Officials from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are out in the city all the time talking about the costs of the capital region’s transit system – the money it takes to run the thing, the investments required to expand service and build new lines, and the fares needed to pay for it all.
But no one talks much about the benefits, the real benefits, not just for faster commuting times, but for the region on the whole.
WMATA officials have been thinking about this around the agency’s 35th anniversary, and as planners prepare to make the case for what should come in the next three decades. Here's the question: what does transit investment really buy the region? WMATA has come up with a clever strategy – one that appeals to the public imagination as much as the rational bean-counter – to make its argument.
"We think one of the best and possibly only ways to measure how valuable something is," says Justin Antos, "is by taking it away and looking back at what you’ve lost."
Antos, a WMATA transportation analyst, has for the last several months been managing a study [PDF] that makes the business case for transit in the D.C. area. The agency tried to isolate the actual impact of rail lines on economic development, property values and tax revenues in the immediate vicinity around each station (they conservatively estimate that Metrorail boosts the value of property within a half mile of stations by about seven to nine percent).
But they also modeled what the region would look like if its transit never existed. And this is where things get really interesting.