Straw Man Argument #2 (Randal O'Toole, Wendell Cox, and transit)

Market-Frankford line trains at a Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) station in Upper Darby, Pa.. Monday, Oct. 31, 2005. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

A couple weeks ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer gave great play to the anti-transit arguments of Randal O'Toole, on the cover of the Sunday Currents section (their equivalent of the "Week in Review," in "SEPTA Out of Loop on Transit Needs."

I meant to write about it at the time, but I didn't get around to it. It came up on an e-list I'm on (which lamented how do people like Randal O'Toole get press coverage--he was on NPR too, and new urbanists don't--well, he keeps sending stuff out, and instead, people like me blog... instead of spending our time writing books which would legitimize us for newspapers and broadcast...).

The interesting thing is that there is one sentence in one of the articles (there were 2-3 articles on the cover of the Sunday Opinion section), towards the very top, that provides all the ammunition that urbanists need to counter O'Toole. The article starts out:

Between 1990 and 2000, the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area gained 27,000 jobs. Virtually every single one of those new workers drives to work, while 37,500 commuters who formerly rode transit switched to driving. Why did so many commuters give up on transit? The reason is simple: Almost all of the job growth was in the suburbs.

EXACTLY!

The article commented how the SEPTA system is oriented to bringing commuters to the city, but that mobility needs have made such a system obsolete.

That is true, somewhat. Really it is that land use policies are disconnected from transit infrastructure development and policies. These policies need to be concert, not at cross-purposes.

But the real issue is that deconcentration and decentralization in development and land use patterns--sprawl--makes transit much less efficient as well as more difficult to provide in a cost-effective fashion. Types of transit system development are discussed very well in Steve Belmont's Cities in Full.

Instead of criticizing the transit system, it makes more sense to argue in favor of compact development. And, we should reterm the debate about transit and land use planning to be about protecting and extending the tremendous public investments that have been made and continue to be made in public transit and infrastructure.

Similarly, another argument to raise whenever O'Toole talks, is the fact that roads are subsidized just as much as transit, to the tune of 50%, the difference is that the number is much higher for road subsidy in actual dollar terms, than it is for transit. (This statement is based on a Neal Peirce column from May 2003, "GAS TAX HIKES: NEEDED BUT POLITICALLY PERILOUS," which references a study published by Brookings Institution, Improving Efficiency and Equity in Transportation Finance.)

Finally, the other argument to raise whenever O'Toole talks is the throughput of one mile of one road lane. (These aren't my numbers and I would need to confirm them before being fully comfortable repeating them.) Jeff Tunlin of Nelson-Nygaard says that this throughput is 900 cars, or 6,250 passengers on bus, or 10,000 people on BRT, and 16,000 people on light rail.

So while I haven't heard O'Toole speak, I am pretty confident that by raising these three points, O'Toole's arguments get skewered.
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This letter to the editor ran in the Saturday Philadelphia Inquirer:

Bus and rail costs

Re: "SEPTA out of loop on transit needs," April 16:

For someone who bills himself as a scholar, Randal O'Toole seems quite incurious about facts that get in the way of his anti-rail conclusions. Fifty-seven percent of the SEPTA capital budget goes to subways and only 30 percent to buses? There's an obvious explanation: Roads and other infrastructure used by the buses are paid for by other government agencies, but the cost still comes back to the taxpayer. Does he think roads just sprout out of the ground?

Also, investment of capital in labor-saving technology is one of the principal elements of capitalism. One operator can transport 400 or more passengers on a subway train, but only 40 or so passengers on a bus. Someone so fixated on SEPTA's labor costs ought to be applauding these investments, not decrying them.

O'Toole's piece stands on a logical fallacy: the comparison of a rail line serving one corridor to the transportation demand of an entire region. By that logic, we should build no more highways because I-95 serves less than 1 percent of the trips taken in the Delaware Valley.

Anthony DeSantis, President
Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers
Philadelphia
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Of course, if the local transit system isn't run very well, people will point to its under-functioning as proof that these three counter-arguments are wrong. For example, Ray Hyde commented on one of my previous blog entries that:

The average load factor for rail systems in the US was 17.6 per cent, for bus 14.3% and for autos it is over 30%. In other words, of those 800 seats, on average only 17.6% of them are filled. This means that the average operating cost per passenger mile was 33.8 cents for bus, and 39.3 cents per mile for trains. for comparison, in 1990 costs per passenger mile for autos was 21 cents.

We have work to do, a lot of it, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of transit. Although in DC proper and the region more generally, we work from a stronger base than most other communities. Our load factors are much higher.

And load factors are highest in the parts of the region that are the most "compactly" developed--DC and Arlington. Bus transit in particular is more lightly used in less dense areas (the outer parts of the subway system for example) at least in terms of getting around those areas, even if it can be well-used going to the city for commuting purposes.

The fact is that DC has a strong employment center at the core, as well as other "attractions" that keeps the transit system focused. But the impact in the outer parts of the region is less pronounced, because of the deconcentrated land use patterns that predominate in those areas.

Index Keywords: transit