The Antiplanner » Transportation » Madison Mayor Gives Up on Streetcars

Madison Mayor Gives Up on Streetcars

By | | Transportation

In an press release Monday, Madison Wisconsin Mayor Dave Cieslewicz announced that he was giving up on the idea of building a streetcar in downtown Madison. This must be a big disappointment for former Portland City Commissioner Charles Hales, who is trying to put two kids through college by selling streetcars to cities like Madison.

(Don’t feel bad for Hales or his company. They are currently doing streetcar studies for Miami, Albuquerque, and Winston-Salem. So the people to feel sorry for are the taxpayers in those cities.)
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The background behind the Madison streetcar story is that the mayor wanted a streetcar while the Dane County executive wanted a commuter train. They came up with the idea of a regional transportation authority that would collect a sales tax from everyone in the county to pay for these projects. But suburbanites objected to paying a sales tax for a Madison streetcar, and even many Madison residents were not very enthused about the streetcar project. So the mayor graciously withdrew his proposal, thus improving the prospects for a commuter-rail line.

Of course, once proposed, no rail project is ever truly dead. Remember Kansas City voted down light rail six times before it finally approved it, mainly because opponents assumed it had no chance and so didn’t bother to campaign against it. So, if the commuter-rail boondoggle ever gets built, you can safely bet that the streetcar proposal will soon be revived.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

One Response to Madison Mayor Gives Up on Streetcars

  1. Dan says:
    August 16, 2007 at 4:56 pm

    Should Urban Transit Subsidies Be Reduced?
    Ian W.H. Parry and Kenneth A. Small

    Abstract

    This paper derives intuitive and empirically useful formulas for the optimal pricing of passenger transit and for the welfare effects of adjusting current fare subsidies, for peak and off-peak urban rail and bus systems. The formulas are implemented based on a detailed estimation of parameter values for the metropolitan areas of Washington (D.C.), Los Angeles, and London. Our analysis accounts for congestion, pollution, and accident externalities from automobiles and from transit vehicles; scale economies in transit supply; costs of accessing and waiting for transit service as well as service crowding costs; and agency adjustment of transit frequency, vehicle size, and route network to induced changes in demand for passenger miles.
    The results support the efficiency case for the large fare subsidies currently applied across mode, period, and city. In almost all cases, fare subsidies of 50 percent or more of operating costs are welfare improving at the margin, and this finding is robust to alternative assumptions and parameters.

    pp 1-4 provides the context that ideologues often leave out of their argumentation.

    DS

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