Over the past 25 years, the population of the Pittsburgh urban area has remained fixed at about 1.8 million people. Driving, however, has increased by almost 50 percent.
During this period, Pittsburgh has spent hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading light-rail lines, building exclusive busways, and — in the latest project — building a $435 million transit tunnel under the Allegheny River. Despite (or because of) this investment, transit ridership has dropped by more than 25 percent.
Although the numbers vary slightly from place to place, Pittsburgh’s story is pretty typical of transit everywhere. Sure, some cities have seen ridership gains, but subsidies to transit are huge and transit does not make a notable (meaning 5 percent or more) contribution to personal mobility in any urban area except New York (where it is 10 percent).
Bill Steigerwald, an editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, surveys the failure of the transit industry through an interview with the Antiplanner’s friend, Wendell Cox. Cox’s comments are scathing.
Since 1970, says Cox, “transit expenditures have gone up more than 300 percent adjusted for inflation and ridership has gone up less than 20 percent. There is no other sector of the economy, including health care, where I can find escalation even close to that.”
Every time someone points out that transit is a waste of money, they are beaten down with the mantra that “transit isn’t profitable anywhere else, so why should it be profitable here?” How do we let people get away with such absurd statements?
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Cox points out that transit is profitable in some places. Tokyo, for example, has 10 private — and profitable — commuter-rail systems and two subway systems there “cover all their operating costs as well as almost all of their capital costs.” Here, a transit agency is doing good if it covers 40 percent of its operating costs and none of its capital costs.
I would add that major cities in many developing nations rely on private transit systems that are profitable. When transit-subsidy advocates say transit isn’t profitable elsewhere, they mean in Europe. And Cox points out that most European countries have stopped their national transit programs and pushed funding down to the local level. This has at least forced economy measures such as contracting out transit services to private parties, which saves taxpayers 40 to 50 percent of the cost of running a transit line.
Why do we put up with this? The answer, of course, is that transit is pork. “For most transit agencies in the United States, if they were to write a mission statement that is reflective of what they do, they would indicate that they exist for the purpose of serving their employees and vendors,” not transit riders, notes Cox.
Steigerwald asks Cox if anyone is looking at an alternative transit model. Instead of answering, Cox points out that Congress, the transit agencies, transit unions, and transit vendors all benefit from the current model too much to change it. The annual budget of the American Public Transportation Association, by the way, is $22 million, more than five times bigger than the budgets of all the highway lobbies in Washington, DC.
But there are other models. There is the jitney model, which Cox himself has promoted. There is the demand-response or smart jitney model — like the current paratransit system but open to anyone instead of just disabled people — promoted by Robert Behnke. Behnke adds a new twist to this model when he points out that wireless Internet can help dispatch transit vehicles. And there is the idea of virtual exclusive busways, which would allow buses to provide better service than almost any rail system on congestion-free roads paid for by tolled automobiles.
None of these ideas are popular among transit agencies because they don’t cost enough. So, in answer to yesterday’s question, “what is my agenda?” the agenda that Cox and I share is to provide better transit service at lower or no cost to taxpayers. But that threatens the entrenched special interests that depend on tax subsidies.
Market Urbanism, I meant that if rail and transit corridors are only used for the movement of people and/or freight then there economic value will only ever be that of moving people and/or freight. Utilising road corridors for moving energy and communications in addition to people and freight gives roads much greater economic value than if they were used solely as transport corridors. It is possible for all transport corridors to be used in this way. In fact, this message will travel along a fibre optic cable located in New Zealand’s main trunk railway corridor. The railway gets revenue from leasing the corridor space and Telecom gets the security of a corridor that isn’t going to be dug up by road workers every few years.
The really big reason for never saying never is that the economic value of any transport corridor is determined by the amount of transport it provides. Thus if gas hits $10 gallon the economic value of roads as transport corridors will probably plummet. This should increase the economic value of transit corridors, or the internet, or apartments but not necessarily by the same amount of value lost from roads. It all depends on how many of the various purposes of trips made by road can be satisfied by these alternatives. If they can’t then the reduced economic value of roads could be either lost altogether (ie reduced GDP) or it could be spent on some entirely different activity.
