Jake: Light rail? Where we’re going, we don’t need light rail!

One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1985 classic “Back to the Future.”

At the end, Marty McFly tells Doc the street isn’t long enough to get the DeLorean to 88 mph — the speed needed to jump through time. Doc’s response is one of the great lines in cinema history: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”

It’s a perfect line. And it fits perfectly with a suggestion I have for Sound Transit.

In the future, we won’t need light rail.

The numbers are ugly

Let me be direct about what’s happening with Sound Transit. The ST3 plan was sold to voters in 2016 at $54 billion. It now carries a price tag of somewhere around $185 billion through 2046, and that’s before accounting for the $34.5 billion funding gap the agency is currently trying to figure out how to close.

I’ve been crunching some numbers on what this actually costs per rider. If you look only at day-to-day operating costs, Sound Transit light rail runs about $15 in taxpayer subsidy per boarding — fares cover just 12% of operating costs. Not great, but defensible for a major transit system.

But once you factor in the full capital buildout? At the current ridership of around 30 million annual boardings, amortizing the total system cost over 50 years puts the all-in taxpayer subsidy somewhere between $120 and $135 per ride. Even under the most optimistic ridership projections — the ones Sound Transit has consistently failed to hit — you’re still looking at $50+ per ride.

For comparison, Community Transit buses in Snohomish County cost taxpayers about $50 per boarding, all-in, including capital. Buses look expensive until you realize the train you’re comparing them to is projected to cost two to three times that.

The future is already here

I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to ride in an autonomous vehicle yet, but it is wild. The steering wheel moves like a ghost. The car navigates traffic, reads the road, and protects you from other drivers’ bad decisions. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s sitting in your driveway waiting for a software update.

Here’s my pitch: fully autonomous electric buses.

Using just the $34.5 billion funding gap as the budget for this thought experiment — money Sound Transit needs but doesn’t have — let’s see what we could build instead.

A standard electric bus runs $800,000 to $1 million. Outfit it with enterprise-grade autonomous driving hardware and software, and add another $200,000. Call it $1.2 million per vehicle, fully loaded.

For $18 billion, you could put 15,000 fully autonomous electric buses on the roads that already exist. No tunnels. No elevated guideways. No decades of construction eating up downtown blocks. You’d have $16 billion left over for maintenance, facilities, and future improvements.

The per-ride math

The highest operating cost for any bus system is the driver. Eliminate the driver, and the economics flip completely.

Current Community Transit buses cost taxpayers roughly $26 per boarding just in operating subsidy, and driver wages are the dominant expense. A fully autonomous bus fleet, once deployed, could realistically bring that operating subsidy down to somewhere between $2 and $5 per ride.

Compared to $120–$135 per ride on a fully-costed light rail system that won’t be finished until the 2040s — if it’s finished at all — that’s not a rounding error. That’s a fundamentally different equation.

Sleek autonomous electric buses running on existing roads today, or a train network in 25 years that costs 10 times as much per rider.

You be the judge.

Which brings me back to the headline: Light rail? Where we’re going, we don’t need light rail!

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