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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
The situations can be pretty different, for example in NYC they have subways running underground. Not much chance of hitting cars or “pedestrians” except for the cases like you mention where someone gets pushed onto the tracks at a station. And in Chicago the trains are (mostly) above ground level. But in Phoenix the light rail is at ground level, everywhere. (I think it should have been elevated, even at higher cost, but they don’t listen to me like they should.)
Hey Rush babe49
I see that Seattle has “water taxis”. Is that working out halfway decently? You can live on Vashon Island and get downtown for work pretty effortlessly, it looks like.
Rufus,
I’m not going to do this. I am going to start with her opinion.
The town is run by communists and it’s hemmed in by water and mountains and they can’t draw a line straight back to Mises.org even if they got rid of all the communists.
I didn’t suggest that you could start with anyone’s opinion. You are asking a question of fact, not opinion.
A financial statement gives you facts. Profit? Or loss?
Why don’t you look it up and show it to us? I am going to do what I want, here.
Also, I didn’t know that about financial statements. Thanks.
I checked with King County Metro as to the water taxi. The service to West Seattle and Vashon is a King County Metro service, and the fare is $5.00 one way, so a rider would pay $10 a day to ride. They are small boats, so the taxis probably don’t make much money for the county and require taxpayer subsidies. I did NOT look up their financial statements or do any further research. The County is advertising their service heavily, and they expand it in the summer season for people living in West Seattle and Vashon who want to attend Mariners games or otherwise visit Seattle downtown.
The high-rise West Seattle Bridge, which is the primary connection to the peninsula for those who live there, has been closed since 2020, due to cracks appearing in its structure (due to shoddy construction by politically-connected builders in the 1980s). The water taxi is a vital service for residents to get to downtown Seattle since they can’t use the bridge. Taxi runs can be canceled due to high winds or very low tides in Puget Sound.
Very interesting. I used to live out there and I found it curious that they hadn’t developed it when I was there, but it makes perfect sense, now. The water taxis aren’t in the news because they are in dire straits without them.
The bridge is falling apart, but they have money for everything like that stupid tunnel and light rail. Really smart.
I was fishing around for that gondola system they were thinking about putting in West Seattle to get people to Seattle and I see that the map to get from West Seattle to Seattle with a vehicle has it’s own Google prompt. You double back a mile in urban driving. That is going to be very unpleasant.
Yes, but they can be amenable to changing the names of what they consider progress. Once upon a time, South Lake Union area of Seattle was slated to install a Trolley system (SLUT). They decided to go with Streetcar instead.
Hm, reminds me of how when there were plans for a national Miss Ebonics contest, nobody wanted to be Miss Idaho.
After they defund the police, Seatle should have all the cash they need to fix the bridge.
Also, with a trillion or two at his disposal, Mayor Pete (who couldn’t fix potholes in South Bend) might see projects like this as a way of punching his ticket to the Democrat nomination.
Thanks for this informative reply.
Note: I didn’t mean to suggest that you or anyone else were under any obligation to look up the financial statement. I mentioned looking them up because they would give an objective answer to the question, “Is the state-funded enterprise justified, based on market prices?”.
Technical weeds, for getting into only by any economists reading this:
I am quite certain that a look at the finances would prove that the trade-off is a bad one from a market perspective: the private consumers would not be willing to pay the market cost of the service, and the whole scheme depends on confiscation of property by the socialists for its funding.
How can we know that? Because if it were a profitable investment based on market prices, people would surely have already been making it voluntarily!
I am not arguing against some justification by reason of externalities because that is not the argument being made by the proponents. Market economic theory can only force, by objective facts, the proponents of state intervention to retreat into vague, untestable claims of externalities. It can’t follow them there, precisely because the theory of markets is fact-based.
Not necessarily. It could be more or less technically illegal for private people to do that kind of thing, traversing public waterways for profit etc, at least not without onerous regulation, but of course the gummint can exempt themselves from all such concerns, and then some.
Plus, even if it were possible to do it profitably, government could still undercut them with the subsidized version and put them out of business.
