Neal Peirce’s latest column struck fear in the heart of rail activists across the country this week. With the transportation bill gingerly working its way through Congress, some feared the recent article published in the Journal for the American Planning Association by Danish planning professor Bent Flyvbjerg and Peirce’s quotes from him mgiht be used inappropriately. Others chimed in with their re-enforcement of the Dane’s flawed logic. Here’s more from Peirce and our Citistates Associate Alex Marshall, a prominent transportation expert.
Peirce: Quoting the folks you may not agree with is one of the perils of newspaper columning … especially if you put their quotes first. I did that just to be fair to a Danish rail critic Bent Flyvbjerg last week– quoting his findings on cases of rail projects where first-year ridership fell far below projections.
Maybe I should have expected a quick response in e-mails of despair from rail advocates. One for example noted:
(Flyvbjerg) is categorically wrong on his facts, but the anti-city, anti Eastern, anti-transit kooks in the Bush Administration will seize upon it. The facts are exactly the opposite: in my experience over the last 16 years, rail studies usually underestimate ridership because there is so little reliable data.
Even the DC Metro, a whipping boy for over-budget projects, is net a good thing: the investment around Metro stations, especially in formerly derelict areas of Washington following the DC riots, literally saved the city.
Marshall: I reviewed Megaprojects, a book by (Flyvbjerg) last year, for Architectural Record. Here is some of what I noted.
“The limited thesis of the first book, Megaprojects, written by academics from Denmark, Sweden and Germany, appears true, as far as it goes. Using the Chunnel between Paris and London, the Great Belt link between Denmark and the European continent, and the Oresund bridge and tunnel between Malmo in Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark as their chief case studies, principal author Bent Flyvbjerg and his colleagues show that proponents routinely underestimated costs and overestimated benefits, which usually meant ridership. They prove their point with reams of data. They say the trains through the Chunnel, for example, still have only about 50 million passengers a year, versus the 100 million predicted for its first year in 1994. Flyvbjerg argues for a more realistic method of project evaluation and gives an example of such in his last chapter.
But their method of analysis is as flawed as the ones used in the projects they criticize. In general, the authors pay scant attention to the idea that infrastructure spending generates economic growth even if it requires government support. The authors are constrained by looking at only easily quantifiable costs and revenues. What they can’t easily measure, they don’t see.
“There is correlation between investments in infrastructure and economic growth, yes, but cause and effect have not been proven to anything that may be called scientific standards,” Flyvbjerg said in an email exchange. “The same correlation holds for, say, investments in refrigerators, electric shavers, and a host of other items that go hand in hand with economic growth, but few have argued that investment in such devices cause growth.”
I beg to differ. Even a casual look at transportation historically shows that infrastructure spending drives economic growth in more fundamental ways than routine consumer spending. If Flyvbjerg’s green-eye-shade approach to infrastructure had been used, New York would have never built the Erie Canal in 1817, the United States would not have built the interstate highway network in the 1950s, and France would not have built its high-speed train network in the 1990s. But such projects helped keep these states’ citizens prosperous.
Rather than criticize the Chunnel for its poor performance, Flyvbjerg might have modeled what would have happened if government, rather than the private consortium, had built the Chunnel. If the Chunnel was publicly built, the fares could have been kept lower to insure greater use of a public asset.”