On Not Gutting Things

It is probably obvious that a lot of transit money in the US comes from the federal government (mostly for construction, not maintenance and operations, but still). And given the current state of the government, this feels like an important time to talk about why even projects that might not be the absolute leanest price tag they ever could have been are not actually waste--and why gutting federal dollars is bad policy.

1. If You Don't Build It, They Can't Come

This isn't meant as a defense of literally any boondoggle project, but unbuilt transit can't be used by anyone. Transit takes time to find its audience, and its uses; jerking projects around causes both delays in actually getting people on transit and distrust of the transit system from people who only hear about projects cut or scaled back. If it's important to keep running a service so people can actually discover it, like the Rochester Fast Ferry, it's also important to actually build it, like the Quad Cities-Chicago link, or California HSR. Obviously there is the Charybdis of the sunk cost fallacy, but there is also the Scylla of pulling the plug too early, and in my view almost all US projects end up in the latter. This is especially likely given the current antgonism to government spending (except on Elon Musk's own contracts).

2. Highways are inefficient, actually 

Look, if we're going to spend billions to trillions on moving people from place to place, could we at least do it on things that move more marginal people than highway expansions? Rail and bus may not be perfect cures for traffic, but neither is a highway.

And if we're going to induce demand, let's do it on train tracks and bus lanes, not already-widened streets and freeways. Federal, state, and local dollars always end up flowing most to road construction, but we never seem to question that in the same way transit dollars get put under the microscope.

3. Time is money

I don't mean this in the colloquial sense of not lollygagging on the job; I mean that transit costs increase over time, especially for unbuilt transit. Think Sound Transit around Seattle, or the NY Second Ave Subway: costs only seem to go one way. Building sooner, more, and faster now is the best way to build at a reasonable/more reasonable/maybe even a little reasonable rate.

If we were actually looking for efficiency, then, we'd build now, rather than building later, because it will cost more (even in inflation-adjusted dollars) to do it then, and we'll need it eventually.

Or as I've said here before, several times:

Just build the train.

Or bus.

Whatever it is: if it's reasonable to build ever, build now. It's the actual efficient option, as opposed to pretending to be "efficient" by delaying, gutting, or shelving transit projects that we'll just have to build more expensively later.