Reason Magazine - Topics > Transportation

Obama's Job Fetish

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Despite all the facile comparisons between the current economic situation and the conditions that preceded the Great Depression, the most recent figures show GDP continuing to grow, with unemployment at a historically modest 6.1 percent. But if, as widely expected, Barack Obama faces a recession when he takes office in January, many Americans will expect him to deliver on his promise to "create jobs."

They probably will be disappointed, because Obama seems to view job creation not only as something the government does with taxpayers' money but as an end in itself. That's a recipe for wasteful spending that will divert resources from more productive uses and ultimately result in lower employment than would otherwise occur.

Obama says he will "transform the challenge of global climate change into an opportunity to create 5 million new green jobs," which he likens to the economic activity triggered by the personal computer. This way of looking at climate change is a variation on the broken window fallacy, according to which the loss caused by a smashed window is offset by the employment it gives the glazier.

By the same logic, Obama should view war, crime, and hurricanes as opportunities to create jobs. All three generate economic activity, but we'd be better off if the resources spent on bombs, burglar alarms, and reconstruction were available for other purposes, instead of being used to inflict, prevent, or recover from losses.

Likewise, overhauling manufacturing, transportation, and power production to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide may or may not be justified, but it is properly viewed as a drag on the economy. We'd be better off if we didn't have to worry about, and use resources to minimize, climate change.

Obama wants to spend $150 billion on "developing and deploying advanced energy technologies, including solar, wind and clean coal." He says this plan "will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, decrease our dependence on foreign oil and create jobs that can't be outsourced."

Leaving aside the desirability of "energy independence" and the merits of Obama's approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions (which has the government, rather than businesses, picking the most efficient methods), the fact that he lists "jobs that can't be outsourced" as a distinct goal is troubling. Paying people to dig holes and fill them in again also creates "jobs that can't be outsourced," but that doesn't mean it's a smart investment or an appropriate use of taxpayers' money.

Speaking of digging holes, Obama also wants to spend $60 billion to "provide financing to transportation infrastructure projects across the nation." He says "these projects will create up to two million new direct and indirect jobs and stimulate approximately $35 billion per year in new economic activity."

Fixing a bridge, widening a highway, or building a light rail system may or may not make economic sense. But the fact that it involves paying people to operate jackhammers and pour concrete does not make it any more worthwhile. If creating jobs and stimulating "new economic activity" can justify transportation projects, why not fill the country with empty airports and bridges to nowhere?

Obama also sees regulation as an engine of economic growth. He says requiring that "25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025...has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs." Even if true, that projection tells us nothing about the advisability of such a mandate. If the government required that 25 percent of cars be replaced by horse-drawn carriages, that also would create certain jobs, while destroying or forestalling others.

Obama's job fetish is apparent even when he talks about spontaneous economic activity. "Businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs," he declared in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. In a free market, businesses exist because they provide goods or services that people value. A business that makes job creation its overriding goal will not be employing anyone for long.

California is Headed for a Real Fiscal Train Wreck

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

With credit markets in New York in crisis last week, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sent an extraordinary letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asking for $7 billion. Although the governor has since withdrawn that request, it testifies to the dire state of his budget.

Yet days before penning his note, the governor told an audience at the Commonwealth Club of California not to worry about the state's budget crunch and to approve $9.95 billion in new debt on the November ballot to build a bullet train to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco: "Just because we have a problem with the budget does not mean people should vote 'no' on high-speed rail." (A spokeswoman confirmed Monday that, despite the request for federal money, the governor still supports the initiative.)

Actually, the state's budget woes should give votes pause—especially since high-speed rail is a fantasy that has as much chance of delivering on its promises of creating 450,000 jobs, vanquishing road congestion and lowering greenhouse gases as "Conan the Barbarian" had of winning the Oscar.

The Golden State's finances are a mess. California's general obligation debt has tripled in the past six years and is now almost equal to the state's $145 billion annual budget. Even without any new loans, in three years the state will spend a record 6.1% of its budget just to service the debt it already has. What's more, with the economic slowdown, the state is now expecting a deficit larger than $1.1 billion for the first three months of this fiscal year. The state's rainy-day fund is running dry, which has hurt its credit rating.

Under such circumstances, the prudent course would be to avoid taking on new debt, even for worthwhile projects, much less sure-shot losers such as the high-speed rail. But in California, prudence is in short supply.

With the governor's support, rail backers in the "Transportation and Land Use Coalition" want to make the Golden State the bullet-train beacon for the rest of the country. Proposition 1A, the bond initiative, represents the first phase of their plan that, once fully in place by 2030, will run high-speed rail from northern San Francisco to southern San Diego, connecting a string of cities in between. What's more, voters are being told after the initial $9.95 billion the project will not need another dime of state funding.

The California High Speed Rail Authority, the state agency overseeing the project, maintains that the Los Angeles to San Francisco line will be so lucrative that it will generate enough revenue to pay for its own operating costs, as well as much of the remaining network, with private investors and Uncle Sam making up the difference.

But there is little reason to believe such cost or revenue projections. The Rail Authority admitted recently that the new estimate of $45 billon is 50% above the original 1999 estimate of $30 billion and more than double what California needs to update and expand existing rails and roads, according to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

An analysis by the Reason Foundation has found that even this figure understates the final price tag by about $30 billion because the Authority has not fully taken into account the added expense of building in the world's most active geological zone and erecting sound walls to abate noise and other nuisances. This is not surprising since political authorities habitually underestimate the cost of megaprojects. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish researcher who analyzed 258 infrastructure projects around the world, reports in his book Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge University Press, 2003) that rail projects on average cost 45% more than originally advertised.

Another rosy assessment comes in estimates of annual ridership. The Rail Authority says the trains will carry 65 million riders each year. But the Reason Foundation's study gives a much lower estimate—23 million riders annually—after looking at Japan and France, which have the world's strongest markets for rail. Neither country has achieved the kind of ridership California is predicting and both countries have far higher population densities in the cities served by their bullet trains than Los Angeles and San Francisco.

