A recent Deseret Morning News editorial called Salt Lake County Council's decision to spend the majority of the new sales tax increase on rail transit a "good decision." Nothing could be further from the truth. The proposed rail projects promise very little benefit to the typical resident of the Salt Lake Valley. Economic studies have shown that light rail has no impact on highway congestion. This is primarily because so few people use public transportation. According to the 2000 Census, only about 3.5 percent of commuters used public transit to get to work — and the bulk of them rode the bus. (For an interesting comparison, 2 percent walked to work and 3.8 percent worked at home.)

In places like Salt Lake County, building a rail system can actually reduce the efficiency of the transport system, since bus lines must be rerouted to feed the fixed rail network, forcing former riders to make a transfer. Light-rail vehicles are simply big buses that have to stay on a fixed track. Furthermore, transit stations and rail lines take up space in the roadways in some cases, reducing their capacity. It is precisely for these reasons that buses replaced trolley systems in almost every city in the United States in the middle decades of the last century. Light rail is even less effective today than it was then.

Commuter rail is no better and maybe even worse. A simple analysis using UTA's own projections of cost and ridership shows that each rail commuter on the Weber/Davis spur of the FrontRunner will be subsidized by perhaps $1,200 per month. The Utah County spur will likely be even less efficient, as commuting flows are smaller.

The Deseret Morning News editorial claimed that completion of the proposed rail projects would result in a transit system that would "allow most people in the valley to travel about without a car." Such a system is already in place, and proposed rail projects will make no material change to the speed or convenience of trips by public transit. For example, a typical trip from a Sandy neighborhood to the University of Utah, two locations well-served by the current light-rail system, takes about 90 minutes, if UTA's trip planner can be believed. Who would be willing to spend three hours each day in transit when the same trip can be made in less than a third the time in an auto? As rail projects move into areas of the county that have even lower population and job density, usage will be low. Only a tiny fraction of travelers will use mass transit, in spite of the huge expenditures that are proposed.

It is more realistic to consider these rail projects as exercises in conspicuous consumption. They are monuments that show the world that Salt Lake is so affluent that it can spend $1 billion or $2 billion on projects that provide virtually no transportation benefits to its taxpayers.

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Michael R. Ransom is chairman of the department of economics at Brigham Young University.