Felix Salmon

Everybody’s favorite transportation geek, Charles Komanoff, has a fascinating new paper out on the economics of New York’s new Tappan Zee Bridge. The old bridge is decrepit, and needs to be replaced — everybody agrees on that. And the replacement is now in the works, at a cost of $5.2 billion. But does it need to cost that much? Komanoff makes a strong case that it doesn’t.

I won’t try to summarize Komanoff’s paper here. Instead, I’ll just point to one fact which is buried there. The new bridge comes with a combined bike/pedestrian lane, 12 feet wide. And the cost of building that lane — the amount that the cost of the bridge would decrease if you simply built it without that lane — is an astonishing $400 million.

To put that number in perspective, Komanoff tells me it would cost roughly $40 million, in the same 2015 dollars, to build two bike/pedestrian lanes on the Verrazano Narrows bridge — lanes which would get vastly more traffic than the one lane on the new Tappan Zee.

As for the cost of the first three years of New York City’s ambitious bike program under transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, that was just $8.8 million, 80% of which was paid by the federal government.

In other words, for the $400 million which governor Andrew Cuomo is planning to spend on a white-elephant bike lane almost nobody is going to use, you could utterly transform the bicycling infrastructure for millions of New Yorkers in all five boroughs.

Oh, and I almost forgot — it looks as if the old Tappan Zee bridge is going to be converted into a bike/pedestrian walkway anyway, making such a facility on the new bridge even more superfluous.

But this is how big projects always work: it’s weirdly easier to raise billions for something huge than it is to add millions to an annual budget somewhere. “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, for instance, in his clever new congestion-pricing plan, is proposing three new massive bike/pedestrian bridges: one from Jersey City and Hoboken, in New Jersey, would span the Hudson River and land just north of Chelsea Piers. A second would go from Long Island City and Hunter’s Point, in Queens, and would cross the East River to midtown Manhattan. And the third, and most ambitious, would start in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, head over to Governor’s Island, and then continue on to the Financial District.

These are utterly wonderful ideas. If beautiful new pedestrian bridges can be built by Santiago Calatrava in Venice or by Norman Foster in London, there’s no reason New York can’t follow suit. Still, it’s a bit depressing that we don’t seem to have the mechanisms to take the billions available for vanity projects, and use some small fraction of that money for things which would make a huge difference to the daily lives of millions of New Yorkers.

This phenomenon isn’t confined to government, of course: anybody working in a big corporation has seen some huge acquisition made, using money which was never available for smaller projects from existing teams which had much clearer benefits. And there are hundreds of museums around the world which never have money for important things like conservation, but which somehow manage to find enormous sums for glossy new starchitectural projects. Basically, people want to be able to see where their money is going, in the form of something large and grand and headline-grabbing. Even if there are much more sensible uses for it elsewhere.

Remember the sharp rise in taxi medallion prices over the past few years? I thought that the price was pretty justifiable back then, in October, although I did have my concerns:

Any time you see a chart like the ones above, you have to worry that there’s a bubble. Plus, there’s political risk: the mayor can print new medallions, making the existing ones worth a little less (but not a lot less, given that the income from medallions is largely fixed).

Since then, however, two things have happened. First, New York City agreed to print 2,000 new medallions — that’s a very large increase. And secondly, Charles Komanoff — you remember him — has done the hard math of what this means for congestion and taxi incomes.

The first thing to understand is that while 2,000 cars might not seem very much in the context of a city which sees 800,000 cars per day, in fact it’s huge. Taxis spend 40 times as much time driving in congested areas as private cars do, so 2,000 medallions is the equivalent of 80,000 private cars. And when you impact the amount of traffic that much in an area which is already highly congested, the effects can be enormous:

The bottom line, here, is not just significantly more congestion, with travel speeds dropping on average from 9.5 mph to 8.4 mph. That inconveniences everybody, of course, not least the cab drivers themselves, who will take a whole extra minute, on average, to get to where their passenger wants to go. That decreases the number of fares they can pick up per day, and hurts their income.

And at the same time, the number of people wanting to take a taxi is likely to go down, when traffic speeds fall, rather than up. If you have fewer people hailing a greater number of cabs, then it’s simple math that the number of fares per cab shift is likely to fall. According to Charles’s calculations, it will fall in total a good 19%.

If taxi fares stay constant, that means a 19% drop in taxi-fare income, per cab. Fares won’t rise enough to cover that fall. And of course the income for the driver is going to fall more than 19%, because the medallion owners are going to be very reluctant to drop the amount they charge the drivers per shift.

All of which implies to me that if there’s a medallion-price bubble, then the introduction of 2,000 new medallions is likely to prick that bubble. And conversely, if medallions keep on changing hands for a million dollars a pop even after those 2,000 new cars are on the road, then we can be pretty sure that there’s no bubble here at all.

If you spend a fair amount of time among privileged dot-com types, you’ll probably be familiar with Uber, a kind of luxury car service for the smartphone era. The idea is that you pull out your iPhone, punch a couple of buttons, and in a few minutes a swanky black car pulls up to drive you to your next destination. You get out, no tipping, and the cost of the fare is automatically charged to the credit card you have on file. Elegant!

You do pay for that convenience. An Uber cab costs significantly more than you’d pay for a taxicab, and I’ve met a lot of people who suffer from Uber sticker shock. I’m one of them, truth be told: after getting charged $43 for my first Uber cab ride, last month, I haven’t used it since. I probably will at some point, when the trip is shorter or when it’s raining or when I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere and there’s no easy way to get a cab. But if you start getting into the habit of using these cars on a regular basis, that habit can get expensive fast.

Uber doesn’t seem to have worked out how it wants to deal with the central question of cost. On the one hand, it’s positioning itself as “everyone’s private driver”: it basically stands in relation to the chauffeur-driven car as NetJets does to the private jet. And compared with the cost of hiring a full-time car and driver, Uber is certainly dirt cheap.

On the other hand, Uber doesn’t like being told that it’s out of reach for people without a lot of disposable income. When Marlooz, a soi-disant “poor freelancer”, said that Uber was “too expensive” for her, the company responded with a 1,750-word data-filled blog post explaining how, even though Uber costs twice as much as a cab, it’s still a good deal. Especially if you’re calling for a cab in San Francisco on a weekend evening, when most of the time the cab you called won’t even turn up.

But the fact is that Uber is too expensive for most people. Hell, taxis are too expensive for most people. Uber is a luxury service, and they charge accordingly. Cab rates aren’t entirely apples-to-apples, but they generally have three components: a fixed base fare, and then a rate for time and a rate for mileage. The meter works out whichever is the higher, and charges you that. And if you compare Uber’s rates to the taxi rates in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, you can see that Uber is a lot more.

*includes $0.50 in surcharges

The other thing which becomes clear when you look at these prices is that Uber raises its prices pretty much in lockstep with local taxi rates. The cheapest Uber cabs — the ones in Washington — are still significantly more expensive than the most expensive yellow cabs — the ones in San Francisco. But on an absolute basis, it’s easy to see why people in Washington feel happier grabbing an Uber to get home than people in San Francisco do. If you get stuck in traffic and it takes 30 minutes to get home, that’s $29.50 in Washington; in San Francisco, it would be $45.50.

On top of that, Uber has dynamic GPS-based pricing which automatically charges you on a per-mile basis whenever the car is going faster than 11mph, even if it’s only for a brief period of time. And then of course there’s the fancy surge pricing that we saw on New Year’s Eve, when people started getting charged exorbitant rates — Brenden Mulligan, for example, got charged $75 for a ride which took just 136 seconds, and Dan Whaley got charged $135 to go 12 blocks.

Uber loves to explain its surge pricing with fancy supply-and-demand curves, but you could call it a “rip off drunk people” strategy too. Mulligan has ideas about how Uber’s software could be improved: at the very least, it should display the current minimum fare prominently, rather than just the current multiplier.

But this gets back to my disagreement with Jacob Goldstein and Matt Yglesias about the wisdom of deregulating taxi rates. They reckon that deregulated fares are a great idea, while I think they would be chaotically disastrous. And I think that the experience of Uber on New Year’s Eve — which has resulted in a significant number of refunds for unhappy customers — is important here. Uber’s customers are as savvy and sophisticated as cab passengers get, and Uber was genuinely trying hard to be transparent about pricing. After all, if surge pricing doesn’t reduce demand at peak times, it doesn’t really work. And it only reduces demand if people understand what they’re going to pay.

But Uber got a fair amount of bad press from its New Year’s experiment, and of course its fares 99.9% of the time — just like the fares of other deregulated companies like those in Stockholm — are set and fixed. That’s good business: Uber provides a valuable service by allowing people to know, when they’re out and about, that if they want to call an Uber cab, it will take them home for roughly twice the cost of a taxi.

If Uber pricing was continuously dynamic, prices might well come down during periods of light demand, especially in the early mornings. But our brains hate having to do dynamic cost/benefit calculations. Instead, we rely on simple heuristics: “I should always take the subway if I can”, “cabs in New York are cheap enough that I can take them when I want to”, “cabs in London always cost more than you think they will”, “I can afford Uber if it’s just a short ride”, that sort of thing. When we think about the costs and benefits of various different types of transportation, we don’t actually think in dollars, most of the time, just in terms of a vaguer cheap/expensive spectrum. Dynamic pricing like Uber’s New Year’s experiment takes us out of that comfort zone, and people hate being forced to re-think these things.

It’s nearly always a bad idea, then, for companies like Uber to implement variable pricing: it forces customers to think too much, and it invariably happens on nights when demand is high precisely because lots of customers are inebriated and therefore in no position to drive. Or overthink things.

But from the point of view of the passenger, Uber itself adds a whole new level of complexity to what used to be a relatively simple heuristic. Most of us understand pretty intuitively what the differences are, in terms of costs and benefits, between walking; taking public transport; and taking a cab. But then if you move to Stockholm, or if you start using Uber, things become much more complicated, since now you need to work out the tradeoffs between various different cab options. And those tradeoffs, as Bradley Voytek’s Uber blog post explains, get very complex very quickly, and involve things like whether you’re calling a cab or hailing it, your expected wait time, and the probability of a called cab turning up at all.

It takes a long time to turn all of that into an unthinking heuristic, and in the meantime Uber’s customers will always feel as though they’re ticking the “none of the above” box, rather than simply expanding the menu which is currently hard-wired into their decision-making apparatus. And that I think helps explain why many people remain uncomfortable with Uber, even if they’re exactly the kind of people who should love it.

Uber is a great idea in theory, and the mechanics of it tend to work well in practice. But Alex Rolfe has an important point: if Uber’s prices came down to the point at which they were vaguely the same as a taxi, then we could just lump Uber in with cabs as far as our mental heuristics are concerned. Because Uber’s prices are as high as they are, however, and because when they change they go up rather than down, customers react with snarky hostility.

