The proposed design of a nearly $8 million street project that officials say will improve the East End of Richmond’s transportation network and parking while providing better access to the riverfront went before the public at a meeting Wednesday night in Fulton Hill.

The project includes widening East Main Street and potentially adding a roundabout at its intersection with a relocated Dock Street. Dock, currently alongside the James River, would be moved north, potentially opening the doors to more development and public access near the river.

Metro’s total shutdown Wednesday forced many people onto buses for the day.

But maybe that’s just the way things should be. All the time.

So say some transportation analysts anyway. They argue that Metro’s climactic failure is another sign that the bus–the lowly bus, so often seen as the clumsy and homely understudy to light or heavy rail–should once again play a starring role in mass transit.

An analyst from the right-leaning Maryland Public Policy Institute went so far as to suggest that Metro is dead, and it’s time to pull the plug in favor of bus rapid transit (BRT). But so did an analyst over at the left-leaning Brookings Institution, who suggested that rail – and maybe even buses too – should be scrapped for private sector solutions coming into widespread use, including ride-sharing (like Uber) and driverless vehicles.

“Why isn’t now the time to ask whether we should keep investing in this system?” asks Thomas A. Firey, a senior fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute. “Any reasonable metric shows it’s not a good form of transit compared to other ones. ”

If Firey had his way, he said he would close Metro and fill its tunnels with dirt.

Clifford Winston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also thinks public subways and bus systems have been so mismanaged for so long, it’s probably time to find alternatives.

“Both urban bus and urban rail are socially undesirable in most cities–that is, their operating and capital subsidies exceed benefits to users,” Winston said.

Both argue that Metro represents the transit option of yesteryear, and that the vast capital investments and operating subsidies that governments must plow into fixed rail systems no longer make sense compared with the flexibility and relatively low cost of BRT or ride-sharing and other innovations. This is particularly true at a time when buses and cars are cleaner and more fuel-efficient than ever. How much carbon, rail skeptics ask, went into the atmosphere to build the underperforming Silver Line?

In this view, the love affair for Metro is a holdover from the days when monumental projects were equated with the public good, and the preference for rail over buses was driven at least partly by middle-class tastes and anxieties. A federally-funded study by the National BRT Institute of mass transit options in Los Angeles suggests buses have an image problem that’s affected more by intangibles, such as perceived comfort, than tangibles, such as their reliability moving people around. Those intangibles also depend at least in part on the “urban context” a bus network serves – that is, the communities it transits — and this can be affected by the perception that the buses travel through low-income neighborhoods, the study says. You find Ralph Cramden behind the wheel of a bus; you find Tom Cruise on a train.

In a paper published in the 2013 edition of the Journal of Economic Literature, Winston argued that the United States has almost always been in flux between public and private approaches to maintaining its transportation infrastructure. But the time has come to either overhaul government’s stewardship of public transit or allow the private sector more of a share, because the current system is riddled with inefficiency and inequality.

Despite the notion that Metro is egalitarian, for example, studies show the federal government is subsidizing rail systems for riders who already have above-average incomes, compared to those who use the bus. The average income of a bus rider is $42,550 (in 2008 dollars); for rail, it’s $85,100. The 2016 median salary for Washington is $69,235, according to the Census Bureau.

Federal employees alone receive, free of charge, up to $255 a month to ride Metro. That’s the maximum a pretax subsidy anyone can receive; for people outside the federal government, it’s deducted from his or her pretax wages. For a federal employee, that’s the equivalent of a $3,060 annual bonus for them and $15 million a year for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. (The average pay for a federal employee is about $79,000, according to the Office of Personnel Management.)

Low-income commuters, or those who make less than $15,000, use rail for only 9.6 percent of their work trips – probably because transit reaches less than one third of metro-area jobs, Winston found.
“Fortunately, innovations in the private sector, including Uber in the short run and autonomous vehicles in the medium run, can improve urban transportation, and will likely eliminate public transit’s drain on the public purse and its patience,” Winston said.

Firey spelled out his reasoning along these lines in a policy paper that he admits sounds “radical.”

In his view, Metro is a dinosaur, built when 1960s urban planners and engineers still harked back to the hundred-year-old success of the London and New York subway systems and believed that electricity – thanks to things like nuclear power, among other things – would be the cheapest source of energy in the future.

Come ride with me: Washington D.C.’s Metro in the 1970s and ’80s
View Photos A look back at D.C.’s Metro to commemorate the Silver Line opening.
People are still habituated to the idea that trains can carry more people and at greater cost efficiency than buses when, he argues, the opposite is true.

