To put Charlotte’s transit debate and future in perspective, let’s drop in on the transit/traffic debate in Los Angeles.
This one features Bart Reed, the executive director of The Transit Coalition, and Ted Balaker, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation. Balaker, you’ll recall, came to Charlotte in June 2004 to critique CATS’ transit plans only to be dismissed by Charlotte city councilman Pat Mumford for presenting a “distorted” picture of Charlotte’s plans.
This was a five-day debate in the Los Angeles Times which I urge you to read in total, and visit the original page for many embedded links for additional info.
I freely admit to cherry-picking the most telling comments below, and interjecting my own observations. As you read any bit of this back-and-forth, keep in mind that Los Angeles is roughly three times as densely populated as Charlotte. Has been for decades, will be for decades. Any problems LA has encountered with light rail deployment will only be magnified many times over in Charlotte.
Now, let’s roll.
Balaker: L.A. officials have spent more than $10 billion on light and heavy rail; they even constructed one of the nation’s longest commuter rail systems. Yet the percentage of L.A.-area commuters who use transit to get to work declined. Given the extra dough and the booming population, boosting transit ridership should have been an easy task, but today’s transit ridership is actually lower than it was 20 years ago.
Although it accounts for fewer than 5% of work trips and just 1.8% of total travel, L.A. devotes 58% of planned spending ($67 billion) to transit. Yet transit is expected to carry only about 7% of rush-hour commuters by 2030. Private vehicles will account for the vast majority of the growth in travel, further straining our already clogged roads.
The reason few of us trade in our cars for transit passes is simple: Even with mounting congestion, car travel is usually faster than transit, and additional factors, like time spent getting to stations and waiting for transit vehicles, makes transit trips slower still. Transit commutes generally take about twice as long as car commutes.
Public funds are always limited, and that means the more L.A. commits itself to rail, the less it can provide widespread transit service for those who need it most. Yet L.A. officials still back pricey rail systems because they regard them as the best way to lure relatively well-off suburbanites out of their sedans.
The typical Metrolink rider has an income of $65,000 and owns at least one car. The typical bus rider (chapter 12) has a household income of $15,000 and owns no car. But guess which way the subsidies flow? Each new bus trip costs taxpayers about a buck; each new rail trip costs about $21.
City Hall ribbon-cutters love rail, but it receives a much chillier reception among those with expertise in cost-benefit analysis. I was the lead author of a literature review (pdf) that examines economists’ views on rail transit. Economists are fascinated (and annoyed) by how rail remains politically popular despite persistently failing to make good on its core promises, such as cutting congestion, getting motorists out of their cars, and cleaning the environment (operating big, nearly-empty trains wastes plenty of energy).
Economists from the Brookings Institution and UC Berkeley recently published an especially telling paper that helps answer the “how much more rail?” question. The authors examined 25 rail transit systems nationwide to figure out whether rail transit is socially desirable. And they didn’t simply point out that all systems lose money; rather, they examined the larger societal benefits that rail backers often tout.
Their conclusion: “We find that with the single exception of BART in the San Francisco Bay area, every U.S. [rail] transit system actually reduces social welfare” (emphasis in original). They find that the yearly drain was typically north of the $100 million mark, and peg L.A.’s train drain (Metro) at $125 million per year. The public mistakenly assumes rail improves social welfare because “supporters have sold [rail systems] as an antidote to the social costs associated with automobile travel, in spite of strong evidence to the contrary.” Their suggestion: stop building rail. I’m inclined to agree.
Reed: Part of the congestion problem lies with a failed urban model that puts a strain on transportation infrastructure. Some believe that living in a metropolis with no center — for which Los Angeles is often mocked — gives residents more options to live and work elsewhere. What this has led to instead is traffic everywhere. Rail may not be able to serve so many far-flung destinations, but no mode of transportation can truly accommodate so many travel patterns. Consequently, we make inefficient use of our infrastructure and in turn create gridlock by taking too many trips here and there when it would be better to do our errands in just one trip.
Job and housing density in urban corridors can bring work, shopping and leisure destinations closer to home. Light rail is the best way to promote this planning method. For those who opt to live in a suburban or rural environment, clustering commercial destinations with transit nodes and connections via commuter rail is by far preferable to forcing everyone to drive for hours every day because their jobs are unreachable via rail.
We must also note that people don’t often choose to live in suburbs. More often, lack of affordable housing forces people to move away from employment centers. Hence, comprehensive affordable housing plans must be part of transportation projects. Rail lines create environments favorable to residents thanks to the instant availability of mobility options and their accessibility to pedestrians. This is especially helpful for our growing senior population, which has fewer mobility choices.
Me: Notice the assumptions here? That no one in their right minds — hint hint — actually wants to live in the suburbs? That people are “forced” to move away from employment centers? And look — affordable housing pops up. Where do we see that in Charlotte? Oh, yeah in the Scaleybark fiasco, the wonderful transit station where taxpayers spent $9.2 million to buy 17 acres the city and CATS just sold for $6.9 million. All because the deal locates 80 units of affordable housing there along with a parking deck for CATS.
