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By D.S. Gow
For about 15 years the Seattle metropolitan area has been pondering traffic congestion and mass transit. "We need to provide people with transportation alternatives" is the public policy mantra.
Of course what this means is an alternative to the private automobile. And so what have transportation planners offered us? A light rail train system has been planned on paper; revised cost estimates putting system cost over $7 billion and a bad public relations track record have seriously jeopardized prospects that it will ever be built. The leading competitor is a proposal for a city-wide monorail system, inspired by Seattle's famous World Fair monorail (installed in 1962, and is actually just a short line between two stations in downtown).
These are the current proposed alternatives to the automobile. But are trains really a true alternative? In the field of economics this question would be rephrased are cars and trains substitutes? In the market for invigorating morning beverages, tea is a close substitute for coffee; if coffee prices go up price-conscious consumers switch more easily to tea than, say, chardonnay. How do trains and cars match up?
| Cars | Trains |
|---|---|
| Your trip begins from your present location | You have to go to a station; you may have to take a bus to get there |
| You go when you want | You have to wait for a scheduled time |
| You can travel by yourself, or choose who you go with | Trains aren't private |
| You don't have to stop along the way (except for heavy traffic) | You may have to transfer to another train, or a bus. Unless it's an express, you have to stop at every station |
| You go directly to where you want to go | You go to another station, usually stopping at every station along the way. There may be express trains, but they may not stop where you want. Then you still have to get from the station to your ultimate destination |
Not very close substitutes, are they? Put simply, trains don't go where enough people want to go, when they want to go. Put another way: Transportation is a market like anything else, and trains are not the product the market is demanding. And yet when the market demands alternatives, the answer that has come back is "let's put in some trains". The line of reasoning seems to be trains are what other cities have; the world's great cities have Tubes, Metros and Subways, and WE are a great city, right? An analogy: Suppose you go out to a restaurant and order a juicy, rare steak with fries. But when the waiter returns he's carrying a plate with a hot, sizzling... soy loaf with non-dairy coleslaw on the side. "This is not what I ordered," you tell the waiter. "But it's food," he replies. "It may not have the taste you wanted, but you won't starve. Get used to it." So the question is: How hungry are you?
Most people would rather go to another restaurant. In Seattle, despite a bus system with rush hour express routes that emulate train service, roads are crowded and the rush "hour" just keeps getting longer. Clearly, even buses are not a close enough substitute to the car. So what has been put forward by Sound Transit, the agency charged with giving the region a new mass transit system? A train system. Specifically, light rail. Sound Transit won't consider a technology like Personal Rapid Transit, and it is also resisting the popular monorail alternative. This is hardly surprising, as Sound Transit has invested millions of dollars and countless hours in planning and fighting for light rail. They are invested in it financially and emotionally. To return to the restaurant analogy, soy loaf is the only thing the chef knows how to make. In fact, the chef is telling you it's not worth his time to learn to cook anything else.
But would a menu boasting Monorail Cordon Bleu stand a better chance at actually relieving our traffic problems? I would submit that the answer is a resounding No. A monorail is just another type of train, with the same service characteristics as light rail. People would NOT choose to ride monorail for the same reasons they choose NOT to ride the bus and WOULD NOT choose to ride light rail. At this time monorail has a capital cost advantage over light rail, and that is all.
Personal Rapid Transit, a technology designed in response to the way people actually use transportation, is the common-sense alternative to trains, offering the best hope of a mass transit that people will really use AND therefore ease traffic congestion.
Part I Part II
The author has a degree in Policy Analysis from the University of Washington Graduate School of Public Affairs (now known as The Evans School).
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