Mercury News Gets It Wrong Again

The San Jose Mercury-News has long been a booster of ridiculously expensive rail transit projects such as Bart to San Jose. This week, it has a five-part series on the woes facing Bay Area transit agencies.

First, it tells us that, thanks to lower gas prices combined with higher transit fares, “commuters are leaving mass transit for their cars.” Maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem if the paper hadn’t encouraged the region to build such a high-cost transit network.

Second, the paper warns that “transit cuts will make Bay Area economic recovery difficult.” Considering that less than 4 percent of San Jose-area commuters took transit to work in 2008, transit cuts won’t be much of a problem for Silicon Valley. They could have a slightly bigger effect on the San Francisco-Oakland area, where 17 percent of commuters use transit to get to work. But if boosters really want to help economic recovery, they should reduce taxes for everyone, not promote high-cost transit for a few.

These first two articles focused mainly on facts. But in the third article, the paper claims that the environment loses when transit ridership declines. “Without a doubt, air quality inventories show that the best way to cut greenhouse gases in the region is by removing cars from the road.” Yes, and without a doubt, poor counties produce less greenhouse gases than rich ones. But that doesn’t mean America’s leaders should try to make us poor. The real question is whether investments in transit are a cost-efficient way of protecting the environment, and as the Antiplanner has already found, the answer is “no.”

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What’s the solution? The last segment of the series says we need a “culture shift,” raising taxes and changing “the way commuters travel and leaders plan cities.” Like that has worked so well in the past. This has essentially been the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission‘s plan since 1970 or so. They certainly have higher taxes, but they haven’t changed the way commuters travel. “The current plan hasn’t worked for 40 years, so let’s do more of the same!”

Maybe instead of building expensive, gee-whiz trains, Bay Area transit planners should rely on buses. Running on high-occupancy vehicle or high-occupancy toll lanes, those buses can be as fast or faster than any rail line. That will save billions in capital costs and, if they run on routes that fill up just 40 percent of the bus seats, the operating costs will be lower too.

More important, Bay Area transportation planners should recognize that transit is never going to carry more than about 4 percent of the region’s travel. Instead of spending 60 to 80 percent of the region’s transportation funds on transit systems that nevertheless suffer from funding crises, they should build the transportation system that people will actually use.

As the Antiplanner has said before, the real problem for transit agencies is not a shortage of money, but too much money. This encourages them to waste money on high-cost transit systems. Then they get into trouble when the cost of completing and running those systems proves to be greater than they expected (or pretended). Unfortunately, the Mercury-News would rather live in a fantasy world than in reality.