Some Light Rail/Transit/Urban Sprawl Links
(From a mostly libertarian perspective)
8/1/00
by Dave Bishop
Independence Institute http://www.independenceinstitute.net/
Several good papers by Dennis Polhill and Steve Mueller on RTD's light rail fiasco, plus a few op-eds are sufficient to make a person more knowledgeable than 95% of the politicians who proclaim their support for transit without knowing anything about it. Look in the Transportation section linked from the home page.Cascade Policy Institute www.cascadepolicy.org
Portland was first with light rail in 1986, and the debate continues as to whether it's working as advertised or as designed. Cascade's site has a number of papers and briefs that argue that enough is enough, but the politicians don't give up easily. Now they have started construction on a "privately-financed" line to the airport, which we all know will cost taxpayers dearly. There's also links to other free-market sites.Thoreau Institute www.ti.org
Randal O'Toole has teamed with Karl Hess, Jr., to give Oregon a taste of free-market environmentalism. O'Toole was one of the first I'm aware of that accurately placed light rail in the context of land-use planning, densification and making streets safe for pedestrians but dangerous for automobiles.
This site is not searchable, and since some of the links were outdated, I suggest these articles as being representative:Turning Portland into Los Angeles
www.ti.org/FS1.html
Congestion and Patterns of Growth
www.ti.org/FS2.html
Light Rail Myths and Realities
www.ti.org/FS3.html
Saving Oregon's Open Space
www.ti.org/FS4.html
Portland Transit: Forward into the Past
www.ti.org/transit.html
Light Rail: Yesterday's Technology Tomorrow
www.ti.org/sa15.html
Portland's Metro and the 2040 Plan
www.ti.org/2040.html
Cato Institute www.cato.orgToo many to list, but I want to highlight these three papers as fundamental to understanding transit, traffic and federal mandates:False Dreams and Broken Promises: The Wasteful Federal Investment in Urban Mass Transit
www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-162.html
Jean Love and Wendell Cox wrote this paper in 1991, but the basic ideas haven't changed since.HIGHWAY AGGRAVATION:THE CASE FOR PRIVATIZING THE HIGHWAYS
Highway Aggravation: The Case for Privatizing the Highways
www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-231.html
Peter Samuel argues that socialism doesn't work any better with highways than it does for anything else. A page or two on transit's falling fortunes.ISTEA: A Poisonous Brew for American Cities
www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-287es.html
Randal O'Toole explains how federal transit subsidies are making cities worse off.
Reason Public Policy Institute www.rppi.orgA number of transit-related papers have been published by Reason. Here is a sampling:"WHY RAIL WILL FAIL: An Analysis of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan
Transportation Authority's Long Range Plan"
www.rppi.org/transportation/ps209.html
Tom Rubin and James E. Moore II are unable to predict the future with any accuracy and doubt that MTA is really any better. They will go out on a limb and say traffic will move faster than 15 mph in 20 years."DOES TRANSIT REALLY WORK? Thoughts on the Weyrich / Lind 'Conservative Reappraisal'"
www.rppi.org/transportation/ftebrief101.html
Peter Gordon checks facts and finds Paul Weyrich's claims lacking substance."A CRITIQUE OF "'DOLLARS AND SENSE: THE ECONOMIC CASE FOR PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN AMERICA'"
www.rppi.org/ps243.html
John Semmens looks at the facts about public transit and uncovers some startling truths."How to "Build Our Way Out of Congestion:' Innovative Approaches to Expanding Urban Highway Capacity"
www.rppi.org/ps250.html
Peter Samuel and Bob Poole look at roadway design, bridge height and truck size to show how a little innovation can save billions and keep the traffic flowing.
A section on transit and the "congestion lobby" makes it clear who's to blame for our diminishing road capacity.
Aristotle
home.earthlink.net/~malli/Jack Mallinckrodt's personal page has some well-done analysis of light rail and highway performance. In charts and graphs, transit's tiny share of the commuter market is computed, using government figures. He also presents a good case that HOV lanes are not worth the expense of barrier-separating them, and would increase total traffic flow if opened to all vehicles.The Orange County Grand Jury report on how the local transit agency tilted the playing field toward light rail, ignoring factual data to the contrary, was first published on Jack's web page. It's created a real stir across the country since. Nothing really shocking, except that bureaucrats are selective about what they read and who they invite to meetings. Surprising?
The Independent Institute
www.independent.orgA first-rate West Coast think tank, David Theroux and staff publish books and articles to academic standards and shun politics. They are independent in every sense of the word.I suggest reading the article, "Autonomy and Automobility," a defense of the automobile by Loren Lomasky, from The Independent Review at
independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/TIR21_Lomasky.html as a good counter to the green/statist agitprop.Also, in the current issue is Randal O'Toole's "Is Urban Planning 'Creeping Socialism'?" independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/TIR44OToole.html which takes on New Urbanism, "smart growth" and the planners who never had it right in the past but are now omnipotent.
