Beating swords into plowshares: If you could cut the Pentagon's budget, what would you spend it on?

So with the usual amount of depressing news circulating through, I set myself a happier task, which nicely dovetails with this piece by Daily Kos' Meteor Blades on military spending:

How much could I cut the U.S defense budget and what would I spend the proceeds on?

The rules were designed to make this somewhat realistic. I'm not trying to eliminate the Pentagon's budget entirely, unilaterally disarm, or make the Air Force hold a bake sale to buy necessary equipment. The idea here is simply to identify some reasonable spending limits for the American military machine (kind of like the discussions we have for regulatory agencies, health care funding research and infrastructure spending), and then think about what sorts of programs (or tax cuts, or deficit reduction) we could implement with the savings.

Figure 1 shows U.S. military spending as a percentage of national GDP between 1962 and 2015, based on GDP figures from the Bureau of Economic Advisors and spending figures from the White House's Office for Management and Budget. This number represents military expenditures, but doesn't represent veteran services or health care (i.e. funding for activities under the Department for Veterans' Affairs.) Notice how the figure generally steadily declines, though it does ramp up during the Vietnam War, the 1980s Reagan build-up and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The 1990s peace dividend is clearly visible as well, reflecting the end of the Cold War.

In 2015, according to GDP figures, from military spending represented about 3.16 percent of GDP. In a world in which we made decisions that maintained a reasonable military investment, what might defense spending look like? I came up with plausible three candidates.

Scenario 1: We reduce military spending to the lowest level of spending (Fiscal Year 1999) in which we spent about 2.7 percent of GDP on military spending.  This scenario would give us roughly $82 billion (all peace dividends will be rounded down) in funding to allocate elsewhere.

Scenario 2:  We reduce military spending to levels of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), which is about 2.6 percent of GDP, according to the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research in 2014. I thought this seemed reasonable, since the ROK is an advanced industrialized democracy, participates at a reasonably high level in international operations and faces a clear and presents military danger from North Korea, both of which necessitate large investments in the armed forces. Cutting to this level leaves us with a annual peace dividend of about $101 billion.

Scenario 3: We could really give into the hippies and spend only the percentage of our GDP that an average country spends on the military: 2.3 percent of GDP.  This would leave us with a cool $155 billion to spend.

Note that all three of these scenarios would leave use spending at least double any other country in the world in absolute amounts of defense spending.

Head below the fold to see what I came up with to spend my peace dividend under each scenario. Some funding proposals are fairly detailed, but most (e.g. the preschool and parental leave are rough back-of-the-envelope calculations at best) Let me know in the comments what you would do with your surplus.

How do we use bikeshare in the Sun Belt?

The Kinder Institute at Rice University has an interesting report out comparing four Bike-Share Systems in four "Sun Belt" cities.  Three are in Texas (Austin, Houston, Fort Worth), while the other is in Colorado (Denver).  The report's central idea is to get a snapshot of bike share in newer cities with lower density and planning optimized for the automobile -- in contrast to the old urban areas in the Northeast with high density.

The study, which covers the first five months of 2015, notes that most kiosks and most trips are still of the two-way weekday variety (i.e. from one-Kiosk to another), indicating that most users use the system for work trips.  However, there is a greater percentage of users in Houston and Fort Worth -- especially Houston -- who use the systems for round trips (i.e. they start and end at the same Kiosk). I'd be interested to see how this compares with bike share systems in older, denser cities.

The study is a good first stab and thinking about how we use bike share in newer cities, but I do have several additional points to make here, including a criticism or two. 

First it's interesting to note that the broad pattern of trips in these Sunbelt cities still is two-way weekday trips, which indicates that many residents here use the program for similar purposes to those in older cities -- though the report doesn't explicitly compare the two.

Second, I think that the report misses a rather obvious explanation for the differences in trip types between the cities. The authors do suggest several useful variables to explain the differences in usage across kiosks and cities. For example, they note that cities with greater numbers of kiosks have more two-way work trips. Also, the kiosks with more round-trips tend to be located near bike paths or in large parks. Also, Houston allows for a full hour of use before additional surcharges kick in, unlike the traditional pay system which gives a free half hour to the first members.

