Tory Gattis over at Houston Strategies continues to do a great job of analyzing Houston Metro’s proposed Richmond (or is that Westpark?) rail line (see here and here). However, I continue to be amazed by the Houston mainstream media’s myopia in failing to take a look at the rail experience of Los Angeles, an area that shares many characteristics with the Houston metro area, but is much more densely-populated, which is normally a requirement for making an urban rail line successful.
That myopia is leading to a dangerous dynamic in the rail transit debate that USC urban economics professor Peter Gordon notes in commenting on this LA Times story regarding extension of the LA region’s rail system. Professor Gordon observes that, despite irrefutable evidence that the LA rail system has been a boondoggle of massive proportions, the LA Times article does not even bother to address the threshold issue of whether more money should be dumped into the black hole rail transit system in the first place. Rather, the article assumes that the money will be spent and then simply addresses the issue of where it will go. Professor Gordon notes the incongruity of it all:

Three light-rail lines have been added to L.A. county’s transit system in the last 20 years. Together, these cost $2.5 billion in capital costs, they serve about 125,000 passengers per day and account for a fiscal loss of approximately $252 million per year — if one acknowledges that capital costs are real, something that transit operators and boosters often neglect.
If one wants to believe that there are external benefits, a variety of optimistic assumptions on auto trips replaced, cuts the loss to “only” $245 million/year. These are simple spreadsheet calculations that anyone can do. Further, no one alleges that the three lines have had any impact on L.A. area traffic conditions. In fact, complaints about “gridlock” are a staple — and the pricing cure is still deemed too esoteric and/or sinister. In fact, there are no correlations known to man or woman to show that projects like this relieve traffic.
None of these simple facts made it into [the LA Times article] . . . Billions of dollars are at stake and a know-nothing debate is respectfully cited — when it is simply about which part of town and which politician gets first run at the trough.

The recent LA Time article follows another one from a couple of months ago that declares that “California’s highways, once the gold standard of the interstate system, are today some of the busiest, most dilapidated and under-financed roads in the country.” That article then goes on to describe the failing highway system without even mentioning the fact that diversion of billions from that formerly great highway system to an unsuccessful rail transit system largely explains the mess.
As noted here and here over a year ago, Houston is at the stage of spending “merely” hundreds of millions on its dubious light rail system, but we can already see the same dynamic developing here that has been so costly for the Los Angeles region — huge investment of public funds in an inflexible rail transit system, poor return on that investment, unwillingness to admit mistakes with regard to that investment and continuation of expensive mass transit policies that only get worse over time. Here’s hoping that a few statesmen emerge among City of Houston elected officials who take a look at the evidence from the LA experiment and move the Metropolitan Transit Authority toward a more realistic and productive public transit system that is tailored for the Houston metro area. However, given the typical quality of the City of Houston’s investment decisions, count me as pessimistic that any such re-evaluation will occur.