A Debate on the Desirability of Urban Rail Transit Systems

This is one more article promoted by conservative think tanks backed by the oil, car industry and the highway construction lobby. Needless to say, the article is written from an engineering perspective, with scant respect to the ground realities.

The aspect the authors fail to notice that the dispersed developmental patterns today is a direct result of the not having mass transit systems in place or at least in planning phase when the land use decisions were done for most part of this country. Transportation and land use decisions should go hand in hand. Coming back at a later date and citing the costs of putting in rail systems through sparsely populated areas is fruitless. Even though there are big capital costs of putting in rail systems, but these systems often lead to the property prices going up and thereby generating more real estate taxes being pumped into the local municipality.

The authors were comprehensive in their costing of the construction of the rail systems. I would like to see a similar costing of the urban roadway infrastructure- how much do they cost to build,( the total cost of the roadway, not just one lane of traffic in either direction as most engineers do to portray a false picture) the traffic signals that go with the roads, the cost of operations and maintenance, the cost of the parking garages, the cost of the new water filtration plants to deal with the excess urban run off, and the loss of open space just to name a few. Also to be factored in to this is the medical costs associated with the treatment of patients who have had prolonged exposure to the vehicular emissions

Add to this the cost of congestion and loss productivity, the loss of human life and the cost to the environment and then we might be in a position to do some comparison. Also please add to this the cost of operating and maintaining a basic automobile. I am not an expert in pricing, but I would have to say that auto insurance in an urban area would be an average of atleast 60 dollars per month and atleast another 50 dollars would be spent in gas bills assuming that a person drives an average of 600 miles to and from his work. Auto repairs are not cheap and labor charges vary from 35-45 dollars per hour in cheaper areas to as high as 90 dollars per hour in places like NYC.

Approximately a million people come to work to Manhattan, south of 59th Street. This is the area which can be called the Central Business District of Manhattan. Let us assume that there is a ridesharing factor of 20%. Therefore for 100 people there would be 80 cars which would drive to the CBD. Therefore for a million people we would have 800,000 cars. Let the average footprint of a car be 15 feet multiplied by 9feet ( this a conservative estimate as most cars are bigger than the mentioned size). Therefore the foot print of 800,000 cars would be 72 million square feet or about 475 city blocks. At this point we have the option of parking them on street, parking lots or garages. Please keep in mind that the area calculation was done on the basis of cars being parked bumper to bumper, side to side with no space in between. Add to this number a conservative 20% more for circulation and we will find that we need about 550 to 575 city blocks to park the cars either on the street or in parking lots (As of today the cost of these 575 city blocks would be in the range of 250 billion dollars at a conservative estimate of 3000 dollars per square feet). Assuming that there are 12 blocks across Manhattan we will have a parking lot which is 12 long blocks wide and 47 short blocks in the other dimension. This will eat up more than 80% of the area of the CBD itself. Hence we assume that we can park the cars in parking garages, which will either be several floors deep or several floors high. If the parking garages are under ground they costs of constructing them will keep swelling with every additional floor we dig deeper and if they are above ground they will lead to a loss of usable productive space. A million square feet building will need atleast 2500 car parking spaces.(In Manhattan 250 square feet of space is allocated to each employee on an average. A million square feet building will have about 4000 employees and hence about 2500 parking spots at the very least). This cost will either be borne by the developer, or passed on to the end user. In either case there is monetary loss. If the choice was to have sterile parking lots dot the city or having above ground parking lots this would severely compromise that ability to add more commercial square footage to the CBD and would cause severe shortage of space leading to a loss of jobs and would cost the local economy billions of dollars. THIS WOULD BE THE INDIRECT COST OF HAVING AN AUTOCENTRIC MANHATTAN AS WOULD HAPPEN IF EVERY PLANNING PROFESSIONAL WERE TO FOLLOW AND BELIEVE THE AUTHORS’STUDY BLINDLY. New York City is New York City, and an unique urban landscape due to the fact somebody visionary thought exactly opposite to what the author’s have to say and prevented the creation of an urban landscape so familiar with the rest of the United States where buildings sit in the middle of parking lots.

A train on the other hand (like the one used in NYC) transports 2000 persons in one go without doing any of the above.

Europe has long survived with use of mass transit and alternate transportation modes, and even today remains aggressive about cutting down the costs of fossil fuels.

NYC being geographically bound has its limitations. In other cities the approach would be to keep expanding horizontally and not treat land as a resource at all and not associate a cost factor to the loss of land, and the associated flora and fauna. Putting a dollar amount to that would never portray a pretty picture for the car lobbyist. As we keep spreading out more horizontally we will have to keep driving more thereby increasing the likelihood of accidents not to mention the loss of time that is valuable to society and the family. There is not dollar amount to this time too and it is taken for granted.

I would greatly appreciate if the author’s took their time to do a life cycle and comprehensive analysis of all the aspects inclusive of but not limited to the economical, social, environmental, health and safety before ruling that rail systems are a general failure.