Little drips make a big mess

More externalities of mass motorization.

The Arizona Republic ran this USA Today story under the better-named  headline “Gulf spill can’t rival oil seepage from cities: Over time, tiny drips add major pollution to oceans”.

“Human-caused spills send more than 300 million gallons of oil into North American waters every decade, an amount roughly double the highest estimate of the BP spill”… “the largest human-caused source of oil into the environment is the byproduct of millions of autos and other oil-powered devices.”

Land-based oil spills add up, too

USA Today, 6/30/2010 Read the rest of this entry »

Burning 10,000 barrels a day

In order to mitigate marine damage, some of the oil that is leaking from the blown-out BP / Deepwater Horizon well, around 10,000 barrels a day is being burned into the open air in a completely uncontrolled combustion. [story from AP: BP starts burning oil from leaking ruptured well, June 16, 2010]

BP or whoever can theoretically run around an pick up every tar ball and clean off every pelican, but who is going to clean the air? As is usually the case, nobody does.  So everyone gets dirtier air. It’s just blowin’ in the wind. Just another externality of oil and gas consumption.

Ezra Klein had a good piece on externalities in last week’s Washington Post:

Think gas is to pricey? Think again Read the rest of this entry »

Welfare Wagons

In a typical bit of masterful Jenkinsian prose, he lays out the case for raising fuel taxes, which I happen to agree with. However, he scolds “politicians” for not being courageous while at the same time not endorsing any such increase himself. This theme appears over and over in WSJ editorial opinions.

Even if you believe saving gasoline is a holy cause, subsidizing electric cars simply is not a substitute for politicians finding the courage to jack up gas prices. Think about it this way: You can double the fuel efficiency of any car by putting a second person in it. You can increase its fuel efficiency to infinity by refraining from frivolous trips.

These are the incentives that flow from a higher gas price. Exactly the opposite incentives flow from mandatory investment in higher-mileage vehicles. You paid a lot for a car that costs very little to operate—so why not operate it? Why bother to car pool? Why not drive across town for a jar of mayonnaise?

Welfare Wagons, WSJ, May 12, 2010

Use taxes are the best way to reflect the externalized costs of an activity.  E.g. in this example taxes on motor fuel. Fuel taxes have been falling for years, this makes the cost of driving less and less — which, as Jenkins points out, tends to make people drive more and more. There are a couple of reasons the tax is falling, one is the simply that taxes are levied on a per gallon basis and the amounts rarely change (Arizona has levied the same tax for around 20 years), this means the real price of the tax is continuously falling. for 20 years. Another is the tendency for vehicles to become more efficient over time, resulting in a lower tax per mile traveled.

City Liability

The Arizona Republic did a roundup of the city of Phoenix’s motor-vehicle  liability claims paid over the about the past 5 years, 2005 – most of 2009. It was about $15M

Phoenix pays millions… March 6, 2010.

On one hand it seems like a rather moderate amount. And not all of these claims has to do with what would normally be viewed as a traffic crash (like e.g. the bus-door-closing ones). Yet still it illuminates just another unpaid (“external“) cost of our car-culture.

Cities, townships, counties, states, and the federal government all run enormous fleets of motor vehicles, running in the many millions of vehicles. Liability expenses being just one of the smaller costs; fuel, capital cost, maintenance and so forth all add up to more.

The vast majority of these expenses are not paid via any sort of use fees (e.g. gasoline tax) on automobiles — but rather from general fund sources; property taxes, general sales taxes, income taxes, and so forth. And my favorite, the new grocery tax; yes we have to pay city sales taxes on groceries, in part to bankroll Phoenix’s vehicle fleet. I’m thinking government entities don’t even pay the so-called “road taxes” on fuel, nor do they pay other use taxes, like Arizona’s VLT (Vehicle License Tax). More on Road Taxes in Arizona. Read the rest of this entry »

More on the socialized cost of parking

An integral part of unrestrained car use is having somewhere to put the darn things when we’re not driving them. Enter the “free” parking space.

They aren’t, of course, actually free — thus someone else is paying, not the driver using it, it is external to the cost of driving; call it socialism for drivers. Thus leading to ever more demand for more driving and more parking spaces.

from the Arizona Republic 12/28/2009; Ahwatukee Park-and-Ride Lot Expanding.

In the example mentioned in the story, 353 spaces are being added to the existing 562 for a cost of $3M. That’s $8,500 per space. But that is only the cost of construction (or land but that is cheap); the ongoing costs aren’t listed but they are significant. A not exhaustive list would look something like; lighting, maintenance like sweeping and cleaning, and re-sealing asphalt, full-time(one employee ~ 50hrs/week) security during operating hours, cost of operating the small building (heat and cooled approximately 24×7, even though no one is usually there; didn’t these people ever hear of a programmable thermostat?).

see Doug Shoup’s book mentioned here; The High Cost of Free parking.

