As growing cities like Dallas, Austin and Atlanta sprawl, they often invest in high-cost transit and highway projects that ignore their residents’ immediate needs.
As many U.S. cities in the Sunbelt continue to see massive amounts of sprawling housing growth, local and state transportation authorities are making big investments. Austin, for example, is planning to spend about $8 billion on reconstructing a freeway near downtown and several more billions on a new light rail network.
But as I explain in a new Manhattan Institute report, many of the investments these boomtowns are making share a few common drawbacks. Many completed and planned Sunbelt light rail investments are poorly designed and are not likely to get much ridership. Highway expansions, for their part, are often geared toward serving new exurban developments — where there are fewer job opportunities available for working- and lower-class residents — rather than increasing transportation capacity where it is most needed near existing jobs and housing.
Many Sunbelt cities have spent billions of dollars on building rail transit systems, often from scratch. For instance, Dallas-Fort Worth — already home to the nation’s longest light rail system, though one that gets pitiful ridership — is spending $1.2 billion on the Silver Line, a new rail line that will connect DFW Airport to several of Dallas’s affluent northern suburbs. Austin is also building a new light rail line to connect downtown with the airport. Several other cities, such as Atlanta and Denver, are planning new light rail investments of their own.
These plans typically prioritize destinations that are easy to get political support for, rather than ones that serve the most riders and jobs. Airport connections often get more political support than is warranted, given their limited utility. Not many residents will take a train to an airport every day, but far more will support building one on the grounds that they might use it occasionally. Meanwhile, airports are typically surrounded by long stretches of sparsely developed land, meaning stations between the airport and downtown have little potential for ridership.
Many other cities’ planned rail expansions run through sparsely developed areas mostly because it is easy to build there, often because there are preexisting unused rights of way or because there are few property owners to object. Atlanta examplifies this tendency: One of the planned capital expansion projects of MARTA, the Atlanta area’s public transport agency, is building light rail on the Clifton Corridor, a disused rail right-of-way that runs mostly through low-density suburban-style development. The project’s principal benefit will be offering Emory University a circuitous connection to MARTA’s heavy rail network that provides only indirect routes to Atlanta’s most important destinations.
Highway investments are no better prioritized. Even though most boomtowns have heavily decentralized employment patterns, the most congested freeway segments are still those in the downtown areas. Nevertheless, in general, most boomtowns’ transportation investments are focused on suburban and exurban areas. For instance, the Dallas area is planning to spend billions of dollars on expanding freeways in relatively peripheral areas — including widening one freeway in the far north of the region to serve new exurban developments. At the same time, the metro’s network of express lanes, which could dramatically improve travel times and reliability for regional buses, still has some important gaps, including the most vital freeway connections into central Dallas. In Atlanta, similarly, major investments are slated for expansions of the metropolitan area’s Perimeter Freeway and upgrades to freeway segments in the exurbs “outside the Perimeter,” but relatively little for improving transportation capacity to the established center of Atlanta.
The common thread in these problems is a neglect of market principles. The best indicator of how much transit improvements are needed is how much people are willing to pay for them.
How can cities make better decisions? First, investments should be targeted to areas with indications of existing demand, in ways that limit risk to public finances. For example, to see if demand would justify more intensive capital investment, municipalities could first try running improved bus service, which, except on very high-ridership corridors, is more cost-effective than light rail in its own right.
Another possibility: Instead of expensive highway widenings to provide more general-purpose lanes, local transportation authorities can hire private contractors to build “managed express” lanes, physically separated from the main lanes, that allow access to public transit vehicles as well as any cars that are willing to pay a toll. Tolls vary throughout the day to ensure free-flowing traffic, relieving peak-hour congestion on main roads by increasing capacity and making public buses more reliable and attractive to riders. Managed express lanes can even be built profitably in elevated structures in existing freeway medians, mitigating effects on surrounding areas. Managed express lanes have virtually eliminated congestion on busy highways like the Lee Selmon Expressway in Tampa. Such projects would be cost-effective, market-based alternatives both to large-scale freeway widenings and to building new transit networks in areas with unproven demand.
The need for exurban freeways, meanwhile, are in large measure a consequence of anti-market zoning laws. Such regulations often limit construction denser than single-family houses on large lots in central areas with the best job access. Under less stringent land use regimes, housing demand currently pushed to the fringes of large metropolitan areas could be absorbed by denser market-rate development in areas closer to existing job centers. In these areas, commutes could be handled via walking, bikes or existing mass transit.
Rising housing prices and successful, privately led revitalization of many near-downtown areas show that there is a demand for center-city living that many zoning codes do not accommodate. Houston, for instance, is the poster child for uncontrolled suburban sprawl in popular stereotype, but many of its inner neighborhoods, such as Montrose, have become genuinely urban over the past several years because, unlike every other major U.S. city, Houston never implemented a formal zoning code.
The rapid growth of many Sunbelt cities testifies to the wisdom of pro-market policies in areas such as business regulation and suburban housing construction. Many, however, have yet to learn the same lesson in transportation policy. More market-oriented transportation and land use policies could make transportation networks far more efficient and save billions of dollars of public expenditures.
______________________
Connor Harris is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here. Based on a recent MI report.
This piece originally appeared in Bloomberg