One of the things about politics is that solutions always seem easier to implement and more promising before they stand a real chance of being implemented. People who have for one reason or another fallen in love with the idea of a carbon tax watch the difficulty Congress is having negotiating a passable climate bill and ask why we don’t just pass a carbon tax. It would be so easy! It’s just a tax! Pass it, price carbon, and bada bing, you’re done.

But of course, a carbon tax looks like a clean, simple option at the moment because no one is invested in securing protections or advantages for themselves because a carbon tax isn’t on the table. The moment it looked as though Congress might actually consider and pass a carbon tax, every single interest that has pushed for free carbon credits or other assistance would take on the carbon tax, demanding exemptions or offsetting subsidies of some kind, and generally producing the exact same kind of mess for a carbon tax bill that we have now with a cap-and-trade bill.

It’s worth thinking about this when reading things by people supportive of geoengineering as a solution to the climate change problem. They tend to look at the difficulty the world has had putting in place a system that will succeed at reducing emissions, conclude that the world will fail at reducing emissions sufficiently, and argue that geoengineering is the only way forward.

Now, this is somewhat off base in that it ignores the progress that is actually being made on emission reductions, despite the scope of the problem. Europe is reducing emissions, America may well pass a climate bill within the next year, and even key emerging market nations are rapidly adjusting their positions to accept and move forward on emission reduction measures.

But the question that stands out most to me is just why these geoengineering advocates think that it will be easier to do grand scale, highly unpredictable projects that will affect the earth’s climate in a significant fashion in just a short amount of time than it will be to continue on the path we’re currently following, negotiating for emission cuts. Really, have they thought about this?

Begin with the fact that politicians are extremely risk averse. Who wants to be the guy in charge of the effort to build the who-knows-how-many-billions-of-dollars 18-mile long sulphur dioxide tube? The downside risks are enormous relative to the potential upside benefits.

And why have they not noticed that the public isn’t exactly enamored with intellectuals at the moment, particularly where global warming is concerned. Think about the conspiracy theories being spun on the right at present and then extrapolate out to what might happen if the United Nations determined that massive amounts of gas ought to be pumped into the upper atmosphere.

But the real failing is the inability to consider the way that various interest groups are likely to act. In the best case scenario for geoengineering, costs are likely to be focused on certain groups and certain locations, and those groups may respond to the proposed solution by doing anything from demanding compensation to threatening war, depending on their severity. If risk models indicate that certain particularly bad outcomes might result from the project with certain probabilities, and they will, the potential for those outcomes will be negotation flashpoints, potentially leading to intractable divisions between countries.

Geoengineering seems like the easy approach now, because it’s not on the table. There is no hysterical battle between proponents and opponents, no op-ed bickering between scientists and faux scientists, no global debate on who would and should bear which costs associated with whatever solution is agreed upon. But as soon as it became a real possibility, a fierce debate would rage. And, if one major geoengineering solution were tried and it failed, it is difficult to see how another attempt could win support, and at that point, of course, we’d have lost the ability to address climate change by reducing emissions when it would have helped.

I think it would be irresponsible not to continue studying the issue and looking for potential geoeingineering fixes, but I think that anyone suggesting that we should abandon the effort to cut emissions in favor of a geoengineering approach has not thought the matter through. It should be considered the last ditch effort, only pursued seriously when it is clear that emission cuts will not prevent catastrophic warming.

Early this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to this Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe.

Rosenthal attributes much of this difference to behavioral factors relating, it seems, to Europeans’ unique tolerance of inconvenience. She writes:

But even as an American, if you go live in a nice apartment in Rome, as I did a few years back, your carbon footprint effortlessly plummets. It’s not that the Italians care more about the environment; I’d say they don’t. But the normal Italian poshy apartment in Rome doesn’t have a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or microwave or limitless hot water. The heat doesn’t turn on each fall until you’ve spent a couple of chilly weeks living in sweaters. The fridge is tiny. The average car is small. The Fiat 500 gets twice as much gas mileage as any hybrid SUV. And it’s not considered suffering. It’s living the dolce vita.

