Light Rail? Rip it Out!!

As we are all suffering the ravages of inflation, we come to think about how it got to this point…well at least I do.  It’s a curse.

And as I focus on what is wrong with the world… my thinking naturally drifts to public transit.  I know. I know. You all have been thinking about crime, the war in Ukraine, and how Kim Kardashian got to be a billionaire, but the issues of public transit, light rail and why we are stuck in traffic, deserve my wading into the historical weeds on your behalf, and why if we don’t divert our resources and attention to this important issue, we are going to be screwed, again.

So, in yet another chapter of “how the hell did we get into this mess”…, I begin. Its origins began more than a century ago.

The heyday of American passenger rail was from 1897-1920.  Back in those days everything was at the center of town, what we now call the Central Business District (CBD), not to be confused with the cannabidiol (CBD) gummies, a compound found in marijuana that we use to take the edge off while waiting in traffic.  The centers of town were where all the factories, shopping, schools, and non-agricultural jobs were.  The factories were multi-storied affairs where thousands of people went to work every day.  Transit systems were developed as hub and spoke affairs in which the city centers (CBDs) served as the hub because that’s where everyone needed and wanted to go. It is estimated that over 70% of the transit trips in those days were to the central business district.

In 1913, Henry Ford revolutionized the transportation industry and thus dooming the hub and spoke public transit model that had taken hold in our emerging American urban centers.  As a result of the efficiencies created by the assembly line, Ford was able to reduce the price of his touring car from $950 in 1910 to as low as $360 in 1916.  American families that owned a car went from 5% in 1913 to more than 50% in 1926. 

However, in addition to Ford providing an affordable method of transportation for American families, the assembly line itself changed the makeup of central business districts.  Where factories had been located in the urban core, new assembly line facilities needed vast amounts of land that were not available in downtown areas.  Manufacturing facilities moved outside the CBD, and their workers moved with them. Ford’s Highland Park Plant, which built the Model T covered 130 acres, and the River Rouge Plant which built model As, was 900 acres.

As other types of manufacturing facilities that used the assembly line process were being developed across the country, car and bus transportation were the only ways that could serve these widespread areas economically.  The transit industry reflected this shift.  The number of streetcar lines and ridership peaked in 1919 and then began to decline throughout the 1920s as the nature of manufacturing changed.

In most cities between 1910 and 1973, streetcars were scrapped, and the rails and electric lines that powered them were pulled out to be replaced by roads and cars to transport Americans to work, school and to shop.  While 40% of the jobs were in manufacturing in 1920, America dispersed its jobs even further as it became a service economy, growing jobs in health care, education, wholesale and retail trade, and government as hospitals, schools, and shopping left Central Business Districts for more convenient suburban locations such that today, only 8% of jobs are located in Central Business Districts.

Stuck with fixed transportation routes and declining passengers, costs for private transit operators increased while revenues declined leading those operators to close their businesses.  In the 1970’s as rail companies were going bankrupt in droves (remember Penn Central?), the interstate transit systems serving New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia were also financially unsustainable. 

As a result of good lobbying, Congress (always willing to spend other people’s money to bail out an industry that had connections) agreed to provide federal funding to help states take over those interstate operations around those four municipalities instead of freeing them to undergo a peaceful financial death and allow the market to develop alternative transportation solutions to fit what people wanted, needed, and could afford.

Now, not even Congress could justify pork spending for only four cities, so making things worse, it agreed to help any city take over its transit system from private interests.  In the next decade, the nation’s transit rail systems were almost completely socialized or municipalized.

However, the takeover of transit systems by governments did not solve the financial difficulties that faced the industry.  In order to finance the operations of these failing transit operations, local governmental entities had to supplement fares by increasing taxes.  In many areas, the taxing districts had to cover larger regions in order to generate sufficient revenue.  As a result, transit agencies also had to expand transit systems into the suburbs to justify their expanded taxing districts so that the taxpayers in the expanded districts would believe they were getting something for their tax dollars even though, they did not want or need public transit to satisfy their transportation needs.

As governmental entities took over the public transit industry, the illusion, if it ever existed, of these operations ever being economically sustainable slipped from our consciousness…. Operating expenses increased geometrically while ridership increased only arithmetically, and public entities got further and further in the hole.  After adjusting for inflation, transit agencies have spent $1.6 trillion (with a T) on operations and improvements since 1970 while only collecting $500 billion in fares.

As public transit was not the solution for urban areas transportation woes, with increased population, highways were becoming more congested as urban growth patterns sprawled to the suburbs and downtown centers emptied out.

