A Question for John Hickenlooper

A governor is the taxpayers’ last line of defense against money-hungry bureaucrats who incessantly seek their “fair share” of worker incomes in the form of higher taxes for all sorts of boondoggles. Governors can limit the amount of money that agencies request, they can veto excessive spending bills, and they can make sure bureaucracies don’t waste money that legislatures have appropriated.

To successfully defend taxpayers, governors must be skeptical of claims made by bureaucrats and the special interest groups that benefit from excessive spending, and they must be open to listen to citizen views of proposed spending programs. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who is now running for governor of Colorado, has failed to meet these tests.

In September, 2004, during the campaign to spend billions of dollars on Denver-area rail transit, Hickenlooper endorsed the new tax for more trains, saying that Fastracks would “take at least 250,000 cars off the road — thereby relieving congestion.” This was a complete fabrication.

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More Bureaucracy Won’t Make Transit Safe

Last week, the Federal Transit Administration presented a “scathing report” on Washington Metrorail safety programs. The report itself found that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) frequently failed to comply with or even respond to safety requirements and investigations of the agency that has oversight authority over Metrorail safety.

Back in 1991, Congress asked the Federal Transit Administration to create a state-based transit safety program. After a mere 4 years, the FTA responded with rules (updated in 2005) requiring each state that has a rail transit system to create a state safety oversight (SSO) authority. Because the Washington Metrorail system crosses from DC into two states, its SSO is called the Tri-State (even though DC is not a state) Oversight Committee (TOC).

What the 1991 law and FTA rules did not do is give the SSOs any legal authority to compel transit agencies to improve safety. As FTA administrator Peter Rogoff told Congress on March 4, transit agencies “don’t have to respond to [the SSOs] in a timely way. In fact, they don’t have to respond to them at all.” Thus, it is not surprising that the SSO system failed to prevent accidents such as the one last June that killed 9 people in DC.

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Bringing an Old Voice to the Debate

The Bipartisan Policy Project, a supposedly centrist organization, claims to be “bringing new voices to the transportation debate to create a dynamic and enduring vision for the future of federal surface transportation policy.” So what “new voice” did it hire to write a review of the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts program, which gives away billions of dollars to transit agencies for rail projects each year? Answer: Parsons Brinckerhoff, known as PB for short.

PB is hardly a new voice. It proudly advertises that it built New York City’s first subway line in 1904. More recently, it has arguably benefitted from New Starts more than any other single entity. When transit agencies need to hire a consultant to “decide” whether to apply for New Starts funds, they turn to PB. When they need someone to do the analyses required to be eligible for FTA New Starts funding, they turn to PB. When they need someone to engineer and design a New-Starts-funded rail line, they turn to PB. In many cases, they hire PB to be the general contractor when they finally get around to building the line. PB isn’t the only firm that does this kind of work, but it has almost certainly worked on more New Starts projects than any other consulting firm.

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Let It Snow

“How many Washington Metrorail employees does it take to change a lightbulb?” a friend who would probably rather not be named asked recently. “Three: one to screw a lightbulb into a faucet, one to assure the public that the system was safe, and one to explain to the media why this proves Metro needs a dedicated funding source.”

The good news about last week’s derailment is that it probably was not due to the poor maintenance that plagued the Metrorail system in 2009. Instead, it appears that the driver of a train ran a red light. The train then entered a side track where it ran into a safety device called, naturally enough, a derail, aimed at preventing a train from going where it wasn’t supposed to go.

This still leaves a mystery. Did someone see that the driver was blowing the red light and purposefully switch the train to a side track? Was there a failsafe system no one remembers? Or was the switch in the wrong position in the first place, meaning the train would have derailed even if it hadn’t blown the light?

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Some people have even suggested spending untold billions of dollars “snowproofing” the Metrorail system, as if that would be enough to keep the government from having to shut down on the very rare occasions when a particularly large snowfall hits the capital city. After all, less than 20 percent of commuters who live in Washington, and less than 10 percent of those in the DC urban area, take Metrorail to work. Since nearly three out of four urban-area commuters drive to work, it would make more sense to spend a little more money plowing the roads.

Of course, I don’t find it particularly upsetting to hear that the federal government has been shut down, since it mostly means that busy-bodies inside the beltway will fall behind in their efforts to regulate everything that people outside the beltway do. The more snow days, the better.

The Cable-Car Test

As the Antiplanner noted in an earlier post, transit planners of the 1960s claimed — and may even have believed — that fares collected for new rail transit projects would cover all of their operating costs and most of their capital costs. Such claims are commonly made today for high-speed rail, but most transit advocates admit that transit will never cover its costs and argue that it shouldn’t have to.

