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Posted Mar 31, 2010, 3:28 AM
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From the Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6922730.html
The emperor’s new light rail
Metro expansion plan rests on myths and falsehoods
By BILL KING
HOUSTON CHRONCLE
March 20, 2010, 4:02PM
In 1837, the great storyteller Hans Christian Andersen wrote the classic short story The Emperor's New Clothes. In the story, a vain emperor is duped by two swindlers who convince him that they can make him a magic suit of clothes that would be invisible to “anyone who was unfit for his office, or unusually stupid.” The emperor buys into the ruse and has the suit made. When it is finished, the emperor sees nothing but will not admit it because he fears others may be able to see the suit and thereby prove that he is unfit for his office. Soon his entire court is swept up in the self-deception as everyone claims to be able to see the nonexistent suit. Ultimately, the ruse is exposed when the emperor and his court go out for a public processional and a child in the crowd cries out that the emperor is naked.
For the last seven years, Houston's leadership has been engaged in exactly the same kind of groupthink about Metro's light rail plan. Anyone who has dared question this plan has been immediately relegated to the status of being unusually stupid, or at least some concrete-loving Luddite with a deviant desire for the automobile.
Well, at the risk of being deemed unusually stupid, I am here to say that Metro's light rail plan is naked as a jaybird. Here are six myths about Metro's light rail plan that you need to know. They demonstrate why we should scrap this plan and stop throwing good money after bad.
Myth No. 1: Metro's light rail will improve traffic congestion.
I am amazed at how often I hear that we must build Metro's light rail transit, or LRT, system to reduce traffic congestion. There is no study, projection or any other evidence that supports the proposition that the at-grade light rail system expansion that Metro is proposing will reduce traffic congestion. To the contrary, all the evidence predicts that it will make traffic substantially worse in the areas in which it is built.
To its credit, even Metro does not claim that its LRT will improve traffic congestion. Its own studies show significant operational degradation at every major intersection the LRT will cross.
Not that it takes a traffic engineer to figure out that an intersection like Post Oak and Westheimer is going to be negatively affected by adding two trains to what is already a nightmare cross- roads. The idea that we are going to improve congestion by cramming a new transportation system into the same horizontal plane as existing vehicular traffic is nonsense on its face.
Myth No. 2: Houston will lose federal funds if it does not build Metro's light rail.
Actually, exactly the opposite is true. As a general proposition, the Federal Transportation Agency will pay for about 50 percent of the cost of a rail system. However, because Metro has included some segments that do not qualify for federal funds (primarily the Uptown line), the FTA will likely pay for only about 35 percent of the cost. That means that we will have to come up with about $2 of local money for every $1 of federal funds. However, for other kinds of transit improvements, like purchasing buses or improving the HOV system, Metro could qualify for as much as 80 percent reimbursement, thus leveraging our local dollars by as much as 4-to-1.
Myth No. 3: Metro's LRT will result in more transit riders.
As part of the federal application process, Metro was required to do studies of how much transit ridership will increase if the LRT is built. It is required to compare projected ridership for the LRT to a “no build” scenario, that is, to continue to rely on buses. What these studies show is that almost all the LRT ridership comes from people already riding a bus. Even the much-heralded Main Street line has resulted only in about a 20 percent increase in ridership over the bus lines serving the same corridor before it was built. If increasing transit ridership is the goal, which I believe it clearly should be, then there are much cheaper and more effective ways to do so.
Myth No. 4: Metro's LRT will reduce air pollution.
Again, there is absolutely no evidence that the LRT proposed by Metro will have any significant impact on air quality. Mostly, the LRT will be replacing some existing buses. Traffic studies show that it will result in very few cars coming off the road. While buses certainly are responsible for some emissions, those could be controlled at a much lower cost by converting to natural gas. And whether there is any overall reduction in emissions actually depends on what kind of fuel is used to generate the electricity for the LRT. If coal-fired electricity is used, the net result might be to increase emissions.
