Never let a good crisis go to waste
2020-04-24 · Guest: Randal O’Toole (Senior Fellow, Cato Institute) · 51:53
Mass transit failures and COVID-19 spread
Bob Zadek and Randal O’Toole discuss the failures of mass transit, specifically focusing on its role in spreading COVID-19 in New York City. They explore the economic distortions caused by transit subsidies, the history of government takeovers of private transit lines, and the environmental myths surrounding rail versus modern automobiles.
Topics: Mass Transit, COVID-19, New York City, MTA, Subsidies, Urban Planning, Environmentalism, Public Policy, Transportation Economics
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek – Host
- Randal O’Toole – Senior Fellow, Cato Institute
Introduction [00:23]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. This show, every Sunday, is of ideas only, no attitude.
This morning we’re going to explore in great detail something which almost all Americans take for granted. It is just there. We take for granted that it is government-provided, a valuable if not essential public service, and it is something we all ought to embrace almost at the level of the proverbial motherhood and apple pie.
We are talking about mass transit. Mass transit, as you will learn, has been in New York and in other urban areas a virtual petri desk—petri dish—for the coronavirus. It has been called an urban parasite because of the way it consumes urban wealth and tax dollars while providing little or no benefit. But none of us get to think about it all that much; we probably have other, apparently to us, more important things to do.
Thank heaven we have men such as and scholars such as Randal O’Toole. Randal is a Cato Institute senior fellow. He works on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues. Randal, as you will learn, doesn’t care for trains all that much, and he has been studying mass transit for as long as probably I have been around. He will share so much wisdom about the merits or, more directly, the demerits, the disadvantages of mass transit and, relevant to today’s circumstances, how mass transit in the COVID-19 capital of New York has contributed to New York City’s problems involving the virus. You will learn this morning stuff you have never thought about, and at the end of the hour, you will be ever so thankful to have had the opportunity to learn the wisdom that Randal has to share. Randal, welcome to the show this morning.
Randal O’Toole: Hey, I’m glad to be here.
Transit and the Spread of COVID-19 [01:45]
Bob Zadek: Now, Randal, you have recently written about, with a data-driven piece, the relationship between COVID-19 and mass transit, focusing on the New York City area, which is, of course, appropriate because the New York City area has been, once again regretfully, ground zero for the problems involving, in this case, the virus. Why would you pick, although you’re no fan of mass transit in general and rail mass transit in particular, why would you single out New York City as the focus of your piece? And what have you learned from researching and writing the piece?
Randal O’Toole: Well, New York actually—the New York urban area—has about almost one-half of all transit ridership in the country. It only represents about 9% of the population of the country, but transit is pretty insignificant everywhere else. In New York, New York City itself, more than half the people who commute to work commute by transit. In the New York urban area, which includes northern New Jersey, it’s about 30% of the people who commute to work commute by transit.
So, New York transit is pretty essential to New York, and I just noticed it’s an interesting coincidence that almost half of all coronavirus deaths were in the New York urban area. In fact, it’s almost exactly the same. It’s about 45% of transit riders are in the New York urban area; 45% of coronavirus deaths are in the New York urban area.
So I looked up the research and I found a 2018 study that said mass transit is an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases. I found a 2011 study that said that people who ride mass transit are almost six times more likely to have acute respiratory infections than people who don’t ride mass transit. So it’s pretty clear that mass transit is involved in the epidemic in New York and the high numbers in New York.
After I wrote that, a new study came out just a week and a half ago. It was written by an economist from MIT, and he showed, looking at zip code coronavirus deaths and subway exits—the number of people exiting different subways in New York—and showed that it was the subways that were spreading the coronavirus in the New York urban area.
Also, I just encountered a paper from China that was published about three weeks ago, and they found that most coronavirus infections take place at home—you get infected by somebody else who’s infected in your house—but the second most number of infections, about more than a third of all infections, take place on mass transportation, which would be planes, trains, and urban transit. I asked the authors if they knew of any infections that took place in private automobiles, and they said they couldn’t find any examples. They did find that other venues like restaurants and theaters and entertainment centers, they made up about 8% of all contamination. So mass transit 34%, all other public places 8%, outdoors almost none. Almost all contaminations, almost all infections took place indoors.
So mass transit seems to be the main way that the virus is spread around. People might get it at home, but they’re getting it from somebody who rode mass transit. The second city in the country that’s second most dependent on transit after New York is New Orleans, and New Orleans is also a coronavirus hotspot. Perhaps the third most dependent city is Chicago, and that’s another coronavirus hotspot. So there’s not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between mass transit and coronavirus, but it’s pretty high.
It indicates to me that when we decided that we needed to ask people to stay at home and we decided to shut down restaurants and bars and things like that, we should have shut down mass transit at the same time. Instead, we kept it going, and now transit agencies are saying, “Well, you need to give us more money so we can provide services to essential workers so they can get to work.” And I’m thinking, “Oh, so you’re saying that mass transit makes people sick and you want to carry essential workers so you want to make essential workers sick?” I think maybe it might be more important to find a safer way to get those essential workers to work than it would be to give mass transit another $25 billion, which was what Congress gave them a few weeks ago.
The MTA’s Mask Policy Failure [06:17]
Bob Zadek: And of course, the gift was a gift in gross; it was just “here’s money.” And I’m sure there’s more than a mere coincidence that mass transit is, of course, as an activity class, as a business class if you will, highly unionized with a very effective public service workers union, and that couldn’t—and they are strong supporters of the Democratically controlled House. So I can’t imagine—I’m sure that is more than a coincidence.
Now, you pointed out also in your piece that the New York City—this is not going to be bashing the New York City mass transit system much, but it will be a little bit—and I want to mention this factoid that you pointed out about the relationship of masks to mass transit in New York City, because there was some pretty interesting stuff in your piece. Share with us that small item of information concerning masks and the New York City mass transit system.
Randal O’Toole: Well, it turns out that this isn’t the first pandemic that the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority has faced. Back in 2012, they were worried about an influenza pandemic, and so they wrote as a matter of policy that the MTA would keep on hand a six-week supply of masks, hand sanitizer, wipes, and so on for all of its employees so they could keep their trains clean and their buses clean and their employees safe during a pandemic.
Well, this one pandemic rolls around. The first recorded deaths in the United States take place at the end of February. So March 6th, the New York MTA sends out direction to all their employees that not only do they not have any masks available for them, they forbid them to wear masks because they said if you’re wearing masks, it’s going to create a panic and people are going to go out and buy masks and there won’t be enough masks left for healthcare providers. And besides, it’s not part of your official uniform.
So they tell them they can’t wear masks, and over the next three weeks, thousands of employees get sick, 72 of them die, and it was not until the end of the month before the MTA finally relents and allows them to wear masks and they finally distribute a few masks. But they only distribute one mask per employee—about 75,000 masks. They have 72,000 employees, so that’s not really going to be very effective. So it’s not just a matter of MTA spreading the virus; it’s a matter of MTA making bad decisions that actually made it worse, particularly for the employees, but also to some degree for their passengers.
Why Transit Agencies Ignore Customers [09:21]
Bob Zadek: Now, you have studied mass transit more than anybody else that I have ever met, and I am always grateful for the original scholarship you make available to us. Do you have any—since you have described some pretty irrational behavior by the leadership of the MTA insofar as the virus is concerned—can you give us an easy explanation? After all, these are professionals, these are people who are at the management level who are—of course, they’re hired in part by political decisions—but one would presume they are hired because of their expertise. How could they have made such a significant bad decision? What is there about the process of decision-making in mass transit, or is there nothing to generalize about how they could have gotten this so wrong?
Randal O’Toole: Well, the real problem with mass transit today is that most of its money comes from subsidies. About 75% of the cost of running mass transit is paid for by taxpayers, not by the people who actually use it. And that means that the people who run transit are not beholden to their customers; they’re beholden to the politicians who hand out the subsidy. And everything they do is aimed at pleasing the politicians.
