Product of the Spotlight: Daily News vs. Metrolink

Monday, January 31, 2005, at 08:30AM

By Eric Richardson

The Daily News takes on Metrolink costs today, in an article titled "Transit on the Wrong Track." The piece itself reads more fairly than the head would indicate, though it does include some fun shots at transit spending:

Every day an average of 40,000 suburbanites vote with their feet by climbing aboard Metrolink trains from Ventura County to San Bernardino. They are mostly former freeway commuters, but only a small fraction of the million or so riders who use Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses, trains and subway in Los Angeles County alone , not to mention the millions of others who drive their cars to work and back.

... The average fare for a Metrolink train trip costs passengers about $5, with the public paying an average subsidy per rider of $5.07, money that comes from sales-tax add-ons that support transportation in the region. That comes on top of the $3 billion in bonds that voters approved to create the system.

It's interesting to see commuter rail attacked. It's one of the cheapest transit modes overall and has a high farebox recovery. More thoughts in the body...

One big criticism in the article is that a commuter transit system doesn't make sense in LA since we're the city with no real center -- ie. dispersed commercial centers.

Fellow USC professor James E. Moore argues that Metrolink makes no sense in sprawling Los Angeles because job centers are scattered across the region.

"If we invest in transportation systems that are premised on concentrated employment centers, we're certainly making a mistake because that's not the way our urban landscape is organized," said Moore, chairman of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at USC.

But yet Downtown Los Angeles has more office space than anywhere else in southern California. If you look at just the financial district and Bunker Hill you find eight buildings each with over one million square feet of office space. A heck of a lot of people work Downtown. Sure, LA has other substantial commercial centers, but Downtown is still a destination.

The article does address the flawed idea that transit systems need pay for themselves:

Jeff Boothe, a national transit advocate, said the subsidy is on par with those required to run similar commuter systems in Baltimore and San Francisco.

"There isn't a transit system in America that pays for itself," said Boothe, chairman of the New Starts Working Group, a coalition of transportation agencies pushing for federal rail funds. "If you adopt that view, let's shut transit down nationwide."

Exactly. I was just explaining this to Kathy the other night. Transit is not intended to pay for itself. Sure, there are small special cases where it may be able to do that, but you're not going to be running any sort of a modern transit system as a profit center. All infrastructure is subsidized, but if it has a positive effect on the community it's worth paying for.