No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Baptists, Bootleggers, and Transportation Planning

Jan 3

2007

In 1983, an economist named Bruce Yandle suggested that the demand for much government regulation came from a loose alliance of what he called Baptists and bootleggers. The “Baptists” represented moralists who argued that government needed to regulate–for example, by banning liquor sales–for the good of society. The “bootleggers” represented businesses who quietly profited from those regulations–for example, makers and dealers of illegal alcoholic drinks.

This combination explains the political demand to build rail transit in cities where at least 95 percent of travel is by automobile. The anti-auto moralists provide grassroots support for rail projects. The bootleggers–rail contractors, railcar manufacturers, and property developers–provide the financial support, usually in the background.

Together, these groups form a congestion coalition that has dominated transportation planning at least since 1991, when Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). This law required all metropolitan areas to write (and frequently update) long-term regional transportation plans. In many regions, the plans were written by planners who support and were supported by the congestion coalition. As I showed in Vanishing Auto update #24, many of the plans called for spending 50 to 80 percent of the region’s funds on transit systems that carried only 1 to 4 percent of regional travel.

A new book by Reason Foundation researchers Ted Balaker and Sam Staley, The Road More Traveled, responds to the congestion coalition’s myths and proposes real solutions to congested cities. This book is a part of the Reason Foundation’s Mobility Project, which is developing policies and plans that will actually relieve congestion.

Most transportation planners, the book points out, actually believe that “we can’t build our way out of congestion.” “They are reading books like J.H. Crawford’s Car-Free Cities and Jane Holtz Kay’s Asphalt Nation, whose authors make it sound like the entire nation has been blanketed by roads,” say Balaker and Staley. “They are enabling congestion because they believe it’s good for us: it gets us out of our cars.”

The authors could have added that many city planners work for elected officials whose campaigns are supported by rail contractors and property developers who expect to benefit from rail construction. These groups prefer to work in the background, but were recently exposed in Portland when their leader, and Portland’s former mayor, turned out to be an admitted statutory rapist. Only then did the local media start writing about the “light-rail mafia” that controlled the region’s transportation plans to maximize their own profits. One newspaper even listed the members of that mafia.

The latest Baptists & bootleggers combination is promoting the idea of building downtown-area streetcar lines. On the Baptist side are the usual anti-auto zealots. Leading the bootleggers is former Portland city commissioner Charles Hales, now working as a consultant for HDR, a firm that wants to get contracts to study, design, and build those streetcar lines.

Hales tells people that the Portland streetcar that was built when he was city commissioner generated $2 billion worth of property development. In fact, it was the $250 million in subsidies in addition to the streetcar that generated this development. And it really did not generate any development at all, it just moved it from somewhere else in the region to the downtown area–which obviously benefitted some property owners and harmed others. Creating winners and losers is a part of the Baptists and bootleggers game, because it takes winners to be bootleggers.

The Wisconsin State Journal recently published an abbreviated version of my op ed about streetcars, the longer version of which discussed the bootleggers in a little more detail.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner