Maximize transit, minimize traffic

The Oregonian ^ | 05/06/03 | editorial

[Willie Green]

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.

Some simplifying force in human nature loves to set up false dichotomies. You know what we're talking about. As in: You're a cat person, I'm a dog person. You're a wine person, I'm a beer person. You're a bus person, I'm a car person.

Some of the criticism of two new light-rail extensions, planned for Clackamas County, stems from this kind of black-and-white thinking, carried over into the realm of public policy. Exaggerate the "transit vs. car" quarrel via a talk show or two, and before you know it, a thick layer of rhetorical asphalt has paved over all the complexities of our transportation system.

If you champion light rail, you're falsely painted as anti-highway. But our light-rail system -- in addition to helping the 36,500 or so people who use it every day -- is a huge help to everyone who loves to drive.

Some people in Clackamas County have discovered this for themselves over the past few years, as they studied the best transportation alternatives to connect them to downtown Portland. They didn't necessarily start out hospitable to light rail. Indeed, in 1997, Milwaukie voters ousted their mayor and two city council members in part over a planned light-rail route.

But after exhaustive public meetings and an in-depth look at other options -- including river transport -- light-rail re-emerged victorious. Part of the credit goes to Metro Councilor Brian Newman, a planner by training, who helped forge a new consensus during three years of meetings, first as a private citizen, later as a member of the Milwaukie City Council and finally as a Metro Councilor.

Recently, the Metro Council approved plans for two light-rail extensions, one along Interstate 205 from Gateway to Clackamas Town Center, which would open in 2009. A second extension is planned from downtown Portland to Milwaukie, which could open by 2014. These would cost $1 billion, and they aren't done deals (the second route would likely require a public vote). Something may change along the way, of course, but based on what we know now, it appears prudent to keep moving forward with these plans.

Just consider what a difference light rail makes at rush hour on Interstate 84 and U.S. 26. Figures collected by Metro's transportation planners indicate that, between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., roughly 10,000 people are headed eastbound from downtown Portland. Another 9,000 are headed westbound. In both directions, at rush hour, about 26 percent of the total number of people traveling are on light rail.

Freeway travel is bad enough, but just imagine the congestion if all those light-rail travelers, eastbound and westbound, were added to the road.

Although it's true, and nice perhaps, that Portland has become synonymous with the success of its light-rail system, that's not why Portland should keep pursuing light rail. The reason has nothing whatsoever to do with Portland's image. It has everything to do with keeping up a smoothly running transportation system.

[Publius]

we might as well rent stretch limos instead for riders, it would be cheaper!

Cheaper maybe. But where would those stretch limos run? On the same gridlocked highways that are the problem! The whole idea of rail is to have a segregated guideway that does not suffer interference from traffic, but moves large quantities of people quickly. The footprint of a rail line is a mere fraction of an urban freeway. In the city, where space is very expensive and at a premium, it is intuitively obviously that the number of people moved per square foot occupied is much higher for a rail line than for an urban freeway. After all, an urban freeway transition ramp is nothing more than a way of making a left turn at 60 mph, and it uses a massive amount space. Forget the silly arguments about how we are hurting Mother Earth. Put this in the context of facilitating commerce and making the most effective use of a scarce resource: Urban space.

The root word of “conservative” is the verb “to conserve”. Too many conservatives think that profligacy is as American as apple pie, and anyone who uses an expression like “scarce resources” just has to be a socialist. Urban space does not grow on trees! An urban environment only works with high-density workplaces, high-density living and high-density transportation. This has been known for a century.

Los Angeles tried to build a large regional city on the basis of the automobile and found itself with a huge freeway system that gridlocked most of the time. Building more freeways only bought temporary relief. Eventually, Los Angeles bit the bullet and built subways, light rail lines and a huge commuter rail network. The terrible irony is that it spent tens of billions of tax dollars rebuilding a privately owned network that it had torn out 50-70 years earlier when it thought that the automobile was the wave of the future. The lesson was hard and expensive.

Vancouver (BC) and Philadelphia wised up earlier than most. They shut down urban freeway building before it could really get rolling and put their money in building or revitalizing public transportation. You don’t need a car to live or work in Vancouver.

you say: "it is unreasonable to expect to drive your SOV on an empty urban freeway at the height of the rush hour at 70 mph. " Why not?