So, for example, Los Angeles had a really good bus system a few years ago. They were carrying hundreds of millions of bus rides a year, and they decided to build rail transit. And as they built rail transit, it was so expensive they ended up cutting back on bus service and raised bus fares, and they lost five bus riders for every one rail rider they got. Well, they got sued by the NAACP because they said, “You’re cutting bus service to minority neighborhoods in order to build rail lines into white neighborhoods.” And the court ordered them to restore bus service for 10 years. They stopped building rail lines. As soon as the 10-year period—and ridership recovered. And as soon as the 10-year period expired, they immediately stopped their bus service, they cut back on bus service, they raised fares again, and started building rail again. And again, they lost five bus riders for every rail rider they gained.
So what’s the point? Building rail pleases politicians. They get their pictures taken at the groundbreaking ceremonies. They get their pictures taken at the ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Politicians thrive on new grandiose projects, and the fact that they’re losing five bus riders for every rail rider, well, that’s a triviality that gets covered up in the glare of the stainless steel trains that are running on empty on various tracks in various places.
So the transit systems are run for the politicians; they’re not run for the customers. And as a result, customers are fleeing, especially low-income riders. If you’re a low-income rider, you’re significantly less likely to ride transit today than you were 10 years ago. If you earn more than $75,000 a year, you’re more likely to ride transit today than you were 10 years ago. Transit has become a mode of travel for the high-income people, not low-income people, because the high-income people are more likely to vote and more likely to make campaign contributions to the politicians who support mass transit.
The Class Divide in Public Transit [13:17]
Bob Zadek: That is so counterintuitive for me and I’m sure to our listeners. I would have quite naturally—I would have just automatically imagined that mass transit, because it is subsidized and therefore the fair box cost is very low—artificially low, of course—that that would have given it a bias, a benefit bias towards people who would benefit from the subsidy, and that naturally one would conclude is low-income people. So can you tell us a little bit more about why what you said, which seems counterintuitive, why that is the case that mass transit customers are more middle and somewhat upper-class people as opposed to the lower-class people who ought to be benefiting from a subsidized mode of travel?
Randal O’Toole: Well, mass transit—most transit systems are hub-and-spoke systems, with the hub being the downtown of the city, of the major city, whether it’s Cincinnati or Denver or New York or Washington, and then spokes running away from that downtown area. That works well if you’re a downtown worker. It doesn’t work well if you work in the suburb. Most Americans today live in the suburbs and they work in the suburbs. They don’t go downtown hardly ever, and so they don’t ride mass transit.
Well, what kind of jobs are downtown? They’re bankers, they’re insurance companies, they’re finance companies, real estate companies, things like that. High-income jobs are the downtown jobs. And so with mass transit being focused on downtown, the high-income workers who work downtown—and then we build train lines to downtown because high-income people aren’t going to ride a bus, they’re going to ride a train. So we have to spend billions of dollars to take people downtown when we could have done it for a fraction of the cost with buses. And so those are the people who are riding transit: downtown office workers, and they tend to be high-income office workers.
Meanwhile, working-class workers—you know, construction workers and so on and so forth—those jobs aren’t downtown anymore. They haven’t been downtown in a long time. Factories moved away from downtown in the 1920s. So those jobs are in the suburbs, and mass transit doesn’t work in the suburbs. It won’t—if you work in one suburb and live in another suburb, to get from one to the other, you first have to go downtown and then go back out to the suburb. That can take hours. It’s just easier to drive. And so mass transit doesn’t work for working-class people; it works for downtown office workers, and those are the people who ride it.
Only about 8% of jobs in America are located in big city downtowns anymore. And so there’s not that many people to ride; it’s a very small customer base. And that’s—you know, the transit agencies go after those customers because they know they’re rich and they’re influential and they’re likely to vote. And they tell people, “Well, transit relieves congestion, transit reduces greenhouse gases, transit saves energy.” It doesn’t do any of those things, but they get people to vote for it based on the idea that, “Well, I’m not going to ride transit, but maybe if I vote for more transit subsidies, there’ll be less congestion because other people are going to ride it.” As The Onion once said, 98% of American commuters want other people to ride transit for them. And so transit gets support because of misconceptions like that.
