If streets are gridlocked, how can mass transit work? Human Transit, a.k.a. Jarrett Walker, explains:

A few years ago I had a memorable ride on the Ventura Blvd Metro Rapid from Warner Center to Sherman Oaks. The service flowed smoothly through Tarzana and Encino but then got stuck in two miles of gridlock leading up to I-405, as it often does, and the crowded bus spent 20 minutes going almost nowhere. It made no sense. Cars can only fit onto 405 at a certain rate, especially if they’re going over Sepulveda Pass. So in the current arrangement, the surplus traffic is stored blocking Ventura Blvd. Why do you give over the entire width of Ventura Blvd, and effectively shut down the street, just for the purpose of storing waiting cars? Why don’t you set aside a through lane for transit (and perhaps also for taxis, HOVs, and certainly for emergency vehicles) so that efficient use of the street can continue even as the cars pile up? What would be the effect on traffic? Simple: the pile of stored cars would be narrower and longer. But meanwhile, people could get where they were going, and emergency vehicles could get through to save lives and property.

Chokepoints in a network are huge opportunities for transit, but only if transit can get past them. This bit of Ventura Blvd is one example. Another is the Sepulveda Pass itself. Caltrans is widening the freeway to add HOV lanes, which will finally give buses a clear path around gridlock, so that from the Valley to Westwood they can start offering the only truly reliable means of getting through the Pass. If it works reliably you may see a range of services extended through the Pass to broaden the reach of that advantage.

But Los Angeles is almost done widening roadways. It’s time to make hard choices about how to apportion the space that you have. The great boulevards of Los Angeles can be, in their own way, as magnificent as the boulevards of Paris. In the last decade Paris has added bus lanes on virtually every one of its boulevards, mostly at the expense of traffic lanes. Traffic isn’t any worse than it was, because once people see that transit is getting through reliably, some of them choose to use it.

Great little video by Streetfilms about the transformation of New York City’s streets so they become both more bike and pedestrian friendly — and create some great new urban spaces in the process.

On the heels of San Francisco’s new parking meters that automatically adjust parking rates based on up-to-the-minute market supply & demand, Tyler Cowen wrote a nice NYT piece on the problems with the fact that here in the US of A, Big Government regulations mandate that real estate developers create lots and lots of parking.

Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.

If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.

The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement….

if we’re going to wean ourselves away from excess use of fossil fuels, we need to remove current subsidies to energy-unfriendly ways of life.

The Economist’s Ryan Avent comments on the entertaining response to the piece by US libertarians, who like most Americans believe free/cheap parking is a God-given Right:

One of the results of the piece was a barrage of perplexing responses from people who normally agree with Tyler…

One thing that surprises me is that libertarian economists wouldn’t immediately adopt the default assumption that mandated parking minimums are bad. What does it mean to be a libertarian if that’s not your default position? Ditto for below-market pricing of scarce resources. You’d expect progressive writers to make a strong case that goods a, b, and c should be affordable to everyone and government subsidized as a matter of basic decency. It’s bizarre that libertarians leap to this position when driving-oriented policies are up for discussion.

The best part of the dustup is where libertarians try to argue that inexpensive parking is one of those rare places where the government needs to step in to provide a “public good.” There’s only one tiny problem:

You’d think that libertarians making the public good argument would have no problem defending government provision of and subsidy for [mass] transit, but of course they don’t. They get around this by arguing that people want to drive and they don’t want to ride transit. This is strange in that in few other cases would a libertarian claim to know what markets want.