The sales and other taxes recently imposed to help restore the DC Metro rail systems are highly regressive, according to an op-ed in the Washington Post written by scholars from the Maryland Public Policy Institute. The op-ed didn’t say so, but Metro’s ridership is equally regressive in that the riders are increasingly wealthy.
As can be found in Census Bureau data posted by the Antiplanner a month ago, Metro ridership has been growing fastest among people whose incomes are $65,000 and up. In 2010, the median income of DC transit commuters was 94 percent of the median income of the DC region as a whole. By 2017, it had increased to 112 percent of the region’s median income. So poor people are being forced to subsidize rides taken by high-income people.
The tilt towards high-incomes among transit commuters is celebrated by transit advocates as a good thing because it makes it easier to convince high-income people — who tend to have more political power than poor people — to support transit boondoggles. But anyone who thinks that government transit is anything but a way to swindle taxpayers out of their money for the benefits of a few well-off people simply hasn’t been paying attention.
Since 2008, Metro’s ridership has dropped by 231,000 weekday trips, from 1,431,000 to 1,200,000, and Metro officials say they have no idea how they are going to get those riders back. “Gotcha!” says the Washington Post, which found an internal report that supposedly shows what the agency needs to do.
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Of course, many people at Metro don’t seem to take maintenance very seriously. Last week, it was announced that track inspectors who had been fired for falsifying maintenance reports will get their jobs back because, an arbitration panel ruled, they were merely doing what they were told.
Track inspections are not the only reports Metro employees falsify: a new report found that 20 percent of the concrete panels used to build the Silver Line were flawed but the panels were installed anyway because inspectors falsified the test data.
Such casual concern over riders’ welfare helps explain why total ridership dropped by 26 percent in ten years. While Metro is probably still safer than driving DC streets, it is far less reliable. Restoring that reliability in what Metro calls “an era of perpetual maintenance” is going to cost billions of dollars and take many years, during which alternatives such as ride hailing and electric scooters will continue to eat away at Metro’s ridership.
Several things to think about here….
1: “the riders are increasingly wealthy”
That’s cause a lot of the people who use Metro rail day to day are either working for the government who thanks to cushy lobbying can make six digit salaries or they’re contractors who work for governments behest. Unlike any other state or city, the Washington DC economy is essentially recession proof, as the main employer, the federal government doesn’t cease functioning in lieu of a bad economy, in fact spending among it’s cohorts increases. Despite this, Metro state remains decrepit, A fare increase may alienate it’s poorest riders but so would service cuts.
2: “The sales and other taxes recently imposed to help restore the DC Metro rail systems are highly regressive”
Whenever transportation infrastructure is financed thru a myriad of various financial methods there’s the invitation for graft, waste, fraud and just plain fiscal incompetence. Also when projects derived from a multitude of financial sources, you run the risk of the source depleting or funding shortages regardless; if it’s no longer valid or substantial. California high speed rail is being financed using Carbon taxes, if the state succeeds in its actual endeavors of reducing emissions, the amount of money will decline further subjecting the project to delay as it struggles for funding enough already. When transportation infrastructure is paid for out of user fees or at least majority user fees, there’s an incentive to keep it simple and functioning. When transportation funding is paid for out of tax money cost controls go down the toilet. Look no further than the most troublesome transportation project blunder in recent memory. Bostons Big Dig. While light rail projects have a tendency to go 50-100% over budget, The Boston project went 200% over budget. Exacerbated by thousands of leaks, substandard materials and deadly ceiling collapse, The Boston Globe estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it would not be paid off until 2038.
3: “Track inspections are not the only reports Metro employees falsify”
This is what happens when you don’t independently audit or investigate. In the defense sector we do have investigatory bodies, Senate/house sub-committees, among many independent un sanctioned groups, from the RAND corporation, Citizens against government waste to CATO. Unlike defense, Transportation is perceived as an essential good, thus investigation into it’s….management and operations is seldom scrutinized by any concerned eyes. And as for electric scooter’s we’ll see if DC implements the same ban as San Francisco.
This is the Ponzi scheme going on in my area :$
https://www.cdpqinfra.com/en/reseau_electrique_metropolitain