Awhile back, I participated with local bloggers Tory Gattis, Anne Linehan and Kevin Whited, Laurence Simon, Owen Courr?ges and several others on a lively thread regarding the causes and effect of the public policy choices that Houston is making in regard to Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority and its light rail system. One of the points that I tried to make in that discussion was the political factors often prompt people who need mass transit the most to vote in favor of transit plans — such as Houston’s light rail system — that really do not really address their needs, and that such choices often have long-lasting and unintended consequences.
Along those same lines, Randal O’Toole, senior economist at the Thoreau Institute, points out here that the public policy decisions regarding mass transit in New Orleans played a large part in the loss of human life that will result from Hurricane Katrina and the storm’s aftermath:
Those who fervently wish for car-free cities should take a closer look at New Orleans. The tragedy of New Orleans isn’t primarily due to racism or government incompetence, though both played a role. The real cause is automobility — or more precisely to the lack of it.
“The white people got out,” declared the New York Times today. But, as a chart in the Times article makes clear, the people who got out were those with automobiles. Those who stayed, regardless of color, were those who lacked autos.
What made New Orleans more vulnerable to catastrophe than most U.S. cities is its low rate of auto ownership. According to the 2000 Census, nearly a third of New Orleans households do not own an automobile. This compares to less than 10 percent nationwide. There are significant differences by race: 35 percent of black households but only 15 percent of white households do not own an auto. But in the end, it was auto ownership, not race, that made the difference between safety and disaster.
“The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out,” an LSU professor told the Times. On Saturday and Sunday, August 27 and 28, when it appeared likely that Hurricane Katrina would strike New Orleans, those people who could simply got in their cars and drove away. The people who didn’t have cars were left behind.
Critics of autos love the term “auto dependent.” But Katrina proved that the automobile is a liberator. It is those who don’t own autos who are dependent — dependent on the competence of government officials, dependent on charity, dependent on complex and sometimes uncaring institutions.
As shown in the table below, the number of people killed by hurricanes in the U.S. steadily declined during the twentieth century. Economists commonly attribute such declines to increasing wealth. Wealth differences are also credited with the large number of disaster-related deaths in developing nations vs. developed nations. But what makes wealthier societies less vulnerable to natural disaster? There are several factors, but the most important is mobility.
Number of Deaths Caused by Hurricanes in the U.S.:
1900-1919 10,000
1920-1939 3,751
1940-1959 1,119
1960-1979 453
1980-1999 57
Source: Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. Number for 1900-1919 is estimated as the exact death toll from 1900 Galveston hurricane is unknown.
People with access to autos can leave an area before it is flooded or hit with hurricanes, tornados, or other storms. When earthquakes or storms strike too suddenly to allow prior evacuation, people with autos can move away from areas that lack food, safe water, or other essentials.
Numerous commentators have legitimately criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies for failing to foresee the need for evacuation, failing to secure enough buses or other means of evacuation, and failing to get those buses to people who needed evacuation. But people who owned autos didn’t need to rely on the competence of government planners to be safe from Katrina and flooding. They were able to save themselves by driving away. Most apparently found refuge with friends or in hotels many miles from the devastation. Meanwhile, those who didn’t have autos were forced into high-density, crime-ridden refugee camps such as the Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center.
Rather than help low-income people achieve greater mobility, New Orleans transportation planners decided years ago that their highest priority was to provide heavily subsidized streetcar rides for tourists. In the late 1980s and 1990s, New Orleans spent at least $15 million converting an abandoned rail line into the 1.5-mile Riverfront Streetcar line. In 2004, New Orleans opened the 3.6-mile Canal Street streetcar line at a cost of nearly $150 million.
New Orleans was planning to spend another $120 million on a Desire Street streetcar line.
These tourist lines do nothing to help any local residents except for those who happen to own property along the line. The city was not deterred by table 7.2 on page 8 its own analysis of the Desire line showing that each new rider on this line would cost taxpayers more than $20.
