L.A.’s Mass Transit Fiasco Shows Limits of Government ‘Investments’
More people ride buses, but Los Angeles devotes more money to its rail system.
JOHN MERLINE
5:59 PM EST
Los Angeles has spent $9 billion over the past three decades to build light rail and subway lines designed to entice people off of the car-choked highways and onto buses and trains. The system boasts six lines, 80 stations and more than 90 miles of track.
So how is this investment paying off?
There are fewer people using public transit than in the mid-1980s, when the only public transit option was the bus.
That’s according to a terrific bit of reporting by the Los Angeles Times, which found that ridership is down 10% over the past decade and that the decline “appears to be accelerating.”
“Transit agencies are still trying to figure out where their riders have gone and what can be done to bring them back,” the Times notes.
Naturally, the government’s answer is to throw more money at public transit — including $12 billion over the next decade to add new rail lines and extensions. They’re also floating the possibility of raising sales taxes to pay for the expansion.
But the problem here isn’t that transit has been underfunded. The city’s ongoing public transit disaster points to the bigger problem of having the government — city, state or federal — make “investments” like this in the first place, investments that are driven more by logrolling politicians and fanciful visions of changing behavior than actual consumer demand.
As the Times notes, buses have always been the most popular mode of public transit, yet the city has for years directed far more of its transit money to trains while cutting service and raising prices for buses.
“There’s been lots of focus by transit agencies on shiny new things, sometimes at the expense of bus routes,” the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies’ Brian Taylor told the Times.
In a free market, this would never happen. Services would go where demand was highest, and the unrelenting pressure to make a profit would drive down costs while improving quality.
That’s precisely why transportation innovators like Uber and Lyft have grown so rapidly — without a dime of taxpayer money or any help from government bureaucrats.
The real mystery isn’t that ridership in L.A. is falling. It’s why so many continue to insist that the government can do things better than the private sector.
http://www.investors.com/politics/capital-hill/l-a-s-mass-transit-fiasco-shows-limits-of-government-investments/
