Earlier posts here and here explored the economic absurdity of urban rail systems in modern American cities, which is a hot topic in Houston these days given the recent launch of Metro’s Light Rail System earlier this year.
Now, the long-range empirical data refuting the economic basis of such systems is emerging. In this article, Wendell Cox analyzes the $10 billion cost relating to creation and maintenance of the Washington, D.C. “Metro” rail system over the past 30 years. His findings are insightful:
No US urban area has built more new high-quality urban rail than Washington, DC, which spent $10 billion, most of it from national taxpayers, on a more than 100 mile system. Of course, it would be unfair to have expected Washington?s ?Metro? subway to have made a difference in area-wide traffic, since, as noted above, transit is about downtown. Predictably, at the
metropolitan area level, Metro?s impact has been virtually absent. In 1970, before the first section of the system opened, the Census Bureau reported that 15.3 percent of area workers used transit to get to work. By 2000, transit?s work trip market share number had dropped 29 percent, to 10.9 percent. Perhaps even more astounding is the fact that Census data indicated a five
percent reduction in actual work trip usage from 1990 to 2000, a period during which the system was expanded more than 25 percent.
Over the past 20 years, traffic in the Washington area has become the fourth worst in the nation, following only Los Angeles (which has opened a metro, light rail and commuter rail), San Francisco (where BART has made no difference) and Chicago (with the nation?s second most extensive rail system). The problem in Washington is that so many planned freeways were cancelled. In Houston, where capacity has been built to keep up with demand, traffic is better than in 1986, and the area has improved to 10th worst traffic in the nation from having been the worst in 1985.
Read the entire article. As we ponder why these public boondoggles continue to proliferate despite the increasingly clear evidence of their enormous cost relative to their relatively small public benefit, I pass along an astute commentator’s observation regarding the politics of such systems from one of my earlier posts:
Concentrated benefits and dispersed costs are one economic reason for the existence of inefficient public projects. The many who stand to lose will lose only a little, whereas the few who stand to gain will gain a lot. Of course, if other public projects exist where overall costs outweigh benefits, then $6 a year per project could add up to quite a hefty boondoggler?s bill.
Speaking as a former Washingtonian – Wendell Cox is out to lunch with respect to Metro’s impact on the Washington area.
It’s not surprising that Metro’s share of transit dropped; after it was built, there was considerable growth outside its service area, but within the DC area. Does this mean Metro addressed the wrong problem? Not at all, the entire region was growing and better transit into the central city was desparately needed.
As for the cancelled freeways… talk about boondoggles. Freeways are an enormously inefficient way to move large numbers of people into dense city cores. Had those freeways been built, they’d be at a standstill today (much like the northern Virginia freeways I had the misfortune to commute on for years), and there would be nowhere to park the cars that were being deposited in downtown DC.
Well, there would be – the land that now holds things like the MCI Center and new Washington Convention Center, the land that is becoming a baseball stadium, the land that now holds revitalized residential neighborhoods that ring the downtown… in other words land that is now being used for things far more economically productive than parking lots
In addition, the freeways would have wreaked havoc on the city itself, creating huge physical barriers between existing neighborhoods.
There are a couple of issues here that Cox misses:
1. Is there value to dense urban downtowns? The people of the Washington area seem to think so. That’s why I sold an incredibly modest house for $550/square foot last year.
2. Are freeways subsidized as much as mass transit? Yes, if you consider the externalized costs (time lost to traffic, an area where Washington has one of the nation’s biggest problems; pollution and the resulting health impact on residents; road building with tax dollars; etc.).
3. Fairness in how decisions are made. Thanks to the unique political geography of the Washington area, the people most affected by the freeways (DC residents) had no voice in the plan. DC is basically a plaything for Congress, which tends to bow to the desires of neighboring governments in MD and VA. You can argue that there are reasons for DC’s status, but it’s hard to argue that this is fair to the half-million people who live there.
Arguing for those cancelled freeways, by the way, ignores the traffic realities of DC. There are issues getting people in and out of downtown, but there are far greater issues moving people around the suburbs, since the fastest-growing commuter pattern there is suburb-to-suburb. Metro doesn’t address that adequately. Neither do the cancelled freeways. The challenge for DC isn’t getting people from the suburbs to downtown; it’s moving people from Bethesda to Tysons Corner, or Loudoun to Dulles, and the freeways would have done nothing to help that.