Posted on 04/22/2020 6:06:16 AM PDT by Kaslin
It's time to stop throwing money at an obsolete form of travel and focus on the transportation system that is already moving more than 80 percent of passenger travel in the U.S.
When most of the nation’s governors shut down nonessential businesses and directed people to stay at home, they made the mistake of keeping urban transit systems running despite a 2018 study showing that mass public transportation systems expedite the spread of infectious diseases in communities. Further, a 2011 study found that people who ride urban transit are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections than people who don’t.
This suggests public transit should have been one of the first things shut down when we realized the seriousness of the pandemic. Instead, the transit lobby persuaded Congress to give transit agencies $25 billion so they could continue spreading the virus to more people. Transit agencies claim they need to keep running to help “essential workers” commute to their jobs. But if those workers are so essential, wouldn’t it be better for them to use safer transportation?
The situation is worst in New York, the nation’s only urban area that is truly dependent on transit. Before the pandemic began, the New York urban area contained 45 percent of the nation’s transit riders. Since the pandemic, the same area has seen 45 percent of Wuhan virus fatalities.
This isn’t entirely a coincidence, although New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority didn’t help when it forbade its employees to wear masks from March 6 to March 30. More than 70 transit employees and innumerable riders have since died of the virus.
COVID-19 is what risk analyst Nassim Taleb calls a black swan, by which he means an unexpected event that can send major shock waves through an economy. Although individual black swans are unpredictable, they happen rather frequently: Think 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis.
Each of these events should have taught us the importance of a resilient transportation system. It must be relatively immune from terrorist attacks, protect its users from infectious diseases, help people flee from natural disasters, and not be disabled by a loss of revenues during recessions and depressions.
The good news is we already have such a system — and it’s not urban transit. The bad news is that many, including the transit lobby, would like to dismantle that system. The system, of course, is motor vehicles and highways, possibly the most resilient transportation structure ever devised.
The lesson of 9/11, historian Stephen Ambrose observed, was “don’t bunch up.” When terrorists aim at transportation targets, they don’t go after roads, which are too dispersed. Instead, they attack planes, trains, and subways.
The same logic applies when we are being attacked by an infectious disease such as the coronavirus. It’s not surprising that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers reported this month that New York’s subway “was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.”
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, New Orleans was the second-most transit-dependent city in the country, with 30 percent of households owning no cars, compared with 9 percent nationwide, making evacuation difficult for many. A few weeks later, when Hurricane Rita made landfall, cars allowed 3.7 million people to evacuate from the Houston area in less than two days.
Motor vehicles and highways are also essential for bringing aid into regions hit by natural disasters. First responders are not going to get where they need to go by taking light rail.
Because they are labor-intensive, mass transportation systems such as Amtrak and urban transit are especially vulnerable to recessions. Highways are far less labor intensive; once built, they are there when we need them and, if properly funded out of user fees, can be maintained in proportion to their use.
Transit advocates repeatedly claim that transit serves low-income workers and is greener than driving. This was true 50 years ago but is no longer correct. The vast majority of low-income workers now have cars, while the people most likely to ride transit are those who earn more than $75,000 a year. Meanwhile, transit uses more energy per passenger mile than the average car in 484 of the nation’s 488 urban areas and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average car in 480 of them.
Transit advocates further insist that “buses, trains, and subways make urban civilization possible.” That was true in most urban areas 100 years ago. But it is no longer true today outside New York City, and the coronavirus pandemic may make New Yorkers rethink whether they really want to live and work at the densities that require a transportation system so lacking in resiliency.
Nationwide transit ridership has declined in each of the last five years, and it seems likely the decline will accelerate after this pandemic is over. It’s time to stop throwing money at an obsolete form of travel and focus on reinforcing the resiliency of the transportation system that is already moving more than 80 percent of passenger travel in the United States.
Run-roh! Leftists aren’t going to like this! Didn’t Obama want to make us a railway dependent nation, like Europe? He never considered the massive size of our country. The Teleprompter pResident never was very good at thinking through ideas.
I have never ridden on a train here in the States. I did in Germany though, I also rode in Street cars
I’m sure that is one of the biggest differences between California and New York. The number riding daily in SF is about 10 percent of the number in NYC. Half a mil vs 5.5 mil.
I disagree, I think we should not only Expand this useless means of effective transportation, but we should MANDATE That ALL PUBLIC EMPLOYEE’S, Including ALL ELECTED OFFICIALS use Mass Transit as their Primary means of Transportation to and from their respective workplace.
My son lives in NYC...won’t take the bus because it’s filthy and scary. He walks 5 miles to work.
Compare traffic deaths Just for one
I occasionally rode in a train, back in the early 70’s. It was an easier trip than driving into the ‘big city’ 3 hours away. That depot has gone to ruin, no one uses trains to get anywhere. Now, in the cities that have subways (New York City, Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, the El in Chicago, etc) those trains are usually full to capacity as it’s easier to commute that way. But traveling state to state? You would have to rent a car when you arrived at your destination. No way.
So the answer is to limit people’s movements to x amount of distance from their dwelling, unless they have proper authorization from the proper authority.
Works in North Korea.
I’ve already seen it referred to as “mass transmit”.
I’ve never ridden the subways in NYC, but I have ridden subways in London, Paris, and a few others. I don’t see how hardly ANYBODY could go to work without the subways.
For most people in the U.S. riding a train, monorail, etc. is a novelty.
Everyone on the subway or a train should have their own private room. Safe public transport is a human right. /s
NORTH Korea
There's some lowering of traffic death from everyone staying home but not much. The fact is that in the age of the pandemic, driving alone is much safer than taking the subway or bus. That will continue until there is general immunity which will probably take years.
Back in the early 60s the DoD, USPHS ran an experiment in the NYC subways. They tossed lightbulbs filled with bacillus subtitles to the tracks as trains came into the station. This bacteria could be tracked by USPHS personnel. Within 15 minutes bacteria released at the 23rd Street Lexington Ave station was detected at every stop between 14th and 59th. Someone should have been thinking about this study six weeks ago.
A city without a good mass transit system is silly. I know multi millionaire ceos who use the metro north and LIRR train systems.
Here in San Antonio it is maniac central vying for position on I 35 with every lunatic in a truck at 90 MPH in the left lane with crap flying off the bed, self centered office gals, and I quote, ‘what? I was reaching for my coffee cup!’
No good reason there isn’t a light rail on that corridor flanked by trains on 1604 and 410.
The Texans love when New Yorkers like me tell them how to manage traffic like, say, don’t eliminate a traffic lane on I 10 in midtown without so much as a warning.
I rode pub trans until late Feb (knew about the germ
spread and thought ahead ) i switched over to
private trans. Working at home since early April.
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