Judge Richard Leon apparently invalidated Maryland’s Purple Line project just in time to prevent the Federal Transit Administration from giving the Maryland Transit Authority nearly a billion dollars for construction. Naturally, rail supporters are outraged by his decision.
The Washingtonian, for example, calls the decision “ridiculous” because it was based on declining Metro rail ridership and “the Purple Line will not be part of Metro.” But the article admits that 27 percent of the projected Purple Line riders will be transfers to or from Metro, so if Metro ridership declines, the Purple Line’s will as well.
The National Environmental Policy Act is supposed to be a procedural law, the Washingtonian complains, so why is Judge Leon allowing substantive issues such as ridership influence his decision? The author of this piece is obviously not an attorney and probably didn’t even read Judge Leon’s decision, or he would understand that getting the numbers right, as the judge demands, is procedural. He might also be able to read between the lines of the decision and see that Leon realizes this project is a turkey, and is using ridership as just the most obvious reason to overturn the decision to build the low-capacity rail line.
The Washington Post calls the decision a “sucker punch” because, even if Metro’s ridership falls 10 percent, that would only reduce the Purple Line’s ridership by 2.7 percent. But, as the Post is fully aware, the ridership numbers are impossibly high in any case. Parsons Brinckerhoff, the firm MTA used to revise the numbers when the original estimates were too low to get federal funding, projected that the Purple Line would attract 50 percent more riders than New Jersey’s Hudson-Bergen line, which serves an area with several times the population and job densities of the Purple Line.
Judge Leon’s alarm over Metro rail is well justified. The FTA just blasted Metro over a July derailment that, it says, could have been prevented if Metro had fixed problems that it had identified as long ago as 2009.
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This led to some political sparks when Representative Barbara Comstock publicly complained about Metro’s lack of dedication to safety and Amalgamated Transit Union local 689 responded by calling Comstock “anti-rider.” The facts that she was pretty much quoting the FTA report, and that many of Metro’s own employees pretty much agree are unimportant: the union, which itself is under investigation for election fraud, is obviously trying to point the blame on anyone else it can.
DC commuters are still suffering from delays due to “SafeTrack,” the agency’s program to restore the system. Not only are riders having to jam into fewer trains, the air conditioning on many of the cars has stopped working. To make matters worse, most riders probably aren’t even aware that SafeTrack is just a stop-gap measure, or that Metro will still need billions of dollars more to bring the system up to a state of good repair.
There’s growing recognition that the DC region should have used the money that was spent on the Silver line to instead rehabilitate the existing system. Defenders say the Silver line was paid for out of a different pot of money than would have been available for restoring the other lines, but that’s just politics, as the region could easily have spent the same funds on anything it wanted.
In fact, the Silver line shouldn’t have been built even if the rest of the system weren’t deteriorating. But since it is, building the Purple Line would only compound this mistake. The region’s true transit supporters should advocate to divert Purple Line funds into Metro rail restoration efforts.
