Washington Metro has been interrupting service for various “safety surges” (they call them “surges” because it sounds better than “slowdowns”), but according to the Federal Transit Administration it has a lot more work to do. The FTA says that the rail system’s power supply is “in a deteriorated condition” and the tunnels and tracks have numerous defects that haven’t even all been identified, much less put on the schedule to be fixed.
Not surprisingly, the American Public Transportation Association’s latest ridership report reveals that Metro ridership in the second quarter of 2016 was 11.5 percent less than the same quarter the year before. As the Antiplanner has previously noted, this decline took place before the delays caused by the maintenance work, so most of it is because people have found other means of transportation due to Metro Rail’s low reliability.
Washington is not alone. Rail rapid transit systems in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia are just as bad off, and New York’s and San Francisco’s aren’t far behind. APTA’s president even issued a rather desperate-sounding op-ed begging for money to repair obsolete and dying forms of transportation.
As the Antiplanner has noted before, both Amtrak and transit agencies count maintenance as a capital cost, not an operating cost. A look at their books makes it appear that they are doing fine when in fact they are falling apart because their capital budgets (really their maintenance budgets) are too small.
Aside that some infertility treatments can be very expensive, couples may need to allocate a considerable amount of time in achieving pregnancy. the best viagra So if men don’t cure the prostatitis timely, they have to endure these symptoms sildenafil viagra tablets mouthsofthesouth.com and live a terrible life. If a person is stressed out or is in some kind of depression then he tends to face erectile dysfunction in his life. cialis online purchase Ultimately, this drug allows men with strong hard-on’s for a long period of time.It treats the impotence by increasing the blood supply to the male reproductive system. buy viagra without prescription A source that I trust tells me that this is due to a change in railroad accounting imposed by the Interstate Commerce Commission several decades ago. Under the old system, maintenance was an operating cost, so railroads could make themselves appear to be more profitable by cutting maintenance expenses. Under the ICC’s newer system, railroads accounted for maintenance as depreciation of their capital plants. Since depreciation appeared on their books whether they did the maintenance or not, they couldn’t make themselves appear more profitable by not doing the maintenance.
That may have worked for for-profit organizations that were used to earning profits in most years. But neither transit nor Amtrak earn profits, so depreciation just becomes one more loss-making item. Moreover, when Amtrak bragged that its revenues covered 94 percent of its operating costs, it didn’t count depreciation among those operating costs even though it appears on the company’s financial reports as an operating cost. Thus, the decades-old ICC reform doesn’t prevent loss-making organizations like Amtrak or Washington Metro from deferring maintenance; it just helps them cover up their losses.
It’s easy to say we should spend more money on passenger rail transportation. But once you accept you should, no matter how unprofitable the system, where do you draw the line and say, “This is enough; no more”? The answer you don’t; instead, you get ridiculous plans like spending nearly $1 billion per mile on a nine-mile light-rail tunnel in Los Angeles.
When did it become okay for transportation to lose money? In 1960, most transportation made money. Then Congress offered to subsidize mass transit in 1964, and to take over America’s intercity passenger trains in 1970. Ironically, even as Amtrak took over in 1971, Congress was reforming our airport system so that it would be funded out of passenger ticket fees rather than general funds.
The real question is why should we spend money on loss-making transportation? Let’s just reform all of our transportation systems so that they turn a profit.
The Antiplanner is getting a little off message. The public doesn’t expect commuter rail to make a profit, but they do expect it to do more good than it costs. While the Antiplanner sort of means that, the public doesn’t hear it that way when he talks about “profit” or “covering operating costs”. Left wingers even rebel at any mention of the evil word “profit”.
The point is that among the transportation options, the public’s behavior and “willingness to pay” for auto and air transportation shows that is immensely valuable to the public. All the public infrastructure needed for auto and air can even be paid for by user fees because it is so valuable to the public.
On the other hand, the rail/subway system that everyone thinks many people desperately want and will relieve congestion turns out to be not very valuable to very many people. It isn’t used much, and people won’t pay much to use it. That is the form of the message that will resonate with the public.