The High Cost of Rail [17:13]
Bob Zadek: Now, you of course have written passionately and with great factual support, you have complained forever about spending money once we start with mass transit, about the massive capital expenditures that go into building a rail system as opposed to other modes of transportation. Now, after the break, we’re going to discuss, Randal, because you have so much to add to conventional wisdom on the environmental impact of all of this, and it is so interesting. I want to devote a fair amount of time after the break. But before we go to break, tell us what your problem is with rail. I grew up in—I grew up in—my most cherished toy was my Lionel electric train set. I was indoctrinated on trains since I was born. So what’s your problem with trains?
Randal O’Toole: Well, I actually—I love trains too. I had a train set. My first train ride was when I was five years old. I met my future wife on a train. I love trains; I think trains are very romantic. But I don’t think other people should have to subsidize my hobby. And that’s really what’s going on here. There’s a few people who love trains, whether it’s Amtrak or urban transit, and so they think everybody else should have to subsidize their hobby so they can ride trains. And that’s really a huge waste of money.
It costs about $5 million to build a lane of freeway—a mile of a freeway lane—and it’s costing $200 million to build a mile of light rail, and even more to build a mile of subway or elevated rail line. So we’re spending huge amounts of money; hardly anybody is riding these trains that we’re building, and it’s just not doing anybody any good.
Now, total subsidies—you know, unfortunately, highways are subsidized, and I’d like to see an end to those subsidies—but total subsidies to highways average about a penny for every passenger mile that is carried on highways, roads, and streets in America. Subsidies to mass transit average a dollar and a penny—a hundred times as much subsidy to mass transit. And I think we ought to end all the subsidies and see what happens. And if people want to ride mass transit, that’s fine, and I think private transit will spring up in various places in the country. But it’s going to look a lot different. You know, if your cost of driving increases by a penny a mile, you’re not going to change your habits much. But if your cost of riding mass transit rises by 50 cents or a dollar a mile, that’s going to affect how much you’re going to ride mass transit. And I think that’s really the market distortion that we’re seeing.
Bob Zadek: And when you have a market distortion, we lose the price mechanism which the market provides, and as our regular listeners know and as all the people who support and follow Cato’s economic scholarship, including you, with a price mechanism, with a free market, everybody gets to learn how much people are willing to pay for various goods and services. And with everything where the pricing is distorted, we have no idea what people want. And it is essential for government, when they are providing services, should at least provide the services people want, and people don’t get to vote with their dollars when there are subsidies.
The History of Transit Nationalization [21:23]
Bob Zadek: And of course, Randal, mass transit is almost 100% government-owned and operated, and that creates the pricing distortion. But it wasn’t always that way. And I’d like to, when we come back from our very short 30-second break, I want to take a walk down memory lane—and it wasn’t that long ago—that we had mass transit systems all privately owned and reasonably priced, making a profit. A pretty gosh-darn good system from an economic model, but that all went away. And Randal, when we come back from break, share with us the history and the forces that caused mass transit as a service to switch from private to public. This is Bob Zadek, we’re spending an hour with Randal O’Toole this morning. Randal is a Cato Institute senior fellow. He works on urban growth, public land, and transportation, and we are lifting the hood on mass transit in America with the absurd pricing distortions giving people exactly what they do not want, what they do not need, and actually hurts them. Lots more to follow. Please stay tuned.
[Commercial Break]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. We are this morning and always the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. This morning we are spending our hour with Randal O’Toole. Randal is a Cato Institute senior fellow. He works on urban policy and transportation issues. He’s an Oregon native, lives somewhat rurally, if I can invent that phrase. He also is the author of The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths. That book came out a while ago, is still in print, it is a—if you can believe it—a must-read if you want to learn the truth behind the battle between the automobile and mass transit as competing modes of transportation.
