It's a fact that a large number of the people who make urban policy in the United States are in love with mass transit. Specifically, they love trains. Conversely, they hate cars. I have a number of theories for why this is. Here are a couple:
The first is Europhilia. The mainly left-leaning urban planners who are the chief advocates for implementing rail systems in America's cities look to Europe as the hallmark of civilization in just about everything and when they look at the Old World, what do they see? They see cities with elaborate rail-based mass transit and small, mainly four-cylinder cars running on highly-taxed gasoline. Almost without thinking, they go straight to the conclusion that governments should do whatever is necessary to make American cities more like European cities: Build rail systems and tax gasoline. They don't stop to consider that all major European cities took on their forms before the development of the automobile and grew to their present proportions during the Age of Rail, having grown in an organic fashion around a developing rail infrastructure. They don't consider that European cities have higher population density or, if they do, they simply conclude that high urban population densities are a good thing and that Americans ought to have governmental policies that discourage that quintessentially American "cultural scourge", urban sprawl. If making Americans live in a more compact fashion requires forcing the change down our throats with expensive legislation and confiscatory zoning laws, so be it. If it doesn't make sense to try to impose an urban rail system on cities that didn't grow up around them, tough.
The second reason that the urban planning profession almost reflexively turns to mass transit rail systems is the key word, "mass." As in "the masses." Again, the predominantly leftist urban planning mentality recoils from the individualism inherent in the ownership and operation of automobiles, in which people travel when and where they want. The urban planner desires to "build community" by making us ride together on trains from predetermined points of origin, along planned routes at designated times, to centrally-chosen destinations. The inherent "chaos' of automobile traffic is offensive to the planner: After all, he's a planner.
Of course, none of this is mentioned by proponents of mass transit as the reason for their obsessive pushiness about "light rail" systems (although the first reason, the Europhilic revulsion at the form of the American city as shaped by the automobile does get pretty explicit play in their work). No, we're told that it's all for our own good. Specifically, we're told that automobiles are inefficient and polluting and that rail mass transit is efficient and clean. Well, is this true?
First off, modern automobiles are massively less polluting than they used to be. Here are some figures - old figures, from 1996 - from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation:
Automobile pollutants have been dramatically reduced - carbon monoxide by 96 percent, hydrocarbons by 97 percent and nitrogen oxides by 90 percent. Between 1968 and 1993, total highway vehicle emissions of carbon monoxide have dropped 96 percent, hydrocarbons by 96 percent and nitrogen oxides by 76 percent - despite a doubling of vehicle miles traveled during that period.
Things have only gotten better since these figures were compiled and published.
Then there's the fact that the U.S. has the cleanest air of any country in the industrialized or industrializing world. Many American environmentalists would find this hard to believe, but they need to look at this chart. I've worked for extended periods of time in two of the most polluted cities in the world, Beijing and Mexico City. Let me tell you, a bad day in Houston or L.A. doesn't come close to an average day in those places.
Now, I'll admit that there are some social consequences of an automobile-based transportation system that it would be nice to fix. Most importantly is the relative lack of mobility of people who are too poor to afford a car. But, as with all social engineering, you have to look at both benefits and costs. Do expensive, disruptive rail systems do enough good for the poor to justify their cost? The rail-roaders never ask that question, much less answer it. Plus there's the fact that even relatively poor people in America can and do afford to own and operate automobiles. No, they're not driving BMWs, and it is stressful to have to make car payments and find the cash for gas, but being poor's not fun. Is all the money and hassle involved in light rail systems worth the cost and trouble while we work toward the Utopia of Europeanizing our cities decades hence?
From a purely utilitarian point of view, it would be cheaper to simply buy compact cars for the poorest of the poor, or even subsidize some kind of taxi cab service for poor people. But that idea is too "way out there" - much stranger than ripping up our cities for years and years while the planners implement their expensive dreams. OK - how about buses? They use the existing road system and can be incrementally cleaned up as technology makes better and better power plants. Apparently the only reason that's not a better idea than trains is that Europeans have trains.
And we have to ask -- do urban rail systems work where they've been implemented? Except on the east coast of the U.S. (specificially New York), the resounding answer is no. The fact is that everywhere but New York (which has the historical profile and demographic characteristics of the European cities beloved of the urban planners), urban rail ridership has never lived up to the expectations of the urban planners. But year after year, urban rail continues to be touted as the only solutions to urban transportation problems.
One important consequence of the urban planners' obsession with urban rail systems is their antipathy to building adequate roads and highways. From their point of view, every penny spent on building new and better roads and highways is a penny that can't be spent on building trains, and therefore they fight against new roads at every opportunity, especially in the all-important "regional mobility plans" that drive long-term budgeting for road-building and maintenance.
One argument that really sets my blood boiling is the rail-roaders' whining that if we improve the freeways that feed people into the city from the suburbs, it will just encourage urban sprawl. Presumably the same argument would hold true for a rail line along the same route, but they don't make that argument. Perhaps because they realize that not as many people would choose to live in the suburbs if they had to take a train into town, giving the lie to their fundamental faith that trains are at least the equal of cars. In fact, they know that people prefer to travel by automobile, for all the reasons they despise: Cars provide more choices to people, and the planners want to reduce those choices.
It is possible to make the automobile a better means of transportation in America, and the radical decrease in the pollution produced by American automobiles over the last 30 years is proof of this. Even more improvement will come in the near term. Improved computerized engine management, lighter and stronger materials and hybrid electric-internal combustion power plants are all beginning to hit our roadways with cars that get better gas mileage, are safer and have an over-all lower impact on the environment than anyone could have imagined when the U.S. embraced the automobile as its preferred means of transportation in the early 20th century. I say get off the train and hit the road!
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