“What drives Republican opposition to transit?” asks Governing magazine. I’ve often wondered the reverse of this question: Why do Democrats support transit?

Every rider gained by new light-rail lines in Los Angeles correspond to five or more lost bus riders. Photo by SounderBruce.

Governing‘s implicit assumption is that transit is a good thing and anyone opposed must have some warped reason to question it. The magazine’s answer is that opposition to transit reflects an urban-rural divide and since Republicans are more likely to represent rural areas that get less or no transit service than urban areas, they have little reason to support it. This belief may be why the Federal Transit Administration is so eager to support rural transit as it is a way to co-opt more political support for transit in general. Continue reading →

As in the U.S., many Canadian transit agencies are fixated on building 19th-century transit systems that make no sense today, says a new report from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Instead of focusing on downtowns, as these transit agencies are doing, the report urges cities to develop polycentric transit systems that serve other economic centers as well as they now serve downtowns.

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The report scrutinizes transit systems in eight urban areas that have built or are planning to build rail transit lines. After adjusting for inflation, the costs of these lines has dramatically increased in recent years: Calgary light-rail construction costs quintupled from $53 million to $275 million per kilometer; Toronto subway costs have grown from $76 million to more than $1 billion per kilometer; and Edmonton, Vancouver, and other cities have seen similar increases. Continue reading →

Who said the following? “The basic objective of our Nation’s transportation system must be to assure the availability of the fast, safe, and economical transportation services needed in a growing and changing economy. . . . This basic objective can and must be achieved primarily by continued reliance on unsubsidized privately owned facilities, operating under the incentives of private profit and the checks of competition to the maximum extent practicable. . . . This means . . . equality of opportunity for all forms of transportation and their users and undue preference to none. It means greater reliance on the forces of competition and less reliance on the restraints of regulation. And it means that, to the extent possible, the users of transportation services should bear the full costs of the services they use, whether those services are provided privately or publicly.”

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1. Ronald Reagan;
2. Milton Friedman;
3. Ayn Rand; or
4. The Antiplanner?

In fact, the answer is 5. John F. Kennedy. Or at least this statement was contained in Kennedy’s April 2, 1962 message to Congress on having an “efficient transportation system.” This means it was probably written by staffers in the Department of Commerce, as the Department of Transportation did not yet exist. Whoever wrote it was at least willing to talk the talk of free markets and fiscal conservatism. Continue reading →

Streetsblog posted an article yesterday that quotes and attempts to refute the Antiplanner by claiming that increasing subsidies to transit agencies actually makes them more efficient. The article, written by former Strong Towns staffer Kea Wilson, misinterprets both the Antiplanner’s quote and the meaning of efficiency.

Does reducing the share of transit costs that are covered by farebox revenues increase efficiency? Photo by AgentAkit.

Transit systems get more efficient when they are more heavily subsidized, Wilson asserts. How can this be true? Efficiency is economically defined as “when all goods and factors of production in an economy are distributed or allocated to their most valuable uses and waste is eliminated or minimized.” Before the pandemic, transit agencies were typically spending four times as much money moving someone a passenger-mile as automobiles. That sounds pretty inefficient to me and increasing subsidies even more is likely to be even more inefficient. Continue reading →