Damning light rail studies... and not so damning ones

In all the recent hubbub about the Gold Line, I have not discussed on this blog the possibility that light rail is a bad investment. Departing editor Eddie Barrera (or as of today, I should say, departed editor) pointed out a recent study on light rail. Its conclusions:

- Light rail systems on the West Coast served only about 2% of the workforce in the service areas of the six systems.
- On average, these systems only remove between 0.39% and 1.1% of cars from the roadway.
-On average, West Coast light rail systems require taxpayer subsidies to pay for 73% of operations and 100% of capital improvements per year.
-The average cost to add one additional rider to the light rail systems on the West Coast is between $82,285 and $242,014 per rider.
-Attracting a new rider to light rail costs 16 to 47 times as much as attracting a new rider to a traditional bus system.

Ouch! That looks really bad. So I took a look at the group promoting the study, the Washington Policy Center, and the first thing that struck me was that they are a group that promotes "market-based solutions" to public policy problems. Meaning, that they are ideologically hostile towards big government solutions to problems.

In all fairness though, their study does draw a distinction between different transit systems in different cities. They point out, for example, that Portland and San Francisco's light-rail systems work much better than other cities and attempt to answer why (though it really doesn't take a study to figure it out- they are both small centralized cities with high population density).

Doing so more leg work on light rail, I found that most anti-rail studies come from libertarian groups and most pro-rail studies come from transit agencies. So who do you trust more?

Then I found an interesting study called "Does Transit Work? A Conservative Reappraisal" by Paul Weyrich, the founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Weyrich argues that it is unfair to judge rail by the percentage of trips that it provides (around 2 percent in the above study). His suggestion is that we judge it by how it does in trips that are rail-competitive. To be rail-competitive, a person's trip must go somewhere that is serviced by close-by, reliable, and quality public transportation. Weyrich's point is that most people don't have a rail-competitive option, and until rail systems are more extensive, there is no way they can compete.

Weyrich points to St. Louis as a success story- the city, which has had its population decline over the last 80-100 years as people have moved to the suburbs, recently put in a new light rail system. Weyrich writes:

However we compute it, we see roughly the same picture: despite enormous changes in the city of St. Louis and the displacement of the streetcar by the automobile as most people's primary means of travel, Light Rail now carries between one-half and two-thirds the ridership it did in 1925, in the area served. As a sober, scholarly historian might put it, Wow!

I think both studies have a point: light rail can be a lousy investment.... and to make it a good investment you need to get it close by to a large number of commuters so they are willing to get on it. In other words, you can't do it half-assed..... if you want to really get people on it you need a lot of stations and lines.