Uber, in other words, is a car service for computers, who always do their sums every time they have to make a calculation. Humans don’t work that way. And the way that Uber is currently priced, it’s always going to find itself in a cognitive zone of discomfort as far as its passengers are concerned.

Update: Rocky Agrawal adds some very smart comments. A taster:

When people feel ripped off, they don’t want to hear about economic theory or the team of Ph.Ds you have developing optimal supply and demand mechanisms.

Most people have a sense of what is “fair”. Study after study has shown that people will make suboptimal economic decisions in the name of fairness. Product and pricing decisions have to take that into account…

I’m disappointed that Uber didn’t turn New Year’s Eve into a positive marketing opportunity. I would have strongly advocated subsidizing rides with some of the company’s $32 million in new funding (from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Menlo Ventures and Goldman Sachs) to create a delightful customer experience. The company is young enough that it could benefit from positive customer feedback.

American Banker’s Andy Peters has a jolly story about how West Virginia’s United Bank is teaming up with Washington’s bike-sharing program, to help the formerly unbanked have access to this handy form of transportation.

To check out a bike from one of Capital Bikeshare’s 110 solar-powered stations, users must first swipe a debit card or credit card.

Such a system locks out plenty of low-income commuters who use Washington’s Metro trains and buses but lack a checking account or a credit card…

Bank on DC is offering a $25 discount on yearly Capital Bikeshare memberships to those who open an account at either United Bank, a unit of United Bankshares, or District Government Employees Federal Credit Union. A Capital Bikeshare annual membership normally runs $75.

“These are not necessarily high-balance accounts, but a lot of the customers are using their accounts very prudently,” says Craige L. Smith, the chief operating officer of United Bank’s Virginia division. “We think there is real value in establishing those relationships.”

The fact is, however, that there’s a lot not to like here, most of which is elided by Peters. This scheme is not going to get the unbanked onto Capital Bikeshare in any remotely significant numbers, for a lot of reasons.

Firstly, the $25 discount comes only on the most expensive form of membership — the annual membership which the poor and unbanked are least likely to be able to afford. If you want to help bring down the cost of accessing these bikes, then charging $50 just to get started is not a great way of doing that. In many cases, that’s $50 desperately needed for food or rent: buying bike access in eleven months’ time simply isn’t on the list of priorities, no matter how good a deal it might be.

Secondly, the unbanked tend to be unbanked for many, many reasons. Some are good, some are bad. But it’s ridiculous to imagine that getting a $25 discount on a bikeshare membership is going to be enough to persuade anybody to open a bank account. Millions of dollars have been spent on all manner of imaginative approaches towards trying to get the millions of Americans without bank accounts to open one. Few if any of those approaches actually work. This one won’t work either.

Thirdly — and this is key — opening a bank account isn’t enough to get you that $25 discount. A bank account will come with a debit card, and a debit card will get you a bike for either 24 hours or three days. But as the bikeshare website clearly says, “all Capital Bikeshare memberships require a credit card”. If you want to get that $25 discount, you’re going to need not only a bank account but also a credit card.*

At the same time, even if you don’t take advantage of the $25 discount, it’s still a bad idea for the newly-banked to rent a bike even for just one day, using their United Bank debit card. Capital Bikeshare spells this out quite explicitly:

When you join Capital Bikeshare with a 24-hour or 3-day membership, a preauthorization hold of $101 per bike is placed on your card account. This is a not a charge against your account. It serves as a security deposit and will be returned to you when the hold expires. Holds may last up to 10 days, depending on the credit card company. We recommend using a credit card and not a debit or check card when becoming a 24-hour or 3-day member. Using a debit card may result in overdrafts if you don’t have sufficient funds in your account to cover the hold.

It’s easy to imagine someone opening their first-ever bank account with United Bank, using their debit card to pay $7 for one day’s biking, and then immediately getting hit by some whopping overdraft fee because of that $101 hold.

Then again, the possible charges if you rent a bike with your credit card are substantially higher. This is hidden away in the small print when you sign up for a membership:

If Member maintains possession of the Capital Bikeshare bicycle beyond the Permitted Period of Continuous Use, then the Capital Bikeshare bicycle is deemed lost or stolen, Member’s credit card will be charged a fee of $1,000, and a police report may be filed with local authorities.

(The Permitted Period of Continuous Use, incidentally, is 24 hours.)

In order to get that $25 discount, then, an unbanked person in Washington has to first open a bank account; secondly get a credit card; and thirdly sign a contract under which they agree to pay $1,000 should their bike be lost or stolen or taken out for more than 24 hours. It’s not even clear that United Bank is promising to give a credit card to anybody who opens up a bank account under this scheme, but assume that they do: then they’re immediately putting the newly-banked individual into $50 of debt, with no real idea as to whether or when that debt will get paid off. Add in late fees and the like, and the $25 savings starts looking even less desirable.

Jim Surowiecki has a column on layaway this week; United Bank should take a leaf out of that book and offer their customers the opportunity to pay the $50 membership fee at a rate of say $4.25 per month, plus whatever usage fees are run up on the Bikeshare program.

