You Can Build Your Way Out of Congestion
This article is from the American Dream Coalition’s Summer 2007 Newsletter
San Jose is living proof that crowded cities can build their way out of congestion: Between 1989 and 1994, the region gained 100,000 new jobs, yet new road construction cut the delays encountered by the average rush-hour driver in half. Yet the aftermath of this stunning success provides a dark lesson for urban leaders all across the country.
In 1984, voters in Santa Clara County (of which San Jose is the seat) approved a ten-year half-cent sales tax for new highways. This allowed the construction of several new freeways and the expansion of several more. As a result, the Texas Transportation Institute estimates that the delay facing each rush-hour commuter declined from 100 hours per year in 1989 to just 50 hours in 1994.
In 1991, California voters agreed to provide even more funding for congestion relief by raising gasoline taxes by 9 cents a gallon. This measure also required all urban counties to create a congestion management agency (CMA) that would decide how best to spend each county’s share of the funds to reduce congestion.
In 1995, Santa Clara County decided to merge its CMA with its transit agency, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). This created a huge conflict of interest: VTA would get to keep any money it decided to spend on transit, while money spent on highways would go to some other agency.
Unsurprisingly, VTA decided to spend as much as possible on transit. In fact, within just five years, VTA effectively stole billions of dollars from highways to finance its rail-transit empire.
In 1996, when the half-cent sales tax for congestion relief was up for a 10-year renewal, VTA decided to spend half of it on rail construction. Then, in 2000, VTA put a new measure on the ballot to renew the sales tax for 30 more years and dedicate it all to transit. After an expensive campaign promising congestion relief, voters agreed.
Much of that money is slated to go for a $4.7 billion extension of the BART system to San Jose. The environmental impact report for this extension says that BART will provide absolutely no congestion relief: the average speed of rush-hour traffic on all highways in the area will be exactly the same with or without BART.
Flush with funds for capital improvements, VTA is also building new light-rail lines. Yet in 2001 it ran out of money to operate those lines, so it cut rail and bus service by 19 percent. This contributed to a 35 percent decline in transit ridership between 2001 and 2005.
VTA’s general manager admits that the agency does not have enough money to build BART and, even if it did, it would not have enough money to operate it. Yet the agency’s board insists on continuing with the project, recently voting to spend $185 million on further engineering studies.
Even before the service cuts, VTA had just about the worst-performing light-rail trains in the country. Although a light-rail car can hold up to 200 people, VTA’s cars carried an average of just 15 people at a time in 2001, little more than half the national average. By 2005, this had fallen to 13. Due partly to this low ridership, VTA spent more than $7 per rider operating light rail in 2005, compared with an average of $2.56 for light rail nationwide.
Ridership is so low that the average mile of light-rail line carries just 4 percent as many people per day as the average freeway lane mile in San Jose. On some light-rail routes, VTA runs only four light-rail “trains” per hour—and the word trains is in quotation marks because VTA often runs just one car at a time. There is no reason why buses could not provide far better service at a far lower cost, but VTA is planning at least one more
light rail route in addition to the BART line.
Fortunately, Santa Clara County voters have wised up to VTA. A new sales tax on the ballot in June 2006 that would have allowed VTA to build the BART line was decisively rejected. But voters still have to somehow wrest the half-cent sales tax that is supposed to be used for congestion relief away from VTA.
San Jose’s transportation experience should provide cautionary lessons to people in other urban areas:
1. You can build your way out of congestion. But if you fund such construction out of general sales tax instead of a highway user fee, the tax will be more vulnerable to diversions to more wasteful projects.
2. If you give an agency the power to decide how to spend money to relieve congestion, be absolutely sure that the agency has no conflicts of interest and is not vulnerable to political meddling. Rather than local transit or state transportation agencies, the best solution is probably a regional toll road authority that can collect tolls and spend them exclusively on roads.
3. In general, a half-cent sales tax is plenty to operate a bus transit agency. When that agency asks for another half cent to build rail transit, however, be warned: it will not be enough money and is likely to result in reduced bus service.