THE ROADS WE TAKE AND GOVERNMENTS WE ELECT: EVIDENCE FROM THE USA

L. Polishchuk,

A. Makar’in

National Research University Higher School of Economics

Introduction

A high number of researchers tend to view traffic jams and accidents as a re­sult of, among other causes, collective action failure, when agents are reluctant to cooperate instead of coming to a win-win solution.

A lot of empirical and theoretical works tend to agree on a crucial influence of the concept of social capital on the public goods provision. Moreover, social capital is often defined as a pool of norms, networks and values that helps individuals to overcome the free-rider problem «in the pursuit of socially valuable activities» [Guiso et al., 2010]. Our main goal is to examine the hypothesis mentioned above, but in a narrow form: whether the amount of social capital is positively correlated with the public goods provision. The example that we take is the problems of con­gestion and traffic accidents that is in our hypothesis partly determined by social capital through vertical channel. This influence is very indirect, so it is of our interest to check whether this hypothesis can be left alive. Zubareva (2011) has not found any signs of vertical channel influence of social capital on the traffic outcomes, but Russian society may not be politically developed enough to have this relationship at work. What we are trying to do in this paper is to test these hypothesis for the country with developed political traditions We look at the US data providing some informa­tion about the state of affairs on the US roads and about the social capital parame­ters among the US metropolitan areas.

Hypotheses

We posit that social capital affects traffic outcomes, such as traffic congestion and accidents in the US metropolitan areas.

vertical one. Through the horizontal channel social capital affects motorists’ behavior (the «drivers» aspect); examples of pro-social behavior on the roads include courtesy, mutual respect and awareness of each other’s needs; joint efforts to avoid problems on the roads, and if such problems should occur - deal with them cooperatively. The role of the vertical channel is to improve municipal governance and hence the supply and maintenance of road networks (the «citizens» aspect).

There is clear evidence from the works of Zubareva (2011), Nagler (2011) and Helliwell (2011), that general social capital can influence the number of traffic ac­cidents and fatalities. Zubareva (2011) conducted a research project for 20 Russian cities that discovered a very strong positive relationship between the prices of volun­tary automobile insurance policy and the stock of «free-riding» motorists’ norms. Nagler (2011) found that among the US states the amount of trust affects negatively the number of road fatalities. The author proves causality of this link by using an elegant instrument - the height of snow covering. Helliwell (2011) notes the same relationship for the provinces of Canada. However, these research papers didn’t found any indications of vertical channel. The aim of our paper is to illustrate its existence on the US data.

The conclusion that part of the social capital influence on roads may be indi­rect and really be implemented through the government (or vertical channel) can also be drawn from the recent literature. As we know from [Knack, 2002] social capital influences the quality of municipal governance. Civic culture, activism and electoral behavior address the quality of bureaucracy since they make the government more accountable. When the government is more accountable it has the incentives to pro­vide a better supply of public goods (for example our case it is supply and mainte­nance of traffic networks).

Data on traffic outcomes

Data on congestion is taken from an open access database which is constructed by Texas Transportation Institute. It is available for 101 metropolitan areas for the period from 1982 to 2009. The data used in this database is combined primarily from the traffic volume data from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and from other sources. The dataset presents a large amount of available indices, such as: travel speed, travel delay, wasted fuel, percent of congested travel, and so forth. But we farther rely on the Roadway Congestion Index (RCI) which is the most repre­sentative due to leveling the differences between areas with different roads length.

Generally speaking, the RCI reflects the balance between road construction and vehicle travel. However, Methodology for the 2010 Urban Mobility Report skepti­cally says that the RCI has been displaced by other indices, which define conges­tion as a travel time and delay, though RCI is still a useful measure. In order to ex­amine whether our results are robust in terms of congestion indices we also estimate our model for another popular indices: Travel Time Index (TTI), Commuter Stress Index (CSI) and Travel Congested, as a percentage of vehicle-miles of travel (TC).

Data on traffic fatalities is limited because it is largely presented for states or cities, but not for metropolitan areas. The only relevant source we could find is bulletin of the organization «Transportation for America», which calculate an index called Pedestrian Danger Index for the US metropolitan areas. In fact, it is pedes­trian fatalities rate averaged for 10 years and weighed by the percent of people walking from home to work on a daily basis.

We present a brief description of the indices in Table 1 below and the descrip­tive statistics in Table 2 right after the first table.

Table 1. Description of the traffic outcome indices

Table 2.