Road, River, and Rail

Gary Galles has a review of Randal O'Toole's recent book Gridlock over at The Freeman Online. I haven't read the book, but the review highlights a common flaw I see in libertarian arguments- an inability to recognize the world we live in today as partially the product of massive government intervention. Here's what I mean:

O’Toole, however, recognizes that cars, while costly, provide benefits that vastly outweigh their costs. He explains that the automobile provides tremendous mobility, giving Americans far greater choices about where they live, where they shop, and whom they visit. That mobility gives Americans higher incomes and lower consumer costs than most of the rest of the world, among other benefits. In sum, we owe our high standard of living to the mobility cars and trucks give us. Unfortunately, transportation planners want to discourage us from driving and believe they will be able to achieve their utopian vision by allowing traffic congestion to become as bad as possible.

(snip)

O’Toole also discusses the massive problems with rail transit, the planners’ panacea for both urban and intercity transportation. The results are bleak. “Since 1992,” he writes, “American cities have invested some $100 billion in urban rail transit. Yet no rail system in the country has managed to increase transit’s share of urban travel by even 1 percent.” He calls high-speed rail “a giant black hole sucking in hundreds of billions of dollars and producing negligible benefits.” Due to the politicization of transportation, enormous sums of money are squandered on infrastructure people don’t use, while the infrastructure they do is neglected.

 The book also reveals the vast array of “strategic misrepresentation” that has allowed rail backers to spend billions on plans almost totally divorced from reality. These include ridership forecasts that were double actual usage; the understatement of costs by an average of 40 percent, using misleading time and distance comparisons (such as falsely assuming the relevant trip is train station to train station, rather than from where people start to where they want to go); and vast overstatement of savings in congestion and pollution.

But why are we so dependent on the automobile? Was it just the market that led to its dominance? I mean, I love my car, and I love being able to hop in and go wherever. Clearly individual transport is superior to mass transport, so it must just be the market that favored the automobile.

Except it wasn't. We are a nation of cars because of a massive, deliberate government effort to make us a nation of cars. The most explicit example of this is the interstate highway system. You will never convince me that the market would have produced Interstate 94, running from Port Huron, Michigan, through Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and finding its end in bustling Billings, Montana. My hometown of Gray, LA, is currently being connected to the interstate highway system through a massive(ly expensive) project devoted to turning our perfectly adequate two-lane US 90 into a massive, six-lane elevated interstate running from Lafayette to New Orleans through Gray. If you want to see a whole lot of swampland and not much traffic, take a drive along this highway.

It's not just desolate stretches of road out in BFE that seem unlikely. Here in my adopted home, the bane of my existence is Interstate 5, a heavily congested monstrosity that links all the communities of the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia metro area. These towns and cities all lie along a narrow strip of land between the Cascade Mountains and Puget Sound, and I rather suspect that, left to its own devices, the market might have come up with a centralized high-speed rail line connected to outlying commuter rail or even to roads rather than just one big honking highway. The area is practically custom-made for rail- a sequence of fairly compact urban areas arranged linearly along a coast. But we don't have it, and we'll never have it, because the government has crowded out all other transportation options by building an expansive network of automobile paths and not charging for their use. Instead I try desperately not to go anywhere outside my immediate area during rush hour, for fear of a fifteen minute errand turning into a two hour expedition.

The consequences of this government derangement of the market are immense. Why are our inner cities gutted? Because the government built roads that let you have the peace of country life without sacrificing the convenience and opportunity of city life. Throughout history the wealthy have spent some of their wealth on transport, so they could maintain their peaceful country retreats without forsaking all the city had to offer. Now the government lets everyone live this dream. Hooray for government, right? Except climate change really isn't pretend, kids, nor are the other environmental consequences of all this sprawl. So now we are facing more government intervention to correct the consequences of earlier government intervention, when had we just laid off the intervention in the first place, we'd probably be much more densely urbanized than we are- and as has been well documented, city dwellers are easier on the environment that suburban and country folk.

I think libertarians need to understand this history better, and I also think this history is key for libertarian proselytism. Arguments about the tragedy of the commons and fun little parables about the true nature of the government are all well and good, but there is a rock-solid, incredibly persuasive case to be made that most of what these idiots and other, more intelligent progressives find so terrible about our society today is a direct consequence of deliberate government policy. Libertarians need to be out there, making that case.