Transportation Cost and Benefit Analysis II – Conclusions and Recommendations

Victoria Transport Policy Institute (www.vtpi.org)

11. Conclusions and Recommendations

This chapter summarizes major conclusions and provides recommendations for improving
transportation system efficiency and equity.

Chapter Index

11.1 Costs and User Pricing............................................................................. 1

11.2 Transportation Decision Making ............................................................... 4
11.3 Equity ....................................................................................................... 6
11.4 Land Use Patterns.................................................................................... 7
11.5 Research Recommendations ................................................................... 8

11.1 Costs and User Pricing

A major conclusion of this study is that a significant portion of transportation costs are
currently either fixed or external, and so are inefficiently priced. This price structure
provides an incentive to driving more in order to “get your money's worth.” Motor
vehicle travel would decline significantly if prices reflected full costs. This overuse
reduces social welfare and economic efficiency.

Inefficient pricing squanders much of the potential benefits of motor vehicle travel.
Vehicle owners have little incentive to limit driving to trips in which benefits exceed
total costs, resulting in wasteful travel behavior that reduces transport system
performance. Underpriced driving results in congestion increasing until it constrains
further traffic growth. Problems such as pollution and community degradation are
virtually unavoidable with current pricing.

According to conventional wisdom, traffic congestion is the greatest transport problem.

This perception justifies planning and funding practices that emphasize increasing road
capacity. In the long term, however, such practices increase total traffic and automobile
dependency. According to this study, congestion is a moderate problem (cost), and efforts
to reduce congestion by increasing roadway capacity are often wasteful. As expressed by
Moore and Thorsnes,
“No rational concert promoter would decide how big to build a stadium based on the number
of people who would come to see the Grateful Dead if the tickets were free. But that is often
how transportation planners decide highway capacity: they estimate how many trips would be
made on an unpriced facility, then try to build a facility big enough to accommodate that
number of trips.”1

1Moore & Thorsnes (1994), Transportation/Land Use Connection, American Planning Association
(www.planning.org), p. 57.

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“Raise My Prices, Please!”

There is a vivid and emotional vocabulary to describe overpricing. A consumer who paid too
much is said to have been “gouged,” “ripped off,” or “fleeced.” It is easy to demonstrate that
overpricing reduces economic efficiency and tends to be inequitable, so overpricing is a favorite
target for political campaigns, debates, and government programs.
Underpricing has similar negative impacts. Underpricing causes economic inefficiency and tends
to be unfair. It imposes social and environmental costs. But we are unlikely to hear a popular cry,
“Raise my prices, please.” Low prices may be acknowledged intellectually as a problem, but
because impacts are dispersed and nearly invisible it seldom creates emotional fervor. Educating
policy makers, planners, and the public about problems created by underpricing is a key
challenge to developing an efficient and equitable transportation system.

Although underpricing private automobile travel benefits some individuals and

jurisdictions, these are mostly transfers. Each unit of underpricing imposes an equal or
greater cost elsewhere in the economy. Underpricing encourages waste, which reduces
economic efficiency. It is often claimed that Americans (or Australians, Germans, or
other groups) have a love affair with the automobile, but high levels of automobile
dependency are partly explained by decades of underpricing and skewed investments. At
one time society may have benefited from economies of scale in vehicle and roadway
production which justified underpricing, but no longer. Increased driving incurs
diseconomies in most areas due to congestion and external impacts.

Economic efficiency, equity, and long term development are optimized if user prices
incorporate total costs. Increasing prices to better reflect costs encourages more efficient
use of our transportation system. In the long term this can reduce the need for subsidies
to transit and other special programs, due to economies of scale. In the short term,
however, in many areas increased transit investment is required to overcome decades of
under investment.

Remarkable Findings
A remarkable finding of this study is that driving would decrease significantly if a few simple
changes were made in how fees are paid, without changes in the total amount charged. For
example, typically, 20-30% of commuters will switch modes given the choice provided by
parking Cash Out, and even more if employee parking was not a tax-exempt benefit. Another 5-
15% of driving would decrease if insurance was made a variable rather than a fixed cost. These
changes would improve equity as well as reduce congestion, pollution and energy consumption,
and save individuals money.

