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Transportation projects make budget sense
Angela Blackwell
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Angela Glover Blackwell: There was a time when massive transportation projects swept the nation. We built the New York City Subway. The Erie Canal. The interstate highway system.
Kai Ryssdal: Commentator Angela Glover Blackwell.
Angela Glover Blackwell: But over time, that bold spirit seemed to leak away. Soon, politics took over the way we spend money on transportation. We entered an age that pleased car-loving, middle-class, suburban voters -- and created a nationwide system of haves and have-nots. Elevated highways left gashes through poor, black urban neighborhoods. Super highways kept sprawling into the exurbs.
We forgot that smart, effective, affordable transportation options are what make America run. We need to be fairer and smarter about the way we think about transportation. Instead, many in Congress are labeling crucial transportation projects as "pork," and are eagerly threatening deep cuts that can hurt transit systems that are just barely getting by. And that's on top of the drastic cuts already happening at the city and state level.
More than 90 percent of all transit systems had to cut service or raise fares last year. That's a double whammy for poor people who rely on public transit. Millions of working people have to walk farther to the bus stop and pay more when they get on. And the people being laid off by the public transit systems -- the bus drivers, the ticket booth operators, the mechanics -- are disproportionately people of color. Black unemployment is nearly double the rate of whites.
But the good news is that transportation investments pay off -- now and in the future. They create jobs. They get people to their jobs. And investments in public transit pay off even more -- creating more construction and operating jobs per dollar spent than comparable highway projects. Transportation is the engine that powers our economy. Let's make sure it connects and serves all Americans.
Ryssdal: Angela Glover Blackwell is the president of the research group Policy Link.
For those extolling the unsubsidized benefits of highway building, I suggest the following well-researched pieces:
http://www.vtpi.org/tranben.pdf
http://www.vtpi.org/railcrit.pdf
In addition, if you'd care to listen to a conservative's perspective on transit, check out this short video:
http://www.streetfilms.org/williamlind/
As for job creation potential, look here:
http://www.cnt.org/news/media/ARRA-Public-Transit-Jobs-Fact-Sheet-Dec-17...
As for housing affordability and linkages with transporation, look here:
Also, here's a piece on genrated traffic and induced demand, which undermine even short term effectiveness of major highway investments:
http://www.vtpi.org/gentraf.pdf
I should add that I love cars and driving, but simply can't support urban highway expansions. Rather than more road capacity, we need more and better transit options for heavily congested urban corridors. Combine that with roadway pricing to further induce mode sshift and provide a revenue stream for both highway and transit operations. That's a win/win.
Finally, we should spend our federal transportation dollars proportionate to population economic return on investment. Major metro areas are the econopmic engines of the states in which they exist and, as such, request world class transpoprtation options to excel and continue to fuel state and national economies.
Today's NPR segments on public transportation highlight many of the reasons I am glad I live in a small city which is part of a larger urban area served by a well-established, though by no means perfect, public transit system. Ms. Blackwell's piece, in particular, names several important reasons why investing in public transit makes both economic and social policy good sense.
Here's another. The truth is, we are an aging nation, and access to public transit is increasingly important to aging populations. Consider the enormous economic and social benefits of including older Americans in the active life of their communities through accessible transit, as opposed to leaving them trapped in their dwellings?
Thanks to partial vision loss, I had to stop driving long before I qualified for senior citizen discounts. Multiply my experience by tens of millions of aging baby boomers who will eventually stop driving -- should they just stay home? That would be a disaster for them as individuals, for their communities, and for our nation.
I don't favor one mode of public transit over another, each has benefits and liabilities. But the era of building more highways for more automobiles is at an end. Every dollar spent on building a new road is wasted. Every dollar invested in adding public transit infrastructure, improving paratransit and creating better interconnections between existing public transit modes and the automobile will be repaid many times over.
In the 21st century we really need to get over thinking about transportation simply as moving workers to their workplace and begin thinking more about to better move the workplace to the worker.
Just over three years ago I released information on the Community Commerce Centers solution for getting worker and workplace together in the 21st century using less energy and money while also providing a means to build the sense of community in our neighborhoods. After the treat recession hit implementation of the Community Commerce Centers solution also became a way to reboot a collapsed real estate and construction industry while putting tens of thousands of workers back on a payroll.
So long as folks remain locked in the notion that the worker must move to the workplace we are stuck in a system that wastes time, energy, and money.
Moving to implementation of the Community Commerce Centers solution creates jobs, provides sustainability, and gets us all off a fossil fuel binge.
Additional information on Community Commerce Centers is available through Google.
The cheap oil is gone and the oil we use is getting more and more expensive. So far, alternative fuels are not filling the gap. Trains move people and freight for less oil than cars and trucks. Steel rails cost less to maintain than highways.
Yet a lot of us are stuck in the cheap oil mindset. They'll waste oil in order to save a few bucks.