“Cities fetch higher prices than rural areas, which means they are more desirable.”– Rationalite
Just to be clear, the price reflects what the market as a whole is willing to pay. A higher price does not necessarily indicate that more people see it as being more desirable than other options.
Market Urbanism,
In reply to number 44. I think, living in different countries, we may have different definitions of roads and highways. When I say road I mean a local road – owned, controlled and partially funded by a local authority. A highway is fully funded by road user fees and controlled by the state highway agency. Most of the traffic on local roads is local with origins and destinations within that local authority’s boundaries. The exact opposite for highways. Generally limited access has only been implemented on purpose built highways. Roads can function as local access, collectors and arterials, highways only serve the latter two functions.
Consequently the economic values are derived from quite different functions.
In the case of limited access highways the economic underpinning are the same as railways or LRT because of the physical similarities.
“The desirability of the location is decreased by externalities. Somehow that makes the land economically viable for more costly, higher density development?” Not decreased, merely affected. The desirability for use as single occupant dwellings is decreased by high traffic volumes but the desirability for commercial use is increased because of the high traffic volumes. Clearly this has to be a main road evolving into an arterial road since frontage access is crucial to the desirability.
There seems to be a rather complex economic impact from new highways until construction actually starts. Land prices can be supressed by the uncertainty of whether the road will actaully ever be built then increased by certainty the road is actually being built. Even if the proposed project is cancelled land values will increase because of the certainty that the land will not be affected by noise etc even though it will not get the benefit of improved access.
I am always sceptical of claims made by subsets of the field of economics. Frequently too much certainty is claimed. This seems to be especially true for the complex areas of tranport and urban land use. My argument follows from the emperical studies I have read and from personal observation in the city where I live. However that city had rigid single use zoning for more than a century but in the last couple of decades it has changed to a flexible zoning system. Although it is now possible to build commercial and industrial buildings in most residential zones this hasn’t happened because land around the airport and along the railway line is much cheaper than land already occupied by houses. Presumably because the noise from trains and planes makes living next to them undesirable.
In the absence of zoning flexibility increased traffic on arterials will inevitably reduce land value. Ditto if freeways are built through middle class neighbourhood. Howver the evidence is clear that building freeways through rundown industrial or residential arrears does lead to redevelopment. But, those studies also suggest very strongly that most of those developments would have occurred somewhere else if the freeway had not been built. In short, building new roads doesn’t stimulate new economic activity, it merely shifts existing growth around. The same seems to be true for rail transit. For more detail see the BART@20 studies at http://www.uctc.net
Craig, The air is cleaner merely means that you’re not hurting as many people as you used to. That goes for all of us everytime we get behind the wheel.
And you’re quite right “and transit is not greener than most of the new cars and suvs that families drive with a full load.” The problem is most cars and SUVs rarely carry a full load. It’s those other trips when transit can be greener, at least on arterial routes.
Don’t get me wrong. I never actaully claimed that transit doesn’t kill people with it’s emissions, but at least if it’s electric powered from coal the emissions aren’t being emitted in the middle of an urban area.
All I ever did was respond to the question you asked in #26. If you had responded that you drive a small car so that the health trespass is smaller than riding buses that would have been a good enough answer for me.
A solution which I think is better than transit or bicycles or higher density. Instead of owning a single vehicle to meet all of a family’s needs American families should spend their wealth owning two or three mission specific vehicles. A small two seater (eg MX5, CRX, MGF) for SOV travel. A mid-size car for one parent plus two kids trips. A large car for when the entire family travels together. A crucial point is that this be phased in so that the average of the three cars is the same as the average age of current family cars. Or to look at it another way, don’t trade in your single man’s car when your first child arrives, keep it as a spare car, then do the same thing when your family outgrows your first family car. This may cause used car prices to increase or it might not, depends on how it impacts scrappage rates.
Me? I’ve never needed anything more than a bachelor’s car, a 300zx.
