Hillsborough County Commissioners Vote No

Tampa-area voters will be spared the expense of having to go through another campaign to build an obsolete transit system in the city thanks to a 3-to-2 vote against the project by Hillsborough County commissioners. Voters already rejected the light-rail project once in 2010, and voters in neighboring Pinellas County voted against a connecting rail project in 2014.

In the end, it was a close thing. The swing vote on the county commission, Victor Crist, said he made his decision during a three-hour public hearing at which half the witnesses favored the project and half opposed. But to get a realistic look at the reality of urban rail transit, Crist and his fellow commissioners need only look at their neighbor to the south, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

As the Antiplanner noted the other day, Puerto Rico is $70 billion in debt, and one of those billions is for the Tren Urbano, a rail system that opened in 2004. Not only are local residents having to repay that $1 billion, they have to spend nearly $50 million per year to keep it operating, partly because ridership is less than half of what was projected.

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Another cost that local taxpayers will have to cover is maintenance. Although the system is more than ten years old, they so far haven’t spent anything on maintenance. This is going to catch up with them soon.

The sad part is that all of the subsidies for the rail line come from highway tolls, gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, and oil import taxes. According to the 2014 American Community Survey, less than 1 percent of San Juan commuters take the Tren Urbano to work, while nearly 90 percent go by automobile. Thus, the 90 percent are subsidizing the 1 percent. That’s just the kind of arithmetic that Tampa and other American cities should avoid.