44. Fighting Obsolete Transit

In 1991, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. It should have been called the Obsolete Transportation Inefficiency Act, as among other things it created a multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund to give to cities to build new rail transit projects. This fund, informally called New Starts and more formally called Transit Capital Investment Grants, had no limit on the amount of money any city could take out of it, which gave cities incentives to propose the most expensive projects they could so they could get the most “free” federal money.

This law was actually a continuation of a 1973 law that allowed cities to cancel planned interstate freeways within their borders and spend the federal dollars that would have gone towards building those freeways on transit capital improvements instead. The 1973 law was instigated by then-Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent, who wanted to cancel some freeways in Boston but didn’t want to be accused of “losing” federal transportation dollars. Boston, of course, has lots of rail transit and could easily absorb the federal dollars from a cancelled freeway by buying new railcars, installing new signals, replacing track, and so forth.

Sargent’s law gave hope to Portland Mayor (and infamous pedo) Neil Goldschmidt, who wanted to cancel an interstate freeway in east Portland. But Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, only operated buses, and if it used all of the freeway funds to buy new buses, it wouldn’t have enough money to operate all of those buses.

Goldschmidt came up with the idea of building light rail, which cost about the same to operate as buses and thus wouldn’t impose a huge operating cost on TriMet, but which cost much more to start up. In other words, he chose light rail because it was expensive, not because it was efficient. For that brilliant decision, President Carter made Goldschmidt his Secretary of Transportation.

By 1991, all the urban interstate freeways that could be cancelled had been cancelled, but by this time a huge rail construction industry had grown up and turned to lobbying to keep the money flowing. Thus, Congress created the New Starts fund.

Light rail was essentially streetcars with a fancier name. It differed from streetcars mainly in that multiple light-rail cars could be coupled together and run by one operator and it sometimes ran on its own right of way, while most streetcars ran almost exclusively in streets. As such, the first light-rail line was probably the Key System, which ran long rail cars that it sometimes coupled together over the then-new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Thus, light-rail technology effectively dates to 1939.

Automobile technology is older than that, of course, but automobiles today are much different from those of 100 or even 50 years ago. They are faster, safer, cleaner, and more energy efficient by far than their counterparts from 1939. Light rail, however, is none of these, as most light-rail trains average about 20 miles per hour, they kill far more people per billion passenger miles than urban automobiles, and they require enormous amounts of energy to run, not to mention to build.

The real reason light rail was obsolete was not automobiles but buses. In 1927, William Fageol had designed the first bus that was both cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than streetcars. He called this the Twin Coach bus, and within a few years hundreds of transit companies replaced their streetcar lines (which were wearing out, being 30 years old or more) with buses.

The transit industry quickly understood that buses were not only less expensive, they were faster and more nimble than streetcars. But few people realized that buses also had higher capacities than streetcars. A standard streetcar was about 60 feet long and could hold about 100 people, and a light-rail train might couple up to four 100-foot cars together, thus carrying up to 600 people at a time.

A standard bus was 40 feet long and could hold only about 60 people, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that buses had a higher capacity than rails. But they did because, for safety reasons, railcars had to be separated by several minutes. Light-rail trains, for example, were generally no longer than the shortest city block in their cities, and thus two trains couldn’t occupy the same station at the same time.

Most light-rail lines can handle no more than 20 trains per hour, while some heavy-rail lines could move as many as 30 trains an hour. As I’ve often said, the terms light and heavy rail refer to capacity, not weight; light-rail cars actually weigh more than heavy-rail cars, but heavy-rail lines have a higher (or heavier) capacity because the trains are longer and they can move more trains per hour.

Before it ever built light rail, Portland built a busway that used one parking strip and one dedicated bus lane each on north and southbound streets through downtown. Each city block had room for four buses to stop and each bus stopped every other block. Blocks were divided into two bus stops, each capable of serving two buses at a time. By actual measure, each bus stop could serve more than 40 buses an hour, which meant the busways could move more than 160 buses an hour in each direction. At 60 people per bus, that’s almost 10,000 people per hour in each direction, while Portland’s light-rail lines could only move about 6,000 people per hour.

Busway capacities can be increased still further by using bigger buses or expanding the number of buses that could use each stop. Istanbul’s busway runs more than 250 buses per hour, all of them stopping at every station along the route. Some of its buses hold as many as 200 people and the estimated capacity of the busway is about 30,000 people per hour in each direction. Bogota has a busway with extra lanes that allow express buses to bypass some stations; its estimated capacity is about 50,000 people per hour. The highest-capacity light-rail lines in America can only move about 12,000 people per hour.

By 1975, only six American cities still had streetcars, and these either had an exclusive right of way (Cleveland and New Orleans) or went through tunnels (Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco) that would be smoked out by Diesel buses, thus justifying the continued cost of maintaining the rails.

