HDR, a consulting firm that routinely misleads cities in order to get contracts promoting and designing streetcars, has written a report for the Michigan Department of Transportation that greatly exaggerates the benefits of public transit. In claiming that those benefits are “conservatively” $805 million a year, the report makes many unwarranted assumptions.
The most important assumption, which the report repeatedly makes, is that there would be no transit without publicly subsidized transit (for example, see p. 13). In fact, without transit subsidies, private transit services would spring up in most major places, as they did recently in Clayton County, Georgia. Even with subsidized transit, some cities such as Miami already have private transit operations competing directly with public transit. Most northern states, most likely including Michigan, forbid such competition, but such laws would be irrelevant if socialized transit were eliminated.
In estimating the costs of not having any transit at all, the HDR report greatly exaggerates those costs. For example, the biggest cost is “riders’ out-of-pocket savings,” that is, the amount they save by riding transit instead of driving. HDR estimates that this was equal to $349 million in 2008 (p. 8). The National Transit Database says Michigan transit carried about 455 million passenger miles in 2008, so at HDR’s cost each of those passenger miles would have cost 76 more than transit riders paid in fares. Since Michigan fares averaged 16 cents a passenger mile, HDR must think that it costs 94 cents a passenger mile to operate a car.
That is simply absurd. As the Antiplanner has noted before, Americans spend less than $1 trillion a year (add lines 54 and 57) driving cars and light trucks 2.7 trillion miles a year, or about 35 cents a vehicle mile. Since many of those vehicle miles will carry passengers in addition to the driver, HDR has overestimated the cost of driving by more than 200 percent.
The second-biggest benefit of subsidized transit, according to HDR, is congestion relief, which HDR estimates to be worth $340 million in 2008. Give me a break! Transit carries less than 0.5 percent of motorized passenger travel, and just 2.1 percent of commuters, in the Detroit urban area (where more than half of all Michigan transit ridership takes place).
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Transit's Share of 2008 Motorized Passenger Miles
| Urban Area | Auto PM | Transit PM | Transit's share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Detroit | 58,186 | 286 | 0.49% |
| Grand Rapids | 9,262 | 39 | 0.42% |
| Flint | 6,266 | 29 | 0.47% |
| Ann Arbor | 5,271 | 33 | 0.61% |
| Lansing | 4,341 | 37 | 0.84% |
| Kalamazoo | 3,083 | 9 | 0.29% |
| Muskegon Heights | 2,221 | 3 | 0.13% |
| Saginaw | 2,125 | 4 | 0.17% |
| Battle Creek | 1,354 | 2 | 0.14% |
| Jackson | 1,247 | 2 | 0.15% |
| Holland | 1,146 | 1 | 0.06% |
| Benton Harbor | 1,116 | 1 | 0.08% |
| Bay City | 1,104 | 4 | 0.33% |
| Port Huron | 1,094 | 3 | 0.29% |
Passenger miles in millions. Sources: Highway passenger miles from table HM-72 of Highway Statistics 2008 (daily VMT multiplied by 365 to get annual and 1.6 to get passenger miles); transit passenger miles from National Transit Database.
Even assuming no private transit springs up to take the place of socialized transit, and further assuming that every single displaced rider would drive to work, would adding 2.1 percent more cars on the road really cause hundreds of millions of dollars of additional congestion? If so, that congestion could be relieved for a lot lower cost using such techniques as signal coordination, ramp metering, and congestion tolls.
HDR also calculates the “accident cost savings” from riding transit rather than driving. “In general,” HDR claims, “transit riders are less likely to be involved in a crash than those who use personal vehicles” (p. 5). Yet HDR’s own calculations show this is false: it estimates “savings” is minus $9 million, meaning transit causes $9 million more damage than without it (p. 8). HDR never comments on this contradiction.
HDR also claims that transit “protects the environment” by “taking cars off the road” (p. 7). However, it wisely does not attempt to calculate this “savings” because, it claims, “emissions cost savings are typically negligible for non-rail modes” (p. 19). By “negligible cost savings,” it means “transit is a big polluter.” In 2008, for example, Michigan transit produced an average of 0.70 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger mile, compared with 0.61 for all automobiles including light trucks. Diesel-powered buses are also notoriously worse emitters of nitrogen oxides than gasoline-powered cars. Michigan transit also used an average of 4,600 BTUs per passenger mile, compared with an average of 3,900 for all autos including light trucks. HDR should be ashamed of keeping this information out of the report.
In total, HDR estimates that transit provided $805 million in “social benefits” (mostly savings to users and congestion relief) and $1.34 billion in “economic impacts” (secondary benefits such as transit worker jobs). HDR wisely “advises against adding these two number” because they are apples and oranges. The secondary benefits represented by the second number would exist with or without transit subsidies. For example, if socialized transit shut down, most of the people driving socialized buses would get jobs driving private buses. If Congress stopped wasting money on transit, it would either find something else to spend it on (which would also create secondary benefits) or let taxpayers keep the money (which would also create secondary benefits).
The only real benefit of transit is the real, not fabricated, amount it saves users whose alternative is driving. Even if we assume all transit users would drive alone if socialized transit ended, that savings would be just 19 cents per passenger mile, or about $86 million on top of the $71 million Michigan transit riders paid in fares in 2008. Against that is the $478 million in subsidies spent on Michigan transit, not to mention wasted energy, added pollution, and $9 million in added accident costs. Socialized transit is hardly a good deal for Michigan.
The only real benefit of transit is the real, not fabricated, amount it saves users whose alternative is driving. Even if we assume all transit users would drive alone if socialized transit ended
chuckle
I guess if want to scare whites, you have to throw in the cheap, gratuitous (old, tired) talking point of th’ soshulizm. Cheap, tacky fear mongering notwithstanding:
.
There are, of course other benefits that several of us have discussed here, but I guess Randal has “forgotten” them.
Ah, well. Whaddya gone dew?
DS
Health Benefits???? I ride roughly 40 rail mass transit miles a day. My fellow riders are quite obese. I’ve been squished by huge riders forcing themselves into too-small seats. I’ve seen women get in shouting matches because they were both too obese to fit in the seats next to them.
Yes. Health benefits.
Folk don’t consider anecdotal information conflated to an entire population or other unnamed areas compelling.
DS
My concern with the HDR document is that it provides zero information on the details of how the benefits were calculated, and on what basis the estimates rely on.
Having said that, the vehicle cost savings is consistent with another analysis I’ve seen that estimates, for every transit passenger mile traveled, two auto vehicle miles traveled are eliminated, or roughly for every 1 transit passenger mile, 3 passenger miles by auto are eliminated. This also comes out to about 1.5 pm/vm for autos, consistent with national occupancy statistics, and slightly lower for urban travel, given that intercity trips by auto tend to have much higher occupancies overall.
I don’t have the reference in front of me at the moment, but if any commenter here is interested, I’ll dig it up and supply in a followup post.
For anyone who wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars based upon a telephone survey of self-reported body weights (with 75% of contacts not included), I can get you a great investment in fen-phen pills and ab-master equipment that report much better correlations with weight loss.
Dan must have been watching a lot of MSNBC coverage of Glenn Beck if he was able to pull a race card from so deep in his colon and use it completely off-topic.
Shucky darns:
DS
Hey Danny Boy, did you ever notice that no one commenting on this website is against public transit? Some commenters oppose substantial subsidies, some oppose massive subsidies, and some are willing to build it all at the public expense and only expect transit to cover operating costs. Some even accept subsidies for transit that are comparable with the societal benefits.
And then there are commenters who think that transit is good no matter what the costs.
Funny how you just change the topic when the Antiplanner points out that transit advocates are lying about costs and benefits. Now that you have burned the race card, we are all waiting for you to play the islamaphobia card, homophobic card, polygamonic card, albinophobic card, etc.
“Conclusions
The results of this study suggest that improving neighborhood environments and increasing the public’s use of LRT systems could provide improvements in health outcomes for millions of individuals.” – the study
“There are, of course other benefits that several of us have discussed here, but I guess Randal has “forgotten†them.
Ah, well. Whaddya gone dew”-DS
Quoting the studies limitations would be useful. In this case, in the nicest way possible they try to say “well, we just might be onto something here but we don’t know so to know.”
http://www.ajpm-online.net/article/S0749-3797(10)00297-7/fulltext#sec4.1
Study Limitations
There are several important limitations to the current study. The most obvious one is that BMI and RPA measures were obtained by self-report and not by objective means. The measures of RPA are rough proxies of an individual’s self-reported weekly walking and vigorous exercise patterns. There is likely substantial reporting error in estimates of these outcomes. For example, the measure of meeting vigorous RPA is likely high because of self-reporting bias. Perhaps LRT users were more likely than the comparison group of non-LRT users to under-report BMI. There also may be additional omitted variables that are confounded with LRT use that explain the LRT use and BMI association. In addition, the percentage of LRT users was quite small, and although the findings were significant, the CIs are quite wide, suggesting that future studies should enroll much larger sample sizes. Furthermore, there was a sizable loss of sample in follow-up, primarily because of the need to continuously reside in the catchment area. Establishing the potential long-term effects of light rail use on obesity will require subsequent follow-up studies with larger samples of individuals that specifically measure walking distances through pedometers or other related technologies.
prk, thank you for copying more of the text.
It is also important to note that this is not the first paper on this topic.
DS
It is important to note that there are more studies like this that conclude well, we just might be onto something here but we don’t know so to know�
but we don’t know so to know?
Ummmm….sure.
DS