Now Available: A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions

Mar 21, 2019

Now available: A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions by David M. Levinson and David A. King, in paper and PDF.

A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions by David M. Levinson and David A. King

About the Book

Why should you read another book about transport and land use? This book differs in that we won’t focus on empirical arguments – we present political arguments. We argue the political aspects of transport policy shouldn’t be assumed away or treated as a nuisance. Political choices are the core reasons our cities look and function the way they do. There is no original sin that we can undo that will lead to utopian visions of urban life.

The book begins by introducing and expanding on the idea of Accessibility. Then we proceed through several major parts: Infrastructure Preservation, Network Expansion, Cities, and Institutions. Infrastructure preservation concerns the relatively short-run issues of how to maintain and operate the existing surface transport system (roads and transit). Network expansion in contrast is a long-run problem, how to enlarge the network, or rather, why enlarging the network is now so difficult. Cities examines how we organize, regulate, and expand our cities to address the failures of transport policy, and falls into the time-frame of the very long-run, as property rights and land uses are often stickier than the concrete of the network is durable. In the part on Institutions we consider things that might at first blush appear to be short-run and malleable, are in fact very long-run. Institutions seem to outlast the infrastructure they manage.

Many of the transport and land use problems we want to solve already have technical solutions. What these problems don’t have, and what we hope to contribute, are political solutions. We expect the audience for this book to be practitioners, planners, engineers, advocates, urbanists, students of transport, and fellow academics.

Preface

1 Accessibility

1.1 The duty of the sovereign
1.2 Access as efficiency
1.3 Access as equity
1.4 Why A Political Economy of Access?

I Infrastructure Preservation

2 Hierarchy of Needs

2.1 The nature of need
2.2 The state of infrastructure
2.3 Infrastructure triage
2.4 Report cards
2.5 Infrastructure heal thyself

3 Road Revenues

3.1 From Snicker’s Gap to funding gap
3.2 How the gas tax may fail
3.3 Fix-it-first

4 Subsidy

4.1 Car subsidies
4.2 Bicycle subsidies
4.3 Transit subsidies
4.4 Subsidize users not systems
4.5 Refactoring subsidies

5 The Solution to Congestion

5.1 Welcome to the club
5.2 Supply-side solutions
5.3 Demand-side solutions

6 Pricing

6.1 Temporal variations
6.2 Spatial variations
6.3 You can toll some of the roads some of the time
6.4 You can toll some of the cars some of the time: Phasing in road pricing one vehicle at a time
6.5 Billing systems
6.6 Road service providers
6.7 What about the revenues?
6.8 Planning with prices
6.9 Congestion is over! If you want it

7 Externalities

7.1 Pecuniary and technical externalities
7.2 Negative externalities
7.3 Positive externalities
7.4 Are reductions of negative externalities positive externalities?
7.5 Pollution ethics
7.6 The art of noise
7.7 Safety vs. speed

8 The Solution to Pollution and Greenhouse Gases

8.1 Global warming
8.2 Supply-side solutions
8.3 Demand-side solutions
8.4 Pollution trust funds
8.5 Domain alignment

II Network Expansion

9 Hierarchy of Wants

9.1 Transport costs too much
9.2 Transport benefits too little
9.3 Transport takes too long to build
9.4 Benefit/cost analysis
9.5 Big infrastructure

10 Macroeconomics: Is Transport Stimulating?

11 The Magic of Streetcars, the Logic of Buses

11.1 Ride quality
11.2 Speed
11.3 Operating costs
11.4 Navigability
11.5 Payment and boarding times
11.6 Nostalgia
11.7 Novelty
11.8 Conspiracy
11.9 Amenity
11.10 Sexuality
11.11 Respect
11.12 Status
11.13 Pedestrian accelerator
11.14 Traffic calming
11.15 Superstructure
11.16 Feedback
11.17 Congestion reduction
11.18 Transportainment
11.19 Permanence and directness
11.20 Development-oriented transit
11.21 Discussion

III Cities

12 Clustering

12.1 Multi-sided markets
12.2 Clustering and economic development
12.3 Constraints drive growth
12.4 Simpli-City
12.5 Beyond density
12.6 Competing centers

13 Zoning

13.1 Zoning tries to solve the externalities problem
13.2 Height limits
13.3 Should the Bay Area have 11 million residents?

14 Fielding Dreams

14.1 Defining induced demand
14.2 Induced demand can be a good thing
14.3 Forgetting faster than we learn

15 Trains, Planes, and Automobiles

15.1 Mapping high-speed rail
15.2 A national high-speed rail network
15.3 Nationalize the rails
15.4 Supercities

16 Value Capture and the Virtuous Cycle

16.1 Infrastructure create saccess
16.2 Access creates value
16.3 Value can be captured
16.4 Captured value can fund infrastructure
16.5 Policy implications

IV Institutions

17 Devolve Responsibility

17.1 Subsidiarity
17.2 Ending the federal surface-transport program .
17.3 Transport finance without the feds: The Canadian model
17.4 Transit federalism
17.5 Whose values?
17.6 ‘Dogfooding’: Ensure managers use the system
17.7 Should voters have full information when voting on transport projects?
17.8 Coordinate local transport and land use policies
17.9 Department of Accessibility
17.10 Metropolitan Department for Transport
17.11 The lump of government mistake

18 Private | Public

18.1 Ownership and network size
18.2 Public-private partnerships
18.3 Tender routes
18.4 Thought experiment: Auctioning green time
18.5 Asset recycling

19 Utility Models for Transit and Roads

19.1 What is a Utility?
19.2 TransLink: organizing transport like a utility
19.3 Transit should focus on core markets
19.4 Think of transit like a club
19.5 Enterprising roads
19.6 Minnesota Mobility: A scenario
19.7 Takeaways

20 Politics and Politicians

20.1 Political parties, three axes, and public transport
20.2 Trust as a positive externality
20.3 Lying as a vicious cycle
20.4 It’s a success
20.5 Mischief in Minnesota
20.6 Taking credit
20.7 Expertise
20.8 Frontiers or values as instruments

21 Transport Poverty

22 Pretexts of Safety and Justice

22.1 Safe Streets for All
22.2 Racial Bias in Traffic Enforcement
22.3 US police interactions are needlessly violent
22.4 Why is traffic safety used as a pretext?
22.5 Not in our name

V Conclusions

23 Jam Today, Access Tomorrow, or Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Appendices

A Goods Framework

A.1 Rivalry and excludability
A.2 Goods and roads
A.3 Goods and transit
A.4 Anti-rivalry and anti-excludability

B Network Economies, Supply and Demand

C The Price of Privacy

D Governance and Performance

D.1 Introduction
D.2 Governance
D.3 Performance of state highway systems
D.4 Analysis
D.5 Conclusions