Transit Investments and the Failure of Randal O’Toole’s Short-Term Thinking

When he tells us that ridership “peaked,” he’s confessing that he’s playing the “arbitrary starting year” game. To get the biggest possible failure story, he compares current ridership to a past year that he selected because ridership was especially high then. This is a standard way of exploiting the natural volatility of ridership to create exaggerated trends. Again, the Los Angeles Times article that got O’Toole going made a big deal out of how ridership is down since 1985 and 2006, without mentioning that ridership is up since 1989 and up since 2004 and 2011. Whether ridership is up or down depends on which past year you choose, which is to say, it’s about what story the writer wants to tell.

Imagine if we had built the Interstate Highway System with this attitude. Oops, we just spent billions on a freeway to newly developing suburbs, but not many people are driving on it yet because the suburbs are still under construction. Surely the O’Toole of the day would have said that those highway planners are fools!

We’ve arrived at what’s really at stake here in this obsession with short-term outcomes. O’Toole begins from a deep hostility to the very notion of long-range planning, at least when done at the level of the city or community, and I hear this more and more from “conservative” voices in local conversations.  (I put “conservative” in scare quotes because the more I hear the word, the less it seems to mean.)  Sometimes I want to get some of these folks (especially older ones) into a room and just ask this:  “Close your eyes and visualize your grandchildren, or whatever children are in your family.  Are there any sacrifices you’d be willing to make so that they would have better lives, more opportunities, and generally a better world, even after you’re gone, even after you are no longer there to enjoy their gratitude?”

Most writers who self-describe as “conservative” these days, including O’Toole, seem to be starting from a clear no on this question, and presuming the same in their readers.  If it doesn’t pay off now, it doesn’t matter.  If you think about it, is the world view of the average thrill-seeking teenager, something most of us hope to grow out of as adults.

Transit investments will make no sense to anyone who thinks this way, so the best answer, I think, is to ask my question about grandchildren.  If the answer is no, there’s no point arguing.