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For Mass Transit to Work, You First Need ‘Mass’
In my experience, mass transit works best in densely-populated cities. There is a lot more actual demand for mass transit, and city systems can be full at least during rush hour. Unfortunately, the Leftists who run West Coast cities are enamored of mass transit, and totally ignore the fact that they simply lack the “mass” to make it work. Seattle is in love with “light rail,” and their mostly-leftist voters voted to increase taxes on everything (sales, property, cars) to pay for a light-rail system. That system is partly running now, from north Seattle to the airport, but it really isn’t drawing many riders.
Of course, they hadn’t counted on a pandemic of respiratory disease that shut down the system for months, then had few riders when it re-opened; they had successfully persuaded citizens that they should fear all their fellow citizens, which doesn’t contribute much to the demand for packed rail cars or buses. Of course, Sound Transit bemoans its funding shortfalls, which could have been expected in any case. Then, they let kids ride free, contributing even more to the funding shortfall. And their trains have become rolling homeless shelters, making legitimate riders very uncomfortable.
Now, they are extending the light rail to Tacoma, and there are some very unhappy business owners there, as shown by this story today: Construction Delays Pile Up. Here’s a quote:
The extension is set to have six new stations as free bus shuttles will replace Tacoma Link service for a few weeks this summer while crews connect the existing line with the Hilltop extension.
“They broke ground in front of my shop in summer of 2019. Fast forward three years, they’re still closing roads here all around my shop,” Salamone said. “They still got construction materials and construction vehicles strewn about alongside road signs, closures. They’re still digging up parts of the rail that they already installed, and then just chip it all out. And, you know, I can’t even imagine what the carbon footprint of this project is.”
Salamone stated a dip in sales occurs immediately with each closure or construction project that his business has to work around.
“The more trouble people have coming to patronize your business, the less people are going to come,” Salamone said.
Exactly what we would have expected. But the Left never listens to reason, they just go by their feelings. And WE pay, and pay, and pay.
Published in Domestic Policy
You don’t need just mass, you also need to set up transit between places where people are and/or want to go. But many times they just seem to plan what looks good on a map somehow, and figure the people will move to where the transit is.
You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen California’s “high speed rail.” Or not.
Good one RB. And QPi said it best. The BART in the San Fran area started in 1972. First just Oakland to SF. Then expanded. Now, especially in Oakland, as dangerous as the NYC system. Lots of homeless and gangsters. Still trying to expand it to San Jose. A money losing joke. Will never got on one again.
It works just fine in Los Angeles, but then, we do have some key parts of the city that have Manhattan-like density.
Funny how the Left loves to go backwards. They want us to use 100-year-old, immovable-rail technology to get to our high-tech jobs. They want us to depend on the Sun and the Wind to power our high-tech gadgets, our factories, and our homes. They want us to give up our high-efficiency fertilizer and efficient tractors, to go back to plowing our fields behind horses. They need to do it first, so we can see how successful they are.
You can’t have full mass transit without a hive and a hive mind.
When I first started traveling to DC as part of my job with the Department of Energy, I was in awe of how cool the DC Metro was. The cars were clean, ran on time, and the way you purchased the fare cards was slick. Unfortunately, like many large systems, maintenance gets the short shrift (especially when funding is tight) and systems begin to deteriorate. Another area is security, which also can take a hit when it comes to funding. Both cases leads to lower “mass” as you put it, which leads to lower revenue. Thus begins the death spiral . . .
And, following one accident, the NTSB wrote of Metro “This agency seems to have a learning disability,” concerning their safety practices.
19th century solutions for the 21st century.
The fact that a technology had its origins a long time ago doesn’t mean it’s not currently valuable. Whatever their value of passenger transport in the US may or may not be, freight rail is today a vital transportation mode.
The use of steam for power is an 18th-century technology, counting from Newcomen’s engine…but the steam cycle is the way power is generated in a nuclear plant, and accounts for a substantial % of the output from a modern CCGT gas plant.
An observation from my long-ago high school and college days that I think is still valid: At the time my family visited Great Britain a lot, especially London. Despite being a southern California kid who greatly enjoyed driving cars, I did enjoy using the Tube and the double-decker busses. But even young me recognized that such a system would not work large-scale in southern California. The London and Los Angeles metropolitan areas had similar populations, but London’s was concentrated in a tiny fraction of the land area that the Los Angeles metropolitan area covered.
Most cities in the United States grew up in the late nineteenth through the twentieth century when people had relatively easy access to individual transportation (horses then automobiles), so our cities ended up being developed rather spread out, lacking the “mass” of population within walking distance of a fixed mass transit route.
Some of that is changing, as many people seem to prefer living in high density, but the transition is messy, as not everything is similarly dense. I just spent a week in San Diego, where I had not been in about 25 years. Many large high-rise condominium and/or apartment buildings down near the harbor, but from my informal observation of traffic patterns, most of the residents seem to work outside the city core, and in rather spread out places around the county. The heavy afternoon rush hour traffic was coming into the city. So even though there is this dense residential area, without similarly concentrated employment, mass transit will have limited effect.
Interesting observations on the social impact of a hot new transportation technology–the electric trolley–from 1902.
You cannot compare freight and passenger rail. Freight railroads have always been in private hands, and they make pretty good profits for their owners and shareholders. Since they were deregulated back in the 1970s, freight railroads respond to market forces-note the huge consolidation into just a few big companies. Bulk freight and now container and trailer-on-flatcar freight are quite efficient, but also note that they need trucks to take the freight to its final destination within cities.
Passenger rail, on the other hand, is mostly operated by governments, and never makes money. Passenger rail, since cars came on the scene, never is profitable, and is always heavily subsidized by governments. Of course, governments always try to minimize costs, so never spend enough on maintenance or security. Just look at the subway system in NYC today-it’s going back to the bad old days of high crime, low maintenance, and massive fare fraud. Seattle and Sound Transit have mostly ceased fare-enforcement activity (since it’s racist to demand fare from passengers!), which denies them even more funds. In the past, lots of people commuted from north and south Seattle to downtown for jobs, and that’s where the rail goes-north and south. With the pandemic, downtown has emptied out, and fewer people go there for work, so it’s a ghost town compared to just a few years ago. They are in the process of extending the trains to the East Side of Lake Washington so all those Microsofties and Amazon employees can take the train to work, but I’m betting that those trains will be half-empty too.
Fare evasion seems to be the least of their problems, when costs are subsidized by 90% or more. Actual fare collection, even in the best of times, might not even cover the cost of hiring fare inspectors etc.
That’s not fair to folks with learning disabilities.
Many supporters of mass transit do so with the hopeful expectation that OTHER travelers will use it. That way the roads and parking will be available for their convenience.
The bigger problems come with cities try to pressure EVERYONE to use it, by reducing parking, turning traffic lanes into bicycle lanes, etc.
Mayor Pete’s program. And he has added “justice” to the requirements of transportation planning.
Is anybody building new freight rail these days? or we just using the right-of-ways and rail work from 100 years ago? Freight is valuable, but not so valuable that they are laying new iron these days.
Yep. Mass transit is run by government and government is too “compassionate” to keep the bums and criminals off the transport, so mass transit in America can never live meet the needs of people.
The city of Chicago supplied the public with a vibrant and useful public transit system.
Then during the later 1990’s, corruption coupled with incompetence began to eat away at that system.
One advantage that Chicago held was that it is a sprawling metro area.
In San Francisco Bay area, with the exception of BART, public transportation is so limited. A news reporter once ventured from the city of San Francisco out to San Jose. The trek via public transit took over 6 hours. (Might have been 8 or 9 hours.)
Why? Because the 60 to 70 miles that this reporter traveled involved crossing numerous cities and their borders. There was a need to get off one transit line and transfer to another.
At a time of relatively cheap gas, it was a price-y excursion as well, and cost this reporter around 16 bucks.
Meanwhile during the same time period, I could grab my luggage off the carousel at O’Hare airport, and if everything was timed right, arrive at my parents’ home in a far off Chicago suburb within 2 hours. For under 6 bucks.
It sounds like Los Angeles might be the exception, but it doesn’t make any sense to put Choo choos up after the country got prosperous. 1946 or whatever. When everybody’s poor, it creates a great deal of utility and things buildup around it. If society is wealthy, cars and trucks have more utility for getting people and stuff moved around.
They are an albatross to manage. Minneapolis is a disaster in every way.
Social problems. Crime. Every fiscal metric on all of these deals is bad.
