Anyone who carefully read the environmental impact statement for Maryland’s Purple Line would know that the proposed light-rail trains would be slow, would make congestion in the region worse, and that buses could move as many riders for a lot less money. It wouldn’t have taken much more research to learn that Maryland had a history of badly overestimating ridership and underestimating costs of its rail transit lines and that the ridership projections for this line had been particularly overinflated in order to make it eligible for federal funding.
Of course, most people didn’t read those documents or do the research, and many chose instead to believe the hype. So Maryland gave a $5.8 billion contract to a consortium of companies to build and operate the line. When, predictably, the line ran into delays and cost overruns, the companies withdrew from the project.
This naturally led opponents to urge Maryland to take this opportunity to cancel the project. Even if you believed the unrealistically high ridership estimates made before the contract was signed, the pandemic has probably decimated the market for transit.
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In fact, the only benefits would go to the contractors, and then only if they are freed from the risk of cost overruns. Supposedly, a public-private partnership like this one was going to save taxpayers money and eliminate cost overruns, but that obviously didn’t happen.
A majority of members of the Democratic-controlled California assembly has figured out that high-speed rail is a waste of money and wants to end the project. Maryland’s Republican governor needs to learn from this example and pull the plug on the Purple Line before any more money is wasted on this boondoggle.
At a time when $$$ are desperately needed to fight the results of the pandemic and to try to rebuild burned out cities, the parties taking taxpayer $$$ for things like the purple line is nothing short of thievery.
When Hogan ran for governor he opposed the similarly expensive Red Line on the grounds it was a boondoggle.
Now his support for the Purple line is questionably laughable. Politics as usual. Even the Washington Post states’ the Purple line is a Six Billion dollar boondoggle.
Public private partnership? Hardley. Maryland taxpayers must PAy for the construction and guarantee FULL return of profit margins for foreign partners whose gains will be returned overseas.
The Pandemic has all but obliterated a significant portion of transit riders especially on the MTA.
Maryland has a history of bad transit decisions, Baltimore’s Light rail was one of the few projects built without Federal money….But after it’s cracks and deterioration the state poured as much money into fixing it as it originally cost to build