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has even thrown out cost-efficiency tests imposed by his predecessor, Mary Peters, that the FTA used for judging whether it should fund a rail transit project. Instead, he wants to judge projects for their impact on livability, whatever that means.

Can your rail line top this?

But there must be some test that a reasonable transit advocate (such as many of the Antiplanner’s readers) would accept for judging whether a rail transit system is successful. For those who don’t believe transit should be profitable, I propose the Cable-Car Test.

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How Much Has New Rail Transit Cost?

How much money have American cities spent building “new” rail transit lines? A 2005 paper published by the Brookings Institution attempted to answer this question, but the numbers were only sketchy for some systems such as San Francisco BART and Washington Metrorail. Other systems were left out entirely, as were, of course, any lines built since 2005.

Using a variety of other sources, the Antiplanner estimates that the United States has spent more than $90 billion in 2009 dollars on new rail transit lines opened since 1970. This includes the BART system, which opened in 1972 but was under construction before 1970. This does not include the Cleveland Red Line, the only post-war rail transit line built before 1970 (unless you count the Seattle Monorail, which also isn’t included). It also does not include additions made to Boston, Chicago, and other rail transit systems that existed before 1970, or the Las Vegas monorail, which was built with private funds. Finally, it does not include money spent on lines that have not yet opened, such as the Norfolk light-rail route.

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The Transit Corollary to the Peter Principle

A dozen people were killed by Washington Metro trains in 2009. Earlier this month, John Catoe, the head of Washington Metro, graciously agreed to “take the fall” for these accidents by resigning his position as of April 2. The accidents weren’t really his fault; Catoe had been hired three years ago to help the agency deal with safety and reliability issues that were serious then; his crime was failing to fix the problems.

A two-year period of relative stability after he was hired led the American Public Transportation Association to give Catoe its outstanding transit manager award for turning the agency around. Then a series of crashes, deaths to workers, revelations about near-accidents and maintenance failures, and — most recently — the near-deaths of safety inspectors revealed that Catoe’s apparent success was largely an illusion.

Metrorail illustrates the Antiplanner’s corollary to the Peter Principle (“employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence”). The transit version of the Peter Principle is that “successful bus transit agencies rise to their level of incompetence when they build rail lines.”

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The Antiplanner’s Library: The Great Society Subway

Most DC visitors and residents consider the Washington Metrorail system to be a great success. Among them is Zachary Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. But, as Schrag clearly documents, by the standards of Metrorail’s original planners, it is a dismal failure.

Back in 1962, planners projected that a 103-mile rail system would cost less than $800 million — or about $4.6 billion in 2009 dollars. Moreover, they expected that fares would cover all of the operating costs and nearly 80 percent of the capital costs (pp. 53-54).

As it turned out, the actual 103-mile system that was completed in 2001 covers all of the basic routes of that original plan, yet cost $17.6 billion in 2009 dollars, close to four times the initial projection. Fares cover only about 60 percent of operating costs and, of course, none of the capital costs.

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Airport Executive: Don’t Build Rail to Airport

Jim DeLong, the former aviation director at Denver International Airport, has a sensible suggestion for RTD: Don’t build a rail transit line to the airport. The airport line, which was originally supposed to cost about $316 million, is now expected to cost $1.2 billion. DeLong says that would be a waste.

Before working in Denver, DeLong directed aviation at the Philadelphia airport, which is connected to downtown and other parts of Phillie by frequent rapid train service. More than 30 million passengers a year use the airport, yet only about 2 million train trips arrive or depart from the airport station, and most of them are airport employees.

DeLong relates that he persuaded SEPTA, the transit agency, and the airport to spend $750,000 promoting the train, but had very little impact on ridership. He concludes that “Men and women who have spent a day or more traveling do not want to wait for a train, even for a short time,” especially when carrying baggage. So he proposes that RTD terminate the East line at Aurora, Denver’s eastern suburb.
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FasTracks Update: Costs Down, Still Can’t Afford It

If there is one thing Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has become famous for, it is making economic forecasts that are proven wrong a year later. Back in 2004, it projected that it could build 119 miles of rail lines for $4.7 billion. By 2007, the cost was up to $6.2 billion, then $7.9 billion. In 2008, it had declined to $7.0 billion (which everyone but the Antiplanner published as $6.9 billion — but it was really $6.952, which rounds up to $7.0).

The latest projection estimates that, thanks to the recession, the cost will be only $6.5 billion (details here). But the other side of the projection — revenues to pay for it — are even more dismal, with revenues now projected to be $2.5 billion less than originally expected.

In fact, the latest projections indicate that, even if RTD manages to build all of the new rail lines, it won’t have enough money to run them. Of course, RTD and the rail nuts who support it just see this as all the more reason why Denver-area voters should agree to another tax increase. Let’s hope they wise up this time.

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