Randal the Transportation-Myth Slayer

February 18, 2010

Five winters ago, the “Connecticut Citizens Transportation Lobby” ferried over 100 activists and pols from Fairfield County to the capitol. The state’s new governor, the group insisted, must make its agenda a priority in her first budget. State Sen. Andrew McDonald (D-Stamford) drew thunderous applause when he ranted that he looked forward to a spending plan “that does not look to solve [Connecticut’s transportation] problems by building more roads.”

It’s likely that Randal O’Toole has forgotten more about transportation than McDonald will ever know, and in Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It, the environmental scholar explains that more roads -- and smarter roads -- are exactly what Connecticut needs.

O’Toole has made a career out of debunking both the anti-“sprawl” claims of the eco-left and the government-transit industry’s well-funded propaganda machine. His new book takes fresh and expanded swings at the transportation establishment’s many false idols.

Is America experiencing an orgy of highway-building? “Between 1980 and 2006, the amount of driving on urban freeways increased by 188 percent, but the number of lane-miles of urban freeway increased by only 77 percent.” Are highways as subsidized as “mass” transit? Nope -- taxpayers pick up the tab for less than a penny per passenger mile by automobile, while the figure for government’s seldom-used trains and buses is nearly 70¢. Is high-speed rail the norm in Europe? Not at all. The average citizen living in EU countries travels only 100 miles per year on speedy trains. (As a share of intercity travel, rail use is declining in Europe, while the portions for driving and flying are rising.) Are trains and buses more environmentally friendly than cars? You guessed it: “When taking all things into consideration, alternative modes of travel, such as rail transit, consume just about as much energy and emit as much greenhouse gases (and in some cases more) as automobiles.”

Facts, O’Toole has found, mean nothing to the people who control the “debate” over the nation’s transportation policies. Here in the Nutmeg State, a refusal to accept incontrovertible data helps explain the existence of Shore Line East. The railroad’s operating costs, O’Toole discovered in 2004, are “the highest of any commuter rail line in the nation, and nearly four times as great as the average commuter rail system.” Undaunted, Governor M. Jodi Rell is moving forward with a New Haven-to-Springfield route. In 2007, researcher Wendell Cox wrote that subsidies to the white-elephant-in-the-making “are projected to be more than enough to lease each new rider a top of the line Lexus or BMW.”

The auto-hating bias O’Toole has documented again and again has led the scholar to an explosive, but well-supported, conclusion: “[I]n a growing number of urban areas, transportation planning seems to be about almost anything but transportation.”

Safe and efficient mobility, once the sole focus, has been supplanted by a grandiose vision of land-use control that involves murky concepts -- e.g., “sustainability,” “infill,” “walkable communities,” and “smart growth.” It’s awfully convenient for accountability-dodging bureaucrats that their reset goals are difficult to quantify.

Nonetheless, the planners keep planning, content that there will be no obstacles on the road to the glorious future they seek to immanentize. O’Toole will have no truck with arrogant futurists: “Twenty years ago, no one could have predicted the Internet; or that telecommuters would outnumber transit riders in the vast majority of urban areas; or that intercity bus service (driven by on-line ticket sales) would be growing for the first time in decades; or that FedEx, UPS, and DHL would be making daily deliveries on almost every residential street in America. Just as plans written 20 years ago would be wrong about these things today, plans written today and projected out 20 years from now will also be wrong.”

O’Toole concludes Gridlock with a litany of common-sense reforms that promise to bring transportation policy back to Earth. User fees should cover maintenance and expansion costs of every conveyance network, not just highways. Short-term planning, tied to how people actually move around, should replace long-term, social-engineering schemes crafted to coerce people into making politically correct travel decisions. Wherever possible, the private sector should be invited to take over wasteful, corrupt, and politically controlled trains and buses. And toll roads, equipped with state-of-the-art technology for variable pricing, have the most potential to reduce traffic congestion.

In an era that finds Connecticut and the nation drowning in debt, are voters finally willing to confront transportation planners’ selfish fiefdom-building and blatant misrepresentations? If they are, Gridlock will be an invaluable weapon in the battle.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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