Think mass transit saves you money?
It has been argued by some that not owning a car saves you money, but my argument is that the opposite is true. Manhattan, the only place I’ve ever lived where it’s reasonable for people to make do without a car, is ridiculously expensive compared to everywhere else. It’s a lot less expensive to live somewhere else and own a car, than it is to be carless in Manhattan. A one bedroom apartment costs $3000/month. A $700/month apartment someplace else would free up $27,600/year to cover the cost of car ownership. On top of that, the local income tax rate is around 10%, higher than any other place in the nation.
Looking at the average cost of owning a car is a deceptive statistic, because most people choose to buy a much more expensive car than they need, and you are averaging in overpriced luxury vehicles with basic transportation. You can buy a brand new car such as the Nissan Versa for less than $11,000, and I’m sure it’s a reliable enough vehicle to get you to work or to the supermarket. Most people choose to spend more on a car in order to display their higher status to other drivers, but that’s a choice they don’t have to make. It’s hard to see why insurance, maintenance, gasoline, and depreciation on a Nissan Versa should cost you more than $5000 per year. This is a lot less expensive than living in San Francisco or New York City.
You can certainly find counter-examples. I do not live in a densely populated city and yet I still manage to walk to work most days. At the same time, I still own a car (and used it to evacuate with lots of possessions recently for a few days when a massive fire threatened to burn down Santa Barbara) since cars are very useful. So his argument sounds broadly correct to me. To live in the same number of square feet of housing space in a city costs far more than in a suburb. That housing savings outweighs the car cost if you choose your car based on cost effectiveness. You can even step up a level or two above a Versa and still save money by commuting.
The trade-offs between city and suburb vary by region. But keep in mind that even though NYC is a cost outlier so are its suburbs. Indianapolis has cheaper housing than NYC or SF. But the suburbs of Indianapolis cost much less than northern New Jersey and Long Island.
You can also save money by living in a much smaller place. But most people do not want to do that. People with kids especially do not want to live in a shoe box. Even if the parents can stand it I think it unkind to kids to deprive them of yards to play in and safe neighborhoods. Then there's the time wasted with mass transit waiting for buses, leaving and coming home based on when the transit runs, and time getting too and from transit stations.
A lot of mass transportation advocates point to Europe as a sort of "shining city on a hill" example of what can be accomplished with mass transit. But I suspect these advocates do not understand just how little mass transit accomplishes in Europe. Check out table 3 at this link which shows percentages of distances traveled in Europe by car, rail, tram & metro, and bus & coach. What you'll see is that cars account for over 80% of distance traveled in 11 western European countries and only gets below 80% in Denmark, Austria, and Ireland. In those countries cars still accounts for about three quarters of distance traveled. These are all countries with fuel prices, population densities regulatory regimes, and mass transit subsidies far higher than what we find in the United States. Yet Europeans still choose to use to cars for over three quarters of miles traveled.
I expect the coming of Peak Oil will change the trade-offs between suburban and city living to some extent. But a lot of people will shift to electric cars and scooters rather than living in denser surroundings or ride buses. Personal transportation is incredibly convenient as compared to mass transit. $200 per barrel oil won't change that.
Update: If you are going to take public transportation at least stay out of NYC subways where the sound is so loud it causes hearing damage. Or at minimum wear ear plugs.
| Share | | Randall Parker, 2009 May 14 07:05 AM Energy Policy |
Far more relevant than peak oil, are peak ingenuity, peak intelligence, peak resourcefulness, and peak sanity.
It is so much easier to declare the "limits to growth" and to fall for simplistic models of resource depletion with collapse of societies, than to use one's brain in order to find substitutes, workarounds, new supplies and technologies and so on.
We are living in a time of sloppy thinking on all levels due in part to sloppy education. In one sense your peak oil euphemism is appropriate: Mr. Obama will make sure that peak oil occurs by political means.
Combining the fallacy of manmade climate catastrophe with the peak oil euphemism, prophecies of doom can be self fulfilled.
The intelligence problem, like the energy problem, is temporary, not a permanent state of affairs. The intelligence problem can be ameliorated by neuroscience, genetics, and eventually AI.
Well, sure - his central argument is clearly correct, and I've said the same thing for years (I lived in SF for 10 years, and am now on my eighth living in NYC). Comparing co-dependent costs (needing a car where houses are cheap, and the inverse) leads to that conclusion, but misses other costs/benefits that are also linked. That I commute on the trains here an average of an hour a day at a cost of about $4/day (month pass, and I'm a heavy MTA user) misses the point that I get most of that hour to do useful things - I work and read for pleasure on the train. Try that while driving. It also misses that living in the burbs makes it substantially more costly to attend any number of cultural events that matter a lot to me - I would miss the vast majority of small art openings, small concerts, etc. that I love if I lived far away enough from NYC to lower my housing costs enough to counterbalance a car. Granted, such things don't matter to a lot of people, so the tradeoffs look different for them. For that matter, relatives of mine positively hate visiting me - they would likely live in the boonies even if the housing cost equation were flipped.