She later adds:

Also, in Europe, the construction of most cities preceded the invention of cars. The centuries-old streets in London or Barcelona or Rome simply can’t accommodate much traffic — it’s really a pain, but you learn to live with it. In contrast, most American cities, think Atlanta and Dallas, were designed for people with wheels.

What makes this particularly remarkable is that she opens the essay by discussing an experience she has in Stockholm, in which she insists on taking a taxi from the airport, which ends up being much slower and more expensive than the train.

Brad Plumer frames the piece as a fascinating read in light of the “lifestyle taboo,” writing:

It’s not considered the height of political savvy here in the United States to point out that European lifestyles are greener than our own. Don’t expect that line in an Obama speech anytime soon. Too many facets of European life — the cramped apartments, the clotheslines for drying laundry — would likely strike suburbanites as inconvenient, burdensome, or even downright primitive…

Rosenthal wonders whether similar measures could fly in the United States: “I believe most people are pretty adaptable and that some of the necessary shifts in lifestyle are about changing habits, not giving up comfort or convenience.” Maybe so, but this sort of talk still tends to be taboo in mainstream U.S. green circles. Josh Patashnik wrote a terrific piece for TNR last year on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brand of “pain-free environmentalism” in California — it’s all just peachy to talk about swapping out coal-fired plants for solar-thermal stations, but ixnay on trying to rein in suburban growth or coax people into smaller homes.

I see several problems with Rosenthal’s essay and with Brad’s framing of it. One is that it’s not really correct to attribute the huge gap in per capita emissions between America and Western Europe to the charming European habit of drying their clothes on clotheslines.

As Brad notes, power sources play a major role, whether one is talking about greater use of natural gas, the French nuclear industry, or Iceland’s geothermal capacity.

Climate is extremely important. Western Europe is fairly temperate relative to much of America (and especially compared to the dirtiest parts of the country). In the same way, Californians are much greener than Texans, thanks to the moderate conditions along the heavily populated Pacific coast, which reduce the number of days on which home heating or cooling is needed.

But there are lifestyle issues involved, particularly where transportation and land use are concerned. And contrary to Rosenthal, it isn’t that Europeans have opted for inconvenience. Rather, they have chosen different conveniences, as her Stockholm air train anecdote makes clear.

It is incorrect to say that an overabundance of land drove America to sprawl, and to drive. The Netherlands is dense of necessity, of course, but in Britain and France and Germany there is ample countryside, which might easily be home to sprawling subdivisions.

But Western Europeans have largely chosen not to encourage such growth, opting instead to tax gas at high rates, invest in transit, and protect center cities from the threat of urban freeways.

I think it is very difficult, objectively, to demonstrate that their choices have produced ways of life that are clearly less convenient than American lives. It is clear that Europeans tend to have better health outcomes than us, and they die in car accidents at much lower rates, and of course they’re enjoying levels of wealth similar to our own while producing half as much carbon.

The obvious retort to this line of thinking is that perhaps that’s all true, but like it or not America is now sprawling, and any effort to make the country greener by pursuing European land use and transportation options would be very difficult. In a similar vein, it is argued that attempts to push Americans into such a life via gas taxes or carbon prices would wind up being very painful.

But this is not quite right. As I have pointed out before, America will more or less need to build itself all over again by 2050 in order to accommodate population growth. Just because most of America is currently sprawling doesn’t mean that most of the America built between now and mid-century has to look the same.

It’s also not clear that increasing the push factor on households has to be especially painful. Taxes on drivers can be levied in a progressive fashion, if some revenues are used to fund transit options while others are refunded to lower and middle income households to help offset the added cost of driving.

