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URBAN MOBILITY
REPORT LEADS TO ERRONEOUS TRANSIT PROPAGANDA
By Randall O’Toole
Publication by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) of its 2003
urban mobility report today has led the transit lobby to make false
claims about the role transit can play in relieving urban congestion.
The American Public Transportation Association claims that the report
says that "more public transportation is needed to relieve traffic
congestion" (http://tinyurl.com/p9hl).
In fact, the report says no
such thing.
TTI, which is part of Texas A&M's engineering program, has published
its annual urban mobility report for over a decade, and the latest
report tracks highways and driving in each of seventy-five urban
areas from 1982 through 2001. (See
http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/ to
download the full report.)
This year, TTI added a new feature: an evaluation of how bad
congestion would be if public transit were somehow eliminated. The
institute also made the unrealistic assumption that, without transit,
everyone who now rides transit would start driving everywhere where
they now go by transit. Since a large share of transit users in most
cities are people who can't drive, this is absurd.
Based on this assumption, TTI calculated that transit greatly reduces
urban congestion. Even this is unlikely in most urban areas. When the
main Los Angeles transit agency went on strike for a month in 2000,
no one could discern any increase in congestion. Except in a handful
of major urban areas (mainly New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago,
San Francisco, and Philadelphia), transit carries too few people to
make any difference to congestion outside of downtown areas. This
makes transit really just a subsidy to downtown densities.
Even if TTI's calculations are correct, the report says absolutely
nothing about whether further investments in transit will reduce
congestion. This is especially striking, because the report DOES
calculate that further investments in other programs can reduce
congestion:
* Freeway ramp metering currently saves motorists 73 million hours a
year, and adding it to congested freeways that do not now have it
could increase the savings by nearly 200 million more hours;
* Traffic signal coordination, which TTI calls "one of the most
cost-effective tools to increase mobility" on signaled roads, could
save motorists an added 17.2 million hours a year;
* Incident management -- a coordinated effort to quickly remove
stalled vehicles and other highway obstructions -- could save
motorists 100 million hours a year.
TTI also examined high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes but could not
find evidence that they had significantly reduced congestion in most
areas. TTI said this was partly due to a lack of data, but in fact
many HOV lanes do not carry enough multi-passenger vehicles to
justify their use. TTI did not consider the effect of turning HOV
lanes into high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes, as proposed by the Reason
Foundation and others (http://www.rppi.org/ps305.pdf).
In contrast to its statements on ramp metering, signal coordination,
and incident management, the TTI report makes no statements about the
effects of investments in transit. Or does it?
A close look at the ranking of regions over the last two decades
reveals that congestion grew fastest in those regions that invested
mainly in rail transit. By contrast, regions that invested heavily in
highways had much slower congestion growth, even in the case of many
regions that grew faster than the rail regions.
To see this relationship, you can download the basic TTI data from
http://americandreamcoalition.org/tti2003.xls . This spreadsheet
shows population growth, growth of the "travel time index" (the
institute's best measure of congestion), and other pertinent data for
all seventy-five urban areas. To interpret the spreadsheet, read
http://americandreamcoalition.org/ttisheet.txt .
Although you can sort the spreadsheet in any order you wish, it is
currently sorted by the growth of the travel time index. The travel
time index is a measure of how long it takes to get somewhere during
rush hour compared to other times of the day. If, in uncongested
conditions, it takes an hour to get somewhere, and it takes 1.5 hours
in congested conditions, then the travel time index is 1.5. If the
index in 1982 was 1.1 and in 2001 it was 1.4, then the growth is .3
or, as the institute puts it, 30 points.
The striking result is that nearly all of the ten urban areas with
the fastest congestion growth are rail cities. I include in this
Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul because, while they did not start
building rail lines until the end of the 1982-2001 period, they both
adapted anti-highway policies by the early 1990s.
In contrast, fast-growing communities such as Orlando and Houston all
have low rates of congestion growth, mainly because they invested in
new highways rather than rails. Las Vegas, the nation's fastest
growing major urban area, is particularly striking. New roads allowed
it to have only the seventeenth-fastest growing rate of congestion.
Las Vegas also improved its bus service by contracting out buses to
private operators, which led to a doubling of the region's transit
market share in the last decade. No other urban area has been able to
double transit's market share in this time period, and certainly none
that focused on rail transit, many of which lost market share.
The American Public Transportation Association, which represents most
transit agencies as well as rail transit engineering and construction
firms, issued its press release urging more spending on transit
within minutes of the Texas Transportation Institute's release of its
report. It is disappointing that the Institute, which in the past has
presented its data in an objective manner, has allowed itself to
become a tool of the transit lobby.
In response, I submitted op eds on the report, saying that rail
transit doesn't relieve congestion, to newspapers in fourteen urban
areas where rail construction (or more rail construction) is under
consideration. I also sent a press release saying the same thing to
reporters in many different cities (a copy of which I sent to you
earlier today).
If you have any questions or suggestions of op-ed editors or
reporters to whom I could send op eds or press releases, please send
them to me. I will keep you updated with further information as it
develops.
_________________________________________________________
Randal O'Toole The Thoreau Institute
rot@ti.org
http://www.ti.org
Please feel free to forward or reprint this article with appropriate
citation. If you would like to be added to or removed from the
Thoreau Institute's Vanishing Automobile update list, send an email
to
rot@ti.org.
A free, 32-page PDF version of the Journalists' Guide to the American
Dream is now available on the American Dream Coalition web site. The
full-color version (2.2 megabytes) is at
http://americandreamcoalition.org/ADGuide.html . A smaller (888
kilobyte) version that is identical but with black-and-white photos
is at
http://americandreamcoalition.org/ADGuideB&W.html .
Back issues of Vanishing Automobile updates are posted at
http://www.ti.org/vaupdates.html . Also see
http://www.ti.org/urban.html for articles and op eds and
http://www.ti.org/urbanmobility.html for other analyses of urban
issues.
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