Yes, new track is being laid, but mostly parallel to existing track to create double tracks where previously single track required trains going opposite directions to alternate use of the track. So now trains can move both directions simultaneously. A lot of it on east-west routes across the western states to move more freight between west coast ports and the middle of the country. The terminuses and transfer hubs are still largely the same ones developed 70+ years ago. Freight railroads spend enormous amounts of money on efficiency improvements such as longer individual trains (200 car trains are not unusual), faster assembly of trains in switching yards, and getting freight from source to destination with a minimum of switching between trains.
Blowing a ton of money on this problem would have been far better than 90% of the stupid things government does.
Fixing the ports and the the freight train transport would create a lot of purchasing power, otherwise known as deflation, and we can’t have that of course.
Tbh I don’t mind the idea of expanding public transportation to reduce traffic congestion and make it easier to get around without a car, along with hopefully reducing emissions, but they actually need to do it instead of waiting years for permits and union negotiations while the property sits vacant, and they also need to manage it properly so it doesn’t hemorrhage money. Unfortunately, these are rarely things the public sector is good at doing, especially in Democratic-controlled cities where there is no political will to actually get meaningful things done, only to signal that they’re doing them so they can feel virtuous.
Light rail doesn’t work anywhere.
Kansas City did and is continuing the same idiocy. Sometimes I think that lefties never got that model train set they always wanted for Christmas. Why they are so enamored with “light rail” is beyond me. What isn’t beyond me is what lying, cheating, miscreants they are. First, the city council makes rules that determine how they can get the electric trolley passed. So they develop “transportation districts” and only the people who live in the gerrymandered district are allowed to vote on the train. The lie is that the voters don’t have to pay one red cent because it is only the property owners who pay with increased taxation. Ninety percent of the voters are renters. Then they claim the cost will only be twenty or so million dollars. The cost overrun was over 150 million dollars. As Rush Babe pointed out, the businesses within the immediate vicinity of the construction were obliterated.
In the meantime, once it is finally finished it becomes only the “starter” line. Now they must build more, and then, more. To encourage ridership, they don’t charge anyone even a dime to ride it. Of course, it becomes the favorite hangout for the homeless. If there is an accident involving cars on the street that it travels, the entire trolley is shut down. For small percentages, they could have purchased electric buses that can alter their route if necessary and wouldn’t have needed massive construction disruptions. But the bigger scam is that there already was a bus system. Nobody rode the busses, so they had to be subsidized.
Rush Babe is exactly 100% correct. Mass transit needs masses of people to support it. In the midwest, people live in suburbs and drive SUV’s. We live here because we love our space and our freedom. Lefties find “freedom” a foreign concept. They love crowded big cities and want to imitate them everywhere. My blood pressure is rising, so I am going to stop.
Geography and history have a lot to do with it. Some cities (San Francisco, Hong Kong, NYC) have a central business district that is constrained by geography. If practically everybody works downtown, then mass transit makes sense.
AFAIK, light rail is popular in San Diego and Salt Lake City. Los Angeles is an unusual case because although the city is sprawling, like Houston, L.A. was originally built as a disconnected bunch of suburbs connected by rail (Who Framed Roger Rabbit was right about that much). So in most cases, the new trains are being put back where the old trains were, pre-1955, and it works because that’s where the people already are.
The light rail lines that don’t work in L.A. are the ones placed there because the right-of-way was cheap, but people don’t live where it goes. L.A.’s Green Line, for example, looked like a bargain because it was placed down the middle of a freeway under construction. Inexpensive! But it’s not needed there, so it was a mistake anyway.
Transit also makes sense for tourism-heavy areas where people fly in. (L.A., Honolulu). That’s why cities hosting the Olympics have the systems in place before they made their bids.
Does it work well enough for consumers to pay what costs to run it?
If not, then it only works well according to the warped economic view of socialist politicians:
The answer to the above question about the willingness of consumers to pay the cost is a resounding “NO”. Even ignoring depreciation, customers (the public) only voluntarily cover 25% of the costs to them of providing the service. The rest is extracted by force.
This deal is what socialists call “compassion”.
Does the widespread and availability (e.g., buses etc are available if your car is in the shop, etc) balance out against the unfairness of funding? Can any one homeowner afford to have paid for the fire trucks etc that keep their house from being totally destroyed? Even if the costs of the trucks etc were divided by ALL the people who call the fire dept each year, could they afford it?