Don't count on the federal highway and transit program to make things better: The casual observer might be tempted to believe that help is on the way. Congress is considering reauthorization of the highway and transit bill, and the "spending hawks" hope to spend up to $400 million in the next six years. But there is little or no reason to believe that this will make much difference. Consider the record. Hundreds of billions of federal fuel taxes and other special taxes on highway users --- all paid by car drivers and truckers --- were spent under previous highway and transit acts over the last ten years. The result? From 1990 to 2000 (latest data available), congestion increased, with per capita delay hours rising more than 65 percent in the 40 urban areas over 1,000,000 population. Average work trip travel time increased four times as rapidly in the 1990s as in the 1980s, according to the Census Bureau, four times the rate of the 1980s. And if the anti-automobile ideologues who control so much of metropolitan transportation policy have their way, traffic will get much worse.

What about transit? Some people think transit's the answer (1). In 1982, the Congress added transit to the things that drivers pay for. The logic was that more money for transit would help it to attract drivers from cars, thereby reducing traffic congestion. Since then, nearly 15 percent of highway-transit spending has been on transit, and nearly 20 percent in recent years. Based upon its level of support in the Congress, this program must surely be a success. The truth is that no one appears to have ever checked.

Transit's falling market share: Since 1982, transit's share of travel has fallen more than 20 percent --- from next-to-nothing to nothing (Figure 2). Preliminary data suggests that transit's share of travel has dropped below one percent --- a figure lower than at any time since befoe before trolley (or "light rail") began operating) six generations ago. This is despite building new rail systems from Buffalo to Sacramento and Portland to Miami, for the specific purpose of relieving traffic congestion. In each of these place, traffic congestion is worse than before. In only one large metropolitan area --- New York --- does transit account for more than four percent of travel, and second place Chicago will soon drop below three percent. Transit has been losing market share since automobile ownership became democratized, especially in the 1920s. Transit gained briefly during World War II, when much more of the nation lived in crowded central cities and driving was limited by gasoline and tire rationing.

Figure 2 (Note 2)
Calculated from FHWA and FTA data.

Special interest control: The unions. Part, though by no means all of the reason for transit's market share losses in recent decades has been the fact that transit costs have escalated out of control. In real terms, total expenditures per mile (capital and operating) of rider travel (person mile) are more than 2.5 times that of 1970. This is in stark contrast to competitive transportation industries, where costs have all fallen. It is also in stark contrast with many European, Australian and New Zealand urban areas, where costs have fallen due to the injection of competition through competitive contracting or out-sourcing. Here, again the federal government must shoulder much of the blame. As one of the few countries that concentrates transit policy at the national level, Congress imposed labor regulations (Section 13c) on transit that workers laid off due to efficiencies or economies to be paid their full wages and benefits for up to six years. Nearly four decades of union favoring US Department of Labor administration of 13c has only made things worse. Combine this with the political power of big city machines, with their union support and you have a situation where a transit manager courageous enough to choose the good of riders over that of the unions had better have an independent source of income, because he or she won't be working long in the transit industry. It is not surprising that few transit managers have ever seriously taken on this burden. Martyrs tend not to be attracted to transit and highways. The labor provisions and the local political power of organized labor with those who govern transit has made it very diffult to convert systems to more cost effective operations, such as competitive contracting. Ironically, urban areas in nations with a strong social democratic or even socialist heritage have or are in the process of converting virtually all of their transit services to competitive contracting. Examples include London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Auckland and others. Virtual union ownership of the governance mechanisms in transit means that costs are higher than necessary, less service is provided and transit ridership is lower than it would otherwise be. Washington is largely to blame, and should, at least in this case follow European examples where power and funding is being made a local responsibility and competition is being used to lower costs and increase service. Someone once said that in 30 years only Cuba and the United States will still have monopolistic government operated transit systems. Sweden, long known for its cradle-to-grave socialism is one of the stars, with competitive transit operation nearly a decade old, and strongly rising transit ridership numbers.