Now, Randal, before the break, I teed up an issue that I want to explore just in a few minutes, a little history lesson if you will. There was a time in my lifetime that almost all mass transit was privately owned and it was—unless you will be correcting me—it was reasonably profitable, the price was market-driven, and the system kind of worked okay. And now today we have a system of government-owned, highly subsidized, providing a product that most people don’t want at a price which is artificially low, providing the service to the wrong neighborhoods for political rather than market reasons. How did everything get ruined?
Randal O’Toole: Well, it’s an interesting story because it relates to intercity passenger trains. In the late 1950s, it was pretty clear that intercity passenger trains were fading away and the railroads were losing money at them. The Interstate Commerce Commission had written that they expect that they’ll all disappear by 1970, which was almost true if it weren’t for the fact that the government took them over.
But in 1958, Congress wrote a law that made it easier for the railroads to drop intercity passenger trains. They expected that that law would apply to trains like Chicago to New York or Chicago to Los Angeles trains. But the railroads also had commuter trains. They had commuter trains in Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, maybe one or two other cities. And so some of the railroads decided to drop some of those commuter trains. And this led to a big kerfuffle because downtown areas in those big cities depended on the commuter trains. There was too many jobs downtown for people to come in and downtown by automobile, so they needed those commuter trains to keep the jobs downtown rather than have the jobs go to the suburbs, which they had already done in most other cities.
And so this was really a way to protect downtown property owners. Congress passed a law that said it would help subsidize any state or local governments that took over those commuter trains. But we’re only talking about four or five cities here. And Congress can’t pass a law that just protects four or five cities because politically they can’t get enough votes to do that. So in order to get enough votes, they said, “We’ll subsidize any city or state that takes over any public transit: buses, trains, whatever, cable cars, anything.”
And so that law was passed in 1964. As of 1964, the vast majority of the transit industry was private, as you say. The vast majority of it was profitable. Ridership was declining, but they were responding to the declines as best they could by making the systems more efficient and cutting service where they had to, but they were profitable.
Well, within five years, almost every city took over their transit system. Subsidies started pouring into transit. And at first, it seemed like it was a good idea. Ridership started increasing because of the replacement of worn-out equipment with brand-new equipment. And in Portland, Oregon, for example, the percentage of people who rode transit to work increased from about 8% in 1970 to 10% in 1980.
But then rail transit, which the transit agencies had dropped like a hot potato when buses were invented because buses were so much cheaper than rails to operate and to buy—somebody figured out, “Hey, as long as the federal government is throwing money at transit, let’s spend some of it on trains because we’ll get more than our fair share if we’re building a really expensive rail line.” So they started building these really expensive rail lines to replace cheap buses. The buses were flexible; they could go on various schedules, you could reroute them if necessary. The rail lines were inflexible. And so instead of rerouting the trains when travel habits changed, they decided that they had to become land-use czars and dictate where people could live, where people could work, so that they would be in a place where they might ride their trains.
So we have a double subsidy going on here. We’ve got subsidies to the trains, then we’ve got land-use subsidies and land-use regulations trying to get people to ride the trains. And it’s become a giant scam, in my opinion, in that we’ve whitewashed transit as a good thing, or we’ve greenwashed it as a good thing, it’s good for the environment, when in fact it isn’t. And it is costing taxpayers not just the $50 billion we spend subsidizing transit, but billions more that we spend subsidizing high-density housing projects along the transit lines, hoping that a few people in those housing projects will ride transit. And it’s become not just a transportation scheme, but a lifestyle reformation where we’re trying to change people socially, engineer people’s lifestyles so they’ll want to ride transit instead of driving their car.
