No.

287 November 5, 1997

Policy Analysis
ISTEA
A Poisonous Brew for American Cities

by Randal O'Toole

Executive Summary

Will travel be faster and easier in the 21st century, or

will traffic be bogged down by a cumbersome central planning
process that creates more urban congestion and gridlock? The
answer depends on how Congress acts on the Intermodal Surface
Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). Passed in 1991 and
recently extended for six months, the act is to be reauthor-
ized early next year.

A better title for the law, which allocates billions of

dollars from the federal gasoline tax, might be the "Urban
Immobility and Pork-Barrel Act." ISTEA creates enormous
incentives for urban areas to waste money on pork-barrel
projects that are unlikely to meet local needs and that will
actually promote congestion.

ISTEA especially promotes mass transit such as light rail

and subways. But those systems carry only a fraction of
commuters and cost from 10 to a 100 times more per mile to
build than do roads. Worse, many supporters of transit, the
so-called New Urbanists, actually favor increased congestion
on roads. They see it as a way to get people out of cars and
to force them to live in central cities rather than suburbs.
But increased congestion will not result in significant
shifts by commuters to transit; it will only result in mil-
lions of wasted hours and increased levels of air pollution
as commuters sit in gridlocked traffic.

Transportation policy is best left with state and local

authorities as well as with the private sector. Congress
thus could make travel more efficient by getting out of the
transportation business and repealing the federal gasoline
tax that pays for federal pork.
____________________________________________________________

Randal O'Toole is executive director of the Thoreau Institute

and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Page 2

Introduction
Both supporters and critics of the 1991 Intermodal
Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA, pronounced
"ice-tea"), which is due to be reauthorized in 1998, say the
conflict is between advocates of highways and advocates of
mass transit.1 That is wrong. The conflict is between
mobility and immobility.

Two centuries ago few Americans ventured more than a

few miles from their homes. A century ago travel of more
than a few hundred miles was rare. Today Americans routine-
ly travel tens of thousands of miles each year. Although
many of the longer trips are by air, most short- and medium-
length trips are by automobile. It is this mobility that is
being attacked by proponents of ISTEA.

The automobile has created a lifestyle unheard of in

the history of the world: a lifestyle characterized by
extraordinary freedom of movement, immense trade in manufac-
tured goods and services, high employment levels and social
mobility, and unheard-of opportunities for individuals to
choose where and how they want to live.

The automobile has also created problems, including air

pollution and solid waste. But rather than address those
particular problems, many critics, especially the New Urban-
ists, as they call themselves, attack the automobile itself.
Increased mobility is a sign that people "lack community."2
Increased trade in goods and services is a sign of a "sick
consumerism." People's ability to live where they want to
has led to "sterile suburbs" and "sprawl."3

Given a clear choice, few Americans would be willing to

give up their cars and the lifestyles they make possible.
Yet an extreme anti-auto view has become the dominant para-
digm behind ISTEA. That has happened because the supporters
of immobility have stolen the terms of the debate by claim-
ing to want to reduce congestion and pollution whereas, in
fact, they want to increase congestion and, in effect,
pollution. In truth, ISTEA

· mandates for transportation a comprehensive central

planning process that has been captured by the New
Urbanists in many cities;

· gives cities huge incentives to build rail lines and

other expensive but practically useless transportation
projects;
 Page 3

· creates perverse incentives for cities to increase

congestion, making them less likely to meet federal air
quality standards; and

· hands out billions of federal dollars for mass tran-

sit, roads, and other projects that satisfy political
agendas rather than local transportation needs.

Instead of renewing ISTEA, the federal government

should back out of the urban transportation arena. The
"TEA-2" proposal, supported by Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) and
Rep. John Kasich (R-Ohio), eliminates most of the federal
gas tax and devolves transportation decisions to state and
local governments. A proposal such as that would allow
cities to focus on transportation rather than the game of
getting dollars from the U.S. Treasury.

History of Urban Transport

Through the end of the 19th century, Americans were
content to leave urban transportation to the private sector.
Urban developers always dedicated a large share of land to
streets to allow for a flow of commercial and private traf-
fic. As the technology became available, private developers
also built streetcar lines and other forms of rail transit
to promote the housing developments accessed by those rails.
Private toll roads connected many cities.

Because of limited mobility, most cities had densely

populated urban cores. Small lot sizes and multifamily
housing reflected both high land prices and people's need to
be close to employment and shops. Streetcar lines allowed
many people to escape to "railroad suburbs," but even those
suburbs tended to be densely populated because most people
wanted to be able to walk easily to the streetcar stops.

In the early part of the 20th century, the increasing

popularity of the automobile led to a "good roads" movement
that advocated government construction and ownership of
roads. That revolutionary idea was partly a response to the
perceived excesses of "monopolistic" railroad and toll road
owners. But it was also in tune with the Progressives'
vision of "scientific management" by government officials.

Advocates of good roads felt that user fees, in the

form of gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, would
make roads self-funding and promote efficient, government-
managed transportation systems. In fact, user fees have
Page 4

paid for the vast majority of the highways, roads, and

streets in the United States. But there are serious flaws
with funding roads with user fees.

Differential Costs
User fees make sense only so long as all roads cost
about the same to build and provide about the same level of
service. The system breaks down when some roads cost far
more to build than others as well as when travel demand is
significantly greater during some hours of the day than
others.

An urban freeway may cost from 10 to 100 times as much

per mile to build as a street yet offer drivers only two to
four times the speed. But drivers who are asked to pay the
same access fee whether they use the freeway or the street
would be foolish to choose the street. The significant
speed benefit of freeways, at no extra cost to drivers,
explains why urban freeways seem to be used to capacity soon
after they open.

In the 1950s the federal government started building

the interstate highway system, paid for with gasoline taxes.
Although intended to be an interstate system, it quickly
turned into an intraurban system, providing cities with
throughways and beltways that were used mainly by local
commuters. Urban interstates allowed drivers to go two to
four times faster than they could on streets--but cost the
government 10 or more times more to construct.

To account for the significant differences in costs and

benefits between freeways and streets, cities might have
charged tolls for use of the freeways. Even better would
have been to reduce peak-hour demand through congestion
tolls that were higher during rush-hour periods than slack
periods. But federal law forbade states and cities to
charge tolls for roads built with federal funds unless the
roads that were rebuilt with federal funds or replaced by
federally funded roads had been toll roads. Thus, only a
few eastern states have toll roads, and until recently none
used rush-hour pricing.

Creating Suburbs
Freeways and the automobile transformed American cities
by allowing people to live a considerable distance from
where they worked and shopped. The auto's door-to-door
 Page 5

service allowed people to live on large lots, away from the

congestion in the city centers. By the 1960s a majority of
Americans lived not in rural areas or cities but in suburbs.
By the 1980s most jobs were also located in the suburbs as
employers followed their workers away from urban congestion.

Increased mobility improved American life in many other

ways. Drawing on a huge consumer base, stores could provide
increased variety and reduced prices. A typical American
grocery store in 1900 offered about 3,000 different prod-
ucts. By the 1950s supermarkets were offering 15,000 dif-
ferent products. Today some superstores sell well over
100,000 different products.

Automotive technology also gave urbanites a greater

appreciation for nature, and urban residents demanded more
parks and open space within the cities as well as wilderness
and other recreation areas outside the cities. Fortunately,
the spread of the suburbs allowed the creation of many types
of open space, from large back yards to greenbelts and
forest parks such as those in New York, Chicago, and St.
Louis.

Problems for Cities

The automobile is not without its problems, of course.
Air pollution is an obvious problem, but more subtle is the
tension between the central cities and the suburbs. Central
city officials consider the suburbs parasites, benefiting
from city services but failing to pay their share of taxes.
Suburbanites have often successfully opposed annexation,
city-county consolidation, and other attempts by the central
cities to absorb the suburbs into their tax bases.
For many city officials, the most upsetting thing about
the suburbs is not that they seem to be parasites on the
cities but that the suburbs do not even need the cities.
With jobs, shopping areas, and various cultural facilities
moving to the suburbs, central city downtowns have declined
in importance. In fact, as Frank Lloyd Wright realized as
early as 1922, the invention of the telephone, automobile,
and electric lighting made downtowns obsolete. Joel Gar-
reau, author of Edge City, points out that "we have not
built a single old-style downtown from raw dirt in seventy-
five years."4

City officials and planners have viewed the decline of

downtowns as a crisis and responded in various ways. In the
1950s they combined "urban renewal," which often proved
Page 6

disastrous, with freeways built through downtowns, creating

enormous congestion.5 In the 1960s, when many cities bought
transit companies with federal help, they stoutly maintained
the downtown orientations of bus routes, so that transit
riders going from suburb to suburb were forced to go through
downtown.

The downtown orientation of transit continued in the

1980s when rail transit became popular. Los Angeles's
freeways, bus routes, and new rail lines are all oriented
around downtown even though downtown provides only 5 percent
of employment in the Los Angeles area.

Another problem was that planners' downtown orientation

led them to build freeways through well-settled and often
historic neighborhoods, provoking enormous opposition. In
1968 the city of Portland, Oregon, published a highway plan
that would have forced 1 of 10 residents to either move or
live right next to a freeway or expressway.

Successful opposition to new highway construction

created something of a crisis in industries grown dependent
on lavish, federally funded interstate highways. Transpor-
tation consultants, engineering and design firms, sand and
gravel companies, and other parts of the construction indus-
try looked around for something else to do.

New Urbanism
As long ago as the 1950s air pollution, congested
freeways, the decline of downtowns, and the supposed steril-
ity of the suburbs led to a growing nostalgia for life
before automobiles. By the 1980s several architects had
developed that nostalgia into what they variously called
"neotraditional town planning" or "New Urbanism."6

In essence, neotraditionalists and New Urbanists decid-

ed that the best way to make Americans less dependent on
cars would be to redesign cities to look as they had looked
before autos were dominant. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, American cities were typified by multifamily
housing, housing mixed together with commercial uses, and
single-family housing on small lots, all connected by
streetcar lines. So high densities, mixed uses, and light
rail (the updated name for streetcars) became characteristic
of New Urbanism.

But New Urbanism reverses cause and effect. The auto-

mobile allowed people to live in lower densities, and forc-
 Page 7

ing people to live in high densities will not lead them to

give up their cars. Indeed, throughout the nation high
density is always accompanied by increased congestion. But
that fact does not make New Urbanism any less popular among
people who wish they could "uninvent" the automobile.

In fact, New Urbanists view increases in congestion as

a good because they think of mobility as a vice. When asked
what he would do to change suburbs, one New Urban planner
told Washington Post writer Joel Garreau that he "would
increase dramatically the real residential population. . . .
I'd raise the gasoline tax by 300 percent. I'd raise the
price of automobiles enormously. . . . I'd limit movement
completely. . . . And then I would put enormous costs on
parking." In short, comments Garreau, that planner would
"force Americans to live in a world that few now seem to
value."7

Overview of ISTEA
Congress passed ISTEA in 1991 to develop

a National Intermodal Transportation System that

is economically efficient and environmentally
sound, provides the foundation for the Nation to
compete in the global economy, and will move peo-
ple and goods in an energy efficient manner.8

Behind those lofty goals was a more basic political

motivation: money--up to $155 billion over six years. The
so-called federal highway trust fund piles up tens of bil-
lions of dollars in revenues each year, mainly from the 18.4
cent per gallon federal gasoline tax. The federal gas tax
was originally instituted to pay for the interstate system,
but by 1991 that system was nearly complete. As a result,
Congress was not spending all the receipts on highways.
Major funding has been provided for alternatives to auto and
highway transportation.

