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Imagine
an alternate universe where Virginia politicians
expended as much energy devising ways to encourage
entrepreneurial, free-market solutions to
transportation problems as they did to raising your
taxes.
Imagine
a private company running a bus every
morning from, say, Fredericksburg to Crystal City.
Instead of 12 rows of seats, imagine there were 10,
creating enough room for passengers to flip down a
tray, airline style, where they could comfortably rest their
laptops. Imagine there were electric sockets where
they could plug in so their batteries wouldn’t run
out. And imagine that the bus, using technology that
exists today, provided broadband Internet access so
passengers could download e-mail, check the news and
do everything else they normally did in their first
hour at the office.
Imagine
that the bus operator charged $20 per round trip,
filling up 40 seats per day and yielding $200,000
annually in revenue per bus. Numbers in that
ballpark should be sufficient to generate a profit. Would passengers be willing to pay $5,000 a
year to save a comparable amount in gas, tolls and
wear-and-tear on their cars -- while adding two
hours of productive work time each day?
We
don't know for sure: The great
disadvantage of ride sharing in the 21st century is
the limit it puts on peoples’ mobility – the
freedom to work come and go on their own schedules,
whether to work extra hours or run an errand on the
way home. But imagine that it was possible to book a
seat on the bus ahead of time on the Internet.
Imagine that someone could tele-work from home one
day a week, camp out at a satellite office one
day, drive to work one day and take the bus two days
whenever it suited them.
The
technology supporting such a scenario exists. NuRide,
founded by Northern Virginia entrepreneur Rick
Steele, allows travelers visiting the NuRide website
to plug in a point of origin, a destination and a
time of day to see if anyone is willing to share a
ride. (See "Carpool
Comeback," Sept. 5, 2005.) The system could
be easily adapted to accommodate shared rides in
buses. Meanwhile, RaySat, another Northern Virginia
company, has developed antennae that provide
broadband Internet and satellite programming for
trains, RVs and other fast-moving vehicles. Adopting
the technology to buses should be relatively simple.
Furthermore,
the private-sector
capability to provide a commuting service exists. A
good number of companies already provide charter and
tour services. Operating buses for commuters would
be a natural extension of their businesses. There is no economic reason
that Virginia couldn’t take tens of thousands of
commuters off the roads in Northern Virginia and
Hampton Roads within a matter of years. Why, then,
isn’t this happening?
Blame
Virginia’s failure to develop a dynamic
commuter-bus industry upon
local transit monopolies and taxi franchises
ossified by state law and local ordinance. Blame
also a failure of imagination. Virginia’s
Political Class and its apologists can conceive of only one solution to
traffic congestion – bolstering revenues to fund
spectacular new road- and rail-building programs.
Relaxing the grip of government and fostering
private, entrepreneurial solutions to shared
ridership is an idea that has never
gained serious consideration.
Shared
ridership, whether in carpools, buses or rail, has
declined steadily over the past half century. There
are many reasons for this trend, not the least of
which is the premium that people put on their
personal mobility. But failed government policy has
contributed, too. By the 1960s,
municipalities had taken over nearly every mass
transit system across the country, relying upon a
mix of fares, federal grants and local subsidies to
continue operating.
Federal
involvement has been particularly damaging. As
Gabriel Roth, a transportation scholar with the Cato
Institute explained to me, federal regulations drove
up labor costs by mandating pay levels,
restricting the ability of bus drivers to work in
split shifts and making it prohibitively expensive
to fire or lay anyone off. Municipal bus systems endeavored to offset high labor costs by
running larger buses at less frequent intervals. But
that tactic discouraged ridership: Passengers prefer
more frequent service so they can spend less time
waiting for the bus.
Another
factor, rarely discussed in political circles, has
been the phenomenon commonly referred to as
"suburban sprawl,” a pattern of scattered,
disconnected, low density development accompanied by
an inattention to creating pedestrian-friendly
walkways. As a rule of thumb, people are willing to
walk a quarter mile to a bus stop, but little
farther. As subdivisions are smeared across ever
larger swaths of land and a decreasing percentage of
the population lives within a quarter-mile stroll of a
bus stop, there aren't enough riders to support a
transit system without heavy subsidies.