And the coronavirus, I think, explodes all those myths because suddenly we see that, hey, transit makes people more vulnerable to viruses. And if we look back over the last few years, we say, “Hey, you know, transit’s also more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, transit also doesn’t help us in the event of natural disasters.” If we need to evacuate, we have to use cars. Cars just work better than transit for evacuating. And if we have a financial crisis or a recession, transit ends up because it’s very labor-intensive, transit ends up having to either have huge cuts or we have to increase their subsidies. Whereas highways, which aren’t labor-intensive, they’re there. We can ride on them, we can drive on them when we need to, and we can ignore them when we don’t need to. So we have a transportation system that’s resilient in the event of various crises, and that’s highways and automobiles. We have a transportation system that has very little resiliency, and that’s mass transit. And yet we’re throwing billions of dollars a year at the non-resilient one and doing everything we can to penalize people who are using the resilient one. That, I think, is bad policy.
Debunking Environmental Myths [30:34]
Bob Zadek: And what’s really interesting in that narrative you just shared with us is the relationship between real estate values and mass transit, particularly train lines. And when you’re building a train line and committing massive, massive sums of money, capital expenditures as you have described, as to deciding where to actually run the rail line, there’s a decision that has to be made which is kind of permanent. That is, you certainly want to have the rail line service a well-populated area. On the other hand, neighborhoods become into and out of favor. Look at Brooklyn in New York City, where Brooklyn was 25 or 30 years ago kind of undesirable; nowadays it is a hot neighborhood, if you will, or has lots of hot neighborhoods. Well, you can’t just move rail lines around like dominoes where the people are. It’s kind of permanent, and therefore you make a decision which neighborhoods to favor and which to not favor. And therefore you are distorting the decision-making on where people want to live, just like schools do in a way. So Randal, there is a really a fascinating and very tight connection between land values and mass transit, that is, train decisions, isn’t there?
Randal O’Toole: Well, that’s true to a limited extent. It makes a difference what kind of train you have. If you have a streetcar that can’t move very many people, you’re not going to have any influence on land values at all. If you have light rail that moves modest numbers of people, you’re not going to have much of an influence on land values. And if you have a heavy rail system, a subway system like the San Francisco BART or New York subway that moves lots and lots of people, that can have an influence on land values.
But it’s a zero-sum game. You build a new subway line or a new elevated express line somewhere, you might increase the land values in one part of your city, but that’s going to be offset by a lack of increase somewhere else in the city. Overall, the urban values of the overall city don’t change at all. Mostly when you build rail line, if you get most of the people who are riding it were former bus riders, some of them might be former auto drivers, you’re not generating all that much new traffic that wasn’t taking place before; you’re just getting people out of one mode and onto another. And that means you’re not getting any new economic activity.
Whereas if you build a new freeway, people are going to be driving on that freeway who weren’t driving before. The freeway opponents call it “induced demand,” like it’s somehow bad that you’re getting more economic activity, more people are finding better jobs, more people are getting their products to customers, more people are getting their services out to customers, whether it’s construction or plumbing or electronics or whatever. And you’re getting new economic activity, and that new economic activity adds to the growth and the wealth of your urban area. Highways can do that; mass transit for the most part can’t do that. All they do is have a zero-sum game where one person wins and another person loses and the overall wealth of the community stays about the same.
Bob Zadek: The elephant in the room, if you will—and I alluded to this before the break—is how environmental concerns influence a decision. We all know that in the urban areas, there is a profound bias against the automobile. Automobile travel, especially with the internal combustion engine which burns gasoline—ugh—there is a profound bias against the automobile on the basis of environmental concerns. And that is why train travel is favored because it is claimed that train travel is more environmentally efficient. Help us understand how the environmental issue impacts automobiles, trains, airplanes, buses, and the like, because there is so much misunderstanding out there, Randal, that only you can help us understand what the true facts are.
Randal O’Toole: Well, the environmentalists are about 50 years behind the times. 50 years ago, automobiles were unsafe—you know, they caused more than 50,000 deaths per year—they produced enormous amounts of pollution. I was living in Portland, Oregon; you couldn’t see Mount Hood on a sunny day, which is 40 miles from Portland, because of all the air pollution. And of course, they were gas hogs; they used enormous amounts of energy. And at that time, mass transit was greener than driving.
