There's Something Tragic About a Train

Transportation analyst Randal O'Toole tracks the failure of urban metro systems in an exhaustive new study, "Great Rail Disasters." Done for the Independence Institute, it lays out in detail what boondoogles most public transit systems be. From the executive summary:

The results show that rail transit has negative net impacts on every urban area in which it is located. In particular, rail transit offers no guarantee that transit commuting will increase or that transit will increase its share of travel. The twenty-three urban areas with rail transit collectively lost more than 33,000 transit commuters during the 1990s, while the twenty-five largest urban areas without rail transit collectively gained more than 27,000 transit commuters. During the same time period, per capita transit ridership and transit?s share of motorized travel declined in about half of the rail regions, while transit?s share of commuters declined in 60 percent of rail regions.

Regions that emphasize rail transit typically spend 30 to 80 percent of their transportation capital budgets on transit even though transit carries only 1 to 5 percent of regional travel. As a result, rail transit is strongly associated
with increased congestion: Sixteen of the twenty regions with the fastest growing congestion are rail regions.

Nor is rail transit environmentally friendly. Sixty percent of rail transit systems consume more energy per passenger mile than private cars and the congestion created by rail transit adds to air pollution. Rail transit, especially light-rail and commuter rail, can also be deadly. Commuter-rail lines kill more than twice as many people, per billion passenger miles, as buses or urban interstate freeways, while light rail kills three times as many.

But Randal, how do you really feel about rail?

Comments

[joe]

"People prefer cars because they cost less and can go anywhere."

That concept of "go anywhere" isn't neutral. You can get to the TGI Fridays on the giant lot, with the acres and acres of parking, out by the highway, much easier in a car. But the restaurant's location decision, lot size, and number of parking spaces, were made by taking into account the zoning, highway spending, and regional development-pattern decisions that had already been made.

The "anywheres" that cars can take you to are there for a reason, just as the anywheres that you might have been able to walk or ride to are absent for a reason. These decisions were not made in a free market, but one that has been skewed towards the interests of those who make money off of sprawl.

[Mark Fox]

joe: I know. The auto culture developed with a large and often subtle set of subsidies.

I also deleted a couple of paragraphs about the original (1880-1905) rail systems being self-funding through land speculation.

A big part of the reason your MBTA lots fill so early is that cars can't actually go everywhere so easily, like into the center of any pre-auto city. But they can go essentially anywhere a modern American needs to go in daily (auto-oriented) life. Like stopping at the day care and drycleaners on the way home from the MBTA lot.

[Warren]

joe,
You're talking nonsense. No rail line will ever run to my grandmothers farmhouse no matter what the zoning, spending, or regional whim whams are. My car is available to transport me at my convenience. In it, I ride in comfort. Mozart and perfumed conditioned air surround me. I can stop and pick up flowers and a movie on the spur of the moment. No mass transit will ever be able to compete with that. Ev. Er.

[Lyle bin Lanley]

Also consider: That bus makes a tasty target for terrorists. You can defend your bridges and terminals, but not every route mile, and it is inefficient for me to blow you up one auto at a time.

[Jay]

Joe, you make a great point about aggressive land-use controls being part of the underlying problem. I agree completely. Unfortunately, a lot of the community activists, politicians and so forth rarely make this connection. They carry on with the fatal conceit that more aggressive top-down planning and authority is needed to undo the last 100 years of aggressive top-down planning and authority.

I've tryed to make the case before that the free-marketeers, the new urbanists and the anti-sprawl green groups have more in common than they dare admit.

[Kevin Carson]

Warren,

Consumers of transportation vary widely in the elasticity of demand for one form versus another. Some, like you, may have a relatively inelastic demand for private cars, for unique personal reasons. But some, even today, prefer to skip the expense of a private car, gas, insurance, etc., in favor of mass transit. In between the two extremes, there is a middle ground of people who would use one or the other depending on the economic incentives. Altering the pattern of subsidies will surely affect the choices of consumers at the margin.

More importantly, I prefer, on principle, to eliminate ALL subsidies to BOTH mass transit AND private cars, and let users of each internalize all the costs of their particular choice. And also eliminate all the zoning laws that were used to impose a suburb/freeway model of urban development on the population. Then we can see who chooses what; and if they're doing it on their own nickel, I'm fine with it either way.