Special interest control: The rail cartel. Then there is the international rail car and urban rail building industry, which lobbies the Congress, state legislatures, local governments and transit agencies to build new urban rail systems. Large rail projects are more profitable than lower cost bus projects that accomplish the same results. The FTA "new start" program encourages urban areas to build more expensive projects than they need by providing large federal funding matches. The result is rail systems far too overbuilt for transportation corridors in low density US urban areas. This means that other corridors aren't built, less transit is provided and ridership is lower. Research led by Dr. John Kain at Harvard in the early 1990s showed that bus strategies could achieve the same ridership results as rail systems at barely one-fifth the operating and capital cost. Talk to many transit managers and they will tell you that busway strategies cannot carry the volume of rail systems. With a perspective rarely extending to the 12-mile limit, they are unaware, for example, that one Bogota busway carries more passengers than the rail systems in Portland, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth, St. Louis, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Salt Lake City combined --- or that the busway system of Porto Alegre, Brazil carries more riders than any metropolitan area rail system in the United States outside New York. The expensive new rail systems in the United States have produced only meager results. For example, transit's work trip market share was lower in Portland in 2000 than in 1980, before the first line was opened. Or there is Dallas, where building three light rail lines and one commuter rail line in the 1990s was accompanied by a loss in overall transit work trip use --- a fact that put the local political establishment, including the cheerleading Dallas Morning News into denial (Figure 3). Building expensive urban rail systems may have enhanced the income statements of the international cartel that builds them. But it has imposed serious losses for the riders and taxpayers. By wasting resources that could have been more productively used for more cost effective strategies, the bias toward rail has hastened transit's market share losses and denied riders the more comprehensive services that could have been made available Thus, so long as the federal government spends money on rail as if it were a hyper-depreciating third world currency, transit will continue to fall short of its potential (however limited that potential might have been made by the special interest driven political malfeasance of the past).

Figure 3
Calculated from US Census Bureau data
Inset illustrates three light rail lines and
one commuter rail line opened between 1990 and 2000.

Transit: The societal cost. But there is a bigger cost problem with transit --- the cost of wasting scarce resources provided by drivers that could be better employed for the greater good of society, providing usable capacity for the 99 percent of people and 100 percent of trucks that travel on the nation's roadways. If the nearly $70 billion (2001$) in transit subsidies extracted from drivers had been used instead to expand interstate highways in urban areas of over 1,000,000 population, enough capacity would be available for traffic conditions to be no worse than during the late 1980s.

Ideological capture: But in a town where the transportation agenda is driven by anti-automobile ideologues who long ago cowed into submission those who provide the means of mobility for virtually all, there seems little prospect that reason will prevail. The anti-automobile ideologues represent a "congestion coalition," as Randal O'Toole has rightly characterized them. The anti-automobile ideologues are committed to making sure that there is little or no expansion of roadways. And so we have a national highway and transit program that has expended barely one-cent per additional mile of travel by people on roadways since 1982 and $0.57 cents per mile of travel on transit (Figure 4). Imagine how the courts would respond to a community that spent 50 times more on public school students in one part of town than another.

Figure 4
Calculated from FHWA and FTA data.

Ideology: Better roads kill people. But it is even more irrational than that. Anti-automobile ideologues have even begun to peddle research to the effect that better roads reduce roadway safety. No, this is not a misprint --- that better roads reduce highway safety! Besides being patently irrationally, one must note that over the last 40 years more and more travel has been on high quality interstate highways, the number of highway fatalities is approximately the same as before and there is five times as much driving. That's what you get when ideology is more important than reality.

Switching to transit that's not there. The anti-automobile ideologues claim that as highway travel times worsen, people will abandon cars for transit. What transit? Transit service fast enough to support busy American lifestyles is simply not available except to the nation's largest downtown areas. And on what basis do they propose that people will leave their cars for transit? Certainly not on the basis of any actual experience, because there is none --- not in the United States, not in Europe and not in affluent Asia. But, where ideology rules, reality loses every time.

Where transit really makes a difference. Transit makes all of the sense in the world for commuting to midtown and lower Manhattan or Chicago's Loop, where there are more jobs per square mile than just about anywhere else on earth. It is not surprising, then, that 75 percent of Manhattan commuters and 50 percent or more of Loop commuters use transit to get to work. What rational human being with a choice would not? But once outside these small core downtown areas of New York and Chicago, everything changes. Other downtown areas have large transit market shares, such as San Francisco, Boston, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. Each of these, however, is much smaller than Manhattan and the Loop. Even in these metropolitan areas with strong downtown areas, transit has virtually no congestion reducing impacts to other locations. Just try to get from home in one New York suburb to work in another by any transit service that is competitive with the automobile. Suburb to suburb transit commutes in the Chicago area can take two to three hours, which of course is why only those without a choice use it (3). There are virtually no large non-downtown employment centers in the United States that have a strong public transit market share, simply because there are no such center to which automobile competitive transit service is provided from throughout the urban area.