To attract riders, California's rail will have to out-compete cars and airplanes by keeping a lid on commute times and fares. To keep commutes short, the state legislature has put statutory limits on travel times. The Los Angeles-San Francisco commute, for instance, is legally required to come under two hours and 42 minutes. This is probably impossible because it would mean that the train will have to post average (not potential) speeds of 200 miles per hour, something that has not been achieved anywhere in the world, even in places whose flat topography allows for far straighter routes.

And as for fares, the Rail Authority is promising a $70 ticket between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This is about half of Japan's Tokyo-Osaka ($135) and France's Paris-Marseille ($140) train and far less than the $172 Amtrak charges riders traveling between New York and Washington—all of which are shorter and, with the exception of Japan, heavily subsidized.

It seems that California is promising to build a train that is faster, cheaper, more efficient, and serves more riders than any high-speed train in the world. And all it has to do to pull off this miracle is defy the laws of economics and physics.

This is the kind of creative thinking possible only in the land of Hollywood, but odds are that eventually reality will sink in and California will have to abandon its rail just like Texas, Florida, and Southern California were previously forced to do with their far less ambitious proposals. Yet should it proceed, this rail will likely become a gigantic white elephant requiring vast amounts of taxpayer dollars.

Regardless of whether California voters green light this project, Uncle Sam should have no part of it—either directly by offering California matching rail grants as it is hoping or indirectly by approving any future requests for emergency cash. American taxpayers should not subsidize California's fiscal train wreck.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation. This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Fake Speed Bumps

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:09:00 EDT

Philadelphia, the home of founder and aphorist Ben Franklin, has taken an old cliché—"penny wise, pound foolish"—to a new level. The city doesn't want to spring for real speed bumps, so it's hoping fake ones will do the trick, despite hard evidence that they won't make any difference.

The faux bumps are flat pieces of plastic painted to look like small pyramids rising out of the road. Preliminary tests have shown that the fakes, which cost about $100 each, are effective only for a month or two before repeat drivers get used to the trick and resume speeding along. Undaunted, the city plans to install them on 60 to 90 streets.

Residents of the test areas didn't notice a change in the speed of traffic; nor did they slow their own driving. Richard Blomberg, a private contractor employed by Philadelphia to help conduct the study, argues that the "conspicuous effect" of the fake speed bumps will remind people that they should slow down. Never mind that statistically speaking, they aren't.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration first tested the fake speed bumps in Phoenix. Terry Sills, traffic coordinator at the Phoenix Police Department, doesn't understand Philadelphia's decision. "When people traversed the same roadway every day," he says, "they learned that the bumps weren't real."

I've Been Collecting Disability from the Long Island Rail Road, All the Live-Long Day...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:18:00 EDT

Alan Vanneman tips us toward this story of a different sort of government-funded bailout:

As former [Long Island Rail Road] workers were arriving to file new disability claims, investigators showed up and closed the office in Westbury, eventually carting out nine file boxes and five personal computers.
The raid came two days after The New York Times reported that nearly all career employees of the railroad—from 93 percent to 97 percent of retirees every year since 2000—retire early and soon after begin getting disability payments from the federal agency [the Railroad Retirement Board, which adminsters such claims]. The retirement board almost never turns down a claim, and since 2000 has paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars in disability checks to former Long Island Rail Road workers, The Times found.

More here.

♫ Freedom's just another word.../...fer takin' off yer shoes ♫

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:22:00 EDT

Last June, the TSA changed the name of its main hub in Herndon, Virginia to the "Freedom Center."

The new name was apparently chosen from an agency-wide competition.

Which means that in addition to being creepily and predictably Orwellian, the government agency in charge of preventing another terrorist attack in our country's transportation system also suffers from a disturbing lack of creativity.

My Other Bike is a Public Transportation System

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Gas prices are higher than Snoop Dogg at Mardi Gras. Tiny carbon footprints are the tongue piercings of the new millenium. Even diehard carburetor-huggers must get tired of the endless cruising it takes to find a parking space in the average American metropolis these days. Together, these forces create, if not the perfect storm, then at least a pretty strong tailwind: There has never been a better time to be a bicycle advocate.

So how are the nation's pedal pushers capitalizing on this propitious moment? Increasingly, by championing high-tech bike-sharing, that stylish European import that posits one-size-fits-some equipment, strict time limits on usage, and mandatory drop-off points as the best way to make cycling seem like a more viable mode of urban transit to people reluctant to abandon the convenience of their automobiles. Washington, D.C. has a shiny new bike-sharing system. Temporary bike-sharing programs at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis gave elected officials from both parties a convenient way to make their requisite green photos ops carbon neutral. San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are just a few of the major American cities contemplating bike-sharing systems of their own.

Paris is the inspiration for them all. In July 2007, it introduced a bike-sharing program called Velib. Compared to earlier bike-sharing efforts, which mostly consisted of making a fleet of low-end cruisers available to anybody who wanted to ride one around for an hour and then dump it in a lake, Velib is a more closely monitored system. The bikes are locked in automated, self-service docking stations around the city; to use one you must purchase a subscription and establish an account. Because Velib knows when you take out a bike and when you return it, and bills you accordingly, its bikes have been much less likely to end up in the Seine.

Funded by the advertising company JCDecaux NA in return for the right to sell ad space on bus shelters, the Velib system now includes over 20,000 bikes and 1,450 docking stations, with no more than 900 feet between one station and the next. It employs 400 people full-time, and users made 27.5 million trips during Velib's first year of operation. "We conceived of this as a public-transportation system, so it operates as one," JCDecaux NA president Bernard Parisot recently told Time magazine.

To the average alternative transportation professional, this sentiment must be pure rhetorical catnip. Private transportation, after all, is the enemy! It's selfish, inefficient, it's organized enough. To the average solo driver idling in his SUV, however, the idea that bikes represent a new kind of public transportation is no doubt less compelling. There's a reason he's idling in his SUV, and it's not because he's such a huge fan of buses, subway trains, streetcars, and ferries. With a car, he can go precisely where he wants to go. He can adjust his route on the fly. He may get stuck in traffic, he may be a slave to the parking gods, but even so, his SUV gives him a strong sense of autonomy.

