Rather than piling up new rail projects, we should fix our current lines
Federal funds for new projects should focus on maintaining existing, critical rail lines.
By Aaron Renn
Rail transit is vital to the health of a small number of U.S. cities such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, which are all struggling to keep their existing systems running safely and smoothly. The Bay Area’s BART needs about $10 billion in maintenance. Washington’s Metro has had numerous recent breakdowns, and users have been fleeing as a result, with ridership down 14% last year. Boston’s network was paralyzed during a snowstorm a couple of years ago and needs $7 billion in repairs.
Yet via a program called New Starts, the federal government continues to use large chunks of its precious rail funding to build dubious new lines in places where transit plays little role. We need a major rethink. Federal funding should go to maintenance on existing critical rail lines, not to building new ones.
Rail transit works best in cities with large central business districts and very high densities, like New York, where 2 million workers descend on Midtown and lower Manhattan.
By contrast, most American cities have a far less-centralized pattern of employment. They grew up around the automobile, and so are polycentric, with job centers scattered throughout the region. People in cities such as Dallas and Charlotte, N.C., travel from everywhere to everywhere. This makes most cities a bad fit for point-to-point rail transit systems designed to take people downtown.
Most American cities also are far less dense than a Chicago or Boston. Dallas, which built a $5.5-billion light-rail system, has only 3,600 people per square mile in its central city vs. 18,400 in San Francisco.
If one city would seem to have been a great fit for developing a new rail transit system, it’s Los Angeles. The L.A. area is actually fairly dense by U.S. standards. It’s also a very large market with terrible traffic congestion and little prospect of adding new highways. …
Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times.
Aaron Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This piece is based on his new report, Does America Need More Urban Rail Transit?
