The
Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) released The 2003 Annual Urban
Mobility Report in September 2003, but in contrast to past years,
when the report's financial backers and sponsors were largely
limited to government transportation departments, this year's
report received funding from, and was co-sponsored by, the American
Public Transportation Association and the American Road and
Transportation Builders Association.
The
American Public Transportation Association, the trade association
and lobbyist for government-subsidized public transit systems, was
quick to claim in its press release accompanying the report's
release that the findings prove that "more public transportation is
needed to relieve traffic congestion." Other transit advocacy
groups echoed this view. According to Paul Farmer, head of the
American Planning Association, "The report found public
transportation is the most effective solution for reducing delays."
Similar claims by transit and smart growth advocates appeared in
newspapers and newsletters throughout the country.
The Unanswered Question
The
only problem is that these statements are without any foundation:
The Urban Mobility Report says absolutely nothing about the effects
of more public transportation on congestion.
What
the report does say is that congestion would significantly increase
if existing public transit systems disappeared and all transit
riders immediately started driving cars. Inasmuch as no one has
proposed that existing transit systems be eliminated, this
conclusion, whether right or wrong, has no practical value to the
current debate over how to relieve worsening traffic
congestion.
Moreover, TTI's answer to this esoteric
transit question may not be completely accurate. For example, TTI
assumes that if transit were eliminated, all transit riders would
drive cars to work, which is an improbable outcome because many
transit users ride transit because they cannot drive to work.
Even
allowing for the irrelevance and flawed assumptions of the
question, when calculating the congestion cost of eliminating
transit, the report also inappropriately includes the delay
suffered by transit riders if they all drove, even though most
would save time by driving.
For
example, if a particular trip takes 60 minutes by transit or 30
minutes by automobile in uncongested traffic, but 40 minutes by car
in congestion, the TTI study counts the extra 10 minutes in
congestion as a cost of eliminating transit even though the
ex-transit rider is saving 20 minutes by driving instead of using
transit.
Does More Transit Really
Relieve Congestion?
In
contrast to TTI's contrived policy question, this paper asks the
much more relevant question: Would increasing transit's share of
travel by some significant amount (e.g., 50 percent) significantly
relieve congestion?
Today, such an increase in market share
would require at least tripling transit spending, from less than
$35 billion to more than $110 billion per year. Yet, as this paper
shows, such an improbable increase in market share would save the
average peak-period commuter only 22 seconds each way (44 seconds
per day) in lessened traffic. Moreover, the normal growth in
traffic in most urban areas would offset that saved 22 seconds in a
few months.
Despite the media's focus on the transit
industry's misrepresentations, overall, the Texas Transportation
Institute's mobility report points the way toward congestion
solutions that are far more cost-effective than improving transit.
These include freeway ramp metering, traffic signal coordination,
and "incident management" (quickly clearing stalled and crashed
vehicles from highways). Another effective tool is turning
high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes into high-occupancy/toll (HOT)
lanes, which would allow low-occupancy vehicles to use those lanes
by paying a toll.
Except in rare circumstances, transit has
little chance of reducing congestion in U.S. urban areas. Attempts
to spend large sums of money to get a few automobile drivers out of
their cars risk losing sight of transit's main mission, which is to
provide mobility for people who cannot drive. Genuine transit
advocates would focus on that mission, while those concerned about
congestion should find new tools, such as congestion tolls, that
would both reduce congestion and fund needed improvements in the
highway system.
Wendell Cox, Principal of
the Wendell Cox Consultancy in metropolitan St. Louis, is a
Visiting Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a visiting professor
at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. Randal
O'Toole is Senior Economist at the Thoreau Institute.