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Home / Washington Business - March/April 2005 / Q&A with Kemper Freeman: Wasting Money on Mass Transit |
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Q&A with Kemper Freeman: Wasting Money on Mass Transit |
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Written On: March/April 2005 |
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Kemper Freeman, Jr. is chairman and CEO of Kemper Development Co. He is involved in the ownership and development of Bellevue Square, a super-regional shopping center. His company has also developed Bellevue Place and is currently the equity owner and developer of Lincoln Square in downtown Bellevue. He is past chairman, the current government affairs chairman, and, since 1987, has served as a trustee of the International Council of Shopping Centers. He is chairman of the board of First Mutual Bank and a board member for Overlake Hospital and PACE — Performing Arts Center Eastside. A former state legislator, Freeman has a long history of involvement in political and civic activities. Through funding and research, he is actively seeking a solution to traffic congestion in the Puget Sound region.
Q How would you describe transportation problems on the east side of Puget Sound?
A: A hundred percent mess. We spend over half of our resources on transit, not on roads. And the road money goes just to fill potholes, on safety and environmental things. We’re 35 years into a “transit-is-the-only-solution” program and in metropolitan areas of Seattle transit carries less than 3 percent of the daily trips. If you carry this out into the planned future for greater Seattle, we’re going to spend the equivalent of $46 billion in today’s dollars on public transit in the next 30 years. The planners hope to get us to 5 percent transit in that time. Today we’re 97 percent dependent on the automobile; 30 years — and $46 billion — from now we’re going to be 95 percent dependent on the car, and yet we’re doing nothing for the car.
Q: Will automobile use increase in the years ahead?
A: The number of trips is growing at a rate of 15 percent per decade. And the dream is that transit market share will increase two-thirds of a percent per decade in the next 30 years. Even the planners acknowledge that congestion [automobiles] is going to get twice as bad in Seattle as it is now. That’s the plan of the day. That is an unacceptable plan.
Q: Is there a solution?
AFinally, out of frustration, I went and hired transportation engineers simply for my own mental health. I wanted to know if there is a better solution, something better we could do. I hired some internationally recognized people to study Puget Sound, which is where 80 percent of the congestion in the state is. These engineers came back with some very simple information: More than 50 percent of trips are occurring on our freeway system, which is about 5 percent of our road system; another 15 percent of trips take place on the major arterials in the region, about 7 percent of our road system. Taken altogether, only 12 percent of our road system is carrying two-thirds of our trips.
Transit, though it has grown twice as fast as the national average, still carries only 2.8 percent of all trips.
Q: If less than 3 percent of our people are riding mass transit, why are we spending so much money on it?
A: It starts off as an emotional, religious experience, the blind faith people have in transit. They just believe it is the right thing to do, they’ve been told it’s the right thing to do. Most of the time — all of the time — they can’t give you any meaningful data as to why it’s the right thing to do, they can just tell you it’s the right thing to do and don’t feel they have to explain it. It’s the politically correct thing to do.
And the funding of the transit campaign is being largely done by those people who specifically benefit from this industry: the engineers who plan it, the people who build it, and the people who are going to operate it. Transit has become as close to Chicago-type politics as we’ve ever been in the Seattle area. It is a political scheme funded by a group of people who benefit as long as transit is being built and will cease to exist if it isn’t.
This is a political machine that is running on blind faith and emotions. It’s well funded…it is now publicly funded. The Regional Transit Authority gives Sound Transit about $350 million a year, and they’re not elected by anybody. They’re removed from reality and they have a lot of taxing authority and they’re not being held accountable for what they do by anybody. And worst of all, they’re draining resources from the community.
Q: Mass transit — subways — seem to work well in New York. Why does it work there and not here?
A: You’re going right to the crucial point. I may be the only person in America who has done a study on the correlation of population density and transportation, which is a core issue.
More than half of all the people in the United States who ride mass transit are within the city of New York. This is a great transportation solution for the great city of New York. To make it work, the population densities in New York, especially in Manhattan, range from 30,000 to 60,000 per square mile. That’s the kind of densities you need for successful mass transit.
In Washington there’s a precinct or two — I think it’s on Queen Anne — that approaches the lower number, about 30,000. For most of us in the greater Seattle area, the average density per square mile is about 2,500 to 2,600.
Our study showed that the mode of transportation used depended on density. We found that as density went up from 2,600 per square mile to 30,000, the use of roadways went up with it in a straight line. Only after reaching a density of 30,000 does the rising use of roads begin to slow down. Thus as you grow through these densities, your road system must grow along with the population density. As densities reach 60,000 per square mile, use of roadways declines. At 60,000 people per square mile, you’re back to needing the same amount of roadway you needed at 2,600 per square mile.
Now, to put that in perspective, it takes decades to increase density in an urban area by 5 or 10 percent. It would be about a 1,200 percent increase to go from 2,600 to 30,000. What we learned is that you would have to increase population density over 1,200 percent in this region before other modes of transportation would begin to become more important that roadways.
Q: In recent years I’ve observed the electric train system they’ve built in Portland, Oregon. Every train I see is running empty.
A: They’re touted as being the poster child for politically correct transportation. They have less market share for public transit than we do. They bet the farm on light rail. Light rail is very expensive, very ineffective and less than 1 percent of trips are accomplished on the light-rail system in Portland. They’re an eternity away from 30,000 people per square mile where things start to change.
Q: I think you just told me that Portland spent billions of dollars for no gain.
A: Exactly. And yet you will see on late-night television [in Portland] government-produced videos that run all the time telling how wonderful it is, how wonderful transit-oriented development is. I can’t figure out where they got the pictures.
Q: Give us an example of some of the recommendations made by the transportation engineers you hired.
A: The engineers found that if we simply increased the capacity of the overall road system — 6 percent more lane miles, half of which would be additional lanes on existing freeways, the other half would be additional lanes mostly on existing arterials — we would reduce congestion from today’s level by 36 percent. And it would fully accommodate the 45 percent increase in trips expected over the next 30 years.
And we’re not saying that transit doesn’t have a place. It’s been oversold, though. Advocates of transit have been trying to fool us, saying that it is how we’re going to solve future transportation problems. I contend that it is mathematically impossible. It will not happen.
Next Issue: Freeman describes how fixing the roads costs less and does more, and why the subterranean Alaska Way Viaduct proposal is a waste of money and potentially Seattle’s version of the graft-infested “Big Dig” in Boston. — Ed.
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