In the particular example of a transit park-and-ride lot it gets even more interesting because of the cross-subsidies involved in mass transit. One wonders if the best use of presumably limited transit funds is to build parking spaces for the relatively well-off remote suburban commuters. This lot serves only one bus line; a rapid/express (no intermediate stops) route between Ahwatukee and downtown Phoenix. The line only runs one way, and only in the morning and evening. Thus the parking spots have low turnover — one spot equals one round trip rider.

Lead pollution

Lead is a powerful neurotoxin. Formerly (up until 199x?) US motorists put millions of pounds per year into the air via their fuel. Now we find that motorists remain the largest lead-polluters in the form of discarded wheel-weights, to the tune of 3.5 million pounds a year. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo Enforcement in the mainstream media

The WSJ (news side) did a story on photo enforcement. Since there’s so much activity on this issue in Arizona, we figured prominently in the story.

Overall, it strikes me that it was fairly typical of such stories. The point of view of photo enforcement opponents, “it’s all about the money” is well represented, and I think that’s fair. But what troubles me, though, is the lightweight treatment of the safety aspects and the science involved. Consider:

Studies are mixed on whether traffic cameras improve safety. Some research indicates they may increase rear-end collisions as drivers slam on their brakes when they see posted camera notices…

A study of crash causes released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last July found about 5% of crashes were due to traveling too fast and 2% were from running red lights. Driving off the side of the road, falling asleep at the wheel and crossing the center lines were the biggest causes identified.

– Get the Feeling You’re Being Watched? If You’re Driving, You Just Might Be. William M. Bulkeley, the Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2009, p. A1

The truth, or rather, the problem with that analysis is it ignores the relative severity of rear-end vs. an intersection collision. The 5% figure is interesting and misleading at the same time. It refers to the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey.

The article also talks about use of automated license plate reading technology being used for other (not traffic enforcement) uses, such as catching those with outstanding fines or whatnot.

Meanwhile, just wandering around the internet, I noticed the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), a wonderful book by the way, Tom Vanderbuilt, blogged on the same article as well, with similar criticisms “to compare them so casually is typical of myopic mainstream-media reporting when it comes to traffic safety”. He also puts traffic dangerousness into terms of it being an externality of driving, just one of many, of course.

WSJ: just say no to taxes; and personal responsibility

In yesterdays ed, Tax My Products, Please the WSJ argues that Ford CEO Mually’s call for higher fuel taxes is like “a Google executive demanding a tax on software”.

That analogy being as it may; what they are really renewing is their intentional obliviousness to externalities. And the tacit cost-shifting that inevitably results. Combusting fuel is damaging on its face (even if you don’t “believe in” global warming — as the WSJ editorial board clearly does not). Both in environmental damage and the toll it takes on human health.

So, who pays for all the negative externalities arising from automobility? Drivers don’t; the costs are all shifted to “society”.

They firmly support the status-quo; dead-set against cap-and-trade, and dead set against any increase in fuel taxes. Fuel taxes, which are supposed to fund road construction and maintenance have been dwindling in real dollars for years. The gas tax, which is levied per gallon, hasn’t budged in years; and does not adjust for little things like inflation. It has been at the current federal rate of 18.4 cents per gallon as long ago as 1993 (going on 16years! The arizona state gas tax hasn’t changed in even longer). This leaving a gap which is filled from other funds, like income, sales, and property taxes. (sources that have nothing to with driving).

This underpricing inexorably (remember WSJ eds, the laws of economics?) causes a greater demand for driving, and more roads, and more driving…

In response to Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s call for higher gas taxes (which you report in “Tax My Products, Please,” Review & Outlook, March 17), I would like to say that Americans don’t want smaller vehicles. We have great distances to travel, mountains and plains to cross in all seasons of the year. We tow our boats and other contrivances. We haul our children around and travel with them over the continent. Our businessmen drive long distances since they can no longer own corporate jets. What we want is a more efficient internal combustion engine, not a smaller car.

And do not tell us it cannot be done. It can be done, because efficient engines can be created today with off-the-shelf parts bought from General Motors, Ford or Chrysler.

A friend of mine has converted a GMC Vortec V8 gasoline engine for his 2.5 ton pickup truck and the engine delivers more than 30 mpg. Why can’t we buy this type of vehicle at the dealer? Why does individual ingenuity have to point the way to corporations that have the money, skill and engineering brainpower to deliver a more efficient engine? Why do we have to pay more at the pump?

The suggestion that consumers should pay more in gasoline taxes is a cop-out on the part of the auto makers, politicians and everyone else who supports it. This is not Europe. This is the United States of America, a vast country with amazing distances and varieties of geography and climate.

We do not want higher gas prices. We want more efficient engines to power our vehicles. We want the Big Three to use their brains to create something new, not deliver a rehash of junk from a bunch of whiners.

Bernard P. Giroux
Fall River, Mass.

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The Risk of Dying in One Vehicle Versus Another

I had some trouble digging up this, so for reference here is a link to reports that list driver (driver only, not other occupants, nor non-occupants) death rates per mile driven. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Market’s Oil Fix: Higher Taxes

I am soooo dissapointed with McCain for the the gas tax holiday thing. Read the rest of this entry »