Advocates of mass transit found their justification for

spending gasoline taxes on nonhighway projects in the prob-
lem of air pollution. Although autos emit less pollutants
now than in the past and air in American cities thus is
cleaner, a few cities--notably Los Angeles, San Francisco,
and some on the east coast--still fail to meet rising Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency pollution standards. An impor-
tant thrust of ISTEA is to use clean air as a wedge to
divert more and more gasoline taxes from highways to tran-
sit.
Page 8

Before ISTEA, up to 2 cents per gallon of the gas tax

had been available for transit. But ISTEA greatly expands
transit's share: after deducting 4.3 cents dedicated to
deficit reduction, the law dedicates nearly half of remain-
ing gas taxes to either transit or "flexible" funds that may
be spent on either transit or highways. That creates a
shortfall in funds for highway improvements.

Essence of ISTEA
At nearly 138,000 words in eight different titles,
ISTEA is the size of a medium-length book. The most impor-
tant titles are Title I, Surface Transportation, and Title
III, Transit. Between them, those two titles account for
more than two-thirds of ISTEA's verbiage and over 90 percent
of its spending.

Title I, which deals mostly with highways, contains two

or three provisions that market advocates might cheer. It
allows toll roads, whereas previously tolls were not allowed
for federally funded highways (except where they had been
charged before federal funds were received). It specifical-
ly allows up to five experiments with congestion pricing--
tolls that are higher during rush hours than during other
hours of the day. And it allows experiments with private
construction of roads.

Otherwise Titles I and III stick with the same old

command-and-control, central planning process that has
caused most transportation problems in the first place. The
two titles earmark billions of dollars for hundreds of
highway, rail, transit, bridge, and other projects in every
state.

The titles also create a new set of planning processes.

To be eligible for federal funding, each state and urban
area is required to prepare transportation plans with sig-
nificant public involvement. While public involvement
supposedly prevents "backroom decisions" that are closed to
the public, in practice all it really means is that a dif-
ferent set of special-interest groups ends up dominating the
process.

ISTEA authorizes funding for 1991 through 1997 and must

be reauthorized next year so that congressional appropria-
tors can continue to spend money from the highway trust
fund. Reflecting the decline in discretionary spending,
ISTEA's reauthorization is the biggest pork barrel in the
 Page 9

105th Congress. And Congress has responded to the promise

of pork with gusto: Individual members have proposed hun-
dreds of expensive projects in their districts. The demand
for seats at the table when the decisions are made has been
so great that the House Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee, with 73 members, has become by far the largest
committee in Congress. At 50 members, the House Subcommit-
tee on Surface Transportation may be one of the largest
subcommittees in congressional history.

Proposals for Change

Three basic proposals for reauthorization have been on
the table:

· "NEXTEA," proposed by the administration, basically

would continue ISTEA for another six years.

· "Step 21" is an alternative favored by those states

that end up "donating" more in gas taxes than they
receive in federal funding. This proposal requires
that each state get at least 95 percent of the funds it
pays into the highway fund. It also reduces ISTEA's
many categories of funds to two: a highway fund and a
flexible "surface transportation" fund.

· "TEA-2," sponsored by Mack and Kasich, would devolve

most policy decisions and funds back to the states. It
would eliminate all but about 6 cents of the federal
gas tax. Four cents would still go to deficit reduc-
tion, and 2 cents would be dedicated to maintenance of
the interstate system. The states could then increase
gas or other taxes and make their own decisions about
transportation funding.

Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Committee on

Transportation and Infrastructure, has made no secret of his
opposition to devolution. "There is a clear federal role in
transportation which must be maintained and strengthened,"
he says. His main goal is to get the trust fund "off bud-
get" so that, except for the 4 cent deficit-reduction tax,
it is protected from raids by other congressional commit-
tees.

ISTEA Interest Groups

Five different interest groups are making common cause
to renew ISTEA:
Page 10

· Central city officials who are eager to maintain the

prominence of their cities over the suburbs and resent
the mobility that has allowed suburbanites to escape
city taxes and regulation;

· Downtown interests that desire to reverse the "de-

clines" of downtowns relative to suburban "edge cities"
and tend to resent the mobility that has created subur-
ban shopping and business competitors;

· New Urbanist planners who believe everyone would be

better off if people spend more time within "their
communities";

· Urban environmentalists who view the automobile as a

great evil and thus oppose more freeways; and

· Engineering and construction firms and unions looking

for federal dollars to spend on urban public works
projects.

The main battle in Congress has been between the "do-

nor" states and highway interests on one side, who want to
renew ISTEA, with more funds for themselves, and the "recip-
ient" states and transit interests on the other, who tend to
support the status quo. A bill marked up by Shuster's
committee, the Building Efficient Surface Transportation
Equity Act of 1997, authorizes $218 billion in total spend-
ing over six years and provides for a more balanced distri-
bution of funds among the states. Unfortunately, there is
little discussion of the adverse effects of ISTEA over the
past six years and the likely effects in the future. A
renewed ISTEA's built-in planning provisions and incentives
all tend to reduce, not increase, America's mobility and the
efficiency of the transportation system.

The Perverse Incentives of Flexible Funding

In passing ISTEA in 1991, Congress declared that it is
the policy of the United States to have a "transportation
system that is economically efficient and environmentally
sound." The good intentions behind ISTEA were to create a
balanced transportation system that is not based exclusively
on a single mode or technology.

It might seem reasonable to suppose that the proportion

of funds spent on various modes of transportation should
reflect the public's demand for those modes. For example,
if Americans want to make 10 percent of their trips on mass
 Page 11

transit, then it seems reasonable to spend 10 percent of

transportation dollars on transit. And if the only major
source of transportation dollars is highway user fees, then
it appears sensible to divert some of those fees to transit
modes.

It also appears sensible to use a rational planning

process to determine what share of transportation dollars
should go to each mode. And since autos are notorious for
causing air pollution and congestion, it seems sensible to
dedicate a share of highway user fees to congestion and
pollution mitigation.

In actual practice, those ideas turn out to be not so

sensible at all. In the hands of various interest groups,
each with its own agenda, the rational planning process
intended by ISTEA produces extremely irrational results.

The problem is not with ISTEA's goals but with its

means. Instead of finding new sources of revenue for pedes-
trians and transit, ISTEA made highway funds available. A
portion of federal gasoline tax revenues is dedicated to
highways, and a portion is dedicated to transit, but a large
share is "flexible," available for highways, transit, or
pedestrian ways.

The flexible funds have become a "commons," leading

advocates of the various modes and regions to try to get
their "fair share" before some other mode or region gets it.
As the executive of Portland's metropolitan planning agency
recently said about ISTEA reauthorization, "The region must
take action to bring Oregon's fair share of federal trans-
portation dollars back home or they will be lost to other
regions of the country."9

Making billions of dollars of highway user fees avail-

able for a variety of nonhighway uses creates incentives for
people to distort the process in their favor. Since rail is
so expensive, for example, building a useless rail line
helps a region to get its "fair share" (or more) of federal
dollars. Rail construction creates many local engineering
and construction jobs. Although buses are nearly always a
far more cost-effective form of transit, most money spent on
buses goes to bus manufacturers. Unless a city is home to a
bus manufacturer, then, city politicians get little politi-
cal benefit from spending federal dollars on buses.

The problem is exacerbated by the structure of the

Department of Transportation. The department's Federal
Highway Administration, which distributes highway construc-
Page 12

tion funds and oversees highway planning, is separate from

the Federal Transit Administration, which distributes tran-
sit funds and oversees transit planning. Similar divisions
exist at the state and local level. That means that at no
level is there an incentive to do an objective analysis of
rail vs. bus vs. highway transportation.

The Federal Transit Administration seems to be devoted

to the New Urbanist goals of density, reduced auto usage,
and increased transit, especially rail transit. Rail's
expense gives the agency a bureaucratic reason to support
rail despite its failure to reduce congestion or pollution.
In a recent report sponsored by the Federal Transit Adminis-
tration, the separation of agencies is seen as a barrier,
not to more reasoned analysis, but to getting more funds for
rail transit.10

ISTEA earmarks billions of dollars for specific proj-

ects regardless of their efficiency or contribution to
transportation. To judge by the size of the House Transpor-
tation Committee and its Surface Transportation Subcommit-
tee, Congress appears eager to continue such earmarking in
the 1998 reauthorization.

Such earmarking, of course, ensures that much transpor-

tation spending is based on politics rather than reason or
need. That often allows a coalition of central city offi-
cials, New Urbanists, environmentalists, and the rail con-
struction industry to dominate over other urban interest
groups.

Supposed Subsidies to Autos

Proponents of ISTEA justify the diversion of highway
user fees to mass transit by the subsidies that society has
supposedly provided for automotive travel. Most auto crit-
ics reckon that those subsidies average $2 to $3 per gallon
of gasoline. But a critical review of their analyses re-
veals that most of the "subsidies" are imaginary.

For example, Getting There, by auto critic Stephen

Goddard, includes some estimate of subsidies to the automo-
bile (Table 1).11

On the basis of the estimate given in Table 1, and the

fact that Americans use about 133 billion gallons of fuel
per year, Goddard calculates that gasoline taxes would have
to be raised by at least $2.25 per gallon to end subsidies
 Page 13

Table 1
Alleged Annual Subsidies to Autos
_________________________________________________

Cost
Subsidy ($ billions)

_________________________________________________

General tax subsidies to build roads 21

Police and safety services 6.1
Highway administration 4.9
Interest and debt service 5.5
Loss of tax revenues from free parking 21.2
Military presence in Persian Gulf 25
Annual cost of Strategic Petroleum Reserve 1.5
Costs of traffic congestion 100
Air pollution and health costs 9
Casualty insurance premiums 99

Total 293.2
_________________________________________________

Source: Stephen B. Goddard, Getting There: The Epic

Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Cen-
tury (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 255.

(estimates based roughly on 1989 figures). But Goddard's

estimates are riddled with errors.

General Tax Subsidies. Goddard says that gas taxes and

motor vehicle fees "cover only about 60 percent of the $53.3
billion that all levels of government spend [on highway
construction and maintenance] each year. The remaining
$21.3 billion comes from general tax revenues that state and
local governments assess on drivers and nondrivers alike."
Goddard's arithmetic, which is based on 1989 figures, misses
four important points.

First, in 1989 highway user fees spent on highways

totaled $44.3 billion. That was only $9 billion less than
the $53.3 billion cost of construction and maintenance, not
$21.3 billion as Goddard claims.12 Apparently Goddard got
his value for the difference from a source that he did not
realize had added to the total costs of construction the
costs of police, administration, and debt servicing. In
other words, he did not acquire construction costs and user
fees from the same data series. That means that he double
Page 14

counts police protection since he includes it as a separate

cost item.