A bike delivers a strong sense of autonomy, too—stronger even than a car in many ways. It doesn't, for example, require a license, registration, insurance. You aren't beholden to routes or schedules. You go where you want, when you want. Unless the bike you're riding is part of a bike-sharing program. Then your usage is more proscribed. Take, for example, SmartBike D.C., America's first high-tech bike-sharing program. Launched in August, and, like Velib, funded by an advertising company (Clear Channel Outdoor in this case) in return for the right to advertise on the city's bus shelters, the program currently consists of 120 bikes and ten docking stations, all of which are clustered within a relatively small radius downtown.

For a $40 annual fee, users get a smart card that allows them to unlock a bike from its docking station and start contributing to America's energy independence. For three hours, that is—if you keep a bike out longer than that, you may get banned from the program. You're also not allowed to ride outside city limits or between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when the program shuts down for the night. All in all, there are 13 clauses and 34 sub-clauses in the SmartBike user agreement. Can't you just feel the freedom and convenience of bike-sharing blowing against your face like a warm summer breeze?

Of course, in giving up some of the autonomy you'd enjoy if you simply rode your own bike, you get other significant benefits in return, right? Well, someday perhaps. One thing that makes bike-sharing programs attractive, in theory at least, is that the bikes aren't yours. Bike theft is rampant pretty much everywhere there are bikes, and secure places to lock your trusty steed, especially for hours at a time, are exceedingly rare.

Offloading the risk of theft to a bike-sharing program makes sense—but in the case of SmartBike D.C., there's only so much risk you can offload. When a bike is safely locked in a docking station, you aren't responsible for anything that happens to it. Unlike Paris, however, D.C.'s docking stations are far from ubiquitous and aren't likely to achieve that state any time soon. (And even in Paris, bike theft remains a problem. Approximately 3000 Velib bikes were stolen and another 3000 vandalized during the program's first year of operation—some Velib bikes have reportedly been spotted as far away as Casablanca.)

In the case of SmartBike, if you want to run an errand in a part of the city where there are no official docking stations—aka most parts of the city—you assume the liability when you lock up the bike. If someone steals it on your watch, you owe SmartBike $550. If someone vandalizes it, you owe SmartBike however much it decides to charge you for the necessary repairs.

In other words, it's like you own the bike, except you don't. You're not permitted to let someone else ride it. You're not permitted to put too much stuff in the front basket. (The baskets are for "light goods" only.) You aren't supposed to ride it in "inclement and dangerous weather." You have to return it to very specific places at very specific times. If something on your bike breaks while you're riding it, you aren't supposed to take it to the nearest bike shop or attempt to make the repair yourself. Instead, you have to call SmartBike's customer service line and wait for a repair person to respond to your request for help. At least when a bus breaks down, you can abandon ship and take destiny in your own hands.

Of course, SmartBike is still in its infancy. As it adds more docking stations, its rules and disclaimers will become less objectionable. But if a bike-sharing program's utility mostly lies in how much secure parking it offers—and it does—why bother with the bikes? And the sharing? Let users be responsible for obtaining their own bikes—that's the simple part of the solution. Let them enjoy the autonomy and flexibility that comes with ownership. Install enough reliably secure bike parking facilities around a city and the users will come, no perky commie three-speeds necessary. Without fleets of collectively shared vehicles, the bikes-are-public-transportation conceit fades, but is that really such a bad thing? For people reluctant to abandon the convenience and familiarity of their automobiles, "It's like a car, only better" is a much more persuasive proposition than "It's like a bus, only worse."

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

Can Rising Motorcycle Fatalities Be Blamed on a Lack of Helmet Laws?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:21:00 EDT

The number of fatal motorcycle accidents rose in 2007 for the 10th consecutive year, hitting 5,154, 7 percent higher than the 2006 total. Meanwhile, car fatalities fell by 8 percent and light truck fatalities fell by 3 percent, "pushing the overall death rate [for motor vehicle accidents] to a historic low," The New York Times reports. The share of motor vehicle deaths caused by motorcycle crashes has more than doubled since 1997, from 5 percent to 13 percent. Although advocates of helmet laws will be inclined to blame their repeal in several states for the rising motorcycle fatalities, the chief culprit recently seems to be higher gas prices, which have encouraged people to take advantage of motorcycles' vastly superior fuel efficiency:

Motorcycle ridership appears to be rising even as the total miles for all vehicles drops....The highway safety authorities say that about 75 percent more motorcycles are registered today than 10 years ago. They suspect each motorcycle is ridden more miles, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it does not have a reliable measurement of use.

The lack of such data makes it difficult to tell how much of an increase in fatalities following repeal of a helmet law results from less helmet wearing and how much results from more riding. The Times avers that "ridership has probably become more dangerous mile for mile," but without reliable information on miles ridden, it's impossible to know for sure. Assuming the Times is right, less helmet wearing is not the only explanation:

Safety officials say many of the [newer] riders are middle-age or older men who rode when they were young, gave it up as they raised children and have recently gone back to the bike. "They think they still have the same reflexes," said James Port, the safety agency's deputy administrator.

Motorcycle riding is inherently dangerous. While wearing a helmet reduces the risk of certain injuries, research suggests the overall impact on fatalities is modest. The unimpressive numbers are one reason motorcyclists have been so successful at defending their right to decide what, if anything, to wear on their heads. "We are the only industrialized country in the world where there is an organized effort to weaken or repeal motorcycle helmet laws," complains Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Is that a sign of backwardness or a point of pride?

The Reason Foundation's New Annual Privatization Report

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:48:00 EDT

The Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website and magazine, came out today with its 22nd Annual Privatization Report, the most comprehensive report on privatization developments you'll find anywhere. From our press release:

"Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell recently accepted a $12.8 billion bid to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in what would be the biggest toll road privatization deal in U.S. history," said Leonard Gilroy, director of government reform at Reason Foundation and author of the report. "Florida has undertaken over 150 outsourcing initiatives since 2005. Leaders of all political stripes recognize privatization is a proven policy tool that can help save money and balance budgets."
The Reason Foundation report singles out Chicago as a hotbed of local privatization under Democratic Mayor Richard Daley. Chicago leased the Skyway-a 7.8 mile toll road-for $1.8 billion in 2005 and four downtown parking garages for $563 million in 2006. Now Chicago is soliciting private sector bids for Midway Airport, its downtown parking meter system, and some recycling facilities.

