Matt Welch was kind enough torespond to my recent post about his book. After demoting me to a mere “civil” libertarian, he makes explicit an implicit theme of Declaration of Independents:
Pro-rail policy is often the explicit foe of individual liberty. All you have to do is consider the enduring fondness among planners and transit enthusiasts (of which I’m one!) for the phrase “get people out of their cars.” A transportation approach that respected people’s preferences more than trying to change their behavior would be much, much more oriented toward buses and road/highway construction/upkeep.
Again, I don’t deny that governments have a tendency to pursue wasteful and unnecessary rail projects. I share the skepticism of other libertarians, such asMegan McArdle, about the viability of the various intercity rail projects now under consideration. And it’s not hard to find examples of light rail projects that come nowhere near to passing a basic cost/benefit analysis.
But it’s not obvious to me that there’s anything special about rail here. Governments have a tendency to pursue wasteful projects, period. They pursue wasteful highway projects, wasteful airport projects, wasteful stadium projects, and so forth. And there are examples of rail projects—like the expansion of the New York and DC subway systems—that seem like they’re unlikely to become boondoggles.
It’s also important to keep the big picture in mind. In the decades after World War II, urban planners across the country pursued a variety of aggressive “get people into their cars” policies. They used the power of eminent domain topush freeways through the heart of urban areas, destroying some neighborhoods outright and cutting others off from the rest of the city. They passed zoning restrictions that systematically discouraged high-density urban living. Many of these laws are still on the books to this day. In addition to restricting building heights and mixed-use development, these zoning codes almost invariably force developers to provide parking for new construction projects, whether the market demands it or not.
The results of these policies—convenient automobile access to the heart of the city, plentiful parking, inflated rents in the city compared to the suburbs, spread-out neighborhoods that are hard to traverse on foot—creates the illusion that people are freely choosing a suburban, auto-oriented lifestyle. But this is like saying the market has freely chosen to sweeten products using high fructose corn syrup while ignoring corn subsidies and sugar tariffs.
Welch is absolutely right that we should “respect people’s preferences more than trying to change their behavior.” But I don’t think this would mean making government policies even more pro-driving. The sky-high rents in the densest areas of New York, DC, San Francisco, and other large cities suggest that there’s demand for even higher-density development in these areas that the law won’t let the market serve. And it’s reasonable to think there are people in cities like St. Louis or Minneapolis who would choose to live in that kind of neighborhood if the law allowed it to exist. It’s impossible to know what the typical American city would look like without six decades of pro-driving social engineering, but my guess is that it would involve more use of trains.
Of course, the fact that the government has traditionally put its thumb on the scale in favor of driving doesn’t justify policies like Portland’s urban growth boundary that pushes people in the other direction. The consistent, libertarian position is to oppose both styles of social engineering, and that can certainly include criticizing train-related boondoggles. But I think it’s a mistake to focus so heavily on the government’s relatively modest efforts to get people out of their cars while ignoring the older, bigger, and more systematic efforts to push people into their cars. Not only does this give a free pass to some seriously anti-liberty policies, but it also risks giving urbanists the impression that libertarians have picked the other side in urban planning’s version of the culture wars.
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