Rail transit systems proposed for three North Carolina metropolitan areas are destined to fail because they conflict with the state’s demographic trends, high auto usage, complex driving patterns, and low transit ridership, experts said at a recent Center for Local Innovation conference.
To have any chance of reducing road congestion and improving mobility, rail requires high-density population — and the problem is the state doesn’t have it, Ted Balaker of the Reason Public Policy Institute told the audience at the Innovate 2004 conference.
For example, Portland, Ore., often cited by “smart growth” advocates as having a successful rail system, is home to 3,300 people per square mile, or nearly twice the density of Charlotte. The density of other major cities is much greater than North Carolina’s metro areas as well. Los Angeles has 7,000 people per square mile, San Francisco has 6,000, and New York has 5,300.
In Charlotte, where there are 1,700 people per square mile, the cost of the proposal to build less than 10 miles of rail is estimated at $371 million. Yet, Balaker said, proponents concede it will reduce auto traffic by just one-tenth of 1 percent, concentrate traffic around rail stations, and create new congestion. In the Triangle, estimates on the reduction of congestion are slightly better but still minuscule — perhaps 1 percent. The proposal for 35 miles of light rail and 16 stations requires an investment of $844 million to serve 1,800 people per square mile. In the Triad, four possible rail corridors are being considered to serve fewer people. If all four are built for rail, he said, capital costs would top $2 billion.
While the rail proposals would remove few cars from the roads, Balaker said, it won’t matter to supporters once the systems are built. They will do what others have done: say that relief of congestion wasn’t a goal anyway and that rail is increasing social identity and interaction. Those claims can’t be quantified, he said, and rail supporters are able to avoid answering hard questions and accountability to taxpayers.
This convoluted thinking is practiced by many transportation planners, said conference panelist Thomas Rubin, a former controller-treasurer of the Southern California Rapid Transit District. Rubin described the illogical analysis of planners who tell themselves that things are going to get worse if they don’t do something, that rail transit is something, and that rail is an acceptable solution even when research indicates otherwise.
“Bus and rail are neither good nor bad in and of themselves,” he said. “They are tools. If you are driving a nail, a hammer is an excellent tool. If you are trying to drive in a screw, no. And when the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems begin to look a lot like nails,” he said of the knee-jerk reaction of smart-growth advocates to propose rail systems. Any rail plan must produce a quantifiable benefit and be built only if it’s the best solution. Appropriate or not, the projects are notorious for cost increases, construction delays, and lower-than-expected ridership.
In 1980, Los Angeles County voters passed a plan for 11 rail lines funded by a half-cent sales tax. In 1990, one line was open but planners determined funding was insufficient, so voters approved another half-cent tax. By 2003, only four lines were open, with others in various stages of development. Officials still need more money and are considering proposing a third half-cent sales tax. Even if passed, it won’t be enough to complete all 11 lines.
The logic planners typically use to compare rail capacity with freeway capacity is equally flawed, Rubin said. Capacity comparisons look only at passenger miles and do not acknowledge freight that moves over highways and that rail cannot accommodate. These “ton miles” are key elements of traffic and should be considered when evaluating the productivity of transportation options. “It does nothing, nothing for you,” he said of rail transit’s inability to move freight.
If urban planners were more diligent, they would understand the fallacy of many purported rail benefits, said Wendell Cox, a transportation analyst who studies transit projects around the world. Transit must be effective at more than getting people to downtowns or it can never compete with the car. In the United States, he said, average downtown employment is about 4 percent to 6 percent of an area’s work force. That leaves at least 94 percent of workers who use cars to get to and from work.
It’s no surprise to Cox that there are few places where transit’s market share is increasing. In the United States, 1.9 percent of trips are on transit, driven largely by high usage in New York City, where transit accounts for 9 percent of trips. In Charlotte and the Triangle, only one out of every 200 trips is on transit. This one-half of 1 percent ridership is much lower than the national average.
It isn’t that people hate transit, Cox said. It’s that it isn’t competitive with the car. To make sense for a rider, transit must be convenient, fast and frequent, and get people within a quarter mile of their destination on either end. “I don’t care how bad traffic gets, you’re not going to get out of your car onto transit that doesn’t take you where you want to go,” he said.
North Carolina’s lifestyle profile doesn’t support rail because the state’s dispersed pattern of living follows the European trend of people moving farther from cities, Cox said. Among the 15 largest states, North Carolina is the only one that has no urban center with more than one million people. “The point is, you’re developing an almost rural style, or a combination rural-urban style of living that we didn’t do before 1950 because we couldn’t do it before 1950,” he said.
As the state’s population has grown — 21 percent in the last decade, twice the national average — traffic across county borders has increased as well. Today a full 60 percent of work-related vehicle travel reflects this pattern, according to conference speaker Dr. David Hartgen, a UNC-Charlotte professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences and a nationally known transportation expert.
Smart growth proponents routinely assert that building roads rather than rail creates sprawling growth, which they consider a problem. However, Hartgen’s research on about 3,000 road construction projects conducted during the 1990s disproved their premise. He found that the opposite is true: Growth occurred before roads did. By overlaying road projects with census tract data, Hartgen determined most of the state’s population growth took place in areas that didn’t have major road improvements. Indeed, about half of the growth was in areas with no major improvements. Local factors such as zoning laws and prior density were the drivers of an area’s growth.
Hartgen is working on a new study about the condition of North Carolina’s roads. Preliminary statistics show they have deteriorated and are becoming a serious problem that must be addressed soon. “The data I’m looking at show that we’re just not spending money that we do have on road repairs and so, relative to other states, we’re losing ground,” he said. The effect, he concluded, will be to make the state less competitive by reducing its accessibility.
Donna Martinez is associate editor of Carolina Journal.