Downtowns: Looking big but not. What surprises many is that these downtowns --- the world's most dense collections of commercial activity, with skyscrapers that dominate the horizontal landscape --- account for barely one-fifth of employment in the New York area and one-tenth in the Chicago area. On average, less than 10 percent of metropolitan employment is downtown in the nation's major metropolitan areas.

Transit ecumenism: All trips are equal? Recently, as transit work trip market shares have continued to slide, advocates of higher transit spending have begun pointing out that too much emphasis is being placed on the work trip, and that transit holds the potential to reduce congestion by attracting other trips. Where is Pat Paulson when we need him? The work trip is the proximate cause of the daily peak hour traffic congestion that occurs in US urban areas. It is also the most concentrated trip, and if transit cannot make a difference in this market, it surely will not in any other.

Transit: A product of its environment. A principal reason that the federal transit program is so ineffective is that its physical and political environment will allow it to be no other way. Good transit service is already provided to the nation's largest downtowns. There is little potential to improve transit ridership to downtowns, since virtually all employment growth is in the suburbs. There is no potential to provide material amounts of automobile competitive service in the sparsely developed city and suburban areas that surround downtown because even the highest conceivable commitment of resources would produce less than a "drop in the bucket."

Transit is about downtown in America, Canada and Europe. It is not just in American that transit's effectiveness as an alternative to the automobile is limited to downtown. The urban areas of Europe and Canada, with their better transit systems, are a virtual transit wasteland for anyone trying to get from one suburb to another in a time competitive with the automobile.

Billions for highways spending but not one cent for congestion relief: But it gets worse. The nation's urban planners, who should know better, are bent upon spending as much money as they can on transit, while doing as little as possible to facilitate the mode of transport that their own projections show will capture virtually all of future travel increases --- personal vehicles (cars and SUVs). And there are gold-plated freeway reconstructions (the Interstate 64 rebuilt in St. Louis is a current example, where there is substantial congestion), with planners taking care that virtually no new capacity is added. There are new and overdesigned freeway interchanges, like the Mixing Bowl in northern Virginia that consume millions more than necessary even before their record setting cost escalation. There are the sound walls, the art on freeway overpasses and anything --- just anything --- to avoid adding capacity.

Equity: 3% gets 77%?: When the people in charge are committed to not solving the problem, things can only get worse. This is evident in future spending plans around the nation. Over the next 25 years, the San Francisco Bay area intends to spend 77 percent of its transportation funding on transit. This would be quite appropriate if transit represented 77 percent of travel demand in the Bay Area. It doesn't --- it's not even three percent (Figure 5). And traffic will continue to get worse --- much worse, in this metropolitan area that already has some of the nation's worst traffic congestion. Minneapolis-St. Paul will spend 61 percent, Denver 57 percent and Atlanta 55 percent. None of these areas reach a two percent transit share, and it would be wildly optimistic to imagine rising to three percent even with this level of spending. The list goes on and on.

Figure 5
Calculated from FHWA and FTA data

Higher densities mean more traffic and slower traffic. Moreover, there are no lessons from Europe or Japan here. With their higher densities both of people and cars, and their greater reliance on truck freight because passenger rail services consume most of the rail freight capacity, even superior European and Japanese transit systems leave them far behind the US. Average work trip travel times are much longer. Tokyo, which may have the best transit system in the world, has an average work trip travel time of 53 minutes --- twice that of US urban areas and 20 minutes more than the worst. Commuters in Western European urban areas typically spend 20 to 30 percent longer traveling to work than Americans in similar sized areas (Figure 6). There, like here, transit travel times (and speeds) are far slower than that of the automobile. Paris, with the western world's best transit system, has an average transit work trip travel time nearly double that of its automobile travel time. Federal Highway Administation research based indicates that vehicle miles per square mile rise at about 0.8 times the rate of population density increase. Thus, an area that is twice as dense as another, can be expected to have 180 percent as much traffic per square mile (Figure 7) (4).

Figure 6
Sources: US Census & Various International Sources

Figure 7
Calculated from FHWA data

Extinguishing opportunity, especially for minorities. The impact of restrictive growth policies (sometimes referred to as "smart growth," the definition of which can vary widely) is to restrict opportunity, by forcing housing prices up, "green-lining" lower middle income households (disproportionately minority) out of the housing market and denying the household wealth accumulation that results from rising home equity. They further restrict opportunity by increasing traffic congestion, slowing traffic and reducing the number of jobs that can be reached in a fixed period of time by commuters. And as traffic slows, it stops and starts more and more air pollution is produced. So the current urban planning fashion retards the quality of life by forcing people to spend more time commuting, and less time at home and at leisure, while subjecting them to less healthful air. This might make urban planners happy, but retards both the health and the quality of life of the people living where such strategies are employed. Entrepreneurial lawyers may want to look into the potential for urban planning malpractice actions.