Second, the vast majority of "general tax revenues"

goes for local neighborhood streets, not highways, and about
a quarter of those revenues comes from property taxes. It
is reasonable to expect local homeowners to contribute to
the streets and sidewalks in front of their houses because
they will use them whether they drive or not.

Third, $5.8 billion of the $21.3 billion cited by

Goddard is not paid out of general tax revenues but is
interest earned on investments of highway user fees before
they are spent.13 Since Goddard is quick to charge highway
users for interest on bonds (so quick that he double counts
them, as shown below), it is hardly fair that he counts
interest earned on user fees as a subsidy to highways.

Fourth, Goddard and his source, a World Resources

Institute study, overlook the fact that a considerable
portion of highway user fees is diverted to nonhighway
activities, such as state general funds, mass transit, and,
since passage of ISTEA, federal deficit reduction.14 If
those fees are put back on the revenue side of Goddard's
calculations, the so-called subsidy is reduced. In 1989
nearly $7 billion in highway user fees was diverted to other
uses.15 After ISTEA that amount ballooned, and in 1995
diversions reached $21.5 billion. That more than offset the
$21.4 billion in non-user-fee taxes that went into highways
and streets in 1995.16

Police and Safety Services, Highway Administration,

Interest and Debt Service. Goddard is double counting here.
All of these costs are included in the amount spent on
highways ($71.2 billion in the year Goddard uses, $92.5
billion in 1995). Hence, all of these costs are covered by
highway user fees or by the other offsets.

Loss of Tax Revenues from Free Parking. Goddard says

that employers should charge their employees to park and pay
them extra rather than just give them free parking. But if
employers did that, the federal government would collect
taxes on the additional pay given to employees to cover
parking costs, reducing the so-called subsidy.

This is a specious argument at best. Employers do not

charge employees for use of office space or office Christmas
parties. They often cover the cost of health insurance and
pay for other nontaxed benefits. In any case, a benefit
given by an employer to an employee cannot be considered a
 Page 15

subsidy from the public trough since the wages in question

are not public property to begin with.

Cost of Traffic Congestion. Goddard relies on the

Texas Transportation Institute's estimate that congestion
costs Americans $100 billion per year. But he does not ask
how much longer travel would take without the automobile.
Nor does he note that a primary reason for increasing con-
gestion is the fact that so many billions of dollars in
highway user fees have been spent on rail transit projects
rather than activities that could really reduce con-
gestion.17

Air Pollution and Health Costs. These are certainly

two of the adverse effects of autos. If autos were elimi-
nated, no doubt many pollution and health costs would be
reduced significantly, but others would be created. It is
difficult to say what the net effects would be.

Casualty Insurance Premiums. Since those premiums are

paid by auto drivers themselves, they can hardly qualify as
a subsidy. The same is true of "drivers' costs in highway
tolls," which Goddard does not calculate but says "could
also [be] added."18

In sum, Goddard's $293.2 billion subsidy turns out to

have been a mere $10.5 billion subsidy in 1995. When spread
across the 143.3 billion gallons of fuel consumed by Ameri-
can motorists in 1995, this results in merely a 7 cent per
gallon subsidy.19 With motorists going about 3.7 trillion
passenger-miles, that works out to a subsidy of about one-
quarter of a penny per passenger-mile.20

Subsidies to Transit
American urban transit riders paid $6.3 billion in
fares in 1994, but transit operations cost $17.3 billion.21
Transit capital improvements cost another $5.6 billion,
leaving a $16.6 billion deficit--$6.0 billion of which was
paid by highway users.22 With transit riders traveling some
40 billion passenger-miles,23 the result is an average
subsidy of about 42 cents per transit passenger-mile, rough-
ly 150 times more than similar subsidies to auto travel.

Subsidies from auto drivers to transit have been grow-

ing since 1974, when some states started spending gas taxes
on transit. In 1983 Congress followed their example by
dedicating first 1 cent and later 2 cents of the federal
gasoline tax to mass transit. By 1995 cumulative diversions
Page 16

of highway fees to mass transit totaled nearly $50 billion

in 1995 dollars.24 (States diverted another $80 billion to
their general funds, and since 1991, the federal government
has diverted about $35 billion to deficit reduction.)25

Many cities that are building rail transit systems are

actually spending more of their transportation funds on
transit than on roads, even though most of the funding comes
from road users and transit typically carries well under 10
percent of local trips. In Portland, for example, total
government capital and operating expenditures on rail and
bus transit outweigh federal, state, and local expenditures
on roads two to one. Since Portland has an ambitious rail
construction program that will last well into the next
century, that ratio is not likely to change. Yet Portland
planners say that rail transit is unlikely to ever carry
more than about 2 to 3 percent of Portland-area trips.

ISTEA Redistribution
One of the major issues of ISTEA reauthorization is
protests by states that get far less than their residents
pay into the highway account of the highway trust fund (so-
called donor states). Yet the disparity for mass transit is
far worse than for highways.

Most states get between 80 and 130 percent of what

their residents pay into the highway account. In 1995, for
example, only one state, South Carolina, received less than
70 percent of what its residents paid into the highway
account and only three states, Alaska, Massachusetts, and
Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia received more
than 200 percent of what they paid in.26 That disparity has
been enough to create a major controversy over ISTEA reau-
thorization.

Because transit makes sense only in the largest cities,

the difference between donors to and recipients of the
transit account is far more serious. Since passage of
ISTEA, more than half the states have received less than 40
percent or more than 200 percent of what their residents
paid into this account.27

· Eight states and the District of Columbia received

more than twice what they paid into the mass transit
account: Connecticut (207 percent), Hawaii (216 per-
cent), Illinois (225 percent), Massachusetts (271
percent), New Jersey (384 percent), New York (504
percent), Oregon (388 percent), Pennsylvania (215
 Page 17

percent) and Washington, D.C. (1,511 percent).28 Not

surprisingly, cities in most of those states are build-
ing major new rail transit projects.

· Two-thirds of the states received less than 80 per-

cent of what they put in, and more than half received
less than 60 percent.

· On a total dollar basis, the biggest winners were New

York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., each
of which received hundreds of millions of dollars more
than their residents paid into the transit fund.

· On a per capita basis, the big winners were residents

of Washington, D.C., New York City, and Portland, each
of which got well over $20 in federal transit grants
for every dollar they paid into the transit account.

The differences between donor and recipient states are

exacerbated by the huge amounts earmarked for transit proj-
ects in ISTEA and subsequent appropriations bills. Over the
past four years, congressional appropriators have earmarked
$3.5 billion for transit projects; more than half of that
amount has gone to just three states--California, Georgia,
and Oregon--that contributed just 15 percent to the mass
transit account.29 Add New Jersey, New York, and Texas and
the total earmarking comes to more than 75 percent.

So-called flexible funding is merely an open invitation

for big cities to fleece other American taxpayers and for
powerful members of Congress to divert federal funding to
their states and districts.

Congestion Mitigation
ISTEA does appropriate $1 billion per year for a con-
gestion mitigation and air quality (CMAQ) fund to help
cities reduce congestion and pollution. Unfortunately, the
fund has two important counterproductive restrictions.
First, it cannot be used on "scrappage," the purchase for
scrap of older cars, even though older cars tend to be the
most polluting. The dirtiest 10 percent of all cars--which
tend to be the oldest cars--produce about half of all pollu-
tion.30 A program that purchased and scrapped those cars
could go far in reducing pollution.

Second, in metropolitan areas that violate any federal

air quality standards, CMAQ funds cannot be spent on highway
Page 18

improvements that increase the capacity for single-occupancy

vehicles, that is, roads not dedicated to carpools or buses.
Yet such capacity increases can reduce congestion, which in
turn can reduce many types of pollution.

On the other hand, CMAQ funds can be spent on activi-

ties that increase congestion. One activity, traffic calm-
ing, consists of reducing road capacities by, among other
things, installing blockades in roads to reduce vehicle
speeds. Such blockades may make sense on uncongested neigh-
borhood streets where residents want to make sure drivers
stay under legal speed limits for safety reasons. But New
Urbanists are now installing various forms of blockades on
major congested collector and arterial roads with the goal
of making the streets more "pedestrian friendly."

One such blockage, a "bumpout," consists of an exten-

sion of a corner curb into the street, preventing autos from
using the street's shoulder as a right-turn lane. That
means that drivers turning right must slow down in the
stream of traffic, delaying everyone behind them. When used
on busy streets, traffic calming devices do not noticeably
increase pedestrian traffic, but they do reduce the flow and
speed of auto traffic. Since slower speeds mean an increase
in many forms of pollution, traffic calming leads to dirtier
air.

Advocates of traffic calming have a remarkably flippant

attitude toward people who use automobiles. Cars should
move "at the speed of a horse and buggy" in downtowns and
other parts of a city, says Toronto urban planner Ken Green-
berg. "A lot of people are furious about tampering with
their ability to drive fast," says Florida traffic engineer
Walter Kulash, "but they aren't politically organized."31
Supporters of traffic calming also seem to confuse cause and
effect. "Anywhere that doesn't have congestion, you proba-
bly wouldn't want to be there," says Greenberg.32 The
typical traffic calmer's rationale seems to be that, since
popular places are congested, creating congestion in unpopu-
lar places will make those places more popular.

In at least one case, CMAQ funds have been used to

subsidize a high-density apartment building. The developer
stated that he planned to build an apartment building on
that site, but without the subsidy he would have built to a
much lower density.33 The high-density development, of
course, will actually lead to an increase in congestion and
congestion-related pollution.
 Page 19

Air Pollution and Mobility

Air pollution is the justification for spending automo-
tive gas taxes on transit and other non-road-related proj-
ects. ISTEA, which has clear links to the Clean Air Act
Amendments of 1990, particularly limits how cities that do
not meet clean air standards can spend their share of feder-
al transportation dollars.

Automobiles produce several significant pollutants,

including carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx),
hydrocarbons (HC), particulate matter, and volatile organic
compounds (VOCs). Between 1971 and 1996 federal air pollu-
tion requirements reduced most emissions from new cars by 80
percent to 95 percent.34

That reduction has significantly improved the air

quality of most American cities. Except for Los Angeles,
virtually every city that was out of compliance with federal
air quality standards (the "pollution standards index") on
more than one day in 1983 saw at least a two-thirds reduc-
tion in the number of days it violated those standards by
1992.35

At the same time, Americans are driving more than ever.

Due partly to the increasing number of women in the work-
force and partly to a growing economy, the number of miles
driven per person is increasing by more than 2 percent per
year.36 That suggests that urban air pollution might worsen
again in the future.

When Congress imposed air pollution standards on new

cars, it made no changes to the standards for older cars. A
California study found that half of all automotive air
pollution comes from the dirtiest 10 percent of all cars--
mostly older cars.37 Removing those dirty cars from the
road would do more to clean up the air than would imposing
tighter standards on new cars.