You’re joking, right?

Why build such a low standard into the system? can we at least beat 15mph that many of these LRT systems average?

You have a point. Light rail is being sold as a panacea. Ever since San Diego had a huge hit with its line in 1981, the concept has become very trendy. This is dangerous. Sometimes it’s just the wrong way to go. You can get much more speed and throughput with heavy rail (subways or elevateds), but it’s much more expensive, especially when you’re building in an area that is already heavily built up.

When you use tax dollars to build something and need direct democracy to build it, you often have to shade the truth, i.e. lie through your teeth, about the eventual cost to get the necessary votes. I witnessed this here in Seattle. A 1994 vote on building a regional heavy rail system failed when the voters got sticker shock. A scaled down 1996 version using the trendy expression “light rail” won, but it’s the wrong solution. We really need a heavy rail system like Chicago’s.

You can beat light rail’s carrying capacity easily, but the cost will frighten off the voters.

Dont social engineer the people around the transport system.

When the Madison Administration got the federal government into the business of building roads and canals for the sake of “internal improvements”, that was social engineering.

When the Lincoln Administration subsidized the building of railroads with government land grants, that was social engineering. It was also corporate welfare.

When the Roosevelt Administration started up the federal highway program to put people back to work, that was social engineering. And it was popular welfare.

When the Eisenhower Administration enacted the program to build the interstate highways, that was social engineering. Granted, Ike didn’t see it that way when he was in office, but by the time of his death in 1969 he understood clearly what he had wrought.

The world we live in – with suburban sprawl, urban and suburban freeways, congestion and gridlock, a world in which you absolutely need a car to get around – is the result of government social engineering after World War II intended to revive a housing market that had swooned 95% during the Great Depression.

About 30 years ago we began to understand that the urban freeway violated the principle of high-density living and working. The Century Freeway was the last urban freeway built in America. Since then the emphasis has been on high-density mass transportation to make the cities livable again.

build something people will use.

• The Los Angeles Blue Line hit its 3 year projected ridership after one month of operation. And the line wasn’t even fully complete!
• St. Louis Metrolink hit its 5 year projected ridership after 3 weeks of operation. It then began a crash program of buying more light rail cars and extending station platforms to carry all the people. On the Illinois side of the river, voters have been falling all over themselves to raise their taxes so the line can be extended into their towns.
• The Dallas DART extension into Plano hit its 8 year projected ridership after a year of operation. The park-and-ride lots are full and overflowing.

People will use a line if the line offers a faster commute or a less stressful commute.

Is the metro mass transit system self-funded? OF COURSE NOT - it is heavily subsidized by in our local community sales taxes, then plenty of federal funding as well. As for highway funding, you assert but didnt lay out the numbers for subsidies of highway. Good description of categories, but waht are the dollars in each bucket? I know for a fact that plenty of gasoline tax revenue is diverted from highways. Bill Clinton in 1993 for one was using gas tax revenue for mass transit. IN other cases, the gas taxes go into general funds. I am all for making highways self-funding via gas taxes etc. but let's get real: Whatever the finding per passenger mile of roads, the subsidy if any is a pittance compared to cost/passenger mile of car/road transport.

At the state level, most states have either constitutional or statutory restrictions that forbid the use of gas tax money for anything but roads. There are exceptions, but they are few. Those who say that they “know for a fact” that this money is going for education, welfare or other general fund items are simply wrong.

At the federal level, Amtrak cracked the gas tax restrictions in 1974, but the money diverted to Amtrak is miniscule. Clinton’s gambit went nowhere. I suggest you drop in at Amazon and buy Getting There by Stephen Goddard. It is the definitive book on how we got where we are today.

A day will come when drivers truly pay for highways via use taxes, but you won’t like it when it arrives.

Some day every car will have a transponder in it. When you leave your driveway to drive on a locally maintained road, the counter will start. When you turn onto a county road, the local counter will stop, and the county counter will start. When you turn onto a numbered state highway, that counter will start. When you enter a limited access highway, you will pay a surcharge. If you drive during primary commuting hours, you will pay a congestion surcharge.

In the interest of fairness, gas taxes will be abolished, as will other car-related taxes. At the end of the month, you will get a bill for your monthly usage fee broken into local, county, state and surcharged categories. Expect to pay about $300 a month to operate that motor vehicle. After a while, you’ll grit your teeth and buy that bus pass for $35 a month.

