Tag: streetcars

Categories
Accountability folly national politics & policies responsibility subsidy too much government

Another Capital Atavism

pork, government waste, Streetcars, public transit

Had I ever heard of the zoopraxiscope before, I’d forgotten it by the time I read Randal O’Toole’s recent critique of the latest Washington, D. C., public transit debacle, the new streetcar system. So I had to look it up.

It was an early “motion picture” projector.

In other words, an “atavism.”

According to O’Toole, “Streetcars were technologically perfected in the 1880s, so for Washington to subsidize the construction of a streetcar line today is roughly equal to … Los Angeles subsidizing the manufacture of zoopraxiscopes.”

O’Toole, a transportation specialist, argues that the new system, barely in place, but already on the hook for more subsidy to build more lines, is grossly inefficient.

As well as atavistic.

“Rather than build five more miles of obsolete line,” he concludes, “the best thing Washington can do is shut down its new line and fill the gaps between the rails with tar.”

Drastic?

Well, is it any more drastic or extreme than debuting a mass system without a fare system in place? That is, without even having decided on which payment system to use?

Unfortunately, the inefficient clunkers are unaccountably contagious. “Following Portland’s example, Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and several other cities have opened or are building streetcar lines,” O’Toole explains. “Most of these lines are about two miles long, are no faster than walking, and cost $50 million or more per mile while buying the same number of buses would cost a couple million, at most.”

Politicians idolize such schemes so much that we, the taxpayers, are forced to be iconoclastic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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pork, government waste, Streetcars, public transit

 

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Categories
ideological culture too much government

A Streetcar Named Veblen

Around the country, cities are going ahead with trolley and streetcar projects, as well as light rail. I just returned from Seattle. Capitol Hill was torn apart at huge expense — all to add a streetcar line to cover a stretch where no buses now run.

Trains are cool; trolleys are neat; streetcars have cachet. But as transportation economist and city-​planning critic Randal O’Toole puts it, these are all more costly than buses. Far more costly. They rack up huge costs in infrastructure, and the ridership for them rarely increases enough to pay off even maintenance costs much less the capital outlays.

But for real transportation insanity, California’s your place. There, the bullet-​train project has spiraled out of control, “forcing” the state’s pixillated pols to court the state’s employee pension funds to “invest” in their beloved boondoggle.

Why this madness? What’s going on here?

I think Thorstein Veblen explained it. Inadvertently.

Veblen was the economist of our great-​grandfathers’ generation who characterized capitalism’s failures as the wastefulness of the rich, in terms of “conspicuous consumption.” He thought that there should be more government, and that this would be … less wasteful.

Well, we got that “more government.” It’s far more wasteful than the billionaires of old. At least they got rich providing benefits for the masses. Today, governments tax the masses to pay for vast, inefficient schemes to … move the masses. And the masses stay away. In droves.

The “conspicuous consumption” is in the public realm.

It turns out that spending other people’s money makes folks in government less responsible and more enticed by technological gewgaws and the strange tides of high-​cost fashion.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.