What Pollutes
For any given car, most pollution is a function of
three variables:

· Engine temperature: HC and, to a lesser extent, CO

are mostly produced when a vehicle's catalytic convert-
er is not yet heated to operating temperature. Thus, a
cold start followed by a 2-mile trip produces almost as
much HC and CO as a cold start followed by a 10-mile
Page 20

trip. That pollution could be eliminated by adding

heaters to autos' catalytic converters.38

· Operating speed: Cars emit far more of most pollut-

ants at slow speeds--0 to 20 miles per hour--than at 20
to 55 mph. The effect is most pronounced for CO and
VOCs. NOx (which contribute to smog) decline from 0 to
20 mph but then increase as speeds rise above 25 mph,
although the increase is not significant until speeds
reach 40 mph.39

· Density: Some pollutants, particularly CO, dissipate

quickly in the atmosphere and present health problems
only where automobile traffic is extremely dense or
congested.

One way to reduce automotive air pollution is to get

people to reduce their driving. New Urbanist planners hope
to do that by attracting people, especially commuters, to
other modes of travel such as walking, cycling, bus, and
rail. Their plans include several elements aimed at reach-
ing that goal:

· Higher population densities so mass transit will be

more feasible;

· Mixing housing and commercial uses so people will be

better able to walk or bicycle to work or shopping;

· Pedestrian-friendly designs aimed at making commer-

cial areas more amenable to people on foot and bicy-
cles;

· Transit-oriented designs, particularly higher density

residential developments around rail stations and other
transit centers and along transit corridors; and

· Construction of rail transit facilities to connect

high-density job and residential centers.

As attractive as those ideas may sound on paper, in

practice they fail to fulfill most of their promises. At
best, New Urban plans will slightly reduce the share of
trips people make by auto and even more slightly reduce the
distance they drive. Those reductions come about not be-
cause New Urbanism makes walking or transit more attractive
but because it increases congestion and parking costs so
much that cars are less attractive. Congestion, in turn,
increases many forms of pollution, particularly those depen-
dent on speed and density.
 Page 21

The Virtue of Cars

New Urbanists often describe Americans' relationship
with their cars as a "love affair" or an "addiction." The
implication is that Americans' use of autos is irrational or
some sort of sickness. In fact, for short-distance travel
within a large urban area, the auto is the most convenient
and efficient form of transportation ever devised.

That is largely because the auto is completely decen-

tralized. Urban areas, too, are decentralized, partly
because centralization, with or without autos, creates
uncomfortable crowding and congestion. Few cities have work
centers that employ more than 15 to 20 percent of the city's
workers. So very few trips have the same origin and desti-
nation.

Thus, high-capacity rail transit is not a viable alter-

native to the automobile. There simply are not enough
origins and destinations between which enough people want to
travel to justify rail. Even large buses are marginal as
substitutes for the auto. One possible substitute might be
jitney services that provide door-to-door transportation for
no more than 10 or 12 people at one time. But many cities
forbid the private provision of such services, and most
public transit agencies are more interested in rail and
other large projects than in jitney service.

Density and Driving

New Urbanists attempt to counter decentralization both
by providing more transit and by increasing population
densities to make high-capacity transit more viable. But
that is self-defeating because most people in high-density
developments will still use cars for most of their travel.
Thus, high-density developments without added road capacity
simply lead to increased congestion.

All of the numbers support this view. According to

Census Bureau data, there is no clear relationship between a
city's density and the share of trips in that city that is
made by auto.40 The New York metropolitan area, which
includes northeastern New Jersey, has the smallest percent-
age of commuters driving automobiles--65 percent--and the
highest percentage using transit--26 percent. But no other
large metropolitan area has less than 81 percent auto usage
or more than 14 percent transit usage. Two college towns,
Iowa City, Iowa, and State College, Pennsylvania, have
slightly less than 80 percent auto usage but less than 8
Page 22

percent transit usage. The difference is due to students'

walking and cycling.41

Even if another city could match New York's level of

transit usage by increasing its population density, the
density increase required would swamp the reduction in the
auto's share of trips. The density of the average U.S.
metropolitan area is a little more than half that of New
York, and 88 percent of urban workers commute by car. Dou-
bling densities to reduce auto usage from 88 to 65 percent--
a 26 percent decrease--translates into a 50 percent increase
in auto traffic within the target area.

New York is an anomaly. Figure 1 compares the share of

commuters using autos with the population densities of the
nation's 282 largest urban areas. Autos hold more than 75
percent of the market in every area except New York and more
than 90 percent in the vast majority of areas, including Los
Angeles and Miami, the two densest areas. There is no clear
correlation between density and auto usage.

Figure 1
Population Density and Share of Commuter Trips Made by Auto in 1990

Source: Bureau of the Census, Database C90STF3A at http://venus.census.gov/cdrom/look

up/875134983 and 875128475.
 Page 23

Figure 2
Population Density and VMT in 1995

Source: Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 1995 (Washington: FHwA,

1996), Table HM-71.

For comparison, in Figure 2 shows that the correlation

between population density and vehicle-miles traveled (VMT)
per square mile is strong. New Urbanists would predict that
VMT would tend to decline in the 391 most densely populated
areas in the United States, but the data indicate otherwise.
Here, a clear correlation is evident: higher densities lead
to more auto travel. Unless those higher densities are
accompanied by higher road capacities, higher densities also
lead to more congestion.

Even the most optimistic New Urbanists say that in-

creased density reduces only the share of trips using autos,
not the total number of miles driven. One study predicts
that doubling density will reduce the auto's share of trips
by 20 to 30 percent.42 But if density doubles from, say,
2,000 people to 4,000 people per square mile and the auto's
share of trips declines by 30 percent, there will still be
1,400 trips generated for every 1,000 trips before the
density increase.
Page 24

Planners in Portland use a transportation forecast

model that the U.S. Department of Transportation regards as
one of the most sophisticated in the nation. In 1994 plan-
ners applied the model to a plan for increasing Portland's
density by 75 percent, emphasizing mixed-use and transit-
oriented developments, and building 120 miles of rail lines
but minimal new highway capacity. The model concluded that
the plan would induce less than 5 percent of auto drivers to
shift to mass transit. That in turn would increase conges-
tion more than threefold.43

In 1980 San Diego imposed a New Urbanist plan on its

region, encouraging density in the city and discouraging
development outside. The plan "was considered a model for
effective management of growth." But by 1990 congestion had
become severe, and the city "estimated that it would cost
over $1 billion to make up the infrastructure shortfall."44

The Issue of Air

Air pollution is obviously the result of many factors,
including geography, industry, energy sources, and climate.
But in major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas, smog prob-
lems are strongly correlated with population density.45

Table 2 shows the average 1990 population densities of

areas by EPA smog rating. The table shows both the 391
metropolitan areas defined by the Census Bureau and the 76
central cities with more than 200,000 people. In every
case, cleaner air correlates with lower densities.

It is worth examining the cities that come closest to

meeting the New Urbanists' ideal of higher densities; low
per capita freeway mileage; mixed-use developments; and huge
transit, especially rail transit, investments. The major
metropolitan areas with the highest densities are Los Angel-
es, Miami, San Jose, New York, Ft. Lauderdale, New Orleans,
and San Diego. Those cites also tend to be characterized by
mixed-use developments, and all have or are installing major
rail systems. Except San Jose, which has "moderate" prob-
lems, all of those high-density cities are rated by the EPA
as having "extreme" or "serious" smog problems.

People are often surprised to learn that the Los Angel-

es metropolitan area has the greatest population density of
any U.S. urban area.46 Los Angeles also has the fewest
miles of freeways per capita--slightly more than 50 miles
per million people, compared to an average of 110 miles for
 Page 25

Table 2
Average Population Densities by EPA Smog Rating
___________________________________________

Average
Smog Density Sample
Rating (mi2) Size
___________________________________________

Metropolitan Areas

Extreme 3,362 26
Serious 2,378 49
Moderate 2,077 56
Marginal 1,744 26
None 1,505 234

Central Cities

Extreme 8,771 13
Serious 4,148 9
Moderate 3,089 23
Marginal 2,968 10
None 1,403 21
___________________________________________

Source: Density from Census Bureau, 1990

Census of Population and Housing (Washington:
Census Bureau, 1992); smog ratings from EPA
Office of Air Quality and Standards.

all metropolitan areas.47 Thus, Los Angeles should be a

perfect advertisement for New Urbanism. In fact, New Urban-
ist planners in Portland say that Los Angeles "represents an
investment pattern we desire to replicate."48 Yet Los
Angeles has the nation's worst air pollution problems.

New Urbanists also say that a mixture of land uses will

lead to a reduction of dependence on the automobile. But a
1994 study by Cambridge Systematics for the U.S. Department
of Transportation found that "land use mix does not impact
drive alone mode share to a degree that is statistically
significant."49 On the other hand, "financial incentives
[programs that reward people for carpooling or using tran-
sit] do have a significant impact on drive alone mode
share."50
Page 26

Rejecting Rail
An excellent example of a report that ignores its own
conclusions is Clean Air through Transportation, jointly
published by the Department of Transportation and the EPA.51
Using data from San Diego and Los Angeles, the report
indicates that huge investments in both rail and bus transit
systems are likely to reduce CO pollution by less than 1
percent and HC by only 1 to 3 percent (see Table 3). By
comparison, relatively cheap investments in signaling to
improve the flow of auto traffic can reduce pollution three
to six times as much.52

Although the report rejects huge investments in rail,

it strongly endorses land-use policies aimed at reducing
trip distances. The report indicates that a 10 percent
reduction in home-to-work distances may reduce pollution by
1.4 to 2 percent, and a 25 percent reduction in home-to-work
distances may reduce pollution by 4 to 12 percent. But the
report fails to assess the costs of reducing home-to-work
distances by 10 to 25 percent. In fact, it would be almost
impossible to achieve such reductions through land-use
policies.

Portland is proposing major expenditures and huge

impositions on its residents, including

· increasing overall population density by 70 percent;

· tripling or quadrupling congestion;

· charging for parking throughout the urban area;

· requiring all work and retail developments and many

residential developments to meet pedestrian-friendly
and transit-oriented design standards; and

· constructing 90 more miles of rail transit at a cost

of roughly $6 billion to $10 billion.

The transportation model used by Portland planners

projects that all of those things will reduce trip lengths
by less than 5 percent.53 That would correspond to roughly
a 0.7 to 1.0 percent reduction in air pollution--about a
third of what might be obtained with traffic signaling
improvements. So the endorsement of New Urbanist land-use
planning goals by the authors of Clean Air through Transpor-
tation makes no sense except as an ideological stance.
 Page 27

Table 3
Selected Strategies for Reducing Auto Emissions
__________________________________________________________________________________

Reduction (%)
__________________

Strategy Description HC CO
__________________________________________________________________________________

San Diego

Transit expansion 20-mile rail extension, double bus service 0.4 0.6
Ridesharing Increase vehicle occupancy 25% 0.4 0.7
Flexible work 15% participation in telecommuting,
schedules & 5% shift in work hours 0.8 1.1
telecommuting
Land-use impacts 10% reduction in overall home-work distance 1.4 2.0
Traffic flow Regionwide signal control
improvements 2.2 2.5
Parking management 60% increase in costs 2.4 4.1
Los Angeles
Transit expansion Add 300 miles to rail system, expand bus
service by 50% 0.9 3.1
Traffic flow Signal control, truck restrictions
improvements 2.1 4.9
Flexible work Eliminate 3 million worktrips,
schedules & 60% participation in flexible schedules 2.2 6.9
telecommuting
Land-use impacts 25% reduction in overall home-work distance 4.1 11.8
_________________________________________________________________________________

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air
through Transportation: Challenges in Meeting National Air Quality Standards (Washington: U.S.
Department of Transportation, 1994), p. 125.