Another important finding is that transportation investment decisions are skewed by the tendency
of planners to ignore the effects of generated traffic and external costs, which overstates the
benefits of roadway capacity expansion projects. A better accounting of costs and benefits would
result in significantly different transportation investments.

These findings indicate that some simple, incremental steps could substantially reduce many of
our current transportation problems while increasing economic efficiency and equity.

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Pricing recommendations:
Ideally, drivers should pay variable prices exactly equal to total marginal costs. Although
it would be difficult to create an “ideal” price structure, a number of practical measures
could greatly improve current pricing:

1. Increased fuel taxes is an easy and efficient 4. Another effective strategy for marginalizing
way to internalize costs, but is not optimal costs is to require employers to cash out
as a stand-alone measure since it does not parking subsidies. Parking should be
affect when and where driving occurs. A charged daily rather than monthly so
variety of charges are needed. commuters who drive part-time only pay for
what they use.
2. Congestion fees can improve traffic
efficiency. Several charging methods are 5. As much as possible, commercial parking
available to charge for travel on congested should also be short term user-paid. Parking
roads. It is important to prevent spillover must be managed at the regional level to
onto un-tolled roads. prevent interjurisdictional competition, and
to prevent spillover parking problems.
3. An easy way to marginalize costs is to make
insurance, registration, licensing, and 6. Pricing should be used to encourage
vehicle taxes proportional to mileage. individuals to buy fuel efficient and low
emitting vehicles.

There is no single solution to our current transportation problems. Neither, improved

bicycling and walking facilities, increased public transit service, “smart” highways, nor
less polluting vehicles alone can solve our transport problems while prices are so low.
Making prices reflect marginal costs is essential to encourage efficient transport. Changes
in planning, land use, and infrastructure investments are also needed. An efficient and
equitable transportation system offers users efficient mobility options and incentives to
use each mode for what it does best.

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11.2 Transportation Decision Making

As discussed above, improving pricing is essential but it is not sufficient to deal with the
problems we face; improved decision making is also essential. Many significant impacts
tend to be ignored during transport policy making and planning. Planning is often
uncoordinated, resulting in a “tyranny of small decisions.” Current transport planning
practices reflect five specific problems:
• Limited scope. Current planning and funding practices do not provide equal consideration to
all options for meeting access needs. Demand management tends to be considered and
implemented only where traffic congestion or air quality problems are significant, and
ignored in other situations. Funding allocation tends to favor roadway expansion for private
automobiles over other modes.
• External costs ignored. Current planning practices tend to ignore many costs, especially
environmental and social impacts. Economic evaluation models can, but usually do not,
incorporate monetized estimates of these costs. Even costs such as parking demand and
public service demands of increased motor vehicle use are seldom considered in
transportation planning and project evaluation.
• Poor public involvement. Although transportation decisions impact many aspects of
individual and community life, transport planning is considered a technical field and the
public is excluded from many critical decisions. Residents are seldom involved early enough
in the planning process to place constraints or establish broad goals that reflect community
values, and even with citizen involvement transportation decisions are highly influenced by
professional biases and preferences.
• Missing link between transportation and land use planning. Although transportation and land
use patterns are highly interrelated, they are seldom planned together. Transportation
planning should be considered a subset of land use and community development planning.
Since transport to a large degree determines long term land use patterns, transportation
decisions should be based on long-term land use goals.
• Generated traffic effects ignored. Research shows that increasing road capacity increases total
driving, especially in congested areas. As a result, projects that expand urban roadway
capacity usually provide significantly less congestion reduction than predicted because latent
demand fills much of the new capacity, and automobile use and the resulting congestion
increases throughout the region.

Conventional planning tends to evaluate transportation performance based on travel

distance, which favors mobility over accessibility, faster modes over slower modes, and
speed over comfort. For example, conventional transport economic analysis can calculate
the monetized value of travel time savings from highway expantion that increases travel
speeds, but cannot provide monetized benefits from incrasing local services, improving
children’s ability to walk and cycle to schools, or from increasing the convenience and
comfort of public transit travel, for example, by providing real-time bus arrival
information or more comfortable transit stop waiting conditions.

