WHERE SHOULD WE GO WITH PUBLIC TRANSIT?

Look First at the Cost

The Important Questions

In general, even those who don’t use public transit are fans of it.  They support the many bond issues and other taxation required to provide it, thinking that this benefits them by taking cars off the road and that it is also good for the environment.  But what transit options are actually the best to solve the local problems?  What will people want and use? What is the cost of all this?  Is our state or locality actually analyzing the situation correctly and providing the most flexible, affordable options?

While the examples come from the SF Bay Area, these bad ideas are coming to your city too, all to “solve climate change” (or whatever they are calling it today).

The First Example

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) started as an idea long before most of us heard about it. Decades of wrangling about it resulted in higher and higher costs.  The board decided to use innovative tracks and cars (which meant no other equipment could ever use the tracks) and we got to see the first train car in El Cerrito in 1970.

The initial promise to us, (remember:  I was there), was that there would be such frequent cars that no one would ever have to stand, they would be comfortable and safe, and that fares would be reasonable for even lower paid workers.  None of this ever really happened.  One big cost barrier was the purported need for drivers.  The system, run on a pretty basic computer, resembled Disney cars and the trams that take you from one terminal to another at an airport.  However, the union for bus drivers forced an expensive compromise: drivers would man every train and be well-paid for that job. Even then, the salaries were much higher than bus drivers, despite the lack of skill required.  Station agents unable or unwilling to help customers appeared.  The computer system was costly, but didn’t actually work well, requiring long gaps between trains.  The trains themselves had a number of problems, including sticking doors.  The unhelpful drivers mostly just forced people off the cars rather than locking the uncooperative door.

Today, BART is dirty, unsafe and expensive. 

The Two Current Proposals

The California High-Speed Rail Authority was established in 1996 after decades of advocacy for building a high-speed rail system in California. The voters approved Proposition 1A in 2008 and federal funds followed.  Ground broke in 2015.  You can just imagine the cost to get to this point and the inflation that made the funds insufficient.  An over-priced, short initial train segment was built in the Central Valley, connecting two points no one cared about.  Huge costs are required to extend this track to SF and LA, not the least of which is land acquisition to build the tracks and stations.  To make anyone use it, it has to cost less than taking Southwest.  The incredible cost will be shuffled onto taxpayers who are still trying to pay off the initial bond.  And who will use it as it will be too expensive?  For those who are concerned, the land seized will most likely be the land lived on by the poorest people, as usual.

Now, the Bay Area has decided to follow suit with Link21, a way of interlinking, (expensively), the various existing transit system and building a 2^nd TransBay tube.  The demand projections come from 2015, which had a very different ridership profile than we have today, and include projections of ridership that make no sense in a time of increasing work-from-home.  The cost will be astronomical and the construction will foul roadways, cause pollution and never really will make a difference to commute times for most.

Once you get any government program going, it is hard to stop it and harder still to keep it from growing, like a cancer.  Any business in the shape BART or the High-Speed Rail project are in would be cancelled.  I’d like to see BART privatized and the HSR cancelled.  Most important, get rid of ALL the employees and their out-of-control unions.

The Why?

Given the high salaries, benefits and guarantees of long-term employment for government employees, it isn’t surprising that other government employees seek to create new, make-work projects to hire their friends.  Spending money you don’t have is the heart of government programs.  And unlike businesses, they never have to pencil out. 

What Would Be Better?

When the Chicago Transit Authority had problems and demanded more money, a bunch of suburban commuters took their SUVs out and started a private commute service.  The success of it in the short term caused the CTA to rethink their plans; they were losing too many riders.  In fact, throughout history, most transit was privately developed and funded. It’s only recently that governments have taken this authority away and given the many business failures of our various governments, it’s not surprising they can’t do transit. We should look to the private option first to control costs, control scope creep and ensure an affordable, useful end result.

While major transit projects can work well for heavy commute corridors, they don’t work at all when connecting lower-demand communities.  And yet, people would often like, (or may have to), use public transit to commute.  The answer is:  the bus.  Bus schedules and routes can easily be altered to fit new demand.  The cost of buses and drivers is lower than having to build infrastructure for new types of transit.  It’s flexible and affordable.  Sure, it’s nice to have a cushy seat for your commute, but if communities charged the actual cost of that train seat, no one would opt for it.

We now have natural gas and electric buses that avoid that “poisonous” product – petroleum fuel.  In the future, clean, easy to charge hydrogen buses will be even better.  They can come in all sizes to meet varying demands.  The last-mile problem – getting to a bus or train – can be met with smaller vehicles, like the shuttles that take you to a rental car. 

There’s a way to make getting to work, appointments and errands much easier.  But it’s not what the government wants.  Buses just aren’t as sexy as high-speed rail.  When you vote for bond issues and taxes, remember…they will NEVER go away. Let’s put our money on buses.

“A reason to think about public policy in economic terms is that human beings have unlimited wants but only limited resources with which to meet these wants.

This means there must be tradeoffs: Resources applied to one set of wants are not available to satisfy alternative desires.”