The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) wants voters to give it $120 billion over the next forty years so it can build more rail projects that are already obsolete. Among other projects, it proposes to build a nine-mile light-rail tunnel between west LA and the San Fernando Valley that it estimates will cost at least $8.5 billion, and probably much more. That’s a billion dollars a mile, which is neither a misprint nor an April Fool’s joke.
The plan, which will probably be on the November ballot, includes some new roads as well as trains. But Metro proposes to spend twice as much on new transit construction as on new road construction, plus lots more on transit operations. As little as 19 percent of the funds would be spent on highway projects.
In 2008, Metro persuaded voters to dedicate a half-cent sales tax to transit for 30 years, which is estimated to bring in $34 billion. Now it wants to double that tax and extend it to 2057, which is estimated to bring in $120 billion on top of the $34 billion it is already getting.
Self-driving cars are probably going to make transit as we know it obsolete long before the existing sales tax expires in 2040. This is certainly true for rail transit: why take the trouble to walk, drive, or take a bus several blocks to a rail station to go somewhere that is several blocks or more from your real destination when, for about the same cost, you may be able to call up a self-driving taxi to pick you up and drop you off at your doors?
Los Angeles transit ridership is hardly booming. According to the National Transit Database, after peaking in 2007 at 717 million trips per year, total LA transit ridership fell to a low of 661 million trips in 2011. By 2014, it recovered slightly to 682 million trips, but APTA’s third-quarter ridership report says that Metro carried nearly 5 percent fewer passengers in the first nine months of 2015 than in the same period in 2014.
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Transit advocates may blame the recession for the decline in ridership, but in fact it is more due to Metro’s obsession with building rail lines. Under a 1996 court decree, Metro had to restore bus service lost when it cannibalized the bus system to pay for the Green, Red, and Blue rail lines. Although that slowed rail construction, the court order expired in 2006, so Metro immediately began planning new rail lines and cutting bus service to pay for them. By 2014, Metro’s vehicle-revenue miles of bus service (including rapid buses) had declined 25 percent. As a result, Metro’s bus ridership fell 20 percent from 454 million trips in 2007 to 362 million in 2014.
Metro’s rail lines are going to wear out soon, so the agency really needs to decide whether to restore those lines or convert them to buses. Its proposal instead to build new lines, particularly an expensive light-rail tunnel, is very short-sighted.
Remember that light rail is, by definition, low-capacity rail, capable of carrying only about 20 percent as many riders as heavy rail. It has the virtue of costing less than heavy rail, but not when it is in a tunnel. Even when it is not in a tunnel, light-rail construction costs today average as much as heavy rail cost 30 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation. Anyone who seriously believes a low-capacity rail line can relieve congestion on I-405 doesn’t know what they are talking about. On the other hand, buses can do anything light rail can do–except spend a lot of money.
Metro’s tax proposal is nothing but a make-work project for the region’s contractors, who are naturally excited about the plan. It will do nothing to relieve traffic congestion and in many places will make it worse.
Starting next week, Metro is holding public meetings about the plan. Perhaps voters will be smart enough to realize that the proposed tax is a cruel joke on them.
“Perhaps voters will be smart enough to realize that the proposed tax is a cruel joke on them.”
Unlikely.
To quote the sage of Baltimore, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
‘Metro’s rail lines are going to wear out soon…” Sounds familiar?
LA is a carbon copy of the DC Metro which now threatens to close down for 6 months unless they can shakedown more money from the vast majority of the populace who do not use the metro. All the while spending money to expand a system that it cannot maintain.
I love LA.
“Perhaps voters will be smart enough to realize that the proposed tax is a cruel joke on them.”
You mean the people who voted for the politicians who want to build these kinds of projects? Good luck with that.
LRT via a tunnel to the San Fernando Valley? Is this a political ploy to try to appease those residents so they don’t secede from the city of Los Angeles? After all there are still plenty of folks that would like to.
This plan looks to have more issues than Denver’s messy and burdensom Fastracks, overly optimistic sales tax revenue projections, under priced project costs and services spread to places they’re not needed to appeal to voters to get the tax passed.
Worse it plans to begin building some things that don’t have money budgeted to complete. INSANELY IRRESPONSIBLE!
Most worrying is the duplication of services. The transit agency and it’s funding should be siloed, 100% separate from highway funding. Yet they want to turn HOV lanes on the 405 into toll lanes AND use the money from those not to improve the 405 but to fund other transit projects.