Spring Street and Georgia? That's pretty damn smooth-flowing already compared to the surroundings.

Try getting through SS on 29 southbound in the evening while contraflow is going in the opposing direction. Left turns (which our lights allow approximately 3 seconds for) onto Spring & Fenton reduce 3 lanes of traffic earlier on 29 to one lane of traffic (which is full of buses stopping and right turns, as well). The other night it took me about half an hour to go 1.5 miles, without any accidents on the road.

Incidentally: Spring and Georgia is the corner where the Montgomery County planning (M-NCPPC) headquarters is located.

by Squalish on Nov 9, 2008 11:19 am  

Raising motor fuel taxes make no sense. Look what happened when motor fuel prices went up. Sale of motor fuel went down resulting in less motor fuel taxes collected. I will also note the setting fuel economy standards higher has and will continue to have the same affect. More miles will be driven on less gallons of motor fuel consumed resulting in less motor fuel taxes collected.

The least harmful and fairest way to increase the collection of motor fuel taxes is to tax the alternative fuels that are consumed by motor vehicles at the same level. As it stands now ethanol and natural gas are taxed at $0.00.00 for the equivalent BTUs that one get from a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.

As to the Georgia Avenue right turn at Spring Street. There is no logic to you conclusion as no transit buses operated by either WMATA or Ride-On turn right off of Georgia Avenue on to Spring Street.

by Sand Box John on Nov 9, 2008 12:21 pm  

Sand Box John: You are making a fallacy of equivalence in regards to fuel taxes. There is no reason that the income from increased fuel taxes would be equal to the amount of reduced revenue from reduced demand. We have seen US gasoline demand drop only around 5% from a quintupling of prices over five years. All indications are that demand elasticity is very, very low, and unlike most consumable goods, that it is a protracted adjustment.

Jevon's Paradox is demonstrably untrue in many, many different situations. Yes, if you increase fuel efficiency you will increase miles travelled, but there is *nothing* to indicate that the rebound effect will be more than 100% (that you end up using more gas). Even if it were true, because of the long adjustment period for gasoline demand, such a change would take years or decades of reduced consumption to achieve.

Finally, even if all of the above is wrong, increased fuel taxes *cannot* mathematically increase demand sufficient to drop budgetary income if they are a small percentage of total fuel cost. Doubling a 1 cent tax to 2 cents will have nearly no effect, even if your suppositions are true.

As to ethanol and CNG - Their increased use has accounted for less reduced revenue in recent years than inflation. Sidenote: Are you certain that gasoline is not assessed for the gas tax long after blending together the ethanol?

by Squalish on Nov 9, 2008 12:51 pm  

Finally a politician has breached this issue. The next step is for the public to ask "how much of our military budget is securing the oil for the gas?"...and just how this is also a "gas tax".

It seems to me even a dollar per gallon raise in the gas tax, if it results in America using less oil and not needing to intervene militarily everywhere in the world to secure a supply, is far less costly in the end. In treasure and blood. After all, caskets are costly.

by stevek_fairfax on Nov 9, 2008 3:15 pm  

stevek_fairfax: Now imagine what it would cost if that dollar was rebated back to the citizenry, a per-capita share of the nation's oil consumption.

by Squalish on Nov 9, 2008 3:51 pm  

I worked out that with just a 15c gas tax we could put back all the money that had to be transferred from the general fund to the highway fund, and then give all the light rail systems currently in conceptual phase a $100-400M grant towards construction. If we built that much light rail it might even reduce demand enough that the price of gas would drop the same 15 cents.

Squalish: Even if we could raise the gas tax a whole dollar (which would be raising it by a factor of about 6), the resulting per capita rebate would be about $600. Do you think it would be better to grant the $600 or to start on building a lot of urban transit systems? What happened the last time we tried to give everyone a flat rebate check? I think what I read was that people paid off debt, rather than made investments that would reduce gasoline consumption. I know economically speaking it's usually more efficient to give people money than to spend it, but in some cases there are public goods that would be a better use of money, items that consumers can't decide on their own to spend money on.

