Among the public policy issues “smart growth” advocates often avoid discussing is the link between traffic congestion and economic growth. Their premise is typically that building fewer new roads or none at all, while devoting increasingly more tax dollars to mass transit, won’t reduce growth, it will only manage it more effectively.
But the results from everywhere “smart growth” development and transportation policies have been put into effect — which is to say in virtually every major U.S. city — are more people sitting longer in frustrating backups that cost billions of dollars in lost productivity. An important new study published by the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles puts cold, hard numbers on what previously was, at best, only intuitively obvious.
The study was done by Dr. David Hartgen, a professor of transportation studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and M. Gregory Fields, a retired Army officer who is now completing master’s degrees in transportation, earth science monitoring and sociology at the Charlotte campus. Hartgen and Fields compared the effect of changes in commuting times on economic output, measured as gross regional product (GRP), for eight major American cities.
Their results point to the significant economic upsurge that would result from eliminating traffic congestion. In San Francisco, for example, the study found that eliminating congestion around five key areas would generate $10 billion in new economic activity and add $750 million in tax revenue to local coffers. The figures for Denver are even more impressive, with $38 billion in economic growth and more than $2 billion in new revenue for local authorities. The average boost in economic growth for all eight cities studied was nearly $16 billion by 2030. The average tax-revenue increase was $900 million.
Hartgen and Fields’ bottom line is that reducing congestion and increasing travel speeds enough to improve access by 10 percent to key employment, retail, education and population centers increases regional production of goods and services by 1 percent. If that seems like too little return for the effort, the figures for increased economic growth and tax revenue would be quite tangible to those filling the new jobs, along with to the beneficiaries of enhanced government services made possible by added tax revenue. The alternative is to continue the losing “smart growth” regulatory game of increasing traffic congestion that suffocates economic expansion in the name of mass transit systems that the vast majority of people can’t or won’t use.
