Brian D. Taylor
To live in Los Angeles is to endure chronic traffic congestion. Cities are places where people cluster together to create and enjoy the benefits of economic wealth, cultural vibrancy, intellectual exchange, and more. But with clustering comes traffic — often lots of it. While nearly everyone agrees that traffic is a problem, opinions diverge widely on what to do about it.
Brian D. Taylor
Prior to the recent explosion of digital access to individual songs, greatest hits albums were a staple of the music industry. An artist with enough successful albums under his or her belt could repackage the best songs on each previous album into a greatest hits collection, which often then became a bestseller itself.
Here at ACCESS, we have more than a few successful issues under our collective belt, so many that our first greatest hits album even has a theme: Transportation Finance. While it was hard to narrow it down, the six articles we chose for this ACCESS Finance Special Issue collectively consider creative approaches emerging in California and elsewhere to address our mounting financial challenges in transportation.
Brian D. Taylor and
Martin Wachs
“Carmageddon” refers to the horrific traffic jams predicted when a bridge reconstruction project in Los Angeles required closing 10 miles of the Interstate 405 freeway on two weekends. The closed freeway through the Sepulveda Pass between West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley is one of the most heavily traveled arteries in the world, with more than half a million vehicles passing through on a typical summer weekend. Traffic from the closures was predicted to back up for miles and spill onto local streets, severely congesting some parts of Los Angeles.
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Andrew Mondschein,
Evelyn Blumenberg, and
Brian D. Taylor
How do you get to work? Do you have a preferred route to your favorite restaurant? To the nearest hospital? To Disneyland? If you know—or think you know—the answers to any of these questions, then your cognitive map is at work. Humans rely on mental maps to store knowledge of places and routes in order to engage in travel and activities. People use their cognitive maps to decide where to go and how to get there. But accessibility research has largely ignored this essential aspect of travel behavior, despite the fact that a trip won’t happen without prior knowledge of a destination and potential routes to it. As cities become larger and more dispersed, good information about opportunities and travel systems is more important than ever.
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Hiroyuki Iseki,
Michael Smart,
Brian D. Taylor, and
Allison Yoh
In an era of stretched tax revenues, shrinking public sector budgets, and partisan debates over the appropriate role and scale of government, investments in public transit systems have been increasing. While the Great Recession has recently squeezed many transit operating budgets, overall public capital and operating subsidies of transit systems have grown dramatically over the past decade. Why have transit expenditures grown when so many other facets of public expenditure have shrunk?
Lisa Schweitzer and
Brian D. Taylor
Economists have long advocated road pricing as an efficient way to reduce congestion and improve the environment. Many critics, however, object to road pricing on the grounds that it unfairly burdens low-income drivers. Implicit in these objections is the idea that existing transportation finance methods burden the poor less, or at least spread the burden more fairly. Most of the equity concerns about road pricing stem from the fact that it is regressive; that is, poorer people spend a larger share of their incomes on tolls than do wealthier people. But in the US, road systems are financed primarily through fuel taxes, vehicle registration fees, property taxes, and, increasingly, sales taxes—all of which are also regressive. Thus the relevant question is not simply whether road pricing is regressive, or even if it will burden the poor. The relevant question is whether road pricing will burden the poor more than other ways of paying for roads.
Jeffrey R. Brown,
Eric A. Morris, and
Brian D. Taylor
Stuck in traffic in Washington, DC in 1959, President Eisenhower was shocked to learn that the delay was being caused by Interstate Highway construction. Surely the Interstates were being built between cities, not in them. The President demanded to know who was responsible for this state of affairs, only to be told that he was; it was the result of legislation he had signed three years earlier. Aghast, Eisenhower attempted to get the federal government out of the urban freeway business. But it was too late: the program had built up momentum that not even he could halt.
Brian D. Taylor
I suspect that every one of Professor Melvin Webber's colleagues experienced The Furrowed Brow at one time or another. Offer an assertion on almost any topic, and Mel would employ The Furrowed Brow—an exceedingly earnest and quizzical expression he wore while peppering you with questions challenging your proposition in a methodical point-by-point fashion. Conventional wisdom of any sort was especially likely to elicit The Furrowed Brow—“good planning requires public participation,” “we can’t build our way out of congestion,” “urban travel is underpriced” or any similar statement was vulnerable. “Why?” Mel would ask. “How do we know?” “Are you sure?” On a few occasions he asked me “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” so many times in a row that I thought that he was pulling my leg. But he wasn’t.
Brian D. Taylor
Increasingly frequent and deadly bombings of public transit systems have put transportation officials around the world on edge. Buses and trains in London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, and dozens of other cities have been the unlucky sites for terrorist attacks in recent years. Such attacks, quite understandably, have prompted calls here in the US and overseas for increased efforts to make public transit systems safe from terrorists. Such calls assume, of course, that public transit systems, or transportation and infrastructure systems more broadly, are the focus of the problem and the appropriate venue for policy- making and action. The solution, we are told, is transit security. But are these recent bus and subway bombings a transportation problem, or something much broader?
Paul Sorensen and
Brian D. Taylor
Who should pay for roads? How should they pay?
These frequently debated questions echoed through the first two decades of the last century as motor vehicle use accelerated. It seemed only fair to ask users to pay for roads, but collecting road– side tolls was costly, slowed traffic, and was feasible on only the most heavily traveled highways. Paying for roads with general tax revenues was far simpler, but was seen as unfair to the many people without cars or trucks who would be forced to pay for roads that they would seldom use. The eventual solution—the motor-fuel tax—was a brilliant one: the tax was cheap and easy to collect, and it charged travelers in rough proportion to their use of roads.