Spike was a classmate of mine for many years when we were little and has always been one of my most brilliant friends. Here, he gives me an education on rail projects. I’m officially starting a “Get Spike to Blog” movement so we can get more of this. I’m also honored that a comment of this quality got posted here.

UPDATE: Spike does blog. All Spike, all the time at the Liberal Empiricist

Doing a full accounting on public transportation is very difficult.

Politically, it’s easy to see the problem. Just think it through from the beginning: if you invest 5 billion dollars in buses, you instantly have more buses on the roads, more bus drivers employed, and less traffic congestion. If you commit 5 billion dollars to rail investment you have a decade of construction, NIMBY battles, unforeseeable issues, and construction. Day to day life gets disrupted with no gain, which jeopardizes political careers.

But looking farther down the road, rail creates serious societal benefits. These include density, reduced pollution, connected communities (which leads to reduced crime, NOT a system wide dispersal of crime as those opposed to a subway to the sea in LA like to argue), reduced commute times, etc. Middle and upper-middle class people are more likely to ride rail than buses due to the social stigma associated with buses as well as the lack of reliability associated with any transportation source that has to deal with traffic.

You live in New York, Mike. How many millionaires take the train in from Greenwich (tons). How many then hop on a bus from Grand Central down to Wall Street (few). So, with rail you have a much larger swath of society as a potential market for public transportation. But how do you put a number on that benefit?

That’s critical, because any federally funded public transportation project has to show how it can be self-sustainable over a relatively short time period in order to receive federal funding. Something that is not true for highway administration. If you aren’t taking into account downstream benefits, rail projects will never pass muster while highways that face no such barriers will keep getting federal money.

The bigger issue for inclusion in the Obama stimulus plan is that he wants any plan to employ people within 24 months. It is nearly impossible to accelerate rail programs to meet this timeline with all the legal and logistical hurdles that accompany them. Not to say that lawyers and engineers won’t be employed in that time (I work for a law firm that does condemnation work for Sound Transit which manages the new light rail program in Seattle… it would be a fucking boon to us if they were to be forced to accelerate their eminent domain proceedings). But if your goal is 4 million government created jobs, increasing the amount of litigation going on in the states is not going to make a dent.

The article you link to is spot on. Further, two of those cities, Seattle and LA have plans in place and ready to go for rail. The Seattle plan was approved by voters in November… but the time line currently stretches out to 2032. If Obama really wants to invest in the future he will divert funds to these projects (Sound Transit applied for stimulus funds) and accelerate those time lines. But if he simply wants us to pull out of this recession so that private enterprise has another shot… well.. he’ll put people to work repaving highways or something. And that will be a mistake. An understandable mistake, sure, but a mistake nonetheless.

This is another example of short run costs being seen as untenable even if long term gains will be made, the ultimate hallmark of US policy for the past thirty years. There is no depreciation constant that can account for what America has done to itself since the Carter administration.

Originally posted as a comment by W.Spike.Friedman on MBB using Disqus.