Facts about Rail Transit
Our friend Ted Balaker over at the Reason Foundation on their Out of Control blog explores the alleged “growth” in public rail transit. The common wisdom, promulgated by the MSM, is that high gas prices are spurring an increase in public transportation usage. The fact is that the raw numbers are not even comparable. An example from an article Ted quotes:
Second, the absolute amount of total travel in private automobiles dwarfs public ransit’s totals: In 2000, transit provided about 46.6 billion miles of movement while passenger miles traveled in the same year on highways totaled about 4 trillion—2.5 trillion in cars and another 1.5 trillion in small trucks and SUVs. That’s 86 times greater than passenger miles on transit. In fact, transit’s share of all passenger miles traveled in the U.S. from 1985 through 2000 averaged only 1.26 percent.
The whole blog piece is quite informative. Rail advocates have been lauding the increase of transit figures for years, but rail is still a tiny fraction of actual miles traveled. In “27 of the top 50 metro areas” telecommuters already outnumber the number of public transit commuters. Spend over $7 Billion on construction, operations and maintenance for public transportation on Oahu? Why?
February 28th, 2006 at 1:14 am
What’s ignored in the Honolulu rail discussion is that even in places where rail has been successful — like Tokyo, New York City, San Francisco, etc. — nobody’s ever been able to make a “commuter rail” successful — because basically you have a system that’s unused except an hour each way everyday because there’s no reason to go to Kapolei unless you live there.
The winning formula is that you have to have a high density of population throughout the route of the kind that doesn’t exist anywhere in Honolulu, no mtter how much they try to deceive us that is so. So basically they’ll be running empty rail cars most of the day — which is true even of the rail projects in Seattle, Portland, Sacramento. There’s nowhere for people to go — and during off-peak hours, driving is the fastest, preferable way to get there because there is no congestion problem then.
We only have a congestion problem for a couple of hours each way, everyday — and the rest of the time, the raods are basically uncongested and underutilized. So the real solution is managing the congestion around those hours — and not adding more capacity that will be unederutilized at all other times — just as the freeways and highways are presently.
It’s a traffic management problem and not a lack of capacity. The preferable solution is ride-sharing — because that’s what the people would be doing anyway, with a rail system. In the age of the Internet (communications), that would seem to be an ideal use of the technology to manage a ride-sharing bulletin board.
Honolulu would be an ideal community to do ride-sharing because most of the people are fairly stable. The rail solution is just empty cars moving around so the people at City Council can say, “We’re world-class too,” of which the rail devlopers are skilled at exploiting those inferiority complexes and sense of inadequacies.