Maryland’s Purple Line is now expected to cost more than $3.9 billion to construct, up from under $2.0 billion at the time the line was approved, according to a report from the Maryland Department of Transportation. The $3.9 billion includes a $250 million settlement with previous contractors and $219 million spent by the state on the project after the previous contractor quit. The opening date has also been pushed back to fall, 2026, compared with the original date of mid-2020 and the most-recent date of late 2022.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and then-Secretary of Transportation Peter Rahn have a laugh at the expense of the taxpayers when they announced that the state would build a “cost-effective and streamlined version of the Purple Line” in 2015. Memo to Gov. Hogan: Light rail is never cost-effective especially when it is predicted to make congestion worse. Photo by Purple Line Transit Constructors.
Like Honolulu’s rail line, the Purple Line is a project that should never have been approved. Even the Federal Transit Administration said it was not worth building until the state fabricated new, ridiculously high ridership estimates. Now that construction has begun, state officials intend to throw good money after bad no matter what the cost.
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The recent state report calls the Purple Line a “critical investment” because it will “help to reduce congestion.” The report’s writers either never read or hope its readers never read the traffic analysis prepared for the project’s draft environmental impact statement. That analysis showed that the line would significantly increase congestion in the region.
The increased costs don’t end with construction. The project is being built with a special public-private partnership under which the companies that build it promise to operate it for 30 years, at state expense of course. The original contract was going to cost taxpayers $5.6 billion, but the contractors quit in anger due to cost disputes. The new contract with new contractors is going to cost $8.8 billion (plus the $250 million settlement with the previous contractors and $219 million spent on construction between contractors). In addition to the $1.4 billion increase in construction costs, operating the line will cost the state an additional $1.7 billion. So much for the efficiency of public-private partnerships.
Public private partnerships… are when tthe private sector says that’s too expensive……….but we’ll build it if you pay us
Elizabeth Holmes is surely going to be sentenced to a long jail term — why not the same for those committing fraud in the name of the Purple Line?
I really don’t get the point of the “private participation” in this project. Is it supposed to save money on operations? If so, how? There are a limited number of private firms who can operate light rail lines, which limits competition, and since the contract is with the Maryland state government (via the MTA) you can bet that there is a mandate for the use of unionized labor in operations.
Somebody needs to go through the records of state lobbying activity and contributions to state elected officials who approved the contract. I have a feeling that the main beneficiaries of this project and its DBOM contract are not the ones emphasized by the governor.
PPP is a scam. In order for the private partner to earn a profit, the losses to the pubic have to be greater that they would be without the private partner.
In this case, it is. I don’t think it condemns the entire concept, though. PPPs work when they transfer more risk to the private sector and thus reduce the exposure of the taxpayer.
That is not, of course, what this project intends to do. Government agencies are often reluctant to pursue the more pure forms of PPP because it reduces their discretion and control over projects. Elected officials dislike them because they both reduce their discretion to direct funding to favored projects and their ability to extract rents from projects in the form of campaign contributions or other forms of support.