You can read more about the report, and download the whole shebang, here.

Pimp my Turnpike

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:34:00 EDT

Stephen J. Dubner at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog posted this letter from a reader. It's chock full of suggestions for improving the New Jersey Turnpike, including the construction of a Milton Friedman "rest spa":

The citizens of New Jersey must decide how to manage a financial crisis that has resulted from both decades of wishful thinking and their leaders’ lack of political courage. A major source of anxiety is the future of the New Jersey Turnpike. Following are a few ideas for improving the finances of the Turnpike Authority, which may have escaped the notice of the planners.
1. Thorstein Veblen would instantly recognize New Jerseyans’ need to be conspicuous consumers. How else to explain the holiday mobs at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom? The Turnpike already comprises both car and truck lanes north- and south-bound between exits 8A and 18. Why not convert the car lanes to first class? The surcharge will provide the same function as toll roads in Texas and Colorado (and alas! the late Concorde) that provide faster travel options for those who … er, think it’s worth it. And we can do it with minimal adverse travel impact by adding an EZ-Pass Express receiver at the entrances to the first class lanes. If traffic gets bad in steerage, then presto! More people will pay the surcharge. And if that is successful, maybe we can attract Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse to the first class service areas, I mean spas. We can name the first one after Milton Friedman (BA, Rutgers U., 1932)....

reason founder Robert Poole wrote about an America without toll booths here.

Nashville to Lebanon Rail Line Fails. Lebanon War to Blame?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:38:00 EDT

Mass transit continues to prove itself to be expensive, unpopular, and unprofitable--even when it "debuted as the least expensive commuter rail to be built in the United States" and when high gas prices are in the headlines every day.

Tenessee's Music City Star line is completely dysfunctional. Transiteers were shocked to discover that insurance, station security, and marketing cost money (who could have known!?). The inevitable $1.7 million shortfall resulted.

The Feds, who contributed some big bucks to the project, aren't pleased. When even the federal government wants its money back, you know things are bad:

The Federal Transit Administration, which invested more than $30 million in the 2006 start-up of the Lebanon-to-Nashville commuter line, would demand its money back from the Regional Transportation Authority and the return of all assets if the Music City Star were to stop running, it wrote in a letter to local authorities this week.

Note: That's Lebanon, Tennessee. Sadly, there is still no Orient Express originating in Nashville. The line was launched in 2006, however, about the same time as the Israel-Lebanon War. Coincidence?

How spectacular is the failure?:

In the first year, ridership fell considerably short of consultant projections of 1,479 daily trips. It's now averaging about half that number and recorded 938 trips on its best single day.

Via alert reader Jason Bates

DWI for Walking a Bicycle

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:23:00 EDT

Jeff Brown of Columbus, Ohio was arrested for DWI, spent four days in jail, and had his license suspended for six months when he refused to take a breath test after an officer confronted him on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Brown was walking his bicycle across his own front yard. Brown has since made a YouTube video detailing his ordeal.

Via Lawrence Taylor, who notes that in 2005, a woman in Florida was arrested for DWI for operating her own wheelchair while intoxicated. That case, fortunately, was thrown out.

MORE: The appellate court decision describes the facts of the case this way:

The record contains scant details of the underlying facts of this case, but it appears appellant was riding a bicycle on a sidewalk on December 18, 2004, when he was detained by a police officer.

Make of that what you will.

Motorcycle Helmet Laws Save Lives, but Not Very Many

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:09:00 EDT

A new study reported in the American Journal of Public Health finds that the repeal of motorcycle helmet requirements for adults has been associated with an increase in motorcycle fatalities, beyond the general increase that has been seen throughout the country in the last decade or so. Although the researchers argue that their study reinforces the case for universal helmet laws, the impact they found looks pretty modest:

On average, when compared to state experience with no helmet mandate, universal helmet laws were associated with an 11.1% reduction in motorcyclist fatality rates, whereas rates in states with partial coverage statutes [applying only to riders younger than 21] were not statistically different from those with no helmet law. Furthermore, in the states in which recent repeals of universal coverage have been instituted, the motorcyclist fatality rate increased by an average of 12.2% over what would have been expected had universal coverage been maintained. Since 1997, an additional 615 motorcyclist fatalities have occurred in these states as a result of these changes in motorcycle helmet laws.

In terms of fatalities prevented each year, the effect estimated by this study is not very impressive. In 2004, for example, "an estimated 135 (or 5.8%) fewer fatalities would have occurred" in the 31 states without universal helmet laws had those states forced adult motorcyclists to wear head protection. That's just a handful of fatalities per state each year.

Previous research has indicated that helmet laws do substantially increase the percentage of motorcyclists who wear helmets. The fatality numbers probably are so small for two main reasons. First, riding a motorcycle, while much more dangerous than driving a car, is also much less common, so there are only 4,300 or so total motorcycle fatalities each year, one-tenth of all road fatalities. Second, helmets are only partly effective at preventing deaths: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that in the event of a crash they cut the chances of a fatality by about 35 percent (compared to a 60 percent reduction for motorists who wear seat belts).

Even the undramatic results of this study may overestimate the impact of helmet laws. To the researchers' credit, instead of doing a simple before-and-after comparison in a single state or a few states, they looked at accident data from all 50 states and D.C. for 1975 through 2004. They took into account the general upward trend in motorcycle deaths since 1996 and several potential confounding variables, including other traffic-related laws, weather patterns, alcohol consumption, population density, and the age breakdown of each state's population. But since the outcome measure they used was fatalities per 10,000 registered motorcycles, they did not take into account miles traveled. That could matter if motorcyclists who hate helmets start riding more often or longer distances once they are no longer required to wear them. In that case, some of the increase in deaths could be due to an increase in miles traveled. Another possible factor: If people who stopped riding motorcycles because they were irked by a helmet requirement suddenly start riding them again once the requirement is repealed, the percentage of motorcyclists who are out of shape and out of practice might increase, which could independently raise the frequency of crashes.

