It’s been a little over a week since Nashville voters rejected that city’s light-rail plan, and the pundits are wringing their hands in despair. Many of them have a common set of assumptions:
- Rail transit is the only real transit — buses don’t count — so voters who reject rail are rejecting transit itself;
- Transit relieves congestion, so it is surprising that voters in a congested city would reject spending more on transit;
- Transit is morally superior to driving and both are subsidized, so the fact that subsidies to transit passenger miles are roughly 100 times greater than to highway passenger miles is irrelevant.
Nashville is “gridlocked,” says Wired magazine, so voters should have supported the plan. But no one except out-of-town reporters really believed that spending at least $5.4 billion building 29 miles of light rail would do anything to relieve congestion. Continue reading