The factory hog farm. And then there's the problem of the factory hog farm in Washington. The economy may have slowed down, but pork production is doing just fine, and transportation is no exception. Perhaps the best example is Boston's Central Artery (Big Dig) project. This project, which is placing a few miles of elevated freeway underground in downtown Boston. The cost is now approximately $15 billion --- having at least tripled from when consultants produced the projections that induced the political establishment to approve the project (5).

Equal protection under the law: Not in the highway program. What is it that is so special about downtown Boston that the nation's drivers have been assessed so much to improve its ambiance? Why aren't the federal fees paid by drivers and truckers used to bury elevated freeways in the cores of New Orleans, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Milwaukee, and Baltimore, not to mention St. Joseph, Missouri? The difference, of course, is that when an unusually large spot opened at the federal feeding trough, Boston's Washington representatives filled it quickly. The result --- the money spent on this single project is sufficient to have built freeway capacity to restore demand per lane mile to 1990 levels in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco-San Jose, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Seattle. Even Boston area drivers have come out behind. While $15 billion was being foolishly spent for downtown extravagance, needs were ignored in other parts of the sprawling Boston urban area (now covering nearly as much land as the Los Angeles urban area) and per capita delay on Boston roadways has increased more than 50 percent --- and the full completion of the Central Artery will make little or no difference.

The need for vision. An effective transportation vision is needed, based upon long-term output (customer service) objectives. The question is not whether a highway is built in one congressional district or another. It isn't even whether a highway or a rail line is built. The question is, in the long run, what combination of strategies and projects will most efficiently improve the lot of customers --- the drivers --- who pay for the nation's roads, not to mention much of its mass transit system.

Starting with the basics. A starting point would be to encourage states to establish long-term mobility and access objectives. How long should travel take in 2025 in our urban areas compared to free flow conditions? Once established, projects should be evaluated based upon their contribution to the long-term mobility objective. The recent Texas Governor's Business Council report, which was authored by the Texas Transportation Institute, Alan E. Pisarski and I, is an important step in this direction. It recommends that by 2025, travel in Texas urban areas should take no more than 15 percent longer during peak hours than during free flow hours. Projects would be evaluated based upon their cost per hour of delay reduction, which by definition would best serve the adopted objectives. The plan refutes the contention that "we can't build our way out of congestion" with calculations demonstrating that indeed we can. It doesn't really cost all that much in per capita terms, and it produces far greater benefits. Just as important, it rejects the notion that people will be socially engineered out of their cars, a principal clear to anyone familiar with trends in Europe. The federal program needs to be reoriented toward reducing congestion, strengthening urban economies and improving the quality of life of those who are sentenced to congestion by a political process that, at least up to this point, apparently couldn't care less.

Genuine user pay: There is much more than highway user fees. As more hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles enter the traffic stream, gasoline tax revenues will fall further in real terms. The present proposal for indexing highway user fees won't solve the problem. This rock is falling and putting wings on it won't help much. Drivers have historically paid hundreds of billions of dollars more in federal user fees and taxes unique to highways than has been on highways. The concept of "user pay" should be taken to a higher level. Congress should encourage development of additional capacity through toll roads and toll additions to interstate highways. This is not a proposal to toll existing lanes; at a minimum the free lanes that are in operation today should remain free. Tolls should be highway specific and removed just as soon as a tolled highway is paid for. Guarantees must be put in place that the tolls will be spent on the highway that is tolled and that raids by the endless litany of public funding demands not be permitted (6). Just as the "amazon.com" buyer can be assured that his or her payment will not be used to send a book to someone else, drivers and truckers should be guaranteed that their user fees pay for the highway they have chosen to use, not another one, or a different government function. Private highway companies, such as already operate toll roads in Italy, France and elsewhere, should be invited to offer proposals. Public toll authorities like the Harris County (Houston) Toll Road Authority should also be encouraged, so long as they have no purpose but highways and are sufficiently independent of other governments so that there is no potential to siphon off money to other uses.

Dethroning the pretenders. There are a number of advantages to this approach. It would make significant additional capacity available without the necessity of increasing federal highway user fees. It would free time for the more than 100 million daily personal vehicle commuters that could be more productively used in commerce and leisure. Perhaps more important of all, however, it would dethrone the political interests that have so effectively blocked needed urban roadway improvements and made the lives of average commuters so unnecessarily more miserable. Government of the people, by the people and for the people extends to highways as well.

