Think Tank Study Attacks MTA’s 20-Year Plan

In a new report that excoriates the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for favoring rail projects over buses, a public-policy think tank contends the transit agency’s 20-year plan for moving commuters in Los Angeles County is based on flawed assumptions, faulty data and inconsistent scenarios that underestimate the long-term cost of building and running trains.

The report, coauthored by USC professor James E. Moore II and Thomas Rubin, a former Rapid Transit District financial executive, asserts that the MTA uses questionable accounting methods to make both heavy and light rail systems appear less costly and more effective than they actually are, and finds the transit agency’s forecasts for subway and light-rail use “optimistic” at best.

The report was commissioned by the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, which is variously described as libertarian or free-market in orientation.

Whether the MTA should continue to concentrate its funding on a rail system rather than bus services has been hotly debated for years. A Los Angeles bus riders union has filed a lawsuit seeking to force the agency to spend less on rail and more on buses, on the grounds that more people use buses. The authors of the study said they have volunteered to serve as expert witnesses for the riders union in the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial Oct. 8.

In one of their more surprising forecasts, the authors say that fewer riders will utilize the Red Line subway system than currently use some bus corridors. The Red Line, being built at a projected cost of about $5.8 billion, will run from downtown to Western Avenue by mid-July. Within the next two decades, it will also link the Eastside, the Wilshire Corridor and the San Fernando Valley.

The authors also say that, contrary to MTA forecasts, an expanded bus system would create more jobs and less air pollution than a rail system.

“If the MTA’s long-term plan is followed, the MTA will find itself committed to construction of rail lines it can neither afford to build or operate,” says coauthor Thomas Rubin, a transit consultant who left his job as controller-treasurer at the RTD in 1993, when it was reorganized into the MTA.

MTA spokeswoman Mary Ann Maskery said agency executives would not comment on the report because they had not reviewed it. In the next year, she said, the MTA will launch a public review of its 20-year plan and present the findings at a board meeting next March.

*

MTA board Chairman Larry Zarian, however, said that while he has “tremendous respect” for Reason Foundation Director Robert W. Poole, he believes that the report underestimates the need for rail.

“Several decades ago, people had the same questions about spending billions for freeways,” said Zarian, a Glendale city councilman. “Our investment in rail today is going to likewise prove to be one of the most important transportation accomplishments of our time.”

Poole, who was recently appointed to a state transportation commission by Gov. Pete Wilson, responded in an interview that he believes the county’s obsession with rail is “bizarre” by normal yardsticks of public finance.

“What you’ve got is a fascination by elected officials with trains,” he said. “The whole system is driven by the political need to do something splashy for each major geographical segment of L.A., regardless of whether it makes sense.”

The report was co-written by James E. Moore II, a professor of urban planning and civil engineering at USC. He began with a critique of the research conducted by the MTA to support its 20-year plan, which was released in March 1995.

The Reason report claims, for example, that one set of population and travel-speed forecasts were used in the MTA plan’s finance model and another set of figures in the transportation model, yielding “suspect” supply and demand figures.

In another example, the report terms “unbelievable” an implication in the MTA plan that there will be fewer riders on public transit systems in 2015 than in 1985, despite a predicted 33.4% increase in the population of Los Angeles.

The report also questions the MTA’s plan to divert funding from buses to rail. Even though some MTA bus lines now serve more riders than the number of patrons who use the Metrolink suburban train system, the report notes that the transit agency plans to reduce bus funding over the next 20 years by $454 million.

The report says that if the $417 million the MTA proposes to spend over the next two decades on transit planning alone were spent on providing bus service instead, the agency could serve 469 million passengers--almost as many as the MTA plan indicates would be carried by rail over the next 20 years if all its planned train lines are built.

The authors call rail an “expensive, ineffective use of scarce resources” that would be better put to work creating more cost-effective means of transportation.

They suggest instead that the MTA use its capital to expand and improve the county’s bus system, reduce bus fares, expand the area’s system of carpool lanes and bus-only freeway lanes, experiment with privatized shuttle services and try to raise money by charging a toll for solo car drivers to use carpool lanes.

The authors say that since the MTA began spending significant sums on rail in 1986, total use of public transit in the county has dropped 20%, even as the population increased 13%.

The report claims that bus operations create five times as many local jobs as rail construction. And the report suggests that if buses cost too much, low-income commuters will use older cars for transportation, creating more smog.

Moore, the USC professor, said in an interview that if a doctoral student had produced the MTA’s 20-year plan as a thesis, he would be flunked.

“The plan is internally inconsistent, it’s not thorough, it’s unsystematic, logically incorrect, circular and self-serving,” he said.

Moore alleged that the rail system was created to absorb money rather than create a more effective transportation system.

“If you’re in the business of getting bigger in the private sector, being efficient helps because you have to compete,” he said. “If you’re the public sector, the rules are different. Being efficient isn’t necessarily a strategy that leads to growth. It’s usually more important to justify additional tax revenues. And rail consumes a lot of revenues.”