Transport-impacts.com

What has puzzled me since I have started learning about decision making in transport is how economics is thought of as a sturdy metric which we can rely on to sort out all our tricky decisions. While it is a nice idea that if we could put a price on all the benefits and burdens of different decisions and then weigh them up and voila… but life just isn’t that easy.

I am not going to talk about any of the “hot topics” such as how it is impossible to see an equivalence between different things which provide different services that cannot replace each other. Or indeed, not being able to put a price on resources and pollutions which have limits that could lead to disaster (with a lot of uncertainty surrounding these limits to add to the confusion). Instead, I am going to bring up a topic that I don’t think is given enough thought - What are all the things that have happened in the past to make the prices of things what they are today????

I am neither an economist nor a historian, so I am just pretending to be an expert. But as far as I know, it’s really important to look at what has happened in the past to understand where we are at and why the price of things are what they are.

From what I have seen, the automotive industry has been powerful and “progressive” from its conception. From the Ford production line to the highly productive Toyota supply chain management and quality management systems, they have been leading the way in efficient manufacturing. Road construction has also been quite an influential industry with a huge amount of development and then there’s the oil industry!!! Whereas passenger train services and other public transport, cycling and walking services, particularly in Australia and America, have had to take a back step (or have been given a good nudge back by the automotive industry).

So we have a situation where the production and construction of the things to make cars go is streamline, well-researched with refined systems to facilitate the growth of this industry. The past government expenditure on road infrastructure has also helped the private vehicle option become as “viable” as it is today. Competing against this industry in every “cost-benefit analysis” is the much undeveloped industries of alternative transport, where there is a lot of room for improvement in manufacturing, construction and systems efficiency.

How dare we compare the price of these two options so simply? It is like comparing the effort involved in making a rich mud cake (not that I think cars are as good as mud cake) from a packet mix to making basic bread from scratch without a recipe or the right tools. Everything has been researched and set-up to make the cake simple and effortless just as everything is set up to make car manufacturing and distribution simple and perversely cheap. Meanwhile the bread maker or the alternative transport provider has not benefited from such research and development, and is left plodding along in the dark.

So that’s the past, what about the future? Due to this lack of development of the alternative modes of transport, surely there is a lot more room for “cheaper” improvement for these transport options. Of course there are, but these don’t seem to get factored into decision making - neither on an individual level nor a policy making level.

Let’s take for an example, the source of electricity for the Sydney suburban train network. If one was to look at the carbon dioxide emissions from private vehicles compared to a train, the savings from catching the train would not be amazing. However, the effort required to change the electricity production for the train system from coal-fired power stations to renewable energy would add a minimal cost to the service. Alas, to improve car systems to run on renewable (or at least non-emitting) sources of energy requires a HUGE amount of effort.

Nothing is still - everything is moving, everything has come from somewhere in the past and is going somewhere in the future. Why do we spend so long analyzing the price of things in the present?

One other little subject that I’d like to raise is that I believe this extends to the public’s attitude towards transport. For many years, we have been pounded with advertising from car industries. This has all accumulated in our little heads (even if we pretend it hasn’t) to make us desire the life on the road. When the best efforts from the rail industry were the “keep training sydney” campaign, this hardly inspires a surge of enthusiasm for public transport, but sounds like a desperate cry of a dying industry. Luckily, these attitudes aren’t fixed. While there is a lot of “de-marketing” of the car (undoing the manipulation of the car industries) and marketing of alternative transport modes to be done, I feel it is possible to wake up the public from their automotive dreaming.

I don’t think I am going out on a limb here when I say most of us are not too fond of traffic. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who got excited about driving through areas of dense traffic (except for the occasional suicidal cyclist who enjoys weaving through the cars). I’m safely going to assume that you feel the same.

Why do we hate traffic - it slows us down, we lose control as to when we will get to our destination, we lose the freedom to drive how we would like, we see the fumes from the car in front. We know that in all those other cars are people who are competing with you for space on the road.

But hang on….we love our cars - symbols of freedom, control, speed and independence.

So what do we love and what do we hate?????

This left me understandably bewildered. Do we not realize that we are part of the traffic? Did we invent the word traffic, so that we didn’t have to say I hate cars? After all, that’s all traffic is!!!!!

Maybe I’m missing something. I guess I’ll just keep weaving around the traffic on my bicycle until someone can enlighten me.