Congestion tolling would mean higher government revenues and reduced driving, but it would benefit rich and poor alike. As with tax revenues, tolls could be used to provide a cushion against the increased cost for lower income families and increased investment in transit. Higher income households (which will tend to place a greater value on work hours lost to congestion) would enjoy a speedy ride into the office.

If the federal government worked to address limits on urban growth in green cities like New York and San Francisco — limits which also serve to make housing in such places extremely expensive — then America could grow denser and greener by improving access for middle-income households to some of the most dynamic metropolitan economies in the country.

Perhaps not all of the policy changes needed to reduce America’s carbon footprint will be a walk in the park, but efforts to improve land use and transportation decisions are likely to be some of the most benefit-rich aspects of the climate change fight (as you’d think most people would realize, given the obvious pain of congestion, high gas prices, driving fatalities, and isolation among those unable to drive, among other things).

This storyline — that changing lifestyles to enhance walkability will be painful — makes it harder to pass good metropolitan policies and easier for politicans to fall back on the lame argument that Americans simply won’t tolerate anything other than the sprawling suburban patterns which have dominated new development in recent decades.

And by reinforcing the idea that some of the most promising and least painful policy changes that can be made are unlikely to “work” here in America, writers and politicians alike ensure that more of the hard job of cutting emissions will fall to the parts of the economy where there are no good alternative options, and where change will be painful for households.

Rosenthal’s essay is odd yet revealing. She instinctually attributes European greenness to practices Americans would dub backward, while pretending that the very convenient and green transport options she finds are built, and presumably used, by Europeans based on some peculiarity in their culture that we lack.

But we could build trains! In any given legislative sessions bills are introduced that would move the country toward the level of convenience Rosenthal enjoyed in her train ride to the Stockholm airport. It’s just that they don’t pass, because “it’s not considered the height of political savvy” to embrace those policies, because Americans seem to think that their American-ness will render such conveniences inconvenient.

“Trains won’t work here,” because “Americans love their cars,” and so high quality rail lines aren’t built, and so Americans continue to drive. And then we sit around wondering what it is about the European character that makes them enjoy using clotheslines so much.

This post originally appeared on Streetsblog DC.

This is the big problem with Ed Glaeser’s New York Times posts purporting to analyze the costs and benefits of a high speed rail system.

Despite Glaeser’s acknowledgment that his “back-of-the-envelope calculation” doesn’t “[represent] a complete evaluation of any actual proposed route,” the posts are sure to be read and regurgitated by rail opponents uninterested in having an actual debate on the merits of high-speed rail investments.

Today, the Washington Post’s lame excuse for an economics columnist, Robert Samuelson, used numbers from Glaeser’s analysis in writing an extremely regrettable piece arguing that investments in high-speed rail are misguided. But this is no honest entry into the discussion of how best to invest in transportation infrastructure. It’s a hack job, plain and simple.

Samuelson begins by complaining about Amtrak subsidies, but he can’t be bothered to address what those subsidies actually suggest about the competitiveness of fast, intercity rail. On the corridor where service most closely resembles true high-speed service, Amtrak runs an operating profit.

It gets much worse from there. Samuelson argues against rail on the basis of population density, writing:

What works in Europe and Asia won’t in the United States. Even abroad, passenger trains are subsidized. But the subsidies are more justifiable because geography and energy policies differ.

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it’s 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile. Trains can’t pick up most people where they live and work and take them to where they want to go. Cars can.

This is embarrassingly bad analysis. America’s overall population density includes vast expanses of land in the west where few people live and where high-speed trains won’t be built (have a look at the administration’s map of proposed routes here and note how many low-density states are not expected to get service).

The proper point of comparison is the population densities of metropolitan corridors where lines will be built. A child could understand the point, and yet Samuelson, out of ignorance or deliberate obtuseness, doesn’t get it.

He follows that up with a similar error:

Distances also matter. America is big; trips are longer. Beyond 400 to 500 miles, fast trains can’t compete with planes.

