Orphan Road

Normally, I wouldn't even waste the time responding to this piece from Michael Ennis at the right-wing Washington Policy Center, but he uses a line of spurious reasoning that, like the infamous whack-a-mole, needs to be smacked down everywhere it appears:

In Switzerland, for example, light rail is successful, not because of the amount of service or infrastructure, but because the country has certain demographic and economic characteristics that induce demand.

In other words, there is an existing market with a customer base, and Swiss policy makers responded with proportional infrastructure investments. As a result, mode share, ridership and fare box recovery are high.

Here in Washington, transit resources are distributed in just the opposite way.

Under the "build it, and they will come" theory, many policy makers think that increasing the supply of transit will somehow create more public demand. This approach is failing because Washington cities do not possess the underlying demographic or economic characteristics that create enough voluntary consumers for light rail.

Despite years of spending increases, the share of commuters using public transit in Seattle actually fell to 6.8 percent in 2000 from 7.5 percent in 1980.

Since "If you built it, they will come" is the subject of a whole series of posts here at OR, we should define what "it" really is. "It" doesn't refer to simply dropping drains into the middle of nowhere and hoping for the best. No, "it" involves a whole ethos of transit-oriented development, from land use planning to economic develoment strategies to zoning to, yes, transit.

Given a lack of transit development between 1980 and today, is it really any surprise that job centers and housing centers have spread further out? Of course not. But now that we've got the Growth Management Act in place, and the PSRC doing regional planning, we're focused on reversing that trend. And despite the protestations of dead-end highway builders like Ennis, this is going to be a good thing for the region and the planet.

PS: We've been building roads for the last 100 years, and congestion keeps getting worse. Which leads me to conclude that if we build exclusively roads for 100 more, congestion will get even worse. Why some folks don't get this baffles me.