Smug love or tough love—what future for rail transit in Travis County?

Melanie Trottman and Josh Mitchell’s article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal has, at first glance, a sufficiently innocuous title: “New Transit-Funding Rules Make Streetcars More Desirable”. Streetcars—what’s not to like, eh? We here in Travis County might not get worked up about those poor commuters from Williamson who think that it’s reasonable to drive an hour down IH-35 from their Round Rock McMansions to downtown Austin, so we can feel free to concentrate on facilitating transportation crosstown, rather than from out-of-town. Streetcars can run off windmills and solar cells and biomass, right? (Punch me, I feel so green.) Frankly, I’d rather ride my bicycle to work (as I’ve done many times in my career), but hopping on a well-scheduled, clean, quiet train with my coffee and the paper is theoretically a pretty compelling alternative to handling a car through traffic.

If only the analysis could stop there. Leave aside for the moment the relative wisdom of building a still-to-enter-service light rail system for a city of just 600,000 people where no one rides the buses, and assigning its management to a quango as badly run as Capital Metro, an organization that covers not ten percent of its operating costs from fares. Fares! You know, those payments from customers that indicate the actual economic value of a service? Instead, simply consider how the rules are being changed, from bad to possibly equally bad.

As Trottman and Mitchell put it, the Bushies had required that local governments “evaluate projects based largely on reducing commuting times at the lowest possible expense”. The Obamanistas, however, will be leading them towards “evaluating projects based on the environmental, community and economic-development benefits, as well as on congestion relief.” That sounds good, and arguably, the old rules were pretty narrowly written. The trouble is that the new ones could be hopeless vaguely, and thus easily politicized. That gets to the problem of far-off DC’s involvement in local anything: when bureaucrats start putting their thumbs on the scales, all sorts of crazy decisions get made. Monies get taken through taxation from rural and small-town residents, and funneled to urban dwellers for transit projects, whether anyone is going to ride the rails or not. That’s an embarrassingly direct transfer of wealth from the many to the few, and often, the politically well-connected and rent-seeking few. Worse, if your local government doesn’t apply for the funds, because it doesn’t like the rules (witness the three-way concurrence in last night’s GOP gubernatorial debate) it’s not as though you get a refund on your taxes. Taxation is supposed to deliver a public good, but that’s just uncompensated coercion, plain and simple.

Now, there are those who will argue—doubtlessly like Barry Obama, his transportation secretary Ray LaHood, and much of the Travis Country Democratic Party—that only the federal government today has the financial capacity to fund projects like this. If so, that’s just further indication of how ill-advised the process really is. By endlessly shoving its bills into the future, Mr. Obama is, to a degree even worse than that of George W. Bush, setting the federal government up for either a serious constriction of its ability to fund anything, or an eventual default on its loans. Gordon Brown has led the United Kingdom further along this path, and the results are already not pretty. In the long run, the folks in Washington might find themselves running just a big version of Ecuador. Booyah to them—and least then they’ll finally have to stop spending like sailors on shore leave.

Back here in Texas, it’s a fine thing to patronize public transportation, and by either meaning of that phrase. If you really think it’s a good idea, then get on, pay your fare, use that wifi, and head to work. In Travis County, though, the low rate of actual bus ridership suggests that most of transit’s supporters prefer the other meaning: that green sense of smugness that higher sales taxes bring them. If that’s the real objective, then at least keep it local, folks. This cognitive dissonance of car-driving transit advocates makes high political involvement even less helpful, as its renders impossible sensible formulation of useful federal policy across the eighty metropolitan areas (and yet more municipalities) in the US that might want to share in this largesse. As a matter of economic efficiency, it’s thus impossible to justify the very existence of the Federal Transit Administration.

That is, rather than another heat sink for so-called stimulus, intracity transportation is primarily a local issue, and metropolitan transportation is at most a statewide issue. For Texans, and pointedly for Texans in Travis, this principle is a matter of both sovereignty and efficiency. If we are to benefit from being one of the United States, then we’d better start insisting that federal funds not be used for state purposes. That was the whole point of the 10th amendment to the US constitution, even if it’s clear that no one in DC —least of all on its high court—has cared about that in at least seventy years. If we really want rails in Texas, then we ought to have the decency and intelligence to insist that each state manage its problems for itself, and seek solutions appropriate to its situation without federal funding or rule-making. The Obamanistas would like to nudge us into better behavior from on high, but as someone should tell Cass Sunstein, as a noun pronounced slightly differently, that word is a rather unflattering moniker.