Again, this is just embarrassing. Distances between major cities on planned corridors will be at most 400 miles. No one is suggesting that rail compete with planes on coast-to-coast routes.

This is a hugely important factual point, and Samuelson seems to be entirely ignorant of it. He simply knows nothing about the policies being considered.

Samuelson goes on to make other mistakes; like Glaeser he fails to consider the costs and benefits of alternatives to high-speed rail — given current congestion levels and expected population growth, new infrastructure of some kind will be necessary to keep the national economy functioning. But given the basic errors mentioned above, it’s hardly worth engaging with the piece.

The Post should be ashamed of its decision to publish this. And Glaeser should be at least a little bit uncomfortable that his work is being cited in factually challenged columns by writers who clearly have no interest in honest participation in the discussion.

So far, the most effective way for a Kyoto signatory to cut its carbon output has been to suffer a well-timed industrial implosion, as Russia did after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. The Kyoto benchmark year is 1990, when the smokestacks of the Soviet military-industrial complex were still blackening the skies, so when Vladimir Putin ratified the protocol, in 2004, Russia was already certain to meet its goal for 2012. The countries with the best emissions-reduction records–Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic–were all parts of the Soviet empire and therefore look good for the same reason …

The explanation for Canada’s difficulties isn’t complicated: the world’s principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity. The recession makes that relationship easy to see: shuttered factories don’t spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air-conditioners, and swimming-pool heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air travel; even af-fluent people buy less throwaway junk. Gasoline consumption in the United States fell almost six per cent in 2008. That was the result not of a sudden greening of the American consciousness but of the rapid rise in the price of oil during the first half of the year, followed by the full efflorescence of the current economic mess.

And he closes with this line:

The ultimate success or failure of Obama’s program, and of the measures that will be introduced in Copenhagen this year, will depend on our willingness, once the global economy is no longer teetering, to accept policies that will seem to be nudging us back toward the abyss.

I’m really astonished at this. It’s mind-blowingly wrong, and dangerous to boot — the last thing we need at this juncture is for Americans to begin thinking that efforts to address climate change will plunge the economy back into the throes of deep recession. And as I can’t reiterate enough, it’s wrong.

Efficiency gains obviously make it possible to do much more with less — to emit less carbon while enjoying the kind of life to which we’re currently accustomed. Owen entertains this idea briefly before dismissing it, saying that fuel-efficiency gains will be entirely offset by increased driving. This is incorrect for several reasons. First, the rebound rate for efficiency gains is nowhere near 100 percent. Second, there are other ways to reduce driving that will improve overall social welfare — things like congestion pricing. And third, Owen seems to assume that steady increases in driving are an inherent part of the process of economic growth, rather than an outcome of a set of rules that have little to nothing to do with economic efficiency.

This line of argument also neglects other examples of efficiency in action. Measures to improve efficiency for things like home appliances have led to far more efficient goods that work as well as ever, and have hardly left Americans destitute. Other efficiency producing innovations like the development of a smart electrical grid could substantially reduce waste and could conceivably lower electricity rates. Owen would have the process of increasing efficiency be an utter waste of time, when it’s anything but.

Another part of the equation — the greening of the nation’s energy supply, is essentially ignored; Owen stops only momentarily to note that green energy sources constitute a negligible portion of Americas total energy use. This is misleading; there are obviously parts of America, and the world, that use a much higher percentage of green energy, apparently without condemning themselves to economic ruin. But he also embraces a common economic fallacy — that just because one product dominates a market it must be far superior to rival products. That need not be true at all. If one product is consistently cheaper than another, it will dominate a market, even if the cost difference between the two is small. And because there are returns to scale for many energy technologies, it’s far from clear that fully deployed alternative technologies would, in fact, be more expensive.

