Unfortunately, the Port Authority of Allegheny County – Pittsburgh’s government mass-transit bus and rail monopoly -- is a typical example of how far the American mass-transit model has devolved after 40-plus years of horrid management, easy federal money and the unconditional support of local and national politicians. To find out if cities elsewhere have found a better way of providing bus and rail service for their people, I recently called our favorite international transit guru and public policy consultant Wendell Cox (www.demographia.com) at his office in southern Illinois near St. Louis.
Q: What's the best mass-transit system in the world?
A: Tokyo. The system is largely commuter rail. There are 10 large, private, profitable commuter rail systems. There are two largely profitable subway systems in the city of Tokyo -- when I say Tokyo, I'm talking about 35 million people stretched over about 3,000 square miles -- one and half times the size of Los Angeles. So I'm not just talking about the city of Tokyo. But in this whole area, transit is profitable. Two big subways in Tokyo actually cover all their operating costs as well as almost all of their capital costs. If you think of the Port Authority, it's lucky if it is covering 30 percent of its operating costs. In Tokyo the commuter rail service is private, they earn strong profits, and they pay for their capital costs and their expansion. Over all the major systems that account for more than 90 percent of the ridership are profitable.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not because they came in later and said, “Oh, we need to build these rail systems.” After World War II, obviously Japan was wiped out, as the cities expanded. Tokyo in 1940 probably had 5 million people; today we have 35 million. While we all know that Japan is losing population, the growth of the Japanese urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s was something to behold. What happened as they grew, these private railroads -- not public railroads; there was not an ounce of public planning here, by the way -- expanded their systems.
You have a situation now where, believe it or not, 60 to 65 percent of the movement of people in the Tokyo area and the Osaka area is by transit -- a stunning figure. When you figure that in the Pittsburgh area the number is less than 2 percent. By the way, it only exceeds 4 percent in the U.S.A. in New York, which is 9 percent.
Another thing helped them as well -- World War II. A lot of people don’t realize that Japanese GDP in 1950, adjusted for