More Good Money After Bad in New Mexico

New Mexico’s Rail Runner has lost 38 percent of its riders since 2012 and is on course to making it 40 percent in 2019. Rio Metro, which operates the trains, is scrambling to find the $55 million it needs to install positive train control, as required by federal law, but remains $20 million short.

Abandoned station on the Rail Runner line. Click image for Wikipedia article. Photo by John Phelan.

A new report published by the state legislative finance committee offers a proposal in response to these problems: transit-oriented development. Although the report reveals that many of the communities along the rail line have zoned land for transit-oriented development, none has come about except in Santa Fe, and even there the development is minimal and required tens of millions of dollars in public subsidies.

New Mexico is going through the same process that took place in Portland and other cities that built obsolete rail transit systems. First, they zoned land for development along the rail lines, expecting people would be so eager to live near the train that developers would happily build high-density housing with no parking. Then, when no development took place, they start subsidizing it. So we have subsidized trains meant to generated development that has to be subsidized to get people who might ride the trains.

The Rail Runner carried an average of 2,825 riders per weekday in 2017. The state report estimates that the train has “about 1,200 regular commuters,” which would account for 2,400 of those trips, and the rest are people who “take the train for leisure and tourism, school, and other business and personal appointments.” With average fares of about $2.50 and average costs of about $35 per trip, the rail line costs about $15,000 a year per daily commuter, not counting capital costs.

Erectile dysfunction is a cialis generic france fairly common condition that most men like to hid from others. These include viagra online discount headache, dizziness, facial redness etc. Many people who suffer from muscle pain have found that they injure themselves because they add more work https://www.supplementprofessors.com/cialis-4842.html buy levitra to the already tired back muscles by lifting and carrying things improperly. Only one of them-PDE5 -is found primarily in the penis. just the once the scientists exposed this fact, the conception of levitra 20 mg https://www.supplementprofessors.com/levitra-1826.html Professional was relatively simple. This line was conceived without any serious evaluation of its feasibility. As one state senator says, “I just don’t think we thought this thing out very well when it was first proposed.”

The Rail Runner was first proposed in 2003 by then-Governor Bill Richardson, who like so many other politicians was attracted to passenger trains without understanding their true cost. He managed to put off most of the cost until after he expected to leave office by borrowing nearly $500 million under a loan that would have a $220 million balloon payment in 2025/2026. The state has since refinanced that but will still have a balloon payment of about $80 million.

Among his other blunders, Richardson thought that spending nearly a million dollars on a train station near the University of New Mexico stadium would allow people to take the train to football games and other events. After three events in which hardly anyone used the train, Rio Metro stopped using the station, which sits abandoned.

Richardson had presidential aspirations, but his political career ended under a cloud. Apparently, a company called CDR gave Richardson’s political action committee $100,000 in exchange for handling New Mexico’s bonds, including those for the Rail Runner. The feds decided not to prosecute, but the pay-to-play scandal effectively ended his political career.

The legislative finance committee report was written by a team of more than a dozen people, at least four of whom have PhDs in something or other and one of whom signs his name “esquire.” All that intelligence and yet the report failed to even consider the least-expensive option, which would be to shut down the train, sell the equipment and any associated real estate, and use the proceeds to pay off as much of the loan as possible. The 1,200 daily commuters who now ride the train could take a bus instead at little or no cost to taxpayers, and the bus would be as fast or faster than the train. The state would end up eating much of the loan, but it would save the $26 million in annual operating losses, the cost of positive train control, and millions more in maintenance costs. That sounds like the closest possible thing to a win-win solution.

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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.

One Response to More Good Money After Bad in New Mexico

  1. LazyReader says:

    Transit oriented development isn’t a terrible idea. But the clickity clack of steel wheel is not a pleasing sound accoutrement. The solution, much the same as some areas have highways and frontage roads connecting to the streets of the neighborhood; is to a bus or rubber tire metro system with frontage road to the neighborhood. And revert to smaller transit vehicles. Buses of the past built by GM are often sighted as some of the most stylish transit vehicles on the road. Unlike todays buses which resemble bricks with wheels

    The completion of Interstate 25 rendered outlet malls and vintage shops dead in many locations from Wyoming to New Mexico. Defunct malls, failing office parks and residential subdivisions devoid of people after the housing meltdown, empty parking lots, abandoned golf courses dot New Mexico. Think of Dead Malls as tragic, I admittedly like the mall. But view it as opportunistic. This .gif showcases how a dead mall with acres of parking can be converted into a lively mixed use community.

    https://www.dpz.com/uploads/Initiatives/Sprawl_Repair_Mall_Animation_800.gif

    The problem with transit oriented development is they build transit first than hope to hell people are gonna move there; this level of lifestyle was so lampooned in an episode of South Park where they took Kenny’s ghetto neighborhood and convert it into a..pffft, historic district.

    Instead take an area that exists i.e. the Dead Mall, usually underpopulated or abandoned and convert it. With the refurbished dead mall as the core hub for the areas function, No need to build any comprehensive infrastructure, it’s already there. It was a shopping mall of course so it already had the connections for power, sewage and water; simply shut off. Transit oriented development can mean anything, it doesn’t have to be a train, it can be a bus, it can be a van. We cant afford to “throw” these places away as they represent a huge investment of resources, energy and capital. Building communities out of the ashes of the retail meltdown; with the option of being able to safely walk, bike, scooter, etc. Suddenly cars are reverted to their original status; a way of transportation, not a way of life.

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