I do see a lot of irony, though, in people condemning subsidized mass transit for not being self-supporting, in a country with a gargantuan subsidized automobile-highway complex the size of America's. It's like Dwayne Andreas promoting rugged individualism to a mom on food stamps.

[joe]

Well put, Kevin. It's also worth noting that the "in between" category includes people who would divide their trips, taking the trolley to work but driving out grandma's farm.

Warren, no one's trying to build a rail line past Granny's farmhouse. This is a question of development patterns and transportation systems in metropolitian (urban and suburban) areas.

Jay, the free market anti-sprawl model has a lot to recommend it, but it suffers from the inability of economics to account for the fact that development patterns get "locked in," and once a neighborhood is built, it is extemely difficult for it to change on its own.

I know I have a tendency to monopolize threads related to this topic, so I'm not coming back until this evening.

[Economist]

I get the feeling that this guy doesn't commute to downtown Chicago everyday. Otherwise he might have some good things to say about some systems.

A better point would be made by looking at cities which developed before the automobile and comparing their mass transit to cities from the automobile age. In the older cities, private companies built the rails which enabled rich people to migrate to the suburbs. Those cities continue to have a strong commuting pattern between the center of the city and outlying areas, and mass transit has continued to be useful.

Newer cities and suburbs of older cities don't have a pattern conducive to mass transportation. That is probably why it is governments rather than private companies that are building today's new system. That is also why the older transit systems show little growth or a decline -- new jobs are in areas difficult to reach without a car.

This doesn't mean that the old system is a failure -- imagine all the train riders in Chicago switching to cars and driving down the 3 lane Kennedy or Eisenhower everyday.

Another useful angle on this issue would be exploring how recent transit systems are more of a monument to the government bringing a city into the big time by wasting money on a transit system. It's similar to how developing countries blow their foreign aid on massive, uselss public works projects. It is here where things are getting really out of hand -- when you have cities like Champaign-Urbana, Illinois planning light rail systems. (Wait until you see the accident statistics from running a few light rail lines in the middle of a college campus...)

[jim]

Please explain how the Big Dig makes auto transport in MetroBoston any cheaper.

[jim]

LIES, DAMN LIES...

[Native NYer]

Warren:

You might like the smell of the air, but you can't read, or go home loaded from the christmas party, or yak on the cell phone while driving your car.

Well, actually you can, but you'd be a menace to the pedestrians.

[Mark Fox]

jim: I don't get your angle, so I'll grandstand. Bostonians waste less time in their cars, burn less fuel, have fewer crashes, etc., thanks to the massive Federal subsidy to the project. Next vacation, while motoring through Yeehaw Junction, I hope Sam Adams stops to thank Bubba for the shiny new tunnels.

Economist: Not disagreeing, but without multilanes and METRA, Chicago wouldn't have grown the same, and there wouldn't be so many commuters.

Governments are building the new systems because they're not economically viable. If there was money it, entrepreneurs would build them. The politicians like to tell us they're "forward thinking", toward the days when there's no cheap fuel left, or no more space for pavement and parking. They sound like visionaries while funneling wads of cash to construction companies and union labor.

[Equality 7-2521]

Is private car transportaion subsidized? Don't the gasoline taxes paid for by every private driver more than cover the cost of the roads?

[me]

Property taxes also go into the cost of roads in many areas.

[Warren]

Kevin et al
We are united. While I find the advantages of auto ownership far outweigh the cons, that is my choice. I agree that the state should not be subsidizing ANY mode of transportation, or be infringing upon peoples property rights. This is absolutely something that should be left to a free market.

[Russ D]

Econ:

The Metra system is just a conglomeration of commuter rail that existed from the railroads than ran the lines originally. (The CTA is similar.) There are only 2 commuter rail lines "created" since Metra's inception in the 80's and these lines run mostly on trackage built in the 19th century and still used by freight carriers.

The multi-lane highways in Chicago were all massive government projects that tore down lots of neighborhoods, built in concert with housing projects. Those projects, along with the crazy quilt of property tax rates implemented at the same time, significantly altered Chicago's growth pattern from what it was before those government projects.

