Cliff Winston
About
Economist at the Brookings Institution; author of the Journal of Economic Literature article on US transportation
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Claims by Cliff Winston (20 of 24)
Transportation Rivals Health Care in GDP Share
When you sum consumer travel spending, freight shipping, and government infrastructure spending, transportation approaches health care's share of GDP, and adding time expenditures roughly doubles the burden since they are about as large as the monetary expenditures.
Public Airports Already Compete Implicitly
Public-sector airports already implicitly compete to attract passengers; privatization would simply make that competition explicit while revealing operational inefficiencies no one knew existed, though the transition would bring shocks and financial crises similar to or worse than deregulation.
Sell Airports to Independent Buyers, Not One Monopolist
Drawing on London's mistake of selling its airports to a single foreign infrastructure company (which was later forced to divest two), the U.S. should privatize by selling existing airports to independent buyers so they compete head to head rather than granting an outright monopoly.
Transportation Started Private, Government Took Over After Crises
Virtually all components of U.S. transportation—roads, airports, even air traffic control—were initially started by the private sector, and government took them over following a recurring pattern: a private entity hit financial distress, government stepped in to assist or assume operations, and where it did not take over (railroads, airlines, trucks) it instead imposed economic regulation until the late-1970s deregulation.
Transit Riders Misunderstand How Little Costs Are Covered
Most people wrongly believe transit covers its costs, when transit systems cover none of their capital costs and at best only a modest fraction of operating costs, with the rest funded by the public; similarly drivers pay a gas tax into a trust fund without realizing roads are now running deficits compounded by deferred maintenance.
Car Commuting Dominates Despite Transit Push
Despite enthusiasm for public transit, commuting by car remains the dominant and steadily growing mode over the last 40 years because transit cannot keep pace with the rapid demographic and geographic expansion of dynamic American metro areas—rail systems are fixed in place and bus routes are hard to change due to regulation—and because subsidized providers lack incentive to respond to customer needs.
US System Best in Toto Despite Weak Spots
Taken as a whole the U.S. transportation system is the envy of the world: its rail freight system is the best globally, its road systems tend to be better, and its air service is far more competitive and affordable, while foreign passenger rail and urban rail systems are extremely inefficient and heavily subsidized even with high density.
Smart Traffic Signals Could End Pointless Waits
Technology could time stoplights to actual traffic flows during off-peak hours so an empty intersection automatically turns green or switches to a blinking red, eliminating pointless waits—a simple illustration of how operations could be vastly improved without new construction.
Congestion Pricing's Wide Second-Order Benefits
Congestion pricing's benefits extend far beyond travel time: it can shift land use toward greater density (lowering the cost of public services and capturing economies of agglomeration), reduce carbon emissions, and dampen the 'peer effects' arms race in which drivers buy ever-larger, higher-horsepower cars to feel safer in heavy traffic—since virtually all engine improvement since the 1980s has gone into horsepower rather than fuel economy, plausibly because rising congestion drives demand for bigger cars.
Deregulation Unleashed Held-Back Innovation
Deregulation in the late 1970s unleashed innovation that regulation had suppressed by changing incentives—railroads adopted real-time freight tracking (replacing the old camera-in-the-yard method), and airlines transformed their networks, pricing algorithms, and yield management—demonstrating that regulation held back technological advance not because the technology was unavailable but because there was no profit incentive to deploy it.
Driverless Cars Compensate for Stagnant Road Tech
Driverless cars are coming and represent the private sector (automakers) leapfrogging technology to compensate for the road system's lack of innovation; they can improve traffic flow and safety—not rubbernecking at accidents and packing cars closer together to expand capacity—but their performance will be undercut by public infrastructure failures like potholes and signals that don't respond to real-time traffic.
Smart Parking Sensors Reduce Search Congestion
A significant part of urban congestion is the time people spend searching for parking, which can be reduced by embedding sensors in parking spaces with applications showing real-time availability and setting real-time prices to make more efficient use of capacity—innovations difficult to deploy in the public sector.
Selling Airports Would Help City Finances
Privatizing airports by selling off existing facilities to infrastructure firms would, beyond efficiency gains, provide a meaningful boost to many cities' financial situations through the proceeds of the asset sales—assuming the money is used wisely.
Transportation Innovation Stalled for Decades
Transportation used to be the source of mankind's major innovations—the jet plane, the car—but it has been many decades since such breakthroughs, and the chief cause is the government's pervasive role in providing, managing, and operating the system; greater private-sector involvement, including private air traffic control as exists elsewhere, is needed to restore that innovativeness.
Uber Enables Real-Time Car Service Competition
Uber offers a technology that lets users hail real-time, responsive car service, turning a reservation-based car service into something more like a cruising taxi and threatening incumbent highly-regulated taxis (where medallions can be worth millions) who want to fight off this new form of entry.
Thousands of Small Airports Sit Unused for Commercial Service
There are thousands of smaller airports that could be used for commercial service but are not, because they cannot get public money and therefore are at a disadvantage competing under the current system that lacks a mechanism for using private money for that purpose.
Congestion Tolls Are Not Just a Transfer to Government
The old objection that congestion pricing merely transfers money from drivers to government is outdated; advances in microeconomics on heterogeneity (people have different and day-varying values of time) plus technology that allows differentiated real-time pricing let high-value-of-time users self-select into paying more and being made better off, while others pay less—so road pricing can genuinely benefit consumers rather than simply redistributing revenue.
Price Before Investing: The Orange Analogy
Before deciding whether to invest more in any facility, you must first ask whether it is properly priced; like underpriced oranges that perpetually run out, underpriced roads (no congestion charge, inefficient truck damage charges) fill to capacity and wear out faster, generating a false demand for more spending—so getting prices right would clear the market and reveal the supposed infrastructure crisis to be a pricing crisis.
Experimentation Is the Key Policy Lever
The single biggest policy improvement would be embracing experimentation, as in regulatory reform where pointing to lower intrastate airfares in California and Texas opened policymakers' eyes; the U.S.'s many cities and states allow trying experiments like real-time road pricing and unconstrained transit competition, letting private entrepreneurs generate innovative ideas and demonstrating to the public that the system can be much better.
Gate Control Creates Airline Entry Barriers
Because airlines funded much of airports' capital improvements via bond holdings, they gained say over investments and effectively locked up gates—including exclusively-used gates and preferred-time slots—creating an entry barrier that, by restricting competition, raises prices, a pattern that only became visible after deregulation.
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