The American Public Transportation Association has just published a paper on the economic cost of failing to modernize transit. The paper claims that the roughly $100 billion maintenance backlog built up by U.S. transit agencies — mostly for rail transit — will reduce “business sales” by $57 billion a year and reduce gross national product by $30 billion a year over the next six years.
Reaching this conclusion requires APTA to make all sorts of wild claims about transit. For example, it claims that a recent New Orleans streetcar line stimulated $2.7 billion in new infrastructure. In fact, that new infrastructure (including a Hyatt Regency) received hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies and low-interest loans from Louisiana and New Orleans. In any case, APTA fails to make clear how rehabilitation of existing infrastructure could generate the same economic development benefits as building new infrastructure.
Essentially, APTA wants taxpayers to give transit agencies $100 billion on top of the $50 billion a year in subsidies that they already pay for. In fact, a strong case can be made that federal, state, and local governments should do nothing to restore most transit systems. Instead, the best policy towards them is benign neglect.
First, restoring obsolete transit is not the same as modernizing transit. Electric rail transit was developed in the 1880s and 1890s and was largely superseded by modern buses in the 1920s. APTA doesn’t propose to modernize rail systems by replacing them with buses; it wants to restore the obsolete systems. Outside of New York City, which is probably the only place in America where rail cannot easily be replaced by buses, this is a waste of money.
Second, the transit backlog is due to bad transit management. Rather than spend money on maintenance of existing infrastructure, politicians and transit agencies have built new infrastructure. New York built or is building the Second Avenue Subway and East Side Access projects; Washington the Silver and Purple lines; Boston the Green Line extension to Medford; San Francisco built BART to the airport; and so forth. Rewarding badly managed agencies by giving them bigger budgets sends the wrong signal to other transportation and infrastructure agencies.
Third, transit ridership is declining nationwide. It may be declining in New York and Washington because deteriorating infrastructure has led to unreliable and unsafe conditions. But it it also declining in places with crisp, new infrastructure such as Norfolk-Virginia Beach and Charlotte. The real reason transit ridership is declining is because the alternatives to transit are faster, more convenient, and increasingly less expensive. It makes no sense to dump $100 billion on an industry that is losing both money and customers.
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Fourth, contrary to APTA’s claims, transit is irrelevant in most urban areas. New York is the obvious exception: a majority of commuters who live in New York City take transit to work. Transit is somewhat relevant in a few other central cities: Washington, where 38% take transit to work; San Francisco, 37%; Boston, 34%; Chicago, 29%; Philadelphia, 25%; and Seattle, 23%. When counting urban areas as a whole, however, transit is much less relevant: 35% in New York, but only 21% in San Francisco-Oakland; 17% in DC; 15% in Boston; 14% in Chicago; 11% in Seattle and Philadelphia; 10% in Honolulu; and under 9% almost everywhere else.
Many places have spent enormous amounts on transit systems that carry few people to work. Transit in Salt Lake City carries just 5% of commuters; Denver is under 5%; San Diego is 3%; Dallas-Ft Worth is under 2%. There is no clear connection between spending money on transit and transit’s actual importance to an urban area.
As for economic development, transit is at best a zero-sum game for urban areas: even if proximity to transit increases local property values (a proposition that is increasingly dubious), it doesn’t increase regional values, meaning some other property owners must lose. At worst, the high cost of supporting transit may be part of the reason why the urban areas that have spent the most on transit are the slowest growing.
Fifth, the transit industry is notorious for spending money in the wrong places. Not only does it spend money on new infrastructure when the existing transit infrastructure is falling apart, the infrastructure it spends money on, whether new or rebuilt, is almost entirely a waste. That’s because the most efficient form of transit, which is buses, doesn’t need any dedicated infrastructure except for storage and maintenance facilities.
APTA’s demand for subsidies to “modernize” transit are the last gasp of a dying industry that has become utterly dependent on subsidies for everything it does. In fact, truly modern transit wouldn’t use infrastructure that is so prone to deterioration. No urban area in America other than New York truly needs rail transit, and New York’s problems are due to a local failure to spend money on maintenance and shouldn’t be the responsibility of state or federal taxpayers.
Failing to provide the funds needed to restore rail transit lines will force transit agencies to replace those lines with buses. That will be a victory for taxpayers and a victory for transit riders.
Do you think being stuck driving in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic for hours on end under the summer sun is pleasant? While being exposed to all the dangers of driving including drunk drivers, distracted rivers, road rage, toxic vehicle emissions, etc?
No those aren’t my words, it’s the flak I get speaking on Streetsblog DISQUS forum. Never the less they do pose some serious talking points.
“Outside of New York City, which is probably the only place in America where rail cannot easily be replaced by buses, this is a waste of money. ”
I disagree, I think Boston and San Francisco might……..benefit slightly with rail. LA and SF in particular because the lot sizes for the city are so small you cant easily re-augment infrastructure any other way. LA should shut down it’s unnecessary rails and modernize the Orange which despite being bus could upgrade with double decker bus or rubber tyre metro. Boston and SF are denser than Chicago. Once a city hits over 15,20 thousand people per square mile, rail does make some…….possible sense, if it’s implemented properly, which in APTA and the transit agencies case………nah.
