“Believers in central planning should take a look at Washington, D.C.’s Metro rail-transit system. While they will find many things to like, they will also see examples of how central planners — and especially rail-transit planners — can get things disastrously and expensively wrong.”
There’s no doubt that Metro has its flaws—for example, the failure to shelter the entrances, which, among other things, has just recently led to the five-month shut-down of one of the entrances to the DuPont Circle Metro. But then Barone pulls out for the bigger picture.
“Metro’s more fundamental and interesting flaw is apparent when you look at its attractive route map. (Metro, like mass-transit systems going back to the London Tube in the 1930s, is good at graphics.)
“What you see is a bunch of differently colored lines converging in downtown Washington, near government and private-sector office buildings.
“The assumption of Metro planners was that jobs would continue to be heavily concentrated in the historic downtown.
“So there is no station serving Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia, which has become the largest office center between downtown Washington and Atlanta.
“Joel Garreau, in researching his book Edge City on Tysons and similar clusters, asked Metro planners why they didn’t put a station there.
“The reply: We never thought there would be any development there. Suburbs are for houses.”
You’ll have to pardon all the paragraphs. Mike had a column to fill, and not much to fill it with. But my larger point—in response to Mike’s larger point—is this. Yes, Metro planners failed to predict the future, a charge that can leveled at most of us. But is this failure, as Mike strongly implies, necessarily a gummint thing? Doesn’t it happen in the private sector? Didn’t those dudes at Bear Stearns, and at Lehman Brothers, and at AIG, and at a few other places, make pretty much a hash of predicting the future, even though it was, you know, their job? And didn’t they get paid a hell of a lot more to, basically, fuck up than those Metro guys? And don’t we have a Metro system that is pretty functional, one that, in Mike’s words, “has stimulated local planners and developers to create vibrant downtown-like clusters of stores, restaurants, and apartment buildings along the Orange Line in Arlington, Va., and around the Bethesda, Md., station on the Red Line”? Whereas, all we have left over from the collapse of the Big Bad Bear, Lehman’s, AIG, et al. are the vacation homes of the would-be billionaires, now sadly shrunken to mere multi-millionaire status, who did their level best to level the entire world’s economy, and whose excesses, incompetence, and lies have burdened us with trillions of dollars in debt.
Oh, and if Mike is looking for a government policy that was in fact “disastrous” (as Metro certainly is not), why doesn’t he look at the war in Iraq, which, unlike Metro, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and (unlike Metro) cost tens of thousands of lives?
Afterwords
In his riff on the inadequacies of Metro, specifically, its failure to foresee the rise of Tysons Corners, Mike has this to say: “But a Northern Virginia lawyer named Til Hazel, who handled land-acquisition cases on the Capital Beltway, figured it out. He bought big parcels in the triangle between the Beltway, Leesburg Pike, and Chain Bridge Road, and made millions developing Tysons.”*
In fact, what Til figured out was that the Beltway would make a shopping center located at Tysons easily accessible to millions of suburban shoppers. He also may have guessed that a business center located with close access to a major international airport (like Dulles) might prosper as well. Gee, and who built that Beltway, Mike? And who built that airport? Not to mention Leesburg Pike and Chain Bridge Road? And Chain Bridge? Mike? Mike?
*By the way, Mike, congrats on stringing two sentences together, in the same paragraph!
