I was delighted and impressed by John Cassidy’s blog post on why he hates the proliferation of bike lanes in New York city. As strongly as I disagree with Cassidy — as my last post makes abundantly clear, I’m a strong supporter of Janette Sadik-Kahn, as I believe her traffic-calming agenda represents a huge boon to public health. But Cassidy knows that pro-bicycling sentiments are fashionable while automobiles are not, and he was surely expecting a torrent of abuse. Nevertheless, he felt inclined to take a stand on an issue that resonates with him as a city-dwelling automobile enthusiast.

Cassidy’s arguments aren’t the strongest he’s ever raised. He suggests that though the number of active bicyclists has been increasing, they’re outnumbered by the number of people who depend on automobiles. And that could very well be true! But traffic-calming is also about pedestrians, and, as Cassidy must know, the number of pedestrians in New York city vastly outstrips the number of automobiles in most corridors at most times. Yonah Freemark teases out the implications of this fact here:

People who live in dense parts of cities like New York, or Boston, or San Francisco are pedestrians at heart. Their residents face the sidewalk and they rely on neighborhood stores for their daily needs. And yet too often they suffer the daily indignity of the poorly designed street. As automobiles pass in every direction, they are confined to sidewalks often too small and a dearth of public space. When they hop on their bikes, hoping to extend their trips, they are caught between fast-moving and dangerous cars, despite their pollution-free form of travel. When they get on the bus, they are stuck in congestion despite the fact that they take up far less of the overall travel corridor than their driving peers.

These are the problems that policies like those that have been implemented in New York are attempting to address. It’s also true that the purpose of creating new infrastructure for bicyclists is to create stable expectations for those considering a transition to bicycle commuting, a policy that will take years to bear fruit. That is, the goal is to shift the equilibrium across transportation modes, by forcing drivers to bear more of the costs of the congestion they create.

And there’s another problem that Yonah raises:

Compounding this problem is the fact that people who drive, despite often constituting a small percentage of overall users, frequently command a high degree of influence thanks to their greater wealth, which allows them not only to drive but also to pay lawyers able to sue transportation commissioners for doing their jobs well.

Not only are drivers not capturing the costs of congestion; they have resources they intend to use to continue collecting these rents.

I happily accept that JSK’s traffic-calming efforts aren’t the right approach for every American city, especially for less-dense cities. But it seems reasonable to me that the densest American cities would look out for the vast majority of their citizens in designing transportation policies.

What struck me as particularly interesting about Cassidy’s post is the parallel to his excellent, thought-provoking posts on President Obama’s new health law. In November of 2009, Cassidy wrote a lucid, intelligent critique of the health reform proposals then making their way through Congress, though of course he was careful to make clear that his heart was with advocates of universal coverage. After raising doubts about projected cost savings and revenue sources, Cassidy wrote:

Many Democratic insiders know all this, or most of it. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established. Even a twenty-first-century Ronald Reagan will have great difficult overturning it.
That takes me back to where I began. Both in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party, and in terms of making the United States a more equitable society, expanding health-care coverage now and worrying later about its long-term consequences is an eminently defensible strategy. Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted. But as an economics reporter and commentator, I feel obliged to put on my green eyeshade and count the dollars. [Emphasis added]

After the passage of PPACA, Cassidy described its potential pitfalls at greater length.

I was left with the same question Ross Douthat raised last March:

What puzzles me is why an enterprising editor at The New Yorker didn’t suggest turning those thoughts into an actual magazine feature, instead of just letting them gather moss on Cassidy’s blog. Between these two posts and that one, the financial correspondent at one of America’s premier intellectual magazines has now written some 6,000 words arguing that the most sweeping domestic policy legislation of our time is almost certainly fiscally unsustainable.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that Cassidy might have been open to writing something, just because he seems like the kind of person who is motivated by getting things right. But I am interested in how incentives shape our work. Some of our friends on the both sides of the aisle think about incentives in very crude terms, e.g., who is getting bribed. But of course there are equally or indeed more powerful incentives at work, like the desire to be thought well of by esteemed others.

And that’s actually why I find myself impressed by Cassidy. Granted, there is a frisson of excitement that comes from being a heretic, but Cassidy’s pro-car post will earn him far more ridicule than grudging respect, and he wrote it anyway.

Objecting to the center-left consensus on PPACA required a far thicker skin for self-identified liberals, as it risked the accusation that one was aiding and abetting The Enemy (i.e., us) or indeed that one was in effect cheering on the deaths of thousands of people. Hence the need to make it clear that subterfuge can be morally righteous. That could be just enough to shield you from a torrent of abuse.

I hasten to add that there is a similar set of incentives for people in any ideological community — conservatives, feminists, socialists, etc.

Briefly, I’ll add that if you want to read a compelling criticism of the views of people like Janette Sadik-Kahn and Yonah Freemark on the need for reducing traffic congestion through use of the price mechanism, the best thing to read is Tim Lee’s post on “Supermarkets, Congestion Pricing, and Free Markets.” I don’t agree with Tim, but he definitely got me thinking. Tim, incidentally, is a pretty fearless contrarian.

P.S. Aaron Naparstek weighs in entertainingly in this post.