How car-driven cities like Phoenix get snookered into building failed but very costly mass-transit systems
The Las Vegas Monorail is different in important respects from the fixed-capital transit systems being built in cities like Phoenix.
For one thing, the population density of potential riders is much higher than in the other car-driven cities now avidly building trolley systems. Moreover, that population — tourists — is more favorably disposed to alternatives to driving. In other words, even though it is failing, out of all the new mass-transit systems in the United States, the Monorail is the one that had the best chance of succeeding.
For another, the Monorail is putatively privately funded, although it seems certain that local, state or national taxpayers will be left holding the bag when the project fails.
But, for a third thing, private funding seems to make acknowledging the failure of the Monorail more politically palatable. In cities newly afflicted with municipal mass transit systems, the facts of life usually go unreported. Ridership will be well below projections, costs will be well above projections, busy bus routes will have been cut or curtailed to subsidize empty trolley cars and there will be frequent accidents ensuing from building a rail system at grade level. None of this will be reported in the newspapers in plain language, and people who insist on discussing these facts in plain language will be denounced.
This was actually the case in Las Vegas for many years, as well, but just lately the dam of silence has broken and the truth gushes forth about the impending financial collapse of the Monorail, how it came about, and how it was foreseen in detail long before the system was built.
From today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal:
In the three years the Las Vegas Monorail has been shuttling empty seats back and forth behind the Strip, we’ve heard excuse after excuse why ridership levels have never met what was originally billed.First, it was the mechanical problems that kept the monorail sidelined for most of 2004. Then it was the time needed for tourists to know the monorail was there. Then it was a fare hike. And the time necessary for new marketing efforts to take root. They might have cried about global warming for all I know.
But there’s another theory that monorail people have mostly ignored: that the monorail’s sluggish ridership levels of today could have reasonably been expected from the start.
That’s an answer that came to mind recently as I read a draft ridership analysis prepared in 2000 — four years before the monorail’s first paying passenger hopped on board — by Wendell Cox, an Illinois-based consultant hired by monorail foes to counter the rosy claims made by monorail backers.
Back then, monoplanners trumpeted expectations of more than 54,000 riders per day, projections that Cox’s report called “among the most aggressive in U.S. transit history and could emerge as the least accurate.”
Cox noted that the Las Vegas Monorail was “projected to carry more passengers per route mile than the New York subway, the London Underground and the Stockholm Metro, and more than double that of the most heavily used new rail systems in the United States.”
“It is not likely that such an intensity of ridership would be attracted,” Cox wrote.
He predicted between 18,500 and 26,600 riders per day would use the monorail.
Last year, the monorail averaged just over 19,000 daily riders.
“I apologize for being too optimistic,” Cox said recently.
How could a city smart enough to see through any scam get snookered so completely? “Strategic misrepresentation” combined with wishful thinking:
So, how did Cox get things so right, while monobuilders got things so wrong?Cox said he just followed the facts.
“Nobody ever gave this stuff a laugh test. And it was laughable from the first day,” Cox said. “What I put in that report was not shocking. I just compared it to things that were similar,” namely other rapid transit lines that failed to gain traction with customers.
The track record of such peer projects meeting ridership and cost projections is “absolutely dreadful. What’s going on is something called ‘strategic misrepresentation.’” Cox said. “Basically, lying.
“They wanted to build the project. They believed in the project. That doesn’t make them any less wrong.”
Why does that happen? In general, because facts might get in the way, Cox believes.
“People tend to overestimate ridership and underestimate cost, fearing if they don’t do that projects won’t be approved,” Cox said. “I don’t know if that’s what happened here.”
A kind of faith-based approach to mass transit projects, I suppose.
Sometimes, such projects are enabled by the work of consultants who profit by telling project backers what they want to hear. Consultants take their cut and walk away, leaving the financial mess to others.
“I’d love to see projectors have to take a financial stake in their projections. I bet we’d see more conservative projections,” Cox said.
Because the Monorail is quasi-private, it lacks the legislative clout to stack the deck in its favor in the style of municipal transit systems. It can’t disrupt traffic flows on busy thoroughfares, for example, or impose automobile-hostile real estate development restrictions. Even so, mass transit is never profitable, and it is only popular when it is the preferred alternative to walking — that is to say, where traffic (or parking) is very difficult, as it is on Las Vegas Boulevard, or where income is too low to pay for a reliable car. Where people can — and can afford to — drive, they will. This is a simple and completely obvious fact — which suggests that you are unlikely to find it in the newspaper.
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The LV Monorail has been cursed by three factors not mentioned here: 1) Much higher fares than public transit systems, either bus or ail, anywhere else in North America. 2) The Monorail was not given prominent placement on the Strip, but instead hidden behind the casinos. As a result, it’s not obvious to tourists. Only a dedicated few seek it out, and those who might have a more casual interest usually decide to take a cab instead when faced with the prospect of navigating through a cavernous casino to find a train station hidden in the back. Most tourists will never discover the monorail, no matter how much time passes, simply because it is well concealed until it gets to the Convention Center area. 3) The Monorail connects only the casinos and the LV Convention Center. It does not serve Downtown, the Airport, or any residential areas, making it impractical for locals to use when commuting to work.
For all those reasons, I agree that the LV Monorail is a failure, but its failure is unique in its causes. The Las Vegas experience should not be a reason for skepticism about the light rail project in Phoenix or similar efforts in other cities.