The scene is the Bronx. The location is an apartment building. There comes a knock on the door. The tenant opens the door, and is confronted by a door to door salesman in a plaid suit, holding a pencil and notebook.

TENANT: Yeah, whuddya want? SALESMAN: Good morning Sir! My name is Smith, and I sell elephants door to door. How would you like to buy a very fine quality elephant for a mere $1000? TENANT: Are you CRAZY?? I live in a two bedroom walk-up (no-elevator) on the fourth floor with a wife ant two kids, and you have the NERVE to ask me if I
fd like to buy an ELEPHANT for $1000. What kind of a nut do you think I am? SALESMAN: How about two for $1500? TENANT: NOW you
fre talking!

What makes this exchange funny is that everyone listening to it understands the underlying economics of the situation. Economics has to do with elasticity of demand and we realize intuitively (without even taking a poll) that there isn
ft ANY demand for an elephant in this situation, much less for two. The tenant doesn
ft (or at least shouldn
ft) want an elephant. Giving him a quantity discount only makes the situation worse. Not much elasticity in the demand for elephants if you life in an apartment in the Bronx.

What many transit advocates don
ft realize is that a similar problem exists with transit. They keep approaching it as if there were a supply problem when in fact, the problem is on the demand side.

MetroKC, when they announced their recent threat of cutting one-third of their service also announced that these cuts were affecting routes which averaged somewhat less than NINE boardings per hour. Given that the average transit rider is only on the bus for around 20 minutes, the average passenger load on these routes was only about three per hour, on buses that could hold a hundred. This is not a supply problem, it
fs a demand problem.

Demand for transit is dropping worldwide as the number of transit dependent decrease worldwide. This is also occurring in the US. This is well known to the USDOT, appearing in numerous reports on their website:

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION THE USE OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION FOR THE JOURNEY TO WORK HAS DECLINED CONSISTENTLY OVER THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES. ACCORDING TO CENSUS DATA, THE TRANSIT SHARE DECLINED FROM 12.6 PERCENT IN 1960 TO 5.3 PERCENT IN 1990. EVEN MORE SIGNIFICANT IS THE FACT THAT THE ABSOLUTE NUMBER OF COMMUTERS USING TRANSIT ALSO DECLINED FROM OVER 7.8 MILLION WORKERS IN 1960 TO NEARLY 6.1 MILLION WORKERS IN 1990. THIS OCCURRED DESPITE A 39 PERCENT INCREASE IN POPULATION AND A 78 PERCENT INCREASE IN THE TOTAL NUMBER OF WORKERS OVER THE SAME TIME PERIOD. >FROM A STRICT POLICY PERSPECTIVE, IT IS REASONABLE TO QUESTION WHETHER CONTINUED INVESTMENT AND SUPPORT OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IS AN APPROPRIATE AND EFFECTIVE USE OF PUBLIC FUNDS. THIS POLICY QUESTION IS ACKNOWLEDGED AND CONSIDERED BY MANY IN THE LITERATURE. DEVELOPMENT PATTERNS THAT EXIST IN AMERICA TODAY ARE NOT CONDUCIVE TO WIDE-SPREAD TRANSIT USE. FOR THIS REASON, IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE A CLEAR AND THOROUGH UNDERSTANDING OF SPECIFIC MARKET SEGMENTS THAT ARE MOST INCLINED TO USE TRANSIT.

http://www.bts.gov/ntl/DOCS/CAUS.html << Recent Trends and a Look to the Future.url>>

We have been pouring money into trying to make transit work for two decades. Capital investment in King County Metro has been over $100 million a year the last three years. Now we are embarking on a $2.3 million light-rail project (including a stand-alone 1.6 mile segment in downtown Tacoma that will cost $65 million to replace ONE BUS!

We have been pouring $200 million a year into transit operations, plus the unfunded mandates we give employers to force them to buy transit passes for their employees. These can only come out of employee wages, but it is invisible to the employees, who believe it
fs a good deal.

"If you build it, they will come, isn
ft working. The metrics on the "SmartGrowth" site aren
ft showing any per capita increase in transit use, even though we are operating service free in many areas where we think we can get high load factors. (Husky games, downtown). Even giving the elephant away, really isn
ft creating demand.

It
fs time we returned transit to it
fs appropriate niche, and devoted most of the capital funds back to roads. Yes, we need to keep a safety net for the transit dependent but no, we don
ft need $29000 per stall underground parking garages in Mercer Island or $65 million amusement rides for downtown Tacoma.

Light rail is an elephant, and a white elephant at that. Don
f

-- Craig Carson (craigcar@crosswinds.net), November 21, 1999

Answers

Does anyone know what the going rate is for a mile of freeway lane? At one of the I-405 Corridor Project open houses I went to (the Kirkland one), I was told it was between $25 million and $200 million per lane mile ($200 million was 'Mercer Island' standards).

-- Jim Cusick (jccusick@att.net), November 21, 1999.

Jim-

Costs of a lane mile kind of depend on where and when. Utah has been rebuilding I-15 for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. They are completely rebuilding 17 miles of I-15, and increasing it to 12 lanes, with resultant need to rebuild a number of bridges and intersections. It is projected to cost $1.6 billion. It
fs hard to figure lane mile cost, because the original lanes are also being ripped up and repaved or replaced. That would make the cost something between $15.7 million a lane mile, and $8 million a lane mile. By comparison, the light rail will be $100 million a mile. The difference being, a lane pair hauls a LOT more than a light rail line does.

From the USDOT Bureau of Transportation statistics: o The Interstate 15 (I-15) project in Salt Lake City, Utah, is the largest "design-build" highway project ever undertaken in the United States. The Utah Department of Transportation will reconstruct 17 miles of Interstate highway in and around Salt Lake City, Utah, replacing all existing pavement, widening the road from 6 to 12 lanes, reconstructing several major Interstate highway interchanges, and replacing 137 bridges and other structures. Construction began in April 1997, and the project is scheduled to be completed in July 2001. A substantial portion of the project
fs $1.6 billion expected cost is covered under one fixed-price contract awarded to a single contractor to both design and construct the project. The project
fs costs could still grow, however, because the state has agreed with the contractor to assume certain financial risks, such as the possibility that hazardous materials may be discovered in addition to those identified through investigations conducted before the contract was awarded. While the design-build process is relatively new to highway construction and there is little historical information for predicting the magnitude of possible changes in the project
fs costs, officials in states where design-build contracts have been completed stated that post-award change orders have added from around 2.5 percent to around 8.5 percent to these contracts
f costs. Changes of this magnitude, if they were to occur, would add roughly $35 million to $110 million to the I-15 project
fs costs. The I-15 project is the largest component of Utah
fs Centennial Highway Fund
\a 10-year, $2.6 billion fund for the construction and reconstruction of highways throughout Utah.

http://www.bts.gov/ntl/data/rc98064.pdf

-- (craigcar@crosswinds.net), November 22, 1999.

From today's PI: (http://www.seattle-pi.com/local/get221.shtml)

Dick Nelson, a Seattle transportation consultant and former state legislator, wrote that Sound Transit's prediction that it will offer commuters a good alternative and contribute "significantly" to travel mobility is "disingenuous at best."

"The reality is that people will only use a transportation system that takes them where they want to go (increasingly to multiple, dispersed destinations) in a reasonable amount of time (less time than it takes to take a bus to connect with a train, to then connect with another bus -- even with congestion)."

A continuing mantra of the pro-transit crowd is that "people need choices in transportation." When will they acknowledge that the overwhelming choice is the auto, and start coping with that, rather than continuing expensive attempts at social engineering that don't work? We need more civil engineers and fewer social engineers.

-- Craig Carson (craigcar@crosswinds.net), November 22, 1999.

Amen, Craig! Using social engineering instead of traffic engineering iw why we are saddled with all these HOV lanes.

-- Abert Fosha (AFosha@aol.com), November 22, 1999.