About 26,000 low-income families in New Orleans don’t own a car. If all the money spent on New Orleans streetcars from 1985 to the present had been spent instead on helping autoless low-income families achieve mobility, the city would have had more than $6,000 for each such family, enough to buy good used cars for all of them. Add the money the city wanted to spend on the Desire Street streetcar and you have enough to buy a brand-new car for every single autoless low-income family — not a Lexus or BMW, certainly, but a functional source of transportation that would have allowed them to escape the current disaster.
While I don’t think that buying low-income families brand-new cars is the best use of our limited transportation resources, it would produce far greater benefits than building rail transit. Studies have found that unskilled workers who have a car are much more likely to have a job and will earn far more than workers who must depend on transit. That is why numerous social service agencies have begun programs aimed at helping low-income families acquire their first car or maintain an existing one.
Yet when I point out the comparative benefits of providing mobility to low-income people vs. building rail transit lines to suburban areas that already enjoy a high degree of mobility, rail advocates often respond, “We can’t let poor people have cars. It would cause too much congestion.” Yes, as the Soviet Union discovered, poverty is one way to prevent congestion.
New Orleans is in many ways a model for smart growth: high densities, low rates of auto ownership, investments in rail transit. This proved to be its downfall. While the city was vulnerable from being built below sea level, many cities above sea level have proven equally vulnerable to storms and flooding. In the end, New Orleans’ people suffered primarily because so many lived without autos, thus making them overly dependent on the competence of government planners.
As noted in this previous post, people are entitled to vote in favor of a mass transit system that does not really address their needs. However, they should not be misled in doing so as has often been the case with regard to past Metro referendums. If a part of Metro’s long-term strategy is to make certain segments of Houston’s population less “automobile-dependent,” then one of the lessons of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is that we should make clear in any future Metro referendums that such a strategy can have deadly consequences in the event that an evacuation of Houston is required.
Hat tip to Peter Gordon for the link to Mr. O’Toole’s piece.
Important transit lessons from New Orleans disaster
Tom Kirkendall has linked to an important piece that should be mandatory reading for City of Houston and Metro officials:
Those who fervently wish for car-free cities should take a closer look…
I agree with you that lack of automobile ownership helped to increase the number of people that stayed in NOLA through Katrina. However, I believe that you are projecting Houston’s boondoggle on to New Orleans. I lived in NOLA until a year ago, and then moved to Houston, and there is a world of difference between the two.
Houston’s light rail is a joke. While working downtown, I don’t think I saw one full rail car in eight months. New Orleans, on the other hand, is another matter. Every weekend night, and most weekdays, the every car on the St. Charles Line is filled with students and other locals headed to the Quarter. Most of these people have cars, but due to the hassles and expense of parking, many people would not travel to the Quarter (or to the Maragny, or to the Warehouse District) without them. Additionally, many tourists use the street car to travel from their hotels in the quarter to the shops on Magazine Street.
My point: The New Orleans streetcars are not about public transportation, they are about tourism and the service industry. People don’t really use the street car to go to work. The revenue generated by the streetcars far outweighs its construction cost. The service industry employs a large number of people in unskilled positions, and the streetcars contributed to that.
While the lack of car ownership should have been addressed, the money that New Orleans spent on the streetcar was a wise investment (except for the Desire Line, which you discuss, which would have been superfluous). Unlike the Houston project, increasing the mobility of poor people in New Orleans, and funding the streetcar system is not an either/or type of dilemma.
The last paragraph states that New Orleans was a model for “smart growth”, but that quality “proved to be its downfall.” However, there were (and are) other alternatives that could improve the evacuation system without abandoning a project that is so lucrative for the city and those that live there.
You’re mixing two issues here. The first (whether any given transit system is the best choice for a city) is a fair discussion. The second – that having mass transit is a problem because people can’t drive out in the case of emergencies – is silly to the point of being offensive.
If money spent on transit had been spent to give everyone in New Orleans a car, you would have had… something near gridlock in much of the city, massive parking problems, and a generally unpleasant, non-user-friendly urban environment.
And of course I haven’t heard anyone opposed to mass transit suggesting spending government money to buy cars, insurance, gas, and car maintenance allowances for the poor, so it’s really a moot point.
