Gregory
L. Thompson
Research Projects
As of Summer 2004 the following projects are current:
Statement of Research Interests
My research follows two paths focusing on policy analysis of public transportation subsidies and investments. One path is contemporary evaluation based on case studies and statistical analysis. The other is historical examination, particularly but not exclusively during the period when the automobile rose to prominence in American life. Currently I am embarking on a new variation of historical research by examining the contributions of American planning practice to the formation of a major urban public policy initiative in U.S. cities. The initiative is the promotion of light rail transit investments, starting roughly in1970 and still on-going.
My first article after my last promotion (Thompson 1995) was based on archival research that I conducted in the management records of the Pennsylvania Railroad between 1987 and 1988 but which I previously had not used in publications. It shows that preoccupation with heavy and luxurious equipment of many rail and transit proponents can be traced to a railroad culture based in part on faulty cost accounting practices. The implication is that investment in long distance overnight luxury trains was not a good idea in 1945 as today, whereas investment in corridor trains would have been a good idea then as today. This finding is consistent with findings from my earlier book (Thompson 1993). Thompson (1996) is based on research from the book but focuses on explaining why Pacific Greyhound Lines was profitable whereas Santa Fe Trailways was not. Both companies were intercity bus companies with railroad antecedents, but the former conceived of its service provision in terms of networks, whereas the latter did not. The network orientation in Greyhound can be traced to Southern Pacific local passenger train management.
My next four articles, (Whately, Friel, and Thompson 1997; Thompson 1997; Hadj-Chikh and Thompson 1998; Thompson 1998 ) continued following the idea that transit networks are important in yielding public benefit from transit investments. Many economists and transportation planners argue that transit policy should be based on the assumption that downtown-oriented commuters and center city poor are the only markets that transit can tap in car-dominated U.S. cities, but the four articles present contrary evidence. Whately, Friel, and Thompson (1997), and Hadj-Chikh and Thompson (1998) examine passenger traffic trends from two recently-inaugurated commuter rail systems whose service patterns were based on the premise that their only markets were downtown-oriented commuters. Despite such design, the overwhelming usage of Tri-Rail and a substantial part of the usage of Metrolink was by people who were not destined to the downtowns of their respective systems, suggesting that had services been more widely conceived and integrated with bus systems going to major suburban destinations, they would have been more heavily used. Thompson (1997 and 1998) uses econometric models of transit demand to show that transit usage from any given parcel of land is largely explained by how well that parcel is connected to all other destinations in a region; not just downtown destinations. The papers examined how patronage increased as a consequence of a restructuring of the Sacramento system from a collection of downtown-oriented spokes to a network allowing better transit accessibility to many suburban locations. Because most users of the transit system studied (Sacramento) were poor, the implication is that their social welfare increased as their transit travel opportunities increased, particularly to major suburban destinations.
Thompson (1998) also examines another aspect of the equity consequences of rail transit investments. The bus route restructuring that took place in Sacramento in 1988 was made possible by the introduction of a new light rail line. Many transportation economists and planners argue that rail transit investments are inequitable, because they benefit the rich while taking bus service away from the poor. By examining transit accessibility of each census tract before and after the route restructuring into a network, the article demonstrates that poorer census tracts benefitted most, primarily by being better connected to suburban destinations. The wealthiest census tracts actually experienced slightly decreased transit accessibility, because their express buses direct to downtown were eliminated so that the bus miles could be used more productively in intrasuburban service.
