|
Q & A with Randal O'Toole
You live near Sisters, Oregon, but you are also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank. What is the Cato Institute and how did you become involved with it?
The Cato Institute is one of the world's premier libertarian/free-market think tanks. As a long-time advocate of free-market environmentalism, I was invited by Cato to be an adjunct scholar in 1995 and became a full-time senior fellow in 2007. I am a pragmatic libertarian: I support smaller government because it works better than big government, but I will support government programs when they work better than any alternatives. I am glad the Cato Institute is willing to tolerate my eccentricities.
Earlier this month in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, "It's the Last Stop on the Light-Rail Gravy Train," you wrote about pending proposals for new light rail lines in the southern cities of San Antonio, Nashville and St. Petersburg: "These proposals are questionable at best and reckless at worst, given that transit ridership -- including bus and what little rail these regions have -- is down in all three jurisdictions. This is a nationwide trend ... The rail system in Portland, Ore., is often considered successful, but only 8 percent of commuters take transit of any kind to work. In 1980, before rail was constructed, buses alone were carrying 10 percent of commuters."
Why do central planners/government officials continue to have such firm belief in light rail as a viable future transit option? Is there any level of increased congestion combined with low transit ridership in the Portland metro area that could cause "smart growth" advocates to quit promoting Portland as a successful light rail model? Is this just an endless urban myth?
The most important reason city and transit officials support light rail is that the federal government is willing to fund half the costs of constructing it, and no local politician wants to turn down "free" federal money. Urban planners have an ideological (and largely irrational) belief in higher-density cities, and many believe that light rail will help them achieve (or at least justify) such densities. But without the carrot of federal funding, planners' ideas would not get much support from political leaders. The good news is the Trump Administration wants to kill the federal program supporting new rail transit construction; the bad news is that Congress is not eager to support that because it sees rail as a form of pork barrel.
Last year in a Washington Post op-ed, "Transit is dead, Let's prepare for the mobility revolution," you wrote: "In 2013, America's transit system spent more than $60 billion carrying fewer than 59 billion passenger miles, for an average cost of $1.03 per passenger mile. By comparison Barclays estimates that self-driving cars will cost only 29 cents per mile. Since cars are also faster and more convenient than transit, transit will disappear except in places that are simply too dense to be served by automobiles, which in the United States means New York City."
Why are planners, particularly in cities revered for their central planning ideas such as Portland, so resistant to the idea that future commuters will be attracted to the convenience and low cost of driverless taxis/cars (Uber, Lyft)? Doesn't this reinforce the beliefs you first wrote about it in your 2001 book, "The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths?"
Most planners have been taught that low-density suburbs are bad; high-density cities are good; auto driving is bad; transit is good. There is little scientific support for these ideas, but it makes them want to shape cities and technologies to their preconceived notions of what a city should look like rather than to allow urban areas to grow naturally.
Generally, planners are about 50 years behind the times in urban development. In about 1900, for example, cities were "monocentric" in that they had downtowns with high numbers of jobs surrounded by residential areas. This model of the city began breaking down in the 1910s and 1920s when factories started moving to the suburbs where land was cheap. This turned monocentric cities into polycentric cities with several major job centers. But planners continued to promote monocentric cities through the 1970s.
By 1980, most jobs were in service sectors that were finely spread out across the landscape, thus replacing the polycentric city with what I call the nanocentric city, since it has no real job centers. This is about when planners decided to start promoting polycentric cities, as they continue to do today. Rapid transit services monocentric cities; planners think light rail will serve polycentric cities; but no form of transit does well in nanocentric cities.
Planners can't turn the clock back; all they can do is make it harder for people to live in modern cities by imposing policies that would only be appropriate in cities 50 to 100 years ago.
Will improvements in automobile battery technology mute the voices of automobile critics who believe cars cause global warming because they burn fossil fuels?
I am not a battery expert, but so far electric vehicles cannot compete with internal combustion vehicles, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. For the next decade or so, internal combustion vehicles will become more energy efficient at a faster rate than electric vehicles will replace them. Remember, electric vehicles require electric power, and in most of the United States that means burning fossil fuels, so they aren't a panacea either.
