More Bureaucracy Won’t Make Transit Safe

Last week, the Federal Transit Administration presented a “scathing report” on Washington Metrorail safety programs. The report itself found that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) frequently failed to comply with or even respond to safety requirements and investigations of the agency that has oversight authority over Metrorail safety.

Back in 1991, Congress asked the Federal Transit Administration to create a state-based transit safety program. After a mere 4 years, the FTA responded with rules (updated in 2005) requiring each state that has a rail transit system to create a state safety oversight (SSO) authority. Because the Washington Metrorail system crosses from DC into two states, its SSO is called the Tri-State (even though DC is not a state) Oversight Committee (TOC).

What the 1991 law and FTA rules did not do is give the SSOs any legal authority to compel transit agencies to improve safety. As FTA administrator Peter Rogoff told Congress on March 4, transit agencies “don’t have to respond to [the SSOs] in a timely way. In fact, they don’t have to respond to them at all.” Thus, it is not surprising that the SSO system failed to prevent accidents such as the one last June that killed 9 people in DC.

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Federal Highway Funds Frozen

The distribution of federal highway revenues to the states ended on Sunday night thanks to Congress’ failure to extend surface transportation funding. This means that transit agencies and highway departments may temporarily lack funds to pay their bills.

Democrats in Congress had proposed to extend funding through the end of the year as a part of a bill extending unemployment compensation. But Kentucky Republican Senator Jim Bunning objected to the unemployment bill, since there was no money to pay for it. So the House passed a bill extending transportation funding for four weeks, but Bunning objected to that as well. Bunning agreed yesterday to drop his objections, but the funds will remain frozen for a few more days.

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Tossing the Neocons

It is amazing how few people understand the tea party movement. The movement is portrayed as fringe right wingers, radicals, conspiracy nuts, and so forth. Yet extremism has nothing to do with what the movement is all about.

What is really going on is that conservatives are throwing out the neoconservatives. Neocons aren’t really conservatives, yet they managed to hi-jack the Republican party after the 2000 election. The Bush administration betrayed the conservative movement by going neocon, and the leaders of the tea party movement are fighting to retake control of that movement.

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Let It Snow

“How many Washington Metrorail employees does it take to change a lightbulb?” a friend who would probably rather not be named asked recently. “Three: one to screw a lightbulb into a faucet, one to assure the public that the system was safe, and one to explain to the media why this proves Metro needs a dedicated funding source.”

The good news about last week’s derailment is that it probably was not due to the poor maintenance that plagued the Metrorail system in 2009. Instead, it appears that the driver of a train ran a red light. The train then entered a side track where it ran into a safety device called, naturally enough, a derail, aimed at preventing a train from going where it wasn’t supposed to go.

This still leaves a mystery. Did someone see that the driver was blowing the red light and purposefully switch the train to a side track? Was there a failsafe system no one remembers? Or was the switch in the wrong position in the first place, meaning the train would have derailed even if it hadn’t blown the light?

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Some people have even suggested spending untold billions of dollars “snowproofing” the Metrorail system, as if that would be enough to keep the government from having to shut down on the very rare occasions when a particularly large snowfall hits the capital city. After all, less than 20 percent of commuters who live in Washington, and less than 10 percent of those in the DC urban area, take Metrorail to work. Since nearly three out of four urban-area commuters drive to work, it would make more sense to spend a little more money plowing the roads.

Of course, I don’t find it particularly upsetting to hear that the federal government has been shut down, since it mostly means that busy-bodies inside the beltway will fall behind in their efforts to regulate everything that people outside the beltway do. The more snow days, the better.

Rail Jobs Overestimated

Remember all those jobs that high-speed rail was going to create? Turns out, not so much.

Wisconsin, for example, had claimed that its share of high-speed rail funds would create 13,000 jobs. In fact, it is only going to be 4,700— and then only at the peak of construction.

