A Debate on the Desirability of Urban Rail Transit Systems

From By Robert Poole's review of the paper in Reason's Surface Transportation Innovations:

Brookings Institution's transportation scholar Cliff Winston has taken a quantitative look at this issue. His new paper is titled "On the Social Desirability of Urban Rail Systems," co-authored with Vikram Maheshri, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. It appears in the Journal of Urban Economics.

The purpose of the paper is to estimate the contribution of U.S. urban rail systems to social welfare. The authors define the net benefit of a rail transit system as the difference between its benefits, broadly measured, and its net cost to taxpayers. If this difference is positive, it means that the dollar value of the rail system's benefits is greater than its net cost to taxpayers (i.e., the difference between what the rail system's customers pay as fares and the total cost to build, operate, and maintain the rail system).

...The authors conclude that rail transit is erroneously believed by the public to be socially desirable, because "supporters have sold [rail systems] as an antidote to the social costs associated with automobile travel, in spite of strong evidence to the contrary." They conclude that, in fact, rail transit is "an increasing drain on social welfare."

From the paper's abstract:

"Despite a decline in its mode share, investment to build new urban rail transit systems and extend old ones continues. We estimate the contribution of each U.S. urban rail operation to social welfare based on the demand for and cost of its service. We find that with the exception of BART in the San Francisco Bay area, every system actually reduces welfare and is unable to become socially desirable even with optimal pricing or physical restructuring of its network. We conclude rail's social cost is unlikely to abate because it enjoys powerful political support from planners, civic boosters, and policymakers."

Thanks to Hugh Pavletich