The Fallacy of Oil Prices Spurring Mass Transit

Many liberals, especially Matt Yglesias, have this hard-core, no-holds-barred belief that raising the price of gas, either by natural economic forces or by artificial ones like increased gas taxes, will cause people to agglomerate in the cities and/or use mass transit more.
Ideas like this are almost always forwarded by people living in cities with at least some semblance of existing mass transit. And worse yet, they do not produce any sort of solution for:
1. Short-term personal economic shock due to rapidly rising gas prices
2. Methods to quickly produce and deploy mass transit in places where it is absent
3. What to do with the houses in the suburbs vacated by urban-moving city residents
4. What to do with the economies in the suburbs once they are vacated by residents

I suppose I am thinking shorter term than Matt. In his mind, he imagines a gradual densification of the city combined with a gradual collapse of the suburbs inward. He imagines trains, subways, and bus routes being established over a period of years. He imagines gas taxes being gradually rising as an increasingly strong nudge for suburban types to urbanize themselves. He imagines the rising price of gas to naturally point people towards fuel efficient vehicles at first, then increasingly towards mass transit.

I, on the other hand, have a pretty tight budget. Back when Mrs. TAE and I were setting our budget last October, we assumed a gas price of $2.50/gallon, which at the time was 30 cents higher than the actual price. Based on that, my 37.6 mile (round trip) commute would consume about 2.2 gallons of gas a day in my pickup, for an annual cost of $1,133. However, gas prices currently sit at $3.75/gallon over the same period, which means I'm out an additional $566 just for commuting.  Times two if you add in the wife. A thousand bucks extra is an appreciable percentage of my budget, and I am pretty-well off when it comes to salary.  Meanwhile, no new train, subway, or bus initiatives have been proposed here. In fact, a major metropolitan area has not started a light rail/subway initiative since the early 90's, when LA put in their current LA County Metro system. The last one before that was Miami in 1984. The gas prices, since 1993, have gone up 500%. Why aren't there light rail and subway initiatives all over the country? The counterargument would be that 1993 gas prices were abnormally low, and not only did that artifical lowness cause the spread of suburban sprawl, but also only now are gas prices reaching "normals" where they actually make people suffer.
If that is true, wouldn't we see increases in mass transit initiatives during previous oil price spikes? Like in the early seventies? In the United States there were a total of two cities that got subways, DC (1976) and Atlanta (1979). San Fransisco's BART system opened in 1972, and was under way a decade before the oil embargo.
So I go back up to my Yglesias daydream. Phase 1: oil prices go up. Phase 2: people switch to fuel efficient cars. Phase 3: people switch to mass transit. I think the 70's was a time when phase 1 and phase 2 clearly happened (my dad sold his 71 GTX with a 426 Hemi for a Pinto or something equally horrible), but phase 3 didn't. Why? The answer is that the rising price of gas was completely mitigated by the transition to fuel efficient vehicles. Phase 3 was unnecessary, in most places. And I think it happens again, and again.

But here's the real reason mass transit drags on in the quagmire of potential projects that don't get funding: mass transit is universally hated. It's not always the same reason. In fact it almost never is. But by and large people strongly dislike mass transit when they could as easily drive. Here's a list of reasons:
1. In many cases, it saves you no time over driving yourself.
2. You have no control over the actions or smells of the people around you.
3. You are claustrophobic.
4. You can immediately start driving to work, but often must wait a few minutes for the next train. Don't underestimate the psychological effect of this.
5. See here.
6. There typically aren't homeless people in your backseat acting weird.
7. You are much more likely to be a victim of a terrorist attack on a subway train than in your own car.
8. You need to run errands during your lunch break or after work that don't fall directly on the subway line.

The list goes on and on. I, for one, visit a city with subways so rarely that riding it still feels like Adventures in Babysitting.

Nevertheless, I want to make a suggestion for a possible way to spur cities into getting mass transit. Rather than messing with the gas prices via tax...why not just reduce the number of lanes on highways? Here in Kansas City, one of the majory arterial interstates is I-35. On my commute, it is anywhere from 6 to 12 lanes across if you count both directions. They are constantly trying to squeeze wider and wider to accommodate more lanes. I have a counter suggestion. When traffic gets sufficiently packed on the highway that they need to expand the road...they should reduce it by a lane. The outrage would be fantastic.
However the difference here is that people wouldn't be out another several hundred dollars; gas prices are unaffected by commute times. Instead they'd be galvanized to either increase working hour flexibility (which is a net gain for a cities' economy) or they would be galvanized into moving away from those highways...which would be impossible because the city streets are just as bad...and so they'd have no choice but to move inward to minimize the amount of time they spent in that awful, awful bottleneck.

Why does no one consider what I am proposing? The best part is, by wiping out lanes of traffic, you'd free up space to lay down a train track for a metro rail system.


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