In his recent “State of the City” address, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt called for construction of a 39-mile passenger rail system running from Edmond to downtown Oklahoma City to Norman. A key reason to support the project, which is expected to cost as much as $1.8 billion and require a sales-tax increase, is that it will reduce traffic jams on area highways, Holt said.

“Collectively, this plan will preserve our quality of life by alleviating traffic congestion, it will preserve the mobility necessary to keep our economy strong and growing, and it will spur commercial development, among other benefits,” Holt said.

But transportation experts say that’s not the case.

“It’s an established fact among researchers that transit does not meaningfully reduce congestion, and nobody should argue that it does,” said Baruch Feigenbaum, senior managing director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation.

When asked if rail reduces traffic congestion on area roads, Randal O’Toole, director of the Independence Institute’s Transportation Policy Center, offered a similarly blunt assessment: “No, absolutely not.”

One of the major reasons that passenger rail service typically has no meaningful impact on traffic congestion is “these systems don’t carry enough people to make a meaningful difference,” Feigenbaum said.

O’Toole also noted that passenger rail systems simply don’t take enough drivers off the road to have a notable impact on highway and street traffic.

For example, he noted that Minnesota’s Northstar Commuter Rail system, which served the Minneapolis area, ceased operations this year because it drew so few riders.

O’Toole said the commuter rail service in Nashville, Tennessee, is “carrying less than 0.1 percent of travel.” He said the same thing is true of the rail system in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas, which “is right at 0.1 percent.”

“A typical commuter-rail train has about 500 seats and is lucky to ever fill them all,” O’Toole said. “Many commuter-rail lines fill well under half their seats. A simple calculation will show that taking a few hundred cars off the roads is not going to relieve congestion.”

Oklahoma City metro area officials project the proposed commuter rail system will have a per-hour peak direction capacity of 600 to 2,400 passengers.

But in his speech, Holt indicated Oklahoma City’s population is expected to have increased by nearly 78,000 people by 2030 compared to a decade prior. And Holt said Oklahoma City’s population is expected to increase even more after that, rising from 758,644 people in 2030 to one million people “around 2050 or 2055.”

Despite emphasizing that part of a proposed sales tax increase will provide “additional road funding” for Oklahoma City, Edmond, and Norman, saying that money is “desperately needed in all three cities” for road needs, and proclaiming that roads “are absolutely a part of this community’s transportation system and always will be,” Holt largely waved off the idea that city leaders should address anticipated population growth by improving road capacity.

“Now, you might be saying, ‘Okay, you’re right, we’re growing, and I don’t want to sit in traffic for hours. Can we expand the highways?’ Well, no, not really,” Holt said.

While a scheduled new turnpike to the south “will divert some traffic,” Holt said, “that’s kind of the last big project there’s room for. The metro has pretty much reached the point of saturation with highways.”

He claimed that adding “new highways, or adding significantly more lanes, is just not feasible for most of our existing system,” pointing to Los Angeles as a picture of Oklahoma City’s future.

“This is a photo of Interstate 405 in Los Angeles,” Holt said. “If you’re intoxicated with the idea of adding lanes to our highways, there’s nothing more beautiful than this image. Look at that—twelve lanes across. And all those cars are still just sitting there. Here in OKC, we live in the 405. In Los Angeles, they live on the 405.”

But transportation experts say passenger rail does not remove the need to address road capacity.

To whatever degree passenger rail causes some people to forgo driving, those individuals are quickly replaced by other drivers because “in growing population areas there is always more demand for roadway space than there is supply available,” Feigenbaum said.

“What this means is every car that is removed from a roadway at say 5 p.m. will be replaced by somebody shifting their trip from a less convenient time (say 7 p.m.) or somebody who decides to make a new trip,” Feigenbaum said. “As a result, any congestion relief is minimal.”

O’Toole noted that commuter rail programs are often touted as a tool to reduce highway traffic, but the results do not live up to those promises.

Between 2008 and 2019, he noted that Denver, Colorado, opened five light-rail and commuter-rail lines with proponents predicting the new rail lines “would take hundreds of thousands of cars off the road,” O’Toole noted.

By 2019, Denver transit was carrying about 8,000 more riders per weekday than in 2008, but traffic congestion in 2019 was still “about 50 percent worse than in 2008,” he said.

“Most commuter-rail lines operate only a few times a day,” O’Toole said. “Denver’s was much more frequent, and it still didn’t do anything.”

When O’Toole recently analyzed a proposed $4.7 billion commuter rail project in Colorado that would run Colorado Connector passenger trains between Fort Collins and Pueblo, he found little reason to expect highway traffic to decline after the rail service launched.

While parts of Interstate 25 carry more than 200,000 vehicles per day, the train would carry only about 500 people, he noted.

“Even at full build-out, which won’t be for many years, only three or four trains will run during morning and afternoon rush hours,” O’Toole wrote. “Taking a few hundred cars off I-25 will not meaningfully reduce congestion.”

And, he noted, the Colorado Connector train could make highway congestion even worse because the proposed passenger trains “will stop traffic at nearly 100 grade crossings between Fort Collins and Denver and well over 100 between Denver and Pueblo.”