Many dirty fuels are cheap primarily because an enormous infrastructure has already been set up to support them. But there are gains to be had setting up an alternative infrastructure, and when that infrastructure is in place, green options will be competitive with fossil fuels (but with the side benefit of not contributing to the catastrophic warming of the earth’s climate).

On green jobs, the best Owen can do is suggest that gains in green employment will likely be offset by declines in “brown” employment. There are reasons to think this isn’t the case, but even if we accept his position we’re left with no net increase in unemployment. And looking back at our recent history, it’s clear that developed nations have steadily reduced the incidence of many formerly ubiquitous and dangerous pollutants, all while the economy somehow managed to keep growing.

And there is the greatest omission of all — that somehow jobs and economic growth won’t be threatened in the absence of action. But that’s not the case. Economic losses from climate change will be substantial, and they’ll be epically large if (as we should expect) changes begin to destabilize political systems around the world. That’s an abyss worth fearing. Perhaps Owen meant well, but this is a damaging piece based on nothing, seemingly, but the author’s erroneous suppositions. Not a very good day for the New Yorker, I’m afraid.

Ronald Reagan

This past week saw the return of the annual spectacle known as CPAC — the Conservative Political Action Conference — to Washington. As is inevitable whenever conservatives gather, invocations of the greatness of Ronald Reagan ran thick. But with a new and charismatic president in office looking to roll back key aspects of the Reagan era, the usual reverie rang a bit hollow. Mr. Reagan, born in 1911, walked out of the White House a generation ago, and America is now a much different place.

The country has been surprisingly slow to cotton to the general shift underway. Even as politicians focus on the pressure retiring Baby Boomers will place on public resources, they seem reluctant to grasp the implications of shifting demographics for other areas of policy. But these changes are making themselves felt, whether we acknowledge them or not.

In 1980, Boomers were in their twenties and thirties, constituting the largest cohort of young householders in the nation’s history. Politics during the era was relentlessly suburban. Residents of the low-tax, low-public service suburbs were happy with their lot and expected their federal government to trim down. Tax rates fell and the welfare structure built to address the social problems increasingly confined to urban centers was attacked (though defense spending ensured a steady flow of red ink). These political impulses were reflected in policy choices that continued to encourage freeway construction and automobility, and in the housing markets, where child-rearing Boomers kicked off a new wave of suburbanization and sprawl.

But 1980 was nearly three decades ago. Boomers are now approaching retirement and looking for an active life even as they age and see their driving skills deteriorate. And their children have far smaller households than previous generations. The economic fundamentals underlying suburban growth have been turned on their head.

Outer suburbs, once considered the American dream, are now the refuge of cash-strapped families forced to extreme commute for the sake of affordable housing. They now suffer many of the ills formerly confined to urban centers, from fiscal struggles to crime and drug issues. In center cities, generational change helped reduce urban crime rates, which had soared in the 1980s and 1990s. And the percent of American households with children, which fell steadily from 1950 to 1980 before plateauing as the Boomers embraced family life, is now tumbling.

Household demand is shifting, and it’s shifting toward denser, more walkable environments. In the past decade, city centers have increased their share of new housing permits — a trend that accelerated over the past five years, according to a survey conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency. The housing bust, which has been far worse in distant exurbs than in city centers, has contributed to the boost in the relative stature of urban centers. Indeed, the bust may itself be a sign of the mismatch in housing demand and housing supply. Builders put up tens of thousands of exurban single-family homes, only to go belly up as buyers failed to materialize.

The dramatic decline in vehicle miles traveled and vehicle sales precipitated by high gas prices and then recession also reflects the weakened state of demand for an auto-centric lifestyle. And perhaps most interestingly, suburban areas are increasingly adopting the development patterns of city centers — grids, mixed-use developments, transit friendliness, and density — to remain desirable and functional for a new generation

Today’s working population was born and raised in the suburbs. They know the territory and they’re increasingly looking for something else for themselves and their families.

