Outside of the defunct Soviet model there is no more obvious example of bad economic planning than public transit systems. The federal government is throwing billions of taxed-and-borrowed dollars after everything from pie-in-the-sky plans for a national high-speed railroad network down to intra-city lightrail systems.
With this federal support in mind, politicians in Georgia are moving ahead with a large-scale mass transit plan for the Atlanta region. The final fate of the plan will be on the ballot as a referendum in 2012. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has covered the plans in a series of articles, including a report from April of this year on the politically driven $29 billion transportation wish list:
The Atlanta region’s cities, counties and towns may well end up fighting each other this summer for slots on the referendum’s project list, to be finalized in October. But for now, as local wish lists are tallied, they are backing each other up to the tune of billions of dollars’ worth of projects. When regional officials did a rough total adding up the local wish lists as they rolled in last week, they came up with $24 billion. But so many local governments put in additional notes of support for projects outside their borders that the latest dollar total for all the region’s desired projects now shows up at $29 billion, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. That number is still subject to change as planners dig into the lists.
The transportation package hinges, in part, on voters approving a sales tax increase. Some of the money would go toward widening highways and building new interchanges along Atlanta’s notoriously congested perimeter I-285. However, the new funds would also be used for public transit expansion, something that should raise a red flag with Atlanta voters.
When politicians and tax-paid bureaucrats talk about public transit systems they almost always over-promise the benefits and under-promise the costs. If voters in Atlanta want to get an idea of what it costs to operate a public transit system in a city of their size, they might want to look at the Washington, D.C.-area mass transit system. The federal government, which has oversight of the District of Columbia’s budget and thereby its contribution to the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA), pumps enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money into the system every year – $745 million in 2009 alone – on top of the system’s costly tickets and expensive commuter cards.
Proponents of mass transit could argue that the Atlanta plans are far from as ambitious as the mass transit system in the nation’s capital. But it does not really matter how big or small the plans are – the tendency is always that taxpayers end up having to pay for the system anyway. According to Cato Institute senior fellow Randal O’Toole, a single commuter train line in the Nashville, Tenn., area costs $25,000 per year – per commuter! Needless to say, the 264 weekday rush-hour commuters who use the train service only pay a fraction of that out of pocket. The rest falls on taxpayers’ shoulders.
In Cincinnati, politicans and other mass transit advocates have been trying for years to build an elaborate mass transit network, centered around a trolley/lightrail system. Earlier this year Ohio governor John Kasich (R) yanked $51.8 million in state funds from the project. (Fee required for access to Cincinnati Enquirer archive.) Other Ohio politicians, like the commissioners of Clermont County just outside of Cincinnati, are also coming to their senses and will likely protect their taxpayers from an open-ended commitment to fund the project. These funding cuts will probably be enough to bury the plans, at least for now.
On top of bad economic planning, politicians also tend to ignore evidence that mass transit actually was economically sound before government got involved in it. A nother report by Cato scholar O’Toole presents chilling evidence that productivity and profitability of mass transit took a nosedive when government decided that it was better than private business at hauling people around. Not only is this a stark reminder of government’s disastrous role in our economy as a whole, but it also gives hope for mass transit for the future: get government out of the business and let private entrepreneurs flourish, and we will get mass transit that takes people where they want to go, when they want to go…without taking taxpayers for a ride.
