November 8 Ballot Measures to Watch

If you think the presidential election is stupid, just get a look at all of the cities that are voting on stupid rail transit projects. Los Angeles wants $120 billion; Seattle $54 billion; San Diego, $7.5 billion; San Francisco, $3.5 billion; San Jose, $3 billion; Atlanta, $2.5 billion, Kansas City, $2 billion; Virginia Beach, $310 million; and Tigard, Oregon, which has the chance to kill a $2 billion project in Portland. That’s nearly $200 billion worth of stupidity that has rail contractors salivating.

Voters from these cities should look at the experiences other cities have had with rail. Portland opened a new light-rail project a year ago that was supposed to carry 17,000 people a day in its first year. Actual ridership is more like 11,000. Rail apologist Jarrett Walker says he isn’t surprised as rail lines “are designed to encourage denser and more sustainable development in addition to serving people who are there now,” so initial ridership is “almost always disappointing.” C’mon, Jarrett: planners took this into account when they made their projections (or if they didn’t they should have). By the way, the article also says the project came in “under budget,” but it doesn’t say that the budget was almost twice as much as the original projected cost, just one more way transit agencies lie about rail transit.

Speaking of cost overruns, Honolulu is the smallest urban area in America to be building rail transit, and its project, which was originally projected to cost less than $3 billion, is now up to $8 billion and possibly more than $10 billion, which would be more than $10,000 for every resident of Oahu. The city is stuck because it doesn’t have enough money to finish it, but if it doesn’t finish it, the Federal Transit Administration says it will demand that the city return the federal share of the cost.

Ridership shortfalls and cost-overruns are just short-run problems. In the long run, cities that build rail can look forward to demands for ever-increasing amounts of money. San Jose is seeking money to pay for cost-overruns on its BART extension. Having persuaded voters to raise taxes twice for previous light-rail lines, Seattle now wants voters to approve the largest property tax hike in Washington history for more lines. Washington DC’s Metro is finally admitting that its current maintenance project, SafeTrack, won’t solve all of the system’s problems and that it is projecting huge deficits due to declining ridership.
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The latest to fall is New Jersey Transit. Regardless of the cause of the accident that killed one person a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times says that the system is “in crisis” due to billions of dollars of deferred maintenance. The article brings up the proposed $10 billion Hudson River tunnel that Governor Chris Christie vetoed, and that would have just created more infrastructure that the agency wouldn’t have been able to maintain.

One more ballot I should mention is in Spokane, which wants voters to fund $160 million worth of bus improvements. Nearly half this money would go for a downtown bus project that involves buying 120-passenger, battery-powered buses for $1.2 million each to serve a route that Spokane transit planners predict will carry an average of 3.4 passengers at a time. Spokane voters rejected this plan in 2015, but transit agencies never take no for an answer.

All of these billions of dollars are going for projects that are functionally obsolete today and will be even more obsolete once shared, self-driving cars replace public transportation in most cities, which is likely to happen in the next decade. Portland planners claimed that they couldn’t have predicted that low gas prices would keep people off the trains. But that inability to predict the future is exactly why cities shouldn’t spend gobs of money on projects that are expected to last for decades. One of the key arguments for buses rather than rail is that buses are cheap, don’t require dedicated infrastructure, and can be easily rerouted as travel patterns change.

The political reality is that railcar manufacturers and rail contractors stand to earn hundreds of millions in profits from these projects, so will saturate voters with promotional materials for projects that most voters will never use. Politicians who support such projects and put these measures on the ballot are sapping the economic vitality of the communities they represent just to make a few contractors rich.