Priming The Pump

If Personal Rapid Transit was designed according to least-cost principles, with low construction cost & operating costs, and high convenience that all add up to profitable operation, why do most PRT strategies involve public investment?

Endorsements of PRT, such as in government long term planning documents and vision statements of transportation-focused NGOs, often contain provisos requiring private funding or operating partners for a future PRT system.

This is often a fair requirement. In SeaTac, Washington, the area once designated for a PRT network was primarily commercial, not residential. Direct public funding may not be entirely appropriate in such a case (although it is not clear how such a PRT system would be philosophically different from publicly-funded stadiums, convention centers and department stores that might be funded by taxes, bonds or federal redevelopment grants).

PRT critics take it a step further. Public money, they say, should be reserved for "proven" transit technologies. There seem to be two justifications for this, first that public investment in new technology is unnecessarily risky or wasteful, and second that there is a scarcity of funds for the transit we already have. A corollary of the latter is that there are "more vital" services needing funding, such as schools. Let's examine these objections, briefly.

"Proven": There is great affinity for transit, which is often seen as an iconic community symbol. Seattle's Alweg monorail and San Francisco's cable cars are two examples. It is easy to see, then, the "proven" requirement as a public endorsement of the validity or worthiness of those systems—almost as though they were living, breathing contributors to civic life.
       They do have value, in that they provide a measure of mobility to the public as well as local color. But there is also a temptation to mistakenly view the "proven" attribute as meaning that current transit cannot be improved upon, that it will forever be state of the art.
       In fact, the main reason we reserve tax dollars for "proven" transit is that they are "proven" to be unable to operate without subsidies (roughly 20-60% in the U.S., depending on mode, tends to be covered by fares). In Seattle, fares cover 19% of Metro Transit's operating expenses (2017); Sound Transit loses $95 everytime a ticket is sold for a Sounder commuter train (2004).

"Scarcity": Scarcity and underfunding implies a state of full funding can be reached, which implies a program providing full service, whatever that is. But government spent $31.8 billion on transit in 2004, roughly $108 per capita. Whether transit is underfunded is not the question: if it got more funding, it could provide more service. Current bus and train ridership is about 8.7 billion trips annually (2002), roughly $3.70 in cost per trip. What benefits would be brought by another 1% ($319M) in funding? 1% more trips (87 million per year, or 238,000 per day nationally)? The real question is whether any amount would ever constitute full funding, and whether full service could ever be met with conventional technologies.

"More vital": Society has many priorities. Schools, health care, public safety and environmental protection are just a few of our many vital needs. But mobility is a vital public need too. Through our political system we rank our needs and allocate spending accordingly, and innovation in transit is a need as well. To deny it any funding whatsoever would mean transit innovation is completely off the national priorities list. Meanwhile, we still have upper class tax cuts, mega-defense contracts, tobacco subsidies, foreign credit financing and other expenditures that benefit only an economic elite.
       The reality is that PRT has received no U.S. public funding for construction or testing since the Illinois RTA participated in the Raytheon project in the 1990s, and that was the first since UMTA funded the PRT/GRT in Morgantown, WV, in the 70s. Today, if PRT gets any public funds at all it is in small amounts to perform general feasibility studies.
      In other words, innovative transit technology is hardly to blame for underfunding of other vital services, and not funding it doesn't mean such funding will be forthcoming. The people we elect to local and state government, Congress and the White House bear that responsibility.