Balaker: You say rail reduces the rate of congestion’s growth, so let’s look at one of these “success” stories. In post-rail St. Louis, the increase in driving dwarfed the increase in transit ridership. Transit captured less than 1 percent of new travel, and light rail grabbed even less. In other words, rail’s impact was too tiny to affect congestion. Bart, when you say rail restrains congestion’s growth, you remind me of the kid who sends his piggy bank to DC and says he helped restrain the growth of the federal deficit.
Rail transit can actually increase congestion, by, for example, sucking up funds that could be put to better use and making motorists wait longer at red lights.
And “people don’t choose to live in suburbia”? Are you sure? Harvard’s Edward Glaeser and UCLA’s Matthew Kahn note that suburbia is “associated with significant improvements in quality of living.” And since suburbanization is a global juggernaut, it’s tough to pin suburbanization on US-style policies.
To many, Los Angeles proves the futility of road building. It’s home to seemingly endless freeways and the nation’s worst traffic congestion. But look closer: L.A. has lots of roads, but it also has lots of people. In fact, among the top 50 urbanized areas, LA is second to last in pavement per person and dead last in freeway miles per capita.
Imagine if officials added lanes to the I-10. Bart, you fret about “induced demand,” in which some who used to be scared off by sluggish traffic suddenly reach for their keys. I’ll also toss in “triple convergence,” the term coined by Brookings Institution scholar Anthony Downs. Here motorists modify their time, route, and mode of travel to take advantage of less congested conditions. Pretty soon the 10 might look nearly as clogged as it was before the lanes were added.
Me: Think I-77 and 485 here. And again my standing challenge to anyone in on the pro-CATS side: Please identify Charlotte’s Golden Age of Road Building, when we actually tried to add road capacity to keep up with vehicle traffic.
Balaker: But congestion relief brought about by expanded transit service (or most anything else) would also be vulnerable to the forces of induced demand and triple convergence. Road pricing (I’m a big fan), may be the only way to completely maintain congestion relief over time.
And Bart, folks like you who hold onto outdated views of induced demand may be inducing bad policy decisions (turns out the degree to which congestion returns has been overstated).
Even Downs declares that “the triple convergence principle does not mean that expanding a congested road’s capacity has no benefits.” For example, added capacity allows for more travel, shortens the rush-hour period, and decreases congestion on surrounding routes.
Places like Orange County, San Diego, and Minneapolis have facilities—often called High Occupancy/Toll or HOT Lanes—that use variable tolling to keep traffic flowing briskly any time of day. HOT Lanes run parallel to regular lanes, so motorists can take ’em or leave ’em. Folks across the economic spectrum use and like HOT Lanes, and L.A. could get privately financed HOT Lanes all its own if local officials would pester state legislators to pass a law allowing for their creation. (And pols, don’t let Lou Dobbs-style fist-shakers cow you; surveys frequently show that people prefer tolls to taxes.)
And how about paying more attention to a quiet success story? From 1980 to 2000 only one commute mode other than solo driving gained market share—telecommuting. Since then it’s become even more popular, and why not? Unlike nearly everything else urban planners try to force-feed us, telecommuting passes the “give ’em something better” test. Telecommuting can compete with solo driving because it can offer something cars can’t—the instant commute. Certain forms of unfriendly policies, such as zoning ordinances against home-based businesses, can slow telecommuting’s progress. But this bottom-up congestion-buster emerged without government assistance (imagine: all that growth with no public subsidies), and it will continue to grow because it’s buoyed by societal trends (like always-improving technology and the ongoing shift to a knowledge-based economy) that are mightier than public policy.
Reed: Methods that merely prolong our use of private transportation are just as problematic. As an avid supporter of new toll roads and high-occupancy toll lanes on existing freeways, you speculate that tolls may hold the promise of relegating the true cost of highway maintenance to the customer, which would surely discourage auto use even more. Yet recent horror stories about toll road agencies charging exuberant fines to users show that they promise to replace time lost in traffic with time lost in court.
Contrary to what you believe, federal funds allotted to road projects pay 80% to 90% of project costs but pay only 50% to 60% toward transit project costs. Naturally, states and cities build transportation projects based upon available funding. As a result, cities are clamoring for an ever-shrinking percentage of funds for transit. Citizens in Los Angeles and elsewhere voted to tax themselves to obtain matching grants for transit projects. (Note that many of these taxes have highway and bus elements as well, so money for various transportation improvements would also be available.)
Telecommuting, bicycling and other forms of alternatives to traditional commuting can also help, but at this time it is not realistic to expect these alternatives to carry the load of either automobile or transit commuting. However, the more alternatives we offer commuters, the more likely we can solve our traffic problems.
Me: Couple interesting things here. An admission that of course cities go after what money is available, but in the case of Charlotte — due to its perverse releationship with the General Assembly — the money that we could get was not for roads, but for trains. Federal money. Well, the federal money ain’t a slam dunk anymore. Certainly not for the $373 million North line or even for the $750 million Northeast line. The latter comes with the added cost of stuffing scarce state money into UNCC’s Uptown presence in order to “link” the two ends together. Recall that one of the last act’s of the Jim Black conspiracy was to plop a $45 million UNCC building Uptown to no good purpose.
Plus note Reed’s continued dismissal of telecommuting as a real, live congestion-reduction option. The pro-train side just HAS to do that because the cost is so much less and the need for expensive new land re-development completely removed.
