Bacon's Rebellion

The Mass Transit Boondoggle

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by

James A. Bacon
in

If there’s a bigger boondoggle than spending billions on new roads and highways, it’s building billions on mass transit where it is economically infeasible. Ken Reid (an advocate of more roads) has sent out an e-mail communique justifiably blasting the wastefulness of the Virginia Railway Express (VRE). Says he:

According to the latest data from the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission — which is supposed to oversee VRE and WMATA costs, but spends more time on pro-transit propaganda — VRE is only carrying about 14,529 average trips a day. This equates to about 7,500 actual physical passengers. 7,000 is about what four lanes of I-66 heading eastbound can carry in ONE hour. For this, taxpayers in the affected jurisdictions where VRE operates will have to pay $28 million a year.

$28 million a year could build ONE diamond interchange, thus providing true congestion relief. If we allow rail into the Dulles Corridor and Loudoun County, Loudoun residents, like those of Spotsylvania county, will be asked to fork out money to subsidize the select few and there will be less money for other needs.

But why stop our examination of the alternatives there? Imagine if we invested $28 million in, oh, say, promoting telework and hotelling programs, or traffic light sequencing, or better GIS tools to analyze the impact of land use decisions on the regional transportation network.

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  1. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    Jim:

    People seem to have this quasi-religious affection for “the public transit system”. Not riding it, mind you, but funding it. I’m not sure how we break them of it.

    It’s a free rider problem. Everyone imagines their neighbor taking the bus or the VRE or the Metro and therefore clearing the roads for driving. Few people actually imagine themself using public transit. Funding mass transit is also one of those “feel good” things that only the anti-christ would argue against!

    So opportunistic politicians push mass transit as some sort of panacea against both traffic and sprawl, when in fact, mass transit is just a budget buster that takes very few cars off the road.

  2. Phil Rodokanakis Avatar
    Phil Rodokanakis

    Paul: You’re absolutely correct. A couple of years ago, I was involved in a primary campaign for a Senate District that covered parts of the Dulles corridor. We did a survey and close to 90% of the respondents were in favor of extending rail to Dulles. However only less than 10% of the respondents said that they would use Metro if the extension to Dulles were completed.

    I take this one step further. I think that a lot of good meaning people have guilt feelings for driving their cars, so they are in favor of outrageous mass transit projects. Perhaps at a subconscious level, being in favor of mass transit projects, this is supposed to counter-balance the fact that they continue driving every day.

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    This site seems to have a reality problem. Suppose you stopped funding Metro and VRE, what then? I suppose we could turn it over to the Smithsonian and make it a National Monument to failed social engineering.

    You guys seem to work from the position of “In an ideal world we could…..” Given that we have Metro, and like any other huge infrastrucure that is failing, we can’t get rid of it, what do we do?
    Unlike a car, we can’t junk it and recycle it. Given that Metro is grossly overcrowded, just like the roads, the only rational thing to do is raise the price to ride until it is filled to normal capacity. I define normal capacity as “everyone has a seat”.

    Same thing holds for the (crowded) roads, we should raise the price until everyone who wants to use them has a spot.

    Together these two things would make the denser and most dysfunctional part of the city much less competitive. Industry and even Government would flee the city for someplace less crowded, less expensive and more pleasant.

    Rampant assessments in the city would stop. The loss of value in the city would be replaced with an increase in value someplace else, and we would have more sprawl, or if you prefer, more rural development, which is where the poverty is, currently.

    The anti-sprawl and anti-highway folks are responsible for the disaster that Metro and VRE and dozens of other projects across the nation have become as much as those who use the highway and hope someone else won’t.

    Maybe we will stop hating “them” when we realize them is “us”.

    You are right, everyone hopes that someone in front of them on the highway will opt to take mass transit, even though it is slower, less convenient, less comfortable, and more expensive. Saying they are willing to pay for this benefit is exactly equivalent to saying they would be willing to pay more to use the highway.

    One of the ways they make themselves “feel good” about this is that they promote the idea that mass transit provides options for those who can’t or don’t drive. This line of thinking says transit is for the working poor and the disabled, so we naturally support it.

    Of the 10% who say they would ride Metro, current statistics suggest that almost half are lying.

    Still, as bad as I think transit is, (and I ride both VRE and Metro, unless I’m in a hurry) rail to Dulles probably makes sense. Dulles provides a 24 hour requirement for transit that is unmatched by the current rush hour usage elsewhere in the system. It is a “balanced community” sort of thing, and Dulles is a substantial job center as well. At Dulles, you at least have an opportunity for two-way ridership from the urban core.

    The way it is being funded does not make the slightest sense. It should be funded by a variety of sources who benefit or will benefit. That means transit area landowners and businesses as well as airline passengers. While Dulles toll road users might ultimately benefit, the history of congestion reduction related to transit development is not good, therefore, the benefit to DTR drivers is likely to be small.

    For all beneficiaries the benfit is far away, therefore the current charges should be small and related to the net present value of the future benefit.

    For landowners and businesses, the benefit is larger and immediate: they can start making plans with some confidence of growth, therefore they should take a larger part.

    However, the whole plan is so big and will take so long, that the benefit to most mortals is remote and iffy. Government is the only entity with the longevity to step up to this plate, and that means we all have to chip in a little.

    This argument started with the position “what happens if we stop funding Metro?” but the other side of the coin is what happens if Phil is right?

    Suppose people suddenly come to grips with their guilt feelings and start riding mass transit? The subsidy to VRE is like $9.50 per trip, and it would be a lot higher if we had to invest in all the track it would take to support those guilty drivers. Where could we possibly get that kind of money?

    We have to focus on the problems at hand:

    How much tax revenue have we got to spend?

    How can we spend it in ways that will most help to generate new tax revenue in the future, while doing the best we can to meet the most important of all the immediate needs?

    Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

    The guy who added “repeat” to those instructions got an enormous bonus based on increased shampoo sales.

    As a society, we should be so smart.

    Ray Hyde
    Delaplane, VA

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