A few years ago I did a
policy study on how Toronto compared to other major cities as far as rapid
transit meeting our population's needs and the level of improvement needed to bring
us up to snuff.
As a Canuck, I spend
much of my time comparing us and them (with "them" most often being
the USA); it's a pastime only surpassed by comparing how many missing teeth our
hockey team has compared to our opponents. I probably spend more time looking
at the USA than I do looking at us. In fact, I probably spend more time looking
at the USA than many Americans do.
One thing I notice
about Americans, when they look at themselves, is that many are even more
self-critical than Canucks are. They look at how badly they are doing, and how
poorly they are succeeding, when (arguably) they are doing pretty darn well at
almost everything. At least comparatively and historically.
One area for which the
USA is commonly most often self-critical is rapid transit. Critics always point
to other places (usually European cities and sometimes Toronto) as doing such a
better job of providing public transportation to their populace.
Now I have learned over
the years that often critics have one foot on the truth and one foot solidly on
their self interests. So people looking at criticism of public issues always
need to look behind the curtain. But that being said, "How well is the USA
doing in public transportation?"
This morning I ran
across a web-page that listed the 125 largest cities in the world by area and
my curiosity was aroused enough to look closer.(http://www.citymayors.com)
And I thought it might
be interesting to compare these data to my previous subway study. So I did and
what did I find?
That a comparison
relative to rapid transit for USA cities to cities in other countries,
especially in Europe, is mostly invalid
largely because of geography.
When rapid transit was
being initiated in about AD 1900, countries in the European Union had a
population of about 400 million people (on 4.2 sq Kilometers of land), while
the USA had about 76 million people (on 9.8 million sq Kilometers). There were
5 times as many Europeans as Americans on 40% of the area.
In Europe land was
precious and expensive while in the USA it was (and is) as cheap as borscht. So
Europe condensed its population while the USA spread it out.
Rapid transit, to be
viable from an infrastructure cost/benefit perspective, has to connect areas of
critical mass of population. Otherwise the cost recovery price of a transit
fare becomes unrealistic for consumers, or the system becomes a sinkhole for
tax dollars.
Now, of course, one
should probably compare the cost of building roads and their maintenance and
the cost to the environment by not providing transit and requiring travelers to
buy and operate their own rolling stock (i.e. vehicles). But I'm not being paid
to write this, so I will be lazy and leave this evaluation to others.
But the point is, in
the USA, the spreading out of the population made - and still probably makes -
sense. Which by definition probably makes a large expenditure on public rapid
transit, in the vast majority of US metropolitan areas, not viable; especially
since commuters travel wildly off in all directions in the USA.
Now there are some
exceptions. American cities with large populations and high densities actually
have fairly decent rapid transit. Residents in New York City, Chicago, DC, and
San Fran all are relatively well served. But expecting to bring this
infrastructure to all urban centres is, well, optimistic.
I encourage anyone to
do a very simple analysis; divide the capital cost of a system by the number of
rides over the course of the first ten years of operation.
Typically a billion
dollars in investment will provide ten kilometers of surface Light Rail Transit
(people cycle to work further than that every day in Toronto). Capacity of a
LRT unit is about 220 riders. Multiply that by about 24 LRT trips / day results
in 5,000 riders / day or 12.5 million over the course of a decade.
This translates to a
cost of $80 / rider just on today's capital costs and not operations or repair
and maintenance or depreciation over a decade. Then ask yourself whether people
would pay this amount to give up their Escalades. To quote a famous American,
"That dog don't hunt".