Institute for Justice
www.ij.orgMaking cities safe for jitneys and taxis is one of IJ's favorite causes. Clint Bolick and his legal team has taken city, state and federal officials to court to allow entry into previously protected occupations such as hairdressers, mortician's assistants and cab drivers. Freedom Cabs in Denver benefited from Bolick's persistence in getting the Colorado PUC to open up the taxi business to more than three companies. Now, they are working on liberalizing New York City's rigid rules that determine who gets one of the 11,000 taxi medallions (in a city of 8 million!) that have more value than the cab they're attached to.At the same time, New York's public transit agency is doing all it can to protect its monopoly. Jitney operators are being intimidated and their passengers made to walk blocks to the nearest bus route, often in unsafe conditions. Those who have money get good transit service, but poorer neighborhoods are generally poorly served by New York's transit system. Taxi cabs don't enter certain areas of the city, leaving jitneys as practically the only way to travel if you don't have a car.
And the city wants to put them out of business.
Liberty & Law newsletter at www.ij.org/publications/liberty has the continuing saga of New York's overregulation of transportation and IJ's attempts to see justice done.
Reason Magazine
www.reason.comReason hasn't published much on transit per se; however, last year Reason did a Breaking Issue on "sprawl" with commentaries from both sides. The real magazine featured Virginia Postrel's "In Defense of Sprawl" in the March 1999 issue which took apart Al Gore's "smart growth" attacks on suburbia. The page at reason.com/bisprawl.shtml has a number of links to articles and related sites."The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles"A link they omitted was to a review of Jane Holtz Kay's book Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back, in Reason's January 1998 issue, by Steven Hayward, is at www.reason.com/9801/bk.hayward.html
Hayward pretends to not understand how serious the car-haters are when he writes:
Not long ago I watched a grown congressman on C-SPAN calling for a tax break for commuters "who would like to do the right thing" and ride mass transit instead of driving to work. The premise--that driving to work is immoral--went unchallenged.Hayward has become one of the most prolific writers on the sprawl/smart growth topic, as a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute and the Heritage Foundation which, incidentally, was founded by railfan Paul Weyrich.
the-tech.mit.edu/~richmond/professional/professional.htmlA doctoral dissertation by Jonathan Richmond, now at MIT, goes far in explaining why politicians who have no technical aptitudes and would have trouble setting the clock on a VCR are enamored (Prof. Richmond uses stronger sexual terms) of rail transit. It is supposed to be published in book form next year, so get your free copy while you can, in pdf.(I'd like to see every member of every city council have a copy, then check back in six months to find out whether they've read it, or even looked at it. The results could be used for another doctoral dissertation, who knows?)
RailRoadingAmerican.com
www.railroadingamerica.comVic Vreland of Cedar Creek, Texas has put together a fun site where Libertarians and other anti-rail cretins can track progress around the country as light rail forces face the glare of the revealing light of truth. Denver and Phoenix were "Railroaded" after voters went along with light rail schemes, but Texas is a different story. San Antonio "Derailed" a tax for light rail last May, and Austin voters will have their chance in November.I'll end with two huge sites devoted almost exclusively to transit. Each has an ax to grind, and there should be no confusion who stands where. However, I believe an impartial observer will find much more of value at Wendell Cox's Public Purpose Web site than at APTA's, where transit agency officials hang out and plot for more tax money.A good set of links to news stories, reports, cartoons, etc. with outstanding (though gaudy) graphics. (Not to be confused with the Independent Institute's home page.) The most activist-oriented site on this list, other than APTA.
WENDELL COX CONSULTANCY & THE PUBLIC PURPOSE
www.publicpurpose.comMore than any one person could read in weeks, this site has numbers, tables and charts galore on every aspect of transit, privatization, demographic trends and related topics. A minimum of opinion pieces, most papers are short and to the point, compiled from official sources. Wendell Cox recently admitted his preference for light rail -- in Hong Kong. It doesn't work anywhere in this country, so maybe it will in China.American PublicTransportation Association (APTA)
www.apta.comMuch of this site is devoted to informing the transit people who pay dues (with taxpayer funds) to APTA about how hard they are working to secure more federal funding for mass transit. A lot of space is also given to promoting conferences, meetings and such which the taxpayers will also be stuck for. The part that interests me can be accessed from the home page by clicking on "Statistics" in the left-hand column. 1998's transit agency profiles for all cities over 50,000 population are available in .pdf and run about 70 kb each.The presentation-quality charts need to be blown up about 300% to read, but all the numbers that once appeared in HTML tabular form are there (I wish there was a way to extricate each column to plug into a spreadsheet. Maybe somebody knows a way to hash copied, undelimited text into different cells in Excel? Heck, I'd settle for copying HTML tables into a spreadsheet as a block. They always look like a diagonal ramp for me, with empty cells spread all over the screen.)
Also on APTA's site are the contracted-for pro-transit pieces by Paul Weyrich and William Lind's dowloadable in .pdf format, "Conservatives and Mass Transit: Is it Time for a New Look?" and "Does Transit Work? A Conservative Reappraisal." People who have trouble distinguishing between conservatives and libertarians would probably not benefit from reading their stuff, but I found it quite illuminating. A little rationalizing can go a long ways.