A recent article in Boston Magazine regarding the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) financial woes is a reminder of how seductive the drive for resource efficiency can be. The MBTA is the public transit agency for the greater Boston area, serving transit needs with a network of rail, light-rail and bus routes.

Without taking a poll, presumably a common understanding regarding mass transit is that while using mass transit is for most inconvenient, at least mass transit is efficient.

Is it? Depending upon the source, which for this post include AAA, the Cato Institute and a study out of U.C. Berkeley, all which use data published by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average cost of automobile travel including road and highway costs ranges from $0.21 to $0.25 per passenger-mile. The average cost of bus transit ranges from $0.85 to $1.01 per passenger-mile. The average cost of light-rail ranges from $0.52 to $1.38 per passenger-mile. How can auto transportation be so less expensive given that trains and buses carry so many more people than can cars?

The Boston Magazine article draws the conclusion that there is a need to reform the MBTA’s management, planning, and procurement procedures. That will not work, because the best management, planning, and procurement procedures cannot overcome the weakness of a faulty premise upon which public transit is based. That premise is that the efficient use of rail cars and buses is economic. Just as reliance upon resource efficiency in production and service work creates waste and hides real inefficiencies so does this notion that rail cars and buses are efficient, even at full capacity.

This is particularly apparent in rail transit, wherein the largest part of the capital cost in not in the rail cars, but in the rails and supporting structures themselves. Those rails are used only a fraction of the time and by resource efficiency standards extremely inefficient, a fact overlooked in the assessment that rail travel is somehow one of the most efficient means of travel. Another factor is the large number of times heavy rail cars and buses must brake to stop and then accelerate toward the next stop. This constant braking and acceleration uses a tremendous amount of energy.

As for the flow efficiency offered by mass transit, anyone who has waited for trains and buses at origin locations and at transfer points understands firsthand that flow efficiency is not a mass transit feature.

Interestingly a focus on flow efficiency in transit, which would be the Lean thinking approach, suggests that with public transit a social need in metropolitan areas transportation agencies should move away from mass transit technologies. The proposed transit technology that most closely embraces Lean thinking is personal rapid transit (PRT), which is a network of small four-passenger vehicles automatically controlled on a dedicated guideway offering direct non-stop trips on a network grid. PRT has had a checkered past, including unrealistic cost claims, false starts due to impositions from bulk thinking, and no PDSA efforts by transportation agencies with the resources to run the experiments required to make PRT a highly utilized Lean transit alternative.

So in the arena of public transit Bulk thinking prevails. Sadly the losers are the Customers public transit systems are intended to serve.