Despite the apparent disconnect between the New Urban-

ists' claims and reality, their ideology has become the
dominant paradigm in the U.S. Department of Transportation
and in many state and metropolitan planning agencies. Ulti-
mately, for New Urbanists, the goal is not to reduce conges-
tion and pollution but to reduce auto travel, even if only
Page 28

slightly, and to punish with increased congestion those

people who continue to drive.

The False Panacea of Urban Rail

Electric-powered rail transit is a 19th-century tech-
nology that was quickly replaced by the automobile, which is
faster, more convenient, and not tied to an expensive rail
right-of-way. Yet rail technology is a critical component
of New Urbanism.

In addition to the fact that rails are a solution to a

problem that would not exist if New Urbanists did not insist
on density, the main difficulty with rails is that they do
not work. Compared with the auto, which "goes where you
want to go when you want to go, trains just don't cut it,"
says Garreau. "Trains require you to go where someone else
wants you to go when someone else wants you to go."54

So why are proposed rail systems so popular? As Ken-

neth Dueker of Portland State University's Center for Urban
Studies notes, rail is a "feel-good" issue: people support
it because they hope it will reduce congestion even though
they do not plan to ride it themselves.55

Another reason for strong support of rail is the "ro-

mance of the rails." Jonathan Richmond, investigating the
myths behind rail transit, found that people "tend to reject
findings [about rail] which fail to confirm prior be-
liefs."56

ISTEA gives cities huge incentives to build enormously

expensive rail transit projects that will carry very few
people. Central city officials and downtown interests want
to keep current jobs and residents in and attract new ones
to the city centers rather than the suburbs. They see new
rail construction as an environmentally correct means to
that end. Just as important is the fact that under ISTEA
the federal government pays at least half of the bill for
rail, so the high cost of new rail construction is viewed as
a virtue. Although an expanded decentralized bus system
could carry far more people at far lower cost, buses do not
create local, though temporary, jobs that boost union and
construction-company support for politicians.

Examination of the actual results from rail lines that

have been built in the past two decades shows that nearly
all fail to meet the goals set for and provide the benefits
expected from them.
 Page 29

Rail's Track Record

Rail construction takes so long that few of the rail
lines authorized by the 1991 ISTEA have been completed, and
those that have been completed are too new to judge. Howev-
er, more than a dozen cities have built new rail lines in
the past two decades, and those lines provide a good measure
of rail's success in moving people efficiently and in reduc-
ing congestion and pollution.

Light rail was originally proposed as an inexpensive

alternative to highways. In 1973 the state of Oregon esti-
mated that Portland light-rail service could begin on 46
route-miles for less than $84 million, or about $2 million
per mile.57 Costs quickly escalated after federal funds
became available and cities committed themselves to rail.
Portland's first 15-mile light-rail line, originally pro-
jected to cost $135 million when construction began in 1979,
ended up costing $214 million, or $14 million per mile; a
17-mile line now under construction is costing $963 million,
or $56 million per mile. A proposed 29-mile line was origi-
nally estimated to cost $2.85 billion, or nearly $100 mil-
lion per mile.

Weekday ridership, which was projected to reach 42,500

after 5 years and 57,000 after 10 years, has stubbornly
remained less than half of projections, around 25,000 riders
per day. Moreover, most of the riders were formerly bus
riders, and at least a third of all riders drive to park-
and-ride stations, which means that they produce almost as
much cold-start pollution as they would if they drove all
the way to work.

Portland transit ridership actually declined between

1980, when light-rail construction began, and 1990, four
years after its completion. Since Portland was rapidly
growing during those years, that means that transit lost a
significant share of both the total transportation and the
commuter market to the automobile. That is particularly
disappointing because Portland's transit system increased
its share of the commuter market during the 1970s, when it
was exclusively a bus system.

Portland's experience is the rule rather than the

exception. Of all the rail systems built in the past two
decades, only two--in Washington, D.C., and San Diego--were
accompanied by significant increases in overall transit
ridership.
Page 30

The Washington, D.C., Metro boosted transit ridership

by 67 percent. But at the same time, transit's overall
share of Washington-area commuter traffic declined slightly.
In 1990 more than four of five commuters still relied on
the automobile and fewer than 14 percent used transit.58
Washington's Regional Air Quality Plan estimates that the
rail system has reduced air pollution by only about 1
percent.59

San Diego's light-rail line helped to boost transit

ridership by 40 percent.60 But in 1980 San Diego also
adopted a New Urban plan that promoted denser inner-city
development and discouraged suburban development. The
overall gain in transit ridership may be due as much to
densification as to light rail. But the gain did not come
without a huge cost: over the same period, San Diego's
traffic congestion grew faster than did that of any other
American city, and the city now estimates that it will need
to spend $1 billion on infrastructure to restore urban
services to their 1980 levels.61

Except for those in Washington and San Diego, no recent

urban rail lines in the United States could be considered
successful on any basis. As a 1989 report by Department of
Transportation researcher Don Pickrell found, nearly all
recent rail projects cost far more and carried far fewer
riders than originally projected.62

Pickrell also found that operating costs and amortized

capital costs per rider were far higher for rail than for
bus transit. By his calculations, the total cost per rider
(in 1988 dollars) was about $6 to $16.63 That was not only
two to nine times greater than the forecast cost, it was
several times greater than the cost per bus rider, which
typically averages $2 to $4. Moreover, since most rail
riders were previously bus riders, Pickrell found that the
cost per new rider--that is, the cost of getting a drive-
alone person out of a car--ranged from $9 to $36.64

"The systematic tendency to over-estimate ridership and

to under-estimate capital and operating costs," concluded
Pickrell, "introduces a distinct bias toward the selection
of capital-intensive transit improvements such as rail
lines." That bias would benefit cities whose goal is to get
as large a share of federal funding as possible.

Advocates of rail claim that Pickrell's study was done

too soon after the lines in the cities studied were opened
and therefore did not accurately show ridership. But in
1995 Robert Dunphy of the Urban Land Institute updated
 Page 31

Pickrell's report and reached similar conclusions.65

Dunphy found that the rail systems Pickrell had studied

did not have "dramatic ridership growth to change the early
assessment." Dunphy also looked at several newer systems,
all but one of which was "following the pattern . . . of
overestimating ridership and underestimating costs."66

Four of seven cities that built light-rail lines during

the 1980s actually suffered significant losses in transit
commuting between 1980 and 1990. Transit commuting fell by
9 percent in Baltimore, by 17 percent in Denver, by 20
percent in Portland, and by 25 percent in Buffalo. Transit
commuting grew in three cities. It increased by 2 percent
in Sacramento, by 18 percent in Los Angeles, and by 43
percent in San Diego.

All of the light-rail lines opened since 1987, after

the Pickrell report, "were in cities with a net loss in
transit commuting during the 1980s," says Dunphy. Those
lines included the ones in San Jose and St. Louis and new
lines in Baltimore and Denver. All of those lines, except
the one in St. Louis, followed the pattern of costing more
and carrying fewer riders than anticipated.

Dunphy reports that the St. Louis line was "a surprise"
because its ridership actually exceeded expectations and
construction costs were within budget. But rail ridership
still accounts for only a small fraction of total trips in
that city.

The pattern of rail construction and overall declines

in transit ridership is so common that it must be more than
a coincidence. Transit agencies that sink most of their
capital funds into rail lines that will replace, at most,
two or three bus lines find that they do not have the funds
to maintain and improve bus service on other routes. As a
result, overall patronage falls.

In most cities much of the impact is borne by the poor

as bus service is curtailed in lower class neighborhoods in
order to pay for rail transit. In Los Angeles lower income
transit riders recently formed a bus riders' union that,
with the help of civil rights groups, sued the transit
agency for neglecting buses while it builds expensive rail
lines. The union charged that the transit agency had spent
70 percent of its budget on rails that carry only 8 percent
of its riders, most of whom are white and well-to-do while
bus riders tend to be minorities and poor.67 The agency
signed a consent decree agreeing to buy more buses but now
Page 32

says it has no funds with which to do so.68

Dunphy concluded that cities now contemplating light

rail "are not well served by unduly positive reviews" given
by rail proponents. "Light rail is expensive," he noted,
adding that it "will not reduce traffic congestion." But he
optimistically (or perhaps cynically) points out that "con-
gestion relief should be one of the best sales tools, since
few residents will use transit but all would gain benefits
from less congestion."69

The Problems of Alternatives

ISTEA requires regional planning. And as a prerequi-
site to securing federal funds, local planners must file
environmental impact statements (EISs). A review of dozens
of those statements reveals many omissions by planners and
shows that, even by their own standards, rail is not a good
transportation bargain.

Nearly all rail EISs consider an identical range of

alternatives:

· A "no-build" alternative that contemplates no change

from current transit operations;

· A "transportation systems management" alternative

that contemplates low-cost improvements in bus service
and actions that might promote carpooling, cycling,
walking, or other alternatives to single-occupancy
vehicles; this is generally the baseline alternative
with which other alternatives are compared;

· One or more alternatives for building exclusive

busways or high-occupancy vehicle lanes; and

· One or more alternatives for building rail lines.

The most recent EISs usually come out in three ver-

sions:

· A draft EIS that considers a variety of rail routes,

· A draft supplemental EIS that narrows the routes to

just one option, and

· A final EIS that usually contains little or no new

information other than public comments.
 Page 33

Rail, particularly light rail, is promoted as an inex-

pensive alternative to expanding highway capacity. Backers
of light rail often claim that a dual-track light-rail line
can carry as many people as a six-lane freeway. But rail
EISs almost never compare actual costs and ridership of rail
with the cost and capacity of highway expansion.

A six-lane freeway, with interchanges and bridge work,

will typically cost about $30 million per mile to build.
Adding lanes to an existing freeway typically costs about $5
million per lane-mile. At a cost of $1 million to $2 mil-
lion or less per mile, light-rail, in the first proposals
made during the 1970s, sounded relatively inexpensive.

The problem is that light rail has proven to be far

more expensive than originally thought. According to the
two dozen EISs this author reviewed, the cost of light rail
would range from $10 million to more than $100 million per
mile.

Only one of the EISs reviewed compared transit with

highway expansion: the I-15/State Street Corridor plan for
Salt Lake City. In addition to two light-rail alternatives,
that plan considered adding two, three (one reversible), or
four lanes to Interstate 15, the north-south freeway through
Salt Lake City. The EIS measured reductions in congestion
by the number of person-hours of time each alternative would
save.