My view is that arguments like this obscure an awful lot more about the cost choices we make than they reveal. Sort of akin to arguing about the time survival characteristics of different artistic media to say that one is superior to others.
Okay, if he is saying it is cheaper to live someplace other than NYC with a car than in NYC without one, let's just extend that argument: it is even cheaper to live in many places in India or Africa without a car, than in some Jersey town with a car.
The man's argument reminds me that all economists can use number to prove any point they want to make. Economists are the lawyers of the financial world.
Good for a laugh, though -- for those of us who can see through the ballast.
As fishbane notes, this was simply terrible analysis. Reducing the city/suburb choice to the relative costs of square footage plus transit ignores substantially everything that actually drives [heh, heh.. sorry] that decision. Even more embarrassing for its author, even accepting this addlepated basis doesn't make an automobile cheaper when your leisure time is worth enough.
Let's do the math with Craigslist apartment ads. $3,000 in Tribeca seems to get you a nice, little 2bd/800sf place, and there are more than 50 listings between $2,800 and $3,200 in Tribeca alone. New Haven has 100 2bd/$650-$750 listings, so you probably commute 90 miles. Pretend that's 2 hours, probably generous. At 22 workdays a month, that's $26 an hour after tax. Nice, but many earn more.
Plus you'd be living in New Haven. Shudder.
Not to pile on, but living in NYC doesn't mean living in Tribeca, either. I've got ~2200 Sq. Ft. and a private ~800 sq. ft. roof deck about 10 minutes from Union Square by subway, and pay slightly less than 2K/mo. Yes, it is warehouse space. Extremely livable for me - that I got to build out my own darkroom and bedroom in a large open space was a huge bonus for me. Certainly not for everyone, but isn't economics supposed to be (at least partially) about analysing emergent preferences in regimes of scarcity?
So... yeah. What wcw said. The more I think about that analysis, the more idiotic it looks to me.
On a personal level for me the economics is not the be all and end all. I've just spent 3 1/2 years living in London and intensely enjoyed the "urbaness" of it all. I took huge (and unexpected) pleasure in simply walking down the street - the history, the architecture, the mass of people. I took months off work and simply wandered around. I could spend a lifetime in London or Paris and not get tired. I think its a tragedy that the US (and where i'm from NZ) have used resources over the last 50 years to create suburban sprawl rather than try to create urban communities via planning codes. Generally i'm a free marketeer but I despair at what the free market chucks up - strip malls, big box retailing, suburban sprawl. I fear that the lefties that have been moaning for years and years about how unsustainable it all is may turn out to be right. I'm back in Auckland, NZ, now and stuck in motorway traffic each day. Glad to be back but hate the traffic.
PS - unemployment in nz is only 5% and house prices haven't really dropped from peak at all. nearly everyone i speak to thinks they won't drop at all. most are still in a dream world. recession hasn't even begun to bite.
wcw, fishbane,
Sure, people who live in NYC have reasons for living there. Half Sigma lives in NYC himself. So obviously he understands that. But he also understands that lots of people - especially those with children - find very compelling reasons to live in suburbs and cities with mass transit in no way give them the utility that suburbs give them. For the dollars they have to spend they get a far better deal from a suburban house and a car and some commuting.
His argument doesn't obscure anything. His argument is a reaction to the idiotic arguments for city living and mass transit as a panacea. A lot of people who prefer city living and mass transit promote this lifestyle on people who prefer suburbs and cars. Some of them are awfully sniffy about their supposedly morally superior choice. You don't hear suburbanites telling people in cities to give up subways and buses. The suburbanites are far more accepting of the choices of city dwellers to live as city dwellers than vice versa. The intellectuals' war against the car doesn't have an equivalent war against subways.
I would also point out that while Europe moves a lot more people by rail than the U.S., the U.S. move a lot more cargo by rail than Europe. IIRC, we move five times as much cargo out of our total percentage than does Europe. That means that given our total transportation budget, we probably transport a lot more by rail than Europe does.
More to the point of the post, almost all economic analysis stating that choice A is a better alternative for most people than choice B are deeply flawed because they create an artificial assumption about the trade offs that people make. Every single economic choice individuals make exist in an interconnected web of tradeoff for every other choice they make.
For example, I couldn't live in NYC even if I wanted to because I'm a computer geek and nobody does serious computer work in NYC. It wouldn't really matter to me if NYC's transportation system saved me thousands a year over a car because I can't work there. Likewise, a lot of people live in the suburbs because that's were the jobs are. It's easier for businesses to set up in the burbs than in dense urban areas. (People who scratch their heads over people moving out of cities should look first at the business climate and then at the schools.)
People choose to drive cars in part because business need the flexible transportation that road based transport gives them. This in turn requires the businesses to locate in suburbs and then people follow the jobs. That's just one thread in the web. There are dozens or even hundreds of such threads that combine to make decisions.
Central planning types always work from a cartoonishly simply model of people's economic choices. This is why such planning fails. Most transportation planning, especially mass transit planning, depends on such simplistic models.
In one sense your peak oil euphemism is appropriate: Mr. Obama will make sure that peak oil occurs by political means.It already happened under Bush, and the massive amount of credit required to finance even the inadequate effort toward oil extraction also vanished under Bush.
