Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation

The Free Congress Foundation and Reconnecting America, 2009, 212 pp., $20

Arguments in favor of mass transit are generally of the serious and earnest liberal variety. Counter-arguments come courtesy of bare-knuckled transit critics from a host of conservative think tanks, including the Reason Foundation, Cato Institute, and Texas Public Policy Foundation. These critics, funded largely by the highway industry, specialize in half-truths and misleading statements that are often politically effective, according to the authors of this book.

William Lind and the late Paul Weyrich — who died in December 2008 — of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, are happy, even gleeful at times, to fight back. Here’s a sample of their prose: “A warning to liberals and others with faint hearts: As conservatives, we share the Lord High Executioner’s fondness for capital punishment, preferably inflicted in ingenious and highly entertaining ways. After all, what better enlivens an otherwise dull afternoon than the public beheading of a myth that had the temerity to disguise itself as a fact,” they write in Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation.

Every conservative argument against public transportation — is there any other kind? — is subjected to a blistering barrage of fact-checking and counter argument in this book. In other words, Lind and Weyrich aim directly at the strength of transit opponents. While much of the book is worthwhile reading, the section on debunking anti-transit myths is the most useful. Lest anyone claim that Weyrich and Lind are fighting straw men, each myth is supported by three to five extended quotes from Wendell Cox, Peter Gordon, Randal O’Toole, and others who are collectively referred to in this book as “anti-transit troubadours.”

How about the oft-repeated claim that light rail is a failure, that its costs are always higher and ridership lower than predicted? “In fact, if we look at new light rail lines, we find that ridership has generally been underestimated, and costs and sometimes construction time overestimated. Examples can be found in many areas, including Salt Lake City, Denver, St. Louis, and Dallas.”

Heard that rail transit does not support economic development? “This myth is an ironic one, because the wandering minstrels’ favorite tune is ‘Buses Not Trains,’ but it is rail transit, not bus service, that spurs economic development. … In one city after another, rail transit — heavy rail, light rail, or commuter rail — has brought increased investment, higher property values, higher rents, and more customers.” What about the claim that it would be cheaper to buy a new car for every transit user than to build light rail? “This one is a real howler,” Lind and Weyrich report. After reading three or four pithy paragraphs, you will agree.

Another reason to read this book is history. I was aware that highways and automobiles were heavily subsidized during much of the 20th Century, but I did not know the extent of this largess. Government was already pouring $1.4 billion a year into highways by 1921, the authors note, a figure that rose to $2.7 billion in 1940. Total operating costs of all rail transit systems — private operations that paid taxes and got little or no government subsidy — were $661 million in 1940. Massive government highway spending continued for a half-century before transit began to receive significant government support in the 1970s, and even then it was paltry compared to highways.

“When we look at the history of the fight for market share between automobiles and public transit, we quickly learn that the rise of the automobile is not a free-market outcome. Rather, it is the result of massive government intervention on the automobile’s behalf,” the authors conclude. The interventions went well beyond direct highway funding, furthermore, and included regulations that drove transit companies into bankruptcy and zoning that mandated low-density development patterns incapable of supporting transit.

Another section of the book worth mentioning is a primer on how to win transit referendums that ought to be mandatory reading for anybody who is trying to get a new rail or bus rapid transit line approved. All in all, Moving Minds is the most persuasive reading I have encountered on public transit.