Rail Reality Revealed: Train Transit will Degrade Austin
COST Commentary: The article below is one of the best written and most concise we have seen regarding the false promises of rail transit to provide efficient transportation and improve people’s economic prospects. Rail transit has all the major shortcomings discussed in the article below and is very outdated for most new applications.
This article’s author, Joel Kotkin, addresses several points specifically to the “Bay Area Plan” in California. The points are valid for any similar plan in the U.S., including Austin’s.
Perhaps the one very significant area not addressed in this article is the wave of glamorized impact of rail transit on development and tax revenue increases near stations. Many years of rail experience has essentially debunked modern rail’s original major impetuses: Reduced highway congestion, reduced air pollution and cost-effectiveness. As these advertised qualities have been discredited, many supporters have turned to “economic development” as the new leading support banner. There is a wealth of study and experience which verifies this to be a sham much as the other promoted benefits of rail transit, as discussed below.
The summary economic development “story” is somewhat straight forward. The vast majority of people do not move to an area because rail transit is available. They move to an area to find opportunity as usually demonstrated by the availability or promise of good jobs. If rail transit exists, a small number may choose to live near it. If there is no rail transit, they will live somewhere else. The bottom-line is that home building and new business, health, education, entertainment, etc. supporting new people will locate near customers and are not incremental development resulting in tax increases for the region due to the train. A train may influence a small number of people in their location choice. Therefore, incremental tax funding as proposed by Lone Star Rail on its “Investment Road Show” visits to all local communities is not additional money and sharing it with Lone Star Rail or any other such scheme, will only serve to increase citizens’ taxes to subsidize trains or reduce basic services provided by local governments.
It is troubling that Lone Star Rail District (Austin-San Antonio Commuter Rail) management is pleading for an agreement, with local Austin-San Antonio corridor governments, to share tax revenue increases within a half-mile of train stations with Lone Star on a 50/50 basis. Lone Star is not operating with transparency and has not revealed its detailed financial plan for the project including schedules, estimated capital costs, operating costs and ridership, with the proposed cost share for each local government entity. Lone Star basically wants a deal without revealing key elements of the plan. It is not surprising, many years and millions spent on the plan has not produced an acceptable roadmap with costs for such major elements as: 1) moving the Union Pacific Railroad to a new rail east of I-35, 2) determining the total capital cost and developed a viable plan to pay for it, 3) determining the operating costs and a viable plan to pay for it, 4) determining how much each local government entity would be required to subsidize the operations, 5) determining the fare for riders, 6) determining the cost-effectiveness and, therefore, sustainability of the rail line. Funding viability is paramount recognizing the 50% portion of rail funding, assumed to be coming from the Federal Government, is by no means assured. There are 10 times the, maybe, available Federal dollars being requested throughout the country.
There are no commuter trains in the U.S., similar to the Lone Star Rail, which are financially sound and Lone Star has not revealed a comparable model system of success which they hope to emulate.
These open project definitions and funding issues as well as numerous others, should have been addressed already and, certainly, prior to soliciting funding commitments from local governments, who must have high assurance of their required level of commitment. This is an extremely high risk rail venture with every indication of a very negative outcome. In all likelihood, it will take many years longer than being advertised and local governments could lose huge amounts of taxpayer funds requiring higher taxes or reduced basic city services while receiving miniscule, if any, benefit from this project.
Project Connect, a “committee” funded by Capital Metro, the City of Austin and the Lone Star Rail District just released a proposed route for Austin’s initial urban rail. More on this later. This route is different than all previously proposed rail routes, over many years. Each time a new group; Capital Metro, Austin City, citizen committees, Project Connect, political bodies, etc. have evaluated a route for the first urban rail, a different route is chosen. This is a flashing, red, warning light that Austin is an adolescent city and is continually changing. Rail is not flexible and is very expensive to move. It is clear, Austin should use very flexible cost-effective transit systems until its development patterns are more developed; prior to evaluating any form of expensive “fixed” transit. Based on continually developing experience, it is very unlikely, long outdated, rail technology will be chosen as the most cost-effective to meet the needs of our future transportation system.
The initial urban rail route, just recommenced by ‘Project Connect,’ seems to be very ill-advised. Its route is a short 4.5 miles north of the city center to the old Highland Mall area and 3 miles south to Riverside and Pleasant Valley road: Current discussions are to limit the first segment the northern portion for a “starter” segment which makes even less sense with wasteful spending of $500 million (about $100 million per mile) of taxpayer funds. This Billion Plus dollar system would serve a very small community of people in two areas which are still in their early development stages. This will assure anemic ridership, requiring huge tax subsidies, for a very long time and it will never be cost effective. It almost appears this route selection is based on an attempt to “fix” transit shortcomings of Cap Metro’s Red Line Commuter; primarily the Red Line does not provide convenient, direct access to UT and the major employment sections of downtown Austin, without transit transfers. This proposed urban rail route would connect to the Red line at Highland and bring riders through UT to downtown Austin. Urban rail is a very expensive transit, shuttle service, especially for the meager ridership of the Red Line.