But lagging behind these trends is government policy. The distribution of transportation funding continues to bear the imprint of an earlier generation’s priorities. The tilt toward highways that emerged over half a century ago continues to guide federal spending. Even as demand patterns began shifting in the past decade, federal officials in thrall to Reaganism sought to shrink funding for transit and rail. This despite unstable gasoline prices and the looming threat of climate change.

Our second and last Boomer president signed the latest version of the nation’s transportation spending guidelines into law in 2005. That law expires this year. As we look to craft replacement legislation, we should recognize that it’s long past time to close the book on the policies of previous generations. Just because our parents and grandparents saw fit to spend massively on highway construction doesn’t mean we must. The Boomers had their chance at the helm. It’s time to show that we learned something from their mistakes.

We should expect those who benefit from a technology to pay for it. This is the basic idea behind a market economy — people aren’t in the habit of giving away something for nothing, and the best way to allocate scarce resources is to let buyers and sellers agree upon a price, which is then paid by the buyer who, we expect, will benefit from the purchase.

But sometimes, when a buyer decides to spend money on a good or service, other people benefit as well. If I build an exceptionally attractive house in a neighborhood, I benefit, but so too do my neighbors, who get to look at the house and whose own homes may appreciate thanks to their location in what is now a more attractive neighborhood. When I pay college tuition and get a degree, I benefit, but so too do future colleagues, who will enjoy greater success as part of a highly educated labor pool. If government does nothing in such situations, then we will get the level of attractive homes or college educations that suits the direct beneficiaries of such investments — but that doesn’t mean that we have provided the number that maximizes the benefit to society as a whole.

This is what’s called a positive externality, and in such situations society is made better off if government encourages more investment than the market alone will make. Transit is rife with such positive externalities. When a transit system is built, riders are the direct — but by no means the only — beneficiaries. Employers and businesses enjoy increased access to labor markets and customers. Drivers who shift to transit contribute to reduced congestion and accident costs. Per capita fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions fall. Other examples abound.

As such it is welfare reducing to ask riders to shoulder the entire burden of operating costs; a system that ran a profit would be imposing avoidable costs on society. Economic research by Ian Parry and Kenneth Small, consistent with other studies, showed [PDF] that on average a fare subsidy of 50 percent of operating costs is justified, rising to as high as 90 percent in some cases.

And so it is wholly appropriate that operating expenses come of out government revenues as well as out of the farebox. But we are approaching a crisis. Transit ridership has grown even as vehicle miles traveled have peaked and fallen [PDF]. In a transportation system that relies heavily on gas tax revenues, the result has been budget meltdowns and service cuts. This is the transit paradox. Transit is dependent upon funding from drivers, so reduced driving necessitates transit cuts.

As Transportation for America has documented, those cuts are now national in scope. And as The New York Times noted this week, they are deep and likely to be very painful. Thousands of bus routes are being cut. Rail service is being curtailed. Fares are going up and workers are being laid off. These changes will directly and negatively impact low- and middle-income households. They’ll force some households to drive, reducing discretionary income. They’ll keep others from jobs and shops, adding to unemployment. And they’ll serve to reverse one of the most positive green trends of recent years: the increase in transit ridership [PDF] to levels unseen in over half a century.

Billions in transit funds have been added to the stimulus, but targeted at capital spending. Such investments are necessary but do not address this growing crisis. State governments will also get a fiscal boost from the stimulus, which might be used to support transit operation. But state budgets have many holes to fill, and multi-jurisdictional systems are likely to be left out. Direct operational funding is needed.

Operational funding is good stimulus, progressive, and green, and it will help to prevent a significant setback to transit that will overwhelmingly harm lower-income workers and households. As a nation, we were willing to part with billions to preserve the automakers for a matter of months, despite obvious falling demand for their historically dirty products. The economic case for transit operating assistance is at least as strong. If we decide to leave systems on doomsday budgets now, we will pay dearly for it later.

