Spending around $1,000, 20-year-old Daniel Jacobson, a Stanford University undergraduate student, has written a 140-page streetcar feasibility study for Oakland, California. The city of Oakland itself had already spent $300,000 on a streetcar study back in 2005, and planned to spend another $330,000 for further study this year.
Of course, the Jacobson’s study is filled with fabricated data, false assumptions, and phony calculations. But most readers will be too dazzled by the beautiful graphics to notice. Besides, any $300,000 professional feasibility study would contain the same fabricated data and calculations.
The biggest fabrication, of course, is the inevitable claim that building a streetcar will lead to economic redevelopment. There is not a chance in hell that spending $100 million or more on a 2-1/2-mile streetcar line would lead to any economic development, and even if it did, it would only be development that would have taken place somewhere in the Oakland area anyway. But any streetcar study is going to make this claim because that is the only way to justify spending tens of millions of dollars on a nineteenth-century technology that is slower, less flexible, and more dangerous to have on the streets than buses that cost far less.
