Annals of Transit – 11

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NO ALLY AT THE TRANSLINK BOARD

Mayor Corrigan on the TransLink Board:

At the inaugural Metro Vancouver Transportation Committee meeting last week, Mayors Corrigan (Burnaby) and Brodie (Richmond) expressed frustration to Robert Paddon, Executive Vice President, Strategic Planning and Public Affairs, TransLink that the TransLink Board hasn’t stepped up to help with trying to get more funding from the province.

Corrigan said, “The board hasn’t been much of an ally at all. Members of the board are not seen pounding the pavement. The board just puts out plans asking for more funding.”

Unfortunately, Corrigan is right: the TransLink Board collectively and individually have not spent their social or political capital to promote the need for serious transit funding in this region.  Their failure, in the absence of any other leadership, makes them, by default, managers of decline – or worse, an impediment.

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DOES TRANSIT RELEIVE CONGESTION?
From Atlantic Cities:
The idea that public transportation relieves road congestion is both logical and popular, but the evidence for it is decidedly mixed. The “fundamental law of road congestion,” for instance, suggests that transit fails to relieve traffic because latent demand for road space is so great. …
That debate just got a lot more interesting with some new work (via Paul Krugman) by Berkeley scholar Michael Anderson, who argues that “the net benefits of transit systems appear to be much larger than previously believed.” By analyzing the impact of a Los Angeles transit strike in 2003, Anderson found that congestion did decrease considerably — but only on roads that paralleled heavy transit corridors. He suggests that previous research has focused too much on general metro traffic and not enough on the specific roads that transit is most likely to influence:

The intuition is straightforward: Transit is most attractive to commuters who face the worst congestion, so a disproportionate number of transit riders are commuters who would otherwise have to drive on the most congested roads at the most congested times. Since drivers on heavily congested roads have a much higher marginal impact on congestion than drivers on the average road, transit has a large impact on reducing traffic congestion. …

Anderson then extrapolates his findings to show the economic benefit of public transit to the city. Using some back-of-the-envelope calculations, he says the congestion relief provided by the Los Angeles system ranges between $1.2 billion and $4.1 billion per year. In other words, the high cost of constructing transit systems come with considerable economic gains. Anderson concludes:

Contrary to the conclusions in the existing transportation and urban economics literature, the congestion relief benefits alone may justify transit infrastructure investments.

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 CARRY ON … UNDERGROUND