Light rail opponent: It’s costly transit that almost nobody rides
Not everybody thinks that light rail is the right answer for Charlotte. Although city leaders largely support adding transit lines, opponents say that light rail costs too much and moves too few. In an interview with the Ledger, Wendell Cox, a transportation and land-use consultant and former member of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, says there are better and cheaper alternatives available.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length:
Q: Does it make sense for Charlotte to be extending light rail?
The Charlotte metro area is about 2.5M people. It’s one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country. But the percentage of people taking transit in all of its forms to work in the Charlotte metropolitan area is 1.5%. That’s absolutely nothing.
When you’re talking about that small a share, you’ve got to ask some real cost-benefit questions. And the growth in Charlotte is in the suburbs, in the outer counties, in Union County and out toward Gastonia and so on.
There are a lot of poor people in Charlotte, just like in every other metropolitan area. The great majority of poor people in this country use cars to get to work, not transit. Why? Because they can’t get anywhere on transit. On average, nationally – and this comes out of the University of Minnesota research on access – overall in the nation, somewhere around 1-2% of jobs in a metropolitan area can be reached by transit in 30 minutes. The average work trip travel time in this country is 26 minutes.
The basic point is, what we need to be doing with respect to transit in our metropolitan areas is we need to be finding ways to get these people to jobs that don’t happen to be on the infrequent bus line they happen to live right next to.
How many single mothers do you think there are who can use light rail in Charlotte to go to work and drop the kid off at daycare on the way? Probably the number is fairly close to zero.
Q: Doesn’t that mean you should spend more on transit to get the number of people using it to go up?
What if we were to say, “Let’s make cities as accessible by transit as they are by car.” Generally, you would have to spend all of the income of the city in a year to do that. It just makes no sense at all.
Q: But doesn’t investing in light rail lines help encourage development that wouldn’t have taken place otherwise? In Charlotte, we’ve seen a lot of development along the light rail line.
How many people have left poverty as a result of that? Do we care about poverty?
How about we take half that money and give it to developers to develop? The purpose of transit is not development. The purpose of transit is to get people to work, to improve the economy. That’s just a bogus argument.
There’s a very strong lobby for light rail. There’s too much federal money. Everybody loves it. It’s a trinket, and it’s largely federally financed. What are you going to do, refuse the federal funding? They’re just wasting an awful lot of money.
Q: So what’s the solution?
What is the solution to getting poor people to get to work? It’s trying to get them cars. They need somehow to have the mobility that can only be provided by cars. Why is it that poor people can’t get to as many jobs in Charlotte as you do?
If we can believe the proponents of the automated cars who talk about how much less costly it’s going to be, my goodness, we can send cars to people and pick them up at their houses and take them to work, wherever they happen to work, whether it’s in Gastonia or in Charlotte.
In addition to that, there are programs that ought to be supported. There are nonprofit programs where they actually supply and subsidize loans to people for cars. There’s this underlying feeling that we don’t want to give these people cars. We’d rather keep them in poverty than do something that helps them.
Q: Wouldn’t that lead to more congestion, more people on the roads?
I realize that everybody has to offer incense at an altar that damns the automobile, but the automobile is the very source of our prosperity. Our cities could not exist or be anywhere near as prosperous as they are without automobiles. The automobile made it possible to create larger labor markets and greater prosperity. It could not have happened without the automobile.
Cars are so much cleaner now than they were before. Everybody who would like to go back and live in a cave, that’s fine, but a lot of people really enjoy modern life.
(This interview is one of two on the topic of expanding Charlotte’s light rail. For an interview with a light rail proponent, click here.)
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