Trains and buses are mainstays of Smart Growth planning, but they have not proven to be cost-effective in many locales. Other alternatives deserve more attention. Emory Bundy makes his case in remarks prepared for a conference entitled, “Sprawl and Congestion—is Light Rail and Transit-Oriented Development the Answer?” (6/17/99).
To make clear my values and orientation, I have been an avid environmentalist for thirty years…
I last owned an automobile in 1982. I grew up in Seattle, always elected to live in the city, raised a family there, reside in a historic structure in a long-established neighborhood, and am a member of Historic Seattle…
I believe in choices, and in markets. But markets work effectively only when there’s a reasonable relationship between cost and price. Unfortunately, the cost of automobiles to society largely is borne by taxpayers and residents, rather than by automobile owners and drivers…
What is true for automobile drivers is in considerable degree true for transit patrons. In Seattle bus riders pay only 25% ($1.25) of the cost of a one-way trip, while the remainder ($3.75) is borne by taxpayers. The buses get considerably worse per-passenger miles per gallon of fuel than autos do, with prodigious externalized costs…
The premises and conclusions of this paper are consistent with those of the definitive study, Avoiding the Collision of Cities and Cars: Urban Transportation Policy for the Twentieth Century, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Aspen Institute (1993), and directed by Elmer W. Johnson. It is the most objective review of urban transportation in America, scrupulously independent and dispassionate…
The allure of the automobile is compelling, and crafting a sensible transportation policy requires an acknowledgement of the wonderful attributes of the car:
The motor vehicle has enriched our lives in countless ways. It has provided the easy connectivity that enables modern, highly interdependent, urban societies to thrive. It has eliminated rural isolation. It has enabled workers to choose employers rather than accept whatever employment opportunities are within walking or transit distance of their homes. The personal truck allowed craftspeople and artisans to carry their tools with them and enter the middle class by becoming independent contractors. The motor vehicle has enabled people to live outside urban centers and still participate in mainstream society.
The car is an amazing piece of technology that has greatly extended our range of choice as to where to live, work, shop, and play. No other form of transport can compete with the automobile in terms of door-to-door mobility, freedom to time one’s arrivals and exits, protection from inclement weather, and comfort, security, and privacy while in transit.[2]
…the study calls for the crafting of policies that cause the various, alternative modes of travel to reflect their true social costs: As people began to pay the full social costs of driving, they would take greater care in deciding when and how to move from place to place. Solo travel would decrease substantially in favor of car pooling and other kinds of shared mobility…
A regional [Transit-Oriented Development] strategy, particularly one involving contemporary rail technology in the circumstances of contemporary urban America, will not produce benefits that remotely justify its costs. And far from producing other benefits, by its stupendous “opportunity costs”—that is, money siphoned away from myriad, more beneficial uses—it will undercut the prospects for desirable outcomes, including the provision of workable and attractive alternatives to the single-occupant automobile trip…
Rail should be applied when—but only when—it is economically and environmentally competitive with its alternatives. Today’s rail systems can carry long-haul freight at an advantageous cost. In some instances they serve as an attractive, competitive inter-city travel option, as in the Boston-to-Washington corridor…
In the European Union the share of passenger miles traveled by automobile in 1970 already was 50% higher than the combination of rail, buses, and coaches. By 1996, auto miles had gone up 250% on a steeply inclined curve, while rail, buses, and coaches remained static—and had declined to a marketshare only one-fourth that of the automobile, and falling. This rapid loss of marketshare by trains and buses occurred despite gasoline prices four-times those in the US, much stricter land use controls in cities and in the countryside, much more compact communities, and superior transit infrastructure…
It is sheer fantasy to spend billions of dollars on a few rail lines, in the belief that such expenditures will cause a massively dispersed metropolitan region to revert its settlement patterns to those of the pre-automotive era…
Every US community that instigated rail lines in the past quarter-century experienced burgeoning transit costs and falling transit marketshare. Every one. The report of Seattle’s Interim Monorail Committee described the reasons:
The very factors that drive congestion—dispersed neighborhoods and business centers, increased population, higher ratio of employed adults, high automobile ownership—undercut the viability of conventional public transit technologies. The bus is a flexible technology, and its capital cost is fairly modest. But it does not offer a reasonable alternative for most commuters in a dispersed metropolitan area, and it is poorly equipped to serve the “chain-linked” trips common to today’s travelers. Its high operating costs (especially labor) severely encapsulates its ability to serve mobility needs. Metro’s bus operations are 75% subsidized, underwritten by a hefty 6/10ths percent sales tax plus a share of the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax equivalent to 3/10ths percent sales tax—yet it struggles to maintain a mere three percent marketshare of trips.
