Affiliation:
1. University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Abstract
Economists tend to favour price-based approaches, such as gasoline and carbon taxes, to address the negative impacts of car travel, while urban planners tend to emphasise land use planning such as compact development. In this paper, we argue that the two approaches are synergistic. We use precinct-level data from two California referenda to show that land use planning makes pricing more feasible: voters in dense, transit-oriented neighbourhoods are more willing to support a carbon price and increased gasoline taxes. Political ideology is a more important determinant of voting patterns, but in a closely divided election, land use patterns, public transportation, and other aspects of the built environment can determine the success of a referendum on driving taxes. Our results also imply that the voluminous research on land use and transportation underestimates the long-run impacts of compact development on driving, through ignoring the ways in which urban form shapes the politics of taxation.
Funder
University of California Institute of Transportation Studies Resilient and Innovative Mobility Initiative
Subject
Urban Studies,Environmental Science (miscellaneous)
Reference44 articles.
1. A global assessment of street-network sprawl
2. Global trends toward urban street-network sprawl
3. Planning, climate change, and transportation: Thoughts on policy analysis
4. Brown J (2023) Partisan Conversion Through Neighborhood Influence: How Voters Adopt the Partisanship of their Neighbors. Working Paper. Available at: https://jacobrbrown.com/#featured (accessed 13 September 2023).