LIGHT RAIL SUCCESS STORIES VS. ALLEGED GREAT TRAIN DISASTERS

LIGHT RAIL SUCCESS STORIES VS. ALLEGED GREAT TRAIN DISASTERS

The great American cities at the beginning of the 20th century relied on streetcars, trolleys, interurban and other transit systems that moved people and helped served rich and poor, young and old, with staggering success.

Cities and transit have never been the same since transit lines were abandoned for smelly, dirty buses and an ever-increasing dependency on automobiles.

Public rail transit is a failure. Only a tiny fraction of people use it and the fare box covers barely one fourth of the cost.

Americans have chosen the car as their mode of transportation and their suburban growth patterns have made it all but impossible to build light rail lines that have any prayer of reducing congestion or serving a significant percentage of the population.

So who’s right?:

The backers of the first two sentences, who say rail transit produces far greater economic impact than can be judged by the fare box.

Or the believers in the other two paragraphs, who look at the numbers and see light rail advocates as little more than “pork lovers, auto haters and nostalgia buffs,” as transit critic Randall O’Toole labeled them in his Great Rail Disasters research paper.

O’Toole excoriates transit with his research that claims “regions that emphasize rail transit typically spend 30 to 80 percent of their transportation capital budgets on transit even though transit carries only one to five percent of regional travel.”

Half of all rail regions lost transit commuters during the 1990s, he asserts.

“Rail’s high cost makes it ineffective at reducing congestion. On average, $13 spent on rail transit is less effective at reducing congestion than $1 spent on freeway improvements. Investments in rail transit are only about half as effective as investments in bus transit,” O’Toole’s study states.

Based on ridership and passenger miles growth versus growth in car use, O’Toole’s recent update to his research assigns letter grades to major rail systems.

By O’Toole’s count, even the transit-rich city of New York gets an “F” for declining ridership and modern transit darling Portland a “D”.because its ridership is not growing as fast as automobile use.

Rail advocates assert that O’Toole is off-base when he gives a “D” grade to a Portland system that has steadily grown and has fought sprawl and focused growth on urban hubs that have developed around commuter transit stations.

Todd Litman, in Evaluating Rail Transit Criticism refutes O’Toole in his publication created for the Victoria (British Columbia) Transport Policy Institute

“O’Toole assigns New York an “F,” claiming that transit ridership is flat. Yet ridership grew significantly between 1993 and 2001, and was projected to set new records until the 2001 terrorist attacks reduced regional travel activity,” Litman states.

Jeffrey S. Wood, a program associate with Oakland-based Reconnecting America, says there are dozens of light rail success stories.

He cited the entire Salt Lake City system plus the Houston Main Street, Minneapolis Hiawatha and San Diego Green lines as four rail programs that have exceeded 2015 projected daily ridership nearly a decade ahead of time.

“From Salt Lake City to Dallas and from Washington, DC to Atlanta, transit, and railbased transit in particular have had an unquestionably positive impact on growth and quality of life in our urban areas,” states the Center for Transportation Excellence in a paper penned exclusively to debunk O’Toole’s numbers. “Investments in public transportation yield tremendous benefits, including reductions in congestion and travel time and increases in economic development in the community.”
“If investments in rail have been `disastrous,’ as the report claims, how does one explain the fact that public expenditures in transit net a gain in sales of local businesses of three times that amount1? A return ratio of more than three to one hardly seems disastrous,” the CFTE report continues. “If investments in rail have been `disastrous’, how does one explain that the average downtown vacancy rates for cities without rail was 12.8 percent in 2000, but only eight percent for cities with rail transit.”

Robert W. Poole, Jr., director of transportation studies for the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, said he does not oppose public transit – he simply wants more bang for his buck.

“Transportation planners have the soul of reformers: they want people to do what they should do, not what they want to do,” he said from his Fort Lauderdale home office. “Rail often captures only half a percent of all daily trips. For new rail, about half of its riders simply switched from buses. That is not solving traffic congestion.”

Poole, who is a fan of HOT lanes, said buses bring a better return on investment than light rail. He said if buses are clean and run on an express route, people will use them.

“In Los Angeles County, the Metro Rapid is an express bus services that skips a lot of regular stops that slow you down. The Metro Rapid opened to huge success on Wilshire Boulevard. The buses have no dedicated lanes, but they do have signal priority time on traffic lights. The system saves a lot of time and it picked up so many riders that it has expanded to 17 other major arterials.”