Money has no intrinsic value, while oil is precious. Maybe we should use oil as our currency. Put the dollar on the oil standard (and not Standard Oil).
From what I've read, public transit systems do NOT pay off, for the average taxpayer subsidy for public buses is well over $20 for every $1 of fare they collect, and light rail gets double that subsidy. In plain English, that means that each and every time some poor soul rides a government bus for a mile or two, other citizen taxpayers are forced to pony up $20 in taxes to pay for the bus, fuel, driver, maintenance and administrative overhead. Even in a single day, that's a great deal of tax subsidy money. In fact, it's quite simple to calculate that with the same amount of money taxpayers use to subsidize regular riders of government buses ($40 per person per day or so for two rides), they could instead buy every regular bus rider a $15,000 car every 5 years, and pay them each $5,000 per year to cover fuel, insurance and maintenance expenses. Indeed, according to information from federal government websites, most government bus systems sport a per rider tax subsidy of at least few hundred thousand dollars over the life of the system, and some even approach an astounding $1 million per rider. Amazing, eh? And, again from federal data online, the average per person mileage of a public bus is about 15 mpg. Jeesh, I get that in my truck, and double that if I have but one additional passenger. So, the economics of the government bus or the government train just don't work.
Further, on a philosophical note, it's sad that government has banished the "good ole days" when most people were independent and responsible enough to somehow get by without relying on the government for something as basic to their lives as transportation. Back then we bought a bike or a cheap used car, shared rides with friends, or perhaps just bit the bullet and arranged our lives so that work and shopping were close to home. The idea of some incompetent bureaucrat controlling when and where I can travel on their hyper-expensive, dirty, fuel inefficient, tax-subsidized buses truly disgusts me. But it would seem that even the many negatives of government buses don't outweigh the government's desire to have us become dependent on them for transport, diminishing our freedom and ability to move about where and when we wish.
Do I hear drums a'beating for Mr. Obama's call to greater 'infrastructure investment'?
Ms. Blackwell's piece completes a triple-play tonight on NPR's MarketWatch, three vignettes focused on the superiority of cities and transit (they're greener, more conducive to innovation and they offer insulation from housing price erosion, etc.)
Yet her piece was the weakest link in the chain -- extolling how more jobs are created by building transit than building roads.
She neglects to compare the long-term benefit of each, which is why these projects are built -- not just for the sake of building them.
There's ongoing operating costs, which taxpayers are asked to cover. Does transit -especially rail transit- outperform roads on that score?
I wouldn't say DC Metro presents an exemplar of return on taxpayer investment, what with a many tens of billion dollar -and unfunded- list of rehabilitation needs, just a few decades after going into service.
Also, Chris Leinberger's comparison of residential values in DuPont Circle to those of single-family homes in the DC suburbs fails to 'selection bias'. It's an intentionally slanted comparison, of little meaning to the average American.
For one, there's only one DuPont Circle (scarcity = higher price) while there's hundreds if not thousands of suburban subdivisions in the DC region. Does Leinberger wish to suggest that a hundred DuPont Circles be built? Just how would that happen? Would this represent a better choice for all? Really?
Rysdal reports "home buyers are voting with their feet, moving to within walking distance of public transit."
That is incredibly myopic.
People don't desire to live near transit for the sake of living near transit.
There are other objectives they're seeking that may lead some to live near transit.
One might be to live in DuPont Circle.
Another might be to avoid having a car.
Many other objectives are possible, not one of them need be "I want to live hear transit for the sake of living near transit."
I am amused by this drum-beating. But I need to take it seriously, as it threatens to drain lots and lots of tax money into many deep and unproductive holes. Not all will be deep holes, mind you. But enough will to be raise cautions.
A stimulus-funded intercity bus service (filling in for the loss four years ago of Greyhound service through this community) has typically carried zero riders and its cost per rider, when a rider appears, hovers near $500. Yes, $500 per rider.
I'm not kidding. Is this the kind of stimulating transportation-as-the-engine -of-the-economy investment Ms. Blackwell lauds?
No, this is where the "gotta do something to produce jobs" mindset can lead. But maybe this is exactly what the drum-beaters want.
Further amusement of late has come from the estimable David Brooks commenting on the president's State of the Union speech: "I'm all for light rail and such...." (or something to that effect).
I watched the speech in full and heard NO mention whatsoever of "light rail."
Mr. Brooks' addled mind confused light rail with high-speed rail, which is the ONLY type of rail Mr. Obama mentioned. (PBS host Gwen Ifill months ago committed the same error, mis-stating one for the other.)
With two bright people confused about these quite distinct transport modes which serve quite different travel purposes (but sharing one similarity: costing multiple billions of tax dollars apiece), it should cause one to wonder if those who supposedly know their subjects but resort to the most superficial and sometimes intentionally slanted presentations really know what they're talking about.
I'm convinced they don't.
