From: kenr@orleans.storage.tandem.com (Ken Rose)
Subject: Re: Question about Libertarian Idealogy posted to sci.econ
Organization: Tandem Computers Inc, Cupertino CA
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 16:02:57 GMT

In article <1992Sep12.011348.3455@leland.Stanford.EDU>, bohnert@leland.Stanford.EDU (matthew bohnert) writes:
> Hello to all...
> 
> I plan to vote libertarian in the upcoming election (due to the clear 
> lack of any acceptable alternative), but I find myself wrestling with
> some of what I perceive, perhaps erroneously, to be `good things' for
> society that the Libertarians appear to be against.
> 
> The first that is obvious to me is government subsidized mass transit.
> I've been to Europe, as well as to several major American ubran centers,
> where subsidized mass transit is an essential key to a prosperous,
> more liveable urban/rural lifestyle.  It appears to reduce several problems
> common to urbanized areas, chief among them smog and traffic congestion.
> At this point in time mass transit seems to be unable to pay its own way
> purely in terms of a revenues/expenses balance sheet, but provides innumerable
> benefits that `trickle down' (I promise I won't use that term again) thru
> the economy, and perhaps cannot have a price tag as such

Well, let me excerpt some passages from a booklet written by Dr. David
Friedman (son of Milton) for a class in Transportation Economics
I had at UCLA some years ago.  Friedman writes:

"The purpose of passenger transportation is to get people from one
place to another; the chief complaint against our present urban
transportation system is that it does not do so very well.  The
specific failures usually ciete are traffic congestion .. pollution,
and high energy consumption.  The conventional solution to all these
problems is to return to an increased reliance on mass transit 
which, it is claimed, can provide better transportation at lower
cost, in dollars, pollution, and enery."

"There are a number of difficulties with this argument.  Over the
past eighty years thaerer has been a massive shift away from mass
transit and towards private automobiles; in 1900 99.7% of
Urban Passenger Miles of Travel occured via transit; by 1929 the
figure was down to 23.7%, to 18% by 1950, to 3.8% by 1974.  One
of the major reasons for this shift was that even when transit
service was less expensive than automobiles, autos provided a higher
quality of service -- they went from where you were to where you 
wanted to go when you wanted to leave.  As incomes rose during
the century, people naturally substituted the higher quality for
the lower quality good."

"The two new systems (BART and the D.C Metro) have proved to be
phenomenally expensive (total costs of ten to twenty dollars
per round trip)...  Proposed systems look even worse -- the
SCRTD's estimate for a line in the LA area came to $22 - $26 per
round trip ($2.60 - $3 per passenger mile), despite the fact that
the estimate assumed the line would attract three times as many
passengers as BART with half as many stations."

"Nor is it clear that modern mass transit systems would be more
energy efficient .. Charles Lave did a set of calculations for
BART, measuring all costs in terms of energy instead of dollars.
His conclusion was that in terms of operating costs BART might
be more efficient ... but that the energy used in constructing
it was enormously greater than the energy that would have been
required to expand the road system sufficiently to handle the
passengers it was carrying -- so much so that it would take 535
years for the savings in operating costs to make up for the 
costs (in energy) of construction."

"Mass transit of all sorts currently provide only about 3%
of urban transportation ... Even if it were possible to greatly
improve the performance of mass transit, the effect on the entire
system would be small in comparison to the effect of even a 
small improvement in the performance of autos.  One way of putting
the difference is to note that doubling the number of passengers
carried by mass transit would produce only about a third as
many rides as would be produced by increasing the average number
of people carried per auto from 1.2 to 1.3.  For this and other
reasons it seems sensible to concentrate efforts to improve
urban transportation not on expensive commuter rail lines but
on ways of making our present system of autos and highways work
better"
____________________________________________________________________
Ken Rose    (kenr@storage.tandem.com)
The Usual Disclaimer:  Any opinions expressed above are mine alone, not
those of my employer (who is kind enough to allow me Usenet access).