In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter was president, and disco was at an end.  Eschewing the standard red vs. blue yard signs, Carter’s signs were green as he rode the wave of the environmental activism.  His energy policy was based on Americans cutting their energy usage, reminding us of the last time we had to turn our thermostats down and freeze in our homes. 

California had become a major player in the environmental movement especially with degrading air quality in the Los Angeles basin from pollution from industry and automobiles. Experiencing the 1973 OPEC and 1979 Iranian oil embargos, the academic community and neo-traditional urban designers (who wanted to reimpose urban density) capitalized on and joined in the environmental movement which was leading the fight against low-density, auto-oriented sprawl. These interest groups. environmentalists, academics and neo-traditional urban planners developed anti-car and anti-suburban initiatives and messaging which matched nicely with transit agencies desperate need for more riders and revenue.

We started hearing the mantras that continue to this day.  “We need to get cars off the road.”  “Single passenger vehicles are bad”, and perhaps not for the first time nor for the last, we see policy makers take positions that do not favor what is in the best for their constituents; in this case the fantastic freedom and opportunity for travel afforded by the American automobile.

Of course, these pleas to restrict auto transportation, were for “other people” with the old joke that the public supported carpooling and public transit for “other people” so they could drive down the highway more quickly with them out of the way.

Air quality did improve but with no thanks to the light rail movement.  It was solved substantially by catalytic converters, and efficiency improvements to gasoline engines and reformulated gasoline to remove lead and other impurities.

In this era, San Diego built its rail system in a few short years for a fraction of what the BART had cost in San Francisco, and municipalities like, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Sacramento, San Jose, and Portland would all open their own light rails by the end of the decade. To capture the sentiment, Shelley Poticha, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the former executive director of the Congress for New Urbanism, a nonprofit that advocated for walkable, transit-oriented communities, said, “There was so much excitement at that point among policy people. They thought, ’Maybe this is the thing that’ll get people out of cars.’”… and “they” were wrong.

Nevertheless, urban planners of the day believed that light rail could draw a new market of riders. They believed that car-owning commuters who lived in suburbs would be interested in alternative transportation options. That’s why virtually all light rail systems followed the old “hub and spoke” layout, with long arms reaching out to the suburbs rather than focusing on the needs of the city core.

This change of public transit moved the focus from the poor who had to use transit because they had nothing else (“captive” riders) to those who had automobiles and were generally better off and able to pay higher fares (“choice” riders). Policy makers and 1980s planners were sold on the ideas of new urbanism and reducing congestion by light rail.

President Ronald Reagan was one of the few to push back against the new urbanist philosophy. His characterization of Miami’s metro rail in March 1985, which was falling short of ridership projections, is a good snapshot. “In Miami,” Reagan told a conference of county officials, “the $1 billion subsidy helped build a system that serves less than 10,000 daily riders. That comes to $100,000 per passenger. It would have been a lot cheaper to buy everyone a limousine.”

Nevertheless, new rail systems spread out across the land with most falling short on attracting significant new crowds of riders or shifting commuters away from their cars. While local officials were sold by planners and academics on the idea of reducing vehicle traffic and congestion, it didn’t happen.  In Sacramento, San Jose, and Pittsburgh, transit’s overall market share has declined since the early 1990s. San Diego’s has stayed flat. Even Portland, which probably has the most fleshed-out light rail network in the U.S., has gained only a couple of percentage points in the numbers of commuters using transit.

Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) followed the same pattern.  In the 1990s, RTD built 16 miles of rail along its southwest corridor. Non-public estimates were that the cost per passenger was $48/trip from the southwest suburbs to downtown Denver leading some to derisively comment that we should have given them taxi vouchers.  Turns out we should have. 

After losing a rail election in 1997, transit officials aligning with the environmental and business lobbies did not give up.  In 2004, they came back with a better campaign and convinced the voters to tax themselves $4.7 billion to build 122 miles of rail, 57 stations, 18 miles of express bus lanes and to renovate the Denver Union Station into a multi-modal transportation hub.  It was called FasTracks, and it was to be all built by 2017.  The head of RTD predicted that 50% of commuters would use light rail, and the public believed him. It was all a fantasy.  By 2010, the projected price tag had ballooned to $6.5 billion, and the completion date was extended to 2050. Commuter ridership never got above 4.8 %.

While total ridership numbers increased briefly until 2014, total ridership has declined every year since despite the renovated Denver Union Station (2014), the addition of the Airport, A-line (2016), the Westminster B-line (2016), the Aurora R- line (2017), and the Arvada G-line (2017).

