No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Winston and Maheshri examine 25 light- and heavy-rail systems in the U.S. and find that, with the exception of the San Francisco BART system, “every system actually reduces welfare and is unable to become socially desirable even with optimal pricing or physical restructuring of its network” (emphasis in original).

 

Supposedly, we build rail transit to “get people out of their automobiles,” as if that is a worthwhile goal. Whether worthwhile or not, it hasn’t worked. In 1970, when all but eight American cities had converted their rail transit systems to buses, the census found that 3.1 percent of American commuters took rail transit to work. By 2000, after fifteen urban areas had built brand-new rail systems, the census found that only 2.1 percent of commuters rode the rails to work.

 

Well before the Winston-Maheshri paper saw print, loyal Antiplanner opponent Victoria Transport Policy Institute published a critique by Jay Warner, a metallurgical consultant from Racine Wisconsin. The critique includes a lot of technical jargon like “auto correlation” and “exogenicity,” but basically Warner’s conclusion is that Winston & Maheshri’s paper is overly simplistic. Warner also criticizes the paper for failing to include commuter rail.

 

I think Warner is correct. But, possibly unlike Warner, I think that a more detailed analysis would conclude that all U.S. rail systems, including commuter rail and BART, are socially undesirable.

 

Warner says that the paper’s “treatment of pollution reduction benefits is intellectually questionable.” I agree; the paper gives pollution a short shrift. As the Antiplanner has shown, most transit systems that include some form of rail transit consume more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than the average passenger automobile. The evidence available also suggests that rail transit systems emit more nitrogen oxides (a precursor of ozone smog) and particulates than automobiles.

 

My analysis did not include many of the recent commuter-rail systems such as Dallas, San Diego, and Seattle because those agencies did not submit fuel-consumption data to the Federal Transit Administration. But their ridership levels are so low that it is likely that their Diesel-powered trains are also heavy polluters per passenger mile.

 

Warner also says that the paper does “not include alternative costs of transportation for non-drivers.” This is a big problem because rail transit has so often proven harmful to non-drivers, i.e., transit-dependent people.

 

San Francisco is an excellent example. Thanks to the high cost of the BART system, the Bay Area’s bus systems have suffered limited funding. As a result, since 1980, the bus systems have lost far more riders than BART has gained. As the Antiplanner has shown elsewhere, most rail systems in the country have suffered similar losses of bus riders.

 

This is a huge equity issue. As Winston notes in his book, Alternate Route, the average income of rail riders is 25 percent greater than the average income of bus riders. Rail riders are much more likely to be “choice” riders — people who have cars who decide to take transit — while a much larger share of bus riders are transit-dependent. Sacrificing low-cost bus service that serves transit-dependent people in order to build rail lines that will give heavily subsidized rides to wealthy people who already have plenty of mobility is a clear case of taking from the poor to give to the rich.

 

Then there is safety. Heavy rail, which operates in exclusive rights of way, is safe. But light rail and commuter rail both kill more people, per passenger mile carried, than automobiles on urban streets and highways.

 

Finally, there is the urban-development angle. Many city officials claim that building rail will lead to urban redevelopment. Yet most such redevelopments are subsidized through tax-increment financing or similar supports. Rather than stimulating redevelopment, it appears that all rail really does is stimulate even more subsidies for redevelopment.

 

So rail transit does not get people out of their automobiles or cost-effectively reduce congestion, it harms transit-dependent people, it does not reduce pollution and at least some forms are more dangerous than autos. So where are the benefits of rail transit? And why do planners do so much to promote it?

At $170 million, the cost of building each mile of Seattle’s new light-rail line is enough to construct four miles of a four-lane freeway. If Seattle is lucky, its light rail will carry 30 percent of a single freeway lane; the national average is just 25 percent.

Flickr photo by brewbooks.

 

On the Desirability of Rail Transit

Randall O’Toole

 

Rail transit is a waste of money, and what little benefit it provides in the form of congestion relief is far exceeded by its cost. That is the Antiplanner’s general opinion, and it is shared by economists Clifford Winston, of the Brookings Institution, and Vikram Maheshri, of UC Berkeley.

 

The two have written a paper, On the Social Desirability of Urban Rail Transit Systems, that has been circulating around the Internet for awhile (and was previously mentioned by the Antiplanner). Now it is being published in the Journal of Urban Economics.