Ottawa has spent billions of dollars on light rail so that it will take longer to get to the airport — at least 39 minutes, rather than the 25 minutes it used to take. Janet Bufton of the Institute for Liberal Studies explains, “All Ottawa light rail lines” are “now open.” But the time it takes to travel from “downtown to airport” “by rail” is “54” minutes” and will require “two transfers,” while traveling “by rail+bus” will take “39” minutes and “one transfer.” It “used to take 25” minutes to reach the airport “with a direct bus,” but now “they are getting rid of the bus.” That’s because the government spent billions on the new rail lines, and it can’t afford to pay for both a train and a direct bus to the same place.
The Ottawa Citizen published an article titled, “Inside the slow-rolling disaster of Ottawa’s $9 billion LRT project: Nearly six months after the launch, the city is exhausted. Commuters can cite by rote the many ways a rail car can be disabled — jammed doors, hobbled communications, unpredictable rail switches, disconnected power cables, disabled brakes and more.” And it costs much more than a bus system.
Light rail is so inconvenient for most people that rail cars are typically mostly empty. Why does the government pay for “mass transit” systems that don’t transport masses of people — but rather consist of mostly empty trains that use more energy per passenger than a car would? You shouldn’t, notes an article in the National Post called “Save the Environment: Don’t Take Transit.”
But California doubled down on doing just that, reports Reason Magazine. The median resident of southern California took zero trips on mass transportation annually, and only 2 percent of the population frequently uses mass transit. And that was “before the pandemic, which caused ridership to plummet” further.
Yet California Governor Gavin Newsom agreed “to bail out these systems” using $5.1 billion in tax dollars, which will enable transit systems to avoid cutting wasteful spending and avoid making “difficult choices regarding which lines to keep operating, which projects to fund and which departments to trim.”
Some of the bus and rail routes Newsom bailed out consume more energy per user than a car, because a bus or train consumes more energy than several cars do, meaning it has to carry times as many people as a car to make a bus or train trip worthwhile.
As Kevin Libin noted in The National Post, “Mass transit vehicles use up roughly the same energy whether they are full or empty, and for much of the time, they’re more empty than full. For the bulk of the day, and on quieter routes, the average city bus usually undoes whatever efficiencies are gained during the few hours a day, on the few routes, where transit is at its peak.”
Light-rail lines blame COVID for their problems. But as the R Street Institute’s Steven Greenhut pointed out,
Transit agencies were struggling long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Ridership levels in almost every major transit system nationwide had been plunging for two decades. The agencies have had plenty of time to adjust to reality, but have not used it to develop new business models that appeal to riders. They haven’t even turned the corner on transit crime waves that literally scare off riders.
Instead of cutting superfluous bureaus or staff, reducing compensation (or at least reforming benefit packages), outsourcing contracts and adjusting routes, or trying innovative solutions (smaller buses, privatized alternatives), they’ve continued to offer these services in an antiquated way….
As I noted in my new short book, “Putting Customers First,” the state’s major transportation agencies focus on a variety of social concerns [rather] than creating bus systems that arrive on time and freeways that are less congested. It’s a long mish-mash of politically correct goals, bolstered by legislation that treats customer concerns as a side issue….By dumping more money into current systems without any mandate for change, we only get more inanity—e.g., “road diets” that increase congestion by reducing the number of traffic lanes in a silly quest to prod us into abandoning our cars.
The Biden administration has turned a blind eye to the wastefulness of many mass transit systems. It chose to spend $500 million on expanding a subway system whose ridership is tiny and is falling compared to the local population.
Even worse, the Biden administration also decided to spend $8.8 billion expanding D.C.’s Union Station, which handles only a fraction of the traffic it used to. Trying to get people to ride mass transit systems was difficult even before the rise of remote work, because it takes so long to commute to and from work on mass transit. It can take an hour and a half to take buses or trains to work for a commute that would take only half an hour by car. Most train and bus stations are not right near where people live or work, and people taking mass transit often have to ride multiple different buses or trains to get to work
