Years ago I came across a description of the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate (it has several names) and wrote about it in my essay on urban transportation.
First of all, I loved the name (after the two economists who devised it.) And secondly, it made counter-intuitive sense. Simply stated: as you increase the efficiency of any resource, it can result in increased resource use rather than less.
Here’s my latest example: high-speed rail (HSR) in Germany.
HSR is promoted as something that can sort out nasty carbon-producing aircraft on domestic routes. It has done this on the Paris-Lyon and Madrid-Seville lines, but this ability to trash a single air route should not be interpreted as something than can dent the growth of air travel.
Germany has one of the largest HSR systems in the world yet has seen an explosion in internal air travel. HSR does not reduce the fuel consumption of domestic aviation or reduce annual carbon emissions from aircraft ….
(From Stephen Ingrouille’s Transport Newsletter 136.)
PS: Stephen also quotes from an Australian Senate report on public passenger transort: “Australia is unique in being the only OECD country which does not have some Federal role in funding and supporting public transport’
Oh? I thought that unique honour went to Canada.
The net positive from this, of course (if you want to refer to it as such) is that the air industry need not worry about high speed rail cutting into its revenues.
One of the reasons that HSR meets so much resistance in North America, and particularly the US, is that the entrenched aviation industry is paranoid about its lucrative inter-city routes (ie, Boston to DC, Seattle to Portland, Chicago to Pittsburgh) being stymied by more convenient, comfortable and ultimately faster rail service.
In Japan’s lucrative Tokyo-Osaka corridor, there is excellent Shinkansen service, but it is mostly the domain of business travellers because of cost. The bulk of travellers still have to fly between the two cities, because of the lower cost.
None of this, of course, addresses the environmental issues that loom over this debate.
Australia, by the way, does have a federal funding source for transit, introduced by the Labor government last year. It was technically a stimulus measure, but is clearly intended to become permanent. Here’s the mission of its Major Cities Unit:
http://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/mcu.aspx
The first round of grants went to a mixture of transit and road projects, with the usual “shovel-readiness” criteria tending to favor the latter. But there’s a clear intent to lead thought about cities at the Federal level, which is new with this government.