Well, since then, a lot has changed. We drive smaller cars, we’ve got catalytic converters, we’ve got safer roads, we’ve got safer cars with crumple zones and collapsible steering wheels and padded dashes and seat belts. And as a result, the fatality rates per billion vehicle miles have gone way, way down. The air pollution has declined by 90% per mile of driving. The energy consumption has declined by 40%. And automobiles today are the green form of travel.
If you want to travel in a way that has the least environmental impact and is the safest, automobiles are much safer than, say, light rail, which kills about 13 people for every billion passenger miles it carries, whereas automobiles in cities kill only about seven or eight people. And on freeways, urban freeways, they kill only about four people per billion passenger miles. So automobiles are safer, they produce a lot less air pollution, they use a lot less energy. Average in about 480 out of 488 urban areas in this country, mass transit uses more energy than the average SUV per passenger mile, much less the average car or a fuel-efficient car like a Prius or something like that. So mass transit is the brown form of travel, and we have to get away from the idea that just because it’s mass doesn’t mean it’s green.
You’ve got buses that carry on average just nine passengers; they’re capable of carrying 60 passengers, which means if you drive around in your Lincoln Navigator and you’re the only one in the vehicle, your vehicle has a higher occupancy rate than the average transit bus because most of their seats are empty on average. So those buses use enormous amounts of fuel; they typically get about four to five miles per gallon of fuel, and they’re just not very energy-efficient. And they’re spewing out as much greenhouse gases as your vehicle, and if you have a plug-in hybrid or something like that, you’re far more greenhouse-friendly than transit.
Now, rail transit is sometimes electrically powered. But guess what? Most of the electricity in this country comes from burning fossil fuels. And even where it doesn’t, you have to spend enormous amounts of energy and generate enormous amounts of greenhouse gases building new rail lines. So even if, like on the West Coast, where most energy comes from hydroelectric dams and you don’t spew a lot of greenhouse gases from those dams, to build a rail line, you use so much energy that it takes 70 or 80 years of savings to recover the amount of energy and greenhouse gases you emitted in building the rail line in the first place. Well, that’s just not going to work because, as you say, 70 years from now, nobody’s going to be riding those trains. I don’t think anybody’s going to be riding them 10 years from now. So you’re just never going to pay back that enormous greenhouse gas cost and the enormous energy cost of constructing rail transit.
The Political Shift in Environmentalism [39:27]
Bob Zadek: Now, you and I are—neither one of us study politics all that much; we study the effect of politics on life and on economic life and the economy, but not on politics per se. So accepting or starting with what you have just explained to us, and if you concede that environmentalists, while the environmental issues are important to them, and since you present data that makes a compelling case that the environment is best served from a transit standpoint by the automobile and by freeways, why would there be resistance in the environmental movement, if I can use that phrase? Why don’t they just say, “Thanks, we hadn’t thought of that,” and “We are most true to our environmental values by promoting automobile and freeway and, if we have time, driverless cars if we have time today”? But why are they stubbornly sticking to their anti-automobile orientation when their goals are best served by the automobile?
Randal O’Toole: Well, it’s interesting that you ask that because I actually spent the first 25 years of my career working for environmental groups. I was doing the same kind of work I’m doing today, except it was on natural resources like forests and parks. I worked for almost as a consultant for almost every major environmental group in the country: the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Audubon, National Wildlife, and so forth. And working for these groups, they really cared about protecting the environment, and they didn’t care whether we used markets or government or whatever tools; their goal was to protect the environment.
That all changed after 1990. You may recall that around 1990, the Soviet Union fell, and it became disreputable to call yourself a socialist in this country. And so the people who were socialists looked around and they discovered, “Well, you know, the one thing that Americans think that we need government for is protecting the environment.” So they joined the environmental movement and they took it over. So now the goal of the environmental movement is not to protect the environment; the goal is to make government bigger, to promote their big government agenda. We can call it socialism; they’ll tell you it’s not socialism, they’ll tell you it’s progressivism, but it’s the same thing.