“transit is irrelevant in most urban areas”, I think he meant to say Rail transit is irrelevant. There are some things that high capacity vehicles can do especially in cities.
“truly modern transit wouldn’t use infrastructure that is so prone to deterioration. ”
That’s true, who’d have thought scraping together steel upon steel would last a long time? Rubber tires do disintegrate, but easily replaced, and recyclable. Changing a tire is as simple as………………changing a tire. At what point will transit riders stop stigmatizing buses over trains. I’ve ridden both and friends of mine safe to say the bums will jack off in either one.
If they really wanna sell trains “image” to people; do what Hollywood does every day…………Fake it.
Give em buses that look like trains.
http://insideofknoxville.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Modern-Bus.jpg
Problem solved.
“Do you think being stuck driving in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic for hours on end under the summer sun is pleasant? While being exposed to all the dangers of driving including drunk drivers, distracted rivers, road rage, toxic vehicle emissions, etc?”
My response to the streetscranks: No. Which is why I no longer live in a large city where there’s a lot of traffic thanks to urban planners (who had decades/a half century to fix the current infra mess but chose to ignore it instead). And when I did live in city, I chose to live walking distance to work so I wouldn’t have to deal with that crap. Because transit has done little if anything to reduce this situation because transit sucks. Then I’d ask them what their excuse is for not making changes? Responses from streetscranks are typically victimologist in nature.
“The real reason transit ridership is declining is because the alternatives to transit are faster, more convenient, and increasingly less expensive.”
The transit agencies picked the technology because it requires more of a bureaucracy to run. You cant facilitate good public union dues with a small workforce, they often have to be big. That requires heavy investment in public resources. It’s not uncommon for Big government to perpetuate the growth of ……big government. Obsolete technology is one of their tools. In a 2010 news story; One out of every three computers in federal workforce still used Windows XP. They still have data, important data stored on magnetic tapes and antiquated magnetic drums. Technology doesn’t necessarily evolve at a pace fast enough for the government to have to replace it yearly; still things should be replaced by electrostatic free and magnetic wipe safe memory such as PCIe based flash.
In 2010, it was estimated that storing a yottabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes) on terabyte-size disk drives would require one billion city block-size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. By late 2016 memory density had increased to the point where a yottabyte could be stored on SD cards occupying roughly twice the size of the Hindenburg.
Update technology or hire more union workers? Tough choice, to be sure.
In perspective of info
Giga: Billion
Tera: Trillion (53.6 TB is the minimalist sum of all the books ever written)
Peta: quadrillion
Exa: Quintillion
Zetta: Sextillion
Yotta: Septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)
Buried at the end of APTA’s 2016 Form 990:
MEMBERSHIP IN THE ASSOCIATION IS DIVIDED INTO SIX CATEGORIES (A) TRANSIT SYSTEM MEMBERS ARE PERSONS, PART V I, FIRMS, CORPORATIONS, TRUSTEES, RECOVERS, MUNICIPAL AGENCIES OR OTHER GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES OPERATING SECTION A, ANY FORM OF ORGANIZED PUBLIC TRANSIT SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES, PUERTO RICO, CANADA, OR MEXICO (B) LINE 6 TRANSIT MANAGEMENT COMPANIES – ANY PERSON, FIRM OR CORPORATION THAT PROVIDES PROFESSIONAL MANAGEMENT SERVICES TO SUCH TRANSIT SYSTEMS ( C) BUSINESS MEMBERS CONSIST OF MANUFACTURERS AND SUPPLIER MEMBERS, CONSULTANT MEMBERS , AND CONTRACTOR MEMBERS ADDITIONAL CATEGORIES OF MEMBERSHIP INCLUDE (D) NON-OPERATING STATE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION MEMBERS , GOVERNMENT AGENCY MEMBERS AND METROPOLITAN PLANNING ORGANIZATIONS (E) AFFILIATES AND (F) RETIREES
So, an unholy alliance of transit agencies, planners, and transit equipment vendors, the perfect triumvirate to suck the maximum number of dollars out of taxpayers and line those members’ pockets. It would be interesting to find out how much transit unions contribute to the organization and how much the organization contributes to politicians’ campaign funds.
Frank; My response to the streetscranks: No. Which is why I no longer live in a large city where there’s a lot of traffic thanks to urban planners (who had decades/a half century to fix the current infra mess but chose to ignore it instead).
THWM; Yet government policy has alway been in your favour. Socialism for roads, capitalism for railroads :$
Frank; And when I did live in city, I chose to live walking distance to work so I wouldn’t have to deal with that crap. Because transit has done little if anything to reduce this situation because transit sucks. Then I’d ask them what their excuse is for not making changes? Responses from streetscranks are typically victimologist in nature.
THWM; Well, people don’t want to pay to drive :$