In response to “Teal”.
“Paying” for the subway also has to be looked at carefully. How many people riding it actually pay full fare? I passed through the turnstiles once and I saw the “fare number” for the guy in front of me. He had over $900 on his fare card. I promise you, he did not put $900 of his own money on that thing. He was participating in a transit subsidy program at work that was either lucrative, or his use was much less than the subsidy. So, even the people that “desperately need” the subways may not be paying the user fee with their own money.
Tellingly, companies and even government agencies would rather pay for a cab ride for employees going to a meeting rather than pay for a subway or bus ride, because the wasted time for a subway or bus is much more expensive than the cost of a cab. Even DOT wants its employees in DC will take cab rides to meetings rather than take the subway.
Sandy Teal – didn’t unprofitable commuter rail just lose an election big time? The Clinton enclaves who want the Trump flyover country to subsidize their commuting costs will get the message sooner or later.
Actually voters approved most transit referendums on the ballot in 2016. If you’re referring to the presidential race, even assuming commuter rail had any relevance on a national level, you’d have to be uniquely delusional or brainwashed to characterize a popular margin of victory of almost negative three million votes as “big time.”
Actually, it’s the other way around. Blue states and urban areas tend to subsidize red states and rural areas at the federal level.
Urban areas tend to subsidize rural roads within states as well.
http://www.mocbt.org/
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/02/26/penndot-sec-rural-roads-subsidized-more-than-mass-transit/
“because the wasted time for a subway or bus is much more expensive than the cost of a cab.”
From here:
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/masstransit.htm
“Affluent Customers Will Not Use Mass Transit. It’s not that they’re selfish, or that they don’t care about the environment. It’s not cost-effective. The higher your salary, the more wasteful mass transit is.”
Actually, it’s the other way around. Blue states and urban areas tend to subsidize red states and rural areas at the federal level.
An excellent reason to get the national government out of the business of funding transportation. Transportation is rightly a state responsibility. Why possible benefit could there be in Washington taking money from states and giving it back?
I would agree with your analysis if you also agree that interstate highway system maintenance should be carried out on a county by county basis, since traffic patterns on the interstate tend to fall into that level of granularity. As a non auto owner, and high income tax payer, I subsidize the interstate highways (which I never use) to a very large degree, while a large amount of the funds for regional transit which come out of the farebox are diverted to suburban transit systems with few riders. Ridership is low because suburban areas are built to the non-dense scale of an automobile, by choice.
For example, in Chicago (my home) the RTA spends over 50% of its funds on suburban rail and transit because the funding formula is based upon population, not on ridership — even though 75% or more of the ridership is in urban areas. This skews spending so that, for example, the iconic “L” in Chicago is constantly enduring deferred repairs, while little-used commuter rail stops in the suburbs build more and more elaborate stations, with more and more elaborate parking facilities, with per-mile per-head fares subsidized to a much larger degree than in the city, where ridership is much higher.
interestingly, I currently travel to DC for work and use the metro frequently. It is an excellent system, relied upon heavily by everyone along its corridors, including the Northern Virginia suburbs. It is being starved because the U.S. Congress doesn’t want to pay for required maintenance, despite many studies which show it is an economic driver for the entire area. Regional funding is trapped in the politics of two states and the DC council, with the Virginia legislature the most reticent to agree to some sort of regional tax that would sustain the system.
It appears the most likely solution is going to be a county-by-county sales tax of something like 1.5%, which means Fairfax and Arlington will pay, while the rest of the state does not, which seems fair to me. However, the state would for some reason have to approve this, and is resisting, which makes no sense and belies the idea that this is about “local control”, and makes it clear it is more about politics. I have no problem with those who use a system paying for its upkeep and maintenance, but to me that would mean something like this: people from outside Fairfax or Arlington (or Cook County) paying full per-mile cost on the metro, and a similar per-mile charge on the interstate highway system, based upon your auto registration locality. Certainly an administrative overhead nightmare, but if your main concern is ‘fairness’, knock yourself out and make both systems more expensive to maintain, but optimized for ‘local control’. To me it seems simpler to just accept that we are all in this together and each end up paying for things that we don’t use in the interest of the greater good.
