City Observatory recently republished their commentary on a report (released earlier this year) called Who Pays for Roads. I missed their original post, so this is new to me.
The report and commentary are all about the mispricing of roads/driving and the fallacy that “user fees” (gas taxes, tolls, and so on) are enough to completely cover the costs associated with driving.
I have been a vocal supporter of road pricing and/or congestion charges here in Toronto, and so I’d like to share two pieces from their commentary.
The first is this paragraph, which talks about how mispricing leads to demand issues (i.e. traffic congestion):
The conventional wisdom of road finance is that we have a shortfall of revenue: we “need” more money to pay for maintenance and repair and for new construction. But the huge subsidy to car use has another equally important implication: because user fees are set too low, and because, in essence, we are paying people to drive more, we have excess demand for the road system. If we priced the use of our roads to recover even the cost of maintenance, driving would be noticeably more expensive, and people would have much stronger incentives to drive less, and to use other forms of transportation, like transit and cycling. The fact that user fees are too low not only means that there isn’t enough revenue, but that there is too much demand. One value of user fees would be that they would discourage excessive use of the roads, lessen wear and tear, and in many cases obviate the need for costly new capacity.
And the second is this chart, which shows the cumulative net subsidy to highways in the US from the late 1940’s:
The point of all this is that when you subsidize something it’s because you’d like to see more, not less of it. So why then are we even surprised by the crippling traffic that plagues our cities? We are doing a lot to encourage exactly that.
I was up early on Sunday morning and I tweeted this out:
620 sf. Family of four. Could you do it? https://t.co/raV5Ha3NIi
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
It’s a link to a Dwell article about a New York family of four that lives in a 620 square foot apartment. It’s technically a one-bedroom apartment but the way they have it set up is that the two kids share the bedroom and the parents sleep in the living room similar to as if it were a studio apartment.
And my question in the tweet was, could you do it?
Part of the reason the article caught my attention was because I currently live in a 640 square foot apartment – but as a family of one. And not surprisingly it’s more than enough space for me. Would I still feel the same way if it were a family of two? I believe so. But what about if it were a family of 3 or 4? I suspect it wouldn’t be as effortless, though certainly not impossible.
I love the idea of distilling one’s life down to only what is absolutely necessary. And if you happen to live in a city, like New York, where the median price of a one-bedroom apartment is somewhere around $3,400 per month, there can certainly be lifestyle advantages to doing more with less.
So I’d like to re-ask the question here to the Architect This City community: Could you do it? How minimalist could you go?
I was speaking with a friend this morning and he told me that he had a Pavlovian association between me and laneways. That made me happy.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve heard me go on and on about the great potential of laneways and laneway housing (accessory dwelling units) in Toronto, as well as in other cities around the world.
So I won’t do that today. Instead, I’m going to link to a report that was just released by the Pembina Institute called Make Way for Laneway: Providing more housing options for the Greater Toronto Area.
The report is obviously about Toronto, but there’s no reason that the lessons and ideas won’t also apply to your city. So I would encourage you to give it a read.
For those of you who have emailed me about my own laneway house, the project is still on hold. And it will likely remain that way until the city becomes a bit more accepting of this housing typology. Hopefully that will happen soon.
City Observatory recently republished their commentary on a report (released earlier this year) called Who Pays for Roads. I missed their original post, so this is new to me.
The report and commentary are all about the mispricing of roads/driving and the fallacy that “user fees” (gas taxes, tolls, and so on) are enough to completely cover the costs associated with driving.
I have been a vocal supporter of road pricing and/or congestion charges here in Toronto, and so I’d like to share two pieces from their commentary.
The first is this paragraph, which talks about how mispricing leads to demand issues (i.e. traffic congestion):
The conventional wisdom of road finance is that we have a shortfall of revenue: we “need” more money to pay for maintenance and repair and for new construction. But the huge subsidy to car use has another equally important implication: because user fees are set too low, and because, in essence, we are paying people to drive more, we have excess demand for the road system. If we priced the use of our roads to recover even the cost of maintenance, driving would be noticeably more expensive, and people would have much stronger incentives to drive less, and to use other forms of transportation, like transit and cycling. The fact that user fees are too low not only means that there isn’t enough revenue, but that there is too much demand. One value of user fees would be that they would discourage excessive use of the roads, lessen wear and tear, and in many cases obviate the need for costly new capacity.
And the second is this chart, which shows the cumulative net subsidy to highways in the US from the late 1940’s:
The point of all this is that when you subsidize something it’s because you’d like to see more, not less of it. So why then are we even surprised by the crippling traffic that plagues our cities? We are doing a lot to encourage exactly that.
I was up early on Sunday morning and I tweeted this out:
620 sf. Family of four. Could you do it? https://t.co/raV5Ha3NIi
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
It’s a link to a Dwell article about a New York family of four that lives in a 620 square foot apartment. It’s technically a one-bedroom apartment but the way they have it set up is that the two kids share the bedroom and the parents sleep in the living room similar to as if it were a studio apartment.
And my question in the tweet was, could you do it?
Part of the reason the article caught my attention was because I currently live in a 640 square foot apartment – but as a family of one. And not surprisingly it’s more than enough space for me. Would I still feel the same way if it were a family of two? I believe so. But what about if it were a family of 3 or 4? I suspect it wouldn’t be as effortless, though certainly not impossible.
I love the idea of distilling one’s life down to only what is absolutely necessary. And if you happen to live in a city, like New York, where the median price of a one-bedroom apartment is somewhere around $3,400 per month, there can certainly be lifestyle advantages to doing more with less.
So I’d like to re-ask the question here to the Architect This City community: Could you do it? How minimalist could you go?
I was speaking with a friend this morning and he told me that he had a Pavlovian association between me and laneways. That made me happy.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve heard me go on and on about the great potential of laneways and laneway housing (accessory dwelling units) in Toronto, as well as in other cities around the world.
So I won’t do that today. Instead, I’m going to link to a report that was just released by the Pembina Institute called Make Way for Laneway: Providing more housing options for the Greater Toronto Area.
The report is obviously about Toronto, but there’s no reason that the lessons and ideas won’t also apply to your city. So I would encourage you to give it a read.
For those of you who have emailed me about my own laneway house, the project is still on hold. And it will likely remain that way until the city becomes a bit more accepting of this housing typology. Hopefully that will happen soon.
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