“I am merely trying to argue that a truly free market in land use and transportation would have prevented much of the sprawl that the “smart growth†people despise in the first place.” –Rationalite
It’s fun to speculate over how things might be different. I have yet to see anything that show that people would be living significantly different than they are now. If anything the sprawl could be even more pronounced. Without emminent domain powers to build roads, investors likely would’ve skiped building freeways through the urban core. Another factor that could make it worse is, as we can see with the issue mininum lot sizes, that an area is developed there has to be a hell of a lot of incentive to change that. For example, all the talk about scrape-offs in the cityies or surburbs almost always tend to be happening in neighborhoods that are already, 40, 50+ years old. Once it’s developed it’s density isn’t likely to change. Which would then just give more incentives to go further out. After all, why putz around buying 4 different lots from 5 different owners, one of which actually has some clause on their title saying that it has to stay R-1 but is going through a process to remove the very clause they themself put in there, just to go through the large expense of building 50 units in some 6 story re-fill (it was already developed, after all) when you could just put the same money into redeveloping 80 acres someplace on the edge of town. Heck, it’s less risk since you can buy the land and sudivide and build as you go.
Now you’re going to say but if the market wants the 6-story condo building, it’s going to be built. That’s true. But that’s a huge if. The same with it being some project of densely populated single family homes. People are going to be making the same choices they are now, “Do I buy the 1600 sq ft triple decker on a skinny ass lot closer in to town or do I buy the 4 acres, 2400 sq ft. neo-rambler (ya know they’re gonna come back sooner than later *grin*) that’s further out?” People will tend to see it that way, do they get more for their money or maybe live closer in.
But that’s the thing, you take away emminent domain and massive susidies and what happens to employers in the core cities? I think they flee all the faster to places that give them and their employees more mobility.
….but eh, it’s all speculation at this point as far as I can tell. For me, I’d go with how people tend to behave. In this case, they tend to want more space of their own and they tend to want bigger homes. Because of that, they’ve been perfectly happy to not fight minimal lot size and similar zoning rules. I’m sure there are some areas that we’d see go through some changes that would lead to more density. But when you’re talking about the choices that 500,000, 750,000, or 1.5million households are making, I just don’t see it ending up leading to less sprawl. I can see more infill occurring in select neighborhoods that currently fight it. But opening things like that has a darn good chance of leading to a lot of growth in areas where not only the land is cheap but you don’t have to deal with 5, 10, 100 different owners just to get a project going.
“Howver the evidence is clear that building freeways through rundown industrial or residential arrears does lead to redevelopment.”
—Tell that to the people living in Frogtown in St. Paul, Mn or North Minneapolis.
Ettinger,
However, I find odd your self characterization as a market urbanist with your constant bashing of places like Houston while turning a blind eye to the much more opressive places like Portland’s master government planned living.
I think you are confusing me for someone else. Can you quote me where I bash Houston’s relatively liberal zoning policies? If you find such a quote, I will be glad to retract it.
Blind eye? There are a billion places in the world, with a billion different ways to control development. I will not apologize if you are disappointed that I have not sufficiently ranted against Portland. I choose to focus more time looking at how urban/suburban municipalities restrict development, which happens all over the place, unlike Portland’s silly laws.
You would rather I spend all my time complaining about Portland? There’s plenty of that. I prefer to criticize all the cities.
@prk166: That wasn’t me you’re quoting. But I agree with it.
Kevyn,
I agree that commercial uses will spring up near the major nodes of a highway system, but the land in between is still relatively undesirable for non-industrial use unless there are other factors stimulating commercial/residential growth.
So, However the evidence is clear that building freeways through rundown industrial or residential arrears does lead to redevelopment would only be true if there are useful nodes (exit ramps?) that provide desirability for commercial uses. But, I’d argue that it’s still a better place to build freeways because the land is already cheap.
Instead of owning a single vehicle to meet all of a family’s needs American families should spend their wealth owning two or three mission specific vehicles
If you are proposing that as an environmental solution, I would also factor all the material, energy, and transportation input that went into manufacture of each automobile. Plus the fact that you have to use some land to park them. I suppose it may be economical for some people. But, it’s difficult to calculate if that’s an environmentally better solution.
PRK166,
That was me you quoted, but that’s ok.
Without eminent domain powers to build roads, investors likely would’ve skipped building freeways through the urban core. Another factor that could make it worse is, as we can see with the issue minimum lot sizes, that an area is developed there has to be a hell of a lot of incentive to change that.
