Continued...
The Transportationists: Garrison and Levinson

The Transit Question

While freight hauling railroads have succeeded most recently by tailoring investments and services to what customers want, "the non-rail modes have those tasks before them, but with the partial exceptions of air and maritime services, they have not begun to recognize them." One of the most visible of the non-rail modes, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), is discussed in the authors’ chapter on transit. They chose BART in part because it is an icon of the region and, as the first new transit system built post-World War II, a model for the commuter rail projects that were built in the decades following its debut in 1972.

"In today's contentious world, anyone questioning transit costs is taken to be ignorant and pro-automobile. Let us do a bit of math on costs anyway."

"In today's contentious world, anyone questioning transit costs is taken to be ignorant and pro-automobile,” they write.  Even so, they do the math, and it is discouraging. The BART extension to Pittsburg/Bay Point cost $505 million and was intended originally to serve roughly 3,000 daily roundtrip riders. About $170,000 had been invested per rider.

Most transit costs, however, are largely hidden to users because much of the money is federal tax revenue collected in the state and returned by the Federal Transit Administration—meaning it comes back as so-called “free” money. For this reason, costs are not politically compelling. The authors note that Roy Nakadegawa, a long-time transit supporter, questioned the wisdom of building the Pittsburg/Bay Point line while he was a BART board director to no avail. “If no one pays attention to him, what is the use of our math?” they ask.

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Transit systems also tend to fall short of the promises made when they are proposed. A few examples: a heavy rail project in Washington, D.C. cost 188 percent more per rail passenger than forecast, and ridership was 28 percent lower. And this was the most successful project in terms of matching performance with forecasts. In the least successful forecast the cost per rail passenger for a Miami project exceeded forecasts by 872 percent, and the project drew 85 percent fewer riders than forecast.

This is not to say that all transit should be questioned, they write. Densely populated urban environments need transit. But they do question the federal government’s ability to achieve these goals or continue its programs. “One might say that federal transit programs are a success because transit service has been preserved, but might there have been other, better ways to do that? Might downsizing and market specialization as illustrated by the U.S. freight railroad industry have served better?"

How did things come to this pass? "We are there because of lack of cognition...Real improvements, those that make a factor of two or better changes, should be tried."

Time Travelers

Time and the lingering effects of the Industrial Revolution are two other subjects transportationists need to contemplate and understand. Because time is one of the two dimensions (along with distance) by which a trip is measured, it is a crucial element in describing and understanding the transportation experience.

Understanding how people use their time in travel cannot be achieved without also understanding how they use their time in other activities. Depending on how much people value their time spent traveling compared to doing other things, they will be willing to use more or less of it for any particular trip.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, time's importance changed, they note. Machine-based factory production created the workday and the workweek, with a need for schedules and schedule keeping. Concurrently, the growth in complexity of transportation systems caused the invention of tools to measure time, so that trips could be coordinated, notably on the railroads. They state that "transportation (and the industrial revolution) framed the modern perception of time, and thus our daily schedules."

Remarkably, given time's importance, how people make these decisions about their time is not fully understood. One theory is that there is a fixed travel budget: when the commute trip, for example, starts to edge over the "budget," people may adjust by relocating their homes or their jobs. As general travel speeds have risen, greater distances can separate jobs and homes without impinging on this budget. In this way jobs and houses located in suburbs, where travel is generally faster, can help reduce the amount of time spent commuting, even as distances increase.

The authors note there are conflicting data about the existence of a fixed travel budget and also note that some researchers suggest that the aggregate data about travel budgets could mask individual variations, and that time spent on travel could change depending on the age, socioeconomic class, and even ethnicity of the people doing the traveling.

"The most important information for travel behavior analysis, the amount of time spent traveling, is ironically the least clear."

Time is one of the major reasons that we care about transportation. When it is working right, transportation permits people to make the most of their time. Arguing against transportation improvements because they will "induce" demand, Garrison and Levinson write, "is to argue against transportation projects because they do what transportation projects are supposed to do." A full analysis of a project's value could include the tally of not just "the lives lost by the additional pollution generated when a new project is constructed," but also, "the lifetimes lost stuck in traffic, or the opportunities lost stuck at home" were the project not to be built.

With the Internet and wireless communications enabling more flexibility in how people communicate, work, and shop, they question the wisdom of continuing to plan and operate transportation systems based on the Industrial Revolution's fixed schedule approach. "Freedom is achieved when citizens regain control of their schedules," they write. "There is an important corollary: freedom is lost when schedules are tightened."