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Just
The
Tip of the Dipstick
Higher
gasoline prices hurt, but the big problem isn't OPEC -
it's the total cost of car ownership, made onerous by
the fact that
Virginians drive 40 percent more than they did a
generation ago.
Fill
up your gas tank lately? I pumped 15 gallons into
my Jeep Cherokee a couple of days ago. With
“regular” running nearly $2 per gallon, it cost me
nearly $30. Fortunately, I drive less than 10,000 miles
a year, so a tank lasts me longer than it does most
people.
All
told, Virginians consumed about 4.9 billion gallons of
gasoline in 2002, the most recent year for which
Department of Motor Vehicles has compiled figures.
Consumption, which has increased relentlessly every year
since 1982, is undoubtedly running higher this year. That means,
at $2 per gallon, Virginians now are spending about $10
billion annually on gasoline. If crude petroleum prices
move higher, as they very well might, Virginians could
be looking at $2.50-per-gallon fuel in the
not-too-distant future. Such a price hike would take
another $2.5 billion in spending power out of our
pockets.
There’s
been a lot of loose talk among politicians about how to
counter this threat to our standard of living. Get
tough with the Saudis. Drill oil in the
Arctic. Tap
the strategic oil reserve. Research hybrid fuels.
But
there’s one thing that no one ever discusses, and
it’s the root of the problem. No one has the guts to
tell the American people, “Stop driving so damn
much!”
Consider
this: In 1973,
Virginia
motorists drove 12,231 miles on average. After eight
years of conservation brought on by high oil prices,
coinciding with a recession, Virginians managed to
shrink their driving to 10,146 miles on average – a
reduction of 17 percent. But then we threw our travel
habits into reverse gear. By 2001, according to DMV figures,
"vehicle miles
traveled" per motorist had surged to a record 17,050 –
an increase of nearly 40 percent!
Any
guesses why we’re driving so much more? Try this: Three
decades of suburban sprawl have forced Virginians into
automobiles for every trip they take and have scattered
their destinations across ever more distant points on
the map.
Presidential
candidate John Kerry has pointed to a “middle class
squeeze” in his campaign against President George W.
Bush. Incomes, he charges, aren’t keeping up with the
rising cost of living. Kerry, I happen to believe, is
pointing to a real phenomenon, not that there’s
anything that either he or George Bush can do about it.
The origins of the squeeze are driven largely by the
pattern and density of local land use, which has driven
up the cost of living in ways not readily measurable by
Cost of Living indices and cannot be ameliorated by federal
economic policy in any case.
The
bureaucrats who calculate the Cost of Living index can
track the price of a gallon of gasoline. They can tell you how much the prices of new cars are climbing,
even adjusting for the introduction of new features and
higher quality standards. What
they can’t plug into their spreadsheets is the fact
that Americans find themselves driving greater distances and spending a higher percentage of
their incomes on auto-related expenses not as a matter
of consumer choice but as a necessity.
Automotive spending that results from driving greater
distances between home, work, day care and the grocery store does not reflect an improved standard of
living.
The
rising price for a gallon of gasoline, one of the few
things the media is observant enough to notice, is only the
most visible manifestation of the problem: Scattered,
low-density, pedestrian-unfriendly development in the
suburbs compels
Americans to take more trips and drive greater
distances. Sprawl-driven demand for gasoline in the United States, the
world’s largest consumer of oil, has offset virtually
all of the
efficiencies achieved by more fuel-efficient cars.
Here in Virginia, politicians don’t give much thought to the price of
gasoline, or the cost of living, for that matter –
those are things for the federal government to sort out. Instead,
local lawmakers focus on the fact that
traffic congestion, something that does
fall within their bailiwick, is
measurably getting worse.
Sadly,
the response of politicians and pundits in Virginia
is
childishly simplistic: More people are driving more and roads are getting more crowded,
so, build more roads! Even after voters soundly
rejected regional tax hikes to finance more
transportation projects in 2003, political pressure is
building again to raise taxes to close a putative
funding gap amounting to some $100 billion over the next 20 years.
(See Barnie Day's column, "What
We're Up Against," August 9, 2004, for a recent
take from this perspective.)
The
notion that the pattern and density of development might
have some connection to both the rising consumption of
gasoline and the congestion on our highways – and that
changing the pattern and density of development might
help solve our problems -- has barely entered the public
discourse. To his credit, Secretary of Transportation
Whitt Clement has at least begun mentioning “land
use” in his speeches, making him, to my knowledge, the first
transportation secretary to utter such heretical thoughts in
public. But even those baby steps put him way out front
of most legislators and his boss the governor, so there's little
prospect that he, by himself, can change things.
Legislators
and planners would do well to acquaint themselves with a
table of motor vehicle statistics maintained on the DMV
website. The DMV thoughtfully provides summary
statistics for Virginia’s
population, the number of licensed drivers in the state,
the number of registered vehicles, gasoline consumption
and total vehicle miles traveled, along with statistics
on traffic injuries and fatalities, since 1967.
As
the DMV statistics suggest, the total number of cars on
the road would have increased, no matter how
intelligently we planned for growth. Between 1973 and
2001, Virginia’s
population expanded from 4.9 million residents to 7.2
million, or 47 percent. Meanwhile, rising affluence made
it possible for more people to afford to buy and
maintain a car. Over those same 28 years, the number of
licensed drivers exploded from 2.8 million to 5.1
million, or 80 percent. As transportation planners never
tire of reminding the public, Virginia's transportation system
has increased capacity at only a fraction of that rate.
