Solving problems that do not exist

Published 7:35 pm Friday, July 26, 2013

There’s a lesson in the headline of a Washington Post article from Saturday. The lesson is that big government solutions don’t always address actual problems.

The headline reads, “Metro’s new Silver Line could face challenge in attracting Northern Virginia riders.”

The story is about the Washington D.C. public transportation system.

“Metro is preparing for what experts say is its toughest challenge since opening 37 years ago: luring people onto the new Silver Line in Northern Virginia,” the story says. “When the first phase of the 23-mile line opens next year, the gleaming new trains will no doubt revive the debate over whether mass-transit projects attract enough riders to make them worthwhile.”

Why did they build it, then? It seems that D.C. public transportation officials think people ought to use D.C. public transportation. And that’s reason enough to build a $6.8 billion taxpayer-funded line.

While they can compel the use of tax dollars, they can’t compel ridership.

“The vast majority of Northern Virginians rely on cars to go where they need to go, and 70 percent of infrequent Metro riders say one reason they don’t ride the rails more often is that they just prefer driving,” the Post observes. “As the region’s population has continued to grow, fewer say they are riding Metro regularly. Only 12 percent of Northern Virginians report riding Metro ‘very often’ or ‘fairly often,’ down from 19 percent in 2010 and 23 percent in 2005. By contrast, the poll finds Metro ridership steady among Marylanders and people living in the District.”

The fact that “ridership is steady” must also be disappointing to transit officials, because the population is growing.

People offer the usual reasons for not taking the train; “among those who ride Metro sporadically in Northern Virginia, many say that stations are not close enough to their homes, that Metro doesn’t go where they want to go and that it takes too long to get from one place to another,” the Post explains.

Ridership worries have led to the Metro system pointing to secondary effects as justification for building the line.

“Nearly 20 years in the making, the Silver Line has been billed by officials as a transportation project that will spur development and job growth in the region for decades to come,” the Post says. “The new line gives Fairfax County a chance to cluster development of offices, retail space and housing closer to rail stations.”

That’s an awfully expensive way to stimulate development. And in any case, economic development isn’t the purpose of a public transportation system. Transportation is. When a system fails to accomplish its purpose, what’s the use in keeping it?

The bigger lesson is that government is good at offering solutions that don’t really address the problem. Wall Street shenanigans really were a problem in the recent recession; the Dodd-Frank law doesn’t really do anything to rein them in.

As the D.C. Metro system demonstrates, big solutions, big spending and big projects are always the first impulse of big government.

And that’s not always a good thing.