Good Bye, Peter Rogoff

After six contentious years, Peter Rogoff will leave his $379,600 a year job as CEO of Sound Transit, where he oversaw the construction of billions of dollars of light-rail lines that he didn’t believe in. It’s not clear that his departure is entirely voluntary: he apparently told the Sound Transit board that “he did not foresee remaining in his role beyond the end of 2022.” The board responded by not renewing his contract, which expires in May, effectively firing him.

Peter Rogoff speaking about “advanced transportation technologies” (which don’t include light rail) in 2016. Photo by AvgeekJoe.

I liked Rogoff when he was making $180,000 a year as the administrator of the Federal Transit Administration in the early Obama years. In his first year, he made three discoveries:

1. America’s rail transit systems had a $77 billion maintenance backlog (since increased to more than $100 billion);
2. America’s rail transit agencies would rather build new rail lines than maintain their existing ones;
3. In most situations, bus-rapid transit could do everything rail transit could do for a lot less money.

He spent the next three years traveling around the country begging transit agencies to stop planning new rail transit lines. As he put it, he was “calling someone out when their behavior isn’t responsible.” Specifically, he would “ask a hard question: if you can’t afford to operate the system you have, why does it make sense for us to partner in your expansion?”

He went on to “share some simple truths that folks don’t want to hear. One is this — Paint is cheap, rail systems are extremely expensive.” By that he meant, instead of building new rail lines, transit agencies could “entice even diehard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet.” He was referring to bus-rapid transit, which he admitted might not work everywhere but would be “a fine fit for a lot more communities than are seriously considering it.”

One of those communities was Seattle, which was not only planning light rail when buses would do, it was planning and building the most-expensive lines per mile of any light-rail system in the world. I call it a high-cost, low-capacity system because it was as expensive to build as a heavy-rail system, being mostly elevated or in tunnels, but its capacity was as low as a light-rail system (the “light” in light rail referring to capacity, not weight).
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For example, just this past weekend Seattle opened its latest light-rail line, a 4.3-mile extension of the University Line. The total cost of this line, which Sound Transit claims was “under budget,” was more than $1.8 billion, or $420 million per mile. Considering that light-rail lines built in the 1980s cost under $50 million a mile (in today’s dollars) and the average cost of light-rail lines in other cities today is about $200 per mile, it’s easy to be “under budget” when you are spending far more than anyone else.

Unfortunately, after giving his speeches, Rogoff then went back to Washington and signed full-funding grant agreements for billions of dollars of rail transit projects. This took away any incentive for agencies such as Sound Transit to listen to him. He may have approved the grants because his boss was Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, who never met a subsidized rail transit line he didn’t like and who specifically eliminated the rules requiring that rail transit projects be cost-effective, relative to buses, to be eligible for federal funding.

In any case, after Obama left office, Sound Transit offered its CEO position to Rogoff, with a starting salary of $298,000 a year and promises of large bonuses and pay increases. They say everyone has their price, and I guess $298,000 a year was enough to get Rogoff to suppress any thoughts about light rail being a waste of money.

Shortly after Rogoff was hired, Seattle voters agreed to spend something like $54 billion (on top of $21 billion already approved) on light-rail construction, so from that point on it seemed that all Rogoff had to do was oversee construction and get some federal matching grants. But the usual cost overruns apparently made his job somewhat stressful: he went through expletive-laden fits of anger and had other management issues that led the Sound Transit board to hire a $550 per hour consultant to help him learn how to “get along” with agency employees.

Due to COVID, he voluntarily didn’t take a $21,000 pay raise this year. But, perhaps to soften the blow of not renewing his contract for 2022, the board increased his departing salary to $32,740 a month ($392,886 a year) plus various fringe benefits including a one-year severance package. That’s pretty good for doing something you don’t believe in.