Romanticizing boondoggles

metrocar020107.jpgThis recent NY Times article caught my attention because it extols the virtues of Portland, Oregon’s pretty new Aerial Tram mass transit project despite the fact that it’s quite expensive relative to the number of folks who will regularly use it. These fatuous media reports that ignore the dubious underlying economics of such projects are a consistent element of urban boondoggles.
Turns out that some other folks noticed the Times story, too. Wendell Cox wrote the following letter to the NY Times editor about the article:

Re: City that Loves Mass Transit Looks to the Sky for More (January 28)
Now The New York Times has been taken in by the Portland transit hype. The ìcity that loves mass transitî shows it by not using riding very much. Today, the share of workers using transit to get to work is less than before the first light rail line was built. Today, little more than two percent of travel in the Portland area is on transit and 98 percent of motorized travel is by car. That is really not much different than automobile champion Kansas City, where the figure is above 99.5 percent. The kind of cheerleading in this article may warm the hearts of urban elites, but only serves to muddle and mislead.

Meanwhile, Houston’s own urban policy wonk — Tory Gattis — provides a balanced analysis of the Portland mass transit system in this post about a recent lecture that he attended by a fellow who was instrumental in the planning of the Portland system. The NY Times report on the Portland system reads like an advertisement in comparison to Tory’s post.

5 thoughts on “Romanticizing boondoggles

  1. Tom:
    I know nothing of the specifics of this project, but there is a consistent theme to your comments on mass transit in general and rail in particular that misconstrues the goal. You seem to measure transit success by how many people driving cars suddenly stop and begin riding rail. That can certainly be on aim of a rail transit project. However, the other legitimate aim is not too accommodate current commuters, but rather to allow future growth without burdening existing infrastructure. You treat it as irrational to build a rail line where no one lives. However, if the goal is to incent people to move there and adopt a lifestyle that involves rail transit, then it may not be irrational. You also adopt a very short time frame for evaluation of the success or failure of a project when the true measure may be in generational terms. Many rail projects are poorly conceived and executed, including Houston’s. However, I think you oversimplify the analysis.

  2. Jim, a mass transit plan should be just that — a transit plan that meets the needs of the members of the community who need or prefer to use mass transit. Once they are used as quasi-urban renewal projects such as the one you suggest, the risk of expensive boondoggling increases substantially. Government is a manifestly poor investment banker when it comes to development of urban areas.

  3. Hi, Tom.
    I’m from Portland and can say this article is not written by someone from here. The tram is/was hugely unpopular here for many reasons. One of which of course is the local city government’s extreme mishandling of its development. Despite being hugely over budget, all that resulted was finger pointing.
    In my opinion, mass transit will really catch on only when it’s easier to use than one’s automobile. In Portland, that’s rarely true as it does not easily serve the vast majority of destinations unlike, say, the one in DC.

  4. Tom:
    If a project facilitates future growth without burdening already overburdened transportation infrastructure it is not an urban renewal project, but rather urban planning. I am a Chicago school free market enthusiast. However, infrastructure is not a good and service that markets handle well on the whole. Providing a community a manner in which to grow – the specifics of such growth dictated by market mechanisms – is not whimsical urban renewal. Government deciding to construct a toll road or new highway is no more market driven than choosing to build a rail line. The mass transit option is designed to allow much higher density – thus much greater growth – with greater efficiency. It all falls apart when the goals get confused. When mass transit is built with a goal of displacing existing transport – it fails. When it is built to facilitate future growth – market driven growth funded by private investment, then it has a chance to suceed. The Houston method you seem to prefer is allow developemnt to occur and then build infrastructure to serve it. The answer that dictates is sprawl and low density. You may like it. I am conservative and not an “urban elitist”, yet I like planning when it comes to inherently public goods and services. I find counter to most of your commentary that you are closed minded and resort to name calling on this issue.

  5. Jim, there is nothing inherently wrong with a community choosing to have a rail system to spur density, but most communities that do so (such as Portland, for example) underestimate the high costs of their decision — high-cost housing, many urban dwellers forced to rent most or all of their lives, middle class flight to other areas where home ownership is affordable, traffic congestion and parking nightmares, heavy development and transit subsidies, growth shifting to the suburbs, etc. The problem with the Houston system — which I do not support — is that it is imposing a system that would work in a high-density area on one of the least dense metro areas in the U.S.
    As for your observation that I am “closed minded and resort to name calling on this issue,” what are you talking about? I don’t recall calling anyone a name on this issue.

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