Pete thinks he is presidential material? And they say Trump has an ego.
They made and saw this, thought it was great, and then voted for them anyway…
Like the young Bill Clinton, Buttigieg knew he would be President some day.
lol
The residents of Seattle and the East Side will not give up their single-family homes with big yards easily. Seattle will be up zoning the entire city, so they can build townhouses and apartment buildings in all neighborhoods. My guess is that Bellevue and the rest of the cities on the East Side will not.
I will never believe that you can force a place to be developed like New York City after its been developed a different way. New York City put up trains while everybody was poor and then everything got developed around it. You can’t do it any other way. The financial consequences are staggering.
The New York subway was also constructed when hardly anyone had private automobiles. The subway would likely have seemed pretty attractive compared to horse-drawn carriages etc.
I don’t see anyone claiming that cities can be forced to be like New York. But it’s not the only city that has lots of transit. Cities that have a strong downtown/suburbs axis at rush hour or ones where the main business area is geographically forced into a narrow corridor are usually good candidates to have a Monday to Friday alternative. That isn’t everyone, but it does describe places as different as Salt Lake City and San Francisco.
Older overseas cities with existing 19th century train routes have expanded them in the 20th century as subways: London, Paris, Budapest, Berlin, Stockholm, and Tokyo, among many others. Older American cities with subways are sometimes just as crowded with downtown stations, like Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, or Cleveland. None of them is just like New York; AFAIK none of them wants to give up their transit system.
The newest systems, like San Francisco, Washington, Atlanta, Buffalo, Miami and Baltimore, are mostly a combination of high speed commuter railroads with a relatively small handful of downtown stops. That speediness encourages people to leave their car behind, but it still leaves the issue of how you get around without a car downtown, which varies with each of those examples. Some are designed to do a great job, others aren’t.
That’s what I mean.
All I’m saying is there is a limit and it’s very, very hard. Minneapolis is totally blowing it.
San Francisco and Washington are typical fiascoes. Crime. Social problems. Every fiscal metric is a disaster. I don’t see how San Francisco is better off even if you use the one metric of how expensive shelter is next to those things.
When you put them up too late, it’s impossible to get them to net out moving people versus time versus the capital you invested compared to roads.
Minneapolis is short an East-West freeway because they were stupid in the 70s. You can’t make up for that with a choo-choo train.
And with all that train stuff in place, they didn’t make the roads big enough to handle the traffic that would be required even if they’re temporarily unavailable, let alone if they totally failed or were removed or something.
There are cities that mass transit is great for, and some it’s no good for. Figuring out the cases in-between is not a one-size-fits-all deal. Subways are not the answer for Abilene, KS or Provo, UT. More cars are not the answer for downtown Manhattan, Toronto, or Boston.
San Francisco and Washington are typical fiascoes. Crime. Social problems. That’s because those cities are a mess. The problems aren’t caused by BART or DC’s Metrorail.
Are you talking about the bad character and stupidity of the leadership and the citizens? Gigantic capital projects created at gunpoint just make the situation worse and I would say it’s pretty much irreversible.
“At gunpoint”? What do you mean? San Fran and DC wanted those projects, voted for them in referendums and and paid for most of their cost before there were federal subsidies available. Same with Atlanta’s MARTA. Nobody held a gun to their heads.
Minneapolis wants to be in the progressive vanguard because we are ruled by idiots. What they should have done is stole a bunch of money from the feds for one, single east west choo-choo train that hit all the things that tourists want. People could have come here and gotten out of their cars for the weekend. It’s not going to fix much but it wouldn’t have been a disaster. They are trying to social engineer the whole metro and it’s insane. They think solar panels and wind turbines are going to run a gigantic hub and spoke system. Now the downtown has all kinds of social problems and crime, so people don’t want to go to the hub.
Fair enough, but when the fiscal metrics go south you take the money at gunpoint. This subsidies are obtained at gunpoint. The zoning is done at gunpoint. It damn sure better work out.
Seriously, if you say there are some cities where it’s working great, I’m all for that.