To me, SLC is the ultimate counterpoint to the whole "Republicans are destroying transit!!" hysteria. SLC's core is definitely left-leaning, but just a few miles outside the city center it is pure Republican territory. And despite the heavily skewed demographics, they are voting in massive numbers to extend rail transit to their cities. It is quite amazing what will happen to voting trends on transit investment when you consistently demonstrate fiscal responsibility, fast construction, and high ridership.
SLC light rail is significantly cheaper than RTD. The furthest zones in Denver are $10 round trip. When I was in SLC it was $2.50 round trip for anywhere on the entire line (I'm sure it's more by now).
Personally I believe that public transportation pricing should be based on an algorithm to maximize ridership rather than on being self-sustaining. Since the point of public transit is to reduce traffic, people that prefer to drive should be subsidizing public transit through registration and gas taxes.
Scaling costs for cars is linear (no congestion) to polynomial (congestion), whereas transit has scaling costs that are a step function on the level of an individual vehicle, and somewhat resembling a logarithmic scale in aggregate. That in itself isn't interesting until you understand the implications of subsidy policies.
For example, if you subsidize auto travel, you may pull people away from walking, cycling, or transit, and put them onto a congested freeway. Every marginal person that moves towards car use increases the costs of car use for every other car user. Transit, on the other hand, gets cheaper, on a per rider basis, with each new rider (although this can be muted if transit ridership is heavily biased in one direction, which can be the case for cities with strong central cores and no outer job centers, as half the buses may be riding at capacity while the other half are riding empty).
I essentially agree with you, but I'm of the opinion that if we would stop subsidizing cars, some small percentage of drivers would move back to transit, and that small percentage could be enough to make transit self-sustaining.
One of the major subsidies for auto drivers is deeply hidden in land use policies requiring huge amounts of free parking at all new construction, rather than the amount the developer desires at the price that the market will bear.
Auto-oriented land-use regulations (single-family-only neighborhood zoning, minimum parking regulations that can only be cheaply satisfied by surface lots, minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, building-height limitations, etc) also cause buildings to be built so far apart, with seas of parking in between and a road network that's inhospitable to walking due to poor pedestrian connectivity and the danger of high-speed traffic, that it isn't possible for pedestrianism to offer meaningful competition to automobiles in much new construction in the US. And since most transit trips begin & end with a walking trip, transit (publicly- or privately-provided) likewise becomes uncompetitive. And this is essentially all due to government policy, often at the local level but also sometimes essentially federally mandated due to FHA mortgage requirements and the like.
SLC is a counterexample to that trend, but Republicans definitely hate transit in many cities— for example, the Tennessee legislature tried to ban a bus rapid transit project in Nashville even when no state dollars were used:
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tennessee-bans-bus-rapid-transi...
Totally agree. For example, the Frontlines project, or "70 miles in 7 years" was done 2 years early and 300 million dollars under budget. [1] That goes a long way towards future budget increase requests and tax increase votes.
I would say that Mormonism would make it even less likely. In my experience (I was raised Mormon), they tend to be even more ideological than southern protestants. That being said, the TRAX does connect with Temple Square, which I'm sure provides some utility to Mormons even if they only use it to avoid parking problems for General Conference (2x per year).
Honestly, I think the defining attribute about SLC was that they did what they set out to do, they did it within budget, and they exceeded ridership expectations. It basically silenced all the ideological opposition and let the projects be judged on their merits.
There's a huge racial aspect in anti-mass-transit politics in many American cities that's missing in SLC. Transit is fundamentally urban, and in a lot of the country 'urban' is code for black.
SLC is heavily Democratic, like a little San Francisco, while the outer suburbs are the most Republican urban areas in the USA. Utah County's suburban voters make it the most Republican urbanized place in the USA with frequent 80+% results for Republican candidates.
But both areas -- Salt Lake and Utah counties -- vote for transit.
Part of the reason is that there is no Religious Right in the Utah Republican Party. The local Republicans are libertarians, western Republicans, country club Republicans, and big business Republicans. But that cultural revanchiste Religious Right just doesn't have a foothold in Utah. The organizations that promote it are unrelentingly hostile to the Church (Specifically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).
My theory is that the people who hate transit are linked to the Religious Right cultural suburbanists and possibly the Neocons. Utahns may happen to live in suburbs, but aren't emotionally invested in hating the kind of people who ride the train. Also, Utah suburbs tend to be close knit because of the prevalence of one church where the community meets regularly.