This is partially because the real cost of rail is hidden from Metro users, whose fares cover less than half of the system’s operating and maintenance expenses and almost nothing of its capital costs, he said. Plus, now that Metro’s critical infrastructure is sputtering toward the end of its 40-year functional lifespan—as has become more and more obvious to the public –the cost of rebuilding the system will be daunting.

“WMATA officials can try to nurse it along, but that will be costly and riders will face many more disruptions like today,” Firey wrote Wednesday. “Ultimately, costly and environmentally damaging reconstruction will be needed.”

Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, thinks they’re both wrong.

Metro is the primary reason for the revitalization of the District and its inner suburbs, from Silver Spring to Bethesda in Maryland all the way over to to Arlington and now Tysons Corner in Virginia, Schwartz said. If anything, Metro’s troubles stem from a lack of concerted government attention and funding, Schwartz said. He agreed that the emergency shutdown this week demonstrates why the city should expand its reliance on dedicated bus lanes, but as a supplement to Metro, not a substitute.
“As our region grows, we need an efficient surface transportation network with dedicated right-of-ways to the maximum extent possible,” Schwartz said in an email. “It’s important for reaching areas Metrorail doesn’t go and is also an important [complement] to Metrorail.”

A network of dedicated bus lanes might even allow WMATA to shut down an entire Metro system for repairs. But Schwartz also said buses could never take Metro’s place, and the emergency shutdown Wednesday has now given people a taste of what it would be like if there were no subway system.

In other words, Metro isn’t dead. It just looked like it on Wednesday.

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Yesterday’s unprecedented closure of the full D.C. regional Metrorail system to examine and make critical fixes to the system certainly disrupted the routines of many thousands in the region. While the move was affirmed by every responsible public official, even seasoned commuters who’ve grown dependent on the system have had to concede that there can be no serious complaining about fixes done in the name of safety.

But the one-day interruption could be raising more questions than it answers. Can WMATA’s new general manager Paul Wiedefeld say with confidence that the corrections made in that one day were really sufficient to fix everything wrong or potentially dangerous that should require attention? Concerns may actually arise in the face of this action that it was merely a band aid, or even simply cosmetic.

It cannot be stressed too much that the public must demand the WMATA leadership not try to cover up for the stingy U.S. Congress that needs to bear the burden for keeping the system going. Underfunding on infrastructure in this nation is a scandal, whether it is in Flint, Michigan or anywhere else. The idea of burdening local jurisdictions with the cost of maintaining vital components of major infrastructure projects is also a joke. Passing the buck like that is almost like not funding at all.

Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, said this about yesterday’s closure of Metro: “It took years for Metrorail to end up in this situation, where maintenance underfunding left us with the problems we see today. Clearly, we have a ways to go to repair Metro’s aging systems….We hope that the ongoing challenges facing Metro will prompt our elected leaders to work together to provide the funding necessary to fix longstanding maintenance and rehabilitation problems. Failure is not an option.”

Underfunding has not only led to an aging system sorely in need of rehabilitation and maintenance, it has also led to the general under-performance of the system from the start. The system has been held back terribly by underinvestment, especially to be able to provide the necessary frequency and extension of hours of operation to make it a genuine alternative for many, many more in the region than use it, or rarely use it, now.

The biggest difference between the Metrorail here and the subway system in New York, where it really works for a population five times larger than here, has nothing to do with the amount of graffiti on its station or rail car walls. It has to do with the fact that the system is extremely passenger-centric, offering a frequency of trains and expanded hours of operation to make it indispensable to the average New Yorker.

The problem with WMATA and other mass transit options and plans around here is that they pull their punches badly and thereby present a shadow of what the region really needs. No one-day patchwork fixes can solve this endemic problem.

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Michael Paul Williams, a feature columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, takes a dim view of a decision by the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors to discontinue a subsidized bus route between downtown Richmond and Chesterfield Plaza. “Chesterfield, despite its dramatic demographic shifts and an increasing poverty rate, continues to turn a blind eye to residents who don’t own cars due to choice, age, disability or the inability to afford one,” he writes in his column today.

He indicts Chesterfield’s decision without ever revealing (a) how much it costs to maintain the service, (b) how many passengers used the service, or (c) how much the subsidies amount to per passenger, much less asking (d) how such a sum might be spent more beneficially in other ways.

