The most notorious opponent of light and commuter rail in all its manifestations, both specific and in principle, is Wendell Cox, a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Among many other positions, he has served on the Amtrak Reform Council and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. He is the principal of his own consulting agency and in such capacity has prepared plans, analyses and evaluations of dozens of transportation projects and systems in cities throughout the U.S. and including Paris, London and Auckland. Moreover, any report coming from him or anyone with his agency is almost certain to be filled with scathing criticism of anything having to do with urban rail. Just about every existing or proposed light or commuter rail project in this country has been negatively evaluated in one of Mr. Cox's myriad reports or public speeches. Denying the validity of just about every advantage to light rail you might think of, Mr. Cox professes it to be "a sort of 20th century bureaucratic idolatry." (Light Rail in Minneapolis: A Bridge to Nowhere ). While he occasionally attempts to demonstrate the superiority of buses to rail for accomplishing particular purposes, he is also generally opposed to expansion of bus services as well as to other policies associated with heavy adoption of public transit, such as smart growth.

Mr. Cox is closely tied to both the libertarian and republican agendas. His funding is seldom disclosed, but many of his critics claim he is not simply interested in the facts, as he claims, but in the pocket of industrial and political concerns affiliated with traditional suburban development and high dependence on the highway system (G.B. Arrington, Parson Brinkerhoff Quade & Douglas, Inc. Responding to Wendell Cox, August 2000). Cox is often referred to as a "hired gun" (www.kclabor.org/its_not_about_transit.htm, www.trolleycar.org/observations/020118.htm, www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/ 2000-10-06/cols_postmarks.html) sent in by politicians to oppose light rail wherever it might be proposed.

To dispute someone's true motivations is not to refute his arguments, of course. Mr. Cox's speeches are powerful, but not unanswerable by any means. He has been frequently accused of selecting misleading and non-representative facts to support highly controversial conclusions . Of note are his criticisms of Portland, Oregon as a "false ideal" which contrast with consumer reports and the majority of public opinion both in at out of Portland. Cox has characterized Portland as "a sprawling metropolis barely half as dense as Los Angeles" in order to make it seem inappropriate for a city plan that includes extensive public transit. Leaving aside the question of why the densest urban area in the country should be his standard for comparison, this sidesteps the point that initiatives incorporating rail (along with famous legislation restricting development outside of set city boundaries) is meant to increase density in downtown Portland and those areas most frequented by light rail. The long term purpose of rail systems is to make themselves more successful over time while limiting growth elsewhere that would damage the environment.

Cox's favorite examples often suffer from the lack of a demonstrable causal relationship. For example, his frequent observation that European cities with high-density urban areas and extensive urban light rail systems suffer from heavy traffic congestion is used to suggest that light rail worsens congestion where it is built. The correlation might just as easily be used to show that light rail has seen significant success in congested urban areas and is therefore appropriate for analogous U.S. cities. Another example is his repeated mention in speeches of city-sponsored subsidies for developments along new LRT routes in Portland and Dallas. This is clearly meant to suggest that property values along the lines have fallen, or at least not grown at the expected rate. The alternative interpretation is that these cities have simply chosen to develop particular corridors and have decided to use multiple means of doing so. In fact, on a site sponsored by Cox's consultancy, there are a baleful list of carefully selected facts meant to show that downtown Dallas's vacancy rate is not being helped by its light rail system, despite the admission that the vacancy rate is down by 7.5%. This figure is compared to "selected cities", all but one of which have improved more since 1995 on this metric. However, Dallas's citizens report that their downtown is booming, and according to the official downtown Dallas site, Dallas's downtown situation has improved where before it was worsening; property values have gone up six years in a row, and although the rate of downtown occupation is slower than at least the twelve cities listed on the Public Purpose page (although the page is oddly silent about the national average), the rate of increase in its rate of occupation is high (see adjacent chart).

On May 28th, 1998, Wendell Cox delivered a presentation (cited above) criticizing proposals of light rail in the Twin Cities (which would eventually be successful nonetheless) to the Sensible Use Land Coalition Forum (also covered by the press) at the Doubletree Park Place Hotel in St. Louis Park. He opened with his standard list of detractions, stating that light rail is slower, more dangerous, costlier, and less efficient than automobiles. These charges carry real weight and have been contested elsewhere. But as always, Cox had a few things to say about the particular region whose plan he was addressing as well.

Cox stated that public transit was not well suited to modern life in the Twin Cities because the radial pattern with which our bus system was designed could not possibly serve the 87% of jobs which are not in downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul. He produced pie charts demonstrating that the majority of jobs are in suburbs while the majority of transit use is in the inner city. While no one is claiming that additional bus routes or light rail will make it possible to serve every job in the metropolitan area (the idea being to revitalize downtown and develop along certain corridors), it is well worth noting that the Hiawatha line will make it possible for many current bus routes which radiate out from downtown Minneapolis to be replaced with routes covering a larger area of the outer city. These will, in theory, not hinder transit to and from downtown because the routes will connect with the Hiawatha line. This illustrates how light rail lines can increase the portion of the city accessible to transit instead of simply being redundant.

Cox pointed out that bus ridership in the Twin Cities is down by about 40% from 1979. Accompanied by convincing reasons that the trend could only continue, this might have been a useful statistic. But the reason Cox gave was not that the city's growth patterns are making transit less serviceable. He cited fare increases instead.

Cox was correct in predicting that the $400 million estimated cost for the Hiawatha line would increase as construction proceeded. The budget is now set at over $600 million dollars, but a larger percentage of this than expected came from the federal transit administration. While the Hiawatha line is coming in over budget, it is coming in on schedule as well, and while one might think budgetary considerations would be the first thing to deter further LRT development, the Metropolitan Council is proceeding with its three decade plan, suggesting that unexpected costs will not be likely to spoil the line's benefits.

Wendell Cox is characterized as confident, intelligent, impassive, chiding, and persuasive. Chances are he believes his own arguments are genuine and formulated for the "public purpose." Their sheer volume, however, is not enough to make them authoritative, for Mr. Cox is a perfect example of how a sufficiently complicated body of socio-economic facts can yield any amount of information supporting any position. Unlike some of his peers, Cox's assertions have substantial research efforts behind them-but they in no way exhaust the mines of information. There is always more to say.