Right, but how would we have as much sprawl without the big government freeways. Remember, most of the jobs were in/near the urban cores. Without, a socialized freeway commute how would the suburban pioneers have endured the daily commute? There weren’t as many jobs in the wilderness.
You have to consider proximity to jobs, not just desirability of big homes. Sure, people would still move away from the city, and some jobs would follow them, but to a much lesser degree than with socialized freeways.
Those with money could easily afford sprawling estates out in the country, as they could afford the tolled commute. Hey, many more people might have country homes for the vacation times they don’t commute.
“Right, but how would we have as much sprawl without the big government freeways. Remember, most of the jobs were in/near the urban cores. Without, a socialized freeway commute how would the suburban pioneers have endured the daily commute? There weren’t as many jobs in the wilderness.
You have to consider proximity to jobs, not just desirability of big homes. Sure, people would still move away from the city, and some jobs would follow them, but to a much lesser degree than with socialized freeways. ”
I disagree. For decades the lion share of the job growth has been in the suburbs. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that having corporate campuses were all the rage. With or without the freeway going into the city, there were still a lot of incentives to do that. On top of that, densities make transit more viable. For example, 3M could still go head and build it’s corporate campus in Maplewood like they did. Those still living in the city could simply make of transit? Heck, there would probably be a few enterprising taxi / jeepney folks to fill in the cracks. The lack of freeways wouldn’t preclude a commute by the city worker. Or do you have something showing that, for example, 80% of Honeywell’s workers at their old corp. campus, just 2 miles south of downtown MPLS, were taking transit? That is… if you already are driving, what’s a few more miles?
Just to focus for moment… “. Without, a socialized freeway commute how would the suburban pioneers have endured the daily commute?” would it matter? They’re already used to driving in the city most likely. So even if it’s not a freeway, why would 6 miles on a 2-lane highway be any worse than 2 miles in the city? Obviously a freeway make things faster. Stopping at traffic lights eats up time. But it wouldn’t necessarily make the commute any worse than what they’re already used to.
And sure, tolls would lessen people’s desire to drive further. But as it has been gas taxes have been a use fee. Drive another 20 miles, pay another .18c. And people know that adds up. So why would an extra dollar or two on top of what they’re already paying change things _that_ much? That is, change it to “a much much lesser degree than with socialized freeways”? I think it would a bit but not that much. I think in some ways there would be less at first. The problem I see is more as a very spare ring encomposes the metro. That is, instead of the old bedroom community suburbs with another layer of less densely but still city water / sewer coming in, you’d have a layer there of 3-10 acre lots with few if any services needed for density. And that’s going to be slow to redevelop. So I doubt it but really without more facts either way we’re just speculating. Which is, unfortunately for my social life, actually a lot of fun. 🙂
For decades the lion share of the job growth has been in the suburbs.
The good jobs moved closer to the talent. They would not move to wilderness places and expect talented people to just move there, especially if there weren’t freeways. Now, many companies are returning to CBDs because the young, energetic, creative talent is living in the cities.
would it matter? They’re already used to driving in the city most likely. So even if it’s not a freeway, why would 6 miles on a 2-lane highway be any worse than 2 miles in the city?
Many didn’t drive when they lived in the city.
Regardless, you would drive 6-miles on the 2-lane highway, and the 2 miles to the city. It would be worse than what you propose, plus who’s building these 2-lanes highways?
And sure, tolls would lessen people’s desire to drive further. But as it has been gas taxes have been a use fee. Drive another 20 miles, pay another .18c. And people know that adds up. So why would an extra dollar or two on top of what they’re already paying change things _that_ much?
I think a lot of people here underestimate the extent of the distortion in the cost of driving. Gas taxes pay for the federal highways, but not the rest. Plus, there are other costs a truly private road developer would incur that a public entity doesn’t. First, they wouldn’t be tax exempt. They wouldn’t be able to finance with tax free bonds. They would charge enough to make a profit above all the capital costs for the risks they take. They wouldn’t build toll roads in all the places they are now because they simply wouldn’t be profitable. Moreover, private developers wouldn’t have built the highways to the suburbs until they were certain there would be someone to use them…
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