Are We Resuscitating a Dinosaur?

Sixty years ago, when I was a toddler, we had a functioning, reasonably efficient, national mass transit system powered by electricity, coal and/or oil, depending upon which portion of the system you used and where you lived. The most urban and cost-efficient portion was purposely destroyed by American auto makers and the institutional predecessors of many of those now being asked to comment on its resurrection. It's no surprise, therefore, that highway officials continue to think of some variation of the automobile as the only workable transportation model. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.

"Miles traveled" figures used by critics of mass transit will be misleading for quite a few years to come because, in many parts of the country, there's simply no alternative to the automobile or truck. When there's only one commuter line for an entire metro area, the laws of physics, if nothing else, prevent it from carrying the majority of commuter traffic. That's not a flaw in commuter rail, it's a flaw in the public policies that leave most workers, suburban and urban, with virtually no alternative means of transportation except the automobile.

One of the few commentators to acknowledge this talks about similar thinking a century ago resulting in massive investments in horses and buggies, and I think that comment is spot-on. Rail service isn't a panacea, and since we've destroyed much of what's necessary to make it usable again (at the hands of Big 3 corporations now seeking our tax dollars to rescue them from their own failed model), reviving a viable mass transit system will be expensive, but if we fail to take advantage of this opportunity, we'll be dooming ourselves to a second-rate economy for decades to come, risking our national security unnecessarily, and reinforcing an already-worrisome dichotomy in our social fabric between the "haves" and the "have-nots."

Much of what we call "suburban" is, in truth, "exurban," and feasible only because of cheap energy. Cheap energy seems more likely to be going the way of the dinosaur, so efficient use of what we have should become increasingly paramount. At the moment, there is no mode of transportation that even comes close to rail transit in terms of energy efficiency expressed as cost per passenger-mile or ton-mile of freight. I don't advocate abandoning highway funding altogether — I live in an area with limited pubic transit of any kind, though that's changing, and I'm still dependent on an automobile for transportation myself — but as a society, we must begin to wean ourselves from a transportation system that's inherently inequitable and inefficient in its use of resources, and that, in the process, promotes inefficiency in land use and other segments of economic activity and public policy. And that's before we even begin to look at environmental impacts...