Too Many Goals

Last week, the director of the Civil Rights Division for Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), Kenneth Hardin, was indicted for having allegedly “corruptly solicited and accepted money from a person intending to be influenced and rewarded in connection with RTD business.” While no further details were provided by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver, it is reasonable to speculate that Hardin is being accused of accepting a bribe to give a minority preference to a potential contractor that wasn’t really minority owned.

Federal regulations require transit agencies that receive federal funding “To ensure nondiscrimination in the award and administration of DOT-assisted contracts.” The best way to “ensure nondiscrimination,” the regulations go on to say, is to set aside a specific percentage of contracts for “disadvantaged business enterprises.” By definition, a “disadvantaged business” is one that is at least 51 percent owned by minorities, women, or other “individuals who are both socially and economically disadvantaged.”

In other words, and something that will not surprise anyone familiar with American civil rights laws, the rules require that agencies ensure nondiscrimination through discrimination. In RTD’s case, the agency is committed to making sure that at least 15 percent of its contracts go to disadvantaged businesses, and Hardin’s job was making sure that happened.

The indictment claims that Hardin, who is reportedly paid more than $110,000 per year (which probably includes benefits as his 2012 salary was just under $80,000), accepted bribes totaling $5,100. The Antiplanner has no idea if Hardin is guilty, and it seems difficult to imagine that someone would risk a cushy job like that for a few thousand dollars. But this is just one more example of how the federal government is messing up America’s transportation system.

Transit is supposed to be about moving people, especially people who don’t have access to cars. But today transit has taken on so many other jobs that the goal of providing mobility has been all but forgotten. Among those jobs, transit is supposed to get people out of their cars, relieve congestion, reduce air pollution, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, encourage developers to build and people to move to more livable communities, provide living-wage jobs, and, of course, make sure that minority-owned businesses get the proper share of federally funded contracts. No doubt there are many more goals and targets that come with federal funding and political control in general.

All of these goals and rules and regulations create a system that invites the kind of corruption suggested by this indictment. But, more important, they distract from RTD’s actual mission, which is to provide mobility.

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The West light-rail line, which opened in May, 2013, is just one example of how poorly RTD has performed. According to the 1997 major investment study for this line, this line was projected to cost $250 million which, after adjusting for inflation, is about $350 million in today’s dollars. It actually cost $709 million, and even then they didn’t double-track the last couple of miles as originally planned.

The major investment study also considered a bus-rapid transit on high-occupancy vehicle lanes as an alternative. The analysis concluded that it would cost half as much but provide 88 percent as many benefits (measured by number of hours saved by travelers), making it far more cost effective than light rail. Yet RTD chose the rail alternative instead. It is worth noting that, as rail costs doubled, the cost of the only major bus-rapid transit line that RTD is building grew by just 8 percent.

The 1997 West line study projected that it would carry an average of 20,000 riders each weekday in its first year of operation. As shown in the chart above, which is based on RTD spreadsheets, it never came close, averaging 13,800 weekday riders in its first year and not improving in its second.

Would RTD have picked rail if it had known that rail costs would double and ridership would fall more than 40 percent short of expectations? It might have if its goals included being (as one Denver lobbyist explained light rail to me) “a WPA program for Colorado contractors.” But if its sole objective was to increase regional mobility, rail would never have been given serious consideration.

This is just one more reason for the federal government (and, in fact, government in general) to get out of the transportation business. By turning market transactions into political transactions, the government takeover of transit has made it a creature of special interest groups, not a vehicle for mobility for people who need it.

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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.

5 Responses to Too Many Goals

  1. JimKarlock says:

    ” this line was projected to cost $250 million which, after adjusting for inflation, is about $350 million in today’s dollars. It actually cost $709 million, and even then they didn’t double-track the last couple of miles as originally planned. ”
    As one private sector purchasing agent observed at the Denver American Dream Coalition conference: Unlike the private sector, the bid price on a government project is only a down payment.

  2. Frank says:

    “Government will malperform if an activity is under pressure to satisfy different constituencies with different values and different demands,” wrote Peter Drucker in his 1989 book, The New Realities. “Performance requires concentration on one goal.”

    And economist Murray Rothbard details that government will always malperform whether or not pressure is placed on an activity:

    Suppose, for example, that there are many competing cantaloupe stores [or transportation providers] in a particular neighborhood. One of the cantaloupe dealers [or transportation providers], Smith, then uses violence to drive all of his competitors out of the neighborhood; he has thereby employed violence to establish a coerced monopoly over the sale of cantaloupes [or transportation services] in a given territorial area. Does that mean that Smith’s use of violence to establish and maintain his monopoly was essential to the provision of cantaloupes [transportation] in the neighborhood? Certainly not, for there were existing competitors as well as potential rivals should Smith ever relax his use and threat of violence; moreover, economics demonstrates that Smith, as a coercive monopolist will tend to perform his service badly and inefficiently. Protected from competition by the use of force, Smith can afford to provide his service in a costly and inefficient manner, since the consumers are deprived of any possible range of alternative choice. Furthermore, should a group arise to call for the abolition of Smith’s coercive monopoly there would be very few protesters with the temerity to accuse these “abolitionists” of wishing to deprive the consumers of their much desired cantaloupes [transportation services].

  3. msetty says:

    As usual, Frank’s ideological blinders have led him to ignorantly quote a useless libertarian ideologue in his attempts to discredit government-owned transit.

    The Murray Rothbard quote he used describes perfectly what happened in South Africa when taxi/minibus service was deregulated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_wars_in_South_Africa.

    In Rothbard’s and apparently Frank’s, libertarian utopia for fools, “private police forces” would actually be 21st Century versions of the Mafia and other organized crime, whom you would be forced to pay for “protection.” With no legitimate authority, it’s also likely that the same sort of violence to control various “markets” would happen here like that of South Africa, particularly under the severe economic depression that would be caused by libertarian “economic policies” (sic).

  4. MJ says:

    The Murray Rothbard quote he used describes perfectly what happened in South Africa when taxi/minibus service was deregulated

    The failure to enforce property rights is not indicative of a failure of bus deregulation, nor is the failure to respond to threats of violence.

    In Rothbard’s and apparently Frank’s, libertarian utopia for fools, “private police forces” would actually be 21st Century versions of the Mafia and other organized crime, whom you would be forced to pay for “protection.”

    Funny, that sounds an awful lot like how many ‘public’ police forces act, not to mention many units of government. The fundamental problem is one party having a monopoly on the legitimized use of force.

    With no legitimate authority, it’s also likely that the same sort of violence to control various “markets” would happen here like that of South Africa, particularly under the severe economic depression that would be caused by libertarian “economic policies” (sic).

    Name one libertarian economic policy that has been adopted in the U.S.

  5. Frank says:

    Only mshitty™ would call a Jew “useless”. Well, not only mshitty™. We all know who else called Jews “useless”.

    I urge everyone not to feed the antisemitic troll.

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