The real problem is that automobile critics want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Automobiles have produced huge benefits for our society, including enabling the civil rights and women's rights movements, giving people access to affordable housing and low-cost consumer goods, and freeing up hundreds of millions of acres of land that had to be used to pasture horses and other working farm animals. Autos also polluted the air and killed people on the roads, but improved technologies have greatly reduced those problems. Fatality rates per million miles driven have declined 80 percent in the last 50 years and toxic emissions have declined 90 percent. Yet, rather than fix problems with autos, critics want to replace or ban them, which would impose huge hardships on the economy and especially on the working class.
In a 2016 open letter to Maryland Gov. Hogan in the Huffington Post you recommended that he forgo the $2.5 billion Purple Light Rail line in suburban DC - now under construction - and choose rapid bus service instead. You estimated buses could run every two minutes on the proposed line, serving the Maryland and D.C. suburban towns of Bethesda, Silver Spring and College Park. You suggested the cost would have been only four percent of the estimated Maryland light rail line cost.
If rapid bus service is so inexpensive and efficient, why isn't it used more often in heavily congested metropolitan areas, such as Portland, Oregon?
Light rail is preferred over buses because it is expensive, which gives politicians the opportunity to hand out pork barrel. For example, in 1973, Congress allowed cities to cancel urban freeways and spend the federal money that would have built those freeways on transit capital improvements instead. Portland Mayor Neil Goldschmidt wanted to cancel the Mt. Hood Freeway, but realized the money from that freeway would buy more buses than TriMet could use. So he proposed to build a light rail line instead, not because it was efficient but because it was expensive and would use up all of those federal funds without imposing huge operating costs on TriMet.
In a 2009 New York Times profile, you were portrayed as someone who enjoys making provocative statements but "doesn't fit the portrait of a corporate advocate." Reporter Saqib Rahim wrote, "O'Toole continued to recommend deep cuts in federal transit funding. He still derides rail projects as 'urban monuments' that burnish mayors' resumes without reducing traffic or emissions."
You were described this way: "On visits to Capitol Hill, he blends in as a middle aged, middle height man in a dark suit -- but his beard gives him away, its shaggy twists seemingly fit for a forest dweller. He wears a string tie that most Americans would only recognize on Colonel Sanders."
Do you think the New York Times and other establishment media have treated you and your common sense economic views fairly?
That was actually a pretty accurate portrayal. What Rahim didn't know is that, when I'm not on Capitol Hill, all of the clothes I normally wear are more appropriate for a forest dweller. After all, I live 500 feet from the Deschutes National Forest.
It's worth noting that there is no reason to think I would look like a corporate advocate, since I am not one. It is the people who support light rail, which is designed and built by corporations like Siemens, Kiewit Construction, and Parsons Brinckerhoff, who are the corporate advocates.
Housing prices rose nine percent in 2016 in the Portland Metropolitan area, the second fastest in the nation. In March of 2017, the median house in the Portland area sold for $370,000. In an Oregonian commentary you wrote: "Since 1980, the population within Portland's urban-growth boundary has grown by 70 percent, yet the boundary has been expanded by less than 15 percent. Land prices have grown by hundreds of percent and, despite the urban planner's mantra, growing up instead out of does not make housing affordable. Oregon's housing affordability crisis can be directly traced to growth boundaries, which make homes cost twice as much as they should."
What is the evidence that housing prices in the Portland area are twice as high as they should be because of the UGB? And why has such an important, even critical, statistic been so long ignored by policymakers and local media?
Looking around the country, there is practically a one-to-one relationship between urban areas with high housing costs and urban areas with growth boundaries or similar land-use restrictions. This has been proven by many researchers. For example, Wharton Business School put together a database of land-use regulations for thousands of cities across the nation. A University of Washington economist compared this database with housing prices and concluded that there is "a tight association between land use regulations and housing price growth."
