The Wall Street Journal points out (search for “Bay Area Shutdown” if this link doesn’t work) that the BART employees who are on strike represent an industry that has seen one of the steepest declines in worker productivity in history. By just about any measure–transit trips per worker, revenues per worker-hour, costs per passenger mile–the transit industry has gone backwards more than a century in both labor and capital efficiency.
The really scary thing, at least if you are a transit rider, is that the result of this strike will be that BART, along with other transit agencies, will sacrifice safety in order to politically accommodate its workers. Many public employees have fat pensions and guaranteed health-care for life, but if paying for these things forces your local planning department to not pass a few new rules or your local library to buy a few less books, no one is going to be particularly damaged.
However, transit agencies–and especially rail transit agencies–can and do cut maintenance budgets in order to keep the money flowing to workers with cushy jobs. This is because of the asymmetry in union-employer negotiations when the employer is a public agency that reports to elected officials who depend on union support to get elected. In the case of transit, this asymmetry is both local and national in scope, as federal law requires that transit agencies keep unions happy in order to be eligible for federal grants.
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BART is actually one of the better-maintained rail transit systems in the country, probably because it doesn’t have a big bus system that it also has to operate. (Instead, Bay Area bus systems have been starved for funds while BART gets all the tax support, leading to a huge decline in bus ridership.) The agency is clearly trying to make a stand here, but it will probably lose do to pressure from the politicians.
Meanwhile, Honolulu is getting ready to spend billions on its own budget-sucking rail transit line, while California is breaking ground on its state budget-killing high-speed rail line. Honolulu’s line is likely to destroy one of the most efficient public transit systems in the country, while California’s HSR will simply put an end to efficient transportation in the region.
As someone fond of passenger trains, I know why people like the idea of trains running around their city or countryside. As a public-choice economist, I know why the political system doesn’t work. But I remain perplexed why so many people get bamboozled into believing that spending billions on an obsolete form of travel will improve the lives of anyone other than the contractors who design and build it.
“But I remain perplexed why so many people get bamboozled into believing that spending billions on an obsolete form of travel will improve the lives of anyone other than the contractors who design and build it.”
Read Ilya Somin’s work on the irrationality of educating yourself about political issues.
Re: safety.
Not to mention the little things the striking employees will do to create safety hazards. None of which will be treated as criminal actions due to the political power of the public unions.
Imagine for a moment that we could go back in time before BART was built. What should the Bay Area have done instead of building BART? More highways and express buses? What would the Bay Area of today look like if BART had never been built?
I imagine that if BART was not constructed then each freeway would require two additional main lanes and the Bay Area would have made do with a park and ride system similar to Houston’s. It would have been alright. It might have been both cheaper and moved more people, to more places, more rapidly. It is still not too late to rip the rails out and utilize a more modern approach.
I think two additional lanes would be woefully inadequate. A freeway lane can handle roughly 2,000 automobiles per hour, while BART is currently moving 21,000 passengers per hour into the city each morning while the Bay Bridge’s five westbound lanes are moving 24,000 people per hour. You’d really have to pack people into those two new lanes to make up for the missing BART capacity.
Additionally, adding two additional highway lanes might seem easy somewhere like Texas, but due to the Bay Area’s spectacular topography it can be a stupendously expensive proposition. It is costing $420 million to tunnel two additional lanes through the Berkeley hills, for example, and CalTrans predicts that it will cost a cool $1 billion to add two additional lanes to the western span of the Bay Bridge (one of which would be a bike lane).
Finally, assuming you could add all these additional lanes, where would you park all the cars once people got to where they were going? Wouldn’t San Francisco end up looking like Tulsa?
Too late or not, no one’s going to rip up the BART tracks any time soon.