Forward into the Past Via VIA

The San Antonio urban area has about 1.9 million people today and, if it keeps growing at recent rates, will add 1.6 million more by 2040. VIA, the region’s transit agency, gets most of its money from a one-half-cent sales tax, so by 2040 it will get about 80 percent more tax revenues.

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The agency is hungry for more, however, so it has written a long-range plan called Vision 2040. Actually, to call this a plan is generous; it is actually more of a sales brochure, as it doesn’t consider any alternatives, any impacts of the proposal, or any real information about costs. Instead, it merely says that it wants increased taxes to provide bus-rapid transit on exclusive bus lanes and possibly light rail–in other words, transit infrastructure that might have been useful a few decades ago, but certainly won’t be useful a few decades from now.

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Transit currently carries less than 1 percent of San Antonio-area motorized passenger travel (and virtually no freight). Just 2.7 percent of commuters take transit to work. While a little more than 3 percent of San Antonio workers live in households with no cars, only 35 percent of those carless workers take transit to work, while 43 percent go by automobile. VIA buses carry an average of 8.6 riders over the course of a day, 18 percent less than the national average and well below Los Angeles Metro (20), San Francisco Muni (19), and New York MTA (18).

Meanwhile, Ford says it will have “fleets” of completely self-driving cars–no steering wheels, brakes, or accelerators–on the road by 2021. Even if that is optimistic, it is clear that self-driving cars will thoroughly transform urban transportation by 2040. Yet, except to half-heartedly allude to the possibility of self-driving buses, VIA’s 2040 plan doesn’t acknowledge the effects of this new technology on public transit. VIA spends more than twice as much to move someone a mile as it costs to drive a car one mile, so when shared, self-driving cars are available, why would anyone need VIA buses?

San Antonio is simply not built for public transit today and it will be even less suited for it in 2040. Thus, it makes no sense for the region’s taxpayers to spend a lot of money on exclusive bus lanes, especially considering those lanes will make congestion worse for everyone else, either by taking lanes from general traffic, giving signal priority to transit, or both.

VIA should probably do some low-cost experiments with bus-rapid transit, but on lanes shared with other vehicles and without giving signal priority to the buses. VIA should be able to do this without a tax increase. Expensive new infrastructure that will only be obsolete in a few years, if it isn’t already, makes no sense at all.