traffic jam today, but jam tomorrow
voices from the beehive, part 5
This is another post arising from a really interesting email conversation with some of my friends at the Niskanen Center (who obviously can’t be blamed for my bullshit!). But it’s also a subject that has been a perennial bee in my bonnet, and which relates to my ongoing and pointless feud with economic geography. That is the question (or rather, the bee; as with all posts in this series, I have to be clear that I am not open to rational persuasion, these are not arguments, they’re bees) of transport-led development policy.
I have unfortunately forgotten who I stole this joke from, but the root of my disagreement is simply that “build some transport infrastructure, and then hope that it stimulates economic activity” is literally cargo cult thinking – it’s what the Micronesian islanders did. It’s really prevalent in UK discourse, though, possibly because people notice what a huge outlier London is, start looking for “what’s different about London” and quickly coming up with the Underground. This allows them to create an epicycle to save the “scatterplot agglomeration model” under which cities spontaneously generate productivity improvements; you can claim that the absence of a light rail system means that the effective size of somewhere like Manchester or Sheffield is much smaller than its physical size, and that’s why it doesn’t line up on your scatterplot of city size versus per capita output. (At some point somebody might say “hang on I seem to remember that Manchester and Sheffield do have light rail systems” but it’s a poor urbanist indeed that can’t invent a reason to get out of that).
My view (partly shaped by living in Exeter, a prosperous small university city with an absolutely horrific traffic problem, but which is adding new railway stations) is that it’s the other way around. Successful economic development is always a matter of transport infrastructure struggling to keep up with activity, not “build it and they will come”. As I mentioned in last week’s post, people will tolerate absurdly awful living conditions and commute times if there is something interesting and economically valuable for them to do at the other end. But it’s very hard to entice them to try to make something out of nothing, even if the nothing has a great multimodal interchange.
So in the past. I’ve tended to think that transport infrastructure is more like a consumption good than a production good. Yes, let’s build some light rail systems, but let’s do it because we need to get cars off the roads and we deserve nice things, rather than kidding ourselves that we’re making an investment that will pay back in future economic growth. (In my view, the idea that a railway from Oxford to Cambridge is going to produce more science in either place is actually a bit comical; you are not going to get serendipitous chance interactions in dormitory towns that don’t even have a hairdresser’s shop).
As I say, I thought that in the past. But recently, the bee has developed a slight degree of nuance to its buzzing; for a variety of other reasons, I’ve been thinking about time-consistency of policy. Although I think Exeter’s implicit model of “transport-last” development (basically, do something when it looks like it’s about to become literally impossible to get to the university at peak hours) is a more realistic description of success than “transport first”, there is a big difference between “transport last” and “transport never”.
By which I mean – transport infrastructure doesn’t drive investment to any significant extent as far as I can see. But the expectation of transport infrastructure is a different thing. In many of the cases that I’d describe as transport-last, the initial investments are made based on the assumption that as the cluster grows, the public authorities will hold up their side of the bargain and help to solve the transport problems which the activity creates. This is partly a “brown M&M’s” factor (a public authority which can’t commit to doing this is unlikely to be a reliable partner in many other ways), and partly because it greatly simplifies the investment decision to be able to assume that the infrastructure problem can be ignored and left to somebody else.
On this revised theory/bee, the problems of UK regional policy aren’t necessarily soluble by throwing money at pet transport and infrastructure projects, but they’re not unrelated to poor transport investment. Because inadequate transport infrastructure is itself a symptom of the real underlying problem of inadequate governance and long term planning. The North isn’t poor because it doesn’t have a Tube network – it’s poor because the very idea of it having a Tube system is a bit of a punchline.
I admit I haven't looked into this at all, but I'd guess that Los Angeles is something of an outlier among US cities in its economic activity, and if you think Exeter has a traffic problem, hoo boy.
If you look at the 19th century or earlier, transport infrastructure was very important for development. Cities were co-located with seaports, or perhaps at the waterfall line. Cities like Atlanta grew because a few railroad lines just happened to intersect there. Chicago was the easiest portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river system.
Nowadays, mostly yeah. Cities develop because people want to live there, or because jobs are plentiful. But transport is still developmentally important at the micro level. Rents are much higher near train stops than bus stops.
On the third hand, the city of Newark, NJ is beginning to boom because it happens to be a transport hub: an airport, a seaport, and a railhead--not to mention proximity to Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson. On the fourth hand, it had decayed despite these advantages.