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Since most urban trips are relatively short (less than 5 miles), there is a “transportation
gap” caused by overemphasis on long-distance travel and too little attention to bicycling,
local transit, and low powered vehicles. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of
increased driving, automobile dependency, inequity and sprawl. Electric cars and other
alternative fuels reduce some external costs, particularly urban air pollution, noise, and
petroleum externalities, but do not affect others such as accident risk, congestion, and
parking subsidies.

Transportation decision making recommendations:

1. Transportation system effectiveness should
be based on access. Policies and programs 8. Traffic analysis must consider the effects of
that reduce the need to travel should receive generated traffic. Generated traffic should
consideration and support equal to measures be assessed using the “rule-of-half” which
that increase mobility. recognizes that these trips tend to have
relatively low value, since they are trips that
2. Transportation economic analysis must users forego if roads are congested.
consider all costs. Non-market and indirect
costs should be given the same weight as 9. The incremental external costs of generated
market costs. Non-market costs should be traffic should be treated as a cost of projects
quantified and monetized as much as that increase roadway capacity.
possible for use in economic evaluation.
10. Resources currently devoted to large
3. Least-cost planning should be used as a regional transport projects may provide
model for transportation decision making. greater benefit if used for local accessibility
This means that a broad range of options are improvements. For example, improving
considered, including both supply and walking and cycling facilities, local
demand management, and evaluated shopping districts, and services (parks,
considering all benefits and costs. “No- schools, etc.) can make communities more
build” options that rely on transport and self-sufficient, reducing motor vehicle
land use management should receive equal traffic and automobile dependence.
consideration and funding a road building.
11. Transportation professionals and decision
4. Transport system performance evaluation makers should make a habit of not using an
should be based on travel time rather than automobile for at least two consecutive
distance. This tends to increase the value of weeks each year in order to experience the
non-motorized modes, and improvements in practical problems facing non-drivers.
convenience and comfort.
12. Impacts on human life and health, and
5. Transport planners should become familiar irreversible environmental damage should
with the environmental and social impacts be assessed with a low or zero discount rate
of their decisions. Environmentalists, urban for the sake of intergenerational equity.
planners, and social policy analysts need to
learn more about transport issues. 13. Neighborhood car rentals and ownership co-
ops should be encouraged to help reduce the
6. Transportation equity and diversity should need for residents to own cars and trucks.
be recognized as important goals in planning
and policy making. 14. Research is needed to understand how
public policies and land use patterns affect
7. Non-motorized transportation modes travel decisions, and to develop practical
deserve increased consideration in planning strategies and programs that achieve
and funding. Special attention is needed for transportation demand reduction goals.
intermodal connections, such as the
integration of bicycling with transit.

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11.3 Equity
The information and analysis tools in this report are useful for equity analysis by
providing guidance on how benefits and costs are distributed between different groups.
More research is also needed to better define transportation equity, determine ways to
measure it, and identify how it is affected by various policies.

Pricing and planning reforms are justified for equity as well as economic efficiency
objectives. Underpriced driving is inequitable. Underpricing forces non-drivers to
subsidize automobile use, reduces travel options, and imposes land use and social
patterns that increase travel requirements. This would be unfair even if drivers and non-
drivers had comparable incomes and abilities (horizontal inequity), and is especially
unfair because non-drivers tend to be economically, physically, and socially
disadvantaged (vertical inequity).

The equity of increasing motor vehicle user prices depends on how revenues is used.
Price increases can be progressive if revenue is used to benefit low-income people. Using
road pricing revenue only for roadway transportation improvements is not necessarily
fair or efficient since driving incurs external costs borne by all of society. Investments in
alternative modes are justified on vertical equity grounds, by improving mobility options
for transportation disadvantaged groups, and on horizontally equity grounds if they help
internalize external costs.