The light-rail alternatives were projected to have

capital costs of about $125 million more than transportation
system management and to save about 5,176 person-hours of
time each day, for a capital cost of nearly $24,000 per
daily hour saved. By comparison, adding two lanes to the
freeway would cost about $166 million but would save more
than 30,260 hours of time, at a cost of less than $5,500 per
daily hour saved. Each hour saved by light rail would cost
more than four times as much as an hour saved by highway
expansion.

Ignoring Important Data

In addition to ignoring obvious alternatives to rail,
many of the EISs failed to present data that should be
critical to a decision. Most presented basic financial data
such as capital and operating costs and the number of new
transit riders the line would generate. Many left out
important data such as
Page 34

· how much traffic currently travels the routes the

rail line would parallel,

· how much of that traffic the rail line would relieve,

and

· how many miles of rail line would be built.

Since nearly all EISs claimed that new rail lines were
needed to relieve congestion, it seems strange that a major-
ity did not actually calculate how much congestion relief
the lines would provide. One explanation is that such
calculations do little to support the decision to build
rail. The EISs that did make such calculations almost
invariably found that congestion relief would be insignifi-
cant.

Biased Cost-Effectiveness Index

An important part of the rail planning process designed
by the Department of Transportation is the calculation of a
"cost-effectiveness index" for each alternative. That index
purports to estimate the cost of each new transit rider
attracted by rail or other alternatives. Since most new
riders would presumably otherwise travel by car, the cost-
effectiveness index measures the cost of reducing congestion
and pollution.

To calculate the cost-effectiveness index, the capital

and operating costs of the transportation system management
alternative are subtracted from those of the rail or other
construction alternatives. The capital costs are annualized
using a discount rate such as 7 percent or 10 percent. If
the rail alternative saves transit riders time over the
baseline alternative, that is counted as a benefit by sub-
tracting it from costs. The total cost is then divided by
the projected number of new riders.70

As a rule of thumb, the Department of Transportation

will provide discretionary funds only for projects that cost
less than $6 per new rider. None of the EISs reviewed
calculated a cost-effectiveness index much less than $10 (to
be precise, $9.97 was the lowest).

A major problem with this index is the value of time

savings for transit riders. For the past several years
Department of Transportation guidelines have directed plan-
ners to assume that transit riders' time is worth $11.70 per
hour. The previous value was set in 1984 at only $2 to $4
 Page 35

per hour. By arbitrarily inflating the value of the transit

rider's time, the government makes the build alternatives
look much more attractive than they really are.

The real problem is that the index considers only the

time of transit riders; the time of automobile users is
effectively presumed to be zero. Yet auto users' time is
affected by rail proposals in at least two ways.

First, rails are often at the same grade as roads, so

autos are delayed when trains cross their paths. Many
cities are even adjusting traffic signals to give rail lines
priority over cars. The one EIS to calculate this cost,
that for Denver's Southwest Corridor, estimated that rail
would save each transit rider 19 minutes but cost each auto
driver 1 minute. Since the plan projected more than 40 auto
users in the corridor for each transit rider, auto users
lost more than 2 minutes for every minute saved by transit
riders.

Second, auto users are affected by rail because any

city has limited funds for transportation capital improve-
ments. A plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on
rail means less money is available for highway improvements.
As found by the I-15 Corridor study for Salt Lake City,
highway improvements can sometimes save people time at less
than a quarter of the cost of rail.

Conflict between Conclusions and Decisions

Despite failure to consider a wide range of alterna-
tives, calculate appropriate effects on congestion, or use a
reasonable index of cost-effectiveness, most of the EISs
reviewed concluded that rail construction would have insig-
nificant effects on congestion and pollution. Nevertheless,
every EIS that designated a preferred alternative recommend-
ed rail construction.

It is claimed that rail lines can carry as many people

as a six-lane freeway, yet none of the EISs reviewed pro-
jected ridership that came close to approaching freeway
usage levels. While a six-lane freeway can easily carry
100,000 cars per day and, at 1.2 people per car, 120,000
people, the EISs reviewed projected rail ridership levels
closer to 30,000 to 40,000 people per day. None of the
American light-rail lines built in the past two decades
carried more than 44,000 people per day in 1995.71

The EISs also estimated that the vast majority of

Page 36

light-rail riders would be former bus riders and that rail

construction would attract no more than 2,000 to 10,500 new
transit trips per day over and above low-cost bus alterna-
tives. Since an urban area of 1 million people typically
generates about 5 million trips per day, combining auto,
transit, and cycling and walking, even 10,500 new transit
riders per day have no significant effect on congestion.

Another measure of rail's effect on congestion is the

share of total trips carried by transit. About half the
EISs studied estimated this share. None estimated that
light rail would increase transit's share of traffic by more
than 0.4 percent; most estimates were under 0.3 percent.
Yet light-rail construction would often consume more than
half of a city's total capital funds for transportation.

Many of the EISs explicitly concluded that rail would

not greatly reduce congestion. For example:

· "Impact of proposed alternatives on congestion: None"

(Twin Cities Central Corridor).

· "Auto travel times will deteriorate significantly

over today's levels by the year 2015 regardless of
whether the no-build or LRT alternative is implemented"
(Denver Southwest Corridor).

· Light rail "does not significantly mitigate conges-

tion on Mississippi River crossings" (East St. Louis
St. Clair County Corridor).

· "On a daily basis the reduction or difference in VMT

between the alternatives is not considered significant"
(Santa Clara County Tasman Corridor).

· "Because travel time savings are minor, mode choice

for downtown work trips [is] relatively insensitive to
transportation improvements in the mid-coast corridor"
(San Diego Mid-Coast Corridor).

· "The traffic analysis did not reveal any substantial

difference in levels of service [congestion] between
the No Build, TSM, and Build Alternatives" (San Diego
East Urban Corridor).

Some of the EISs claimed that reductions in congestion

would be significant even when the data did not support
those claims. The preferred alternative for the South
Sacramento Corridor "is expected to induce a shift from auto
to transit. . . . Major shifts are predicted for corridor
 Page 37

freeways." But a "major shift" turns out to be 2,600 cars

out of 360,000, or a reduction of about 1.2 percent. Rail
in Dallas's North Central Corridor "would reduce regional
vehicle-miles traveled by 96,560 miles daily." But since
Dallas residents drive well over 20 million vehicles-miles
per day, that is a reduction of less than 0.5 percent.

No matter what was claimed in prose, no EIS presented

any data suggesting that rail construction would signifi-
cantly reduce congestion, VMT, auto usage, or pollution or
significantly increase transit ridership or transit's market
share over levels projected for the low-cost transportation
system management alternatives. That did not stop planning
agencies from always proposing to use federal funds to build
rail.

One reason for those proposals is that rail is an

important part of New Urban planning. John Fregonese of
Portland's Metro expresses that view. Light rail "is not
worth the cost if you're just looking at transit," he ad-
mits. "It's a way to develop your community at higher
densities."72

The False Panacea of Planning

A major innovation of ISTEA is a requirement that
states and urban areas produce state and regional transpor-
tation plans. ISTEA ties those plans and federal transpor-
tation funding to federal air quality standards. Cities
that violate those standards, for example, are required to
spend federal dollars mainly or exclusively on activities
that supposedly will reduce air pollution.
The prime lesson of the 20th century is that government
planning does not work. Compared with economic freedom as
expressed in the market, planning has three strikes against
it. Planners simply cannot get enough data about current
problems, future needs, and public preferences to write an
efficient and sensible plan. Even if planners could deter-
mine the public interest, giving government the power to
plan creates opportunities for special interests to tilt the
planning process in their favor. And even if special inter-
ests can be overcome, the constraints that planners place on
personal freedom inevitably result in unintended conse-
quences that are often the exact opposite of the planned
goal.

Traditional state transportation (mainly highway)

planning minimized those problems by minimizing planning's
Page 38

scope and time horizon. Historically, road planners simply

responded to people's movements, adding capacity wherever
there was congestion. Except when captured by downtown
interests, state road planners made few attempts to direct
 Page 39

people's movements to places where people did not want

to go.

Highway planning was not perfect, of course. One

problem was pricing: funding roads out of gasoline taxes
created excess demand for the most expensive roads and
failed to regulate peak-hour demand. Another problem was
conflicts of interest: a major freeway interchange could
greatly alter local land values, and few people were sur-
prised when developers with representatives on state highway
boards often turned out to own land where such interchanges
were to be located.

In the 1970s urban planners and environmentalists

raised a new criticism, charging that highway planners
failed to assess the connection between transportation and
land use. Highways, said the urban planners, were destruc-
tive of urban and rural environments, promoting sprawl,
congestion, and pollution. The solution was a longer term
planning process that accounted for more variables, such as
pollution, land use, and alternatives to the automobile.

Such a planning process was built into ISTEA. But the

increased complexity of ISTEA planning only created more
opportunities for fads and special-interest groups to domi-
nate the process. The fad currently endorsed by the U.S.
Department of Transportation is New Urbanism.

Transit and Urban Form, a report sponsored and distrib-

uted by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal
Transit Administration, focuses on the connections between
transportation and land use. The report endorses most New
Urban concepts, including higher population densities or
"compact cities," mixing commercial and residential uses,
and creating pedestrian-friendly environments.73

As previously noted, New Urbanism provides significant

benefits for several major interest groups: central city
officials, downtown businesses, urban planners, urban envi-
ronmentalists, and construction and engineering firms. But
it is detrimental to the interests of most urban residents
because it leads to significant increases in congestion.

As is typical of New Urbanism, Transit and Urban Form

downplays the increases in congestion by focusing not on
congestion but on market share for transit and VMT per
capita. "A doubling of residential densities," says Transit
and Urban Form, "correlates with a decrease of 20 percent to
30 percent in VMT per capita."74 But that optimistic as-
sumption implies a 40 to 60 percent increase in miles driven
Page 40

per square mile. Congestion will significantly increase if

the doubling of density is not accompanied by a 40 to 60
percent increase in road capacity.

Elsewhere, Transit and Urban Form says that a "doubling

of residential density more than doubles transit use." But
except in New York City, transit has no more than a 14
percent market share of commuter traffic (and a smaller
share of all traffic) in any U.S. metropolitan area. Even
with a doubling of transit use, doubling densities still
leads to significant increases in VMT per square mile and--
unless accompanied by new highway capacity--increases in
congestion. Transit and Urban Form is not an isolated exam-
ple; other DOT reports also support New Urbanism.75

Many of the planning techniques required by ISTEA or

endorsed by the Department of Transportation help a variety
of special-interest groups to dominate the planning process.
Those techniques include the legal requirement that planning
be done by a metropolitan planning organization (MPO),
"visioning" advisory committees, focus groups, unscientific
public opinion surveys, and various forms of grassroots
lobbying.

