The Citistates Group

A big impediment to transit growth in our regions has to be the bitterly divided views of light rail and bus proponents.

I discovered that following an August column focused on Honolulu’s transition from attempted light rail a decade ago to a busway now. As U.S. metro regions face ever-more-horrific traffic crunches, I suggested, busways might at least offer quicker and less expensive alternatives — at least until growing ridership justifies a switch to rail.

Heresy! Suddenly, I found myself in the midst of a statistical food fight between rail and bus proponents. From coast to coast, the squash came flying in, then the peas, a veritable e-mail barrage.

I’d been “cuckolded by the busway fraud,” wrote one reader, citing alleged inflated costs and unrealized ridership projections from new bus services in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Houston and Ottawa.

No, said others, L.A.’s efforts, emulating Curitiba, Brazil, are among the new success, not failure stories. Buses deliver affordable and much quicker new service, not to mention flexibility when routes need to be shifted.

Take a look, one reader advised, at Adelaide, Australia, claimed to be using “regular street buses to provide the entire system at a fraction of the cost of light rail.”

No, said others, buses aren’t the bargain they appear. “Busways, to be grade-separated and effective, are bigger, more obtrusive, and probably as expensive as rail,” wrote a former federal transit chief. “Buses,” he added, “cost more to operate since you can carry fewer people per driver and they have a shorter useful life than rail cars.”

The irony for me is that I personally prefer rail. Though if there were ever a season to be open-minded, to search out least-cost alternatives, it’s now — especially as Bush budget deficits clamp down on federal subsidies for new systems.

Transit boosters better get together and decide on realistic, clear ways to assess and compare costs. Of course there’ll always be other valid issues, from aesthetics to safety to city image to quality of ride. But at least agree, guys, on likely costs, or the AAA crowd and asphalt hard-hats will keep on eating your lunch.

The major American urban centers, lining both the east and west coasts, are fast running out of fresh land for more people. But merely reciting the smart-growth mantras about more compact centers creates no real markets. Investment in convenient connections and mobility choices that don’t depend entirely on cars might. More investment in rail is a part of the answer.

Even though Congress still doesn’t get it, rail is behaving like a Warren Buffett value stock through this lingering recession. Those weary stock trackers on CNBC pointed out today that while the broader stock index has taken a dive over the last year, the transportation sector has held its ground. No thanks to airlines for sure. The strength is in rail holdings.

That strength is of course about commercial freight lines. But it makes we Citistaters think about passengers. The same day, the Wall Street Journal, while reporting a suspension in Amtrak’s Acela service due to cracks in shock and sway absorbers, said that Amtrak’s service in the Washington-Boston corridor now carries more passengers every day than U.S. Airways and Delta airline shuttles combined.

Still, appropriations for Amtrak are routinely excoriated as wasteful subsidies, while taxpayers have “lended” America West a bucketful of cash and may have to feather U.S. Airways flight from bankruptcy within the next year.

Watch how fast some congressmen will call for giving up on higher speed train service, now that the Acela train sets are showing some structural weaknesses. Cars and vans are recalled for defects every year, but nobody suggests reducing service to roads and bridges.

Perhaps it’s because Amtrak is a semi-public organization, like the postal service, that we feel such contempt for its business practices. The freight side of rail, after a brutal decade of consolidations, manages to make money for its investors. Even by the pound, passengers won’t pay what freight does. But imagine for a moment a federal government that maintained a sound track system, a backbone network covering the country. Something like the Interstate system, including formulas for cost sharing with states. If we treated rail like roads, maybe they’d be sustainable as well as popular.

(See Neal Peirce’s July 10 weblog entry, Amtrak, Rails, Regions.)

The “creatives” are on the move, morphing the socioeconomic map of the nation.

Musicians, software developers, engineers, artists — people who make a living with ideas, creating value with new products, services, or just experiences — are converging on Austin, Texas, say Austin American-Statesman writers Bill Bishop and Mark Lisheron.

Only a few months since Richard Florida thrust the “creative class” into the nation’s lexicon of regional economies, and a little over a year since David Brooks offered up Bobos in Paradise, these journalists are tracking migration of “creatives” in a series of reports, the latest of which appeared Sunday August 4. The Austin region alone gobbled up 57,045 people, who brought net incomes 17 percent higher than the residents who left. That’s a $2.15 billion net annual gain for Austin. Houston and Dallas round out a Texas golden triangle of “cities of ideas.”

This success over just a decade stands in stark contrast with other Texas regions like El Paso. El Paso gained population too, but came out on the losing end of the skills and income race. While both regions can point to San Jose as a source of in-migration, the family incomes of those moving to Austin were nearly $50,000, while those headed for El Paso were $12,796. Like other large Texas cities, San Antonio got a share of migrants from Los Angeles, but they were largely families who earn the lowest wages.

This story’s bigger than Texas. The newspaper’s consultant, Robert Cushing, analyzed IRS migration and incomes data for the past decade in 310 U.S. metro areas. Cushing’s data clearly show these fearlessly footloose “creatives” streaming toward relatively few American regions. Like Austin, they tend to be places with great universities, an atmosphere in which arts flourish, where cultural and recreational opportunities abound, where entrepreneurial behavior is nurtured. Rich Florida claims his “bohemian index” is the best predictor of these movements. (Note the review of Florida’s book by the Alliance for Regional Stewardship).

All this is about incomes — but with immense implications for cities and regions. Historically, rural areas got poorer at the expense of metro centers. Or vast amounts of wealth switched from inner cities to suburbs. Now, by contrast, we’re seeing some metros becoming more affluent, others poorer — a new rich-poor division in America. Those folks congregating in Dallas and Austin came from the Clevelands, the Baltimores, the Kansas Cities of America.

Policy question: if this is the survival-of-the-hippest, do the winner regions have any stake in the struggle of the losers? Will regions left behind pick themselves up? Should states start to consider revenue sharing, tax redistribution, to help out the losing regions (who may, as Texas indicates, represent a big majority of a state’s population?) In the short term, anything dressed up like Robin Hood may be unpopular in legislatures already afflicted by recession-born deficits. But if these disparities deepen, a new politics of interregional conflict may well emerge.