Median housing prices in the nation's fastest-growing urban areas, Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth, are about 2.5 times median family incomes, whereas in Portland and Seattle they are more than four times family incomes. Housing is more affordable in Dallas and Houston precisely because they have minimal land-use rules. Counties in Texas aren't even allowed to zone, much less restrict development.
Unfortunately, the political momentum behind urban land-use regulation is too strong to reverse it. For one thing, two out of three families own their own homes, and ending the regulation would reduce the equity they have in their homes, putting many of them underwater. So they are not going to support such rollbacks.
Early in your career you worked with environmental groups to oppose the U.S. Forest Service's subsidized sales of timber from our public forests. In your recent report, "Reforming the Forest Service," you note that since 1996 timber sales have fallen by 85 percent (on federal lands) and remain at fairly low levels. You state, "This relieved the controversies about overcutting."
Since the early 1990s, more than 4 million acres have burned in Oregon national forests, a figure 4 times higher than during the entire period between post-WWII until the "spotted owl" controversy in the early 1990s. During that time, more than 200 sawmills have closed in rural Oregon, and 30 percent of Oregon's rural children live below the poverty line. What are your views today on the best ways to manage our national forests? Are Congress and the U.S. Forest Service guilty of malpractice when it comes to managing these forests?
Actually, that decline was since 1990, not 1996, and I think the report you are referring to was called "A Matter of Trust," not "Reforming the Forest Service," which was the title of my 1988 book.
For as long as the Forest Service has been keeping records, wildfires have been proportional to the amount of drought. There is no evidence that more or less timber cutting, fuel treatments such as thinnings or prescribed burnings, or decades of fire suppression have significantly influenced the number of acres burned each year. A bigger influence is changes in fire fighting methods that require more backfires than direct fire attacks. If anything, the Forest Service is spending too much money on fire suppression each year.
When I was working with environmental groups in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear to me that the Forest Service had gone too far with their timber programs and were cutting more from the forests than could be sustained or was compatible with other resources such as recreation, wildlife, and water quality. By the late 1980s, I realized that this had happened because Congress had inadvertently given the Forest Service budgetary incentives to cut timber even if it lost money and harmed the forests. After I pointed this out in a 1988 book, Reforming the Forest Service, many Forest Service leaders came to agree and cut back on timber cutting in order to protect other forest resources.
This reduction in sales caused economic hardships in many rural areas, and I am sorry about that. I also think that some national forests could support more cutting than the Forest Service is doing today. But it is also true that the recreation and retirement economy has replaced the timber economy in many rural areas. Deschutes County, for example, has far more high-paying jobs directly or indirectly because of local recreation than it ever had for timber (and I'm including jobs that moved here because company leaders wanted to be near recreation areas).
As Americans become more and more disgusted by their seemingly inept government institutions, do you think the libertarian movement will gain broader acceptance with the millennial generation than it has with baby boomers? Will these views always have to be channeled through the two major parties?
It has been more than 150 years since a new political party became successful in the United States, so I don't see an end to our two-party system. Libertarians are fiscally conservative and socially liberal; Democrats tend to be fiscally and socially liberal while Republicans tend to be fiscally and socially conservative. To be successful, libertarians will need to work within one or both parties to draw out the social liberals among Democrats who happen to be fiscally conservative and the fiscal conservatives among Republicans who happen to be socially liberal.
Ron Paul was a very attractive candidate among young voters, showing that this is possible. But libertarians have a history of demanding perfection among their candidates. I met some in 2015 who told me they would rather see Hillary Clinton become president than Rand Paul because Rand Paul wasn't perfect enough for them. This is a mistake and helps explain why libertarianism has remained a fringe movement.
Historically, the libertarian movement was founded at about the same time in the 1960s as the environmental movement. Initially, environmentalists were tolerant of a wide range of views, while libertarians were not. This is why environmentalism became more successful. Since 1990, the environmental movement has grown far less tolerant while libertarians have grown more tolerant, but they still have a ways to go.
Back to Top
| 