The following COST posting contains Mayor Leffingwell’s lists of urban rail questions, established 2 ½ years ago, required to be answered prior to proceeding with rail. Also contained are a list of additional key questions by the Austin Chamber of Commerce and by COST.
Austin’s Urban Rail has Many Unanswered Questions
None of these key questions have been answered to this date. The election was previously planned, but not conducted, for 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012, all with different routes and similar unanswered key questions.
This entire new urban plan needs a thorough evaluation of alternatives which could take two years. A 2014 election is not responsible as key questions cannot be adequately answered prior to city’s projected urban rail election, less than 12 months from now. Issues include: 1) the lack of firm cost estimates, 2) the lack of credible ridership estimates, 3) it will have zero impact on congestion, air pollution and economic development, 4) it is not an effective way to spend a Billion dollars of taxpayer funds, 5) there are no viable ways to fund this project and its operation without higher taxes, 6) it will degrade overall transportation by using a huge, disproportionate share of funds and starving more effective mobility solutions, 7) it will increase taxes or reduce basic city services, 8.) it will degrade social equity by having a disproportionate negative impact on low income citizens, and, many other issues noted in “unanswered questions,” above
A statement made about a new, proposed high speed rail in Japan certainly applies to Austin’s proposed urban and commuter rail lines: “If you seriously take a look at its high cost and low demand, you’ll find it makes no business sense,” said Reijiro Hashiyama, a visiting professor at Chiba University of Commerce (Japan), who has argued against the project for years. Proposed Austin trains do not “make business sense” and in the broader context: They do not serve the greater societal good of citizens and community.
We have added a few comments in brackets [ ] and italicized below to supplement the article.
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Thinking Outside the Rails on Transit
by Joel Kotkin, 09/23/2013, newgeography.com
To many in the transit business – that is, people who seek to profit from the development and growth of buses, trains and streetcars – Southern California is often seen as a paradise lost, a former bastion of streetcar lines that crossed the region and sparked much of its early development. Today, billions are being spent to revive the region’s transit legacy.
Like many old ideas that attract fashionable support, this idea, on its surface, is appealing. Yet, in reality, the focus on mass transit, however fashionable, represents part of an expensive, largely misguided and likely doomed attempt to re-engineer the region away from its long-established dispersed, multipolar and auto-dependent form.
Traditional transit works best when a large number of commuters work in a central district easily accessible by trains or buses. New York and Washington, D.C., where up to 20 percent of the regional workforces labor downtown (the central business district), are ideal for transit. Even in those metropolitan areas, however, the auto is king. [The average downtown employment in major U.S. cities is under 10% of their regional work force. In Austin, this is slightly higher, about 14%, due to the State Capital and UT but it is not 30% which has been reported by Lone Star Rail and various train supporters in the area, as they wish to emphasize the larger work force to support rail.]
In contrast, less than 3 percent of Southern Californians work in downtown Los Angeles. Overall, despite all the money sunk into new rail lines around the country, Americans’ transit commuting is overwhelmingly concentrated in a few older “legacy” cities. Altogether, 55 percent of transit work trips are to six core cities: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, and 60 percent of those commutes are to downtown.
In contrast, in the Los Angeles-Orange County region, barely 6 percent of workers take transit, one-fifth the rate in New York. Yet we’re a bunch of committed strap-hangers compared with Phoenix, Atlanta, Charlotte, N.C., and Dallas-Fort Worth, where, despite surfeits of new trains and streetcars, 2 percent or less of commuters use public transit. Even in Portland, Ore., widely proclaimed the exemplar of new urbanism and transit investment, the percentage of commuters taking transit is less today than in 1980. Portland is now contemplating cutbacks that could eventually eliminate up to 70 percent of its transit service.
[Austin region’s transit work commuting is about the middle of U.S. regions, outside the six legacy cities mentioned above, at 2.3% of total commuting. This has declined over the past dozen years as it has throughout most of the nation. Commuting is the most extensive use of transit as overall transit in the Austin region is less than 1% of total passenger miles traveled. In Austin, public transit is the 5th highest commute mode behind: drive alone; carpool; work at home and other.]
Imposing Past on Future
This miserable record reflects how trains, a largely 19th century technology, have limited utility in a contemporary setting. Indeed, the only way to make it work, planners insist, is if the population is moved from their low-density neighborhoods to high-density “pack and stack” areas near transit stops, while suburban businesses are dragooned to denser downtown locations. This is the essence of the recently approved Bay Area Plan.
