In the back and forth of the light rail debate, a big point that often gets missed is the overall benefit of light rail. Or lack of benefit, more accurately. Metro has already spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a type of transit that a small fraction of Houstonians use. And we already know the per-rider subsidy is astronomical for light rail, when compared to bus service. The human cost is that Metro has sacrificed many bus routes, especially ones that provide service for the poor and the elderly, both to feed bus riders to the train, and to cut costs, since the train is a huge money drain.
Metro is a public transit agency, and the core mission of public transit is to provide transportation to those who otherwise wouldn’t have it. Metro, however, has decided to change its focus and become a mass transit agency — except that the “mass” part is misleading. Metro is actually trying to become an inner-loop taxi service. If it was actually doing some mass-transit service (Katy and The Woodlands commuter lines), in addition to providing the bus service for which it used to be known, perhaps Metro wouldn’t be in its current shape.
Now go read Tom Kirkendall’s post on the light rail boondoggle, and how we can look to Los Angeles to see what we are heading toward. Here’s a taste:
I continue to be amazed by the Houston mainstream media’s myopia in failing to take a look at the rail experience of Los Angeles, an area that shares many characteristics with the Houston metro area, but is much more densely-populated, which is normally a requirement for making an urban rail line successful.
That myopia is leading to a dangerous dynamic in the rail transit debate that USC urban economics professor Peter Gordon notes in commenting on this LA Times story regarding extension of the LA region’s rail system. Professor Gordon observes that, despite irrefutable evidence that the LA rail system has been a boondoggle of massive proportions, the LA Times article does not even bother to address the threshold issue of whether more money should be dumped into the black hole rail transit system in the first place. Rather, the article assumes that the money will be spent and then simply addresses the issue of where it will go.
For the pro-rail crowd, it’s more of a feel-good thing than a measurable benefit thing.