Who, under that kind of continuous-layaway scheme, would take on the responsibility of paying $1,000 if a bike were to be lost or stolen? Bank on DC is the obvious organization to do such a thing. They should post a $10,000 bond to cover the first ten times this happens, see whether the scheme is any kind of success, and then take it from there. If there are lots of stolen bikes and the $10,000 disappears quickly, then the scheme would be an interesting failure — but organizations trying new ideas should be open to failure. And there’s a good chance that the $10,000 would not be touched at all.

What’s really needed, in other words, to get the unbanked onto bikeshare schemes is not bank accounts at all — it’s a way of finding institutions which will accept the responsibility of paying $1,000 should the bike be lost or stolen. If you do that, then memberships can be given out to individuals without bank accounts at all, and they can use any old prepaid card to pay the modest usage fees they run up, without worrying about the $101 hold.

Which institutions would do such a thing? Well, there are a lot of non-profit organizations which work with the poor and try to get them mobility — they’re a good place to start. But there’s another set of institutions which might be interested as well: churches, of which there are very many in the DC area. Churches know their flocks, after all, and might well be interested in giving out memberships to those who need them, and taking on a contingent liability in the process. All you’d need is a single credit card belonging to the church, which could then deal in its own way with any congregant who ran up that $1,000 charge.

The Capital Bikeshare scheme has been built in a very cautious manner, carefully constructed so that everybody with a membership needs to have a credit card associated with that membership. That in turn allows Capital Bikeshare to be sure that it can collect $1,000 every time a member loses their bike for whatever reason. This system was set up ex ante, with no indication of how often such a fine would turn out to be necessary — and it has essentially excluded the unbanked from Bikeshare.

I would much have preferred to see an optimistic scheme at first, with the restrictions coming in later if the cost of lost or stolen bikes turned out to be substantial. But even now it’s possible to imagine ways around these problems, if some well-intentioned group has faith in its members and in the Bikeshare scheme. The Bank on DC promotion, however, is not such a way.

*Update: It seems that the website is wrong about this: you can use a debit card to pay for a 30-day or 1-year membership, and when you do so no hold is put on your account. On top of that, Bank on DC also has a scheme to help defray the $1,000 cost if your bike is lost or stolen. More details as I get them!

Update 2: Details, from Bikeshare:

• You can pay for 30-day and annual membership with a debit card.
• There is no hold on an individual’s account if they purchase a 30-day or annual membership with a debit card. The reason for this is that Bikeshare has contact information (name, address, etc.) when an individual signs up online for one of these types of memberships — but not for 24-hour or 3-day members.
• If the bike is stolen and no police report is filed, Bikeshare would charge the debit card $1,000. If the individual who is responsible for the bike does not have $1,000 in their account, Bikeshare would charge the amount available in the account and work with the financial institution to ensure no subsequent charges can be made to the account until there is a full reimbursement for the cost of the bike.
• Approximately 85 percent of annual members do not incur any usage fees when riding. The average usage fee the other 15 percent incur is between $6-$7 per individual per month.

What’s behind the rise in bus travel in recent years? It certainly seems very impressive, according to the latest research from DePaul University.

Here’s how Bloomberg’s Jeff Plungis characterizes it:

Megabus.com and BoltBus led U.S. curbside bus companies that boosted trips by 32 percent this year as travelers opted to leave their cars behind and surf the Internet while traveling.

And here’s Matt Yglesias, with a slightly different take:

Like Duncan Black, I’m far from certain that the right way to understand this is actually as intercity bus trips substituting for intercity car rides. The way I would primarily interpret it is as these services leading to additional trips that wouldn’t otherwise have been taken. Instead of riding Amtrak to New York once a year, you ride the bus three times instead.

If you look at the data, Yglesias seems closer to the mark than Plungis. Could the massive 30% rise in curbside bus ridership be accounted for by the 1% fall in private autos? Possibly. But it’s more likely that something else is going on.

Both Plungis and Yglesias, I think, miss the elephant in the room, and the obvious reason why the DePaul measurements for bus ridership have been growing at such a startling rate. Here’s how the paper puts it:

The analysis we provide also excludes all “Chinatown operators,” which have significant different qualities than mainstream operators. As a general rule, those carriers listed on the GotoBus.com web site are considered for purposes of our study to be Chinatown operators. Many of these carriers do not invest in a brand identifiable by the paint scheme or insignia on their buses.

Indeed, DePaul specifically excluded the dramatic growth of California’s USAsia Bus Lines, just because they determined that it counted as a Chinatown operator.

The obvious theory, then, is that big operators like Megabus and Bolt Bus saw the huge success of the Chintaown bus market and saw an opportunity there. They brought in branding and professional marketing and wifi and much higher safety standards, and succeeded in taking a huge amount of market share from the Chinatown operators who were never part of the DePaul survey in the first place.

That theory is borne out by my own anecdotal experience: when my friends took the bus from New York to DC or Boston ten years ago, it was normally a Chinatown bus. Today, it’s more likely to be a Bolt Bus, or even a higher-end product like the Limoliner.

In other words, the DePaul data is consistent with total bus ridership actually staying constant, with the recognized curbside buses simply taking ridership share from unrecognized Chinatown operators. In reality, I suspect that bus ridership is growing. Just not nearly as fast as the DePaul paper would have you believe.

As for the much-vaunted wifi on these buses, it’s basically the same as the wifi on Amtrak, or from Gogo in-flight: in a word, crap. If you’re working on a laptop and can download emails or web pages in the background while reading or writing something else, then it’s fine. But it’s pretty much useless for people on iPads, where the lack of multitasking means you can’t read one thing and download something else at the same time.

