By Cliff Slater

Academics studying urban transportation at places like UC-Berkeley, the University of Southern California and UCLA are puzzled as to why city leaders across the United States favor rail transit.

They are perplexed since they find little evidence that rail transit projects accomplish much beyond increasing the taxes necessary to support them. There is near unanimity in the nation's transportation institutes that rail transit projects are the highest-priced public transportation options with the lowest potential benefits relative to costs.

Over the years, in puzzling this over, I had come to believe that for the truly committed, the "visionaries," rail is holy and that the quest is not a rational one but rather it is faith-based. I was led to this belief by, among others, the tactics finally used by the rail transit proponents during the 1992 rail transit battle.

Having failed at every attempt to show that rail transit was rationally justified, and finding no spokesperson for their cause for some months, rail proponents finally persuaded Bob Fishman, former city managing director, to take the job. His tactics were simple. He would stand up at a presentation and say, "We concede the numbers. But having a modern rail transit system is not about numbers; it is about whether we are going to be a world-class city. It is not about today, but whether we are going to have the vision to grow into the future." And so on for 20 minutes of vision-speak.

Bob Lanier, a developer elected mayor of Houston for his anti-rail stance, had the same experience. He said, "First, rail's supporters say 'It's cheaper.' When you show it costs more, they say, 'It's faster.' When you show it's slower, they say, 'It serves more riders.' When you show there are fewer riders, they say, 'It brings economic development.' When you show no economic development, they say, 'It helps the image.' When you say you don't want to spend that much money on image, they say, 'It will solve the pollution problem.' When you show it won't help pollution, they say, finally, 'It will take time. You'll see.' "

But I now believe I have found a better understanding of why our business leaders favor rail since recently reading Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" — in its entirety.

Briefly, the tale is of two swindlers who come into the kingdom telling the citizenry that they could weave a "marvelous cloth" that had "the strange quality of being invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or unforgivably stupid."

The emperor hired them to weave this cloth, but they only pretended to do so. When the emperor sent his prime minister to inspect the new cloth, the minister could not see any cloth. However, not wishing to appear "unforgivably stupid," he said he could see that it was, indeed, "marvelous cloth." In time, he convinced others of the "marvelous cloth" because they too did not wish to appear "unforgivably stupid."

Finally, even the emperor was persuaded of the reality of the cloth, and the swindlers pretended to dress the naked emperor, who then took part in a procession. Only a small boy (who was out of the loop) suddenly saying, "But he doesn't have anything on," brought everyone to their senses.

While an exaggeration, of course, this tale is somewhat analogous because I have noticed that the prominent business people who favor rail transit never analyze the data. They do not compare other cities' performance in transit ridership or traffic congestion before and after rail transit has been constructed. Nor do they check the cost per rider on the system. This lack of analysis is the very antithesis of what experience teaches business people to do. One can only conclude that they simply do not wish to find out that there is no "marvelous cloth" and thus appear "unforgivably stupid."

No one really expects calm, objective financial analysis from most of our elected officials; when we cannot get it from our business leaders, then government spending is certain to continue spiraling upward.

Cliff Slater is a regular columnist whose footnoted columns are at www.lava.net/cslater.