At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the overwhelming way in which government policy has encouraged such development, intentionally, and unintentionally. The government didn’t necessarily intend for a massive network of (largely) free-to-user highways to spur suburban growth and gut urban centers, but that’s what happened. Similarly, the government’s long-term commitment to increased rates of home-ownership wasn’t necessarily about changing land-use patterns. But as economist Ed Glaeser notes at the New Republic, the relationship between the policy and the outcome is clear:

Roughly 87 percent of all single-family detached homes are owner-occupied. Roughly 87 percent of all homes in buildings with five or more units are rented. Multi-family dwellings have common spaces, such as lobbies, and common infrastructure; sharing joint control over these things can often be quite difficult. Landlord control over large buildings irons out the difficulties of dealing with the cacophony of collective control.

The connection between homeownership and structure type implies that when the federal government gets into the business of supporting homeownership, it also gets into the business of supporting single-family detached homes — and this means supporting lower-density living. New Yorkers have converted plenty of rental units into co-ops, but still 77 percent of the households in Manhattan rent. The government’s big post-war push into homeownership was inevitably also a push to suburbanize. You do not need to be an enemy of the suburbs to wonder why the government is implicitly urging Americans to drive longer distances and flee denser living.

Of course, this is just one of many reasons why we should be skeptical of policies that subsidize homeownership. Such subsidies are regressive. They encourage heavy, leveraged investments in undiversified assets that perform unexceptionally over time. They reduce mobility, which prevents households from responding to changing economic conditions. And should there be a massive housing bubble and collapse, they put millions of households at risk of foreclosure and bankruptcy and contribute to global economic meltdown.

But for all this, the odds of a reversal of these policies, like the mortgage interest reduction, are basically zero. Which is yet another reason that we ought to focus on undoing other suburban subsidies wherever it’s politically feasible. Congestion pricing, which could address crowded freeways while funding better urban transport, is a good place to start.

Congestion costs America some $80 billion per year, in the form of lost time and wasted fuel. And as it turns out, commutes extended by congestion have other effects, as well:

There is a strong empirical evidence demonstrating that labor force participation rates of married women are negatively correlated with commuting time. What is more, the analysis shows that metropolitan areas which experienced relatively large increases in average commuting time between 1980 and 2000 also had slower growth of labor force participation of married women.

Long commutes are typically associated with dense cities like New York, but in recent decades, congestion has grown fastest in places with rapid exurban growth — like Dallas, Riverside (California), San Diego, and Washington, D.C.

At the heart of the problems of increased congestion and longer commutes are three related issues. We have focused excessively on inefficient transportation technologies (namely, personal automobiles), we have underpriced the infrastructure supporting those technologies (via subsidies or free parking and roadways), and those policy choices have led to poor land-use decisions.

We can think about the Washington, D.C. area as an example. In the center — the District, Arlington, and Alexandria — there is good access to high-capacity transportation technologies — Metro, and a dense, mixed-use settlement pattern. As such, commute times in these places are the lowest in the metropolitan area. But this density rapidly gives way to low-slung suburban development, which spreads people out over much larger distances, and keeps residential areas well away from jobs centers. What’s more, the principle transportation technology in the suburbs is the automobile (personal vehicles can’t move nearly as many people along rights-of-way as mass transit), and the roads are almost entirely free to use. The result is that too many people try to use underpriced roads and parking, and too many people choose homes in places that rely on underpriced roads.

And the problem becomes worse in that the most convenient urban locations are limited in scope — central density rapidly gives way to suburbia — and these supply limitations generate very high housing costs. In suburbia, the most convenient locations — nearest to job centers — are also very limited, and therefore expensive. So increasingly, affordable workforce housing is only found on the outer edges of metropolitan areas. And households there bear the brunt of congestion costs and the brunt of increases in fuel costs, and, as the research above indicates, they struggle the most to balance work and family life.

