Public transit boondoggles

There's a post up at Hit and Run, talking about the problems with high-profile, low-return-on-investment projects like light rail:

A front-page story in yesterday's New York Times noted that politicians' transportation vanity projects drain money away from the sort of maintenance work that apparently was needed on the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last week. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Times put light rail lines in the same category as boondoggles like Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere [. . .]

The scenario is very common — just about every city larger than 500,000 has probably built, planned to build, or been wined-and-dined by potential bidders for such projects. The projects are almost always economically ludicrous (but not as far-out as publicly funded sports venues for professional teams), basing their revenue projections on literally unattainable levels of use and minimizing or ignoring the crowding-out of other activities.

Light rail projects are very popular with politicians, because every politician wants to leave "a legacy" of their time in office. That means they want to spend as much of your money as possible to ensure their own "immortality". Light rail projects are popular with the public because they appear to offer a way to reduce congestion and speed up transit times . . . for other people . . . in other words, get some of those slowcoach commuters the heck out of my way by making them give up their cars and use a new light rail system instead.