Bike Thieves, Induced Demand, Congestion Charges, and FDR

Off-Ramps for 21 November 2024

Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight four interesting pieces that I think you will enjoy reading. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.

(And come back seven days from now for Musk Week! I have three good pieces about Elon ready to go. Given the way the news cycle has been going, I’m pretty sure there will be another one presently, and I’ll serve them all up to you at once.)

1. How to Catch a London Bike Thief

Basically, do it yourself.

That’s the conclusion that Jim Waterston reaches after his own bike is stolen; coincidentally, while he is researching a story about bike theft, which is rampant in London (and elsewhere).

How to catch a London bike thief

We’ve had wonderful advances in bike technology in the past two decades. Notably e-bikes, and more specifically pedelecs—bikes that one must pedal, but with electrical assistance—could transform urban commutes by doubling a cyclist’s range. With a pedelec, an experienced cyclist can commute as far as 20km comfortably, but even a complete tyro can easily go 5km, which many commutes fall into.

Pedelecs could do this, but they won’t, because they’re very expensive, and as such prime targets for thieves. A bike is typically stored outside, is left alone, and is difficult to trace, meaning it is an ideal thing to steal. This makes bike theft rampant… in fact, such a common crime that police forces are overwhelmed, and don’t try to combat it, making it even more common.

As long as this is the case, e-bikes will remain niche products, not the standard features of urban transport that they should be. So what can be done about it? Waterson offers a few possibilities in his piece, including what he did himself, which is use the electronic tracker on his bike to locate and the thieves and then confront them personally.

I like his moxie, but this solution won’t scale. Better ones are needed.

2. Induced Demand Is Fake

Earlier this year I wrote Bike Lanes and Progress: a Play in One Act, a piece that has proved to be one of the least popular things that’s appeared on this blog. Part of that is because of its experimental form, but another part of that, I’ve been given to understand, is that it doesn’t dismiss out-of-hand the idea of building highways.

I haven’t changed my mind, so let me tilt at this windmill one more time, by signal-boosting this piece by Ben Southwood on Why Induced Demand Is Fake. As my character, Anne, observes in my own piece, the standard argument against building a highway to defeat congestion is that the presence of the highway will simply induce demand. If we allow a road trip to happen more quickly, more people will, at the margin, choose to take road trips, congesting the road back to its previous level.

The problem here is that the argument confuses induced demand for latent demand. A bigger highway allows more trips at the margins, and more trips are good! That’s more economic activity, more consumption, more visits to friends, and more tourism; generally, more people pursuing their vision of the good life. We want more of these things!

So, when faced with a proposal for a new highway, we shouldn’t dismiss it immediately as prima facie bad. We should instead, as Bianca notes in the dialogue, undertake a cost-benefit analysis: how many trips will this highway facilitate? at what cost? how else could we facilitate trips with that money? A new highway is probably going to fail such a test, as the road network is pretty much built out and the return-on-investment is unlikely to pencil out. But we actually have to do the analysis, rather than simply relying on hacky memes about induced demand.

3. I Am Once Again Asking That We Not Tie Congestion Charges to Transit Funding

In case you missed it, congestion charges in Manhattan are happening.

They were supposed to have begun earlier this year, on June 30, but New York state governor Kathy Hochul intervened to halt implementation a few weeks beforehand. She gave some word-salad defenses of her move, but it was not a secret that the real motive was to avoid implementing an unpopular measure in an election year, and in particular to help Long Island Democrats in tough races keep their seats in the House of Representatives. Now that the election is over, congestion pricing will proceed, albeit at a lower rate. Originally, drivers entering lower Manhattan during peak hour were to pay $15; now they will pay $9.

I’m glad it’s happening, and I hope that the incoming President doesn’t find a way to shut it down, as he has threatened to do. As per the previous item, building new roads is unlikely to help address congestion, but charging for use during peak times will. That is the point of congestion charges, and it’s enough to justify them.

Which is why I really wish that we would stop being too-clever-by-half by promising that the revenue raised will be used to pay for transit.

On the face of it, it seems elegant: oh, you can’t afford the congestion charge? Take transit instead! The service is better than ever because we’re using the congestion charge to improve it! That is what New York is doing, allowing the MTA (the local transit operator) to borrow against charge revenue to expand service. And that is what Bangkok is poised to do as well.

But what this approach actually does is take what should be a bland technocratic measure—charging for use of a scarce public resource, namely road space during peak times— and make it thoroughly, radioactively political: a salvo in the War on the Car. Proponents might as well twirl their mustaches and chortle about how much they enjoy sticking it to drivers in order to help the truly needy, the transit rider.

Transit riders are truly needy, as my ongoing series on the Endless Emergency has been exploring. And road users should be paying congestion charges: user fees are the fairest way to fund transport infrastructure. Framing this situation as a zero-sum game where one has to lose so the other can win makes it harder to recognize either truth.

Please just throw charge money into general revenue, or explicitly tie it to road maintenance, which certainly needs it, now that gasoline taxes are waning due to the rise of electric cars. Don’t tie the charge money to transit funding, or it will go away the next time a populist takes power, and transit will be even worse off.

4. How FDR Became a Progressive

Adam Cadre is one of my favourite writers, although he doesn’t publish nearly as often as I would like, due to his need to earn money at non-writing work, in order to live. (I can relate.) He’s been mostly on hiatus since 2017; at that time he had been writing an excellent series of biographical pieces of U.S. presidents, and had just reached Franklin Roosevelt. Given that Roosevelt dwarfs his predecessors, in time in office as well as impact, Cadre broke the essay up into parts, and had only written the first piece when other commitments stalled the project. In the intervening seven years he’s written only two more installments, but the most recent was earlier this year. I hope he finds occasion to keep going!

The series’ revival inspired me to re-read the first piece, on Roosevelt’s life up to the beginning of his presidency.

The whole thing is excellent, but the part that has stayed with me since I read it the first time was his account of how FDR, born a child of immense wealth and privilege, nonetheless became a staunch, effective progressive, championing the New Deal and building America’s welfare state.

It was a puzzle: as an undergraduate at Harvard, FDR “had enough credits to grad­uate in three years, [but] he stayed in school an extra year specifically in order to serve as editor-in-chief” of the Crimson, the school newspaper. “And how did this student of politics use his personal bully pulpit?  To write editorials com­plaining about how people didn’t cheer loudly enough at football games.  Franklin Roosevelt had no deeper concerns.”

The standard answer to the puzzle, as you probably expect, is that polio inspired those deeper concerns; that losing his ability to walk changed everything about Roosevelt, his politics not least. But no:

[The] account goes like this:  ~Franklin Roosevelt was a callow, arrogant scion of privilege who had never encountered a moment’s misfortune until he was struck down by polio.  Learning that undeserved calamity could befall anyone at any time taught him compassion; spending hours crawling down the driveway trying to walk again taught him humility; slowly working his way back into public life taught him patience and perseverance.  And these were the qual­ities that made him the foremost progressive leader in American history and allowed him to steer the U.S. to victory in our great­est international war.~  The main problem with this narrative is that not only was Roosevelt already patient, perseverant, and humble enough to happily serve as a second banana in the naval department for seven years, but he had also become a reliable progressive a full decade before he contracted polio. 

So what was the reason? No spoilers from me. Read the whole thing.