Once trucks with transponders get billed for the true damage they do to highways, long distance trucking will no longer be economically viable, and the railroads will haul trucks over long distances.

These are the kinds of things that happen when you eliminate subsidies. Established lifestyles change.

"Portland has decided to become a European-style city, concentrating its people in urban villages," You miss a BIG POINT: What if people living in the town/city dont want to live that way???

When you choose to live in a city, you give up certain rights you would have if you lived in a rural area where your next door neighbor was 5 miles away. That’s just how the world works. If you want to see a city designed for rugged individualism, check out Los Angeles. It didn’t work, and they have finally seen the light.

Concerning your quote about Smart Growth: The idea behind Smart Growth is get people out of cars and onto public transportation. Congestion relief will only happen when people do that, and even then it won’t change all that much. All successful cities are congested. It’s not about eliminating congestion, but controlling it.

The problem in Portland is that many people just haven’t gotten it yet. Their city is densifying – the eventual destiny of all successful cities – and people still want to drive their SOV’s as though the city was still one large suburb in search of a core. As light rail expands, people will eventually discover that public transportation is faster and less stressful than taking the car.

Concerning the profitability argument

Before the Great Depression, private industry ran urban transit companies. Beside buses, you had subways, els, trolleys and even high-speed electric rail interurbans. You had steam or electric commuter rail lines linking cities and suburbs. Take a look at Metro-North, the old New Haven Railroad, and see how cities in New York and Connecticut had truly high-speed commuter rail service into New York City over a century ago.

Once we had government-built and -subsidized highways, the private rail systems all began to lose money. When the Wagner Act and rampant unionization raised the labor costs through the roof, cities bought these systems because there was a social need for public transportation, but it was no longer profitable. Unions learned how to milk these transportation authorities of their tax money because union members were voters. Think of it as a hostage situation.

Today, it is flatly impossible for an operator to make a profit running public transportation. For rail systems, it’s the property owners near the stations who rake it in.

If you want to turn this over to the private sector and get government out of the rail-building and -subsidizing business, you have to break the unions and repeal the minimum wage. Why? Because unions and the minimum wage are both forms of government subsidy artificially driving up the cost of operating a transit system.

But then again, would you want a train driver, in whose hands your life lies, to be some guy only making 75 cents an hour?

[Publius]

Ping. Check post #41.

[WOSG]

"When you choose to live in a city, you give up certain rights you would have if you lived in a rural area where your next door neighbor was 5 miles away. "

People dont want to give up their rights, that's why you missed the whole point! Portland is NOT where people want to go, and even Portland hasnt solved their congestion problems.

"Dont social engineer the people around the transport system.
"
I said, and you still dont get my point - forcing people off of what they want is social engineering at its worst. This whole attitude of forcing people out of cars by underbuilding roads is wrongheaded.

"Too many conservatives think that profligacy is as American as apple pie, and anyone who uses an expression like “scarce resources” just has to be a socialist. Urban space does not grow on trees! " ... If the shoe fits, wear it. It is socialist to demand that people get restricted rights to spend their money as they see fit. It is socialist to insist that you know better than people themselves how to organize their lives. It is socialist to say 'of course you give up rights to live in XXX' ... It doesnt have to be that way. ONly socialist insist on it! We dont WANT boondoggle LRTs, can you get that through your skull? I wont ride it, I dont need it. May NYC needs a subway, or DC or chicago, but not the smaller cities of America and not my town.

Some of us want, enjoy and appreciate the system of transportation that gives maximum flexibility and options to people. Even giving it a malodorous name like "sprawl" when it is nothing more than lower-density housing than a city build with townhomes. I guess if we call Phoenix 'normal' and just referred to anything denser than LA as a "sardine can city", the shoe might be on other foot.

Exactly why is "sprawl" such a bad word? It just means that people choose to have MORE SPACE to live on. You say: "An urban environment only works with high-density workplaces, high-density living and high-density transportation. "
And many of us want to live with a nice big backyard, and we will pay in $$ on houses and in time on commute to get that - do YOU get it? Not everybody WANTS URBAN CONDO LIVING!