[garym]

Things will get really interesting in Boston the week of July 26. North Station, which services all commuter rail from the north and northwest, is located under the Fleet Center, where the Democrats will have their quadrennial pep rally. Because of security concerns, North Station will be closed for the week, as will at least one of the two adjacent subway stations. A temporary station will be opened, and will be connected to the subway grid only by special shuttle buses. If you think the MBTA is chaotic now, it will really be fun that week.

Parking for MBTA stations varies quite a bit. My preferred station is Littleton, which has adequate parking except that most of it is unmaintained dirt which doesn't actually belong to the MBTA; it's former farmland which doubtless will eventually be sold. North Billerica, on the other hand, has always had adequate parking, and on the occasions I've used Anderson-Woburn, it always had space available. That's the extent of my experience with commuter rail parking.

But if you want a real impossibility, try to park in Cambridge after 9 AM.

[garym]

BTW, I have to agree with joe that the at least one claim about Boston -- that it has "stopped building highways" -- is truly bizarre, considering the extent to which the city was recently torn up by the Big Dig.

[Jay]

Equality:

Not for the extra capacity needed for peak period usage that's for sure. And then there's the nebulous question of externalities which some anti-road types cite as a 'subsidy' to the auto. The gas/property taxes get filtered through a Soviet-style political/technocratic planning process before the rubber ever hits the road. In some cases light vehicles are being overcharged for the use of roads in uncongested conditions, while pavement shredding trucks clogging a freeway at rush hour are being seriously undercharged.
Imagine the govt ran grocery stores and we collectively paid for food through property taxes and a surcharge on utensils. The people seem to want hamburgers but we really don't know because there are no valid price signals. The vegans start blaming subsidized junk food for making everyone fat and demand more subsidies be given to tofu and trail mix. Who's right, who's wrong? You need to give the old public policy etch-a-sketch a shake and set everyone back on equal footing, paying their own way.

[brett]

Equality, you're really talking out of your ass if you think Portland's traffic is worse than LA's. I live and work here and while the traffic is bad, it doesn't compare to Seattle's, much less LA's. The article's argument on Portland is unconvincing - of course MAX doesn't carry as many riders as projected. What system does? More importantly, who believes those projections?

MAX has been a success here, no doubt. It's expensive, yes. But it is filled to capacity at rush hours - even the streetcar is crowded now. As more people move into the areas closer to downtown served by Interstate MAX (open 4/1), there will be more riders, including me.

Maybe in some places rail doesn't make sense, but here it does.

[Equality 7-2521]

Jay,

I am not advocating the use of gas tax for maintaining roads, I am just pointing out that the average commuter is already paying more than the "true" cost of the roads. So you can hardly say that automobile traffic is being subsidized.

Brett,

Hey, I grew up in PDX, so I understand your anger at the suggestion that something besides the weather might be better in LA. A few years ago I would have felt the same way. But have you been on the sunset highway lately? I only go back a couple of weeks a year, so maybe the days I was on it were unusually busy. Or perhaps one of the most heavily travelled highways in a >1M person metropolitan area only has TWO FUCKING LANES.

[Andy]

Warren:
No, the run to the TJ border here in San Diego doesn't make any money. The average cost per ride is around $6 (I'm too lazy to look for where I saw that stat) and the highest fare is

[J Galt]

Let's put something in perspective. If rail or bus transit was a private enterprise or priced on the free-market, it would not survive. There's no such thing as a free lunch or in this case, a cheap ride

[joe]

To get a sense of the leve of honesty we're dealing with, scroll down to page 23 and read what he has to say about Boston.

Spin, spin, spin. It would be interesting to read a report by someone who isn't motivated by hatred of "auto haters" and "nostalgia buffs."

[PLC]

If you want to understand joe's position on this issue, go look up "cognitive dissonance".

[joe]

So you've nothing, huh?

[Chris Puzak]

Although I yield to no one in my hatred for Philadelphia's SEPTA rail system, I will say that riding the train is better than riding the bus becuase you get a much lower percentage of crazy people on the train. Then again, one time I was on the train and a homeless guy tried to steal my rail pass and then accused me of working for the United Nations.