Some anti-helmet-law activists argue that helmets, on balance, decrease motorcycle safety by making riders more reckless, making their heads heavier, or impairing their hearing, peripheral vision, and sensitivity to air pressure changes. There isn't much evidence to support that claim, and I have little doubt that helmet laws reduce fatalities to some extent. It just does not seem to be a very big effect, which is one reason opponents of these laws have been so successful at rolling them back and preventing legislators from reimposing them. In principle, the fatality numbers shouldn't matter: The right to ride without a helmet should not hinge on exactly how big the risk is. But practical politics is rarely about principle, a point illustrated by the contrast between helmet and seat belt laws that I drew in reason a few years ago.

Heirs of a Terror War, That's What We've Become...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:50:00 EST

Bush is once again trying to cut its budget to a mere $900 million (and will likely fail, like he did last year, when asking for that sum got him $1.3 billion appropriated by Congress), and while continuing its (sadly eternal) dying gasps, Amtrak makes the experience of riding the rails even more annoying:

Amtrak will start randomly screening passengers' carry-on bags this week in a new security push that includes officers with automatic weapons and bomb-sniffing dogs patrolling platforms and trains.
The initiative, to be announced by the railroad on Tuesday, is a significant shift for Amtrak. Unlike the airlines, it has had relatively little visible increase in security since the 2001 terrorist attacks, a distinction that has enabled it to attract passengers eager to avoid airport hassles.
Amtrak officials insist their new procedures won't hold up the flow of passengers.
"On-time performance is a key element of Amtrak service. We are fully mindful of that. This is not about train delays," Bill Rooney, the railroad's vice president for security strategy and special operations, told The Associated Press.

Peter Bagge cartoons wickedly on the Amtrak experience, from our Dec. 2005 issue.

"Personal Responsibility Underground"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:59:00 EST

The New York subway is (slowly) decentralizing and The New York Times editorial board is *gasp* in favor of a potential new system where "subway managers will compete to see which line is cleanest, most efficient and all-round best":

Over the last few decades New York City’s huge subway has become too centralized into a “large, unwieldy system.” The management is one big stovepipe — that is, everybody works for a few people at the top. For example, one person is now in charge of all 468 subway stations across the entire New York City area. So, when it takes more than two years for workers to mend a leak that creates dangerous, icy steps, nobody really gets blamed for it. If it works right,... subway riders will soon have a real live person to blame.

Life in the Slow Lane

info@reason.com (Robert Poole) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:38:00 EST

Americans are going to be driving on toll roads a lot more in the years ahead. One of the least pleasant experiences of this form of travel is the toll booth. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can, if we want, get rid of every toll booth and toll plaza in the country.

Technology is leading the way. First came windshield-mounted transponders, like the Northeast's E-ZPass, Florida's SunPass and California's FasTrak. Transponders were first introduced merely to speed up passage through toll booths. Then engineers figured out they worked fine at highway speeds, and that plazas could be eliminated for "open-road" tolling of vehicles with transponders. Only cash-payers, off to the side, would have to queue up. This transformation has been completed on the Illinois Tollway system and is under way on Florida's Turnpike and a number of others.

Engineers are now developing new toll roads from scratch that are entirely cashless. On the Melbourne CityLink in Australia and the new toll motorway system in Santiago, Chile, you either pay by transponder, or you call in and register your license-plate number for certain days when you plan to use the toll road. They bill you when their video cameras pick out your plate number.

And in Toronto, Canada, you can drive onto Highway 407 with no transponder and no reservation. They will simply video your license plate and send you a bill. The 407 has had this system since 1997. It is one of the world's most successful new toll roads.

Why do away with toll booths? No more delays, accidents and pollution caused by long lines of waiting cars. No more need for large swathes of land for toll plazas, making it possible to fit toll roads into tight corridors where congestion relief is needed. Lower payroll costs, no buildings and no cash "shrinkage" (i.e., theft) by collectors.

Today there are only a handful of no-cash toll roads in the U.S. The half-dozen high-occupancy toll lanes now operational in California, Colorado, Minnesota, Texas and Utah are all cashless, as they have to be to make use of market pricing, with toll rates changing to reflect periods of higher and lower demand. So is the recently built Westpark toll road in Houston and Tampa's new elevated express toll lanes on the crosstown expressway. Several new toll roads in Texas are being planned as cashless, and so are planned HOT lanes in northern Virginia, Miami, Dallas and elsewhere. But I've been able to identify only two existing toll-road systems that have made firm plans and set deadlines for getting rid of all toll booths: the North Texas Tollway Authority in Dallas and the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority.

Why isn't everybody doing this, since the technology works and has been proven overseas? There are legitimate concerns to be weighed. Unless the toll road already has high transponder market share, some fraction of cash customers may simply stop using the toll road if the cash option is eliminated. There are also real costs (staffing and technology) involved in video license-plate recognition and billing. And there is the problem of what to do with all the now-redundant toll collectors, especially if they are unionized.

It is not coincidental that the pioneers in cashless tolling have been investor-owned toll road companies: the 91 Express Lanes in California, Highway 407 in Toronto, the Cross-Israel Highway, the Melbourne CityLink and Santiago's toll motorways. All of these cashless toll roads were developed by private companies under long-term public-private concession agreements.

It is also not coincidental that the public-sector toll agencies in Florida and Texas going cashless are among the most businesslike and entrepreneurial, in a public-sector industry that has historically been very conservative and in some states highly politicized.

To a company whose business is offering its customers high-quality mobility (and to public toll agencies that think and operate like businesses), going cashless and boothless is a no-brainer. One of the very first actions taken by the companies that leased the Chicago Skyway in 2005 and the Indiana Toll Road in 2006 was to introduce electronic toll collection.