Myth No. 5: Metro can afford the LRT.
The cost of the LRT has exploded since it was first proposed in 2003. Then approximately 30 miles were to cost $1.2 billion, with the FTA expected to pick up half the cost. That is about $40 million per mile total cost, the local share being about $20 million per mile. Now the cost has soared to something well in excess of $3 billion, with the FTA contributing only about a billion. That works out to $100 million per mile total cost and a staggering increase in the local share to something over $67 million per mile.
In April 2008, Metro showed me its financial projections. At that time, Metro projected that the LRT would consume about 75 percent of its discretionary funds for the next 30 years. In fact, its projections showed that it would have only about $1.5 billion over the next 30 years to make additional improvements such as enhancing the HOV systems, building transit centers or adding commuter rail. But here is the kicker. That projection assumed a 5.15 percent increase in sales tax over the same period and a 7.5 percent annual increase in fares. Obviously, these projections are not working out so well, because Metro's sales tax revenue has plummeted and its attempt to raise fares has resulted in its largest ridership declines ever.
That is why you now are beginning to hear calls from Metro loyalists to end the general mobility payments to the city of Houston. However, with the city's finances running on fumes, that is unlikely to happen. The result is that Metro will either never be able to put the financing together for the LRT (and we will have wasted hundreds of millions planning it) or it will cobble together some highly leveraged plan that will permanently cripple Metro financially. In that case, the biggest losers in this will be Houston's transit-dependent citizens, because Metro will be forced to gut the bus system to pay for the LRT. Make no mistake; if the LRT is ever built, it will be done on the backs of the low-income working families that currently rely on the bus system to get them to and from work.
Myth No. 6: The voters approved Metro's LRT plan.
This may be the one that irks me most, because I was in the mix when the compromise plan that appeared on the 2003 referendum was struck. The 2003 referendum had three elements: (1) a $1.2 billion LRT system; (2) a roughly 50 percent increase in bus service; and (3) initiating a plan for commuter rail. Metro has completely abandoned the bus expansion: We have fewer buses and bus riders today than we did in 2003. It also has done absolutely nothing to further the development of any commuter rail lines and has instead gotten in the way of other groups like Harris County when they have tried to initiate some action. The voters in 2003 did not approve just a light rail plan; they approved a comprehensive, multimodal system. Metro, for its own reasons, has abandoned what the voters approved in favor of its own grandiose vision.
Additionally, it should be noted that the voters specifically restricted Metro to borrowing $640 million to build the light rail system. Metro now plans to subvert that limitation by entering into a sale/lease-back arrangement with a separate subsidiary and actually borrow more than four times what the voters approved. Metro is always quick to invoke the moral authority of the 2003 referendum but casually ignores its inconvenient restrictions.
Most people who have heard the Emperor's New Clothes story think the tale ends with the crowd bursting into laughter after the child cries out and the emperor running away embarrassed. But that is not how the story ends. Rather, the emperor shudders, fearing that the child is telling the truth, but nonetheless marches on with his courtiers trailing after him continuing to pretend to see his suit.
The question is whether we, as citizens and taxpayers, are going to demand that Metro live up to the 2003 referendum promising a multimodal transportation system that will address our ever-spiraling traffic congestion or whether we are going to allow Houston's courtiers to continue to march us toward a system that will financially cripple Metro, increase traffic congestion, gut any other transit initiatives for generations and destroy the bus system on which working families rely.
King is a frequent contributor to Outlook.
Its quite an eye-opener to see a heavily car- and freeway-centric city stumble so badly with LRT. US$100M per mile? ouch!
And they still can't figure out how to keep drivers from smacking into the street-running trains. Perhaps the drivers are trying break so many trains the LRT won't be able to run any more.
I really like how the rebuttals to Myth 1 state that running LRT on the streets have made traffic worse for both cross-traffic at intersections and the streets the LRT runs on.
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