Least of all the Thoreau Institue, which describes itself this way: “Inspired both by Henry David Thoreau’s love of the natural world and his dislike of big government, the Thoreau Institute seeks ways to protect the environment without regulation, bureaucracy, or central control.”
John, I think you are missing Mr. O’Toole’s main point. He notes in the article that he does not advocate buying an automobile for everyone in New Orleans who could not afford one. Rather, his main point is that the people who need mass transit the most were bypassed by the New Orleans mass transit system, which was built primarily to accomodate tourists and the leisure community. As a result, when the people who needed the transit system really needed it — i.e., during an evacuation — the system was not in a position that it could accomodate them. Thus, it’s a fair question to ask whether these folks got a fair return out of the civic investment in the transit system.
As an aside, you undermine the substance of your argument when you attempt to buttress it by ad hominem attacks on Mr. O’Toole’s organization.
I think that the mistake you make is thinking of the streetcar as a “mass transit system”. It is no more a mass transit system than an elevator at a shopping mall, and it serves the exact same purpose.
Tom,
There’s two points here that I don’t see how you connect … the case of New Orleans targetting mass transit to the tourist/leisure set versus our own case (thus far, at least) of aiming it at commuters headed to high-density areas.
That last sentence of yours seems to muddle the two points. As I read your narration of the original article, I see a stark difference between our mass transit and that described as New Orlean’s case. Wouldn’t that mean that Metro’s been doing pretty much the right thing, by and large? I mean, a one-line light rail setup is certainly incomplete, to say the least, but at least it connects several important parts of town in case it’s needed for emergency situations (at least till it’s flooded). And to add to that, I have to claim complete confusion over the first part of that last sentence: “If a part of Metro’s long-term strategy is to make certain segments of Houston’s population less ‘automobile-dependent’….” Based on what anecdotal experience I can claim as my own, Metro is reaching out to those communities that are “automobile-absentia” rather than creating some new diaspora of people thinking “Ya know, what with all these busses and trains around me, I have no need for a car.” This is, after all, still Houston. Put another way, I have yet to meet someone who’s foregone a car based on our “wonderous” transit system (yes, I’m using that phrase sarcastically … and, unfortunately, as a heavy user of Metro).
Furthermore, there’s still the incomplete prescription on what to do for those who cannot afford cars. To that end, this post smacks a bit of Thomas Franks’ “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” Am I the only one here with any faith in Sam Popkin’s “Reasoning Voter”?
As I said, the question of whether New Orleans’ investments in transit were good ones is a fair one. However, he goes on to explicitly make the argument that transit is, itself, dangerous because of the issue of evacuating non-auto-owning residents. That’s quite a leap.
I don’t think I made an ad hominen attack on the organization. i think it’s fair to point out that someone from an organization that explicitly opposed government activity while arguing that transit money should have been used to help people get cars is being rather disingenuous.
The problem in New Orleans could have been handled by a good evacuation plan for non-car-owning residents, and timely response afterwards. That’s a much cheaper – and less intrusive – approach than the article seems to be advocating.
versus our own case (thus far, at least) of aiming it at commuters headed to high-density areas.
That’s just not what the light rail here does. It has nothing to do with commuter solutions.
And because of the financial problems it’s caused (including METRO taking on debt for the first time in its history), there have been cuts in bus service that serve the poorer communities to which Tom refers.
If we as a city want the “gee whiz” factor of having rail to boost development in certain corridors and trying to attract people who look a lot like the relatively affluent types who post and comment on blogs *smile* fine. Bully for us!
But let’s not call it commuter rail. That’s delusional. And let’s not pretend it’s helping the less affluent. That’s delusional too.
Some facts: In the entire 20th century, about 15,550 people have died in hurricanes in the U.S. In just one year, around 50,000 people die in automobile accidents in the U.S. And your conclusion is that we buy more cars to protect all of those vulnerable coastal areas? Is this a joke? If this country had reliable intercity transit, that would have been a much more effective way to evacuate people from New Orleans. And I havenít even mentioned Houstonís own schlerotic, car-choked evacuation.