Elsewhere one can sense the first stirrings of change. In recent weeks, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and Denver's E-470 toll agency have all announced studies of going cashless. The new North Carolina Turnpike Authority is seriously considering developing its new toll roads without any toll booths or plazas.

I'm confident that the growing number of private-sector toll companies can be counted on to put their customers' interest first, by eliminating cash tolling. Since most U.S. toll roads are still operated by public-sector agencies, however, voters should demand that they phase out toll booths and toll plazas by a date certain -- a decade from now should be plenty of time.

Mr. Poole is director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation. An engineering graduate of MIT, he has advised the U.S. Department of Transportation and a number of state DOTs.

The rest of this column appeared in the Wall Street Journal, where you can read it now.

Tear Down the Toll Booths!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:30:00 EST

Reason Foundation founder Robert W. Poole argues for toll roads and against toll booths in the Wall Street Journal:

Americans are going to be driving on toll roads a lot more in the years ahead. One of the least pleasant experiences of this form of travel is the toll booth. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can, if we want, get rid of every toll booth and toll plaza in the country....
Why do away with toll booths? No more delays, accidents and pollution caused by long lines of waiting cars. No more need for large swathes of land for toll plazas, making it possible to fit toll roads into tight corridors where congestion relief is needed. Lower payroll costs, no buildings and no cash "shrinkage" (i.e., theft) by collectors.

The article is behind the subscriber wall, but this link ought to get you through to the whole thing.

More from Poole and Reason Foundation regarding transportation and other issues here.

Travis Shrugged

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:04:00 EDT

New York's cabbies go on strike to protest new city regulations:

Since Oct. 1, all yellow cabs have been required to carry an onboard GPS and credit-card machine, as well as a television on the back of the driver's seat that plays advertisements and short programs. The devices were required as part of a 2004 deal that increased fares by 25%.

According to [Taxi Workers Alliance chief Bhairavi] Desai, there are glitches with the GPS devices, which she said slow the meters and take minutes to load. The TVs heat up the driver's seat, and credit cards lead to a 5% surcharge for cabbies - problems she said the city has ignored.

[Via Roderick Long.]

Why Cities Decline, Case Study No. 1,223 (Idiotic Streetcar Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:25:00 EDT

Officials in Cincinnati, a city that's been in decline for decades (maybe a century), have finally hit on a way to pull re-enthrone the Queen City (a.k.a. Porkopolis) as urban royalty: Build a $100 million, 4-mile streetcar route with the money they don't have.

Yeah, that's the ticket. To rub salt in the wounds of taxpayers, officials are claiming that the project will add $2 billion to the city's economy and revitalize a long-unrevitalizable section of town.

Cincinnati today will unveil plans on how to pay for a four-mile, $100 million downtown streetcar line that advocates believe will contribute $2 billion to the city's economy and transform [the] Over-the-Rhine [section of town].
The plan's cheerleaders include politicians, transit activists and urban developers. So far, it seems to have no enemies, although that could change when the city explains where it will get the money to fund the plan.

More here. The project is a fantastic example of how city officials delude themselves into thinking that whipped cream and sprinkles--or a goddamn transit technology that is one of the most frustrating, underperfroming rides imaginable--can save cities. What is it about trains? Or light rail? Or streetcars? Is there a Freudian analysis that's relevant here?

Why won't cities such as Cincinnati do far more basic things to lure people back into their craptacular clutches? The list might include: Generally reducing taxes and regulation so that it's relatively cheap to live and easy to do business in an area; creating a safe climate with regards to crime; reforming a public school system so people who don't have kids (a majority pretty much everywhere) don't have to worry about school issues and people with kids have some decent measure of choice; not spending billions of dollars on the owners of jerk-off sports teams.

Somehow I don't think building a 4-mile streetcar from point Y to point Z is going to help.

Back in 2001, as Mr. Mxyzptlk at Suck, I wrote about Cincinnati's woes as a way of talking about the plight facing many other mid-sized (for now) cities.

Cincinnati's leaders (if you can call them that) are predictably holding up Portland, Oregon as a model. Here's Randal O'Toole in reason on why that is totally off-target. And here's Dan McGraw on why sports welfare is destructive of just about everything it touches, except the wallets of fatcats.

O'Toole (named after his father, perhaps [scroll down]), wrote a good piece for Cato cleverly titled "A Desire Named Streetcar."

Get Caught in Gridlock with Drew Carey at Reason.tv!

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 06:30:00 EDT

...

Waltz Across Texas

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:35:00 EDT

Not all the opposition to the Trans-Texas Corridor is coming from paranoid nationalists. From a Time story on the project:

David Langford, an activist for the Texas Wildlife Association, is organizing farmers and ranchers whose land could be cut in half or condemned by the Trans-Texas Corridor. An early plan for central Texas showed a corridor passing near the homestead Langford's family settled in 1851. With the state's new "quick claim" ability -- granted under TTC legislation -- his family homestead could be gone in 90 days, he says, transferred to private investors operating the corridor. Though he would be compensated financially, he's still steamed. "I can't believe Rick Perry's grandfather would want his house and ranch taken and turned over to Paris Hilton's family to build a hotel on one of these roads," he says.

Opponents argue the roads may require the seizure of "more than half a million acres of private property." Gov. Rick Perry's "Trans Texas Corridor Fact Sheet" doesn't mention a total -- it gets vague whenever the interesting criticisms come up -- but it does claim that the project "will ultimately result in the purchase [sic] of less public land than would otherwise be needed to keep up with growth, and all the needed land will be purchased during one process, instead of on a piecemeal basis as we need to build out infrastructure one project at a time." Apart from the moral issues involved in taking private property, this runs up against the possibility that a process of "piecemeal" evolution is less likely to grab giant chunks of land that aren't actually "needed."

One thing that isn't clear to me, as a fellow who hasn't lived in Texas for years and hasn't been following this story closely: How much is the state planning to spend on the corridor, and how much is coming from private sources? Perry's factsheet says that "The first segment of the corridor...will require no tax dollars up front for construction while ensuring a $7.2 billion private investment in the corridor." The phrases "first" and "up front" imply that Texas taxpayers will be paying money down the road, but somehow a document that can cite the exact amount a private company will be spending doesn't say how much the state plans to kick in.