It seems to me that the travel industry in general has done a very bad job of adjusting to the fact that most wifi-enabled devices these days are not laptops. I even stayed at one pretty high-end hotel in England, recently, which thought that providing an ethernet cable was a perfectly good alternative to providing wifi, and which didn’t have any kind of Airport Express devices or similar that it could lend out to guests who didn’t have ethernet ports on their computers or tablets.

So far, no one’s really cracked the problem of the mobile web — we’re still in a world where connecting to the internet when on the move is far too difficult, and needs to be configured (and often paid for) on a device-by-device basis. Companies like Lightsquared want to change that, but for the time being they’re vaporware, and I’m not holding my breath for them to arrive. Which means that for the time being it’s a bit of a stretch to say — as Plungis, for one, does — that the mobile web is actually changing the way we travel from city to city.

Shelly Banjo’s article about the multi-year waiting lists for parking spots at Connecticut train stations is going somewhat viral, for good reason:

The waiting list for a Fairfield Parking Authority permit has 4,200 people and stretches past six years…

“It’s like season tickets to the Giants—even when you’re dead they get passed down to your children,” said Jim Cameron, head of the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council…

Connecticut’s parking crunch is, in large part, a problem of supply and demand: More than 60,000 commuters head toward Manhattan on Metro-North’s New Haven train line on weekdays, but transportation officials say stations have public parking for nearly 20,000…

John Eck, a former television executive from Fairfield, kept his permit after he left his job last spring—”just in case” he needed to start commuting again.

“You hear horror stories of people missing the renewal deadline and losing the permit in other towns,” Mr. Eck said. “I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”

Eugene Colonese, the transportation department’s rail administrator, said the task force “came to a certain point and well, stopped its work for a little while.”

He said the department is still “looking for the best way to get commuters to stations, a balance we think will be between building more transit-oriented development, looking at shuttles and other public transportation, as well as parking improvements.”

The parking lot at Fairfield train station is big enough for 1,053 cars; the station sees 2,942 people, on average, ride in to NYC, and the waiting list now has 4,278 names on it. These are all big numbers. The price for a spot, however, is low: just $340 per year. Obviously, that’s well below market, and causing all manner of problems. But there’s another number that’s lower still:

We recently spoke to Director of the Fairfield Parking Authority, Cynthia Placko…

Placko told us there isn’t room for many more than the 24 bike lockers that are already there, and those are totally filled.

My guess is that it really isn’t all that hard to take the space given over to 1,053 parking spots and use it effectively to house transportation for 2,942 people. Unless, that is, those people are all taking up the space of some enormous SUV.

In a place like Fairfield, it’s hard to raise the price of parking so much that you start to incentivize car-sharing directly. So here’s my proposal: rip out a bunch of car spaces, and replace them with covered, secure parking for bicycles and scooters. Maybe motorbikes, too. Surely that’s an obviously better way of getting commuters to stations than giving them each a couple of hundred square feet of massively underpriced prime Connecticut real estate, and then acting shocked when they flock to the opportunity.

Update: Fairfield could even buy back parking slots for more than they were sold for, and convert them to two-wheeled parking. Continue to do that until there’s one empty two-wheeled parking space. And then auction off the rest to the highest bidders.

In March 2010, I had the bright idea — stolen shamelessly from Eric Joiner — that airlines might charge a negative bag-check fee.

A lot of people, of course, simply hate the idea of risking their bags being lost, and/or of milling around at a baggage carousel waiting for their bags to arrive. But many others would love the idea of getting paid, in dollars or in frequent-flyer miles, for checking their bags…

Passengers would get on and off planes more quickly, the airlines would make more money, and everybody would be happier.

My commenters were unimpressed. Wouldn’t this just encourage people to pack more and therefore add more weight to the plane? Wouldn’t it even — at the margin — encourage people to check empty cardboard boxes, and not even bother picking them up at the other end?

But lo — look what American Airlines has just announced!

Through November 22, 2011, American Airlines will offer AAdvantage® elite status members the opportunity to earn a minimum of 500 AAdvantage bonus miles for checking bags on flights departing Boston Logan International Airport (BOS).

Earning the bonus miles is easy – simply visit a BOS Self-Service Check-In machine on the day of your departure and follow the normal steps to check-in with bags. Check at least one bag under your own name to earn the bonus miles, which will automatically post to your AAdvantage account five business days after you have completed the travel associated with your itinerary. As a reminder, all AAdvantage elite status members are entitled to check two bags free of charge (within current size and weight limits) in addition to earning the bonus miles with this special offer.

By confining the offer to elite status members — you need to be gold or platinum — AA has presumably minimized the number of people who will try to check empty cardboard boxes, or pack more than they need. But this does seem to confirm that AA has begun to realize that its current incentives are misaligned: it’s got far too many business travelers wheeling on luggage which is carefully designed to go right up to the limit of the carry-on rules. As a result, it takes far too much time to get people on and off planes, whose luggage bins are permanently overstuffed. And flyers unhappily schlep heavy bags all over airports across the country.

I have no idea whether AA’s experiment will catch on — for the time being it’s only at one airport, and it’s only lasting a few weeks. And AA is in pretty desperate straits right now — it’s probably willing to try things it wouldn’t normally consider. But this is a big conceptual leap from AA’s current policy of charging extra for checked bags and therefore giving people an incentive not to check. If it’s a success, dare we hope that those bag-check fees might start going away?