In Resor and Thompson (1999) one of the nation’s leading railroad costing experts and I document the absence of change in railroad managerial cost thinking over the past 80 years despite continuing and abundant evidence that such thinking bears no semblance to reality. The paper argues that impact of such thinking on current railroad strategy, which while heavily applauded, offers no future for the freight railroad industry. The paper offers an alternative view of the variability of railroad costs which if adopted could lead to a brighter future for the industry. This work was a continuation of Thompson (1995 and 1996). It and the earlier work led to an invitation to join the Intercity Rail Economics Subcommittee of the Transportation Research Board in 2000. At the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, I was asked to give a summary and update of Thompson (1995) to a lunch meeting of the subcommittee, which included the president and several members of the Amtrak Reform Council as well as staffers from the Federal Railroad Administration. I believe that the presentation convinced the council that Amtrak’s strategy of achieving self-sufficiency based on increasing the volume of long distance train service, including a major initiative to move mail and express freight on passenger trains, would incur greater marginal costs than revenue. I also argued that Amtrak’s short distance train service was being mismanaged. Both of these pronouncements now are recognized generally as true.
Despite my interest in policy toward intercity rail service, I decided in early 2002 to move away from that research topic and concentrate my effort on urban public transportation policy. Opportunities were opening for research in this area as well, and I could not pursue both research agendas simultaneously. I chose to emphasize urban public transportation for several reasons. One is that urban public transportation policy is more directly connected to other areas of interest to urban planners and thus is more relevant to the department in which I am employed. Second, major federal policy initiatives toward urban public transportation in which I participated over the past 30 years now are history, but history that is recent enough to be relevant to scholars of contemporary planning debates. By focusing on public transportation policy formulation, I thus could combine my interest in transportation history with my employment as a planning academic. Thirdly, this interest fits well with my interest in how network orientation (and its impact on accessibility) affects the efficiency and equity of transit investments. It also is consistent with much of my previous research. Finally, the intercity rail people wish to focus research on the external benefits of intercity rail service, which is a topic that already has been covered thoroughly in my opinion, while avoiding research into institutional issues, where there is much to be learned. Consequently in Fall 2001, I wrote a proposal to the Council of Research Creativity and Service of Florida State University to fund exploratory research into the debates leading to the major federal light rail initiative that began in the mid-1970s. When my proposal was granted in Spring 2002 I decided to focus my research activity on that project.
Already I had moved in that direction. Two papers that I co-authored with my colleague Ivonne Audirac and which have been sitting on the revise and resubmit back burner for a couple of years treat the question of whether focusing on service to suburban destinations, such a big box retailing, can increase transit ridership. They also examine the question of whether accessibility changes brought about by new transit investments will affect the decision-making locus of land developers. More recently I got together with a co-activist from the days before I became an academic to examine how the performance of three transit systems in which we implemented multi-destination ideas in conjunction with light rail investments from the mid-1970s through late 1980s (San Diego, Portland, Sacramento) compare to performance of systems that did not adopt multi-destination route structures (Thompson and Matoff, in press). Some of the later systems also invested heavily in light rail (Cleveland and Pittsburgh), while others invested heavily in express bus service (Seattle, Houston, the Twin Cities, and also Pittsburgh).
My work on transit accessibility and labor force participation rate in Dade County (Thompson 2001) also is consistent with this initiative. In this paper I again examine the question of whether transit accessibility to the totality of employment in a region rather than to just employment in the downtown conveys value to residents experiencing greater transit accessibility. I found that the variable of transit accessibility that I used in the model did not affect the degree to which residents were employed, but that it did affect their income. I concluded that higher transit accessibility enabled auto-restricted residents to search farther for better-paying jobs. This could be an explanation as to why transit ridership increases substantially when transit systems are restructured into multi-destination systems.
I have begun work on the COFRS-funded project (see Attachment at end of this statement). From 7 to 16 June I traveled to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia to tape interviews with five former Urban Mass Transit Administration officials, including Ken Orski who was Deputy Administrator for Planning and Research during the Nixon years, an academic involved in those years, and Campbell Graeub of the Transportation Research Board, who convened the committee that organized the first light rail conference in 1975. I shortly will interview those involved with decisions in Edmonton and San Diego. Based on the interviews that I conducted so far, I am optimistic that I will be able to obtain foundation or other grant funding for carrying the project into the next couple of years.
