RIDING FROM RAIL TO REALITY; BILLIONS SPENT ON SUBWAY, BUT CONGESTION WORSE.

Byline: Wendell Cox 

TWENTY years ago, I was a passionate advocate for rail and its tremendous potential to alleviate freeway congestion.

In 1980, as a member of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, I authored the amendment that dedicated 35 percent of the Proposition A referendum funding to building a rail system in Los Angeles.

I had long believed that a comprehensive rail system would reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, and I had been involved in the unsuccessful 1974 rail tax election. My belief in the value of rail was strengthened by commission staff and consultants who generally suggested that a rail system was the antidote to traffic congestion and air pollution in the Los Angeles area.

But billions of wasted dollars and years of experience have convinced me I was wrong.

Things are worse than they were before $5 billion was spent building rail in Los Angeles. Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus and rail ridership is 25 percent below what it was in 1985 when the MTA was a bus-only system.

Debt service alone for the rail system, which carries barely 15 percent of MTA riders, is rising toward $400 million annually and will be equal to one-half the annual operating cost of the entire bus system. It is no wonder that the Bus Riders Union has sought legal recourse to limit this distortion.

But the failure of new urban rail in the United States has far more fundamental roots. Despite tax referendum claims that rail can carry the same number of people who travel on as many as 12 freeway lanes, no new urban rail system in the United States has materially affected traffic congestion.

Indeed, traffic congestion is increasing faster in cities with rail lines than in those without them.

New light rail lines carry, on average, only 20 percent the passenger volume of a single freeway lane, and subway systems, like the Red Line, average only 40 percent.

Even so, fewer than half of the rail riders are attracted from cars. Most have been forced to transfer from bus routes that previously provided more direct trips.

Why does urban rail remove so few cars from the road? The simple answer is that not enough people are going to the same place at the same time. Transit's best hope for reducing traffic congestion is to attract trips to work, which largely occur during the congested morning and evening peak-travel periods.

Large, concentrated downtown areas are the only locations that have high enough employment densities to attract a significant proportion of job commuters to transit in the United States.

The problem is that downtowns are no longer dominant.

Downtown Los Angeles provides only 3 percent of employment in the area. This means that, for 97 percent of work trips, there is simply no hope for transit to reduce traffic congestion.

Even downtown, the potential is limited, because a large percentage of workers there already commute by transit.

A relatively new school of urban theorists suggests that traffic congestion can be reduced by increasing urban densities in the hope that more people would then rely on public transit, especially rail, instead of their cars.

The new urbanists' principles have been adopted in Portland, Ore., and they regularly send their missionaries around the world testifying to the paradise they claim to have created there.

In reality, Portland is less transit-friendly than Los Angeles. For its population, Portland sprawls nearly twice as much as Los Angeles does. In population per square mile, its peak densities are one-third those of Los Angeles.

Indeed, peak population densities in the suburban San Fernando Valley are 60 percent higher than in Portland. The new urbanists have it wrong on another count as well. Higher densities mean greater, not less, traffic congestion.

It is hard to imagine a more bankrupt policy direction.

Finally, because so few people are attracted from cars, the cost per new rider is exceedingly high. On the most cost-effective new light rail systems, which are not in Los Angeles, the cost per new commuter is more than the cost of leasing a new standard-size car, such as a Ford Taurus or Honda Accord.

On some systems, it would be less costly to lease each new commuter a luxury car, such as a BMW 740 or a Jaguar XJ8.

All of this is not to say that rail does not have its place. The large and densely populated central areas of Tokyo, Paris, London, New York and even Chicago are dependent upon their rail systems, which carry significant numbers of commuters, although these cities also have intractable traffic congestion.

But Los Angeles, Portland and virtually all other large U.S. metropolitan areas are not like New York or Chicago, much less Tokyo, Paris or London. They will never have the concentration of employment destinations necessary to make rail an effective strategy.

It will require a recognition of this fact to implement policies that can ease traffic congestion.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--2--Color) A lone passenger sits in a subway car while freeway lanes are congested in Encino. New rail lines may inevitably fail to get commuters out of cars in regions where jobs are dispersed, not concentrated in a downtown area.

Eric Grigorian/Special to the Daily News