Rail—save for the unusual circumstance in which a surplused freight rail line, located in a fairly heavily settled corridor, can be obtained inexpensively and converted to transit—is even less promising. Thirteen US metropolitan areas introduced or expanded rail service in the 1980s. The uniform result was a radical increase in required tax subsidies and a marked decrease in transit marketshare…
[Examples are provided of costly experiences with rail in Boston and Los Angeles]
In response to this travesty [in Los Angeles], rail enthusiasts and transit-oriented development advocates urge that the rail building and capital borrowing continue, and that massive additional public subsidies be sought in order to promote amenities and “densification” along the rail corridors…
[Example is provided of an expensive rail initiative in Seattle, which was projected to remove just 18,500 cars from the road by 2010–the capital investment amounted to $135,000 per car removed]
…There is a misconception that rail is an energy efficient, environmentally benign technology. While that impression has considerable truth when applied to long-haul freight, it is not true of rail as a passenger device in US urban communities. The automobile consumption of fuel per passenger mile, in 1993, was 3,593 BTUs. Rail transit was higher, 3,687 BTUs.[20] But actually, the picture for rail is considerably worse. The automobile takes its passengers directly from origin to destination, but rail typically requires supplemental trips to and/or from the station, whether park-and-ride, kiss-and-ride, or by bus…
Further, urban rail systems require local transit operators to alter bus routes to “feed” the rail, due to the limited coverage of its stations and its higher capacity. These feeder lines, as in Portland, are among the least cost-effective and least energy-efficient of the bus lines. And buses are far more fuel-consuming per passenger mile than automobiles (4,374 BTUs/mile vs. 3,593 BTUs), and are even less fuel efficient than trains (3,687 BTUs)…
…not a single light rail line in America carries as many passengers as one conventional freeway lane…
There are a myriad of environmentally superior options, including walking, bicycling, carpooling, vanpooling, congestion pricing, telecommutin
g, flexible working hours, parking reform, pricing strategies to improve bus utilization, etc.—that are beggared and largely ignored while the money and attention is directed to rail. As for good urban design, it’s jeopardized rather than aided by squandering money on high-capacity urban rail projects…Consider the civic leadership in the central Puget Sound area, including leading political figures and institutions, the Chamber of Commerce, Boeing, and various good government and environmental associations. They have led the public to believe, in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary, that its salvation from congestion lies in a multi-billion dollar investment in a “starter-rail” project, to be followed by a sequence of additional multi-billion dollar rail projects. Since these projects cannot possibly catch up with the growing population, the approach also is supposed to “drive” the wholesale adoption of compact, pedestrian-friendly, environmentally-correct, rail transit-oriented communities, similar to those of the pre-automotive era. The unreality of these pretensions is self-evident, and the experiences of every American city that has preceded Seattle along this course demonstrates that the outcome isn’t going to be pretty: higher taxes, burgeoning debt, loss of transit marketshare, intensifying congestion…
[Locales like Portland are tempted to embark on boondoggle rail projects in order to avail themselves of federal government subsidies: “It’s predictable that public bureaucrats, the construction industry and unions, certain professional service providers, and even business associations would promote such projects, each reaching for a chance to cash in on some piece of the action.”]
…We need good land use—but we are not going to revert to 19th century land use patterns, because we are not confined by the limits of 19th century technology. People love cars, for understandable reasons, and cars must be accommodated—though, with innovations like those revealed by Amory Lovins, they can be effectively domesticated and relieved of most of their wasteful by-products…
Footnote 7: One enduring myth is that urban rail systems would have continued save for a conspiracy by automobile and oil companies. There may be a shred of truth to that myth, somewhere, but there’s no general evidence of such machinations. But some TOD advocates are relentless conspiracy theorists…
Footnote 11: Here’s how Charles Lave, economist from the University of California at Irvine, described what happened [in Los Angeles]: What we had was an odd marriage between idealistic planners and cynical profiteers. The idealists wanted to improve Los Angeles. They perceived cars as a problem, and were so determined to cure the problem that they talked themselves into believing it could be done. The profiteers are the engineering companies that go around the country pandering to the idealists. These companies know that new rail systems cannot lure people out of cars — no rail system built over the last twenty years has done so. But, like cancer quacks, consistent failures do not bother them. They know there is money to be made by peddling hope.
