MASS TRANSIT'S PERSISTENT ALLURE DIFFICULT TO FATHOM

Saturday, August 10, 2002

Despite the subsidies lavished on it, and a modest growth in ridership, mass transit is steadily losing ground to automobile travel, which is growing much faster.

Randal O'Toole, author of The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths -- so you know where he's coming from -- summarizes the failure of transit to make gains at the expense of the automobile in a recent issue of the Environment and Climate News, published by the Heartland Institute ``for common-sense environmentalists,'' which is not necessarily an oxymoron.

Transit agencies reported 9.4 billion trips in 2000, more than in any year since 1960, and a 6.8 percent increase since 1990. Transit miles increased 16 percent to 47.7 billion miles.

But in the same period, urban vehicle miles increased by 30.6 percent to 1,665 billion miles (that's 1.665 trillion) and rural vehicle travel to 1,085 billion miles, up 24.9 percent. And that's not counting a trillion ton-miles of freight.

Why is that? Because cars go where you want to go and transit goes where planners put it.

Some people might look down on mass transit, whether bus or rail, but I grew up near New York and think buses and subways and trains are perfectly suitable ways to get somewhere -- in principle. I live and work close enough to light rail to walk easily to the station, and buses run right by my corner. But in five years, I've only taken light rail once -- and because I had to wait so long to change trains, I could have gotten where I was going quicker if I'd walked.

The 2000 census surveys showed 6,067,700 people taking public transit to work, actually 1,900 fewer than in 1990, O'Toole says. Since the number of commuters rose from 115 million to 128 million in the same time, transit is attracting a smaller share than it did. ``Any growth in transit ridership must be noncommuter traffic,'' O'Toole notes, ``which means it isn't doing much to relieve rush-hour congestion.''

In just six big metropolitan cities -- Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. -- does transit claim more than 8 percent of commuter travel, and they account for two-thirds of all transit passenger miles. And in all but San Francisco, transit's share is falling. Even in New York it's now less than a quarter. You still have to be crazy or insanely rich to expect to be able to park in Manhattan, but the other four boroughs are not much less car-dependent than less densely populated cities. Transit's share of commuter travel in Denver is 4.3 percent, essentially unchanged since 1990.

It's true that trips on Denver's light-rail system have exceeded projections since the southwest line along Santa Fe opened in 2000. But the crucial question is, compared with what? By O'Toole's figures, auto passenger miles grew 39 times faster than transit passenger miles from 1993 to 2000. In Phoenix, the ratio was 223 and even in transit-obsessed Portland, Ore., it was 22.

A shortage of money is not the problem. In the 1990s, capital spending on transit was $70 billion, and operating expenses were $186 billion.

Only $72 billion came back in fare revenue.

Conventional wisdom has it that subsidies to highways are much larger than transit subsidies, but O'Toole argues that isn't true. For 2000, governments at all levels collected $101.5 billion in gas taxes, vehicle taxes and tolls while spending $123.9 billion (capital and operating expenses combined) for a net subsidy of $22.4 billion. For transit, total revenues were $8.7 billion and spending $32.2 billion, for a net subsidy of $23.5 billion.

But because the number of highway passenger miles is vastly greater, the total cost per highway passenger mile is 2.8 cents, for a subsidy of 0.5 cents, while for transit the cost per passenger mile is 67.5 cents and the subsidy 49.2 cents. Light rail, in particular, costs 136.5 cents a passenger mile -- though that is in part because many light rail lines are new and capital expenses are high.

Another measure of how efficiently different kinds of travel operate is to calculate the number of daily passenger miles per ``directional route mile,'' that is, one mile in one direction. A freeway lane mile in a large urban area carries an average of 26,334 passenger miles a day -- 37,000 in Los Angeles. Heavy rail, averaging 24,617 passenger miles a day, is close to that -- though of course heavy rail is used for commuter traffic only in places with a potentially large number of commuters, such as Long Island. Light rail carries an average 4,428.

Given the numbers, the persistent allure of mass transit is difficult to fathom. For Manhattan straphangers, it might make sense. But just about everywhere else it's a pipe dream.