Valuing Rail Transit: Comparing Capital and Operating Costs to Consumer Benefits

摘要

A certain acrimony pervades the longstanding debate over the costs and benefits of publicrail transportation in the United States. Some seem opposed to all rail transit all the time, whileothers support any and every rail project, despite sometimes high costs and low ridership. Withmuch of the debate focused on pricing automobile externalities, transportation choice, and therail's external benefits, surprisingly few studies assess which rail transit systems create netpositive social welfare. If consumer benefits alone do not justify the high cost of a transitinvestment, what would the external value of a passenger trip have to be to do so?Combining fare, ridership, operating, and capital cost data for 24 transit agencies' heavyand/or light rail systems, this paper makes back-of-the-envelope estimates of how transitsystems' rider benefits compare to operating deficits. Urban rail systems may not be optimalfrom a transportation systems or economic cost-benefit perspective, but they clearly create valuefor consumers and society. Given a low, but commonly applied, elasticity of -0.3 and a lineardemand curve, two transit systems create net social welfare gains based solely on consumersurplus. At least ten others likely provide net benefits when accounting for economicexternalities. At an elasticity of -0.6, no system provides net social welfare gains withoutaccounting for externalities. At least five systems are unlikely to provide net economic benefits,even given generous assumptions about external and rider benefits.