Streetcars Will Waste Your Money And Your Time

Paul Jacob writes in his blog This is Common Sense:

Transportation scholar Randal O’Toole regales us with the fix that California’s overlords have put themselves in. Merely assuming that dense city living decreases commuting, California’s legislators cooked up a law requiring local governments to increase population density.

But it turns out “transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by ‘level of service,’ which,” O’Toole informs us, “measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.”

This should be no surprise to Kansas Citians, who are familiar with official calls for increased urban density and the streetcar system that they believe will bring it. An effort to raise private money for the streetcar (so far, $3,775 of their $10 million goal) says that streetcars:

. . . provide high-quality transit service that promotes compact, walkable, higher-density development.

A firm hired to help build the streetcar system offers as a potential benefit, “Increase[d] population and economic density to the urban core.” Streetcar booster and former Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser claimed that a rail system “produces density, which is key to efficient land and resource use.”

We know from previous studies that rail transit does not remove cars from the road. And we know that it is not the rail lines themselves that drive economic development but rather the additional tax incentives that governments hand out along rail lines. We know that the people of Kansas City have voted down streetcars every time a legitimate election has been held. And judging by the effort to raise private funds yielding only three-ten-thousandths of 1 percent of their goal, Kansas Citians still don’t support it.

But just as in Kansas City, California politicians continue undaunted. O’Toole writes:

The gist of the new standards of “regulation”? “[T]hey ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if densification reduces per capita vehicle miles traveled by 1 percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year.”

If you doubt that city leaders care more about spending taxpayer money than respecting taxpayer time and convenience, consider the plans to build a $1.2 billion airport terminal.