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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 revenue on the notorious ones are still down 25% after the pandemic. Crime and social problems are up on most of them.
There are always tradeoffs. The point is for conservatives to make more intelligent tradeoffs than seems possible for liberals.
For example, the California high speed train is moronic, not because it’s a train, but because the need it’s supposed to fill is already efficiently covered from two sides by cars and planes. BTW, I said tradeoff: that doesn’t mean that cars are utterly and always perfect for every job, or that planes are sacred.
These things have horrific fixed costs and capital investment. The implications are staggering if you ask me.
I remember the gas crises of 1973 and 1979. Cars weren’t doing so well then. Today’s gas prices don’t look prizeworthy either. I recall that after 9/11, air travel wasn’t so popular. From time to time we are compelled to stick with unpopular choices until either conditions improve or better alternative emerge.
The difference is, it’s a very inflexible capital structure. The other thing is, to the extent it’s politically managed or badly managed, they drag the whole society down with them.
Personally, when ***I*** travel out there, BART has done me a ton of good, but that’s not how you analyze it. Minneapolis is a joke from top to bottom.
The areas where it’s going to work are limited, but the thing I’m most excited about is the Hyperloop. That thing has very high odds of jacking up life quality and economic output. Supposedly, in less than five years they are going to prove if it’s going to work or not.
Inflexible capital structure I can’t argue with. But it’s not just transit. Sure, if a city’s employment and residential tastes change, it’s tough to pick up a subway tunnel and move it five miles. On the other hand, ever try picking up a major airport and moving it a few miles out of town? It happens…and it’s always a huge, expensive political fight.
In L.A., the downtown traffic interchange is between an east-west freeway that is 12 to 14 lanes wide and a north/south one that’s 8 lanes wide. It was designed in the late Fifties and built over the next 15 years. Many of the industries that kept downtown humming in 1960 are long gone, but the freeway interchanges will probably be there for a century.
What I mean is, on one extreme you have roads and cars that are far less centrally managed and don’t have the problems of centralization. Choo-choo trains are the complete opposite and really, airports are more flexible than choo-choo trains and do more for everybody.
When individuals and cities make mistakes with cars and roads, it doesn’t have the implications that you do with choo-choo trains. I mean these things are going to sit there forever and suck up capital. They are going to be even worse if you shut them down. You start having a bunch of social problems, get behind on maintenance, or pension deficits, it gets really hard to stop the momentum. It’s like the most leveraged risk up or down that a city can take.
It’s really hard to put into words what I mean so ask questions, no problem.
Minneapolis should have put in one single east west choo-choo and then just let sprawl happen. They want to turn the center into utopia and it’s not going to work. No way.
That’s a lot of concrete to recycle.
Subsidize any product enough and you can make it appear to be working. It’s a case of the Bastiat effect: “That which is seen” is the benefit; “that which is unseen” is the cost.
There may be an urban rail system somewhere in the world that is not a failure in the narrow sense of its consumers being willing to pay for the service, but there aren’t many.
The US would benefit enormously by simply educating its successive generations in basic economics, as a part of a civics curriculum. It is only the incalculable wealth created by such markets that have been allowed to survive by the state that has concealed the magnitude of the damage done by economic ignorance.
Note that I don’t question that all of these tax-funded products have arguments in favor of them based on costs and benefits that market prices are truly incapable of signaling.
But let’s give thinking a chance:
Read End The Fed. All is revealed.
Also, I don’t think that Minneapolis is putting in one penny for long-term capital gear replacement, like the rails and the cars. They are supposed to be doing that constantly.
I cannot think of a single example of these kinds of projects in which those promoting it didn’t exaggerate the benefits and underestimate the costs.
Trains are really slick, and they think they can social engineer everything so it’s better. If we had natural interest rates, this crap would never get off the ground.
I got in a big argument with the local communist about electric buses. I am all for electric buses. That is a much better way to live. The problem is they haven’t worked anywhere in Minnesota and it’s just money down the drain. Of course he can pull something up from NPR about why it works.
Same thing with electric dump trucks. Those things are really cool. Much better way to live. They make way less noise. The driver can run it with a remote control outside of the truck. The problem is, they cost 50% more.