Politicians Love Transit, Just Not For Themselves

info@reason.com (Ted Balaker) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:35:00 EDT

“You’ve got to use public transit,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared. “You can't keep on pointing to someone else and saying it's their responsibility.”

Imagine the credibility and public relations points Villaraigosa could have racked up uttering those words while commuting on a bus to City Hall. But instead of being the “eco-friendly transit-riding mayor” Villaraigosa rides an SUV to work.

Yet many Angelinos probably sympathize with the mayor. “Give me a first-rate transit system, and I’ll use it,” they might say. Until that system arrives, they support new transit proposals, like the $5 billion “subway to the sea,” while continuing to drive everywhere.

But what would it say about the practicality of mass transit if the mayor of the city with the nation’s best subway system also took an SUV to work?

After Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City, he invited reporters to follow him to work. The billionaire mayor didn’t slip into a limo—he piled into a subway car like a “regular Joe mayor.” Positive press gushed forth. Bloomberg was the real-deal, a green leader and blue-collar populist. One transit group dubbed him “the MetroCard Mayor.” Bloomberg bragged about taking transit, and urged others to follow.

Yet, after a five-week stakeout, New York Times reporters discovered that Bloomberg’s enthusiasm for transit has since fizzled. These days he only takes the subway to work about twice a week. That’s more transit travel than Villaraigosa, but not enough to meet the federal government’s definition of a transit commuter.

Even during transit days, Bloomberg doesn’t schlep to the nearest subway stop. Staffers drive him 22 blocks so he can hop aboard an express train, avoiding the hassle of making a transfer and shrinking his commute time by about a third. Avoiding transit is commonplace for those who run some of our nation’s other top-tier transit systems.

The Philadelphia Inquirer discovered that only four of 14 transit board members interviewed used that city’s system at least twice a week. And when asked by the Washington Post, only five out of 10 local transit board members said they rode their rail system even occasionally (two others refused to talk, so it’s probably safe to file them under “infrequent transit user”).

Villaraigosa’s actions make the obvious point that his words never would: Public transit doesn’t work for the vast majority of Angelinos, 95 percent of whom find another way to get to work. Still he and other public officials fuel a double fantasy.

First, they claim our existing public transit system is a better choice for motorists, at least those who aren’t serving as mayor.

Villaraigosa says he’d use transit more often, “But my problem is I have to go all over the city … It’s very tough because of my schedule.”

City Councilman Herb Wesson, a transportation committee member, says the same thing, "Given the type of work I do, it just doesn't work for me to take public transportation."

Don’t the rest of us also have busy schedules - jobs to get to, kids to pick up, and errands to run?

Why are we being urged to ditch our cars for a transit system that is ill-suited to serve city officials?

The second fantasy is that each new rail transit project represents a step toward building a New York-style transit system. New York’s subway system boasts 468 stations; LA’s 78 (if you generously count light rail stations too). The current piecemeal transit approach should get LA to New York’s level sometime in the middle of the next millennium, and the “build it all at once” strategy made fashionable by Denver is really just a replay of LA in 1980, when Prop A was supposed to fund 11 rail transit lines. What committing to rail really did was soak up funds that could have gone toward more sensible fixes: mainly improving and expanding bus service for the transit dependent poor

Bloomberg’s falling out with transit adds another disturbing wrinkle: Maybe even a system as extensive as New York’s couldn’t transform Villaraigosa into a transit-riding mayor. In Metro New York, 25 percent of commuters rely on transit, much more than LA’s 5 percent, but not in step with the popular view that “everyone” takes transit in New York.

Back when workers traveled in beelines from homes in the suburbs to offices in a city center, it was relatively easy to design successful transit systems. Today, old fixed-route systems don’t serve most travelers. Yet officials still prefer to fund snazzy rail lines over buses because for them transit’s primary use isn’t transportation but a backdrop for photo ops: Cut the ribbon, huddle around the others who fought for funding, smile, and then jump back into your SUV

Imagine how much transit might improve if public officials actually had to ride the systems they tout.

Ted Balaker is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation and author of The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think and What We Can Do About It (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). This column originally appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News.

Reducing Accidents By Removing Street Signs

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:17:00 EDT

Reader SPD points to a town in Germany that is taking a novel approach to reducing auto-related accidents: getting rid of all traffic signs.

The idea of removing signs to improve road safety, called "Shared Space," was developed by Dutch traffic specialist Hans Monderman, and is supported by the European Union.
The EU will cover half of the 1.2 million euros ($1.66 million) it will cost Bohmte to ditch its traffic lights.
Monderman's ideas have already been implemented in the town of Drachten in the north of the Netherlands, where all stop lights, traffic signs, pavements, and street markings have gone.
"It's been very successful there," Goedejohann said, adding that accidents in Drachten had been reduced significantly.

The area covered has about 13,500 car trips a day, plus pedestrians, etc. The theory apparently is that autos will need to be careful since they don't have the right of way. Or something. As a reflexive jaywalker, I applaud the experiment, even if it takes away the thrill of jaywalking.

More here.

Amtrak Boom Just One More Sign the Terrorists Have Won

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:00:00 EDT

The 9/11 attacks and rising fuel prices are just two more ways to say that there's something magic about a train!

Amtrak is proud to report, in the Wash Times' motion-sickness-inducing, pun-inflected gloss, that it "is chugging toward its fifth-straight record year for ridership nationwide....The money-losing service...says it is riding higher, illustrated by the hundreds of thousands of additional riders flocking to expanded routes in Illinois and California."

How big is the jump in ridership? In the fiscal year that ended last September, 24.3 million rode the service, setting a record for the fourth consecutive year; the odds look good that this fiscal year will set a fifth straight record.

But hey, Casey Jones, you better watch your speed. Trouble ahead, trouble behind:

The service has never been out of the red since its start in 1971, meaning it must rely on government handouts year after year.

In trying to hash out the federal budget for next year, Congress is weighing how much U.S. taxpayers should underwrite the passenger service. Amtrak has requested $1.53 billion, nearly twice the amount the Bush administration wants to give it. In the past, President Bush has proposed giving the service nothing.

