Smart Wheels

By Charles Euchner

With soaring gas prices and concerns about global warming, a rickety but persistent coalition of smart growth advocates has again called for massive new investments in public transit. Build light rail, they say, and the problems of congestion and pollution and sprawl will fade away.

Sadly, they're wrong. I would love to see old-fashioned "urban villages" take root at the intersections of Main and Broad in Everytown, U.S.A. I would love dense development to arise around these transit nodes. I would love people to give up their second cars; hell, I'd be happy if they gave up their third cars.

But people drive because it remains the most affordable and convenient form of transportation. You go from point A to point B, in the comfort of a rolling living room, without having to wait 45 minutes or get squished between John Candy lookalikes and angst-ridden spike-haired kids. And with jobs, schools, churches, ballfields, pools, and most other destinations scattered all over, simply building a train line is not going to help much.

And new rail lines are expensive. Once upon a time -- before cars, before greedy unions, before sprawl, before restrictive zoning -- massive investment in trolleys and heavy rail made sense. But now it sucks out capital and operating funds that would be used better elsewhere. Too often, new rail lines actually make sprawl worse. Since localities do not want stations near the downtown -- "We don't have enough parking!" -- the stations get located on highways. So people clog the highways to get to Kiss-'n'-Ride lots.

A former Harvard colleague named David Luberoff once calculated that building and running the new commuter rails to Boston's South Shore would cost more than giving every rider taxi fare for every trip. Talk about subsidies!

But even though the knee-jerk transit dreams don't make sense, Rochester, N.Y., shows that you can run a decent bus service efficiently. You can get more bottoms on bus seats, for less money. You can even make a small profit.

How? By paying attention to what groups might want to use the bus system. By cutting out the lines that don't carry anyone. (To me, one of the ugliest sites is a bus rolling by with just one or two riders on board.) By taking a community-planning approach.

The Genesee Valley Transit Authority has negotiated deals with the Rochester public schools, local colleges, and businesses to pay for lines serving them. A local developer has agreed to subsidize a line out to a new suburban development.

To be sure, Rochester has also gotten more money from the state. Subsidies help. But everyone gets hefty subsidies. How many massachusetts residents know that one penny of sales tax on every purchase goes to Boston's transit system? The question is: Once you get your subsidies, do you manage the system efficiently and creatively?

Transit advocates usually scream when bus services change lines. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority still runs buses out to a shopping center in Cambridge where a supermarket was once the raison d'etre for the line. Initiatives to shift a line even a block produce howls of protest.

Like it or not, buses offer the best hope for transit. The greatest virtue of buses is their flexibility. Transit systems should actively seek the lines that produce the greater number of riders.

Here's a simple idea. Invert the build-it-and-they-will-come adage from "Eight Men Out." Found out where people are, and where they actually want buses, and move the lines there.