See also:
AP: “Inside Washington: Pricey bus test a bust” (4/17/09)
Falls Church, VA… Taxpayers subsidize the service at a whopping $8 per ride, in most cases enough to pay for a cab ride.
The GEORGE system has become another demonstration of the risks of congressional earmarks — spending provisions in the law that doles out money for specific projects in their home states or districts…
Service began in December 2002, with the buses primarily delivering Falls Church commuters to two Metro subway stations on opposite ends of the city. Initial projections estimated ridership of about 144,000 annually. But ridership has never exceeded 75,000 and now stands at about 70,000…
Paige said GEORGE demonstrates many of the problems with earmarks. Among them is the temptation to throw good money after bad, with local governments on the hook for heavy operating subsidies to justify the money spent to establish the system.
Gazette: “We drive alone, on state’s longest commutes” (2/26/07)
Not surprisingly, driving alone is the dominant means of commuting to work for Pioneer Valley residents. The trend is expected to continue as rural areas are developed and people trade a longer commute for more affordable housing, among other reasons…
“I think this is one of the most exciting prospects for the next decade,” Timothy Brennan, executive director of the PVPC, said of the proposed commuter rail link.
One estimate to bring the future commuter rail into Springfield has been pegged at $30 million for the state of Massachusetts…
Less than 3 percent of commuters in the Pioneer Valley reported using public transportation to get to work in the 2000 U.S. Census, a figure that probably hasn’t increased since then, transportation statistics from the region indicate.
The Springfield-based Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, the public transit agency serving Hampshire and Hampden counties, saw a steady erosion in ridership from nearly 12 million passenger trips in 2001 to 9.1 million trips in the past year…
Gazette Hampshire Life: “A hard habit to break” (7/27/07)
For all the talk of getting people out of their cars to take public transit, ride bicycles, walk or car pool to work and other destinations, the reality is that habits and lifestyles are hard to break.
As the Gazette reported last month, the “Park-and-Ride” lots constructed at Sheldon Field in Northampton, designed to reduce Route 9/Coolidge Bridge traffic by having people leave their cars and take the PVTA bus or share rides, remain substantially underused; perhaps 20 cars a day are left in the lot, according to Northampton planning officials…
But at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a rideshare program introduced in late 1999 has shown significant progress. The percentage of what’s known as “single occupancy vehicles” (SOVs) has dropped 16 percent on campus in the last eight years, according to Rob Hendry, the university’s rideshare coordinator.
The program, which encourages people to carpool, take public transit or otherwise not drive alone to campus, offers various incentives to do so, like reduced parking fees and more favored parking spots for carpoolers. The program was begun in part because the university was required by the federal Environmental Protection Agency to try to reduce the number of SOVs on campus as part of a regional effort to reduce air pollution.
Smart Growth Winners (Rich People) and Losers (Other People)
Smart growth is great if you can afford to have everything you buy delivered, or are in excellent physical condition with a physically undemanding job; it is not so great if you have to come home from your shift at the nursing home to lug groceries a quarter-mile down the street, and then up three flights of stairs… Smart growth is great if you can afford taxis when you need them; it is not so good if you are forced to take three busses to get somewhere you really need to be…
The fact is, public transportation is an absolute failure everywhere it has been tried except for cities which grew up around a public transportation network in the pre-automobile era. Public transportation–and I am second to none in my love for public transportation, and have a fabulous commute besides–is more expensive, both in money and environmental costs, than automobiles outside of New York, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago. That’s right, I said it’s more environmentally costly than giving every person on the train a car, because a train running empty consumes an enormous amount of energy.
NY Times Magazine: “The Autonomist Manifesto (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road)”
Smart-growth advocates say that suburbs have flourished at the expense of cities because of government policies promoting cheap gasoline, Interstate highways and new-home construction. What if the government, instead of devastating urban neighborhoods by running expressways through them, instead lavished money on mass transit and imposed high gasoline taxes to discourage driving?
