Send to a Friend <% dim printurl printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Version

July 24, 2002, 12:50 p.m. Mass Mythology Transit myths disguised as science. By Wendell Cox

ransit's Washington lobbying group, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) has just released a report suggesting massive energy-consumption reductions from an "attainable" increase in transit use. "Conserving Energy and Preserving the Environment: The Role of Public Transit." Characteristically editorializing in its news pages, the Washington Post fawningly called Conserving Energy and Preserving the Environment: The Role of Public Transit "the first scientific analysis that compares mass transit with private vehicles in terms of the fuel they burn and the pollution they spew." (Presumably buses and trains don't "spew;" maybe they "ventilate" pollution.) If the Post had consulted the data it might have substituted the word "pseudo-scientific."

APTA underestimates the energy used by electrified urban rail systems (subways an light rail) by at least 25 percent. According to the U.S. Department of Energy Transportation Energy Data Book, rail transit uses four times as much energy as APTA claims. The difference is that APTA conveniently ignores the energy (much of it oil) required to produce electricity as well as transmission losses. For the APTA numbers to work would require a massive switch to nuclear and hydroelectric power. Perhaps a Hudson Valley Authority could build a series of dams from the George Washington Bridge to Albany. Or, there's always the Yukon.

APTA overestimates the amount of energy used by light trucks and sport-utility vehicles (SUV) by one third. APTA calculates this high-energy-consumption rate by including millions of commercial vans, vehicles excluded from the Department of Energy data. Perhaps APTA expects the drivers of commercial vans to ride transit and leave their deliveries and equipment on the street. Why did they stop there? Imagine how much energy would be saved if tractor-trailer drivers switched to transit.

Again proving that "garbage in" produces "garbage out," APTA concludes that Americans could reduce energy consumption nearly 50 percent by switching from cars and SUVs to transit. In fact, the savings is less than one-tenth the APTA estimate (in fact, autos are more fuel efficient than transit), at less than five percent. Even for an industry virtually unrivaled in getting project costs wrong, this magnitude of error is stunning.

But that is just the beginning of the problem with the APTA thesis. In a fleeting reference to truth, APTA notes that transit accounts for barely one percent of travel in the United States. APTA claims that if Americans used transit as much as Europeans, 40-percent less Persian Gulf oil would be needed. To attain Europe's 10 percent would require a 900-percent increase in transit ridership. This seems like an overwhelming challenge for an industry that, according to Census data, has just reached a 40-year record low in commuter use.

APTA's European goal is worse than fantasy; it is hallucination. People like transit. They take it where it is competitive with the automobile. But, auto-competitive transit service is available to just one location in major urban areas — downtown. High levels of frequent transit service attract 75 percent of commuters to Manhattan, 60 percent to Chicago's Loop and from one-third to one-half to downtown Brooklyn, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington (D.C.), and Seattle. It seems unlikely that transit's market share would rise to 750 percent in Manhattan or 600 percent in the Loop. But to reach the Europe's 10 percent would require that and more, because transit displaces so few auto trips elsewhere.

Outside major downtown areas, virtually no employment center has a large transit market share, because there is little or no auto-competitive service. Perhaps APTA expects drivers to abandon their cars to take transit service that doesn't go where they need to go. The usual "take transit" messages on the nation's freeway transit message boards during ozone alerts demonstrate that much of the transportation profession really doesn't understand transportation. Yes, transit makes a lot of sense for the few who live in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and the small dense cores of Los Angeles, Chicago, or San Francisco. It also works for many of the barely 10 percent of metropolitan commuters who work downtown. But for the overwhelming majority of Americans, auto-competitive transit service is as scarce as numbers that add up in APTA's energy report.

— Wendell Cox is principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy and was appointed to three terms (1977-1985) on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley.