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Light rail routing: do goals matter?

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Abstract

Decisions to fund light rail (LRT) have been critiqued as instrumentally irrational. This paper examines whether the seemingly more technical LRT routing decisions are instrumentally rational. To this end, we test whether routing decisions are made to address goals that are rationally derived from the challenges faced by the urban region. On the basis of a review of the literature, two rationales that underlie most of the stated goals are identified: providing service for the most heavily travelled and congested corridors and inducing development, and subsequently demand, in areas perceived to be underdeveloped or distressed and in areas that have deteriorated. In a survey of key respondents from 16 cities, we find that goals are only weakly correlated with the challenges. While most routes provide service on the most heavily demanded corridors, routing decisions are no less driven by a desire to cut pecuniary and transaction costs. For this reason existing rights of way are often preferred. This is explained by the intertwining of routing and funding decisions. The implications of these findings for evaluation techniques of LRT routes are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Under the term LRT we include all urban rail systems that run at least partially at grade. These include light rail, trams and light railways, but not Metro or suburban rail systems. According to a data base complied by Michael Taplin, over 560 such systems were operating or planned by February 2007. See: http://www.lrta.org/world/worldind.html

  2. Interestingly a third likely rationale, coverage, which aims at mitigating social exclusion, has not come up in reviews of LRT systems. This is probably because coverage is seen as a goal mainly for bus systems (Walker 2008), while LRT is not seen as a system that can provide coverage due to its high capital cost.

  3. It should, of course, be noted that high LRT use does not assure that these objectives will be met. Thus, high LRT use is a necessary condition for achieving these goals, but not a sufficient one.

  4. These plans, in turn, are likely to be an outcome of power structures in the city or region. Hence, this seemingly rational process is not divorced from power structures. To the contrary, power structures can be expected to play a central role in framing the city’s challenges and hence in determining the official goals and in formulating the development plans. However, the premise hypothesized here is that instrumental rationality becomes more central as the process proceeds.

  5. The list of challenges, as presented in the questionnaire, is presented in the left hand column of Table 3, while the list of goals appears in the left-hand column of Table 4.

  6. Responses were also received from Zurich. However, due to the dates of LRT development there respondents could not answer all the questions and thus this case was dropped thus N = 26.

  7. The survey included many non-English speaking cities but although the covering letter was sent in the local spoken language (French or Spanish) the questionnaire was written in English and consequently, led to a very low response rate from those cities. Therefore, the data collected overrepresented English speaking cities and underrepresented European cities with other languages.

  8. Cronbach’s alpha is a measure of internal consistency, that is, how closely related a set of items is as a group. A “high” value of alpha is often used as evidence that the items measure an underlying (or latent) construct.

  9. Consequently, the analysis at the respondents level may include more cases than the city level analysis.

  10. This line was not necessarily the first line in the system, as some of the systems date back to the Nineteenth century, but rather to the first line in the expansion they were familiar with.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and School of Public Policy, The Hebrew University, Mount Scopus, 91509, Jerusalem, Israel

    Galit Cohen-Blankshtain

  2. Department of Geography, The Hebrew University, Mount Scopus, 91509, Jerusalem, Israel

    Eran Feitelson

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  1. Galit Cohen-Blankshtain
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  2. Eran Feitelson
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Correspondence to Galit Cohen-Blankshtain.

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Cohen-Blankshtain, G., Feitelson, E. Light rail routing: do goals matter?. Transportation 38, 343–361 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-010-9305-x

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