Yes...
and no. Here’s
where the analysis starts getting tricky. Yes, the
number of licensed motorists has outpaced the growth in
population and stressed the transportation system. But,
no, you can’t explain the entire increase in the
number of cars on the road by the fact
that people are more affluent and can afford to buy more
cars. The surge in licensed drivers also reflects the
fact that, because transportation options have diminished,
driving is more of a necessity than it was 28
years ago.
Over
the past 30 years, the pattern of development has gotten
even more dysfunctional. Scattered over the landscape
with ever greater abandon, offices, houses and retail
centers are ever more disconnected from one another.
Zoning codes and comprehensive plans have quarantined
offices from housing developments, creating massive
imbalances between the number of jobs, homes and
amenities within reasonable driving distances of one another. And, with a few exceptions,
developers have made scant effort to create pedestrian-friendly
environments or sufficient density to support mass
transit. Fewer people can reach their destinations by
walking, biking, carpooling or taking trains and buses.
For all intents, anyone living in the suburbs, where
almost all new development has occurred, must
own a car or remain confined to the house.
Not
only are more Virginians taking to wheels, but they’re driving
farther. The average number of vehicle miles driven (per
licensed driver) blew past 17,050 miles in 2001. A glance
at the following chart is instructive.
Between
1973 and 1981,
Virginia
motorists curtailed their driving
dramatically. (It can be done!) In the
face of high fuel costs, they cut unnecessary trips,
carpooled, used mass transit and – I would hypothesize
but cannot prove at the moment – were more likely to
consider the length of their commutes and other
driving-related costs when making decisions about where
to live and work.
Then
came the era of cheap energy. Driving surged through the
1980s, dipped briefly during the Gulf War recession, and
then took off again in the 1990s. Scarily enough,
motorists appear to have blasted through the most recent
recession without modifying their driving habits in the
least -- I call it the "Hummer Era" of
conspicuous gasoline consumption. Throughout this period, developers and businesses
also made locational decisions predicated on the
assumption of ever-abundant
oil and cheap gasoline. Thus, Virginia was treated to
the spectacle of companies like AOL and MCI locating
huge office campuses in Loudoun County on the periphery
of the Washington metropolitan area far from where
employees lived. In effect, these companies shifted
their locational costs to their workers, trading cheap real estate for
longer employee commutes.
The
fantasy of inexhaustible cheap energy was rudely
interrupted by the War on Terrorism. The invasion of
Iraq
crippled the flow of Iraqi oil, while terrorists
targeted Saudi oil supplies. In the Western hemisphere, political
instability in
Venezuela
cut
another major source of crude. Meanwhile, China
and India,
spurred by rapid economic growth, entered world oil
markets as major buyers, fueling global demand at the same
time, as luck
would have it, that oil industry analysts began questioning
whether the proven reserves owned by multinational oil
companies were as large as previously believed. Within
the space of one or two short years, the world passed from
oil abundance to oil scarcity. The price for a barrel of
petroleum zoomed up to $45, and pundits suggest it
could climb to $50.
Doubling
the price of oil and gasoline impacts the economics of
mobility in Virginia. It
makes driving significantly more costly. More to the
point, it makes the visible portion of the cost of driving more
costly.
Driving
has always been more expensive than motorists commonly
understood. While most people can tell you how much
they pay for a gallon of gasoline, few have any concept of what it costs to own
and operate their car. Sure, they can tell you their
monthly car payment, but few bother to track the cost
of depreciation, fuel, insurance, property taxes, routine maintenance
(like tires and oil changes) and the cost of major
repairs over time -- much less calculate their per-mile
cost of car ownership.
Perhaps
the most objective measure comes from the Internal Revenue
Service, which allows businesses to deduct 37.5 cents
per mile from their expenses. Employing this yardstick, we can see that the total cost to Virginians of
driving 87 billion miles in 2001 was approximately $32.6
billion. That implies a total cost of auto ownership
attributable to sprawl -- the increase in vehicle miles driven
per motorist since 1973 -- of about $13 billion.
Despite
the aggravation they experience in traffic jams, few
motorists place a value on their time. For purposes of
calculating quality of life, they should. Assuming for
purposes of argument that drivers average speeds of 30 miles per
hour on the road, that 87 billion miles translates into
roughly 3 billion man hours of driving.
Then, assuming the average Virginian values his or her
time at $25 an hour, that implies a $75 billion cost for
driving – of which about $30 billion was induced by
sprawl.
By
totaling the entire cost of car ownership plus the
amount of time spent driving, we can see that the spike
in gasoline prices, though highly visible and, thus, painful, represents only a fraction of
the cost imposed by our dysfunctional human settlement
patterns.
If
the political class truly wants to improve the lives of
Virginians, they should abandon the illusory goal of ameliorating congestion
through building more roads and transit facilities in
the absence of land use reform. Instead, lawmakers need to tackle the infinitely more complex –
but ultimately more rewarding -- challenge of achieving Fundamental
Change (as my fellow columnist E M Risse refers to it)
in Virginia’s pattern and density of human settlement
patterns. Any
other strategy keeps us on a course of ever-escalating
Vehicle Miles Driven, which no amount of taxing and
building can hope to keep pace with.
--
August
9, 2004
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