The MPO requirement has an important unintended conse-

quence. The central cities tend to dominate the MPOs even
though they have only a plurality of residents in a metro-
politan area. That gives the central cities an opportunity
to gain control over the suburbs--an opportunity previously
denied them by the suburbs' resistance to annexation, city-
county consolidations, and other efforts by the central
cities. Since the central cities are generally denser than
the suburbs, they readily embrace New Urbanist density
goals.

"Visioning," as defined by the Department of Transpor-

tation, "results in a long-range plan with a 20- or 30-year
horizon."76 Visioning, however, is inherently unrealistic
because no one can know future needs. Who would have known,
20 or 30 years ago, of personal computers, the Internet, and
telecommuting? Many people "visioning" the future during
the energy shocks of the 1970s would have assumed that auto
usage would decline and transit usage would increase. Yet
the opposite has happened. In practice, visioning has
merely become a way for idealists to impose their views on a
city rather than deal with the city's actual needs.

Nominally, citizen advisory committees include repre-

sentatives of a broad cross section of the public. In fact,
they tend to be dominated by special-interest groups--often
 Page 41

with the complicity of the planning agency. For example,

about 5 percent of U.S. urban transportation is by walking
or bicycling, and planning agencies usually go out of their
way to ensure that cyclists and pedestrians are represented
on advisory committees. Some 85 to 90 percent of urban
transport is by auto, yet advisory committees rarely have
members explicitly representing drivers. And advisory
committees do not have anyone explicitly representing the
taxpayers who will have to foot the bill.

The Department of Transportation describes focus groups

as "a way to identify customer concerns, needs, wants, and
expectations."77 But focus groups are really a sales tech-
nique, a way of finding out how to convince the public to
support planners' preconceived notions. Through focus
groups, for example, planners may learn to use terms such as
"livability" when they mean "density" and "balanced trans-
portation" when they mean "increased congestion."

Scientific public opinion surveys can give useful

results if the questions are objectively worded. But too
many planning surveys are unscientific, with leading ques-
tions and a self-selecting sample. While noting that "in-
formal" surveys "tend to bring responses from . . . those
who are more personally interested in specific transporta-
tion issues," the Department of Transportation effectively
endorses such surveys by saying that they can "reach a
broader group than those who attend public meetings."78

Grassroots lobbying, through which planners explicitly

encourage people who support their views to participate in
planning, is implicit in many of the planning techniques and
has been endorsed by the Department of Transportation. The
department calls the Minneapolis-St. Paul region's public
involvement program "exemplary" but chides planners for
failing "to build grassroots support for the multimodal
transportation philosophy."79 On the other hand, the de-
partment commends Seattle's planning agency for forming
"active partnerships with community and special interest
groups, including advocates for bicycle facilities."80

ISTEA's public involvement requirement is supposed to

bring transportation decisions out of the "back room" and
into the open where, supposedly, they will more accurately
reflect the public interest. But if "back-room" decisions
were most responsive to highway contractors and developers,
the ISTEA planning process has often been captured by a
combination of central city officials, New Urbanists, rail
contractors, and cyclists and pedestrians, none of whom have
an interest in seeing reduced highway congestion. As a
Page 42

result, the transportation mode of choice for 85 to 90

percent of trips in U.S. urban areas is seriously slighted
by many MPOs.

The Case of Portland

A good example of all of the use of those techniques is
provided by Metro, the MPO for Portland, Oregon. Dominated
by New Urbanists, Metro has as its goal making the suburbs
as dense and congested as Portland itself. "Suburbs are
passé," says Michael Burton, Metro's director.81 One of the
major proponents of Metro's planning process is City
Commissioner Charles Hales, who refers to the suburbs as
"trash . . . godawful subdivisions."82 Hales's complaint is
that many of Portland's suburbs are low density which, in
his opinion, wastes land.

Metro has formed numerous advisory committees, all

dominated by New Urbanist supporters, most of whom live in
the central city rather than the suburbs. Metro has used
both focus groups and unscientific public opinion surveys
and is proud of the fact that most of the 17,000 comments it
received on its land-use plan supported density and less
reliance on autos. But Metro never mentions that scientific
polls it commissioned found that a majority of Portlanders
who have an opinion oppose density. Metro's pollster spe-
cifically warned that the people responding to Metro's
public involvement processes "hold views that are not neces-
sarily reflective of the community as a whole."83

Metro and the city of Portland both engage in various

forms of grassroots lobbying. For example:

· For several years, Portland has sponsored an "annual

rail summit" at which advocates of light rail gather to
organize, learn about lobbying techniques, and rally in
support of their favorite pork. Such "transportation
fairs" are another technique endorsed by the Department
of Transportation.84

· Documents Metro distributes to the public claim that

higher densities and light rail will relieve conges-
tion, reduce people's dependence on cars, and keep
Portland from becoming "like Los Angeles."85 Yet tech-
nical documents prepared by Metro planners show that
density increases congestion; light rail has no effect
on congestion; and Los Angeles, with the highest urban
density in the United States, represents "an investment
pattern we [Metro] desire to replicate."86
 Page 43

· Metro's "community outreach" plan for its light-rail

planning specifies that it will "identify citizens,
business and community leaders willing to speak and
make presentations."87 Metro has indeed identified and
arranges speaking engagements for more than 50 citizens
who favor light rail but none who oppose it.

Metro's land-use and transportation plans for Portland

will be a disaster for most of the area's residents. The
plans will more than triple road congestion, make single-
family homes almost unaffordable, and raise taxes--and those
are only the intended consequences. Unintended consequences
could include increased air pollution and crime and the
creation of a permanent underclass forced to live its lives
in rental housing because home ownership is too expensive.

Metro's Regional Transportation Plan includes a list of

570 "preferred network" projects with an estimated cost of
about $4.5 billion, and a list of 240 "financially con-
strained network" projects with an estimated cost of about
$1 billion. Planners say that funding is ensured only for
the constrained list.88

The most glaring problem is that planners made no

attempt to evaluate the effects of the various transporta-
tion projects on land use, congestion, air pollution, or
other important aspects of life. For example, the south-
north light-rail line proposed for the reauthorization of
ISTEA is projected to carry fewer than 1 percent of all
person-trips in the Portland area, at a cost of nearly $3
billion. That amount, with the funds for the constrained
list, would allow Portland to cover the costs of its pre-
ferred list, the one that presumably would be most benefi-
cial to the city.

By what standard will planners judge the success of

their projects? Portland's transportation plan says that
congestion in residential and commercial areas will "signal
positive urban development for these areas."89

Yet even with the proposed 120-mile rail system, plan-

ners predict that Portlanders will continue to drive the
vast majority of their local trips. Automobiles currently
account for 92 percent of the metropolitan area's trips, and
the plan predicts that they will account for 87.8 percent of
trips by the year 2040 (Table 4). Transit's share of trips
will increase from 2.8 percent to less than 6.4 percent, and
most of that increase will be in bus riders (the remaining
trips will be made on foot or by bicycle).90
Page 44

Table 4
Portland, Oregon, New Urban Transportation Mix
_____________________________________________________________

Mode of Travel 1990 2040 Change

_____________________________________________________________

Auto 92.05% 87.79% -4.6%

Transit 2.78% 6.38% +129.5%
Walk or bike 5.17% 5.83% +12.8%
Total trips (millions) 4.48 7.9200 +77.8%
Auto trips (millions) 4.12 6.950 +68.7%
Congested roads (miles) 150 454 +202.7%
_____________________________________________________________

Source: Metro, Region 2040 Recommended Alternative Technical Appen-

dix (Portland: Metro, 1994).

Note: The 1990 column represents the current situation; the 2040 column
represents the projected situation after implementation of Portland's
New Urban plan.

Although the plan would cause a 4.6 percent reduction

in the auto's share of trips, a 77 percent increase in the
projected number of trips means that the number of auto
trips will increase by 69 percent. Since Portland's New
Urban plan calls for just a 14 percent increase in road
capacities, planners predict that congestion will triple.
That congestion contributes to a projected 10 percent in
crease in NOx, a component of automotive exhaust that con-
tributes to smog.91
Density, mixed use, light rail, pedestrian-friendly
design, and transit-oriented developments turn out to have
little effect on modes of travel. Instead, the basis of the
prediction of fewer auto trips is probably the unrealistic
assumption that all employers and shopping centers will
begin to charge for parking.92

Despite the lack of analysis in Portland's transporta-

tion plan, several important tradeoffs are apparent. For
example, for $66 million, Tri-Met, Portland's transit agen-
cy, could start "fastlink" service on a dozen different bus
routes. Tri-Met describes fastlink as the bus equivalent of
light rail. More frequent buses would go on existing routes
but stop much less frequently, leading to faster speeds and
greater service reliability. Tri-Met's experience is that
 Page 45

express buses cost less to operate than does light rail.

Page 46

Yet Metro notes that the cost of operating the south-north

light-rail line will limit future bus expansion.

Despite all of the flaws in Portland's transportation

plan, it received a glowing endorsement from the U.S. De-
partment of Transportation.93 The department was particu-
larly enthusiastic about Portland's "promising" land-use
planning process. Reviewers did not note whether they were
aware that Portland planners projected a 300 percent in-
crease in congestion and a 10 percent increase in smog-
related pollution.

Conclusion
Many of ISTEA's supporters may have good intentions,
but the law's flaws produce consequences contrary to its
stated goal of producing a transportation system that is
economically efficient and environmentally sound to move
people and goods in an energy-efficient manner.

ISTEA creates perverse incentives. States and locali-

ties view the federal Treasury as a commons, available
primarily to those who are first in line. Rather than
promote efficiency, ISTEA's funding system places cities in
competition with one another to get federal dollars for
expensive transportation systems that rarely meet local
needs.

ISTEA in fact is based in part on the ideology of New

Urbanists who see cars as a scourge that breaks up communi-
ties and creates "sterile suburbs." They would increase
road congestion as a way to induce individuals to live in
downtowns, shop in local shops rather than large malls, and
make rail a more attractive and economically viable alterna-
tive to the car.

Light-rail systems built in recent decades, however,

have cost 10 to 100 times as much per mile as roads but have
attracted few net new riders. Meanwhile, as congestion
increases, air pollution problems will most likely get
worse. But the fact that cities may suffer federal sanc-
tions at some point in the future if they fail to clean up
their air is less important than the fact that cities with
dirty air today are eligible for additional federal funding.

States and cities managed to bridge the rivers that

divide them and join roads across their borders long before
the creation of the federal interstate highway system.
 Page 47

Transportation, especially urban transportation, is ulti-

mately a local problem, not a national one.

Ironically, past federal involvement in transportation

created many of the problems that ISTEA purports to solve,
including congested urban freeways unregulated by tolls or
congestion fees.

The only way out of the current dilemma is for the

federal government to take itself out of the transportation
planning and funding process. It is time to repeal the
federal gasoline tax and reduce the U.S. Department of
Transportation's jurisdiction to areas of strictly inter-
state concern that cannot be managed by the states alone.
That is to say, it is time to repeal ISTEA.

Notes
1. See, for example, Ed Carson, "Road Hogs: Will Congress
Cut Back the Transit Pork?" Reason, May 1997, pp. 49–51.

2. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, "The Second

Coming of the American Small Town," Wilson Quarterly 16, no.
1 (Winter 1992): 19-48.

3. James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and

Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1993).

4. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New

York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 25.

5. On urban renewal, see, for example, Jane Jacobs, The

Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage,
1963); and E. Fuller Torrey, Nowhere to Go: The Tragic
Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill (New York: Harper &
Row, 1988).

6. Peter Katz, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of

Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).

7. Garreau, Edge City, p. 239.

8. Public Law 102-240 (1991).

9. Memorandum from Mike Burton, Metro's executive director,

to the Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation on
South/North LRT Proposal, Portland, December 11, 1996.
Page 48

10. Crain & Associates, Institutional Barriers to Intermodal

Transportation: Policies and Planning in Metropolitan Areas
(Washington: Transportation Research Board, 1996), pp. 3-1
to 3-3.

11. Stephen B. Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle

between Road and Rail in the American Century (New York:
Basic Books, 1994), p. 255.

12. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 1989

(Washington: FHwA, 1990), Table HF-10.

13. Ibid.

14. See James J. MacKenzie, "The Going Rate: What It Really

Costs to Drive," World Resources Institute, Washington,
1992.

15. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 1989,

Tables FE-210 and DF.

16. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 1995

(Washington: FHwA, 1996), Table HF-10.

17. Peter Samuel, "Highway Aggravation: The Case for Privat-

izing the Highways," Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 231,
June 27, 1995.

18. Goddard, p. 257.

19. For fuel consumption, see Federal Highway Administra-

tion, Highway Statistics 1995, Table MF-21.
20. For passenger-miles, see Bureau of Transportation Sta-
tistics, National Transportation Statistics 1997 (Washing-
ton: BTS, 1997), Table 1-7.

21. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 1995,

Table LDF.

22. Ibid., Table HF-10.

23. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, National Trans-

portation Statistics 1997, Table 1-7.

24. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics,

various years, Tables FE-210 and DF.
 Page 49

25. Ibid.

26. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 1995,

Table FE-221.

27. Federal Transit Administration, "Comparison of Projected

Federal Highway Trust Fund Receipts for the Mass Transit
Account to Federal Apportionments and Allocations for Tran-
sit, FY 1992-1997," Federal Transportation Administration,
1997.

28. Ibid.

29. Transportation Appropriations Acts of 1994, 1995, 1996,

and 1997.

30. California Air Resource Board, On-Road Remote Sensing of

CO and HC Emissions in California (Sacramento: California
EPA, 1994).

31. Quoted in Mitchell Pacelle, "'Traffic Calming' Support-

ers Say Slower Pace Will Help Businesses," Wall Street
Journal, August 7, 1996, p. 1.

32. Quoted in Ibid.

33. Eric Goranson, "Developers Plan Apartment Complex Next

to Light Rail in Gresham," Oregonian, November 8, 1994.

34. J. G. Calvert et al., "Achieving Acceptable Air Quality:

Some Reflections on Controlling Vehicle Emissions," Environ-
mental Protection Agency, 1993.
35. Environmental Protection Agency, National Air Quality
and Emissions Trends Report (Washington: EPA, 1992).

36. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics,

1970–1992 (Washington: FHwA, 1994), Table VM-1.

37. California Air Resource Board.

38. See J. G. Calvert, "Achieving Acceptable Air Quality:

Some Reflections on Controlling Vehicle Emissions," Science,
July 2, 1993, pp. 37-45; and Phil Enns and David Brzezinski,
"Comparison of Start Emissions in the LA92 and ST01 Test
Cycle," Report M6.STE.001, Environmental Protection Agency,
Assessment and Modeling Division, May 30, 1997.
Page 50

39. Ibid.

40. 1990 Census of Population and Housing (Washington:

Bureau of the Census, 1992).

41. Ibid.

42. G. Harvey, Relation of Residential Density to VMT per

Resident: Oakland (Oakland, Calif.: Metropolitan Planning
Commission, 1990).

43. Metro, Region 2040 Recommended Alternative Technical

Appendix (Portland: Metro, 1994).
44. Nico Calavita, "Vale of Tiers: San Diego's Much-Lauded
Growth Management System May Not Be As Good As It Looks,"
Planning, March 1997, pp. 18-21.

45. In this discussion, "cities" refers to incorporated

urban areas and "metropolitan areas" refers to the urbanized
areas in and around the incorporated cities, including
adjacent and nearby cities. Census Bureau definitions are
used in all cases.

46. Measured by Census Bureau definitions of "urbanized

areas." The Miami metropolitan area has a slightly higher
density than the Los Angeles area unless it is considered
together with the contiguous Ft. Lauderdale metropolitan
area.

47. Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 1995,

Table HM-72.
48. Metro, Metro Measured (Portland: Metro, 1994), p. 7.

49. Cambridge Systematics, The Effects of Land Use and

Travel Demand Management Strategies on Commuting Behavior
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge Systematics, 1994), p. 3-7.

50. Ibid.

51. U.S Department of Transportation and Environmental

Protection Agency, Clean Air through Transportation: Chal-
lenges in Meeting National Air Quality Standards (Washing-
ton: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1994).

52. Ibid., p. 21.

 Page 51

53. Metro, Region 2040 Recommended Alternative Technical

Appendix.

54. Joel Garreau, "Metro, Creating a Livable Future: Deci-

sions for the 21st Century," in Proceedings of Metro's 1992
Regional Growth Conference (Portland: Metro, 1992).

55. Kenneth Dueker, "Portland's Love Affair with Light Rail:

Assessing the Risk Factors," Center for Urban Studies,
Portland, 1995, p. 6.

56. Jonathan Richmond, "The Mythical Conception of Rail

Transit in Los Angeles," Journal of Architecture and Plan-
ning Research, forthcoming, draft p. 9.
57. Railroad Division, Public Utilities Commission of Ore-
gon, Light Rail Transit: Portland Area Rail Corridor Study
(Salem: PUC, 1973).

58. Bureau of the Census, 1990 Census of Population and

Housing (Washington: Bureau of the Census, 1992).

59. U.S. Department of Transportation and Environmental

Protection Agency, Clean Air through Transportation, p. 26.

60. Robert Dunphy, "Review of Recent American Light Rail

Experiences," in Transportation Research Board, Seventh
National Conference on Light Rail Transit (Washington:
National Academy Press, 1995), pp. 106–7.

61. On congestion, see David Schrank, Shawn Turner, and

Timothy Lomax, Estimates of Urban Roadway Congestion--1990
(Washington: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1994),
p. 18. On restoration cost, see Calavita, p. 21.

62. Don Pickrell, Urban Rail Transit Projects: Forecast vs.

Actual Ridership and Costs (Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Depart-
ment of Transportation, 1989), pp. x–xiv.

63. Ibid., p. xi.

64. Ibid., p. xv.

65. See Dunphy.

66. Ibid.

67. Don Chen, "LA Bus Riders Union Sues MTA," STPP Progress,
Page 52

February 1995, available at http://www.transact.org/feb95/

labus.htm.

68. Consent decree in Labor/Community Strategy Center et al.

v. Los Angeles MTA, October 26, 1996, available at http://
www.ldfla.org/decree.html.

69. Dunphy, p. 113.

70. The formula is

Cost-effectiveness index = (Cap cost + Op cost -

Time savings) ÷ New riders

where

Cap cost = the annualized capital cost of the rail or

other construction alternatives (the build
alternatives) minus the cost of the transpor
tation system management alternative,
Op cost = the operating cost of the build alternatives
minus the cost of the transportation system
management alternative,
Time savings = the amount of time transit riders would save
under the build alternatives compared with
the transportation system management
alterna- tive, and
New riders = the number of transit riders under the build
alternative minus the number under the trans-
portation system management alternative.

71. John Schumann and Suzanne Tidrick, "Status of North

American Light Rail Transit Systems: 1995 Update," in Trans-
portation Research Board, Seventh National Conference on
Light Rail Transit, p. 4.
72. Quoted in J. Hall, "The Choice: High Density or Urban
Sprawl," Wisconsin State Journal, July 23, 1995.

73. Transportation Research Board, Transit and Urban Form,

vol. 1 (Washington: National Academy Press, 1996), p. 6.

74. Ibid., p. 12.

75. Snohomish County Transportation Authority, A Guide to

Land Use and Public Transportation (Washington: U.S. Depart-
ment of Transportation, 1989); U.S. Department of Transpor-
tation, Building Livable Communities through Transportation
 Page 53

(Washington: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1996); and

U.S. Department of Transportation and Environmental Protec-
tion Agency, Clean Air through Transportation.

76. U.S. Department of Transportation, Innovations in Public

Involvement for Transportation Planning (Washington: U.S.
Department of Transportation, 1994), p. B-1.

77. Ibid., p. F-1.

78. Ibid., p. J-1.

79. U.S. Department of Transportation, Review of the Trans-

portation Planning Process in the Minneapolis-St. Paul
Metropolitan Area (Cambridge, Mass.: U.S. Department of
Transportation, 1993), p. 3.

80. U.S. Department of Transportation, Enhanced Planning

Review of the Seattle Metropolitan Area (Cambridge, Mass.:
U.S. Department of Transportation, 1996), p. ix.

81. Quoted in Peter Fish, "2040: A Portland Odyssey," Sun-

set, November 1996, p. 16.

82. Quoted in Alan Ehrenhalt, "The Great Wall of Portland,"

Governing, May 1997, pp. 20–24.

83. Western Attitudes, "A Community Attitude Survey for

Metro," Lake Oswego, Oreg., 1993, p. 4.

84. U.S. Department of Transportation, Innovations in Public

Involvement for Transportation Planning, p. E-1.
85. Metro, 2040 Framework Update (Portland: Metro, 1995),
pp. 2–3.

86. Metro, Metro Measured, p. 7.

87. Metro, "South/North Study Community Outreach," Portland,

1996, p. 1.

88. Metro, Regional Transportation Plan (Portland: Metro,

July 1995), chaps. 5 and 7.

89. Metro, Regional Transportation Plan Update (Portland:

Metro, March 22, 1996), p. 1-20.

90. Metro, Region 2040 Recommended Alternative Technical

Page 54

Appendix.

91. Metro, Metro 2040 Growth Concept (Portland: Metro,

1994), Exhibit C, p. 19.

92. Memorandum from transportation planner Cindy Pederson to

John Fregonese, director of growth and management planning,
Metro, on additional preferred alternative evaluation mea-
sures, September 12, 1994.

93. William Lyons et al., Review of the Transportation

Planning Process in the Portland, Oregon, Metropolitan Area
(Washington: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1994).

Published by the Cato Institute, Policy Analysis is a

regular series evaluating government policies and offering
proposals for reform. Nothing in Policy Analysis should be
construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Cato
Institute or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of
any bill before Congress.

Contact the Cato Institute for reprint permission.Printed

copies of Policy Analysis are $6.00 each ($3.00 each for
five or more). To order, or for a complete listing of
available studies, write to: Cato Institute, 1000
Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20001.(202)842-0200
FAX (202)842-3490 E-mail [email protected]