Withholding Funds to Improve Transit

The Washington Metro rail system is falling apart. Should local governments (which are responsible for most operations and maintenance costs) “key their payments to a certain number of problem-free rush hours, say 10 or so to start, before the payment is made?” a Washington Post reader asks Dr. Gridlock. “Maybe then they would be forced to make things run better.”

Dr. Gridlock points out many of the problems with this idea (some delays aren’t the transit agency’s fault, withholding money could make delays worse). “The key isn’t a rigid system of financial penalties,” he concludes. “It’s a question of getting the region’s governments to pay attention to how their money is being spent.” In other words, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) just has to persuade local governments to give it more money.

The good doctor misses the point, however, which is that politicians are always going to underfund maintenance because it isn’t highly visible. They want to be seen doing big things; updating signals, keeping insulators dry, and replacing dangerously obsolete railcars with new ones that look identical on the outside just isn’t sexy enough compared with building a Silver Line or a Purple Line.

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The solution is to make transit less dependent on politicians and more dependent on user fees. The subsidies transit gets aren’t really needed for transit riders; they’re for transit unions and to stroke the egos of the politicians handing them out. Too many people don’t want that because transit creates too many cushy jobs, promotes social engineering, and fits in to some people’s ideals of how cities should work. User-fee-dependent transit also probably means fewer trains (and no new ones) and more buses.

Yet transit systems that responded to user fees instead of chasing after big federal grants would provide better service to most of those who need it most. So in a broad sense, the answer to the reader’s question is yes, withholding government money will provide better transit.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

7 Responses to Withholding Funds to Improve Transit

  1. Sandy Teal says:

    WMATA has a budget that gets approved by somebody. Whoever approves their budget should all be fired and replaced with people who will spend enough on maintenance. It is that simple.

    The lack of maintenance is not a “problem” to these people — it is part of the plan to let things get bad so that Congress will give them a huge amount of money to “fix it”.

  2. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    The Antiplanner wrote:

    The good doctor misses the point, however, which is that politicians are always going to underfund maintenance because it isn’t highly visible. They want to be seen doing big things; updating signals, keeping insulators dry, and replacing dangerously obsolete railcars with new ones that look identical on the outside just isn’t sexy enough compared with building a Silver Line or a Purple Line.

    And where are the dollars considered “capital” funds for heavy rail, switch and traction power supply system repairs and new trainsets coming from? Not from transit patrons.

    The solution is to make transit less dependent on politicians and more dependent on user fees. The subsidies transit gets aren’t really needed for transit riders; they’re for transit unions and to stroke the egos of the politicians handing them out. Too many people don’t want that because transit creates too many cushy jobs, promotes social engineering, and fits in to some people’s ideals of how cities should work. User-fee-dependent transit also probably means fewer trains (and no new ones) and more buses.

    I respectfully assert that you missed the one thing that would help with the above – have the trains and the buses operated by private-sector contractors (as they are in, for example, nationally in Sweden and with the entire red bus fleet in London, England), which are in turn responsible for reaching agreement with those transit unions (and if the agreement is too generous, results in less or no profits for that contractor).

  3. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Sandy Teal wrote:

    WMATA has a budget that gets approved by somebody. Whoever approves their budget should all be fired and replaced with people who will spend enough on maintenance. It is that simple.

    The WMATA Board of Directors approves the budget. That board has representatives of the municipal government of the District of Columbia, the state of Maryland, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the United States government.

  4. Sandy Teal says:

    Perhaps the political answer is for some entity to draw attention to the budgets that fail to fund maintenance. That is the point where the failure occurs. If the national association of Engineers or Planners or Budget Critics or Maintenance Police would rate these budgets as “F” each year, then we could start to assign blame for deaths and in political arguments force all people responsible for the irresponsible budgets to resign and get sued.

  5. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Washington Post: Metro workers say safety culture doesn’t exist

    Metro train and bus operators, mechanics and other employees have lined up to criticize the agency’s safety culture nearly three months after a deadly smoke incident left one person dead and spurred new questions about the system’s management and training.

    A union meeting grew heated Wednesday night when Metro employees assailed interim General Manager Jack Requa with allegations that the transit agency has cut corners to minimize costs and has willfully ignored a laundry list of safety warnings from its workers.

    They said Metro has instead promoted an internal culture that discourages workers from reporting safety concerns, a trend that they say has worsened recently.

    “As an operator, I never know what happens when I make a report about a hazard that I have just seen,” Niya Banks, a train conductor, told the assembly of Metro workers, officials and transit experts who had gathered at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. “I have seen reports go many months without being properly handled.”

  6. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Sandy Teal wrote:

    Perhaps the political answer is for some entity to draw attention to the budgets that fail to fund maintenance.

    More than a few states have a “maintenance first” policy codified into statute. That usually means that maintenance has to be funded before system expansion.

    I have never heard of a U.S. transit property that has such a policy.

    That is the point where the failure occurs. If the national association of Engineers or Planners or Budget Critics or Maintenance Police would rate these budgets as “F” each year, then we could start to assign blame for deaths and in political arguments force all people responsible for the irresponsible budgets to resign and get sued.

    I think it’s the ASCE that does those ratings.

  7. prk166 says:

    The problem with this idea is that the local gov’t. officials will not stop funding the system. Riders are convinced – maybe rightly so? – that they do not have a better option. Take away their metro and they’ll show up at the polls to vote against you.

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