Transforming Regressive Taxes into Profits

Just once, I’d like to see a regional transportation plan that didn’t try to transform the region into some planner’s fantasy of how people should live but instead tried to serve the actual transportation needs of the people who lived there. Unfortunately, given that the federal government is giving out tens of billions of dollars for “transformative” projects, we are mainly seeing plans whose only real transformations will be to make some rich people richer and most poor people poorer.

Click image to download a 13.0-MB PDF of this 346-page draft regional transportation plan for Baltimore.

I bring this up because of an op ed earlier this week by two Baltimore-area politicians promoting that region’s $70 billion plan which, they promise, will produce “transformative changes to our transportation system.” More than half of the capital projects in the plan will be for urban transit, including the Red light-rail line that had previously been rejected as a waste of money as well as another, even more-expensive light-rail line.

Before the pandemic, transit carried less than 2 percent of Baltimore-area passenger travel and, of course, none of its freight. Since the pandemic, this has declined to around 1 percent. No matter how much is spent on transit, I doubt that it will ever reach 2 percent again.

An objective look at Baltimore’s existing rail transit lines show they have clearly failed to transform anyone’s mobility. After a 60 percent cost overrun, the state opened a heavy-rail line in 1984 whose ridership was less than 42 percent of projections. Total transit ridership briefly rose but by 1989 was back to where it was in 1984.

Then in 1992 it opened a light-rail line and five years later total transit ridership was lower than it had been before either the heavy-rail or light-rail lines opened. By 1998, it had doubled the length of the original light-rail line, yet by 2005, when the economy was booming, transit ridership was even lower than it had been in 1997. As of 2019, ridership was even lower still.

Currently, the state is building the Purple light-rail line in DC suburbs whose cost overrun so far is 70 percent and whose ridership is likely to be less than half of projections. But these miserable results don’t stop Baltimore politicians from wanting to build two more lines.

Not to worry. The new regional transportation plan promises that spending money on transit will be transformative even if it doesn’t increase ridership. According to chapter 5, page 3 of the plan (PDF page 129), ridership is not even considered important enough for planners to forecast or to be made into a performance measure. Instead, the transit performance measures in the plan are the condition of transit assets, transit safety, and . . . that’s it! Let’s spend more than $10 billion on transit projects without even caring whether those projects will increase ridership or mobility.

The main transformation these transit projects will have on the region will be to transform regressive taxes into profits for wealthy transit contractors and paychecks for high-paid union members. That’s a transformation, for sure, but not one that anyone should be proud of.

Chapter 3, page 15 of the plan briefly mentions that, due to the pandemic, Baltimore transit has “struggled with decreased ridership” and that ridership “has not made a steady recovery.” The Census Bureau says that only 3.2 percent of workers in the Baltimore urban area took transit to work in 2021, down from an already low 7.1 percent in 2019. The politicians who approved the plan either didn’t know this or didn’t care, but the pandemic has made transit projects that were highly questionable in 2019, such as the Red Line, completely stupid today.

Ironically, the transportation plan is called “Resilience 2050” even though transit is measurably less resilient than highways and motor vehicles. During the pandemic, transit demanded and received nearly $70 billion of Congressional relief funding but lost nearly half its riders anyway. Highways were there when people needed them without any COVID relief funds.

The op ed supporting the plan naturally mentions sustainability and equitability, two of the biggest excuses for wasting money on transit. But they don’t work here. Even before the pandemic, Baltimore’s light rail used more energy and emitted more greenhouse gases per passenger-mile than the average light truck, and far more than the average car. Light rail is also far from equitable, as everyone in the region has to help pay for it but few actually use it.

While the plan does include money for highway improvements, the politicians who wrote the op-ed were proud to say that every proposed transit project was included in the plan while at least six highway expansions projects were rejected. Much of the money that will supposedly be spent on highways will actually reduce highway capacities, such as the planned deconstruction of a highway in west Baltimore. Other projects include a variety of “complete streets,” bicycle lanes, and other anti-auto programs.

Baltimore is the nation’s 19th-largest urban area, but according to Inrix it had 15th-worst traffic congestion in 2022, a downgrade from 2021 when it was the 16th-worst. Traffic congestion is one of the performance measures in the Baltimore plan, but one of the main ways they measure it — the percentage of vehicles with more than one occupant — really has nothing to do with congestion. Census data show that a majority of Baltimore-area workers in every income class drive alone to work, and efforts to reducing single-occupancy vehicles could particularly harm low-income people, who usually have less flexibility about work hours and locations than middle- and high-income workers.

If necessary, this should include helping the 4.4 percent of workers who have no cars to acquire them if they want more mobility. That’s less than 50,000 people, so even if the government gave them all new Toyota Priuses, which cost less than $30,000 each, the total cost would be less than that of one of the proposed light-rail lines. (Rather than giving away cars I advocate low-interest loans as high finance charges are the main barrier to auto ownership for many low-income people.)

A truly transformative plan for Baltimore would relieve congestion and promote mobility for everyone without imposing significant taxes on people for transportation systems they don’t use. But local politicians won’t be interested in such a plan as long as the feds are handing out money for ridiculous transit projects that few people will ride.