The Big Light Rail Rant (Interurban material analysis)
Hey fellow Cohost folks(and anyone else who happens upon this), here's the big two-part rant I did on Cohost about modern light rail and why it sucks(in north america, at least). Enjoy:
While there are obviously specific circumstances of each service and its geographical area, largely speaking modern interurban redos fail at the first hurdle: Provide a similar (ideally superior) level of service to the previous one.
The reasons for this are varied (the US having purposefully obstructionist regulations on light rail vehicles and operations, for example), but these are just window-dressing to hide the real causes.
On the surface, it's obvious that the 20th century electric railways failed because they were privately owned, and therefore subject to direct competition from the car, which was more "convenient". That's the line you usually hear, even from supposed transit supporters, and it is factually accurate. The problem is, the facts are heavily cherry-picked to paint a picture that seems to confront reality, but actually disguises the real issues (This is a very common tactic used by liberals to avoid material analysis, btw).
The old interurbans and streetcars weren't run by people who dreamed of gleaming rails and towering wires from shore to shore, only to be hit with a cold dose of capitalist reality. They were capitalists themselves, using electric rail as a way to sweeten their other investments. At the turn of the 20th century, transportation was a hot commodity. Most people never ventured past where their feet could take them. Even a bicycle was a serious purchase the average person couldn't justify, and cars were still brand new and therefore very expensive and unreliable, so the trolley was it. That's why they were everywhere, they facilitated capital's need to move people and goods around quickly to exploit both more efficiently.
When cars began to develop as a technology, capital moved to this new paradigm, as it was (and still is) much cheaper to have each person be responsible for their own transport. Capitalist states were quite happy to go along with this, and purposefully remade roads and laws to be more "car friendly", giving more and more space to cars and boxing the trolleys and interurbans out. This also made it easy to blame the new found danger and congestion of car-filled roads on the railways "getting in the way" of traffic (another line that is often repeated to this day).
The solution, then, is presented as equally obvious: Nationalize. The state can use the tax base to maintain public transportation, and legislation to protect it from market forces. This is a very convenient idea for people pretending to support public transit, because any failures in the plan can be laid either at the feet of the "masses" or individual politicians. "We didn't vote in that transit friendly candidate or approve that parcel tax and now the bus sucks even more." "That asshole in city council is on the GM payroll and if we could just get corporate money out of politics we could have the Sac Northern back", and so on. And again, this all may be true, but zeroing in on these few details hides the true nature of the problem, the state does not want to run a public transit system.
The primary function of the state in a capitalist system is to facilitate capitalism. A state by its very nature as a vertical power structure will attract and promote the most ruthless actors, and capitalism is the natural outcome of such people holding sway over society. This power structure will then work towards the most efficient ways to funnel wealth and/or power from society to its own members. Capitalists will constantly demand as much of this power and money as they can get, limiting state funds and therefore state spending to only those things that will squeeze more money out of a society.
This is where things go south for public transit in the modern era. We already have cars. The burden of procurement, training, maintenance, and operations for personal transportation have already been shifted onto the individual, so operating transit is a step backwards in the view of the state. It doesn't matter that a pair of rails and a wire or two are far less expensive to build and maintain than a highway, in fact that's yet another benefit to capital. Private contractors can be hired to build and maintain the highways allowing direct transfer of public funds to already wealthy private hands.
Under these circumstances, the only way to make transit "make sense" is to turn it into a series of bloated, overwrought projects. This serves two purposes:
Those same private contractors can get their hands on these transit projects and use them to bleed the state dry.
Long, complex, and costly projects eat up budget that could be used to sustain or improve other operations, giving the state a series of excuses allow service to stagnate and even degrade.
Other than BRT boondoggles and self-driving gadgetbahns, there aren't a lot of ways to do this with buses, so electric rail becomes the target. What could have been a simple prewar-style streetcar line becomes a ridiculous viaduct and/or subway project that lasts 30 years and costs 3 billion dollars. Legacy systems like SF Muni, which are largely surface running, get locked into the positively ancient concept of high-floor vehicles, rendering large parts of the system inaccessible to anyone with mobility issues. Massive expenditure on each new line leads to spread out service that is almost entirely focused on white-collar commuter routes, leaving even the white-collar people themselves with no option but a car when it comes to their non-work related transportation needs.
Compare iconic systems like the Key to modern-day BART. There is no comparison. BART is a constant and comical waste of time and energy for not even a fraction of the density that the Key System provided (did you know that the Key even ran 24-hour service to SF?). It's 6-9am and 5-7pm weekday frequency is nothing special, and its "off-peak" frequency is a fucking joke. It's an entirely dedicated right-of-way, heavy, third-rail "replacement" for an almost completely surface-running streetcar system. It has a fraction of the lines and stops, and it's far from the only example.
LA Metro vs. Pacific Electric?
Chicago L versus North Shore?
MBTA commuter rail versus Eastern Mass Street Railway? (you used to be able to go from Boston to fucking Newburyport on a STREETCAR)
The bottom line is, it's all over-priced crap designed to appease both capitalists and middle-class commuters who need to feel good about themselves without thinking too hard about the world around them and their complicity in its erosion.
Now, if you're asking "is light rail a viable technology for modern interurban service" my opinion is that it is the best technology for the vast majority of overland passenger and "less-than-car-load" freight. It's the same as most heavy rail systems but more efficient, more accessible, more flexible, and lower impact on the environment. Low-floor, better grade performance, more adaptable to existing infrastructure, less material used in construction, lower maintenance, lower energy consumption for the same capacity and vehicle speed, etc.
If you're asking how specific systems do at replicating the old interurbans, I can tell you without looking into any more detailed data that they all fail because they all provide the same or less density and frequency of service as their 20th century predecessors while the population of the areas they serve has gone up and their supporting systems (i.e. local transit) is the same or less density and frequency as well.
There's nothing inherent to light rail vehicles or infrastructure that makes this so, it is manipulated by the state to be inefficient, sometimes with straight up lies.
Recently, Charlotte, NC tried to get a Lynx light rail line extended by 3 or 4 miles. A "study" was commissioned comparing this modest extension of a single line of an existing service to an extension of the nearby highway by the same length. This "study" found that two surface-level tracks and wires and a few stops would cost as much as the same length of highway.
I don't claim to be an expert in highway construction or rail construction, but I think anyone can agree that "study" is horseshit of the most comical variety, and yet, it was successful in killing the light rail extension.
A few years ago, Diane Feinstein tried again to get the fabled "Second Crossing" from the east bay to SF built. She and some other feckless dimwit commissioned a study on how best to configure this new bridge. The study found that the bridge should be a rail bridge with bike lanes. So they commissioned three more studies which all said the same thing. Finally, on their fifth attempt, they found some group of charlatans who would go along with the idea that it should be cars only. I can't prove that's what happened with the Lynx "study", but I'd lay odds.
This process is how infrastructure is built under capitalism. You can't accurately judge the "feasibility" of a given technology because you can never be sure you've penetrated all the layers of bullshit. The US spends 35 million per mile of light rail in construction, more than double what other liberal capitalist states do. Clearly, something is up there.
Is it a good idea to try and get light rail built anyway, even within the liberal capitalist framework? Well for one thing, good luck with that, but to directly answer the question, maybe? I think it's a better use of time and energy to dismantle capitalism and the state, perhaps radical infrastructure of some kind could be included in that process, but the state is going to do everything in its power to obstruct the return or expansion of previous systems, up to and including murdering us, so it's probably better to focus on overthrowing them first.