via Human Transit
The University of Minnesota's David Levinson wrote a bracing article
last week arguing for a new approach to how we decide what transit
lines should exist. In its emphasis on "not losing money," it may
remind you of some of the broadsides of the anti-transit right, but Levinson is not one of that crowd, as far as I know.
So I thought I'd quote the juiciest parts here, and provide some
counterpoint. Levinson and I use very different frames, but if you look
beyond those, there's some agreement here.
Mass transit systems in the United
States are collectively losing money hand over fist. Yet many
individual routes (including bus routes) earn enough to pay their own
operating (and even capital costs). But like bad mortgages
contaminating the good, money-losing transit routes are bogging down
the system.
This "profitability" or "breaking even" frame may alienate many on
the left from the merit of Levinson's idea. Currently, transit agencies
are not trying to break even, so they are not failing if they don't. If we propose a free-market view in which transit should
be breaking even, well, I'd like to see this as well in a perfect
world. But that would be a world in which government isn't heavily
subsidizing transit's competitor, the private car -- not just through
road expenditures but through such interventions as minimum parking
requirements and petroleum-based foreign policy. I would further
suggest that current environmental crises argue for government to be
biased away from the private car and toward modes that do less
environmental harm, and that subsidies toward transit (i.e. accepting
that transit "loses money") are one valid way of doing that.
We can divide individual systems into three sets of routes:
Always be suspicious when a transit network is analyzed as though it
were a pile of routes, because a good network is more than the sum of
its parts.
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