Policymakers can focus too much on congestion relief and not enough on urban mobility and accessibility. Light rail is an attractive idea, especially in famously congested Los Angeles. Why sit stuck in traffic while the light rail glides by?
Light rail projects are booming around the United States. Reports from the National Transit Database show that between 1991 and 2012, light rail transit capacity increased from 27 million to 99 million service miles nationally. Light rail service, in fact, has grown at a higher rate than bus, subway, and other public transit modes. Los Angeles is part of this trend. LA Metro has the most ambitious urban rail transit development program in the U.S.: Projects worth approximately $8 billion are currently under construction. The first segment of the Los Angeles Expo Line, between Culver City and Downtown LA, opened in 2012 as part of this widespread recent investment.
One of the common justifications for investing in light rail is its potential to reduce roadway traffic congestion. Yet, little evidence exists to support this claim. There are many studies of the impacts of light rail, but few have examined its impacts specifically on traffic congestion.
We took advantage of a unique data set to analyze how the Expo Line affected transit ridership and road traffic in the corridor — and found that the project has had a positive impact on the former, but not much effect on the latter. Our results indicate that the real benefits of rail transit investments are not in traffic reduction, but rather in increasing the accessibility and popularity of transit within high-demand corridors.
We identified three conditions that must be satisfied for a light rail system to decrease corridor-level traffic congestion:
A net increase in transit service and accessibility, relative to previous transit services within the service corridor, in order to attract new passengers rather than those who already used transit. The increase must be large enough to be perceived by individual travelers.
Potential demand for transit travel within the corridor must be enough to generate more passengers. Specifically, enough existing travelers must be willing to shift to transit and new travelers must be willing to choose transit over other modes if quality transit service such as light rail is introduced within the corridor.
The new transit system should not interfere with or slow down roadway traffic within the corridor.
If these conditions are met, light rail systems can attract new riders by promoting car-to-transit shifts, and thereby reduce congestion, improve mobility and reliability of travel, and increase person throughput across their service corridors.
“A natural experiment”