[John]

>>Commuter-rail lines kill more than twice as many people, per billion passenger miles, as buses or urban interstate freeways, while light rail kills three times as many.

[PLC]

But, John, as the average IQ increases, the use of commuter rail will inevitably decline. Only morons use public transportation.

[joe]

90% of peak hour trips onto Manhattan are public transit. Morons all.

The really smart people are backed up on the bridges.

[PLC]

The really smart people have all moved to the suburbs.

[chthus]

"The twenty-three urban areas with rail transit collectively lost more than 33,000 transit commuters during the 1990s, while the twenty-five largest urban areas without rail transit collectively gained more than 27,000 transit commuters."

So that's a whopping loss of about 1500 people per region. Given the decline in population in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (both with rail transit, although you wouldn't know it in Pgh unless you lived in the South Hills) throughout the 90's accounted for far more than this total, the numbers hardly seem telling.

"During the same time period, per capita transit ridership and transit?s share of motorized travel declined in about half of the rail regions"

So this would mean it increased in what? About half? I'm guessing Randal Tool think he's a master of statistics, blinding us with his insight. This one deserves to be filed in the draw below damned lies.

[digamma]

joe said: "90% of peak hour trips onto Manhattan are public transit."

PLC replied: "The really smart people have all moved to the suburbs."

Wouldn't those be the people making peak hour trips into Manhattan? Or should I not even bother responding?

[Russ D]

joe, if you don't mind my asking, what metro area do you live in?

I've visited Boston many times, I can't see what he's describing as a disaster. But I live in Chicago (actually a close-in suburb) and I know what I'm talking about as far rail usage here goes, and it takes a pretty deranged mind to quote the statistics O'Toole quotes and call them a disaster. The present rail system in Chicago can't meet the demand! The "new" rail line he talks about going to O'Hare is 21 years old! And the two stops closest to O'Hare are two large office centers, loads of people use the line to get to these points, not the airport.

There is a new commuter rail "line" going to O'Hare, though this all used existing freight trackage. There have been numerous transit plans floated around here, almost of them boondoggles and the boondoggles never get past the reporting stage. The real boondoggle is the 95% of ideas that make little economic sense on the surface, but get multi-million dollar "investigative" funding.

[Homer]

Did somebody say "monorail"?

[Equality 7-2521]

His comments about Portland are spot on. To put it in perspective, I moved from Portland to LA to get away from the traffic.

[John]

The best way to commute is by bicycle.

That way, you can slow down & watch accidents; and no one minds.

[Jay]

The pro-rail/anti-road and anti-rail/pro-road gangs continue to dig in and distance themselves from any rational discussion about urban transportation.

Couple of things that both sides consistently miss in their salvos:

a) 'mass' transit does not necessarily have to mean 'publicly-funded' transit, nor does transit have to run on rails to be very effective (see Ottawa, Curitiba)
b) the inability to separate a massively subsidized road network from the empirical observations that people 'prefer' low density suburbs
c) unless you want to grant Stalinist control of both land use and transportation systems, you're delusional if you think building a choo-choo train into your downtown is going to somehow unravel a century of auto-oriented development patterns.

Yes, politicians and planners across North America are incurably afflicted with a rail fetish, but why is the alternative so often a continuation of the wasteful, distorted status quo?

[joe]

Russ, I live in metro-Boston. That's why I scrolled down to page 23, to see if his comments on the Mass Bay Transit Authority jibed with reality. What I discovered is that they don't even jibe with themselves.

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to be made about rail transit projects, but this author starts off with the assumption that everything but the private automobile is a failure, and tortures his data and language to bear that out. When you are determined not to see the difference between a good transit project and a bad one, you make yourself look stupid and dishonest.

One reason the MBTA's share of transit trips hasn't risen as much as the total number of trips, is that most MBTA commuter rail station parking lots are full by 6:30 or 7 or 7:30. I wonder why that datum never made it into Randal's study?

[MALAK]

I know it's a different type of railway but, at least in Iran, they blow up GOOD!!!

[joe]

"unless you want to grant Stalinist control of both land use and transportation systems, you're delusional if you think building a choo-choo train into your downtown is going to somehow unravel a century of auto-oriented development patterns."