Seriously, what do you think $147/bbl oil was about? Supply had been roughly flat since 2004 (when Bush had not yet been re-elected), and demand was balanced by higher prices pushing more and more marginal users out of the market as Chinese and Indian demand grew. Peak oil is behind us, and would have been regardless.
RP, HS wrote a rant. It is a bad rant: boring, overlong, and not funny. It was too dull to elicit a comment from me on its own blog. I commented here, not there. You chose the pullquote and your headline focused on its awful analysis. The self-righteousness of smelly hippies, still my least-favorite thing about living in the Bay Area, is no excuse for stupid analysis, bad math, or boring rants.
Next time write "cities with mass transit in no way give [some] the utility that suburbs give them." That's true, if so obvious as to verge on tautology.
The intellectuals' war against the car doesn't have an equivalent war against subways.
Um. Wow.
First, if the approximately 13 random annoying people who rant about urban density qualify as an "intellectual[...] war against the car", I suppose we also are in dire need of an economic analysis of the follies of promoting non-iceberg lettuce and a scathing cautionary tale about the perils of the wearing Tivas. And don't get me started about the pernicious influence of rimless glasses.
Never mind that it is rather funny to see a futurist complaining about "intellectuals".
As an aside, I wonder how many libertarian leaning folks who don't like hearing about high density living give much thought to the tax base that enables their chosen lifestyle. I personally don't care about that conversation - I'm live and let live on these topics - but a painfully inadequate doodle about Car v. MTA, as I said, is about as convincing as, say, an argument about why everyone in moderate climes should wear Tyvek clothes. More durable than polyester, very cheap, and available in fashion colors! Who's with me?
And Shannon, as a freelance software engineer who has nothing to do with finance software (admittedly, the bug-zapper of otherwise quality geeks in NYC), I'd have to question your notion that nobody does serious computer work in NYC. I'd give better than even odds that software I was paid to write executed when you posted your reply. But please, feel free to stay away - less competition for me.
"The intellectuals' war against the car doesn't have an equivalent war against subways."
You obviously haven't read the AntiPlanner blog (Randal O'Toole).
wcw, fishbane,
I think you dislike HS's attitude more than disagree with his position. Cars are very cost effective. I think he's right. I care more about wheter he's right than whether he's ranting.
I also supplemented what he said with that link to info about mass transit usage in Europe. I think it provides very strong evidence for the utility and cost effectivness of cars.
fishbane,
Regards complaints against intellectuals: Hey, what's the point of complaining about non-intellectuals? They aren't battling over ideas. Non-intellectuals are much more live-and-let-live.
RP, cars are awfully cost-effective. I own two and make no apologies: individual virtue is no substitute for public policy.
That said, your post here has precisely the same flaw as the smelly-hippy analysis: it's simply wrong much of the time. Didn't like my numbers? Fine. The very first lesson they taught me was, don't fight the tape. New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston should tell you that HS's analysis is stupid at best. If you want to argue that everyone should commute from the suburbs, you have to explain why anyone in the world doesn't. Are we all just idiots, all whatever million of us?
On the other hand, of course, Phoenix, Jacksonville, DFW and Nashville should tell the smelly hippies their self-righteous bullshit is equally stupid. But I don't read their blogs.
Maybe I should start. At least they'd call me "man" and maybe pretend to engage my analysis.
Peak oil is 30 years ahead of us, don't you know? But that gol darnded Obama wants to create artificial peak oil. Try to drive a car under them circumstances eh?
wcw, I agree with lots of people who think NYC sucks in many ways. I think it would be cool to spend some weeks there if one was rich and got around in limos to go to arts and music events. But it holds little attraction to me as long as my net worth isn't in the tens of millions.
As for other cities: they aren't as bad. But they are mostly not as dense and not as practical for using mass transit either.
But again, I'm not ignoring your analysis. Half Sigma himself lives in NYC. He realizes there are other factors besides cost per square foot. But for the vast bulk of the population NYC is unattractive. For people with children NYC is especially unattractive. It costs too much.
Where do most middle class and upper middle class people in America live? Suburbs and rural areas, not cities.
But the main thrust of my own post and Half Sigma's post is about cars versus mass transit. Cars are overwhelmingly more popular than mass transit even in Europe. The vast bulk of the European population prefer getting around with cars. Cars really are more cost effective.
On the US, I give you the current population survey: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032008/perinc/new01_001.htm Define middle and upper middle as above median income, and 63% live in metropolitan areas or in principal cities. Cities are big.
On the Eurodata, have you got a study of commuting pattern measured per capita without any exclusions? I am no practitioner, but per kilometer excluding foot, bicycle and air strikes me as a poor metric.
On NYC, congratulations. I didn't think anyone could make hippies look good, then you told eight million people they suck.
The census is misleading - I live in a so called "metropolitan area" that has one small city of 125,000 an a bunch of towns -a big agricultural region - no large cities. Mass transit doesn't work here. The small city's bus will barely get you around - but will take hours longer than a car.