Ted Balaker at the Reason Foundation, co-author of The Road More Traveled, has developed 15 key points about travel and living patterns. In plain English, they are useful for anyone who seeks to save commuters’ time from being wasted, and taxpayers from having their money squandered, on outmoded transit schemes. What follows was pulled from the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii website; I added some links.

Here are Ted Balaker’s thoughts:

1. America is becoming wealthier. See, for example, this report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

2. As people become wealthier, they drive more because it is almost always the fastest, most convenient surface transportation mode. Time is our most precious commodity. As people grow wealthier they are better able to trade money for time.

3. Even with mounting congestion, trips by car are typically faster and more convenient than trips by transit.

4. As people become wealthier, they take public transit less often.

5. The growing prevalence of auto use and the declining prevalence of transit is not an American quirk. It happens almost everywhere wealth increases.

6. Mass transit is a historical anomaly. Personalized travel is the norm. As William T. Bogart notes in his book Don’t Call It Sprawl, mass transit was the dominant mode of travel from about the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. The mass transit anomaly emerged because it was superior to early forms of personalized travel (foot or carts) and it faded when a new form of personalized travel (car) proved superior. See Don’t Call It Sprawl by William T. Bogart.

7. Like nearly every other developed society, America’s metro areas are suburbanizing (i.e. housing and employment are decentralizing). Most people aspire to own their own home, prefer more space to less, and more privacy to less. Usually these aspirations are easier to fulfill in suburbs rather than cities.

8. Public policies that discourage auto use and suburbanization are surprisingly ineffective. Houston has no zoning, little rail transit, and been relatively open to expanding highway capacity. Portland [Oregon] uses aggressive Smart Growth-style policies including an urban growth boundary, it has funded light rail for decades, and has done little to expand roadway capacity. The public policies are very different, yet travel habits in the metropolitan areas are fairly similar. According to the 2000 Census, auto travel accounts for the great majority of work trips in each case (91 percent in Houston; 85 percent in Portland).

9. It is relatively easy to design transit systems that take commuters to and from a downtown area, but such “hub and spoke” flows are giving way to dispersed commuting patterns.

10. Public policies that attempt to discourage dispersed commute patterns are surprisingly ineffective. Even with the nation’s largest downtown area and the most extensive transit system, commute patterns in New York are still dispersing.

11. Although they do little to limit driving, suburbanization, or the dispersal of commute patterns, and public policies that fight “sprawl” can make mobility and housing affordability worse. Housing is much more affordable in Houston than in Portland, and—even though Houston is more populous and has experienced greater population growth in recent decades—traffic congestion has grown twice as much in Portland compared to Houston.

12. If wealth continues to increase, widespread auto use and suburbanization will almost certainly continue to be the norm.

13. The suburban lifestyle and the widespread auto use that accompanies it, produce far more good, and far less bad, than is commonly acknowledged. For example, see Sprawl and Urban Growth by Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn, Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegeman[n], and The Road More Traveled by Ted Balaker and Sam Staley.

14. It would be nearly impossible to turn America into a transit-oriented society. American public officials have been trying (smart growth, reluctance to build roads, tolerance of traffic congestion, a half-trillion in transit subsidies since the 60’s), but auto travel continues to grow. Much more aggressive policies in Europe and elsewhere have done relatively little to slow auto use.

15. The carrot is more powerful than the stick. People will shift away from auto travel and suburban-style living when better alternatives emerge. Foot travel was replaced by travel by animal powered carts, which was replaced by rail cars, which was replaced by the motor car. The car will probably be replaced one day, but only when a better alternative comes along. A partial substitute has already emerged as millions of Americans have replaced auto travel with telecommuting.

Ted Balaker is a Policy Analyst and the Jacobs Fellow at Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank advancing free minds and free markets. You can reach him [at]  Ted.balaker@reason.org.