However, the report misses the idea of density.  Denver's and Austin's systems seem at first glance to be more closely spaced in a tight network, facilitating two-way commuter or errand trips. In contrast Houston and Fort Worth's systems are more spread out, limiting the utility of the system and leading to people treating it like a bike rental than bike share. They don't have any measurements on density, which would be interesting to see as well (maybe a median distance between adjacent kiosks, or a distribution of distances would be a good measure here....)

Density of the network is also rather valuable to total usage, as a National Association of City Transportation Professionals study has noted. So as Houston looks to expand this year, while I hope officials expand the scope of the bike share (please, please come to Rice Village!), I also hope they reinforce its density in its existing footprint (more stations in the Museum District!). This will expand its utility as a short-distance commuting tool.

And it goes without saying that expanding the bicycle infrastructure on the ground (more and better bicycle lanes please...) will help bring more cyclists on to the roads and keep cars moving at more reasonable (and safer) speeds.

But with this gripe aside, the report is a nice initial foray into how bike share works, and has nice nuts-and-bolts data on the use of each kiosk in all the cities and some good basic visualizations of usage in each city's network.

The invaluable Charles Kuffner, as always, has a summary and extensive analysis of a Houston Chronicle article on the subject.  He also makes the trenchant point that while knowing how people use bike share is useful, the fact that they are using it widely is the most important point.

Amen to that.

Coming FRA rule changes will boost passenger rail, cut costs, maintain safety

Little bureaucratic rule changes can sometimes make a big difference. And a pending rule change at the Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees safety on America's railways, will drastically cut costs, improve reliability, and maintain or increase safety standards.

The FRA has traditionally focused on safety in terms of "collision survival" while its European and Japanese counterparts have evolved to think of it as "collision avoidance." As a result, other countries have invested heavily in Positive Train Control systems, which track train location and speed and automatically stop trains to avoid collisions. In contrast, the U.S. has stayed with a traditional safety style of armoring its trains to protect occupants in a collision.

Despite several high-profile crashes, European passenger rail systems have a sterling safety record  Many U.S. rail corridors are investing in PTC technology to meet an FRA deadline of 2015 to install it on all Class I railroad mainlines. The mandate may be delayed, but the Northeast corridor and major Amtrak routes are making progress on the mandate (notably in Michigan and Illinois)

But for now, this difference in regulations also means that it's illegal for standard European and Japanese train designs to run on U.S. tracks, which are considerably ahead of their U.S counterparts technologically. (They invested in passenger rail between 1950 and 2000, while we abandoned it in favor of highways and air travel.)

As a result, we need to special-order train sets that cost more. The transit expert Alon Levy has estimated  that the incoming Amtrak City Sprinter locomotive costs 35 percent more than the established European design that it's based on -- which works out to around $70-150 million for the order. (That's enough money to make significant improvements on a moderately traveled medium-distance Amtrak train route)

Worse yet, the heavier trains consume more fuel and often cost more to maintain due to the increased wear and tear the extra weight places on things like braking systems (which also degrades safety).

The pending FRA rule change will greatly ease many of the obsolete standards to allow modern European designs onto U.S railways, which will ease the issues of cost and poor performance that plague intercity AMTRAK equipment and American commuter rail systems.

The rule improvement is important, but it isn't isolated -- It's part of a slow and steady change that's been coming over the American passenger rail system for the last decade or so.

For example, despite its problems caused in part existing weight rules, the AMTRAK Sprinter order (which will serve on standard-speed NE corridor and the eastern Pennsylvania Keystone service) actually is an improvement over past practices. First, the order is large enough that it will spread the costs over a reasonably number of units (70) instead of past orders, which relied on as few as 16 units. Second, it standardizes the locomotives in use for the NE Regional Service, currently operates three different locomotives. which should ease training costs, and lower maintenance form the current investments necessary to maintain the three locomotives currently used in the service. And finally, the Sprinter does represent a number of improvements in performance and efficiency from its predecessors.

So two cheers for the bureaucrats who finally look like they are getting this one rule right. I'll take any piece of good news on public policy these days. And here's hoping that the changing culture at the FRA can keep looking forward to ease the expansion of rail travel in the United States (which is up 50 percent on Amtrak since 2001.)

Now, if only we could get some follow-on investment from the feds in rail capital improvements, and fewer governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich and Rick Scott.

H/T to  Atrios and Robert Cruickshank