I will close with two chapters in edited books that currently are in press. Thompson (in press, a) is based on my cumulative experience as well as a course that I teach on introduction to transportation planning and policy analysis. The chapter turned out to be a much more ambitious work than I anticipated when I accepted editor Kim’s invitation to write it, but I think that it provides a useful overview of the evolution of transportation systems and institutions, including planning, in the United States. Four referees unanimously voted to publish the chapter in its current form. The other chapter (Thompson, in press, b) is a more modest contribution examining how real estate development interests fought with national transportation concerns to shape the early development of Los Angeles. This is a tale with some relevance for those who today wish to tell development interests how they should behave. It possibly also could fit into later work that I have in the back of my head for examining current transit development controversies in the Los Angeles basin. These are among the most significant planning controversies of the last couple of decades in the United States.
References
Gibran Hadj-Chikh and Gregory L. Thompson. “Reaching Jobs in the Suburbs: Tri-Rail in South Florida.” Transportation Research Record 1618 (1998): 14-21.
Rebecca Miles-Doan and Gregory L. Thompson. "Planners and Pedestrian Safety: Lessons From Orlando," Journal of Planning Education and Research 18 (Spring 1999): 211-220.
Randy Resor and Gregory L. Thompson. “Do North American Railroads Understand Their Costs? Implications for Strategic Decision-Making.” Transportation Research Record 1653 (1999):9-16.
Gregory L. Thompson. The Passenger Train in the Motor Age: California's Rail and Bus Industries 1910-1941 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993).
Gregory L. Thompson. "How Cost Misunderstanding Derailed the Pennsylvania Railroad's Efforts to Save its Passenger Service." Journal of Transport History 16 (September 1995):134-158.
Gregory L. Thompson. "The Interwar Response of the Southern Pacific Company and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway to Passenger Road Competition," Business and Economic History: Journal of the Business History Conference 25/1 (1996):283-292.
Gregory L. Thompson. “Achieving Suburban Transit Potential.” Transportation Research Record No. 1571 (1997):151-162.
Gregory L. Thompson. “Identifying Gainers and Losers from Transit Service Change: A Method Applied to Sacramento.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 18 (Winter 1998): 125-136.
Gregory L. Thompson. “New Insights into the Value of Transit: Modeling Inferences from Dade County,” Transportation Research Record 1753 (2001): 52-58.
G. L. Thompson and T. G. Matoff. “Keeping Up with the Joneses: Planning for Transit in Decentralizing Regions.” The Journal of the American Planning Association. [accepted and in press].
Gregory L. Thompson and Ivonne Audirac. “Alternative Models to TOD (Transit Oriented Development): What Can they Offer in a Car-Dominated Urban Form?” [submitted to Journal of the American Planning Association; peer reviewed; journal asked for revise and resubmit].
Gregory L. Thompson and Ivonne Audirac. “TODs Can Increase Transit Ridership Significantly: Planning Scenarios for Sacramento.” [submitted to Journal of the American Planning Association; peer reviewed; journal asked for revise and resubmit].
Gregory L. Thompson. “Transportation Development and Institutional Change,” Tschangho John Kim (ed), Transportation Engineering and Planning, EOLSS Theme 6.40, EOLSS Publishing Co. for UNESCO, Oxford, UK. [In press, a].
Gregory L. Thompson. “The Impact of Railroads on the Early Growth of the Los Angeles Region.” Javier Vidal Olivares, ed..Ferrocarril y desarrollo urbano (Railways and Urban Development), Madrid, Fundacion de los Ferrocarriles Españoles (Spanish Railways Foundation), Book chapter. [In press, b].
Lynne Marie Whately, Bradley Friel, and Gregory L. Thompson. "An Analysis of Suburb-to-Suburb Commuter Rail Potential: Metrolink in Southern California." Conference Proceedings 8: 7th National Conference on Light Rail Transit, Vol. 2 with Associated Papers on Issues and Future of Rail Transit (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997):175-183.