By 1991, several cities, including Baltimore, Buffalo, Sacramento, and San Jose, had followed Portland’s example of building light rail, usually with cancelled freeway funds. (San Diego had built one before Portland but used only local funds to do it.) The New Starts fund inspired several other urban areas, including Dallas, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City, to join the obsolete transportation club. Baltimore and Miami also built heavy-rail lines, which proved such a flop that most cities focused on light rail instead.

Some of these cities were in states that required voter approval for the taxes that would pay the local share of rail costs. In most cases, rail proponents required multiple elections before they so wore down opponents that the measures passed.

I’ve already told the story of my involvement in Denver’s light-rail debate in 2004. But before that, I participated in the debate over the Twin Cities’ first light-rail line, which was planned to parallel Hiawatha Avenue from Minneapolis to Bloomington, where the Mall of America is located.

This light-rail proposal had been debated for several years when Jesse Ventura decided to run for governor on a third-party ticket. Among other things, he said he would kill the rail project. Instead, he appointed pro-rail Ted Mondale to be chair of the Metropolitan Council, which was planning the project (and which didn’t require voter approval).

I was asked by a local group to debate Mondale. Only it wasn’t really a debate; first Mondale spoke, then he left, then I spoke. On one hand, this gave me an advantage because I could respond to his arguments. On the other hand, by leaving early he effectively dismissed me and my arguments.

He said that the region had to build rail because it would cost billions of dollars to build enough new highways to relieve congestion. Unlike most people, I actually read the environmental impact statements for this and other projects, and I knew that planners calculated that the Hiawatha line would take only a few thousand cars off the road each day. Based on this, I quickly calculated that building enough light-rail lines to make a dent in the region’s traffic congestion would cost well over a trillion dollars.

Although Ventura had been pretty much talked into light rail, he decided to have a public forum debate the issue. Wendell Cox and I were invited to speak in opposition, while California New Urban architect Peter Calthorpe and right-wing activist Paul Weyrich spoke in favor. Held in February, 2000, the debate was moderated by Ted Mondale, and Ventura loomed over everyone like a wrestler waiting for his partner to tag him into the ring.

Weyrich was a founder or co-founder of several conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation. He also was a rail nut, especially electric railways, and published a quarterly called the New Electric Railway Journal. The American Public Transit Association loved to trot him out showing that even conservatives could love transit, but Weyrich’s conservatism and mine had nothing in common.

I’m a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, where Weyrich was a social conservative (anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, anti-marijuana legalization, anti-free trade, etc.) and yet was enough of a fiscal liberal that he believed other Americans should subsidize his favorite forms of obsolete transportation. While Calthorpe proved to be an effective debater, Weyrich was an embarrassment, spending most of his time calling Wendell and me names and cursing under his breath.

At the end of the debate, Mondale said that he would change his mind about light rail if any of three statements proved to be true: that Portland’s light rail had reduced ridership; that Portland’s light rail failed to stimulate neighborhood redevelopment; or that Portland’s light rail cost more to operate than buses. Since I was the one who made all three statements, I submitted documentation and wrote op-eds verifying that they were true, but not surprisingly Mondale didn’t change his mind.

The line got built and I have to admit it is one of the few cases where light rail actually did increase transit ridership. Twin Cities’ ridership had been on a downward slide for many years, but after the Hiawatha line opened, rail ridership quickly grew and bus ridership grew as well. That may have been partly due to the fact that many transit riders who could previously take a one-seat trip from their residence to downtown Minneapolis now had their buses rerouted to be rail feeder buses, forcing them to change modes en route. But passenger miles grew as well, showing that the transit system picked up some new riders.

As far as congestion relief, however, the Hiawatha line proved to be a disaster. Light-rail trains were given priority over other traffic at all traffic lights. While the rail line never crossed Hiawatha Avenue, also known as state highway 55, it did cross many streets that cross Hiawatha, and the signals on those streets were coordinated with the signals on Hiawatha. Thus, each train forced the Hiawatha signals to change even though the trains didn’t cross Hiawatha itself. Traffic engineers estimated that this added 20 to 40 minutes to the average trip between Minneapolis and Bloomington.

“This is not a sinister plot to make traffic as miserable as possible and move everybody onto the train,” one transportation official vowed. But it turned out that it was: state representative Phil Krinkie dug up documents showing that a consultant had predicted that the light-rail line would jam up traffic on Hiawatha, and state officials dismissed the problem, saying “we need to give the advantage to transit.” After fiddling with the signals for several months, the state gave up and admitted that “light rail always will slow the flow” on Hiawatha.

