From Richard Risemberg

These things are often by nature obvious; one does not prefer to trust a society's safety to militias and warlords, but instead (in the spirit of the 2nd amendment of the United States Constitution) employs trained agents in regulated and accountable police and military forces; one enacts guidelines and regulations preventing the shortsighted self-interest of individuals seeking to externalize the costs of their activities from poisoning land or water, spreading agents of disease, or robbing their fellow citizens either directly or through exploitive labor contracts; one institutes a system of justice for the amelioration of harms done by individuals to each other, rather than leaving mediation and punishment up to vigilantes.

Among the functions of society that particularly interest readers of The New Colonist are those which affect development and the urban form, comprising primarily transportation, zoning, the provision of utility infrastructure, and taxation.

In the United States for many years now--over half a century--it has been the practice to subsidize automobile use heavily, through direct subsidies to oil companies (as well as below-market-value leases) and the provision of automobile infrastructure at little or no cost to users.

At the same time, and especially in the last thirty years, public transit and interurban rail service have been systematically starved of funding, accused of fiscal inefficiency, and even impugned as "socialistic." In this usage, the word almost certainly means anything that allows people to explore their common interest by communicating directly, without the mediation of an authoritarian vetting body such as government, church, or corporate media, but the pseudo-conservative types always couch their criticisms in terms of the fiscal burden imposed on the populace by public transit-subsidies.

We will leave aside the right's decimation of community through government-funded, zoning-enforced separation of people not only into classes and functions, but into nearly solitary atomized family units bearing the emotional burdens a healthy society distributes over a large, diverse, and nurturing community, and we will concentrate on the economic hypocrisies of transportation subsidy for now.

What brought this most particlarly to mind was a posting by J. H. Crawford (author of Carfree Cities) recently comparing the relative efficiencies of rail and truck transport. While the example he gave dealt with freight, the relationship will apply fairly closely to passenger movement as well.

I saw last night regarding Canadian Pacific that they now run trains 2 km long with 3 locomotives. The trains weigh 14,000 tons and are pulled by only 18,000 horsepower with crew of just two. Now, lets do the numbers for trucks. The payload of this train is probably about 10,000 tons. The payload of a 40-ton truck is about 25 tons, so we need 400 trucks with a crew of 400. The trucks have engines around 400 HP, so we have a total of 160,000 HP on the job, nearly 10 times as much.

...Trucks pay a small fee to use the roads while doing great damage to them. Railroads pay their full costs of operation and at the same time pay hefty real estate taxes on their rights-of-way. Their climate-change emissions are a fraction of road freight, per ton-mile.

The cost of maintaining one track, capable of moving as much freight as you're likely to need, is fairly small in comparison to maintaining a huge fleet of expensive trucks with limited life spans, to say nothing of the cost of rebuilding the roads beat to cinders by these trucks.

If you want to talk "free market economics," the long-haul truckers couldn't survive without their subsidies. The railroads in the USA still manage to make a profit despite the highly adverse market in which they must compete.

Considering that federal highway subsidies alone average over $50 billion a year, and that cities and states also spend money on road building and maintenance, traffic control, pollution cleanup; and considering how much of our present military budget is dedicated to achieving control over petroleum resources so that we can keep US citizens trapped in agonizing traffic jams in massive twelve-lane troughs in the name of "freedom," you have to wonder whether the subsidy these rugged individualists in their ranks and files of metal toys enjoy is not merely foolish but evil.

Meanwhile, the same right-wingers that dole out free roads to suburban welfare queens--sorry, I meant soccer moms--deride Amtrak's paltry half-billion as a communistic waste of money. And freight railroads build and maintain their own roads, operate in a far more highly regulated environment than trucking enjoys--and manage to make money while using far less petroleum, and without devastating both the Earth's very surface, and the tax bases of its human communities.

Conversely, the experience of Hasselt, a city in Belgium, provides an instructive insight to the question of urban mass transit. Several years ago, burdened with ever increasing traffic, Hasselt faced the prospect of dipping into the civic coffers to build yet another ring road. But the mayor and town council, perhaps fortified by good chocolate and light ale, thought a little outside that famous box, and decided--well, they decided to make all public transit in the city free of charge.

The results were stunning: transit use went up by 800%; traffic dropped so dramatically that they not only abandoned the plans to build a new ring road, but closed down an existing one and converted it to a greenway and park; and business in the city center increased so much that, rather than losing money from the subsidy, the city found itself awash in tax receipts, enabling them to improve services for all while reducing taxes!

Indeed, there are healthy subsidies and unhealthy ones. Right now, California's Governor Schwarzenegger is proposing, one the one hand, a program to "incentivize" the installation of a million solar roofs by 2018 (lagging behind Japan and Germany by only a few decades); on the other hand, he is pushing another proposal to add yet more lanes to the concrete python that is the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, so that it may swallow up yet more of the city's land and tax base, and induce yet more driving on feeder streets and boulevards, requiring that eventually they too be widened, which will lead....

Put a double-track subway along its route, improve feeder bus service and extend (as the new LA mayor Villaraigosa hopes to do) the two branches of the Red Line Metro to Warner Center and the beach, so that they would cross what NC contributor Gina Morey dubbed the "Tan Line" (from the Valley to the beach, of course), and you could probably unbuild the 405 to a 3 or 4 lane highway, freeing up room for much-needed housing and businesses, cleaning the air, frustrating Saudi petro-oligarchs, and freeing us from having to find that elusive parking spot.

There's nothing wrong with subsidies in themselves. There's plenty wrong with stupid ones, and the degree of hypocrisy our government functionaries and their tax-guzzling SUV constituents exhibit, as they corral us into ever-more-congested roads leading to ever-duller suburbs, crosses that line from foolish to evil.

It's time for us here in the US to think realistically about what we subsidize, what really shapes the semi-mythical "market," and just how much our love of industrial cowboy fantasies imposes, not just on our neighbors, but on ourselves.

A Word from Richard Risemberg for July, 2005

Sense & Subsidy