This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
The Richard Morrill piece in Crosscut has been sufficiently fisked today by STB, so I won’t duplicate efforts (1% of trips? Really? Have we not yet comprehended that it’s only peak rush hour trips, not the 3.a.m. dash for Dick’s Burgers, that cause traffic and therefore need to be mitigated with transit?)
I do want to respond to Dr. Morrill’s comment “the cost of driving must and will rise.” Well, that’s true and not true. In the long term, the costs from congestion will certainly rise. But in the medium term, the cost of driving a car is likely to decrease. Think about it: the average fuel economy in the US is about 21mpg, but the Prius gets north of 50mpg.
We’re not all going to drive Priuses, but the cost per mile traveled will definitely go down, certainly for heavy commuters who choose such cars. Finally, the cost of carbon emissions will certainly decrease as plug-in vehicles become available that can be charged by nighttime excess hydro power.
In other words, it’s hard to say. We don’t know what the future will bring. But we’re pretty sure that we’re going to add another 1 million residents in the next 30 years, so we should probably invest in a diversified transit portfolio: roads, trains, buses, seaplanes, jetpacks, PRTs, etc. as well as Morill’s preferred solution, demand management (i.e. tolls and congestion pricing).