Boston: Success Story or Disaster?

Boston began planning for compact development and rail transit in the early 1970s under Governor Francis Sargent. Sargent appointed Alan Altshuler, a transportation professor at MIT, to be his Secretary of Transportation.

Sargent and Altshuler decided that freeways were destroying Boston, so in 1972 they cancelled almost all new highway construction inside route 128 (a beltway around Boston). They convinced Congress to allow states that cancelled urban interstates to spend the federal money allocated to the interstates on transit instead.

Since the money could only be spent on capital improvements, that meant rail transit; buses just weren’t expensive enough. ($100 million buys a lot of buses that the local government then has to operate, but it may buy only one rail line, so the operating cost obligations are a lot lower.)

Massachusetts also limited growth outside of the beltline by creating agricultural reserves. In some, if not most, cases, the state compensated farmers to keep the from developing their land.

Boston subsequently enjoyed a high-tech boom that was often called the “Massachusetts Miracle.” But high housing prices resulting from land-use regulation and traffic congestion resulting from the no-new-road policy soon put a lid on this boom.

A recent paper from Harvard economist Edward Glaeser found that land-use rules have added more than $155,000 to the cost of the average home in the Boston area since 1990 alone. This is very close to the estimate I made for the Boston area, which was about $171,000 (see page 18). My estimate covered the total cost of regulation; Glaeser’s just the cost since 1990.

From one viewpoint, however, Boston’s transportation policy seemed to be working. The Big Dig (which was planned by Parsons Brinckerhoff, the same company that planned so many rail lines that went overbudget) was a disaster, but it really wasn’t a transportation project; it was a city beautification project.

What seemed to be working was transit, most particularly commuter trains. My review of rail transit systems across the country found that “Boston is one of the few rail regions where transit works,” because it was one of the few rail regions with significantly higher transit ridership today than twenty years ago. Although transit trips grew slower than driving, transit passenger miles grew faster than auto passenger miles, mainly because of a 250-percent increase in commuter-rail trips. Commuter-rail trips tend to be much longer than average transit trips, so an increase in commuter-rail riding can significantly increase transit passenger miles.

Transit did not do anything about congestion. The Texas Transportation Institute’s annual mobility report says that Boston congestion nearly quintupled (when measured as hours of delay) since 1982. That’s about average for urban areas as a whole, but above average for urban areas that the Texas Transportation Institute defines as “very large.”

Should Boston’s experience encourage other cities that want to try commuter rail? According to a recent report from Harvard University’s Rappaport Institute — also summarized in this op ed in the Boston Globe — the answer is “no.”

The report compared transit ridership in neighborhoods near commuter rail stations with ridership in other neighborhoods. The report also looked at neighborhoods that once had commuter rail but had their commuter rail lines shut down in the 1970s or 1980s.

The report found that:

• 11 to 21 percent of commuters in neighborhoods with commuter rail used transit to get to work, compared with 8 percent in the region overall.
• However, neighborhoods that had lost commuter-rail service had about the same share of transit commuters as those which still had commuter-rail service.
• Regardless of whether a neighborhood had a nearby rail station, all lost transit shares in the 1970s and 1980s and gained in the 1990s.
• Areas where new rail stations opened saw some increases in medium-density housing and businesses near the stations, but on only about 15 percent of the land near the stations.
• Opening or closing commuter-rail lines had no affect on overall population densities.

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I interpret this to mean that places with commuter rail tended to have higher transit ridership because the people who lived in those places tended to prefer transit over driving. Take away the rail transit, and they will use some other form of transit. Add rail transit, and you may attract some of those people into the neighborhood, but not affect regional transportation trends.

As the director of the Rappaport Institute says in the op ed, “commuter rail can, at best, play a modest role supporting stringent efforts to increase density, reduce sprawl, and promote transit.” Considering the high cost of commuter rail, this casts doubt on whether “massive new commuter rail projects are really as good as many seem to believe.”