The other thing is, all of this stuff makes it more dangerous to drive. They change the layout of the roads. They are trying to make it easy for bicycles, which doesn’t move any volume of people but he increases the danger. Really dangerous where they put choose in crowded areas. I’m going to upgrade my Subaru again to get better anti-collision systems.
To be fair to the DC metro up until the last few years it was a relatively pleasant experience, no crime to speak of, mostly on time, and reliable.
But from about 2018 it started to experience tangible signs of neglected maintenance, and the charges started to no longer reflect a reasonable rate for the casual users, which given the DC tourism flow is significant part of the revenue base. Folks start to bail for alternate methods of getting downtown. My last trip this summer did not have the feel of being unsafe, but Union Station, as lovely as it is, has way too many vagrants. I suspect that many other stops on Metro are experiencing these issues.
Stapleton to Denver International Airport…
DEN was moved way out to the middle of no where, but now Denver is “moving” up to the west side of the airport. It was not a big political fight, but boy did it increase the time to get from the airport to say Boulder (or for most folks, the ski resorts on the other side of Loveland pass into the Rockies proper.)
I don’t know, but I’m assuming this was started a long time ago when everybody was poorer. Those have potential to work. The development goes around them naturally. They have a good start because everybody is poor, basically.
Metro’s initial service was ~1980 (and was about 1/2 the service area it is now). While the country was suffering from stagflation, the initial 20 years of operation were a boom time for the recession proof DC metro area.
One possible feature that works for them is, people are genuinely forced to be in a central area. That is just wishful thinking in Minneapolis.
I just remembered that, Seattle only has like 20% paying customers. Everybody else just jumps over the turnstile. lol Madness. And for reasons I can’t understand, BART is spending millions on bigger turn styles. Everybody’s more dishonest four years later. lol
I rode it years ago as a visitor and agree, it was super nice and very convenient. I am glad someone paid the cost of it, which was probably 5 or ten times what I paid for a ticket.
And there are no economies of scale for a train system, either surface or subway. As the years go by, everything gets more expensive. All the capital equipment deteriorates and must be maintained and replaced, always at a higher cost than the original construction. Since they are subsidized by taxpayers, the majority of whom never ride the trains, their taxes can go only one way, and that is UP. At some point, the taxpaying public (if they are paying attention) will refuse to pay the higher taxes for no visible benefit to them.
On the other hand, the populations usually increase too, so the per capita tax doesn’t necessarily go up as quickly as it otherwise would.
The bigger problem tends to be putting off maintenance etc to “save money” or sometimes even to “cut taxes” which makes it so much worse later on. Repairing or maybe even just repainting something now, might cost $10, but they want to “Save” $10 now which requires a $100 replacement in the future. Or maybe it just doesn’t work any more.
Well done. Perfect.
You could say that about any nominal public good. That would be the absolute last reason I would do it.
Let’s just not even go down this road because all of this crap is managed politically. This is the worst thing to manage politically. Maintaining roads in this sense is way easier.
Oh, and I just thought of something else. Since trains are run by government, they all get some amount of federal funding. And one of the very tight strings of federal funding is “project labor agreements”, which mandate union wages on construction projects-government knowingly increases taxpayer costs on all construction. And union workers not only come with high wage demands, but they come with working conditions that non-union workers might not require, increasing cost burdens even more. Lose-lose-lose.
But where is the compromise? Should they import prison/slave labor from China to do it as cheaply as possible?
Everyone loses except the high-rolling union boss or the politician who is expecting a “campaign contribution.”
LOL
On the one hand, I’ve lived in places (two years in Chicago, a month in Innsbrueck) and visited places (London, Amsterdam, Munich, Paris, Venice, Washington DC, New York City) where you could do fantastically well without a car. I loved it. Like this guy, I hate needing a car, which I do where I live.
On the other hand… the economist in me annoyingly insists on asking, “Would I be willing to pay what it costs to consume that product?
Darn economists.
We’ll never know (I didn’t have to pay for the product when I consumed it. Somebody confiscated the money and paid it for me).
The nice thing about replacing coercion with markets is that we would find out just what is worth it, and what is not. Maybe I would not want to own a car at all!