So we are prisoners of our cars – that’s nothing new. They are part of identity, our debt, our daily life, we give them a room in our houses, we devote a section of our paper to them and some of us even devote our weekends and our water allowance to wash and polish them. The industry is huge and we cannot imagine how a loss in car advertising would affect the operability of our papers and television stations and how the loss in car production would affect employment and the economy. There is no easy escape.

There is another way in which we are like prisoners. The prisoner’s dilemma is all too real when we look at our car driven society.

The commuters in modern society share similar decisions to make when choosing the way they travel. For anyone with a job, a driver’s license and the ability to afford a car, they must decide how to get to and from work. We are all well aware that cars are responsible for many burdens including congestion. It is well recognized that cities with a lower dependence on cars have more efficient transport systems. So what are the outcomes of our decision each morning when we see the car keys, the bike helmet and the train timetable sitting next to each other?

If I choose to drive and all my neighbours take alternative motives, I will get to work the fastest with no problems of parking or congestion, and because I’m the only one driving the other car related problems (air pollution etc.) will only be minor.

If I choose to drive and my neighbours also drive, there will be some congestion and a possibility of parking issues, but at least I will have my own private vehicle and the flexibility it brings. There will however, be a lot of social and environmental problems which the car brings including usage of urban space, pollution, high demands on road infrastructure development, energy consumption and road accidents to name a few. But, I will be sharing these problems with the whole of society, so it’s not all on my shoulders.

However, if I choose to cycle and/or take the train and my neighbours are all taking alternative transport as well, I won’t have to worry about too many cars on the roads while cycling and the cars will have a good awareness of cyclists as there are so many of us. Then, when I am catching the train, the frequency of services will be higher (Mohring effect) and there will be money to invest in better infrastructure and service because there are so many patrons. I might not be quite as fast or have quite the same degree of flexibility but there are other bonuses. All the car related problems no longer exist and we find that our hospitals are freed up with fewer car accident victims, fewer illnesses from air pollution, and fewer obesity-related problems, we also have more land space available, we have less personal financial pressures as we spend less on transport and we are on the way to meeting the Kyoto protocol obligations.

But hang on, if I choose to cycle and/or take the train while all my neighbours are driving this isn’t going to be good. I am firstly going to have to cycle in congested traffic next to all these cars that don’t recognize a bike as a road vehicle, there will be no decent facilities for cyclists and I am risking my life (when I told someone I cycle, they told me that Australian cyclists are temporary Australians). When I try to get the train, I am left waiting 30 minutes on a smelly platform for a rickety train from the 1950’s to take me on the all-stops service (which includes several unscheduled stops due to unforeseen maintenance work, signally problems, miscommunication or maybe a suicide attempt from someone who could no longer waste their life waiting for a train). At least I know I am not polluting but I am certainly putting some extra burdens in my life.

So, just like the prisoners, each commuter adds up the pros and cons of his choices. He looks at his possible outcomes and realizes the matrix shows that his best chance is with the car. While he knows that the best social optimum arises if he and his neighbours all take alternative transport, he runs the risk of having the worst possible commute if his neighbours all choose to drive while he is left weaving through traffic and waiting for the train. This dilemma is compounded by the fact it is not only one other prisoner but a whole city (or a large proportion) who would have to choose alternative transport in order to reach the social optimum. He is doubtful of this. Added to this, is the temporal aspect, the socially optimal conditions are going to take time, infrastructure takes time to build, people attitude to cyclists takes time to change and during this period he may have to cope with some crowded trains and some fowl language from passing cars.

So….. the commuter chooses the car as does his neighbour. The system is pareto sub-optimal and the car continues to dominate our roads. However, there may still be some hope for the bike helmet and the train timetable yet:

• To start with the public transport and cycling conditions in Australian cities are not as bad as the commuter in this story made them out to be.
• There is also the possibility for government to react to the car use epidemic by improving the facility of using alternative transport which reduces the burdens for these commuters and prepares for the extra capacity required for the future (which will quash the temporal aspect as an excuse for not getting out of the car)
• There is also the possibility of peak oil and greenhouse gas abatement financially forcing people out of their cars
• My hope, however, is that we are not like prisoners and we have a sense of social conscience – we choose the path that will eventually lead to a social optimum rather than looking at our immediate option. Unlike the prisoners, there is no single fixed date for the prosecution, we can lead by example and hope that our neighbours will follow tomorrow.