use regulation. (As an urban planner, I'm generally for it). But it is forcing me to sharpen my rhetorical skills, so I suppose that's a plus.