And they don’t care about what the impact of their policies is on the environment; what they care about is making government bigger. I left the movement at that time. A lot of my friends also left the movement. Other ones who stayed in the movement tell me privately that they can’t speak out their true opinions because if they do, they’ll get fired or shunned or whatever. So the environmental movement has changed. Their goal isn’t to protect the environment; their goal is to make government bigger, and mass transit is one good way of doing that.
Bob Zadek: So the environmental movement has become a political or economically driven organization rather than its original values of environmentalism. That’s—Randal, that’s fascinating. I hadn’t ever focused on that, but now when I think—when I quickly play in my own brain all of the most extreme spokespeople for the environmental movement, it kind of checks out, Randal. I hadn’t, until you said that, I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but as I think back quickly as we’re speaking to all of the policies of the “environmental movement,” it’s consistent with what you just said. But why aren’t the true environmentalists—why were they so passive in allowing their goals to get co-opted?
Randal O’Toole: Well, in the 1980s, environmentalists discovered that the way to get contributions, the way to get support, the way to get political support was to demonize someone. So they demonized James Watt, they demonized the Reagan administration, and they got large amounts of contributions from that demonization. Well, in 1992, a Democrat was elected to the White House. They’d been telling people for 12 years that the problem with the environment was that there was a Republican in the White House and that Republican was threatening the environment. And so as soon as the Democrat entered the White House, all these people stopped making contributions to the environmental movement because the problem was solved; we now had a Democrat in the White House and there were no more environmental problems.
And so these groups were desperate for money, and they turned to foundations. And the foundations gave them money on the condition that they would all sit down and agree on the same policies. The socialists came in, took over the environmental movement, took over those meetings with the foundations, and essentially—I can’t tell you whether the foundations themselves were big government socialist types, but I know that anybody who spoke out in favor of markets or things like that, instead of demonizing the White House, they started demonizing the market, the free market environmentalists, and drummed them out of the movement so that the foundations only ended up giving their money to the environmental groups that wanted big government. If you were an environmentalist and you didn’t want big government, you were shunned, you didn’t get any money, and it created real problems for you. And so you either left the movement or you hunkered down and didn’t express your opinions.
The Future of Transit Post-COVID [45:28]
Bob Zadek: And so what you have concluded is that whether you favor environmentalism, whether you favor simply free markets—let the marketplace determine the value of land and let the marketplace determine how one gets back and forth to work and to maximize productivity—that this demonizing of the automobile, which as you pointed out earlier, which was really an interesting point, that while the negative feelings towards automobile as a transportation mode is accurate, it’s just 50 years out of date. And that today, if we were starting today, environmentalists, urban planners, environmentalists, everybody ought to be encouraging automobile travel as a way to get around.
Now, Randal, we have only a couple of minutes left. What do you see as the most optimistic and the most realistic future for mass transit in America? We have two minutes.
Randal O’Toole: Well, realistically, mass transit doesn’t have much of a future except for in a few big cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Boston. I expect that we’re going to see huge declines in ridership as we recover from this pandemic because people are going to be discovering that they can work at home better than they can ride transit to work. And for a while, there’s still going to be a push to continue subsidizing it, but with the decline in ridership, I think the subsidies are going to fade away. And with that fading away, we’re going to see public transit replaced by private transit, and they’ll do a good job in the core of dense cities like San Francisco and New York. And you’ll still be able to take transit to work, but if you live in a suburb, if you live in a smaller city like Phoenix or San Antonio—you know, one that’s low-density and doesn’t have a dense urban core—there’s not going to be much transit left. If there are any government agencies at all, they’re going to be zombie agencies that are sucking up tax dollars to pay off their pension and healthcare obligations and maybe running a few buses in order to justify those tax dollars.
Bob Zadek: Randal, thank you so much for your wisdom this hour. It was a fascinating hour. I and my audience learned so much from what you have shared. Bob Zadek saying thank you to Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Thank you so much for listening.