Austin Wants High-Dollar Transit

Austin voters have twice rejected light rail at the polls, so naturally the region’s transit agency, Capital Metro, is eager to try again. Earlier this week, it presented a plan to the Austin city council for eleven transit corridors that could cost $6 billion to $8 billion. As if to underscore the agency’s inability to learn from history, it is calling this plan “Project Connect,” the same name it used for the plan that voters defeated by 57 to 43 in 2014.

While Cap Metro deceptively calls light rail “high-capacity transit,” the Austin American-Statesman more accurately calls it “high-dollar” transit. Light rail was rendered obsolete in 1927 when a company called Twin Coach started producing buses that could move more people for far less money than streetcars or light rail.

Bus or rail, now is not the time for Austin to spend a lot of money on transit. Capital Metro lost 20 percent of its riders between 2012 and 2016, and is down another 2.2 percent in the first six months of 2018.

Nor has light rail insulated other cities from transit declines. As the Antiplanner noted yesterday, Charlotte lost 15 percent of its riders in the last twelve months. Despite opening a new light-rail extension in March, it lost 36,000 more bus riders in June than it gained in light-rail riders. Ridership is plummeting in Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Phoenix, and many other urban areas that have light rail and other rail transit.

Cap Metro officials haven’t been locked away in some kind of chamber isolated from the real world, so they have to be aware that transit is declining and that almost nothing that other transit agencies have done has been able to stop it. Other than Seattle, where ridership is growing due to a 35-percent increase in downtown jobs, the only real success story is Houston, where ridership at least isn’t declining (much). But that’s mainly due to a low-cost overhaul of Houston’s bus system, not light rail. Capital Metro did a similar redesign a couple of months ago, but it is too soon to tell whether it will work as well as in Houston.

As recently pointed out by the Austin Monthly, agencies like Cap Metro should be identifying more low-cost improvements to their bus systems, not trying to talk taxpayers into supporting grandiose urban monuments. Instead, Capital Metro wants to put a measure on the ballot for its plan in 2020. If approved, the first light-rail line in the plan would probably open in around 2026 to 2028, by which time driverless ride hailing is likely to have captured half or more of Capital Metro’s customers.

There is no doubt that congestion in Austin, one of the nation’s fastest-growing urban areas, is awful. But there is also no doubt that light rail won’t do anything to relieve that congestion. We can only hope that sanity will prevail and Austin voters will be spared another debate about the inanity of spending billions on obsolete transit.