The Daily Plunge

Ten years ago I visited New York City for the first time. The first thing that impressed me was the transit system. The subway system in New York is great. There’s practically no place in the city that’s far from a subway stop. It’s not surprising then that many people believe commuter rail should be used everywhere. I used to think the way to reduce congestion was mass transit by rail. Unfortunately it is not the case. New York is the exception to the rule. The idea that you can’t “build your way out of congestion” isn’t true. Adding lanes to highways reduces congestion. The problem is planning. There’s too much of it.

For example, here is Sarasota there’s been a great deal of debate about what to do with the Bayfront Connectivity. The city council has authorized a series of studies at great taxpayer expense to analyze what to do to make the Bayfront more accessible for pedestrians. Unfortunately for the commissioners the city of Sarasota doesn’t have control of US Highway 41. The state decides what happens to the road. This hasn’t stopped the city council from making fools out of themselves. So while the city wasted money on a study, and the state funded their own study. No solution to congestion has been made but local governments have spent a lot of money.

Infrastructure projects are already underfunded. The fact there are so many useless studies are part of the reason there’s no money available. You don’t have to do a study to realize more lanes equal less congestion. Far too many city planners carry outdated and ignorant beliefs about transportation. One of the biggest frauds is rail.

Randal O’Toole’s book The Best-Laid Plans has a ton of examples of why rail isn’t a good alternative to automobile transportation. Thanks to planners; however, there are a lot of rosy studies out there that justify rail projects that don’t deliver.

A group of Danish researchers led by Bent Flyvbjerg found that U.S. rail transit projects cost an average 41 percent more and attracted fewer than half the riders than originally projected. In contrast, U.S. road projects went only 8 percent over budget and actually underestimated use. Rail cost “underestimation cannot be explained by error,” says Flyvbjerg, “and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.”

For many city planners the ends justify the means. Simply believing that rail transit is better for society is enough to misrepresent the facts. Toole who lives in the Portland area has a great story about how city planners cover up their tracks to deceive the public.

Transit agencies routinely deceive people about these estimates, often claiming that rail projects whose costs far exceeded the original estimates were finished “under budget.” For example, Portland’s Westside light-rail line was initially projected to cost $175 million ($350 million in constant dollars). Its final cost turned out to be $944 million, or 170 percent over the projected cost. Yet Portland claims that it came in under budget.

Who can blame citizens for not noticing these kind of discrepancies? We’re told that these expensive projects are being built to reduce congestion. However, the evidence is clear, simply building more lanes is more cost effective and it works better. Plus, rail transit riders are down in cities that have already sank money into building the infrastructure.

The sad part of this tragedy is that the rail transit lines were built largely to serve relatively wealthy suburban commuters who already have lots of mobility, while the reductions in bus serve mainly harmed low-income inner-city residents, many of who did not own automobiles. As Brookings Institution economist Clifford Winston observes, the average incomes of rail transit riders are more than 25 greater than bus riders.

City planners could care less about those poor people who can’t afford to ride the Utopian rail. “Huh, those poor people can’t afford to shop at Whole Foods either, don’t they know Walmart is evil?” Planners seem to know so much that isn’t true. They certainly think they know more than everyone else. This kind of elite thinking is precisely why there are so many urban areas in such a disarray.

The simple fact is that rail is too expensive for poor. What about Europe? Isn’t it a rail utopia over there? Not really, according to Toole automobile travel has increased over the past two decades and rail passenger travel has fallen from 21 percent to 16 percent. Unless cars are banned there’s no reason to think that people are going to abandon them anytime soon. Cars are becoming more fuel efficient, less harmful to the environment, and safer. City planners may hate cars, but as long as they ignore the fact that the here to stay expect more congestion and more money wasted on rail.