Tax activist groups had a better chance of stopping light rail when it required a ballot measure, but, as mentioned above, in too many cities proponents just kept coming back until the opponents were worn down and the measures passed. Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Seattle were among the areas that first voted rail down then passed it.

Opponents did better in Austin, Kansas City, Milwaukee, San Antonio, St. Petersburg, and Virginia Beach. Light rail has been on the ballot in Kansas City nine times; it passed the eighth time, but that plan proved impossible to implement so they put a supposedly doable plan on the ballot and it lost. I didn’t play a role in Kansas City but I did in other cities, serving as a policy analyst for local groups.

For example, I wrote a review of a light-rail plan for Austin and another review of the proposed light-rail line in St. Petersburg. I also wrote a review of a proposed streetcar system for San Antonio. In Milwaukee, Virginia Beach, and other cities, I wrote op-eds and did some public speaking.

Light rail was on the ballot twice in Austin and lost both times; it may go on the ballot again this year. San Antonio has voted down various light-rail and streetcar proposals. Virginia Beach’s neighbor, Norfolk, built a light-rail line that is one of the worst-patronized lines in the country. Nevertheless, proponents put a measure on the ballot to extend the line into Virginia Beach, and (with a little help from me) it lost.

Rail proponents responded to my reports with ad hominem attacks, usually having something to do with the fact that Cato gets some of its money from the Koch brothers. According to the New York Times, I am a “weapon in the Koch arsenal” that is trying to kill transit. While I’ve never met either of the Koch brothers, I suspect they don’t give a damn about light rail or any kind of transit except that they may see it as a waste of money. Ironically, the issues they seem to care about most — personal and economic freedom and peace — are issues that the left agrees with more than not. But the left has decided to demonize them because they won’t support big-government solutions to every problem and because it is easier to hate a person than to actually debate his or her ideas.

The problem with winning in Austin, Milwaukee, and other cities that this was like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole: even if we could kill a light-rail project in one city, another one would spring up in another city. This is because federal New Starts funds were always out there tempting cities to build their own obsolete rail projects.

To be honest, the reason why skeptics were able to defeat rail in these cities was not because they asked for my help. Instead, the fact that they had the resources to ask me to help (usually paying travel expenses but not a fee) indicated they had the resources to defeat rail. Before 2000, I estimate that any opposition group had a good chance of defeating rail if they could raise more than 2 percent as much as proponents spent. After 2000, when Utah Transit showed the industry how the agencies themselves could “educate” the public with pro-rail propaganda, opponents required at least 5 to 10 percent as much money as proponents to defeat rail.

One city where I can take a lot of the credit was not in the United States but in Winnipeg, Canada. The Frontier Centre asked me to review of light-rail plan proposed by Winnipeg’s mayor. Based on my review, I wrote some op-eds and spoke to a few forums on Winnipeg.

One evening while I was there, the transit agency held an open house to tell people more about rail. One of the participants who worked for one of the companies that hoped to sell their goods or services to Winnipeg approached me. Though he spoke with a thick French accent, as near as I could tell he was trying to bribe me into shutting up about light rail. He said the company he worked for owned a small tourist railroad in Alaska that didn’t make much money. He would try to talk his employers into giving it to me provided I stopped campaigning against light rail.

I may have misunderstood him, but if not this was the only time someone ever tried to bribe me. They say everyone has their price and he came pretty close to mine as the White Pass & Yukon Route was my favorite tourist railroad in the world. Unfortunately, I had done my job too well: after my op-ed was printed and I talked to some reporters, the mayor dropped his support for light rail. Thus, Winnipeg remains rail-free and I didn’t get to move to Skagway, Alaska.

Voters in my own former hometown of Portland approved light rail just once. After that, voters rejected it every time it was on the ballot (often with help from my op-eds and public speaking). Voters even rejected a measure to raise taxes to buy new buses, since everybody knew that the real goal was to free up money to build more light rail. Despite voter opposition, Portland continued building light rail, partly by getting the federal government to pay a higher percentage of the cost and partly by using tax-increment financing (the only taxes the city could raise without voter approval) as matching funds.

Portland also invented the claim that light rail led to economic development. It initially made this claim by listing all new construction that took place near the light-rail line and stating that the light rail generated the construction. For example, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen purchased the Portland Trailblazer basketball team and decided to build a new arena with more seats for his team. The new arena was next to the old arena which was near the light-rail line, but Portland and TriMet claimed that it wouldn’t have been built at all without the light rail.

Similarly, President Clinton and Oregon’s Governor Barbara Roberts issued executive orders requiring all federal and state agencies that were located in cities to move to the downtowns of those cities. The Bureau of Land Management and the Oregon Highway Division both were required to abandon offices in suburban areas to move to downtown. This led to a downtown construction boom that had nothing to do with light rail, but of course TriMet took credit for it.