So how did 4,700 turn in to 13,000? If you have a job this year, and a job next year, they counted that as two separate jobs. And if you have a job the year after that, that’s three jobs.

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Obama’s Transportation Budget

The White House released its proposed 2011 federal budget today, including the transportation budget. For the most part, this budget is an extension of past budgets, but it includes a few new programs.

First, the budget includes $4 billion for a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, also known as an “infrastructure bank.” The Antiplanner has a couple of problems with this idea. First, infrastructure should be paid for out of user fees, not tax dollars. Second, unlike many other transportation funds, which are distributed based on specific formulas, this fund will be an “open bucket.” This will give states incentives to come up with the wackiest, most expensive transportation projects.

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High-Speed Raildoggles

A day after proposing a spending freeze (that everyone from Glenn Beck to Paul Krugman thinks is stupid), Obama gleefully announced $8 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail. But Obama knows full well that the final cost will be much, much more than $8 billion.

How much more? The Antiplanner once estimated $550 billion in capital costs (not counting cost overruns). BNSF CEO Mark Rose guesses $1 trillion (he must have included cost overruns). Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio compromises at $700 billion.

“The thing is unimaginably expensive,” admits DeFazio. But, he adds, $700 billion is “the same amount of money that Congress gave in one day to Wall Street!” In trying to make high-speed rail sound cheap, he is hoping you won’t remember that Congress didn’t give Wall Street anything; it was almost all loans and most, if not all, will be repaid. That won’t happen with high-speed rail.

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Jobs vs. Jobs

President Obama’s state of the union speech yesterday focused on creating jobs (a word he used at least 25 times). On the same day, Steve Jobs presented Apple’s revolutionary and magical iPad. Which will have a more positive effect on people’s lives?

Let’s look at their track records. When President Bush was inaugurated as president, 130 million Americans had jobs. By the time he left office, it was 134 million, not a big increase, but not a decline either.

The first thing President Obama did was to persuade Congress to pass a $787 billion stimulus package in order to “save jobs.” As of December, only 130.9 million workers still had jobs, 3.4 million less than when Obama took office. You can blame that on Bush, you can blame it on whatever you want, but the fact is that Obama promised to create jobs and instead we lost millions of them. At least some people would argue that one reason the economy hasn’t recovered more quickly is that businesses are unwilling to make investments in an unpredictable political environment.

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The Transit Corollary to the Peter Principle

A dozen people were killed by Washington Metro trains in 2009. Earlier this month, John Catoe, the head of Washington Metro, graciously agreed to “take the fall” for these accidents by resigning his position as of April 2. The accidents weren’t really his fault; Catoe had been hired three years ago to help the agency deal with safety and reliability issues that were serious then; his crime was failing to fix the problems.

A two-year period of relative stability after he was hired led the American Public Transportation Association to give Catoe its outstanding transit manager award for turning the agency around. Then a series of crashes, deaths to workers, revelations about near-accidents and maintenance failures, and — most recently — the near-deaths of safety inspectors revealed that Catoe’s apparent success was largely an illusion.

Metrorail illustrates the Antiplanner’s corollary to the Peter Principle (“employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence”). The transit version of the Peter Principle is that “successful bus transit agencies rise to their level of incompetence when they build rail lines.”

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TriMet’s Latest Big Lie

TriMet’s $166 million “Westside Express Service” (WES) commuter rail is a miserable failure. After going 60 percent over budget, it is carrying only about 600 round trips per day. The amortized value of the capital cost alone is enough to buy every one of those commuters a brand-new Toyota Prius every year for the next 30 years. Those Priuses would be cleaner than the WES too.

Click for a larger view. Thanks to Steve Schopp for the photo.

So naturally TriMet wants to “celebrate WES” so much that it is advertising this great project on the back of its buses. Note that it isn’t asking people to actually ride the train, because that would never happen — no offense to Wilsonville, Tualatin, or Tigard, but from a transportation view the train goes from nowhere to nowhere, which kind of explains why hardly anyone rides it.

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