Three questions for Jarrett Walker and Randal O’Toole

Cato Institute's transit-oriented Downtown DC headquarters (photo courtesy of Clark Construction)

As DC holds its breath for the conclusion of Brett Kavanaugh’s supplemental FBI investigation, more mid-workday drama is in store for the city on Tuesday.

Jarrett Walker, the renowned expert behind bus system redesigns that have improved mobility for countless people around the world, will head into the catacombs of the Cato Institute (originally called the Charles Koch Foundation) and, at 11:30am ET, come face to face with Randal O’Toole, the pundit who wants to take away Whoville’s – sorry, Washington’s Metro system that many in the crowd will use to get to Hayek Auditorium.

Both men acknowledge the shortcomings of existing U.S. transit, but come into Tuesday’s forum with contrasting visions and goals. Expect Walker to focus on strategies to make it easier for people to get around, highlighting best practices in the transit industry. O’Toole, on the other hand, will try to turn the discussion into a debate about whether or not fixed-route transit should exist at all.

O’Toole’s evidence that we’re apparently about to turn back the clock to the 1950s: out-of-context numbers that actually result from American neglect of every ground transportation option other than the personal automobile. Yes, a high percentage of Americans use cars today, but this doesn’t mean their cars serve them well. In North Korea, Kim Jong-un enjoys strong approval ratings too.  

Cato moderator Emily Ekins, formerly of the Reason Foundation, will likely craft questions intended to limit the conversation to topics O’Toole is comfortable commenting on. In line with the cars-or-bust crowd’s typical approach, she will try to force Walker to spend the two-hour forum defending the very existence of bus and rail lines while avoiding discussion of what can be done to make it easier for people to get where they need to go.

But if Walker, people in the crowd, or anyone else gets a chance to ask O’Toole an uncensored question on Tuesday, I’d like to hear his (and Walker’s) thoughts on the following three topics:

Why is Cato’s headquarters building located in transit-rich Downtown DC?

Cato’s headquarters, located near Mount Vernon Square in Downtown DC, is located a quick walk from all six DC Metro lines, as well as numerous bus routes. As a result Cato’s workers enjoy the benefits of a mixed-use, transit oriented workplace, such as walkability, quick trips to outside meetings, diverse commuting options, and lots of great lunch places and happy hour spots within steps of their desks.

If O’Toole’s vision for transportation became a reality, central parts of DC – or any city – would never again be the same. More and more space would be paved over to accommodate cars, though thanks to science the cars would still be stuck in traffic

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To make more room for cars, neighborhoods and parks would inevitably be bulldozed to plow highways through the city, ensuring the auto and oil industry’s mid-20^th century goals would finally become reality. The sliced-up urban core would become blighted and intolerable, and residents and businesses who could afford to flee to the suburbs would.

Presumably, O’Toole and his fellow Cato minds feel such a future would benefit our quality of life. Thus, it would be logical for Cato to move its headquarters to a suburban business park and tout the purported benefits of an auto-dependent workplace. I would like to learn why the Institute chooses not to pursue such a move.

Will neglecting transit now cost taxpayers more money in the long term?

Soon after our country allowed cars to become king, it became clear that many important transportation needs were not being fulfilled. As a result, we’ve had to spend billions to restore just a fraction of the transit we lost. 

For example, Los Angeles’s Expo Line, which largely follows the right of way of the former Pacific Electric Railway’s Santa Monica Air Line, cost $2.4 billion to restore. New York spent $4.5 billion to resume rapid transit service on a portion of Second Avenue in Manhattan.

 

If we take O’Toole’s advice and once again allow transit to disappear, get ready to experience déjà vu. As car congestion worsens, cities will decide that getting people where they need to go is their priority and will work to restore transit. But they’ll be forced to spend much more to do so than is required to sustain and improve multimodal options today.

O’Toole should explain how the high likelihood that abandoning transit would increase long-term government transportation subsidies aligns with Cato’s free market goals.  

   

Is a car payment any more voluntary than a transit subsidy?

Law-abiding citizens must pay taxes, meaning they help fund transportation infrastructure for both cars and transit.

But if they don’t have access to a viable multimodal option, they’ll also need to give money to the auto and oil industry if they want to go anywhere. Though the money goes to industry executives, rather than government agencies, the payments are every bit as mandatory and the corporations are perfectly capable of mismanaging and squandering them.

Some money spent on gasoline may even help fund transit – in Saudi Arabia.    

In the first 11 months of 2017, American spending on vehicle purchases and fuel totaled over $7 trillion. Where did that money go, Randal?