HDR, a consulting firm that routinely misleads cities in order to get contracts promoting and designing streetcars, has written a report for the Michigan Department of Transportation that greatly exaggerates the benefits of public transit. In claiming that those benefits are “conservatively” $805 million a year, the report makes many unwarranted assumptions.
The most important assumption, which the report repeatedly makes, is that there would be no transit without publicly subsidized transit (for example, see p. 13). In fact, without transit subsidies, private transit services would spring up in most major places, as they did recently in Clayton County, Georgia. Even with subsidized transit, some cities such as Miami already have private transit operations competing directly with public transit. Most northern states, most likely including Michigan, forbid such competition, but such laws would be irrelevant if socialized transit were eliminated.
