June 30, 2009

The Metrorail Crash: Disastrous Government

There’s no making light of last week’s accident on the Red Line of the Metrorail system here in the Washington, D.C. area. Nine people are dead.

But it’s fair game to point out that the worst of government in America today is on display across the board in the mishap. While no one yet knows for certain how the crash happened, all the ingredients of a recipe for disaster were in place.

Start with a gold-plated mass transit system, the construction of which was largely financed by federal, state and local taxpayers who never ride it. Sprinkle in perennial funding shortfalls due to inefficient (read “politically driven”) operation, lucrative union contracts and the dreaded “lack of a dedicated revenue source” (read “regional tax similarly unrelated to the benefit conferred”).

Bake well to yield chronic underinvestment – including the failure to respond to the National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendation to replace, to the tune of $1 billion, outmoded rail cars of the type involved in the pileup. And frost the concoction (and the public) with, according to the Wall Street Journal, a sale-leaseback contract to take advantage of a loophole in our insane tax code – under which the cars reportedly could not be taken out of service for years to come.

The calamity led to the usual cry from the media and political elitists: When will we establish that “dedicated revenue source” to get Metro out from under its red ink? But the question that really needs asking is precisely the opposite: Why is the public funding public transportation in the first place?

I hear the scoffing now: Neanderthal! Everyone knows we all benefit from mass transit’s reduction of traffic and pollution. Besides – we subsidize drivers by building highways.

To which I reply: Exactly! If we really want to reduce traffic, pollution and energy waste, let’s make mass transit and highway users pay the full freight, so to speak, for their own transportation. Why should a virtuous home-based worker such as I, who travels to Washington only once or so a week, subsidize the travel of people who commute there daily?

After all, the technology exists to figure out who is on what road where and when, and Metro and other mass-transit systems have already established the concept of charging based on distance.

And once we’ve crossed that felicitous Rubicon, the next step is easy and logical: Once travel revenues are user-based, why not privatize both mass transit and highway transportation?

Once again noses turn up: Imbecile. Everyone knows you could never privately raise the capital for expensive mass-transit and highway projects.

To which I again respond: Exactly! If neither public transport nor road projects can pay for themselves – including construction and ongoing maintenance – they almost certainly aren’t worth the investment in the first place. Privatization would result in projects driven by actual value delivered to commuters and travelers, and not by politics and prestige.

Spend billions on a publicly funded Metrorail to Dulles Airport? Why, when privately financed buses could do the trick much more cheaply and with far greater flexibility (not to mention sooner)? It’s guaranteed that once that boondoggle is completed, Metro will whine about how it can’t afford the upkeep of that route, either.

It’s no coincidence that the D.C. metro area is also plagued with financing shortages for road construction and maintenance – and traffic nightmares. If a service is artificially underpriced, demand will be high and supply low. Plus, if government is involved, politics will indeed drive inefficiencies and misallocation of funds (for example, from urban to rural areas).

As my friend and former Virginia Republican Chairman Pat McSweeney points out, if we would turn to private transportation solutions – he writes of highways, but I include mass transit as well – our traffic problems become profit opportunities.

Or we can continue to entrust the challenge to disastrously overwrought, overpriced yet “underfunded” (read “misfunded”) governments entities such as Metro. With predictably disastrous results.