I agree with any mechanism that gets users to pay their way for use of products, goods, even public goods. Mass transit riders should PAY THEIR OWN WAY and so should the highway transit users.

You say: "In the interest of fairness, gas taxes will be abolished, as will other car-related taxes. " I am sure that will never happen. The anti-car Liberals would never abide gas under $1/gallon!!

Notably you didnt address the critiques of the article on smart growth. You are spointing the 'party line' of mass transit advocates.

Wonderful St Louis eh? Only 27% of expenses are covered by fares. ... From my earlier source ... "Figure 11 shows that the federal government's average "contribution" for construction of LRT systems has been 51.3%. St. Louis is currently facing a ten million dollar per year operating deficit--even though the federal government paid for 98.5% of the LRT system construction. Figure 12 graphically demonstrates required local taxpayer subsidy to cover the operations of LRT system. Not a single system is revenue-neutral in covering its operating costs. St. Louis is now proposing a state-wide sales tax increase to finance its desire for streetcars. "

Bottom-line: You are not being honest about which form is being subsidized more heavily.

You can get more transportation problems solved through properly designed roads than with mass transit boondoggles ...

http://www.ncpa.org/pd/budget/bud9b.html

# It is now three times as expensive to travel by mass transit as by automobile, on a per-passenger-mile basis.

[WOSG]

Let's be honest about the gas tax and mass transit subsidies ...

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/agcomm/writing/newsrls/1-23-02b.htm

" More than one-third of the price of a gallon of gasoline goes for gas taxes. ...
Almost 20 percent of federal gas tax revenues are earmarked for mass transit systems. Since the largest of these systems is located in the Northeast, these states get more than their share of federal gas tax revenues."

[WOSG]

$114 billion in motorist-related taxes, and $76 billion in spending. It seems the motoroists are funding other things, not the other way around ... http://www.ncpa.org/pd/budget/bud9a.html

Competition for taxpayers' funds between special interest lobbies promoting road building and social engineers favoring mass transit has resulted in taxpayers funding both -- although roads pay their way through taxes while mass transit has required increasing subsidies.

Today, more than $900 billion is spent annually in the United States on surface road and rail transportation.

• The largest portion is spent privately on automobiles and freight, but government spends more than $70 billion annually on roads.

• By contrast, nationwide operating expenses for mass transit -- train, subway and buses -- is $18 billion.

• Only about one-third of this amount is covered by commuter fares, with nearly two-thirds coming from taxes.

• Federal grants for transit construction and equipment have grown from $3.0 billion in 1990 to $4.6 billion fiscal 1995.

Supporters of road building successfully lobbied last year for passage of the National Highway System bill, which makes nearly 170,000 miles of roads eligible for federal aid.

• Opponents of additional road building, such as the American Public Transit Association, argue that motorists gain $345 billion in benefits while paying $44 billion in taxes -- a net $301 billion in public subsidy.

• However, the Highway Users Federation and the American Automobile Association calculate that motorists are net losers by $38 billion annually, paying motoring-related taxes of $114 billion for only $76 billion in services.

An alternative to continuing conflict over transit versus highway funds is building privately-funded and managed toll roads. State turnpikes with revenues of $5 billion annually are also ripe for privatization.

Source: Peter Samuel, "The Transportation Lobby: The Politics of Highway and Transit," Organization Trends, February 1996, Capital Research Center, 727 15th Street, NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 393-2600.

[WOSG]

If LRT is so great, why does it have to funded 80% by the Federal government -- why isnt 50/50 good enough? The fact is, these systems cant be built unless they are "fee riders" on the federal (gas tax!!) payers dime.



http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2003/Feb/25/ln/ln13a.html

"... Under the proposal, the federal government would cover no more than half of a local community's mass transit construction costs. Currently, the government pays for up to 80 percent of mass transit projects.

"If they went ahead with that, it could have a huge impact on our thinking," said Senate President Robert Bunda, who earlier this year introduced a bill calling for study of a rail transit system on O'ahu. "If they go to 50-50 funding, we'd get clobbered. I don't know if we could afford that."
"

[WOSG]

More on gas tax diversions for mass transit ...

http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed072201.cfm

A second congestion-causing flaw in the federal program is the growing diversion of federal fuel-tax revenues to purposes other than roads. When the trust fund was created in 1956, all such federal revenues (then just 3 cents a gallon) were spent on the construction of the interstate highway system. However, over time--and even as the interstate system neared completion in the early 1980s--the federal fuel tax increased and a growing share of the revenues generated were siphoned off into non-highway programs such as mass transit, and into programs that do not serve general-purpose transportation needs.

