by James A. Bacon
Art Guzzetti, public policy director for the American Public Transportation Association, gamely walked into the lion’s den Sunday evening when participating in a debate at the American Dream Coalition annual conference attended by fiscal conservatives and free marketeers from around the country. He was the consummate gentleman, he never lost his cool, and he made the familiar case that mass transit helps alleviate traffic congestion, is environmentally friendly, provides access and mobility for the poor and elderly and, thanks to the growing preference for walkable urbanism, is the wave of the future.
And he got taken down like a baby antelope.
Guzzetti simply had no satisfactory answers to most of the points raised by members of the audience, many of whom were grassroots activists who had been fighting heavy rail boondoggles in communities from Honolulu to Tampa. His free-market counterpart in the discussion, Randal O’Toole, the Cato Institute’s transportation scholar, calmly and politely dismembered his arguments.
The specific topic of debate was the federal New Starts program, which doles out some $2 billion a year to communities building new fixed-guideway transit systems (heavy rail, light rail and street cars). O’Toole took the position that the construction program should be abolished and the money distributed on a formula basis.
To my mind O’Toole’s most devastating point was the fact that rail and street car systems around the United States have a collective $77 billion backlog in deferred maintenance. None of the projects have paid their capital costs, and all operate at a deficit. No one knows where the money is coming from to keep the systems repaired, yet the federal government is dispensing billions to localities eager to build or expand money-losing transit systems of their own.
Buses, O’Toole argued, are a more cost-effective form of mass transit. If you want to capture a more affluent clientele than traditional city buses, which is necessary to increase modal market share, you can equip them with Wi-Fi and leather seats. You can serve food and pastries. Riders can swipe cards or smart phones rather than fumble for change. “If you take a bus and paint it a special color, you can call it a special bus” — and people will ride it.
The irony is that the massive investment in rail has come at the expense of bus transit. Rail and street-car transit is so expensive that local and/or regional authorities have curtailed spending on buses to help pay for it. Yuppies get to ride the train while the poor and elderly find bus routes more constricted. That’s a major reason why, O’Toole explained, despite the aggressive expansion of light and heavy rail around the country and all the factors touted by Gazzetti, mass transit’s modal share (which includes bus) has increased imperceptibly over the years.
During the conference other speakers and presenters drilled into case studies. Unionized workforces hamper productivity and run up massive unfunded pension liabilities. Government monopolies make poor management decisions. Bad projects are driven forward by special interests — unions, big construction firms, property owners whose land will gain value from proximity to rail stops, environmental groups, goo-goo civic boosters who see only the benefits while ignoring the costs and risks, and government officials looking for Hail-Mary congestion solutions — and many projects are helplessly flawed from inception.
Perhaps most fundamentally, mass transit advocates seem to learn nothing from experience. They live in a world of computer models and never monitor results, said John Charles, a community activist who has made a point of documenting mass-transit promises and performance in Portland over the years. “When you live in a world of future projections, you can’t be proved wrong. There is simply no consequence to being wrong.”
The mass transit community seems totally uninterested in addressing the problems of low workforce productivity, unfunded pensions, deferred maintenance and construction cost overruns, the kind of reforms that are necessary to restore public confidence and put mass transit on a sound economic footing. The mass transit lobby has chosen the path of rent seeking: lobbying for subsidies and resisting rules and regulations that might hold them financially accountable. According to O’Toole, the American Public Transportation Association’s $24 million budget is several times larger than that of all the highway lobby groups in the nation’s capital combined (not that the highway lobby is an entity to be admired).
Putting mass transit back on a sound financial footing is essential for the United States to maintain a world-class transportation system. The first step is to stop making things worse by building new projects that shouldn’t be built.
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