One benefit of government funding crises is that choices have to be made, which tends to make government less inefficient over the long run. It sometimes even happens that irrational projects are cancelled.

Such a fate may befall the Baltimore to Washington "magnetic levitation" train project. "Mag lev" is a technology whose time has not yet, and never will come. Like the atomic car some touted by hallucinaries in the 1950s, other developments have long since rendered the technology obsolete. What remains with us, however, is government's habit of spending money on things that don't make sense. On this, Mag Lev has earned the gold medal, hands down.

Mag Lev is attractive. Who has not seen the "spiffy" artists renderings on the covers of popular science magazines? They (the covers) have been running since the 1960s, at least. The trains, can operate over 200 miles per hour on structures that people mistake for monorails like Disneyland made famous.

But there are problems. Why, for example, would anyone need to go over 200 miles per hour between Washington and Baltimore, a distance of less than 40 miles? Where would the projected $3.5 billion come from to build the system? --- even that would be a bargain since government infrastructure projects often double or even triple in cost as they proceed.

Who is going to pay the $27 each way that would be required simply to pay for the operating costs? Are there no highways between the two cities? Are there no MARC trains? Are there no Amtrak trains? One thing is sure, however, the 33,000 daily passengers that the planners say will pay these high fares every day will never escape their present incarnation as numbers in a computer model.

Mag Lev arrived too late to make a difference. Mag Lev might have had a chance if the Wright Brothers had not complicated things with airplanes. But airplanes can do anything that Mag Lev can do faster, and for less.

But if Mag Lev cannot compete with airplanes, it is even less competitive in urban transport, such as the Baltimore to Washington route. Over the past 50 years, the nation has suburbanized to the extent that all but trips to downtown areas require cars. Rail systems like MARC, Washington's Metro, and Baltimore's light rail system do a good job of getting people to downtown. But few people who work in the suburbs can use transit, because few suburban job locations are served by transit service that is auto-competitive. Transit service to suburban job locations is slow, requires transfers and as often as not does not even exist between specific homes and employment sites. The reality of the modern North American or European urban area is that people principally live in the suburbs, a comparatively small percentage of jobs are in the core that transit serves, so that work trips to locations other than the core are principally by automobile. What we loosely call regional transit authorities and metropolitan transit authorities are, for people who have cars available, just downtown transit authorities.

Mag Lev's problem is even worse. Imagine the convenience of a line that speeds from downtown Baltimore to Washington's Union Station at greater than Indianapolis 500 speeds. You leave your Hunt Valley office (northern Baltimore suburbs) at 10:30 am for a Washington lunch appointment. You drive 20 to 30 minutes to Penn Station in downtown Baltimore, or at least to the new parking lot built to accomodate the many thousands of people, who like you have nothing better to do with their money that spend four or five times as much as they need to for a comparatively short trip. There, you pay a parking charge higher than the one-way MARC fare between Baltimore and Washington, and walk to the station. You pass through security (yes, 200+ mile per hour trains will need airport-type security), you take a seat next to Buck Rogers and are on your way. Twenty minutes later you arrive at Union Station. You then walk to the Metro station, wait for a while, board a train, arriving at the Farragut North Station. After leaving the train, you walk to the restaurant. If you are lucky, you arrive at the restaurant 10 minutes before your noon appointment.

On most days, the car would be faster. This is precisely the point. Mag Lev makes sense for those who start their trip within walking distance of the origin station and end their trip within walking distance of the destination station. There would be only three stations (the two downtown stations and one at Baltimore-Washington Airport), and while there are destinations in downtown Baltimore and the Union Station area, the vast majority of trips neither begin nor end anywhere near either of these places. The most promising market segment is those who intermittently live at (or immediately outside) Penn Station in Baltimore, if only they worked at Union Station. But they tend not to work at all.

Indeed, for most people in the narrow Baltimore to Washington corridor, MARC makes much more sense. While you are whizzing by Odenton or Halethorpe on Mag Lev, don't imagine that the local residents who work near the Capitol (nearby Union Station) are trekking over to BWI or up to Baltimore to catch Mag Lev. They'll be on MARC, or in their cars.

But perhaps the most irrational characteristic of this project was that it was to have been built to support the 2012 Olympics. Spending $3.5 billion or $7.0 or $10.5 billion to support a two-week event is like blowing the retirement account on a two-week cruise.

Once the car arrived, there were few modifications to horses that could make them auto-competitive. One might fit them in shiny metal plating of various colors, or enclose and air condition the buggies. And once the airplane system was established, there was simply no place for Mag-Lev, which is nothing more than a train --- an extravagantly expensive train (even high speed rail is cost effective by comparison).

Credentials:

Author Wendell Cox is a transportation and demographics consultant and a public policy commentator. He is principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy in the St. Louis area. He also serves as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), during which time he was elected to chair the American Public Transit Association Policy and Planning and Governing Boards Committees. In 1999, Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to fill the unexpired term of New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman. He has testified by invitation to committees of the US Senate and US House of Representatives and to 35 state and provincial legislative committees.