Scrutinizing TriMet’s list of buildings supposedly generated by light rail, I found a chain store that had been remodeled. I looked up the web site of the chain store, and it proudly stated that the company had remodeled all of its chain stores in the previous two years. Ironically, the chain store on the rail line soon closed saying that the rail line had brought in so much crime that it wasn’t worth being there. It was the only time in that chain store’s history that it had ever closed a store without opening a newer, bigger one nearby.

Frustratingly for Portland planners, none of the developments that had been built near the rail line were “transit oriented” in the sense of including high-density housing in walkable, mixed-use developments. This was especially peculiar as Portland had rezoned all of the areas near light-rail stations for such developments. A decade later, the Portland city council held a hearing asking what happened.

“We have not seen any of the kind of development–of a mid-rise, higher-density, mixed-use, mixed-income type–that we would have liked to have seen” along the rail line, a Portland planner admitted to the city council.

“We are in the hottest real estate market in the country,” exclaimed city commissioner Charles Hales, yet maps of potential infill developments showed that most of the areas around light-rail stations were still vacant.

Developers testified that the problem was that there was no market demand for high-density housing. People wanted to live in single-family homes, not mid-rise condos or apartments. Although Portland housing prices had been growing for a decade, single-family homes were still pretty affordable in 1996, when this hearing took place.

Urban planners liked to tell themselves that there was a pent-up demand for high-density housing of the kind they favored but zoning laws prevented it. This was far from true in Portland, whose first zoning codes zoned wide swaths of single-family neighborhoods for apartments. Mayor Goldschmidt bemoaned the fact that the suburbs were growing much faster than the city even though Portland, whose population was about 375,000 people when he was mayor, was zoned for a million people.

Since zoning wasn’t enough to attract transit-oriented development, Commissioner Hales proposed to subsidize it. First, he persuaded the city council to waive ten years’ of property taxes for high-density residential developments on the light-rail line. Second, the city urban renewal agency, which under state law was allowed to put a fixed percentage of the city’s area into urban renewal districts, drew such districts around all of the existing and planned light-rail lines. That would allow the city to use tax-increment financing to subsidize both the new light-rail lines and the development along the existing line.

Next, Hales convinced the city council to build a streetcar line connecting a new urban renewal district north of downtown with another new urban renewal district south of downtown, passing through two existing urban renewal districts in downtown. The city spent hundreds of millions of dollars attracting new mid-rise and high-rise development in the new urban renewal districts, then claimed that all of the new development took place solely in response to the streetcar. When Portland State University, which was on the streetcar line, built a new classroom building, the city credited it to the streetcar, as if students were choosing Portland State over the much more prestigious Oregon State or University of Oregon solely because of the streetcar.

Among the new developments were numerous parking garages including at least 10,000 new parking spaces, wom3 or. Yet Portland crowed to the media that all of its rail transit was reducing driving and greenhouse gas emissions. I reviewed its claims and discovered that all of the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions took place because of the closure of an aluminum refinery east of Portland. Transportation greenhouse gas emissions hadn’t declined at all.

In the next election, Hales was challenged by a radio talk show host who objected to the streetcars and all the tax-increment financing. But Hales was able to pull in some big donations from light-rail contractors and railcar manufacturers and won the election. Then he surprised many by quitting his seat on the city council in mid-term so he could take a much higher-paying job with HDR, a consulting firm that helped cities plan rail transit.

The revelation that Neil Goldschmidt had statutorily raped a 13-year-old girl when he was mayor led to his downfall and for the first time Portland newspapers openly discussed the notion that the city was run by a “light-rail mafia.” Although he hadn’t held political office since 1991, Goldschmidt was the godfather, using his connections to hand out no-bid rail construction contracts, got his allies placed into key jobs such as the general manager of TriMet, and blocking legislation that might have democratized the regional planning process.

U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer quickly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Goldschmidt’s disgrace. He persuaded Congress to create a new program called Small Starts that would fund streetcar lines and other smaller rail projects. On behalf of HDR, Hales traveled around the country telling officials in other cities that a streetcar line would generate billions of dollars’ worth of economic development. The Bush administration threw a monkey-wrench into the works when it passed a rule requiring cities to show that streetcars would be more cost-effective than buses. That rule was thrown out by the Obama administration, which obviously didn’t care how much money was wasted especially it was wasted in Democratic districts, leading Atlanta, Cincinnati, Tucson, and other cities to get federal grants for streetcars.

I documented Portland’s problems in one of the first reports I wrote after being hired by the Cato Institute. When streetcars became an issue, I wrote another report for Cato. I’ll discuss these and other Cato publications in the next chapter.