A Conservative's Defense of Mass Transit

Fox 13 did an interesting little story about the falling ridership numbers of FrontRunner. For my Minnesota readers - FrontRunner is the local commuter rail line that runs from North of Ogden to Downtown Salt Lake City. Once downtown, a commuter can hook up with either the UTA Trax (lightrail) or the buses...but I digress. The gist of the Fox 13 story was the pros and cons of continuing to build additional lines when ridership of the North line is not what was projected. The money quote (for many) was when they quoted a local economist who said that it did not make sense to continue building rail lines at a time when the demand was not there for it. However, perhaps I can give you a couple of reasons why building now, in spite of low ridership, is preferable to waiting for 20-30 years (as the Minneapolis Metro area did) to build.

Take, for example, my old home town of Chicago. I won't go into a detailed history, but I will say that the rail corridors that Metra uses today (as well as the tracks for the "L") were built long before the city and the suburbs were where they are so that there was no need to condemn properties in order to make room for the trains. In fact - many of the suburbs around Chicago (like Wheaton and Glen Ellyn) were actually built up AROUND the Metra station! Ridership did drop in the 1960's and 1970's but it has gone back up and is back at a point (now that the Northern Illinois area has become a nightmare for drivers) where it is actually faster to commute into Chicago via train than it is to drive. Contrast that to the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. Rather than incorporate the old trolley lines (as many metro areas did when they phased out trolleys) into a newer train system (the pre-cursor to light rail) they ripped the rails up. Now that the pendulum has swung back the other way - Minneapolis is looking at spending many times more the amount to build new rail lines now as they would have spent maintaining the old ones all this time.

Which brings us back to Utah. I know it seems counter intuitive to continue to build the rail lines at this point in time (with ridership below projected levels) but the cost of the land and ripping up streets and the other costs of construction are never going to be any lower than they are today! Utah has one of the best balanced transit systems I have seen in this country (it is very reminiscent of the type of systems I have seen and used in Europe). While a transit system will never replace cars entirely, the fact that we have a system that gets the commuter from where they are to where they want to go relatively easily (as opposed to ANYTHING that has been proposed in Minneapolis) is key. Which is why stopping now would be a foolish waste of money.