Sometimes I think Randal O'Toole is putting us on. He reacts to Frumination's calculation of the highway and parking capacity Manhattan would need to replace it's rush-hour subway capacity. O'Toole's alternative? Buses, of course:
Many 40-foot bus can carry 64 passengers (42 sitting, 22 standing, which means a higher proportion sitting than on a subway). Spaced five bus lengths apart, 11 buses per minute can cruise down a highway lane carrying more than 42,000 people per hour. That means fewer than 10 new lanes would be needed to carry the people now taking subways — and those 10 lanes would take up a lot less space than the 22 subway lines.
This can be further reduced by assuming that some people will time shift. During the 8 to 9 am hour, the average subway car carries 108 people, but in the afternoon peak hour the average subway car carries only 87 people. If some of the 108 people in that morning hour time shifted to the 7 or 9 am hour, then even fewer bus lanes would be needed to carry people into Manhattan.
Randal should have finished his calculations. Forty-foot buses can cruise down a highway at 11 buses per minute only if they are averaging almost 30 mph. But buses traveling into Manhattan could not approach that speed because once they got to Manhattan, they'd have to exit the freeway onto crowded local streets. The ensuing bottleneck would back up bus traffic for miles.
Worse, Randal ignores the sheer amount of space his buses would occupy once they got to Manhattan. It would take 6,250 buses to move 400,000 commuters. At 40 feet per bus, 6,250 buses would take up 47 linear miles of street space -- if they were lined up nose-to-tail. (94 miles if we allow one bus-length between buses.) Manhattan is only 13.5 miles long.
And this ignores that commuters would need another bus network once they got to Manhattan, because express buses couldn't drop commuters at their final destination.
This is absurd. Randal must understand this, because he generously allows that buses might not be able to replace the entire subway capacity:
If there were no federal subsidies to New York City transit, it is possible that the subways would decline and not be entirely replaced by buses. If so, downtown Manhattan might lose some of its allure as a job center. Would that be so horrible? A lower-density Manhattan might have had less attraction as a terrorist target. It would save taxpayers money. And people would get to their work faster, as (thanks largely to its high proportion of transit commuters) New York has the longest average commuter times of any urban area in the nation.
It sounds to me like getting rid of the subway might benefit everyone except, of course, downtown property owners. And that is really what rail transit is all about: transferring wealth from millions of ordinary taxpayers to a few downtown property owners, rail contractors, and transit agency officials and employees.
Let's ignore that highways and bridges are also a subsidy to property owners. (Is he factoring these capital and maintenance costs into his bus fares?) Let's also ignore that all of the boroughs and suburbs served by the subway are much more valuable thanks to their accessibility to Manhattan.
It's clear that Randal simply doesn't understand the concepts of increasing returns and agglomerations. New York metropolitan residents are willing to endure longer commutes, pay higher commercial rents and housing costs, and fork over a good chunk of their income in taxes because they receive at least that much value from living in or close to the city. New York City is a wealth-generating machine, and that is largely -- if not entirely -- due to a bunch of highly productive people crowding together. Density begets productivity, and rising productivity is ultimately the source of rising wealth. Turning Manhattan into Jacksonville or any other low-density city would destroy vast amounts of wealth. Subway subsidies are trivial by comparison. Most New Yorkers understand this, which is why you don't hear them argue for the elimination of the subway but instead leave that to an "economist" from Oregon.