The
woes of mass transit in Virginia are compounded by
the unique inefficiency of the Washington Metro
system. Metro combines all the woes of the typical
metropolitan bus system with unique pathologies of
its own. With an unwieldy governing structure
representing the often-divergent interests of
Virginia , Maryland and Washington, D.C., contends
Roth, Metro “is almost impossible to reform."
Metro’s
ungovernability and high cost structure have
inspired a number of Northern Virginia jurisdictions
to set up their own transit systems, observes
Jonathan Gifford, a scholar with the Transportation
Research Board at George Mason University. But the
fragmenting of mass transit has deleterious
consequences: Passengers often have to change buses
at the interface of different systems, which adds to
the length and uncertainties associated with a bus
ride.
We
Americans have lived with the current system so long
that our imaginations have become constrained. We
can imagine nothing but big buses driving at fixed
schedules along fixed routes demarcated by bus
stops. But that is only one model among the wild
profusion of possibilities that is evident to anyone
has has been overseas. In countries that don't
create transit monopolies, there is a fantastic
array of transportation options. Big buses, small
buses, vans and cars. Call ahead and book a ride, or
hail down a ride while walking down the road. From Israel to Puerto Rico,
Russia to Nigeria, jitneys are ubiquitous, and they
do a very good job of ferrying people back and forth
to work.
Even
in the United States, interesting
services have taken root in economic nooks and crannies.
Gifford cites Moms on Wheels in Fairfax County,
where mothers of school children banded together in
the face of government obstacles to transport
children to school. Roth notes also that a private
“club” transports employees from the Reston area
to employment centers closer to the Washington
region’s urban center. In the absence of
government-subsidized monopolies, these types of
enterprises would blossom, branching out to serve a
wide variety of needs. The old fixed route/fixed
schedule transit service might survive in older
urban areas, but many of the new business models
would spring up to serve unique constituencies.
What,
then, should lawmakers be doing to spur
private-sector investment in mass transit? Here are
a number of possibilities:
Remove
barriers to entry. Survey all state laws and
local ordinances that restrict barriers to entry.
Consider phasing out local transit monopolies that
prevent private entities from providing shared
vehicle services. Consider
loosening up taxi franchises to permit jitney-styled
service. Throw open the market to competition,
innovation and experimentation.
Delineate
property rights. Focus on ways to make
competition work more effectively. Allow minibus
owners to form “route associations” -- like those in Atlantic City,
N.J. -- if they agree to operate according to set
routes and time
schedules. Alternatively, explore the exploration of “curb
rights” that jitney or minibus owners can lease
from municipalities in exchange for the right to pick up
passengers along certain routes.
Alter
land use patterns. Economical mass transit
requires density at the points of origin and
destination, if not along an entire route. Local
governments can encourage property owners to build
transit-friendly developments by clustering
housing, offices, stores and amenities at greater
densities and paying greater heed to urban design
standards that would improve the pedestrian
experience. Going a step further, local governments
can encourage developers to build transit-friendly
communities, as Pulte Homes proposes to do
in Fairfax County (See "Traffic
Buster," Nov. 2, 2006).
Build
infrastructure. State and local governments can
contribute to the building of transit-friendly
communities by paying for seats and shelters along
bus routes, amenities that private operators do not
normally provide themselves. Similarly, local
government could take a more active role in
converting “Park ‘n Ride” facilities into
suburban terminals for buses, minibuses and jitneys.
If scarcity of parking space is an issue,
municipalities in low-density jurisdictions might
even consider erecting parking decks at bus
terminals where commuters can gather for bus rides to
employment centers.
Pay
vouchers. Government has a bad habit of
subsidizing business enterprises, regardless of how
inefficiently they’re run or how poorly they serve
the needs of customers. An alternative method of
encouraging shared ridership is to pay the riders, suggests Gifford. Give them a voucher
offsetting some of the cost, and let
them choose the option that works best for them. As
long as the cost-per-commuter of a voucher program
were less than the cost of operating and maintaining
traditional bus and rail alternatives, they would represent a net gain to
taxpayers.
State
and local governments have critical roles to play in
encouraging mass transit, albeit different ones from
what they do today. Instead of operating bus
systems, government should create a positive
climate for private business to do so. It’s the nature of
entrepreneurs to continually seek new markets, to
innovate, to experiment. Governments should turn
them loose to devise creative solutions.
--
March 20, 2006
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