In case anyone wants more details, I wrote an article here:

Raise the gas tax as prices fall

by Michael P on Nov 9, 2008 5:09 pm  

I doubt you'd get an additional 15 cent drop by building more transit. The laws of "induced demand" work for transit just as well as they work for highways.

by Froggie on Nov 10, 2008 6:32 am  

Froggie: You know, you're probably right. I did some numbers to see about how much building 20 new light rails systems would save in terms of gas, and it's very small compared to total demand so it's not likely to have much of a price effect. Thanks.

For the curious, I assumed a new light rail system would serve 15,000 passengers per day, comparable to a highly traveled bus route, that 20% of the riders would be ones that had previously made the journey by car, that the average trip was 3 miles, that the fuel efficiency of the car was 25 mpg, that there would be 20 such systems built, that the ridership is based on 240 days per year. Given these assumptions, the US would save 1.7 million gallons of gasoline per year, which is 0.0016% of US consumption of 105 billion. Assuming a price elasticity of demand for gasoline (short run) of 0.2, this will have a negligible effect on gasoline's retail price (less than one penny). You can of course try your own assumptions, but the result isn't likely to become convincing until your assumptions become unreasonable.

by Michael P on Nov 10, 2008 8:27 am  

You also have to remember the land use patterns will change around the light rail system. That makes a difference. We just might be forced into this scenario anyway. There was an article in the Financial Times two weeks ago that said that the amount of oil extracted globally dropped 9% last year.

It's very simple. We can continue to keep doing the same inaction that got us into this mess in the first place. Or, we could plan and build something before it's an absolute necessity. Either you plan for the future, or the future comes and sweeps you away.

by Cavan on Nov 10, 2008 9:13 am  

Cavan: I haven't backed off of my advocacy for an increased gas tax to fund transit improvements, it's just that after having done the numbers I could no longer in good conscience claim that such improvements would amount to a free lunch. I especially think it would be a good idea now that the price has dropped almost in half.

by Michael P on Nov 10, 2008 9:56 am  

My preferred model of the moment involves:

Taxing oil & liquid fuels heavily(Maybe $50 per barrel) in a revenue-neutral manner specifically to reduce consumption, as a preparation for Peak Oil and a liquid fuels crisis & as middle & working-class protectionism. That's around a $2000 check every year for every adult citizen. Send it out in advance with rhetoric about punishing the oil company's record profits by returning some of it to the taxpayer. Increase it by some percentage every year to make sure it continues to affect change.

Increasing it in a non-revenue-neutral manner would punish the working classes too much, and be politically nonviable.

Entirely separate from that: Tax fossil-fuel-generated CO2 on a tonnage basis in a non-revenue-neutral manner. A mere $10/ton CO2 with no "carbon credits" or "trading" involved would give us a cost scenario that wouldn't shut down coal overnight, but it would make it long-term viable for coal companies to become wind/solar/nuclear companies. It would also give an 'energy and environment' department $60 billion per anum - at least 1/6 of which would go towards transit projects.

Separately from that, up the gas tax to the amount required to do road maintenance & construction - it's not hard, it just requires adults who believe in fiscal responsibility rather than children afraid to anger the electorate until there's an emergency that they can't avoid.

Micheal P - I think where the drop in induced demand model fails is that oil is a fungible world market. A reduction in US demand has the fantastic benefit of reducing leakage from the economy(a Very Bad Thing which we are currently doing a lot of), but it doesn't necessarily reduce the world supply all that much.

AlanfromBigEasy, over on The Oil Drum (where they are quite pessimistically analytical about these things), has been claiming that a real 10% reduction in oil usage is possible for the US in a decade if certain affirmative steps are taken and certain projects are completed.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/2/195254/6633/251/215363

http://local.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/15/174452/43

by Squalish on Nov 10, 2008 10:43 am  

do Not cut the 11th Street Bridges and Great Streets Prgrams!

seriously.

by DG-rad on Nov 10, 2008 11:12 am  

Squalish,

You are forgetting that ethanol producer receive subsidies of $0.50 for each gallon they produce. Roughly $0.08 of the tax on blended gallon of 15% ethanol and 85% gasoline is a subsidy to the ethanol producers. The taxes on E85 is negative by more then $0.30 a gallon.

by Sand Box John on Nov 11, 2008 12:18 am