Actually, it's the removal of aggressive land-use controls - parking minimums, low Floor Area Ratios, height limits, big setbacks, single use zoning, high minimum lot sizes (these apply to both the downtown business district and the surrounding residential neighborhoods) - that is responsible for the automotive pattern. When lots of people have convenient access to a train station, and the train stops at places where they can get a lot done on foot, rail service is very popular.

[John]

Another good use of light rail is if it helps me get plastered & buy black velvet paintings of Elvis.

Isn't San Diego's Trolley to Tijuana making money?

San Diego's trolley was done on the cheap because it used existing rail lines.

Hey, light rail leads to Globalization! (I bought lots of Cervezas & statues of Bart Simpson saying "I am a radical Mexican dude" after my trolley ride). Now liberals will want to ban it.

[joe]

"that ARE responsible for the automotive pattern"

[Mark Fox]

People prefer cars because they cost less and can go anywhere. Once the price of automotive travel rises above the price of transit, people will clamor first for auto subsidies (already happening: More freeways to our far-flung suburbs!), and then begin to prefer transit. Once the economics shift, the retarding land-use restrictions will be removed and we'll find people clustering more around transit routes.

Rail fans hang on. In a hundred years or so, when the easy oil is gone, people will ride the train again. Unless technology provides an alternative to oil (already happening), in which case you'll have to go to Europe and enjoy the dramatically subsidized, but really cool, transit systems there.

[Warren]

Well, sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail!

[joe]

"Commuter-rail lines kill more than twice as many people, per billion passenger miles, as buses or urban interstate freeways, while light rail kills three times as many."

Almost all bus passenger miles are through dense areas of cities, at slow speeds. Urban interstate freeways are, by definition, through dense urban areas. Commuter and light rail, on the other hand, are mostly modes of moving commuters through suburban areas. This is not an apples to apples comparison. Notice that he doesn't compare deaths per passenger mile for SUBURBAN interstant freeways, or for urban rail lines in urban areas vs urban interstate freeways. Wonder why that is.

Also, I don't believe I've ever seen bus travel, the safest mode of travel in the world hands down, lumped in with highway travel in that way. Could he be fudging for the statistics he wants? If you eat a diet of broccolli, whole grains, fruit, fish, and a little butter, it will be good for your heart. Therefore, by Randall's logic, butter is good for your heart.

[Mark Fox]

joe: From the Philadelphia Enquirer "The [Pennsylvania Turnpike] generates about $400 million a year in total revenue, mostly from tolls. Half of that money, goes to operations, which includes administrative salaries. The turnpike is also carrying about $2 billion in debt, which costs the agency $88 million a year to repay."

400-200-88= 112

About $112 million in annual profit. For a state-operated project, with its assumed bureacratic inefficiencies.

Toll roads become a source of revenue, while rail projects require subsidy. But trains are cool!

[brett]

Equality -

Yeah, you're right about LA, something about being 15 points up in the fourth quarter and then.. never mind. And good point about the Sunset - I grew up a stone's throw from it, and it has steadily gotten worse. ODOT refuses to even think about using all that space to expand it. I'm about to head out to Hillsboro myself, and I always plan on it taking an hour each way from downtown. But I still think MAX makes a difference - imagine how much worse the Sunset would be without it.

[joe]

Less than 1% of roads are toll roads, Mark. And that turnpike is part of a roadway system that does require subsidy.

Your example is about as useful as noting that the ticket booth at the train station takes in more money than it spends.

[MD]

Equality - you're wrong on auto subsidies.

Most cities and states pay for huge portions of their roadway network (this is direct construction and maintenance - not other externalities) from sales taxes and property taxes.

The gas tax would have to be roughly tripled in most locales just to pay for all construction and maintenance (taking up the slack from current contributions from other sources such as the above plus vehicle registration and other arguably non-user-fees, or in the case of registration, non-variable fees).

[Kevin Carson]

MD,

Do you have references for those stats? I might want to cite them.

[Douglas Fletcher]

My conclusion is that going to work sucks.

