What if Mass Transit Does NOT Save...Anything? - Granite Grok

What if Mass Transit Does NOT Save…Anything?

Is Rail a wasteful proposition?
Is commuter Rail a wasteful proposition?

The assumption sold by planners and their mass-transit water carriers is that publicly funded public transportation is a public good. They still tell that tale, but now the emphasis is on how public transportation is essential to saving the planet. Mass transit makes for a better environment.

But does it?

H/T Ace – from The Coyote Blog

The key issue turns out to be occupancy — how full is the train or bus. And it turns out that occupancy is probably lower than most people think. That is because everyone rides on buses or trains as they commute — they are going in the direction of most people’s travel at the time of day they travel, so the transit is totally full. But no one thinks about those trains having to go back the other direction, usually mostly empty. As a result, we get to this fact, from the National Transit Database as synthesized by Randal O’Toole.

2014 Energy Use per Passenger Mile

Transit: 3141 BTU
Driving: 3144 BTU

Valley Metro Rail here in Phoenix does better, at a reported 1885 BTU per passenger mile. As reported many times here on this site, the cost of building this rail line, now well over one and a half billion dollars, would easily have bought every round trip rider a new Prius, with a lot of money left over. This would have saved more energy as well. Buses in Phoenix are averaging just over 6000 BTU per passenger mile.

If you follow the links you get to the Antiplanner, who has a link to a spreadsheet using the Fed’s data, “showing trips, passenger miles, fares, operating costs, capital and maintenance costs, rail miles, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and similar data for each transit agency and mode of transit,” from which the above distillation is drawn.

Whatever your thoughts may be about the use of resources to create and sustain public transit as a public good, and there are places where it serves (at the very least) a public purpose, it is not saving the planet–whether it needs saving or not–and it is not doing it by redirecting resources that could clearly be used for more meaningful purposes, including (and most importantly) leaving the dollars in the hands of the people who earned them to do with as they please which includes paying a suitable fare to use that transportation.

Will this throw off the rail fanatics in New Hampshire anxious to create a commuter line down the Concord Manchester corridor? No. But it should. It makes no sense. As I observed back in 2009.

Passenger rail costs are not limited to the root infrastructure itself.  That would be rails versus roads.   Taxpayers would have to subsidize passenger rail-cars, fuel the cars, maintain the cars, probably pay the workers and their benefits, and support the entire system when it fails to turn a profit, which will be always and probably forever.   While roads have some other infrastructure nothing compares to rail.

In contrast people buy their own cars, and pay for their own fuel and maintenance.  They may buy the car to get to a job that’s probably not funded by taxpayers either. (Except in Concord) Taxpayers do not need to subsidize any of that where with rail we’re supporting all of it.  So there is no possible apples to apples comparison to road and rail taxes.

It is not cost effective.

According to the state Department of Transportation, I-93 costs roughly $10,000 per lane per mile to maintain. At four lanes, I-93 between Concord and the border would cost about $1.6 million a year. After the Manchester to Massachusetts widening, it would be about $2.6 million a year — roughly half of Burling’s lowest estimate for operating the train. Double the I-93 maintenance figure, just to be safe, and we’re still at the low estimate for the state’s portion of operating a train.

The Coyote blog and the Antiplanner have provided us with more evidence and another reason to eschew the rail boondoggles, and more so in New Hampshire, where ridership will be sparse by design and costs high, all for no public good nor “greater good,” real or imagined, unless making it easier for jobs to travel out of New Hampshire, and out-of-state vote stealers to travel in (and then back out) of New Hampshire, is your idea of a greater good.

As a closing note, I am not anti-rail. There is one form of rail transportation that continues to be cost effective, profitable, and one I have praised for years. Freight.

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