(via the indispensable Joe Brancatelli)

In cases like that of the Chicago parking meters, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the privatization argument. But New Jersey Transit parking spaces aren’t Chicago parking meters, and so I’m entirely in agreement with Yonah Freemark that privatizing NJ Transit’s parking lots is a very bad idea.

Frankly, all you need to know about the plan in order to hate it is its name — it’s called the System Parking Amenity and Capacity Enhancement Strategy. But there are three more substantive reasons to dislike it.

Firstly, press coverage of the scheme has revealed nothing about the state’s willingness to cap or guide the amount charged for parking in these lots. Indeed, the official RFQ states that “it is currently contemplated that this transaction will include an opportunity to adjust parking rates in accordance with market demand” — and the stated aim of the privatization is to raise as much money as possible. As a result, the successful bidder is likely to give themselves a lot of freedom to hike parking rates in the future.

The problem is that right now no one knows what the revenue-maximizing market rates might be. If New Jersey thinks that a revenue-maximizing strategy is the way to go, it should try to implement such a strategy itself first, just to get an idea of how much revenue it could generate that way. Otherwise, there’s a serious risk that it will sell of the lots for a fraction of their actual worth.

Secondly, the plan comes on the heels of the price of rail tickets being hiked by 25% in May. If the cost of traveling by train and the price of parking at train stations both rise substantially, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen to the number of people taking mass transit as opposed to simply driving to their final destination. While the headline revenues from the privatization contract might look attractive, no one seems to be thinking about the hidden costs to both the state and its citizens in terms of extra congestion.

New Jersey Future’s Jay Corbalis makes this point another way, saying that privatizing NJ Transit’s parking lots only makes sense in the context of broader congestion pricing, where the cost of the driving-only alternative rises commensurately:

“By privatizing parking facilities, this proposal will have the effect of further raising costs for many NJ Transit riders,” Corbalis said. “If New Jersey wants to move toward a user fee-based system to pay for transportation, it should apply the same approach to roads and bridges as it does for mass transit.”

Finally, there’s the likelihood that the best and highest value for all that land currently being given over to parking spaces is probably not parking at all. Instead, it’s new residential and commercial development, centered on the transit services already there. (See San Francisco for an example of this in work.) The term of art for this is transit-oriented development, or TOD, and the RFQ is well aware of it:

Many of NJ TRANSIT’s parking facilities are key properties that have the potential for TOD and certain Concession Assets are currently under active consideration for TOD. Consequently, Prospective Proposers are advised that NJ TRANSIT is strongly interested in ensuring that TOD opportunities are not negatively impacted by the award of this Concession. To that end, Prospective Proposers will be encouraged in the RFP stage to submit TOD proposals as an option in their responses…

The selection of a Concessionaire will be based entirely on the proposals for the Concession Assets submitted pursuant to the RFP; however if the selected Concessionaire has submitted a TOD proposal that is deemed advantageous to NJ TRANSIT, NJ TRANSIT may, but shall not be obligated to, negotiate an independent and exclusive development agreement with the Concessionaire.

If NJ Transit will pick the winning bidder entirely on the basis of what they want to do in terms of parking, then it’s almost certainly not going to pick someone who’s ideally qualified to build new development on those parking spaces. More to the point, if NJ Transit does not negotiate an independent development agreement with the concessionaire, then the chances are that the land will simply remain a parking lot for decades to come, since the concessionaire at that point has the right and indeed the obligation to continue to run that land in exactly that manner. While it’s possible that NJ Transit might be able to team up with a third-party developer to buy out the concessionaire’s parking rights, that’s a very expensive and complicated way of doing things.

Writes Stephen Smith:

Rather than taking on entrenched suburban interests, we’re just adding another layer of government dependents, this time of the monied corporate variety (bidders include KKR, Morgan Stanley, Carlyle, and JP Morgan). The land on which transit parking lots sit is uniquely positioned to be converted into dense development, and the only thing worse than sitting on the land would be for the agencies to sign away their rights to change that within the foreseeable future.

None of this is particularly surprising, coming from the government of tunnel-killer Chris Christie. But it’s very depressing, all the same.

Greg Lindsay knows a lot about airports: in fact he’s just written a whole book about them, called Aerotropolis. So I thought I’d ask him whether my uninformed ramblings about airports and infrastructure made any sense.

Specifically, I asked him about freight, which is where a huge amount of the real value in airports lies. How do freight airports compare to what we air passengers are used to? What’s their architecture like? Are the most modern and efficient freight airports just as beautiful, or even more so, than passenger airports, or are they just big ugly concrete sheds? How do they compare to the great resorts of America? (That one for Larry Summers.) And how important are they, from an infrastructure perspective?

He replied:

In many cases (especially overseas), the busiest cargo airports are also some of the busiest passenger hubs. Maybe the best example is Hong Kong, which cost $20 billion to build (still the most expensive ever) and boasts a passenger terminal which is both one of the nicest shopping malls and biggest buildings in the world. That’s what Larry Summers probably has in mind. But maybe more important is the airport’s cargo terminal, which is the second busiest in the world (after the FedEx hub in Memphis) and has all the ambience of the Port Authority Bus Terminal — it’s basically a giant loading dock hundred of feet tall. But you can’t have one without the other. The gleaming terminal isn’t a loss leader — it rakes in millions from duty free and other sources — and it attracts the passenger traffic which makes being a cargo hub possible. Eighty percent of the Apple iPods in the U.S. were made at the giant Foxconn plant in Shenzhen and flown to LAX in the bellies of Cathay Pacific passenger flights. Hong Kong’s airport is what makes it possible for Apple to manufacture nearly all of its products in a single factory on the other side of the world. So yes, sometimes it pays to have a gleaming airport.