[Jay]

Kevin:

The FWHA Highway User Cost Allocation Study is a good place to start to examine the system-wide equity effects. This study suggests on the whole that road users "pay their way" at a very macro-level. Unfortunately at the urban level is where most of the congestion occurs, and where the truly gross economic distortions occur.
The extreme opposite end of "make the drivers pay" is represented by Todd Litman at the Victoria transport institute. His work is comprehensive and is useful in critiquing auto subsidies, but he has been criticized for lumping too many 'costs' onto auto users and advocating more top-down planning and cost allocation rather than anything approaching 'laissez-faire'.

[Mark Fox]

joe: I thought you were going to nail me for my arguing that government only takes on money-losing projects (modern urban rail, etc.), then pointing out that the PennsyPike is profitable. Thanks for saving me. 🙂

Are you saying that since all roads are connected we should consider their operation only as a system? If I am driving from San Francisco to Boston, I don't care about all the side roads the Pike finances; I'll never use them.

I can always draw the line between profitable segments and subsidized segments, while you can reasonably point to the cost of the whole system. I think as it relates to this thread, there are nearly zero profitable segments in modern urban rail.

[Walter Wallis]

I love riding trains. My dad and grandpa were locomotive engineers. In my working life I have been able to use public transit for less then three months out of 50 years. Trains are great for carrying freight from manufacturing centers to retail centers, because merchandise can be packed and stacked.

Here in Silicon Valley, we have been taxing and robbing the highway trust fund for years, and yet the mass transit we have is nowhere able to handle most of the commute. Mass transit presumes a stability in employment that just does not happen any more. Even if you live within easy walking distance of a transite stop, are you willing to limit your job opportunities to those jobs on the line? An auto commuter can look to a far wider employment choice.

[joe]

Mark sez "Governments are building the new systems because they're not economically viable."

J Galt basically agrees.

It might be worth pointing out here that highways don't turn a profit either, and are also being built on the public dime. When was the last time you saw Modern Continental building a new highway with private dollars?

[Don]

I don't know what kinda profit or loss highways turn in, but here in California, the state government wants to use the gas tax for more than just highways & transportation related funding, so I assume there is a profit.

Here in San Diego, the Coronado bridge had a toll, which was supposed to end after it was paid for. It paid for itself, and the toll continued. The people in Coronado liked the toll 'cause it kept the riff-raff out, at least that's what the major of La Mesa said . . . The toll is now gone.

[MD]

Jay,

The FHWA leaves out most spending at the local level (based on past experience with them) and also relies heavily on the theory that if 90% of people (let's say) drive, and if 90% of the money from property and sales taxes which is spent on transportation goes to roads for commuters, then nobody is getting subsidized.

[Anvil]

My big problem with rail: When it stops, it stops and you are done. Ever sat through a transit strike?

My car takes me from where I am to where I want to go, when I want to go.

[joe]

"I can always draw the line between profitable segments and subsidized segments, while you can reasonably point to the cost of the whole system." The thing is, you can't. The turnpike wouldn't be profitable if those unprofitable littel streets weren't connected to it.

"I think as it relates to this thread, there are nearly zero profitable segments in modern urban rail." Absolutely wrong. The MBTA Green Line trains that are absolutely packed between downtown stations are taking in more money than they cost to run, while they have wall to wall paying customers. But those runs wouldn't be full if there weren't lines out those people's homes, which probably don't make money. Or, the 6:00 outbound train that is full every day might not be if there weren't 6:40 and 7:30 trains every night, because the people who ride the train every day might not ride if they can't stay late once in a while.

Different elements of a transportation system have to be looked at by how they function as part of the whole system.

[mark]

Brett/Equality:

ODOT's been working on widening the Sunset to three lanes between 217 and Sylvan for the last 18 months. That construction's part of why traffic there sucks so bad now. It'll be done in Sept. and handle twice as much traffic.

[Mark Bahner]

One thing any discussion of rail-versus-auto needs to consider is the likely evolution/revolution in automobiles. In less than 20 years, it's likely that automobiles will no longer be driven by people.

They will be driven by computers, and the distances between them and the speeds at which they'll move (passing by each other at right angles at intersections, at full speed, missing by inches!) will make all present discussions seem very quaint. Urban roads will easily have capacities of 3+ times their present capacities.

The light rail system being built here in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, NC) should be coming online just before computers take control of automobiles. Needless to say, the light rail system here will be a bloody disaster. Financially, at least.