In Some Policy Debates, the Numbers Can Drive You Crazy
By A. Barton Hinkle

Friday,August 18, 2006
Edition: Final, Section: Editorial, Page A-11
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In public policy, some issues can be resolved simply by resorting to numbers. Police lineups provide a perfect example: Experiments can determine whether witnesses pick the actual perpetrator more often out of simultaneous lineups (in which photos of several suspects are shown to the witness all at once) or sequential lineups (in which he views suspect photos one at a time). Once you know which method works better, the debate is over. Everyone agrees on the goal; the only question is how best to get there.
Sometimes numbers don’t matter at all. That’s especially true concerning the basket of issues that make up the culture wars - abortion, homosexuality, etc. - in which, at bottom, people disagree about the primary goal. (Is it, say, protecting individual female autonomy, or protecting the unborn?)

Debating is such great fun because people with deep-seated convictions persist in pretending as though empirical evidence swings much weight in settling philosophical differences. E.g., supporters and opponents of abortion rights go around and around over whether abortion correlates with breast cancer. But supporters won’t change their view that a woman has a right to control her own body even if there is a correlation - and opponents won’t change their view that abortion stops a beating heart even if there isn’t.

Most issues consist of a thoroughly enjoyable muddle of empirical and philosophical questions. But even those that seem empirically straightforward quickly can get tangled up if you pick at the right (or wrong) thread.

Take transportation.

TAKE, EVEN, a very small question about transportation: Which costs more - traveling one mile by train or one mile by car?

There are two schools of thought. Fans of public transit say rail travel costs less. Public transit’s skeptics say car travel costs less. Who’s right depends on how you count.

A few weeks ago these pages cited figures of 21 cents per mile for car travel, including the costs of road construction. Rail advocates objected and demanded to know the source, which was a chapter in 21st Century Highways: Innovative Solutions to America’s Transportation Needs, produced by The Heritage Foundation. The source raised eyebrows, as they say; the sense was that anything from Heritage could be dismissed out of hand because Heritage has an agenda (which it does). But casual dismissal is a mistake, for three reasons.

First, Heritage - or, say, the liberal Brookings Institution - is not run by amateurs. The policy wonks know their stuff; they live and breathe and actually enjoy dissecting issues such as comparative per- passenger travel costs. Second, disliking someone isn’t the same as disproving what they say. If the Yankees beat the Mets, hearing George Bush or Hillary Clinton report the news does not mean the Yankees actually lost. And third, precisely because think tanks elicit skepticism, they have good reason to be able to back up what they say.

Nevertheless Wendell Cox, the author of the chapter in question, was kind enough to provide his methodology, which seems clear enough (but, please, don’t fall asleep): From the Bureau of Transportation Statistics he took the total expenditures in 2004 on user-operated transportation nationwide, in current dollars ($939.8 billion), and divided it by the number of person-miles traveled in 2004 by two-axle, four-wheeled vehicles (4.452 trillion). Result: 21 cents per mile.

RUBBISH, SAY rail advocates who contend car travel costs a lot more. They cite figures from AAA, which are markedly higher: 62 cents per mile for a vehicle driven 10,000 miles a year.

The car club says its methodology for estimating annual driving costs is “proprietary,” but the details it does disclose seem to inflate its figures. It counts costs only for the first five years of ownership of a new car - by far the most expensive years. E.g., AAA estimates financing costs based on a five-year loan at 6 percent interest, with 10 percent down, which works out to about $4,100 a year for the first five years for a car costing 20 grand - and $0 per year for every year afterward. Yet most people keep their cars beyond five years. Indeed, Cox notes the average age of the vehicle fleet in the U.S. is almost 10 years.

What’s more - to get really granular - insurance costs likely are lower than AAA’s estimate. Maintenance costs might be higher, but many drivers don’t buy the comprehensive extended warranty AAA includes in its cost estimates. And Cox’s stats from the BTS include actual figures (not hypothetical estimates) for insurance premiums, tires, tubes, accessories, parts, and so on - as well as the capital costs for highway infrastructure.

We still haven’t touched the rail side of the question (big surprise: cost-per- passenger- mile estimates vary widely), or externalities such as pollution, or the marginal gains to be had from an additional dollar invested in a system that’s highly developed (roads) vs. one invested in a system with lots of room for growth (rail).

