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The Washington, D.C., Metro boosted transit ridership

by 67 percent.  But at the same time, transit's overall

share of Washington-area commuter traffic declined slightly.

In 1990 more than four of five commuters still relied on

the automobile and fewer than 14 percent used transit.58

Washington's Regional Air Quality Plan estimates that the

rail system has reduced air pollution by only about 1

percent.59

San Diego's light-rail line helped to boost transit

ridership by 40 percent.60  But in 1980 San Diego also

adopted a New Urban plan that promoted denser inner-city

development and discouraged suburban development.  The

overall gain in transit ridership may be due as much to

densification as to light rail.  But the gain did not come

without a huge cost: over the same period, San Diego's

traffic congestion grew faster than did that of any other

American city, and the city now estimates that it will need

to spend $1 billion on infrastructure to restore urban

services to their 1980 levels.61

Except for those in Washington and San Diego, no recent

urban rail lines in the United States could be considered

successful on any basis.  As a 1989 report by Department of

Transportation researcher Don Pickrell found, nearly all

recent rail projects cost far more and carried far fewer

riders than originally projected.62

Pickrell also found that operating costs and amortized

capital costs per rider were far higher for rail than for

bus transit.  By his calculations, the total cost per rider

(in 1988 dollars) was about $6 to $16.63  That was not only

two to nine times greater than the forecast cost, it was

several times greater than the cost per bus rider, which

typically averages $2 to $4.  Moreover, since most rail

riders were previously bus riders, Pickrell found that the

cost per new rider--that is, the cost of getting a drive-

alone person out of a car--ranged from $9 to $36.64

"The systematic tendency to over-estimate ridership and

to under-estimate capital and operating costs," concluded

Pickrell, "introduces a distinct bias toward the selection

of capital-intensive transit improvements such as rail

lines."  That bias would benefit cities whose goal is to get

as large a share of federal funding as possible.

Advocates of rail claim that Pickrell's study was done

too soon after the lines in the cities studied were opened

and therefore did not accurately show ridership.  But in

1995 Robert Dunphy of the Urban Land Institute updated