Spending for results . It is time to legislatively bury the Big Dig and all the "smaller digs" that are so emblematic of what ails the federal highway program. The federal highway program is, in the final analysis, about spending. But there is little vision beyond that. Yet, the nation is chasing hard after the gridlock of European and Asian urban areas, as traffic congestion worsens at an increasing rate. A vision beyond spending money is needed. A vision beyond jobs and profits is needed. There' no question that they'll be jobs, profits and that we'll spend a lot of money. We'll do all that --- we always do. But, in the process, why not also leave the nation's drivers better off? After all, it's their money.

Notes

(1) The writer also shared the view that transit could reduce urban traffic congestion when he authored the 35% rail set-aside amendment to the 1980 Los Angeles County Transportation Commission Proposition A referendum, which was enacted. The national transit market share was at least a third higher then, and this was before it had become so obvious that building urban rail systems had virtually no impact on traffic volumes.

(2) Two charts are shown on this figure. The larger chart illustrates the "from next-to-nothing to nothing" market share of transit on a 100 percent scale. The smaller chart shows a 1.4 percent maximum scale that shows transit's market share loss in relation to its infinitesimal market share.

(3) Transit's principal purpose is mobility and access for people who do not have access to automobiles. This market segment, largely lower income, represents, according to Federal Transit Administration research, nearly 70 percent of ridership. This is also a segment that must perpetually be on-guard to stop transit agencies from putting an inordinate share of their resources into the expensive rail systems that are more attractive to transit managers than this social service function. The extreme case was Los Angeles, where a union led movement representing low-income riders successfully obtained a moratorium on rail construction and has obtained concessions that have reversed a downward ridership spiral.

(4) Traffic intensity (vehicle miles per square mile) is not, in itself, a determinant of traffic congestion. For example, an urban area with a modest traffic intensity, but with a substandard road network can have worse traffic congestion than an area with much greater traffic intensity. Atlanta is an example of an urban area with a substandard road network (the virtual lack of a quality arterial street system), relatively low traffic intensity and highly congested traffic. But, all things being equal, greater traffic intensity leads to worse traffic congestion. This is a critical factor as urban areas are implementing plans to increase population densities, which are associated with greater traffic intensities. Such urban areas are usually seeking to minimize highway investment, so they do not develop the higher capacity infrastructure required to keep traffic congestion from growing. Portland, Oregon exemplifies this approach, where plans for higher density are not only not associated with correspondingly greater highway capacity, but traffic standards have been weakened to permit greater traffic congestion. Thus, while greater traffic intensity is not always associated with greater traffic congestion when comparisons are made between urban areas with differing roadway patterns, greater traffic intensity (from higher density) is virtually always associated with greater traffic congestion in the same urban areas, because of the lack of correspondingly robust highway expansions to accommodate the new demand.

(5) Escalating costs is nothing new with regard to large transit and highway projects. In fact, the incentives appear to ensure it happens. Research published by the American Planning Association notes that transportation project cost escalation is rampant and that much of the cause is a technical term used by the researchers, "lying." The researchers suggest that "low-balling" project costs increases their likelihood of approval and that once having been approved there is little chance of cancellation by a political process in which embarrassment is equated, at least in the eyes of some elected officials, with potential future electoral loss. I witnessed this process first hand as the $140 million Los Angeles to Long Beach light rail line that we approved in 1981 grew to nearly $900 million by the time it opened --- some of the increase was inflation, but much of it was not. See Bent Flyvbjerg, Mette Skamris Holm and Soren Buhl, Underestimating Costs in Public Works Projects: Error or Lie? APA Journal, Summer 2002.

(6) For example, during the last reauthorization, $8 billion was moved from the "Highway Trust Fund," to the US Treasury. The act also takes all future interest earning on Trust Fund for use by the US Treasury. The $8 billion raid is enough to have restored travel per lane mile to 1990 levels on the interstate highway systems of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco-San Jose, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis and Seattle. The cumulative interest raid loss is already in the billions of dollars.

Credentials:

Author Wendell Cox is a transportation and demographics consultant and a public policy commentator. He is principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy in the St. Louis area. He also serves as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), during which time he was elected to chair the American Public Transit Association Policy and Planning and Governing Boards Committees. In 1999, Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to fill the unexpired term of New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman. He has testified by invitation to committees of the US Senate and US House of Representatives and to 35 state and provincial legislative committees.