Equity recommendations:
Many, although not all, strategies to increase transport system efficiency also contribute
to equity. Here are specific ways to support transportation equity objectives:

1. A basic level of access and mobility should 4. Transportation policies and programs should
be defined in each community. This might be evaluated in terms of how they affect
include, for example, freedom to walk disadvantaged groups.
safely, access to public services,
employment, schools, recreation, and social 5. A significant portion of revenue from
activities. increased automobile user charges should be
targeted at refunds, tax reductions, and
2. Transport user price increases should be services that benefit disadvantaged people.
predictable and gradual to allow individuals
to adjust travel patterns (housing and job 6. A variety of non-automotive modes should
locations, vehicle purchases, etc.). be considered to increase access and
mobility of non-drivers, including walking,
3. Transportation equity and option value costs bicycling, ride sharing, taxies, delivery
should be borne by all of society, not just services, telecommuting, and land use
users of a particular mode. For example, the pattern changes, not just transit service.
incremental costs of handicapped access for
transit systems should not incorporated into 7. Transition costs associated with reduced
the base price of all transit riders. automobile dependency and use, such as
unemployment in automobile industries,
should be anticipated and minimized.

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11.4 Land Use Patterns

Transportation and land use are interrelated and should be considered together. Transport
decisions have substantial land use impacts and land use decisions affect travel activity.
Transportation planning decisions should reflect land use goals such as openspace
preservation, urban redevelopment and neighborhood livability. Specific transport
policies and projects should be evaluated in terms of their impacts relative to these goals.

Traffic impacts on community livability deserve special attention. The road system is a
valuable public asset. In addition to accommodating vehicle travel streets define a
community’s character, accommodate walking and cycling, and allow community
interactions. Motor vehicle traffic tends to degrade these functions. New urban
neighborhood design and traffic calming programs can reduce traffic impacts and return
streets to multi-function use. Implementing these improvements requires changes to
transport planning and funding practices.

Many of the benefits of urban-fringe development are offset by the external costs of
increased vehicle travel and land use sprawl. More efficient pricing is needed to insure
efficient land use development.

Land Use recommendations:

1. Transportation and land use planning should driving to stores, employment, and other
be integrated so policies and projects are public services.
mutually supportive.
6. Zoning laws and development policies
2. Prior to developing a transportation plan, should encourage diversity of housing types,
communities should establish land use and infilling and appropriate land use mixing.
environmental goals and objectives.
7. Greater attention should be paid to
3. Full-cost pricing of public services should streetscape design and development of local
be used to encourage smart growth. activity centers to encourage walking,
bicycling and neighborhood interaction.
8. Parking requirements should be flexible,
and decline when automobile ownership (for 10. Rail stations and bus route areas are
residential developments) or use (for particularly appropriate for mixed use
commercial developments) decreases. communities and affordable housing.

9. Zoning laws, development standards, home 11. Local services, such as neighborhood stores,
buyer programs, and other land use and land local schools, and small parks should be
development policies should be modified as encouraged to reduce travel needs.
needed to conform with and support
community transport goals. 12. Zoning and development policies that
preserve greenspace and discourage urban
4. Efficient parking pricing and management sprawl should be implemented.
are needed to encourage efficient use of
parking facilities and address problems such 13. Traffic Calming and other traffic manage-
as parking spillover impacts. ment strategies should be used to reduce
traffic impacts and improve walking and
5. Communities should insure that at least a cycling conditions
portion of housing is accessible without

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11.5 Research Recommendations

More research is needed to better estimate transportation costs under various conditions
and locations. Transport equity and diversity appear to be significant values which
deserve more research. Decision-makers need better information on consumer demands,
such as the value people place on improved travel convenience and comfort. Research is
also needed to evaluate the synergistic effects of combined planning decisions.

Transportation land use impacts need more research to understand how transport
decisions affect land use, and methods to measure and monetize these effects. This
research should cover impacts to both natural environments, such as the loss of wildlife
habitat and landscapes, and impacts on the built environment, such as the degradation of
neighborhood life from high traffic volumes. These appear to be significant costs with
major implications for many transport decisions.

The barrier effect (severance) has been studied and measured in Scandinavian countries,
but their quantification techniques have not been applied to the same degree in North
America or other areas of the world. Research is needed to test the Scandinavian
formulas here and develop estimates of this cost per vehicle mile under a variety of
conditions.

Latent demand has important implications on transport decisions. Some progress has
been made to develop tools for predicting generated traffic. More information is needed
to predict generated traffic under typical conditions. Most current studies focus on traffic
generated on single roads. Of equal or greater importance is the overall increase in
regional automobile use that results from increased road capacity.

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