Although these kinds of strategies have never materially reduced automobile use – the Bay Area Plan itself says automobile use will still increase by 18 percent over 30 years – the bureaucratic logic here is almost Stalinesque in the scope of its social-engineering ambitions. As Bay Area journalist and plan advocate John Wildermuth puts it, people know they should take transit but don’t because it’s very inconvenient. But by forcing three quarters of new residents into dense housing, some with no parking, he reasons, it then will be “easier for them to either give up their cars or, at least, use them a lot less.”
Yet getting people to change their way of life, as many central planners have discovered, is not as easy as it seems. The highly dispersed San Jose-Silicon Valley area, the economic epicenter of the Bay Area and worldwide information technology, has a commute trip market share barely a third of major metropolitan area average. Building “one of the longest” light rail systems in the United States in 50 years has barely moved the percentage of transit commuters over the past three decades.
What the Bay Area Plan will probably accomplish is to boost housing prices ever further out of reach, both in urban areas and in the suburbs. With new single-family development effectively all but banned, prices of homes in the Bay Area already are again rising far faster than the national average and now are approaching two and half times higher, based on income, than in competitor regions such as Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Tex., Houston or Raleigh, N.C.
Environmental Imperative?
Greens and their allies in the high-density housing lobby long have suggested that “peak oil” and rising prices will inevitably drive suburbanites out their cars. But, clearly, recent advances in U.S. oil and natural gas production may have already made this moot. Transit activists increasingly have focused on climate change to justify massive spending on expanding transit and forcing recalcitrant suburbanites from their cars.
This logic is largely based on the notion that suburbanites must travel greater distances to work. Yet, a study by McKinsey & Co. and the Conference Board found that – largely because of the impact of higher energy standards for cars forecast by the Department of Energy – sufficient greenhouse gas emission reductions can be achieved without reducing driving or necessitate “a shift to denser urban housing.”
The fundamental limitations of transit in dispersed cities further weakens environmentalists’ claim. Ridership on some transit systems is so sparse that cars are more energy efficient. Then, there’s the oft-mistaken assumption that higher-density housing will reduce congestion and travel. But in multipolar areas like Southern California, traffic congestion and resultant pollution generally becomes worse with higher density.
There may be other, more technologically savvy ways to reduce emissions and energy use. People have cut automobile use the past three years but their reduced travel is not showing up so much in transit usage, but, rather, is driven by other factors such as unemployment and the high price of gasoline.
But, arguably the biggest reduction can be traced to the rise of telecommuting. Over the past decade, the country added some 1.7 million telecommuters, almost twice the much-ballyhooed increase of 900,000 transit riders. In Southern California, the number of home-based workers grew 35 percent, three times the increase for transit usage. By 2020, according to projections from demographer Wendell Cox, telecommuting should pass transit, both nationally and in this region, in total numbers.
What About the Poor?
Perhaps the most compelling argument for transit stems from serving those populations – the poor, students, minorities – who often lack access to a private car. Yet, for workers in newer cities, public transit often is not an effective alternative. Brookings Institution research indicates that less than 5 percent of the jobs in the Los Angeles and Riverside-San Bernardino areas are within reach of the average employee within 45 minutes, using transit. The figure is less than 10 percent in the San Jose metropolitan area, the same percentage as for cities nationwide. Moreover, 36 percent of entry-level jobs are completely inaccessible by public transit.
Not surprisingly, roughly three in four poorer workers use cars to get to work. Recent work by University of Southern California researcher Jeff Khau finds that car ownership is positively correlated with job opportunities; no such relationship can be proven with access to transit.
At the same time, we should look at more-flexible systems, notably, expanded bus and bus rapid transit, which work better in dispersed areas and are less costly. Most rail systems tend to cannibalize most of their riders from existing bus lines, which explains the small net increases in total transit ridership.
Transit too expensive
Costs matter, and will become more important as cities and counties face the looming threat of fiscal defaults. In this respect, rail systems essentially steal from other transit – notably, the buses used mostly by the poor – and from hard-pressed city and county general-fund budgets. Gov. Jerry Brown’s outrageously expensive high-speed rail, which will principally serve the affluent, takes this unfairness to an extreme.
Instead, we should push far more cost-effective ways to provide transportation options, including those from the private sector, such as the successful Megabus, which provides efficient, quicker and far-less expensive transport between cities than either existing rail or short-haul airline flights. [Megabus routes from Austin to San Antonio are much cheaper than the proposed train, just as comfortable and schedules are comparable..] USC’s Khau suggests the private sector also could enhance solutions for lower-income commuters through car loans and car-sharing services such as ZipCar and Lyft, a mobile app that links riders with drivers.
As we attempt to figure out ways to improve both the environment and people’s economic prospects, innovative 21st century solutions – from telecommuting to car-sharing – may prove more effective than relying on the 19th century technology of rail. We should not blindly follow transit ideology but focus on how to improve people’s mobility in ways other than the overpriced, inefficient and often far-less-equitable solutions being bandied about today.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
This piece originally appeared at The Orange County Register.