I had one follow-up: How important is the “gleaming” bit? If Hong Kong’s new airport had all the atmosphere of Newark International, but still had the same capacity, what difference would that make? Here’s what I got back:

Bling doesn’t matter. Size matters. Speed and efficiency matter. Being able to move 50 million people a year in and out quickly and painlessly is the point. America’s airports can barely do that. Summers was wrong to compare airports and resorts; what makes Hong Kong’s or Beijing’s or Dubai’s super-sized terminals important is the fact that they’re super-efficient and haven’t outlived their lifespans by a good 20 years — not because they resemble a dragon or are filled with palm trees. Newark is a perfectly fine airport (the Continental piece of it, anyway), but an even better example is JetBlue’s Terminal 5 at JFK. It’s a big, cheap steel box with some nice restaurants and free WiFi inside, which distracts you from the fact that it was engineered to turn planes around in record time, which directly affects the airline’s bottom line. If all of our airports were that good, we’d be fine. And it cost a fraction of the airport resorts in Asia.

So I’m still not convinced that a major investment in airports is the best — or even a modestly good — use of federal infrastructure-investment funds. Yes, America’s airports are miserable places to travel through. But if what we want to do is boost long-term GDP, then there are better places for the government to spend its money. As and when airports get replaced and upgraded, they will naturally become more modern and efficient. Sadly, however, that’ll take time — and it might not make the passenger experience much better.

It doesn’t matter whether you fly private or whether you fly commercial: you still have to fly from an airport. Which clearly annoys the Obama administration’s top plutocrat, Larry Summers. Justin Fox was in Washington on Tuesday to hear Summers give a speech on the inadequacies of US infrastructure. And he came up with a truly classic example to make his point:

“Compare the quality of our great resorts with the quality of the airports you take off from to visit those great resorts.”

It’s clearly not easy, being Larry Summers. For all his millions, he still needs to travel from A to B, and keeps on finding himself stymied. First of all he lost his Harvard town car and chauffeur when he moved to Washington, and stood out there for demanding a similar car and driver in recompense for not getting the job of Fed chairman.

And now, it seems, the poor chap has to navigate airports fit only for the masses, while making his way to luxury resorts designed to pamper the every whim of the gilded elite.

As an economist, Summers should know that it makes perfect sense for great resorts to spend enormous amounts of energy on the kind of quality he’s talking about: that’s their comparative advantage, the very heart of what they’re selling. Meanwhile, Summers isn’t really even the customer of the airports he’s passing through: the airlines are the customers, and the passengers are the goods being transported. So the airport doesn’t have much in the way of economic incentives to ease Summers’s way.

I’m sure that Summers has encountered lots of shiny new airports in his travels around the world, in comparison to which US airports look decidedly crumbly. But a lot of that is simply a function of age: it’s easy for Chinese airports to be super-modern and efficient, just because they’re brand new. (And have the advantage of very low construction costs.) It’s much harder for Delta’s Marine Air Terminal to be as Summers-friendly: it was built in 1939, long before anybody ever so much as imagined the TSA. (Indeed, it was before the planes which landed there even landed on solid ground: it was designed to service sea planes.) But because the terminal is one end of the Delta Shuttle from National Airport, I’m sure Summers knows it well.

More to the point, a lot of the money spent on shiny new airports around the world is simply wasted, from an economic perspective. National governments, especially in developing countries, like to show off when it comes to the airports where luminaries like Summers arrive. But all that expense isn’t really necessary for the smooth functioning of the airport.

Summers has been a vocal proponent of infrastructure investment, but if his idea of good infrastructure investment is cosmetic airport revamps which give him plusher lounges and colder drinks, then that’s just depressing. The really crucial infrastructure investment is in things like the national electricity grid, or NYC’s Water Tunnel 3 — expensive, yes, but decidedly unglamorous.

So let’s leave the provision of luxury to America’s great resorts, and maybe to the airlines trying to upsell Summers to a first-class seat. When it comes to infrastructure investments, there are much more important priorities.

Blog comment of the day comes from Ben Baldanza, the CEO of Spirit Airlines, with a crystal-clear explanation of why his fees for carry-on baggage make a lot of sense. It’s really worth reading the whole thing, but here’s the gist:

• The fees reduce the amount of time it takes to board and exit the plane, benefiting everyone.
• They reduce the chance that someone will be parted from their bag at the jetway because there’s no more baggage space left in the passenger cabin.
• They eliminate the perverse monetary incentive to carry on a bag.
• They make pricing transparent: Sprit has reduced fares “by at least as much, or even more than the amount of the carry-on fee”, says Baldanza. “Southwest makes you pay for checked bags even if you don’t check bags, since they have to cover those costs but give you no break if you don’t use the infrastructure. At Spirit, you spend only for what you use and don’t pay for what you don’t use.”

Baldanza says that Spirit’s sales “have soared” since the announcement was made; I’d love to see some numbers on that. And I can’t wait to see the reply to Baldanza from Bill Taylor, who wrote the original blog entry saying that the fee is “a horrible idea” and “a pretty interesting case study in the wrong ways for companies to respond to tough economic times–a reminder of how so many leaders manage to make bad situations worse”. Has Baldanza’s comment changed his mind at all?

