The Antiplanner’s Library
Trains, BRT, People — But Don’t Count Costs

Christof Spieler was on the Houston Metro board of directors for eight years, so he thinks he understands transit. Unlike many transit advocates, he is willing to admit that some transit projects, such as Nashville’s commuter train, Cincinnati’s streetcar, and even the St. Louis light-rail system, are failures. “The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings,” he says, “it is whether transit makes people’s lives better” (p. 1).

But while his book is called Trains, Buses, People, it almost completely ignores bus service unless that service uses dedicated lanes. Instead, it reviews transit service only in the 47 cities that have or are building either rail transit or dedicated bus lanes. Cities that don’t have these things are ignored. For example, the book devotes several pages each to transit in Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Houston but leaves out San Antonio, even though San Antonio transit carried more trips per capita in 2017 than transit in any of the other three Texas urban complexes.

Spieler also makes a fundamental error regarding bus transit. He believes that “heavy rail can carry more people than light rail, which can carry more than BRT” (page 2). To support this, he says that a BRT line can move no more than 120 buses per hour (page 32). Yet Portland has operated 160 buses per hour on ordinary city streets with one lane dedicated to buses. Istanbul operates 257 buses per hour on its Metrobus busway and regularly carries more people per hour in actual practice than the theoretical capacity of any light-rail line. Bogota’s TransMilenio BRT system moves more than 350 buses per hour.

In fact, BRT capacities can rival even those of the longest heavy-rail trains. Of course, few American urban corridors that don’t already have rail transit could fill transit lines with these kinds of capacities, meaning there is no reason to build new rail lines or dedicated busways.

Spieler offers some good advice that was clearly influenced by Jarrett Walker: put transit where it can be justified by densities; increase frequencies in the densest areas; don’t decide on a mode until you know what you really need in a particular corridor. But his emphasis on infrastructure and his failure to understand the true capacity of busways leads him to effectively endorse many foolish projects and proposals.

For example, Spieler endorses rail construction in Honolulu, which has proven to be an incredible financial mistake that will cost at least three times the original projections if it is ever completed at all. At 79 trips per resident in 2017, Honolulu’s bus-only system successfully attracts more rides per capita than the bus-plus-rail systems in all but four American urban areas (New York’s 223, San Francisco-Oakland’s 129, Boston’s 88, and Washington’s 81). So why did Honolulu need to build rail?
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His review of transit lines identifies many as “low performers,” including Baltimore light and heavy rail, light rail in Cleveland, Norfolk, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and St. Louis, and commuter rail in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, and Orlando. But it isn’t clear where he draws the line: St. Louis, which carries 1,009 people per mile, is a “low performer” while Dallas, which carries 1,096, ought to be but he doesn’t list it as such.

Moreover, he doesn’t put these ratings into the context of the entire transit system. St. Louis transit carried 20 trips per capita in 2017; Houston carried 16; and Dallas-Ft. Worth carried 13. While he calls St. Louis light rail a “low performer,” he classifies the light rail in his own city of Houston as a “high performer.” But what good is an expensive, high-performing light-rail line when the overall transit system is submarginal? He admits that Dallas should have “focused as much on services as it has on infrastructure,” but the same could be said for Houston and St. Louis, and for that matter Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, San Jose, and many other urban areas.

Another problem is that Spieler rarely mentions cost. His comparison of modes on page 32 makes it appear that capacity is the only (if incorrectly calculated) consideration in choosing between bus, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail. His performance rankings are based solely on ridership. He ranks the Music City Star as the “most useless” commuter rail line in the country, but — as the Antiplanner recently showed — there are many others with much higher costs per rider, whether counting just operating or both operating and amortized capital costs.

While Spieler appreciates the role of density, he never mentions the importance of downtown jobs. The correlation between population density and per capita transit ridership is about 0.4; the correlation between the number of downtown jobs and per capita transit ridership is nearly 0.9. Putting transit in dense places with no major job concentrations is a recipe for failure, as shown by San Jose, the nation’s third-densest urban area but one whose transit system carried only 22 trips per capita in 2017, about a tenth of the New York urban area, whose overall density is lower than San Jose’s.

Finally, Spieler says nothing about trends. As Antiplanner readers know, transit ridership is declining almost everywhere. Infrastructure-heavy projects are likely to be a huge waste because, by the time they are done, the number of people interested in using them will be a lot less than today.

It is refreshing to find a publication by a transit advocate that admits that not all transit spending is worthwhile. But the book’s many flaws mean that any advice in it should be taken with as many grains of salt.