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John Taylor,
President of the Virginia Institute for Public
Policy, publisher of Virginia Viewpoint.
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By
Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D.
On
November 5, 2002, residents of nine
Northern Virginia
communities will vote on whether to increase the
state sales tax from 4.5 percent to 5 percent, and
apply the additional revenue to transportation
spending throughout the region.
This half percentage point increase will
raise about $130 million per year to start, and this
extra revenue will be used to pay the annual debt
service on as much as $2.75 billion in money
borrowed to pay for 28 planned projects.
Although the debate on this vote has centered
on whether Virginians can afford a tax hike, very
little of the discussion has focused on whether the
proposed projects will perform as promised and
reduce congestion. That
neglect should change because there is plenty of
reason to believe that many of these costly projects
will make no meaningful improvement in local
congestion.
One
of the chief reasons for the plan’s likely failure
to deliver the promised relief is the extent to
which the planned projects are at variance with Washington’s mobility patterns and commuters’ preferences.
According to the plan’s proponents, an
estimated 40 percent of the $2.75 billion borrowed
will be spent on transit programs such as buses,
commuter rail and metro upgrades, while the other 60
percent will be spent on road improvements to better
serve automobiles and trucks.
The
chief problem with this revenue split between
transit and cars is that the prescribed shares for
spending bear no relationship to the actual market
share each mode holds in Washington’s vast transportation market.
According to findings on
America’s travel patterns just released by the U.S.
Census, less than 10 percent of commuters in the
Washington/Baltimore metro area (9.3 percent to be
exact) use transit to get to work, and much of this
usage is concentrated in Baltimore
and in Washington
D.C.
proper. If
the transit market share is calculated just for
Northern Virginia
commuters, usage drops to 7.6 percent.
It is to this small fraction of commuters
that tax increase supporters promise 40 percent of
the money. Go
figure.
Given
how few people in
Northern Virginia
use any form of public transportation to get to
work, this plan will waste $1.1 billion, or 40
percent of what’s borrowed.
And by devoting a significant share of the
money to transportation schemes the public
consistently avoids, Virginians will be paying more
in taxes but getting little or no congestion relief
in return.
Transit
advocates will answer this pessimistic prediction by
arguing that spending more on public transportation
will make transit more attractive, and people will
respond by riding the rails or buses, not cars.
While there is a kernel of intuitive
plausibility to such assertions, history shows this
line of speculation reflects the triumph of hope
over experience. In
reality, transit systems throughout the country are
littered with costly improvement schemes that failed
to reverse transit’s long-term decline in market
share across the nation.
Since
1960, governments at all levels have invested
approximately a half a trillion dollars in a variety
of transit projects around the country.
But since that same year when the U.S. Bureau
of the Census first began measuring commuting
practices, transit’s share of the market has
continually declined despite massive investment.
Between 1990 and 2000, transit’s share of
commuters fell from just 5.12 percent of the market
to 4.57 percent, the lowest it’s been since the
series was first calculated.
Moreover,
ridership declined in absolute numbers as well: Over
the past decade the number of commuters riding
transit declined by 22,596.
Among the nation’s top 50 metropolitan
areas, transit ridership declined in thirty-nine of
them, including Washington/Baltimore where
transit’s share of commuters fell from 11.55
percent in 1990 to 9.3 percent today.
For all travel in the region, transit’s
share is less than 4 percent.
Some
environmentalists point to Portland,
Oregon
as an example of the kind of success that can be
achieved with a costly pro-transit strategy that
includes land use regulations to encourage
development near transit.
But even here the facts offer scant support.
Despite huge investments in transit, very
little in highways, and subsidies to encourage the
building of homes and offices near rail, Portland
has managed to raise transit’s market share by
only one-third of one percentage point in ten years.
With transit holding just 5.7 percent of that
commuting market, transit’s performance in the
Portland
metro area lags even that of auto-obsessed
Northern Virginia
.
By
the time Virginia’s commuters discover the false promise of a
bizarre transportation plan that devotes 40 percent
of tax money to transportation programs that more
than 9 out of 10 Virginians avoid, it will be too
late to undo the damage. By borrowing against several decades of
future tax revenues,
Northern Virginians
will be legally committed to service these bonds
year after year. Something
to think about.
Deeply. Before
it’s too late.
--
November 4, 2002
Ronald
D. Utt is the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior
Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and an
adjunct scholar with the Virginia Institute for
Public Policy, an education and research
organization headquartered in Potomac Falls,
Virginia.
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