Maryland DOT Cooked the Books

You may want to sit down for this, but it is finally becoming obvious to everyone that the Maryland Department of Transportation and its consultants overestimated ridership on the proposed Purple light-rail line. Even the pro-Purple Line Washington Post is skeptical of the numbers. Of course, this is only after Governor Hogan appears to have signed off on the line.

As the Antiplanner pointed out in a review of the proposed low-capacity rail line, the projected first-year ridership of 58,800 people per weekday is more than any single light-rail line outside of Los Angeles and Boston–and rail lines in those cities serve centers with far more jobs than are found on the entire Purple Line. The line that is most comparable to the 16-mile Purple Line is New Jersey’s 17-mile Hudson-Bergen line, which serves an area whose population density is four times greater and has far more jobs than that along the Purple Line, yet the Hudson-Bergen line carries just 44,000 riders per weekday (p. 9). The Antiplanner also pointed out that light-rail planners almost always overestimate ridership, and Maryland in particular has a poor track record with its lines in Baltimore (p. 8).

Hogan’s Secretary of Transportation, Peter Rahn, apparently didn’t read the Antiplanner’s report, as he told the Post that he was “comfortable” with the numbers because “the FTA was involved, and they were acceptable to them.” Of course, the FTA rarely questions any numbers given to them by transit agencies. What Rahn was really doing, of course, was shifting the blame to someone else for not doing the job he should have done.

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As the Post points out, Maryland’s projections jumped by a whopping 45 percent in 2008 when planners “discovered” that people would ride the light rail for more non-work trips than they originally thought. What really happened is that the Bush administration had set a hard-and-fast rule that it would fund no rail transit project that cost more than $25 per hour of people’s time saved by the project. That time was supposed to include both transit riders’ and auto users’ time, but the FTA looked the other way when transit agencies only counted transit riders, ignoring the fact that Maryland’s own models showed that the line would greatly increase congestion for auto users.

Even with that subterfuge, the high cost of the Purple Line meant that it didn’t make the $25 per hour threshold. Then-Governor Martin O’Malley decided to fix the problem by hiring Parsons Brinckerhoff, openly promising that it would cook the books, excuse me, “improve” the numbers enough to make the project appear to meet FTA standards. Parsons Brinckerhoff responded with the 45 percent ridership increase, bringing the cost per hour to just below $25.

Since Parsons Brinckerhoff’s analysis, projected construction costs have grown from about $1.6 billion to $2.5 billion, so the cost per hour, if anyone bothered to calculate it, would once again be above $25. Fortunately for MDOT, the Obama administration has since repealed the $25 requirement, effectively saying it was willing to fund any rail project no matter how wasteful. Once built, of course, the state is likely to find that even the pre-2008 estimates were too high, but by then it will be too late: Maryland taxpayers will be stuck paying operating and maintenance subsidies, not to mention the state’s share of capital costs, for decades.