As it happens, that experiment has already been conducted in Europe with surprisingly little effect. To American tourists who ride the subways in the carefully preserved old cities, the policies seem to have worked. But it turns out that the people who live there aren’t so different from Americans. Even with $5-per-gallon gasoline, the number of cars per capita in Europe has been growing faster than in America in recent decades, while the percentage of commuters using mass transit has been falling. As the suburbs expand, Europe’s cities have been losing people, too. Paris is a great place to visit, but in the past half-century it has lost one-quarter of its population…
…for most Americans, mass transit is impractical and irrelevant. Since 1970, transit systems have received more than $500 billion in subsidies (in today’s dollars), but people have kept voting with their wheels. Transit has been losing market share to the car and now carries just 3 percent of urban commuters outside New York City. It’s easy to see why from one statistic: the average commute by public transportation takes twice as long as the average commute by car…
Randal O’Toole: “The Folly of ‘Smart Growth'”
…despite the shortage of single-family housing, Portland residents have failed to embrace Metro’s high-density developments…
Although the smart growth policies — high-density developments, light-rail transit, limited freeway expansions, traffic calming, and parking limits — are supposed to reduce per capita driving by 10 percent, Metro’s own planners say that they will fail to meet that goal…
Even with a five- or 10-percent reduction in per capita driving, the projected 80-percent increase in population density assures that Metro’s plan will greatly increase Portland-area congestion. Metro predicts that the amount of time Portland-area residents waste sitting in traffic will quintuple by 2020…
People who are disabled, too old, too young, too poor, or otherwise unable to drive have long been the major users of public transit… [I]nstead of building high-cost, high-capacity rail lines and then attempting to redesign cities to provide ridership, planners should focus on designing transit systems systems to serve low-density urban areas. That means using low-capacity jitneys, shuttle vans, and demand-responsive transit systems. It also means demonopolizing public transit, opening the door for private providers of transportation services…
Planetizen: “Trouble in Smart Growth’s Nirvana” (6/30/02)
Despite the claims of the transit-media complex, Portland’s anti-highway policies are failing. The 2000 Census shows that transit’s work trip market share remains 20 percent below the 1980 Census rate, which preceded opening of the first light rail line. And, Portland’s highway congestion has become the worst of any metropolitan area of its size…
Randal O’Toole: “Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn’t Work” (PDF, Policy Analysis, 7/9/07)
When judged by the results rather than the intentions, the cost
s of Portland’s planning far outweigh the benefits. Planners made housing unaffordable to force more people to live in multifamily housing or in homes on tiny lots. They allowed congestion to increase to near-gridlock levels to force more people to ride the region’s expensive rail transit lines. They diverted billions of dollars of taxes from schools, fire, public health, and other essential services to subsidize the construction of transit and high-density housing projects.
Those high costs have not produced the utopia planners promised. Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move to Vancouver, Washington, and other cities outside the region’s authority. Far from reducing driving, rail transit has actually reduced the share of travel using transit from what it was in 1980. And developers have found that so-called transit-oriented developments only work when they include plenty of parking.
Federal Highway Administration: Benefits of Congestion Pricing
[An example of an innovative, low-cost way to relieve traffic congestion that preserves consumer choice]
Congestion pricing benefits drivers and businesses by reducing delays and stress, by increasing the predictability of trip times, and by allowing for more deliveries per hour. It benefits mass transit by improving transit speeds and the reliability of transit service, increasing transit ridership, and lowering costs for transit providers. It benefits State and local governments by improving the quality of transportation services without tax increases or large capital expenditures, by providing additional revenues for funding transportation, by retaining businesses and expanding the tax base, and by shortening incident response times for emergency personnel and thus saving lives. By preventing the loss of vehicle throughput that results from a breakdown of traffic flow, pricing maximizes return on the public’s investment in highway facilities. And it benefits society as a whole by reducing fuel consumption and vehicle emissions, by allowing more efficient land use decisions, by reducing housing market distortions, and by expanding opportunities for civic participation.
“Sprawl and Smart Growth” (PDF) by Jane S. Shaw
Senior Associate, Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, MT
…the net result of adding roads is less congestion. Studies show that metropolitan areas that have built more streets have seen less increase in congestion than cities that haven’t added as many…
Sustainable Northampton Plan: The December 2007 Changes (PDF)
Added new objective 7 [to page 54]:
Participate in regional efforts to consider the expansion of passenger rail service along the North-South rail links with service to Northampton.