In a lengthy and imploring editorial, a local newspaper claims that restoring state transit funding “isn’t a bailout” but “an investment in a public good.”
“Transit is a public good, but it’ll take compromise and political courage to ensure that good is available to as many people as possible. Whether Pennsylvania’s leaders are up to the task remains to be seen,” the editorial concludes.
This “public good” claim is one that we hear repeatedly from Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) public relations-types. And now, it’s being parroted by local media.
Sorry, but public transit is not a “public good” in the true economic sense.
As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis noted in its “The Economic Lowdown” podcast series:
“For a good to be classified as a public good, it must meet two conditions: It must be nonexcludable and nonrival.
“A good is nonexcludable if the supplier of the good cannot prevent those who don’t pay it from consuming or using it. A good is nonrival if one person’s consumption does not hinder anyone else’s consumption of the good. That is, everyone gets to use it freely.
“So, I can consume as much of the good as I like and you can consume as much as you like. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t hog it.
“Additionally, a public good may not necessarily be a physical good that you can hold in your hands. Nonexcludable and nonrival services are also considered ‘public goods.’”
But, but, but, those shilling for restored or more state money for struggling public transit protest, surely public transit is a public good.
“Efficient, robust, safe public transit is a public good that’s essential to economic development, population growth and regional prosperity,” the local editorial argues.
But that doesn’t make it a “public good,” per se, the St. Louis Fed says.
“Public transportation … is excludable, because the transit company won’t give you a ride if you don’t pay the fare. It’s also rival because public transportation has limits. At busy times, a train or bus might have to leave passengers behind because of lack of space.
“So, public transportation isn’t a public good because it is not nonexcludable and nonrival,” the Fed says.
But that’s not the only problem with this local editorial’s rah-rah-sis-boom-bah-ing for greater taxpayer funding.
As Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, the editorial’s author(s) totally ignore “PRT’s long running history of extraordinarily high cost and inefficient operations” when compared to not only peer organizations but those much larger.
Throwing good money after bad won’t solve that problem. It only condones it.
And lest we forget “the power the unions have over transit operations that lead to inefficiency and horrible levels of cost per mile operated,” the Ph.D. economist reminds.
We’ve steadfastly argued that transit unions should be stripped of their “right” to strike that allows them to hold high the cudgel of profligacy-producing waste and inefficiency over government and taxpayers.
But that’s unlikely to ever happen in a climate in which pols are so beholden to organized labor (though that stranglehold shows some signs of loosening in some jurisdictions).
That said, those same pols must insist, as an ironclad provision of the appropriation of any taxpayer dollars, that PRT (and other similarly situated public transit agencies in Pennsylvania) begin to rein-in their out-of-whack cost structures.
Anything less and they’ll continue to be the financial public evils they long have been.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