RTD ridership:

2015-103.4 million

2016-101.3 million

2017-100.9 million

2018-97.6 million

2019-94.8 million

2020-52.6 million

Thus, despite hopes and expectations, the riders didn’t materialize, and congestion was not reduced.  In 2000, 4.8% of workers in Denver and Aurora took transit to work, and after the expenditure of $8 billion in building light-rail and commuter-rail lines in Colorado, the metro area share was still unchanged at 4.8%.

The public transit officials, environmental interests and business community’s answer to the problem of failing to get people to use light rail was to be build more light rail. “If we just had a larger system, it would increase ridership” and accomplish what we always thought to be true.

The promise to make people’s lives better was long forgotten.  The goal was now not to have a better transportation system for the benefit of all but how to increase public transit even if the riders hated it.

After building line after line with ridership declining, it was suggested that perhaps fares were too high. “Perhaps if we had better signage?”  That should do it.  “Perhaps if we redid our fare structure to make it clearer”.   Yep. “Perhaps, if we had better security on the rail cars and at the stations that were turning into dangerous drug dens”.  “Perhaps if we had more trains that would run on time?” Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps….

Another option was to blame free parking at destinations. The reasoning went that if only they could raise the price of parking, (and make people’s lives more miserable), then the costs would compare favorably to the already heavily subsidized light rail fares. The same argument is being used today to push electric vehicles. To counter the argument that EVs are too expensive, the response from some of our leaders is to increase the cost of gas and subsidize EV purchases in order to level the playing field. 

However, there was one reason that public transit supporters would never consider.  That is that the service they are providing is not worth the cost and annoyance that comes with it, and that a substantial number of potential riders wouldn’t be attracted even if it was free.

The basic truth is that light rail doesn’t go where enough people want to go and if it did, it would take too long.

According to 2019 data, Denver residents could reach 55% of the area’s jobs within 30 minutes by car but train users could only reach 1.39% of area jobs. Even if you expanded the time to a 50-minute commute, while car users could reach 100% of the jobs, train users could only get to 7%.  Add that to the myriad of other destinations; school, shopping, entertainment, where light rail doesn’t go, and its use is simply not realistic and never will be.

Only 2.8% of Denver workers live in a house without at least one car and not all of them take transit.  Giving a chronically poor person a used car will do far more for their job prospects than giving them a free transit pass.

Nationally transit uses almost exactly the same amount of energy and emits the same amount of green house gasses per passenger mile as automobiles.  Encouraging people to drive cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars will do more for the environment than failed efforts to get them out of their cars and on to transit.

Transit often makes traffic worse as we follow lumbering busses that stop at every corner and while we wait at crossings for the train to pass.  Some have suggested that these delays while we are running our motors contribute more toward pollution and congestion than is solved by the few cars public transit takes off of the road.

What also continues not to change is the pending financial crisis that Denver RTD and other metropolitan area transit authorities are facing.  In Denver for 2019, 2020 and 2021, RTD suffered operating losses of over $825 million per year.  Prior to the pandemic, the fares plus the RTD sales taxes did not cover the total operating costs of running the organization. As a result of the COVID relief packages, RTD received $508 million in federal funds which served to postpone its inevitable bankruptcy absent massive tax increases on the public.

A separate financial time bomb are the upcoming capital costs to rebuild the system. Just like everything else, things wear out.  Every 30 years or so, all the rails, track and signals have to be replaced.  The stations have to be redone.  The railcars wear out.  Being a young system, RTD has never had to go through the rebuilding of its light rail lines.  Thirty years is coming up fast since its first line was put into operation in 1994, and RTD doesn’t have the cash for the multi-billions in capital costs to rebuild the system.  In addition, RTD will begin to have new retirement costs under their defined benefit plan as employees reach their 20-30 years of service.

What to do?  Well definitely don’t build any more rail lines.  Such a massive capital investment for limited ridership would only be throwing good money after bad.  This will be a political disaster for RTD officials because it will require them to abandon the northwest rail line through Boulder and Longmont betraying those who have been paying increased sales taxes for almost 20 years who will now realize that they will get nothing. Our Governor who resides in Boulder wants it built, damn the costs, and RTD management will be under tremendous pressure to do his bidding. 

When the rest of the system reaches the end of its useful life and needs to be rebuilt, don’t. For once our politicians should recognize their mistakes.  Rip up the old lines and instead of rebuilding them, make them available for car and truck traffic to solve the congestion problems of the people.  Focus the remaining revenue on a smaller bus system aimed at people in underserved communities who do not own a car and for whom bus service is their only option for transportation.

Sigh! Sometimes, as I wrote this column giving you all the bad news that public transit is not free and that you are not getting what you thought you were getting, I felt like I am the one who has to tell you Santa Claus doesn’t exist.  Well, I’m sorry, but Santa has run out of cash.