Kevin Smith, Tooele Transcript Bulletin (Op-Ed):
About $2 billion has been spent or is committed to being spent on TRAX and Frontrunner even though in Salt Lake City freeways are a whopping 88 percent more cost-effective, according to Owen Courreges of the Urban Futures Program at the Reason Foundation. Randy O’Toole wrote in “Rails to Nowhere: The Utah Transit Tax” that even if UTA tripled transit ridership it would still carry less than a 1.3 percent of all passenger miles in the region.
Do we in Tooele County really want to spend billions for that kind of return on investment? Cline’s assertion that “it helps keep pollution in check” is erroneous. In “The Great Rail Disaster,” O’Toole states, “Since automobiles pollute most in congested traffic, rail transit often leads to more … air pollution. Even where [rail] can reduce air pollution, the cost is exorbitant — roughly $1 million per ton of reduced emissions, compared to $10,000 per ton for many other air-quality measures.”
Another myth Transcript-Bulletin staff writer Jamie Belnap’s piece perpetuates is that mass transit will relieve congestion. Of two dozen U.S. urban areas with rail transit, 16 have the fastest rising congestion. Ted Balaker of the Reason Public Policy Institute states that one proposed rail system in North Carolina would reduce regional congestion by about one-tenth of 1 percent. Not impressive.
One of the primary reasons I support mass transit in general is the possible reduction it does/will/might one day have on carbon emissions in metropolitan areas. And those results have yet to be seen on any sweeping scale. The Reason article cited in this op-ed does conveniently ignore certain success stories of increased, substantial usage in New Mexico, New York, New Hampshire, and other large cities.
I’ve found little tangible proof to back up Smith’s opening statement that “most” mass transit systems are “incredible costly failures.” I don’t think the success of mass transit can be measured by accounting ledgers. They are an investment. But admittedly, the ridership “boom” promised for many systems currently in place has yet to materialize.
Will it, or is this just a hopeful ideal, destined for failure?
I’m a fan of mass transit in principle, but the more I learn about it the more convinced I am that its value is closely related to population density. It’s a tough trade-off because it is much cheaper to make the investment when population density is lower but the payoff only comes when the population density gets higher. The question of whether the ridership boom will come depends on the population density rising. Will it happen – I believe it will for Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front, but there are no guarantees. Some areas can probably guess safely that they will never grow to a population density where mass transit would pay off (say, between Ogden and Logan) but I think that population density really is the measure that most closely predicts the value of mass transit systems.