** FART blows its way to the airport
Topics: Transportation
25 Aug 1997
From: "DG ervan@worldnet.att.net"
Really from: Ervan Darnell
How bad can public transit be? BART seems to be the poster-train of public
transit. It is reasonably pleasant to ride, but it is also preposterously
inefficient.
This year BART opened two new stations in the East Bay (Dublin and
Pittsburg) across the East Bay mountains[3]. The cost: $1.0G [4]. The
estimated ridership: 34K per day (total rides, including both ways). I'm
not sure which bonds are presumed to pay for that, but at a nominal 7% and
30 years that comes to $6.6M/month. The average month has 22 working days,
which comes to $306K/day, or $9/ride. The fare covers about 50% of the
_operating_ cost, and none of the capital cost [6]. It varies depending on
distance, but $2-$4 is typical. That fare needs to cover the whole ride,
so if half of that fare is amortized just against the new line (and the
average ride is half on the old line), it would be $1-$2/ride that
passengers pay. In other words, the per ride subsidy is at least $10. In
fact, the Bart director estimates the total capital cost subsidy (over the
life of the line) at $16/ride [4]! This is just for the capital cost, it
doesn't even include the operating costs.
That comes to 22 days * 2 ways each day * $16 $704/month for a commuter.
$704! That's way more than enough for a car payment, insurance, and gas. =
At
even a high estimate of $0.30/mile for average expenses for a car, a year's
travel (not just commuting, but total travel) of 12K miles $3,600.
That's compared to the subsidy amount which is $8,448/year. Thus, the
subsidy would cover not only commuting, but personal travel, and leave the
commuter with $5K in his pocket.
What about congestion? 94% of commuters take their own car [1]. BART
carries 267K riders per day [2], or 133K commuters (counting each way).
That's about half of the remaining 6% who take public transit. The new
gold plated BART lines represent 17/133*3% 0.4% of the total traffic.
That's hardly a congestion or pollution strain. In any case, those extra
17K drivers would be paying extra gas taxes to cover the cost of road
construction. And, there is plenty of money left over for the gas taxes
(though in the Bay Area gas taxes only cover part of road costs).
Who is this supposed to help? The people who live in these communities are
largely middle and upper middle class families fleeing urban life that
living closer to work dictates. That's fine of course, but the reality is
that the net effect is taxes on the poor, who cannot afford to move away,
are being raised to subsidize transit for middle class commuters who could
afford their own car.
On the other side of the Bay, the same story is being repeated with the
extension to the airport (SFO). This line is only 6 miles and is estimated
to cost $1.2G. That's only the estimate; they haven't even started yet.
The goal is to carry 20K passengers daily [5]. Using the same arithmetic,
that comes to a subsidy of $19/ride (compared to the $10 above, not the
$16).
Who is this supposed to help? Most air travelers are either business
travelers or pleasure travelers, neither of whom have any compelling
argument for needing a subsidy (unlike the 'help the poor' argument that
applies to city busses, which is not ultimately compelling either, but at
least not outright silly). $19 is almost enough to pay for taxi fare all
of the way to SF, and the destination of their choice (instead of still
needing to take a taxi once Bart gets them to the city). Even that taxi
fare is held artificially high by the government restricting the number of
taxis. For that matter, there is a direct 6-mile stretch of highway that
connects SFO to the southernmost BART station. Allow people to run
shuttles between them. If there is really a demand for that kind of
connection, it should be easy to operate such a shuttle for a profit.
How can this ever be afforded, even by liberal Bay Area standards? Because
the feds are paying for $800M of it (and the airlines are being forced to
pay $100M even though they all think it's a bad idea). Yes, the farmer in
Iowa is paying for Bart rides for business travelers flying to San
Francisco. I'm sure in Clinton's parlance this is an "investment". It's
classic pork barrel where everyone loses after we get done paying for each
other's respective goodies that we would never build if the beneficiaries
bore the cost.
Not to be outdone in the stupid department, the Peninsula's (everything
south of San Francisco all of the way to San Jose) answer to public
transit, Caltrain, is proposing equally ridiculous projects. Caltrain
wants to extend itself 0.75 miles from its north end to connect to BART
(and BART wants to connect to Caltrain on the way to the airport). Both
transit systems overlap for about 10 miles worth of north-south travel and
never connect. I thought this was exactly the kind of problem that central
planning was supposed to alleviate. The extension is expected to cost
$600M [7] (they haven't started yet) and raise ridership from 24K daily now
to 42K daily in 2010. The latter number sounds optimistic (a doubling?)
and they load the question by putting it in the future when the population
will be greater. Nonetheless, if we accept an additional ridership of 20K.
The cost per ride (for 7% bonds over 30 years) is $9/ride, that's not for
the whole ride, just the last 0.75 miles, just for the capital cost
(Caltrain, like BART, cannot even cover operating costs with fares). This
could be done much cheaper by paying taxi drivers $3/Caltrain ticket they
turn in. Caltrain passengers could turn over their ticket to a taxi (who
at $3/0.75 miles would be lining up to get fares) and pay the extra margin
to go wherever they wanted. That would cost less than half as much, could
be done tomorrow, and would be more flexible in terms of changing the final
destination. No, I don't seriously propose that, but want to show only how
absurd the current thinking is.
In my conversations with some friends who are fans of public transit, the
most common response to the above is that we have to make suburbs illegal
and force people to live near the train so that public transit can be made
efficient. Of course, I find that a preposterous bit of socialist
thinking, use one government disaster to argue for an even bigger one.
That seems to be the real desire. No one is arguing how best to get people
to work (or even how to subsidize transit for the poor), but the whole
debate is driven by the planning mentality that wants to dictate where
people should work, where they should live, and when they should travel.
Perhaps that's the real cost of public transit, beyond the money wasted, is
that it will be an excuse to limit other freedoms.
-----------------------------
[1] Monday, January 20, 1997 =B7 Page A1 SF Chronicle,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/chronicle/article.cgi?file MN502.DTL&directo=
ry
/chronicle/archive/1997/01/20
[2] Wednesday, December 18, 1996 =B7 Page A1, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/chronicle/article.cgi?file MN49193.DTL&direc=
to
ry /chronicle/archive/1996/12/18
[3] http://www.bart.org/frames/system_map.html
[4] 5/4/97 SF Chronicle
[5] 8/17/97 SF Chronicle
[6] Monday, February 24, 1997 =B7 Page A1 San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/chronicle/article.cgi?file MN32508.DTL&direc=
to
ry /chronicle/archive/1997/02/24
[7] 6/9/97 SF Chronicle
=
=
Ervan Darnell |"Term limits are not enough.
ervan@cs.rice.edu | We need jail."
http://www.appsmiths.com/~ervan | -- P.J. O' Rourke
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