January 9, 2006

The Oncoming Train

From today's Nashville City Paper, a story that won't make the proponents of Nashville's new commuter train very happy:

Federal transportation subsidies encourage local governments to squander money on under-utilized transit projects, according to a new study released last week by the Cato Institute.

"Total inflation-adjusted subsidies to transit - buses and trains - have more than doubled since 1990, yet total ridership has increased by less than 10 percent," argues Randal O'Toole, an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. In his paper, O'Toole writes that, before 1964, public transit was largely owned by private entities. Now it is largely funded with taxpayers' money.

"Today more than three of every four dollars spent on transit come from taxpayers, not transit riders," he writes. "The effectiveness of local transit systems is undermined by federal subsidies, which encourage the construction of highly visible and expensive services such as light-rail trains to suburban areas despite the chronically low number of riders on those routes."

When government builds mass transit to low-density suburban population areas - such as Nashville's new "Music City Star" service to the suburbs east of Nashville - one of two things follows, and often both: the amount of taxpayer-funded subsidization of the system rises - often at the expense of bus service that serves neighborhoods with a higher minority population - or the government begins to enact policies to force the redevelopment of the service area to a higher population density.

Five years ago yesterday, the Nashville City Paper published a column I wrote headlined "Why Nashvillians Should Oppose Commuter Rail." Every word of it is still relevant, and I urge you to read the whole thing. Just in case you don't, here is an excerpt...

New commuter rail service will be pitched as a major civic advancement with promises of inducing large numbers of people to abandon their cars and take the train to work each day, greatly lessening highway congestion and air pollution. Years later, we will realize it was mostly just hype.

Fixed rail service is the single most expensive way to move people, does little to impact highway congestion and has little impact on air pollution. However, it does have one big impact: Usually the cost to build and operate the service comes at the partial expense of existing bus services, harming the people who depend on those buses.

Consider the following popular myths of commuter rail service. Light rail, it is claimed, gives people more transportation choices. But in fact, rail rarely expands options for commuters. Instead it often replaces low-cost buses with high-cost service. Government transit providers pushing rail do not want bus service competing with its own trains, so often they will alter or reduce bus service in order to increase train ridership. Often, bus routes will be reconfigured to take bus riders to a rail station, rather than to their destination, extending their ride times. In other cases, low-cost bus routes are closed and replaced by higher-fare rail transit.

In many cities rail replaces a low-cost bus system - which is used by many lower-income inner city residents for all of their transportation needs - with an expensive train used primarily by upper-class professionals for recreational and shopping trips from the suburbs to downtown. In fact, a study of 14 mass transit systems released [in 2000] by the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government was especially critical of Portland, Ore.'s, transit agency Tri-Met for pumping up its light rail use with former passengers of the better, cheaper, but dismantled city bus system.

Make no mistake: If Nashville proceeds with rail service to its higher-income suburbs, our city's working poor will likely find the bus service they depend on suffering. Even more services will be reduced, which has characterized Metro Transit Authority for more than a decade, and the fares will rise.

Six million dollars in federal money have been secured for the project, far less than the $26 million needed from Washington just to build the first phase. Yet every dollar that comes from Washington means more tax dollars must also be spent by local residents and the state. A rail system isn't a one-time budget item but a perennial money-sucking budget buster that must be paid for whether anyone rides it or not. And Uncle Sam will only pay 80 percent of the huge cost.

Yet few people are going to ride this train. Projections show only 90 daily riders from Lebanon and about 400 riders a day on the Mt. Juliet-to-Nashville leg.

The City Paper story today quotes a local transit official hinting the transit system will soon seek a dedicated regional funding source - a tax - to provide it more revenue and more federal matching funds. It is interesting to me that, as the Nashville commuter train project's need for taxpayer funding grows, the official projections of daily ridership are growing as well.

If I was a reporter, I'd be asking if the ridership projections are being inflated to justify the requests for greater and greater taxpayer funding...