In 1982, for example, a Mass Transit Account was created within the highway trust fund, and today as much as 18 percent of trust-fund revenues paid by motorists are reserved for transit programs that benefit only a tiny fraction of commuters--currently about 5 percent.

Moreover, federal transit spending suffers from regional imbalances that are worse than those for highway spending. In 1999, more than 50 percent of federal transit spending went to just five states--California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas.

[Willie Green]

In reply #36, Publius stated: "San Diego, Calgary and Portland have been hugely successful."

In #39, WOSG replied: "I showed average of only 30% recovery from user fees, that's quite poor."

Truth: source link provide by WOSG in reply #26, referencing "Figure 10" lists "Operating Cost Covered by Fares" as 47.1% for Portland and 69.0% for San Diego.

Publius awarded 2 points out of 3.

No points awarded for Calgary either way, as it is not a U.S. city and U.S. federal involvement is not applicable. (At least I HOPE we're not financing Canadian mass transit, but you never know. Gotta take care of things here at home first!)

[Poohbah]

San Diego, Calgary and Portland have been hugely successful.

I live in San Diego.

The trolley out here is not successful, unless you're talking about the trolley lobby's ability to force the non-trolley users to pay for the trolley.

[Poohbah]

69% recovery in San Diego? Only if they're hiding large amounts of the operating costs in other funding lines.

[WOSG]

http://www.taxpayersleague.org/pdf/TransBrochure.pdf

yes more on diversion of the gas tax for mass transit subsidies ... $4.5 billion in Minnesota alone over the next decade, if not changed.

A huge diversion even though only a miniscule percentage of Minnesotans are served by such systems.

Cost for roads is 5 cents per passenger mile, cost for mass transit over $1 per passenger mile. Do the math!

[palmer]

"If the line disappeared tomorrow morning, would there be gridlock in the region?" For the above cities, the answer is a resounding Yes.

And the day after that people would start to adjust their schedules to avoid the congestion. Some congestion is useful as a signal to commuters to change their location or schedule. Other congestion is chronic and unlikely to be alleviated by mass transit or wider roads.

Just like "rich" and "poor" aren't static groups, the people who sit in congestion are rarely the same ones from year to year. Also some people learn to cope with it.

[Old Professer]

You just make this stuff up as you go, don't you?

[Old Professer]

You better hang on, you're going to get hit with all of the imaginary costs of pollution, economic losses supposedly caused by commuters not grinding their noses to bumps at their offices, etc, etc.

[Willie Green]

I live in San Diego.
The trolley out here is not successful,

You need to get out more, Poopster.
You don't know what you've been missing!

SAN DIEGO TROLLEY ORANGE LINE and SAN DIEGO TROLLEY BLUE LINE
-- © LRN - Jul 10, 2000

San Diego is America's most successful and cost effective light rail system, so opponents habitually charge that San Diego's light rail lines simply gave the same bus riders a more expensive means of travel. Clearly the enormous ridership increase on light rail compared to buses that previously operated in this corridor dispels this falsehood as light rail here has greatly increased transit's market share.

[saminfl]

Thank-you for setting the record straight, Publius.

Nice writing, but I would like to see cites for some of his claims.

[WOSG]

The overall average in all the listed cities was 30% ... not just those three.

And I dont understand how a system that only recovers a 1/2 of costs (ie Portland) is 'hugely successful'. that's still an economic failure.

Remember, these systems has their construction subsidized to start with by federal grants. The operating spending should be a minimum level of cost-recovery. Do you know of a single LRT in American that meets that standard?

[WaterDragon]

The wisdom of the city fathers? In Portland, OR? You have got to be kidding.

[Poohbah]

Willie, those numbers are completely irrelevant.

They fail to show just how SMALL those numbers are relative to the total traffic in each of those corridors.

San Diego's only real "success" with the trolley is how it has managed to portray itself as a "success" despite not recovering its annual O&M costs.

[WaterDragon]

Sounds like you base your opinions on the Katz-enjammer Kid, Vera.