Longtime Houstonian Bill King is a common sense fellow who serves on the Transportation Council, a group of elected officials and agency staffers that sets priorities for transportation spending in the 13-county Gulf Coast region. In this Chronicle op-ed from over the weekend, he reviews the Metro light rail system’s horrific ridership numbers (previous posts here) and concludes that — given the massive sunk costs invested in the light rail system — the ridership numbers are so bad that it makes economic sense to attempt to increase ridership by simply allowing riders to use the system free-of-charge:

Today, the Metropolitan Transit Authority reports slightly under 300,000 daily “boardings.” Because of transfers, it is a little bit of guesswork to determine how many commuters are actually using transit. But it is probably something in the 120,000-130,000 range. For every commuter we can convince to take a train or bus to work, we get one car off our roads. That means less congestion and fewer emissions and collisions. Clearly a good thing.
Metro has developed a far-ranging, multibillion-dollar plan dubbed Metro Solutions that it hopes will increase transit ridership. Phase 2 of that plan consists of five light rail lines and will cost about $2.2 billion. The ultimate cost will undoubtedly be higher. Metro projects that its Phase 2 lines will have about 140,000 daily boardings. However, these lines will replace existing bus service along the same routes, so not all of the boardings will represent an increase in transit ridership. The net increase on the Main Street line from switching to light rail has been about 19 percent.
If this ratio holds on the Phase 2 lines, we should pick up an increase in daily boardings of about 20,000 to 30,000 or something like 10,000 to 12,000 new transit riders. This is a very small increase compared to well over 1 million daily commuters in Houston.
The traffic models indicate that this relatively small increase will be about offset by the lost street lanes the rail lines will use and the scores of new street level crossings. As a result, there will be no meaningful reduction in traffic congestion from the Phase 2 lines. [. . .]
. . . Metro recovers a very small percentage of its costs through fares. In fiscal year 2006, Metro only collected about $54 million in fares compared to $435 million in operating expenses, or only about 12 percent. That is because Metro gets the overwhelming majority of its funds from a 1 percent sales tax. And Metro is currently enjoying a boom in its sales tax revenues. In the past two years, sale tax receipts have increased by approximately $84 million and are on track this year to increase almost another $40 million. Metro currently is sitting on nearly $400 million in cash, receivables and short term investments.
Also, Metro spends about $5 million a year collecting its fares and advertising, expenses that could be dramatically reduced if fares were eliminated. So eliminating fares would probably only cost us around $50 million annually. [. . .]
Elimination of fares is not an end game solution. There is still a pressing need for expanded transit service throughout the region. But going to a fare free system may be a way to jump-start a new transit paradigm. With a larger transit constituency, public support for new programs may grow.
The nice thing about the idea is that it is not irrevocable. If it does not result in the hoped for benefits, we can always reverse course and try something else. Houston’s transit program has been log-jammed for years with no end in sight. Personally, I am ready to try something different, even if it is a little “out of the box.”

Bill King is a good sport and I give him credit for attempting to make the best of a terrible investment. He is not attempting to justify the construction of Phase 2 of the light rail system by eliminating fares (that would be impossible); he simply references Phase 2 to make the point that eliminating fares would have a bigger impact on ridership at a much lower cost. Most of the benefit of his proposal would probably come from eliminating fares on the Park & Ride system and using the system’s unused bus capacity.
However, thinking “outside the box” in the face of these numbers (10-12,000 more daily light rail transit riders in return for a $2.5 billion investment?) calls for something far more than just “let’em ride free.” Indeed, you could quadruple that increase in daily ridership and it would still be an extremely poor return on investment of public funds.
A more appropriate response in the face of such a poor cost/benefit ratio is to cut the losses altogether, halt the light rail project where it stands and either return the public capital at Metro to the taxpayers or use the funds on something that will truly benefit a substantial portion of the area citizens (flood control or more flexible area-wide bus transit, maybe?). Just how much money will Houston’s political leaders allow Houston-area residents to blow before exhibiting true leadership on the colossal light rail boondoggle?
Update: The Chronicle’s transit columnist, Rad Sadlee, comments here on King’s op-ed.