El Paso is spending $90 million building a 4.8-mile streetcar line. For that price, they could have built close to 9 miles of four-lane freeway. The streetcar will connect the University of Texas El Paso with downtown, which suggests that they don’t expect many students to go downtown. If they did, they would have provided a bus service, which would have been faster and could move more people per hour.
In the course of paying for the streetcar, the city paid $3.2 million to an email phishing scammer. Two payments intended for the construction company were “misdirected” to another account. The city discovered the scam in early October and tried to cover it up but held a press conference about it yesterday.
The Antiplanner applauds the city for admitting it fell victim to a phishing scam. Now I’m waiting for the city to admit that it fell victim to the streetcar scam. That will be harder. Washington DC, for example, is home to one of the most embarrassing streetcar failures in the country, yet it is already planning another line. El Paso is more likely to argue that the phishing scam it fell for will promote economic development than admit that the streetcar it is building is also a scam.
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Meanwhile, in San Jose, the FBI raided the offices of a private transit contractor after the region’s transit agency cut ties with that contractor because of allegations of fraud and shoddy bookkeeping. It’s too bad the public can’t cut ties with transit agencies that commit fraud and shoddy bookkeeping.
I grew up in El Paso. There is a great deal of nostalgia about the streetcar system that ran between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez until 1974. I rode it once or twice as a very small child. It was, to my knowledge, the only streetcar system, in the world, that provided regular service, not just between two cities, but two states, and two nations simultaneously. It is still a point of pride among old timey El Pasoans and Juarences even today. Nobody, in El Paso, believes that the new streetcar is about anything other than a nostalgia trip and promoting tourism downtown. They are even using the original rolling stock from the previous system, albeit completely refurbished at great additional expense. The feds are providing 90 percent of the funding for the streetcar, thus the prevailing attitude is “Por qué no”.
“Nobody, in El Paso, believes that the new streetcar is about anything other than a nostalgia trip and promoting tourism downtown. They are … completely refurbished at great additional expense. The feds are providing 90 percent of the funding ”
Therein lies the #1 explanation for rampant wasteful transportation funding in the United States: a Federal Department of Transportation that is more about nostalgia and advocacy than stewardship. If FRA and FTA required an honest benefits/cost test, the Antiplanner would be out of business.
Why do you expect 2 stretches of steel rebar less than 5 feet apart embedded in a road to be profitable, but you don’t expect a 5 foot wide stretch of concrete next to a road to be profitable? :$
Andrew (highman) get out of here unless you have something novel to say. Which is to say get the *#)@ out of here.
The scam still cracks me up.