The term public-private partnerships, often abbreviated PPP, has come to include two very different arrangements. One arrangement, which I prefer to call franchises, has proven very successful. Advocates of the other arrangement, which I shall call corporatism because the name I prefer is too emotion-laden, are riding on the coattails of the success of franchises.
The Antiplanner discussed this subject six months ago. But the topic has come up in the comments so it is worth repeating.
I’ve played with the 2006 transit data (previously) some more. The summary file now breaks down trips and passenger miles in each urban area by the main modes: buses, trolley buses, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail.
I then transcribed these numbers to my rail transit data file, which includes data from all rail urban areas dating back to 1982. This file also includes miles of driving, but the Federal Highway Administration hasn’t published 2006 data yet. The file also lists the number of route miles of each form of rail transit, but I wasn’t able to interpret the “fixed guideway” file that came with the 2006 data, so I didn’t fill these numbers in for many cities.
Still, we now can compare trends in transit ridership and passenger miles in the various rail cities. Here are the results.
Rail advocates sometimes claim that we can ignore the high cost of building rail lines, because “once they are built, they are there forever.” Yes, forever, or about 30 to 40 years, whichever comes first.
Which is why the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), Washington Metro, and Chicago Transit authority are all looking at roughly $10 billion each in rehabilitation expenses in the next few years, little of which is funded. Of the three, BART is in the best shape, saying it needs $11 billion for rehab, slightly less than half of which is funded. The remaining $5.8 billion is still a lot of money just to keep the system going.
Posts will be light this week as the Antiplanner is helping the American Dream Coalition put on its annual Preserving the American Dream conference in San Jose this weekend.
If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, I hope you can come by the ED leads on line levitra a person to lots of patients. But you must take the necessary precautions while female viagra using it for the first time. Jeff and Leena were really waiting for their death because nothing was their life, what they should think about. side effects cialis Here, the person basically fails to make firm erections and also see to it that they exercise at least purchase cheap levitra once in a day. Wyndham Hotel and catch some of the conference. If not, read the Antiplanner’s recent report on San Jose — home of some of the least affordable housing and the worst-managed transit agency in the nation — and be glad you don’t have to live there.
The Salt Lake County Council of Governments recently agreed to spend $2.5 billion on rail transit. But a state auditor found that the analysis used to justify the decision contained some errors that, if corrected, would have indicated the money should be spent on roads instead.
The analysis ranked commuter rail as the second-highest priority transportation investment for the county. But when the errors were corrected, it dropped to 19th out of 34.
“So what?” say city and county leaders. They would have spent the money on rail no matter what the analysis found.
Last month, the Congressional Research Service put out two reports on federal transit funding. These reports offer some intriguing alternatives for transit for the next round of federal transportation reauthorization, which is due in 2009.
The first report (above), issued in September, deals a little more with transit history and structure. The almost-identically titled second report (below) came out about two weeks later and deals a little more with transit finance. But the two reports overlap in many ways, including their recommendations.
Rail transit is a waste of money, and what little benefit it provides in the form of congestion relief is far exceeded by its cost. That is the Antiplanner’s general opinion, and it is shared by economists Clifford Winston, of the Brookings Institution, and Vikram Maheshri, of UC Berkeley.
The two have written a paper, On the Social Desirability of Urban Rail Transit Systems, that has been circulating around the Internet for awhile (and was previously mentioned by the Antiplanner). Now it is being published in the Journal of Urban Economics.
At $170 million, the cost of building each mile of Seattle’s new light-rail line is enough to construct four miles of a four-lane freeway. If Seattle is lucky, its light rail will carry 30 percent of a single freeway lane; the national average is just 25 percent.
Flickr photo by brewbooks.
Winston and Maheshri examine 25 light- and heavy-rail systems in the U.S. and find that, with the exception of the San Francisco BART system, “every system actually reduces welfare and is unable to become socially desirable even with optimal pricing or physical restructuring of its network” (emphasis in original).
The Los Angeles Times takes a hard look at transit-oriented developments (TODs) and concludes that they don’t change people’s travel habits. Local officials say TODs will revitalize neighborhoods without adding to congestion, but the Times finds that “there is little research to back up the rosy predictions.”
The paper cites one study that “showed that transit-based development successfully weaned relatively few residents from their cars.” Two reporters from the paper itself spent two months interviewing TOD residents and reached the same conclusion: “only a small fraction of residents shunned their cars during morning rush hour.”
Bandon, Oregon, my home town, was featured in the New York Times last week as a “hard-luck community” apparently inhabited by a bunch of rubes who foolishly subsidize wealthy executives. The article (also viewable as a video) actually left out some of the juiciest parts of this tale.
#6 at Bandon Dunes Golf Course. Photo by Bandon Dunes Resort.
The story is about Bandon Dunes, a destination golf resort built by a wealthy golf enthusiast named Mike Keiser (who, everybody likes to observe, made his money selling greeting cards printed on recycled paper). Keiser spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money building the course on sheer speculation. When he opened, greens fees started at something like $175 a round (and are now as high as $250). But every hole has an ocean view and the course was quickly rated one of the best in America, so he got more business than originally anticipated.
Keiser did not need any subsidies to build. Full disclosure: I understand Keiser gives money to my new employer, the Cato Institute. After his resort proved successful, however, some local governments decided to promote their empires by subsidizing Bandon Dunes and its wealthy customers.
Sound Transit, which is way overbudget in the construction of Seattle’s first light-rail line, now wants voters to approve a measure to build 50 more miles of light rail for the modest cost of $10.8 billion (in 2006 dollars). That’s a mere $216 million per mile, which is about four to five times the average cost of light-rail construction elsewhere.
I suspect this is going to be an uphill battle for the transit agency, if only because the Seattle Times article reporting this story emphasizes a much-higher figure of $23 billion (which includes projected inflation and some finance charges). Newspapers that want to promote light rail usually underplay the cost, but the Times feels burned by the last rail plan, which it supported, and which ended up costing far more than was projected.
Sound Transit, which wants to build 50 more miles of light rail, is also running commuter trains. Ridership proved so far below forecast levels that the agency ended up selling many of the commuter cars it had purchased for the operation.
Flickr photo by MGJeffries.
