As much as he is a fan of passenger rail, Kevin Page, Virginia’s director of rail transportation, is realistic: He understands that passenger rail in the Old Dominion is not everyone’s preferred mode of travel, and he knows that it can be difficult to justify economically.
Page espouses “transit sustainability.” Even if a local government or regional authority can cobble together the funds to launch passenger rail, someone needs to fund ongoing operations, he explained to me in a recent interview. Under Page’s doctrine, any mode of mass transit must be able to recover a significant proportion of its costs through passenger fares. The idea is to start with the most cost-effective method of mass transit — that which loses the least money — and test the market. Only if ridership increases does it make sense to upgrade to more expensive, higher-volume systems.
Thus, Page envisions mass transit routes starting, say, with city buses in city streets. They might be supplanted by Bus Rapid Transit, a higher-volume system that relies upon dedicated bus lanes. A BRT system, if supported by the market, might evolve to a light rail system, and then to a heavy rail system. The idea is to “get people more connected with transit” and move to more ambitious systems upgrades as the market materializes.
“Transit sustainability” is an interesting way of appraising the practicality of competing projects. It certainly makes more sense than doling out Virginia’s rail and transit dollars to whomever has the most political clout. I’m still not totally convinced, however. As I argued in “Midlothian Leviathan,” a private-sector, developer-driven approach to mass transit might make more sense.