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Light Rail Results in Increased Traffic Congestion in
Portland, Dallas, and St. Louis
(From the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, Arizona)
Playing with Trains
As Valley gears up, light-rail ridership elsewhere
declines
By Wendell Cox
The Valley will soon spend more than $1 billion for the
Central
Phoenix-East Valley light-rail line. The line was sold to the voters
under the promise of reducing traffic congestion. They were misled.
Portland makes the point. For nearly two decades, the nation's
transit-media complex has been touting the "success" of light rail
in Portland. Yet, along Interstate 84, which the first line
parallels, traffic continued to rise and today stands at more than
50 percent above the counts before light rail.
> Things are no different for the newer Westside line, which opened
in 1998. The latest Oregon Department of Transportation traffic
counts indicate that auto use into downtown Portland has increased
more in this corridor than the two freeway corridors that do not
have light rail.
> Then there is Dallas, which opened three light-rail lines in the
1990s. Any observer of national rail advocacy press releases over
the past five years cannot have missed the giddy reports on Dallas.
It thus came as a surprise when the 2000 Census reported that
transit ridership to work declined by 4,000 in Dallas since 1990,
while employment was increasing by 36,000. It is difficult to reduce
traffic congestion when transit's market share is dropping 18
percent.
> The bronze medal usually goes to St. Louis. A rags-to-riches
story has been oft repeated about how light rail revived a transit
system that was near dead since the line opened in the early 1990s.
Large ridership increases were reported, while the transit agency
claimed that most of the light-rail riders had been taken out of
cars.
> If the transit publicists had consulted highway vehicular counts
they might have exhibited more caution. The hype got so out of
control that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, not normally given to
skepticism about costly public expenditures, expressed criticism.
> Well, the Census Bureau also had a surprise for St.
Louis, where
journey to work ridership dropped by 4,000, while employment was
increasing by 95,000. The press has been silent about this, as it
has been about the fact that ridership after adding a second line
into Illinois remains below 1998 numbers, when there was only one
line.
> The rail promoters often discount the emphasis on the journey to
work. Admittedly, work-related trips are by no means a majority of
metropolitan travel. But it is their concentration on two to three
hours each weekday morning and evening that produces the worst
traffic congestion in virtually every major urban area. If light
rail is not taking people out of their cars on the way to work, and
it is not, light rail can be having no impact on the recurring
traffic congestion that takes so much time out of our lives.
> But if Valley residents cannot look forward to reduced traffic
congestion, what can they expect? That costs will rise. Charlotte,
N.C., transit officials have announced that the cost of their
proposed rail system has more than doubled, blaming "things that
were left out of the original plans."
> Mayor Pat McCrory of Charlotte even went so far as to claim that
the voters simply approved a tax, not a transit plan. The mayor was
wrong. There was a plan, it was detailed, and the voters of
Charlotte, like those elsewhere, do not simply approve new taxes for
taxes sake.
> But it doesn't end in Charlotte. St. Louis voters were promised
four lines, but will get only one. The Los Angeles system approved
by voters was long ago scaled back from 11 lines to four. Promises
were broken in Dallas. Seattle's cost escalation has become a
national joke, even before ground is broken. Portland's Westside
line nearly tripled in cost.
> It goes on and on. A new report published by the American
Planning Association found that cost escalation occurs in nine of 10
projects, in a study of hundreds of projects North America and
Europe. The authors, Danish university professors, coined a
technical term for the cause - "lying." My personal experience
mirrors their findings. In 1981, members of the Los Angeles
Transportation Commission were told that a light-rail line could be
built from Los Angeles to Long Beach for less than $150 million.
Soon after we approved the line, the costs started rising. By the
time the line opened in 1990, the cost had more than quadrupled,
after accounting for inflation.
> A private company that spent $600 million for a $150 million
project would be mercifully forced into bankruptcy. But things are
different in government. No public official, especially no elected
official, can imagine suffering the embarrassment of "pulling the
plug" on a major project, no matter how obscene the cost escalation
becomes.
> It is not surprising that light-rail builders have an incentive
to claim projects will cost less, while planning to push the prices
up after virtually irrevocable approvals have been given.
> None of this is to suggest that the light-rail systems are
unpopular in their communities. In Portland, St. Louis, Dallas and
elsewhere, people have found out that light rail is a pleasant way
to travel to downtown stadiums, arenas and festivals. But as for
commuting to work, light rail will provide no relief and fails
abjectly in the fundamental promise that induced approval.
> Barely 1 percent of Valley residences will be within walking
distance of the line. At least 99 percent of destinations will be
outside walking distance of light rail. There is a difference
between playing with trains and solving transportation problems.
Wendell Cox is principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy in St. Louis and
was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to three terms on the Los Angeles
County Transportation Commission (1977-1985).
DEMOGRAPHIA (Wendell Cox Consultancy)
+1.618.632.8507 Fax +1.810.821.8134
"People should have the freedom to live and work where and how they
like."
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