In public policy, some issues can be resolved simply by resorting to numbers. The hard part is figuring out which numbers.

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Train Wreck

Thursday,July 20, 2006
Edition: Final, Section: Editorial, Page A-10
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Several independent candidates for federal office held a joint news conference the other day to announce that while they disagree on numerous subjects, they are of one mind concerning rail. They think Virginia needs more of it.
They’re not alone. Rail holds allure for many people, and for many reasons - from its comparably low environmental effects to its European sensibility to its essential tidiness: Centrally planned rail lines move people along specific trajectories in an orderly fashion. Rail seems less chaotic than vehicular traffic.

Rail certainly has its place. It provides an efficient means for moving cargo and the safest means for transporting hazardous materials. Yet passenger rail confronts three dilemmas of daunting proportions: cost, ease of use, and density.

When all the capital and operating costs of both mass transit and automobile travel are accounted for, rail travel is almost four times as expen- sive as vehicular travel. In 2002, rail cost 82 cents per person per mile; vehicular travel cost 21 cents, even after factoring in government spending on roads. Travelers might be willing to pay that higher cost in return for conveniences such as briefer commute times, diminished highway congestion, and less road rage. But passenger rail travel in most of the U.S. - and certainly in Virginia - promises few such offsets.

A principal reason concerns ease of use. An automobile is compatible on any road or street anywhere. A driver can enter the road network at any point and get off at any point - at whatever time he wants - without changing cars. But even bus systems, which are the closest mass- transit analog, require transfers for more than the simplest of trips. Imagine trying to get from, say, Carytown to an address in Herndon using only mass transit.

* * * * *

Mass transit works in places where people are, well, massed together - such as New York, which has a population density of 26,000 persons per square mile; Chicago, with a density of 13,000 per square mile; and Washington, D.C., with a density of 9,300 per square mile.

The City of Richmond has a population density of 3,300. So Richmond can support the GRTC bus system - sort of. More accurately, the GRTC bus system can efficiently serve Richmond’s population. Outside the capital city the utility of mass transit drops off the edge of a cliff. Chesterfield’s density is only 610 persons per square mile - and even that comparatively low density seems sardine-like compared with the Commonwealth’s average density of 179 persons per square mile, which is far higher than the U.S. average of 80.

Why does density matter? Because it enables large numbers of people to live or work within walking or bicycling distance of a transit station. Low density rates force transit systems into an unhappy tradeoff: Either they maintain numerous stations along their routes, which slows travel speeds considerably, or - for the sake of greater speed - they maintain just a few stations separated by large distances. The latter option not only makes use of the system inconvenient to most potential passengers, it also requires them to drive to the stations - which largely defeats the point.

* * * * *

Advocates of rail don’t envision a subway system running from Danville to D.C., of course. They favor something more like an expanded version of the Virginia Railway Express (VRE), which runs from Fredericksburg to the District. But the federally subsidized VRE charges $229 per month to transport someone from Fredericksburg to Crystal City in Alexandria - and the trip takes an hour and a half. Only a tiny fraction of commuters find the VRE practical and cost-effective.

The VRE estimates that about 100 of its regular riders to D.C. are Richmonders who board at Fredericksburg. Other Richmonders travel to the District by vanpool, and still others who drive might take the VRE if it had a station here. Yet the cost of extending the VRE to Richmond likely would exceed by orders of magnitude the cost of schlepping commuters to Fredericksburg by express bus - a possibility recently raised by the GRTC.

* * * * *

But even if a few thousand people a day used express train service between Richmond and D.C., that would do next to nothing to alleviate the state’s transportation problem, of which I-95 traffic constitutes only a tiny fraction.

Traffic in Northern Virginia is congested because people are traveling from Fairfax to Arlington, from Arlington to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Springfield. In Richmond people want to get from Short Pump to downtown, or from downtown to Courthouse Road, or from Courthouse Road to the Showplace in Mechanicsville. Mass transit for metro D.C. doesn’t work in less-dense Northern Virginia. It certainly wouldn’t work here in Richmond, where the diffuse population would make the system hugely inconvenient to use - or astronomically expensive.

Why hasn’t Virginia embraced mass transit? Not because citizens harbor an irrational animosity against it. They just are insufficiently dense.