Brouhaha in Grants Pass

As if to show that even small cities can waste gobs of money on transit infrastructure, Grants Pass, Oregon (population 35,000) recently debated the wisdom of spending more than $100,000 each for several modest three-seat bus shelters to serve the Josephine County Transit system. As The Oregonian notes, this is roughly the cost of building a modest three-bedroom, two-bath home, not counting the land.

The story began when Grants Pass decided to boost transit ridership by building five bus shelters using federal Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ) funds. Under state and federal rules, the city did not have any engineers who were considered qualified to design such shelters, so the city had to hire an outside consultant. The shelters designed by the consultant were originally expected to cost $76,000 apiece, but due to cost overruns the cost rose to $106,000. By comparison, the nearby city of Roseburg, Oregon (population 21,000) built similar (though perhaps not quite as pretty) shelters for $7,000 to $11,000 each.

As an aside, Oregon has a 1-percent-for-art rule, so when the cost of the shelters grew, the minimum art cost probably grew as well. But the actual budget for art grew from $2,500 to $15,000 per shelter, so the city was spending far more than the minimum on art. In fact, the city was proposing to spend more for the art than the shelters themselves should have cost. In the end, the city council decided not to pay for the cost overrun, though no one yet knows whether this means there will be fewer shelters, less art, or otherwise less fancy shelters.

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One reason why Grants Pass would be excluded from the database would be if it received no federal funds. But Josephine County’s budget shows that the county’s transit system receives more than $700,000 in federal grants a year, with a similar amount coming from the state (see p. 59). In fact, transit riders pay only a bit more than 10 percent of the cost of the system, and local taxpayers only pay about 2.6 percent (see p. 57). All the rest comes from federal and state funds.

Assuming an average fare of about $1 a ride, Josephine County Transit carries roughly 500 passengers a day. That’s not very good considering it has two bus routes that go 24 times a day, two more that go twelve times a day, and two long-distance routes that go three times a day, plus demand-responsive service for seniors and handicapped passengers. That’s an average of about 6.5 riders per bus trip, with a taxpayer subsidy of about $9 per ride. As of 2009, most of the system’s buses had 21 seats (see p. 22), and generously assuming each rider rode half the distance of each route (most of the routes are circular), that means an average of 15 percent of the seats are full. That’s probably optimistic, which suggests the buses aren’t very good for the environment either.

Congratulations to Josephine County for proving that transit boondoggles happen in even in remote areas. Congratulations to the Grants Pass city council for calling a halt to this boondoggle, or at least keeping it contained to a mere $76,000 per $7,000 bus shelter.