The House Appropriations Committee recently agreed to boost Amtrak's federal funding to $1.4 billion - a modest increase from the service's $1.3 billion in government help - while a Senate panel has endorsed spending $1.37 billion. But Mr. Bush has promised to veto any spending bills exceeding his budget requests, forcing Amtrak to slice service if the president makes good on his threat....

The service also continues to be nagged by travel delays, mostly tied to having to share the tracks with freight haulers that own the rails and charge Amtrak a modest fee....With freight traffic soaring in recent years, Amtrak's on-time performance slid to an average of 68 percent last year, its worst showing since the 1970s....

More here.

I don't know about the current numbers, but in 2002, reason's Mike Lynch calculated that Amtrak cost $3.37 for every $1 they took in from passengers (I know, I know, they'll make it up on volume). And that same year, I noted that 71 percent of Americans--real Americans, the kind who drive everywhere, god bless their souls--absolutely loved Amtrak, "the state-sponsored terrorist network that has extorted billions of dollars from taxpayers over its tortured 31 years of existence."

And back in 1997, reason foundation founder Bob Poole counseled "Kill Amtrak Now!", a title that was reportedly optioned by Russ Meyer. And in 2005, reason cartoonist Peter Bagge devoted four fun-filled pages to the self-evident truth that Amtrak Sucks.

More Amtrakania (and it's all ania) here.

Bad Transportation Policy at a Higher Price

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:58:00 EDT

In the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse, House Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) was struck with a blinding insight on how to solve the problem of neglected infrastructure. Before you continue reading, let me suggest that you take a pair of vise grips and use them to get a tight hold on your wallet. Because what occurred to Oberstar is that the federal government needs more money to spend on aging bridges.

"If you're not prepared to invest another five cents in bridge reconstruction and road reconstruction, then God help you," he declared. Actually, he doesn't want just a single nickel, but a nickel on every gallon of gas sold to motorists, which would amount to a 27 percent increase in the federal fuel tax. This boost, he insists, would last only three years, bringing in $25 billion in new revenue.

But just two years ago, Congress and the president agreed on a federal highway bill with a six-year price tag of $286 billion. Nationally, all bodies of government spend in the neighborhood of $150 billion a year on roads. Somewhere in that mountain of cash, you might think, there must be funds that could be spared to keep bridges from rotting and falling down.

You would be right. When the 2005 package passed, it included 6,736 special projects inserted by members for the benefit of their home districts, which had a total price tag of $24 billion—helping to make it what the organization Taxpayers for Common Sense called "by far the most expensive, wasteful highway bill in the nation's history."

Among the worst federal road projects identified by the group in a 2004 report was $121 million to add new ramps to, yes, Interstate Highway 35W in Minneapolis. It's just a hunch, but maybe those funds would have been more wisely spent on maintenance than expansion.

President Bush has not always been a voice for fiscal discipline, but in this case he wisely rejected the idea of entrusting additional resources to the same people who helped create the problem. "My suggestion would be that they revisit the process by which they spend gasoline money in the first place," he said.

Oberstar's proposal, however, betrays the strange mentality that prevails among many elected officials. When people mess up royally in the private sector, they are punished by the loss of money and even the disappearance of the entities that employ them. When people mess up royally in the public sector, they often get more money and more responsibilities.

That's not the only perverse pattern on display here. The story of federal highway spending is one of funding glamorous construction projects and neglecting more tedious obligations. Former Rep. Bud Shuster, R-Pa., who served as House Transportation Committee chairman from 1995 to 2001, managed to get an interstate highway built back in his home state. It is now known as the "Bud Shuster Highway." What congressman has ever had a resurfacing project or bridge repair named after him?

Anyone can see that it makes no sense to add a rec room to your house when the roof is leaking and the lights are shorting out. Somehow, though, spending money to build new transportation links while letting existing ones deteriorate masquerades as sound policy on Capitol Hill.

Much of the problem of neglected maintenance arises from the fact that almost all roads and bridges are owned and operated by the government—which doesn't have the same incentive as private companies to preserve valuable assets.

If a shopping mall lets its facilities decay, customers will go elsewhere. If authorities let a major bridge or road fall into disrepair, by contrast, motorists may have no alternative, except other bridges and roads that are also under-maintained by the same authorities. A corporation whose negligence is lethal will face a flood of lawsuits, but governments are generally exempt from such accountability.

There are other problems with transportation funding. Robert Poole, the peerless director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation, says the federal highway formula systematically diverts money from "fast-growing, highly populated states to slow-growing, less populated states." This serves political needs at the expense of genuine priorities. "We couldn't have designed a more perverse approach to solving our highway investment problem if we tried," says Poole.
Actually, we could. We could keep the perversities and lavish more money on them.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Light Rail to Nowhere

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:14:00 EDT

A front-page story in yesterday's New York Times noted that politicians' transportation vanity projects drain money away from the sort of maintenance work that apparently was needed on the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last week. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Times put light rail lines in the same category as boondoggles like Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere:

Further, transportation and engineering experts said, lawmakers have financed a boom in rail construction that, while politically popular, has resulted in expensive transit systems that are not used by a vast majority of American commuters.
Representative James L. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, sent out a news release last month boasting about Minnesota's share of a recent transportation and housing appropriations bill.
Of the $12 million secured for the state, $10 million is slated for a new 40-mile commuter rail line to Minneapolis, called the Northstar....
Some transportation experts also said that though light rail and other public transportation projects made sense in cities, investing in them in sprawling suburban regions might not, even if the systems were supported, in theory, by the public.
"Too many American cities are spending far too much money on expensive rail transit projects, which are used for only 1 to 2 percent of local travel, and far too little on highway projects which are used for 95 to 99 percent of local travel," Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, said in an e-mail interview.

O'Toole explained the folly of light rail in this 2004 paper (PDF) co-published by the Reason Foundation, which has assembled its light rail links here. reason's coverage of the subject includes a 1999 piece by O'Toole and an article by Sam Staley and Ted Balaker in our April issue.