Metro officials have called for construction of a roughly $1 billion “ONE Transit” passenger rail system stretching from Edmond to Norman, proposing that the massive railroad project be funded in part with a sales tax increase.

Yet, at the same time, the existing OKC Streetcar rail system, a nearly five-mile stretch of rail service running across much of downtown Oklahoma City, struggles so much to attract riders that officials recently announced the service will now be provided free of charge to boost usage.

The OKC Streetcar rail system was constructed in 2017 and 2018 at a cost of $135 million (about $185 million in today's dollars).

But, despite that massive price, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt recently declared the OKC Streetcar rail is nonetheless “analogous to the moving sidewalks in an airport.”

In an Aug. 7 post on social media, Holt said the taxpayer-funded OKC Streetcar rail service did not typically appeal to local citizens, saying it instead primarily attracted “visitors who are staying downtown and have no car, special event attendees who found a parking spot far from their destination, or downtown workers and residents who want to quickly shift to another downtown destination.”

“Right now, we don’t have a great number of downtown workers or special event attendees who commuted via public transit,” Holt conceded, before predicting that those individuals will eventually use the rail in greater numbers “in the decades to come.”

The low ridership occurred even though the rail service was virtually free. Adults were charged $1 for a single ride and $3 for a 24-hour pass, while seniors 65 and older, Medicare cardholders, and riders with qualifying disabilities paid just 50 cents per ride.

“The fare was not high,” Holt wrote, “but the level of hassle was.”

Despite having ridership so low that officials had to make the service completely free to boost usage, the VisitOKC website nonetheless declares the OKC Streetcar “has already proven to be an economic catalyst.”

Similar fiscal claims have been put forth by the proponents of the new Edmond-to-Norman passenger train system. Holt is among the proponents of that potential system.

Such economic predictions are common when public transportation projects are proposed, but a substantial share fails to live up to promises.

In 2024, when researchers reviewed 164 large-scale transit infrastructure projects in the U.S., they found that transit ridership is about 24.6 percent lower than forecast on average, with about 70 percent of projects over-predicting ridership. While projection accuracy has improved since 2000, researchers found that even among projects forecasted since 2000, average ridership was about 22 percent lower than forecast.

In his defense of the OKC Streetcar rail system, Holt indicated that financial viability and long-term economic stability are not major considerations for government officials when they propose taxpayer-funded, mass-transit projects such as the proposed Edmond-to-Norman passenger rail system, writing that “most government services don’t create profit for the provider.”

“In government, we don’t measure the success of our services by the profit they turn,” Holt wrote, “because they never have and they never will.”

Photo Credit: Steve Morgan, via Wikimedia Commons