Differences in taste dictate that some folks will prefer low-density suburbs while others will want to live in denser neighborhoods. But choices about where we live and how we get around are also heavily influenced by relative costs. Those costs are determined by supply, which is a direct function of public policy. We’ve chosen to invest heavily in one kind of development for decades, to an extent that’s entirely without economic or social justification. And we’re paying the price now, monetarily, environmentally, and socially.

Several trade and issue advocacy groups are part of OneRail, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Amtrak, the American Short Line & Regional Railroad Association, the Association of American Railroads, and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.

If I have a complaint, it’s this: A broader coalition is necessary. When highway funding is on the table, the heavies get into the game — the oil companies, automobile companies, and chambers of commerce. Rail activities should also work to exploit the economic spillovers generated by rail investments. Transit-oriented development has proven lucrative for city governments as well as many commercial and residential developers. Producers of products from steel to electric and diesel engines to upholstery could benefit from new transit projects. Power companies, which helped develop the first generation of streetcar networks a century ago, might conceivably benefit from an increase in electricity demand or from the grid improvements that could accompany creation of improved national rail corridors.

The point is this — rail investment is good environmental, energy, and economic policy, but it’s also good business. And if OneRail can get business on board, then we can expect real legislative progress.

The explanation is simple: wages are flat, prices are down. The labor market operates on a bit of a lag, so while the recession affected oil demand and prices very quickly, layoffs and falling wages are emerging more slowly. Eventually, the weak economy will catch up to workers (those who still have jobs), and spending power will decline.

But this is important to remember given the trends of the past decade. When economies are growing, oil prices rise. This means that even while wages are growing, it’s difficult for consumer spending power to keep up, unless we reduce the intensity of oil in our economy. How can we do this? Easy — cut commuting times, reduce driving, reduce congestion, green intercity travel and green freight shipping (so that rising oil prices don’t feed through to prices for other goods, including food).

This, of course, is the logic behind a push for greener infrastructure. Better transit and rail systems boost productivity — by improving movement of goods and people — which increases wages. They also reduce the petroleum intensity of the economy. In a boom period, you then have rising wages that aren’t much eroded by rising energy costs. And that means a richer and greener society.

Barack Obama understands this; at least, that’s what we’ve been led to believe by his speeches. Many Congressional leaders understand it too. And it is therefore very disappointing to see the contents of the new American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — also known as the stimulus bill. As has been widely reported, roughly $30 billion of the proposed infrastructure spending will go to highways, while only $10 billion is allocated toward transit and rail.

Optimists might see this as a reflection of the shovel-readiness of various initiatives, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The bill itself reflects that more could have been done. A line item allocating $6 billion to transit capital programs concludes:

The Department of Transportation’s 2006 Conditions and Performance Report indicated there is an annual investment gap of $3.2 billion to maintain our transit systems and an annual gap of $9.2 billion to begin to improve our transit systems. In addition, a January 2009 survey of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) identified 787 ready-to-go transit projects totaling $15.9 billion.

Elsewhere it identifies unmet transit and rail needs totaling $78 billion.

What’s more, the horizon of the bill is longer than many anticipated. The Congressional Budget Office reports that of the $355 billion in federal stimulus spending, only $26 billion will be used in 2009. Over $200 billion will be spent between 2011 and 2019. Within a ten-year window, the scope for useful spending on transit and rail is nearly unlimited. The lack of transit spending is unquestionably political, and not logistical, in nature.

The possibility remains that the Congressional leadership and the Obama administration are waiting for the 2009 transportation bill overhaul to adjust spending priorities, and indeed, that vote will be hugely important for the future of the nation’s infrastructure. There may also be scope for funding in Obama’s energy bill. But there is reason for concern here.

The security of our economy and our environment depend upon a sea change in transportation planning. That transit and rail were so easily sacrificed in stimulus negotiations should send us a message — now is no time for transit supporters to ease up on their legislators. We’ll need to fight until the money is in the pipeline.