Airlines save money when their customers check bags rather than carry them on board the plane. How to encourage their customers to do just that? They don’t seem to be jumping at the idea of the negative bag-check fee. But how about charging money for carry-ons? Spirit Airlines has now announced it’s going to do just that: while a small carry-on which fits underneath the seat in front of you is fine, anything which requires stowing overhead is going to cost at least as much as that checked bag.

The point is that it makes no sense to penalize people for doing something — checking their luggage — which makes the flight more pleasant for their fellow passengers, and which saves money for the airline as well. Unless you have a baby, you don’t need more than a small bag’s worth of stuff on the flight itself. So if you insist on carrying that huge wheelie suitcase or duffel bag on board, then why should the airline let you do so for free if they’d otherwise charge you to check it?

And as Basili Alukos notes, we’re still talking here about sums of money significantly less than it would cost to ship the same bag. Maybe, if people start having to pay good money to travel with luggage, they might start traveling with less. Which would be a boon to everybody.

Back in September, Joe Brancatelli made a compelling case that bag-check fees at major airlines were actually losing them money, rather than making money. And that was before Southwest airlines embarked on a major marketing campaign touting the fact that they check bags for free — a campaign that Eric Joiner calls “pure marketing genius”.

Eric has some very smart and well-informed analysis of the economics of checking bags: essentially, if, like Southwest, you only have one kind of aircraft, then checking bags saves you money because it speeds up the rate at which passengers get on and off the plane. And he knows that the economics of reducing the bag-check fee from $25 to $0 are essentially the same as the economics of reducing it from $0 to -$25. And so:

What if an air carrier said…rather than charge you a fee to check a bag, They would PAY you to do so?

I love this idea. A lot of people, of course, simply hate the idea of risking their bags being lost, and/or of milling around at a baggage carousel waiting for their bags to arrive. But many others would love the idea of getting paid, in dollars or in frequent-flyer miles, for checking their bags — especially if they had realtime information on exactly where their bags were at all times. (I think the current paper baggage tags would need to be replaced by tags with RFID chips, but that’s doable.)

The result? Passengers would get on and off planes more quickly, the airlines would make more money, and everybody would be happier. It’s a vast improvement from the status quo, where, according to Eric, airlines sometimes deliberately lose bags:

Consumers think the airlines lost the luggage. In fact many times the airline couldn’t accommodate it so they chose to pay a premium to deliver it to you later, often at the cost of your loyalty and future business.

So, Southwest (or JetBlue, or Virgin America, or one of you guys), whaddyathink? Who wants to be the first airline with a negative bag-check fee?

(HT: Ryan Schick)

While I was waiting in an interminable security line at America’s friendliest airport today, a woman’s voice came over the intercom and scolded us that it was basically our fault that the screening was taking so long, and proceeded in a mildly unintelligible voice (the intercom’s fault, not her own) to go into great detail about exactly what had to be done with both small and large containers of liquids, gels, aerosols, and whatnot. People who didn’t fully understand the liquids-and-gels policy, she said, were causing unnecessary delays for everybody else.

It’s worth remembering, here, that the TSA’s security policies “are designed to be unpredictable” and to change from week to week and from airport to airport. Frequent fliers might eventually learn to navigate this kind of security theater with Zen-like grace, but for most travelers it will always be a confusing and exasperating hassle. If the TSA feels the need to implement confusing policies, then it’s a bit much for its officials to then turn around and blame the public for getting confused.

All of which reminded me of nothing so much as the acres of agate type which accompany checking accounts, credit cards, and pretty much all other consumer products. We consumers never read the small print, but we end up being blamed when we’re dinged by billions of dollars in unexpected fees every month. “It’s not the banks’ fault,” say their apologists: “it’s the consumers’ fault for not keeping a solid grip on their personal finances”.

Well, some people don’t keep a solid grip on their personal finances. That’s simply a fact of life. And if you happen to fall into that particular subset of the US population, there’s no reason that you deserve to pay enormous amounts of money to your bank. It might be the reason that you get dinged so much, but it doesn’t really make it your fault – especially in a world where banks deliberately profit from creating as much complexity and confusion as they possibly can. Why else would they be so opposed to offering plain-vanilla products?

Last week, weighing in on a miles-travelled tax, I said that “there really is something quite creepily Big Brotherish about trying to track every single vehicle in America”. But then I heard from Bern Grush of Skymeter, and he’s persuaded me that you don’t actually need to make tracking information available in order to tax miles travelled.

Under his system (and of course he has a system capable of implementing this), anybody who’s pre-paid for their miles will simply see those miles essentially erased from their tracking device as they’re driven — along with the money leaving their pre-paid account. If you pay after you drive the miles, at the gas station, for instance, then the tracking data gets erased then and there.

Of course, you have the option to retain and not erase the data, if you want to keep it for your own records. But if you do that, there’s always a risk that someone could subpoena it.

In a Please Rob Me world, then, where Federal authorities are pushing to be able to track your cellphone, the privacy issues associated with a miles-travelled tax are probably the least of our privacy worries — so long as they’re very clearly articulated, and so long as the default settings are for absolute privacy. If you want to worry about people being able to track your movements, either in real time or in retrospect, then you should probably worry much more about your GPS-enabled phone and your FourSquare checkins than about any tracking device in your car.