@TEAL: As for transit pass programs, they are not paid for by employers, these are ‘pre-tax’ deductions from payroll, which are only available through payroll deduction. Employers do not ‘subsidize’ or contribute to this. Also, why would you be looking at someone else’s accrued balance anyway? What business is it of yours? Are you just looking for reasons to be angry, whether they are based in facts or not?
My wife uses one of these transit pass programs and I assure you it is all her money, simply deducted from her pay. The balance often gets rather high, because she chooses whether to use transit on a daily basis — when weather and road conditions are poor, she uses transit, because she drives part way and often enjoys walking the remainder fo the way, unless it is raining or snowing. Again, it is her choice WHEN to use her OWN money, and no one else’s business how much pre-tax money she puts on the card. This is definitely less of a “subsidy” than the federal tax money that goes toward interstate highway repair, and which is also deducted from every taxpayer’s pay check, including those whose wages are too low to afford an automobile. In fact, transit pass programs are much more of a ‘user fee’ than federal funds for highways, which in a truly fair system would be funded solely by tolls to the users, at which point local (non-toll) roads would become swamped because in high-use areas maintenance per mile is extremely expensive per passenger – um, much more than per-passenger costs for rail systems. I will also note that in order to pass this program, Congress included a “parking pass” component that indeed subsidizes private parking garages by allowing pre-tax funds to be dedicated to a PRIVATE entity, parking garage businesses. That is a lot more galling than allowing taxpayers to direct funds to a public entity like transit systems.
I had to comment on this since you cite both DC and Chicago in the post, and I have first hand knowledge of both of those systems as a rider. Do you, sir? Since you are making broad judgments about the usefulness of those systems, I would assume you wouldn’t make this statement without actually using them, would you? Or is the political agenda more important than having first-hand knowledge of the facts on the ground?
I take I-55 to Midway and either 90/294/190 or 290/294/190 to O’Hare. You never use any of these roads? I realize that Midway is accessible by surface streets but O’Hare too? I’m just curious.
Also, I assume you consume goods and services that are delivered via interstate highways even if you, yourself don’t drive on them.
“As a non auto owner, and high income tax payer, I subsidize the interstate highways.”
If $8B weren’t diverted to mass transit, there would be no issue. You don’t subsidize interstate highways; they subsidize you.
@StevePasek.
Don’t know if you’ll ever read this since the post is a weekend old now.
But, you are sincere.
And you are sincerely wrong on several topics.
#1. I ride the DC WMATA and I (and all other employees of my company) receive a company transit subsidy that is above my salary but below the taxable limits set by the IRS. This limit was dramatically lowered (or put in place I forget which) by President Obama’s efforts to negotiate a way to fund his “Obamacare” initiative and get it to pass. That’s right, taxing transit subsidies to fund healthcare.
#2. Not that you are wrong, but your question as to why I was looking at someone else’s balance on their fair card shows your lack of experience with the DC Metro. If you ever rode the system when it was crowded, you would be herded through the turnstiles like the rest of us and when you checked the little green-light panel display on the turnstile to see if your smarttrip card was registered by the reader you would see the previous person’s fare card balance still glowing on the panel. This also tells me that you haven’t traveled on the system enough to have to suffer it’s ills, or haven’t been in a position to depend upon the system. In which case you wouldn’t be calling it an excellent system. Yes, it works well for the visitor that needs to get from one of the National Mall to the other, or back to the hotel, but for those of us trying to keep a daily routine of commuting…..
What I don’t get is why expanding rail service is prioritized by US transit agencies. I’m sure DC Metro could have upgraded it’s current system for the cost of the new Silver Line and the DC Streetcar. Questions regarding funding sources seem trivival if the organizations getting the money spend it incompetently, be it the DOT or Mass Transit system.