The prospect of such reasoning taking hold in the Richmond region and driving the expenditure of real money should be terrifying in the extreme to anyone who objects to the squandering of tax dollars on symbolic gestures rather than on remedies that actually work. Walk with me through his column and despair.

Williams writes:

The supervisors gutted the budget of the Route 81 Express, creating the ridership decline they used to justify killing it. What exactly did the board expect from a route that offered one round-trip in the morning and a single one-way trip from downtown Richmond to Chesterfield in the afternoon with no stops in between? The board couldn’t have undermined the bus route more effectively if it had let the air out of the tires.

He has a point. Sort of. True, the route structure was idiotic. From Williams’s account, it sounds like the Chesterfield supervisors were trying to provide mass transit on the cheap and the route was doomed to fail. The obvious solution, however, is to pull the plug on the project before wasting any more money — just what the board did. The alternative is to double up on a bad situation, spending money to beef up the schedule or add interconnecting lines in the hope of creating critical mass. But what would such an arrangement look like, how much money would it cost, and how many people would be likely to ride that route? Just how much money does Williams propose throwing at the problem?He doesn’t say. He just wants more.

Williams brushes close to enlightenment when he quotes Jesse W. Smith, Chesterfield’s transportation director: “The county really doesn’t have the density to support traditional bus service.”

Bingo. The rule of thumb is that people are willing to walk 1/4 mile to avail themselves of mass transit. If 500 people live within a 1/4-mile radius of a bus stop, that represents far fewer potential customers than if, say, 2,500 people live within a 1/4-mile radius.  It also matters how walkable the streetscapes are. Are there sidewalks? If so, are they set away from streets with cars whizzing by at 45 miles per hour? When pedestrians cross the street, do they feel like they’re taking their lives into their hands? Is the walk visually interesting or is the view monotonous and undifferentiated?

Chesterfield is the epitome of the autocentric suburb. Given decades of low-density, hop-scotch, pedestrian-unfriendly development, Chesterfield County has a pattern of land use that is totally hostile to walkability and inappropriate for transit. Trying to implant mass transit in such an environment would be like planing a banana tree in Alaska: It can’t possibly thrive.

Chesterfield fully deserves criticism for its horrendous land use decisions, but that is no reason to compound the error by superimposing an unsuitable mass transit system. If Williams would like to spark a useful discussion, he could start by suggesting which transportation corridors might lend themselves to mixed-use development at higher densities that might one day, given sufficient redevelopment, support a bus line at reasonable cost.

“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Williams then quotes my old friend Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, as saying. Williams summarizes Schwartz as making a point similar to one that I have often made on this blog:

In today’s competitive marketplace for corporations and employees, the suburban office park model of the late 20th Century is fading fast as companies seek to appeal to a millennial workforce that increasingly eschews the automobile and would rather walk, bike or ride mass transit to work. From Charlotte to Phoenix to Denver to Cleveland, “elected officials and business leaders recognize that transit provides a competitive edge,” Schwartz said.

That’s all very true. But it’s also totally irrelevant to Chesterfield. The transit systems he mentions serve areas that have far more people within walking distance of their bus stops than Chesterfield can ever think to have. Buses and Bus Rapid Transit might make sense in Richmond’s urban core (assuming City Council enacts appropriate zoning and invests in walkable streetscapes) but none at all in Chesterfield.

Williams then quotes former Sen. John Watkins, a Republican who represented Chesterfield County, who “was a lonely voice in the wilderness on the need for mass transit” (and who also was a prime mover behind the Rt. 288 corridor that opened up vast new swaths of the county to autocentric development). When he joined the legislature in the 1980s, Watkins observed, Fairfax County was adamant about not wanting buses, “and how they’re the biggest user of transit dollars in the state.”

Here’s the flaw with that comparison: Fairfax County had a population density of 2,862 inhabitants per square mile in 2014; Chesterfield had a population density of 742. Fairfax had nearly four times the population density! Moreover, there are sections of Fairfax that have far higher density than the average, while population in Chesterfield is smeared uniformly across the landscape. Buses make far more economic sense in Fairfax than Chesterfield.

Yes, Chesterfield has made a mess of itself. Yes, Chesterfield has created a land use pattern that makes life difficult for poor people lacking access to automobiles. But, no, compounding one folly with another is not an answer. Chesterfield needs to develop corridors of high-density, mixed-use development capable of supporting mass transit before adding new bus routes. Only then will the cost-benefit ratios look remotely favorable.

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