Posted on 04/23/2004 10:47:01 AM PDT by GOPcapitalist
FROM TODAY'S HOUSTON CHRONICLE
April 22, 2004, 11:55PM
Metro agrees to contract for next 4 light rail lines
By LUCAS WALL
Metro has taken a significant step toward the construction of Houston's next four light rail lines.
Directors on Thursday authorized signing a five-year contract estimated at $60 million with STV Inc. of New York, the same consortium that shepherded development of the Main Street line, which opened Jan. 1.
...
Six firms competed for the project, which includes options for two two-year extensions. Dennis Hough, the Metropolitan Transit Authority's director of contracts, said STV and its 16 subcontractors stood out as the most qualified companies to continue oversight of light rail construction in Houston.
NOW TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED:
TEXAS ETHICS COMMISSION
CONTRIBUTOR SEARCH
Please Click On the Report Number to View Reports
STV Incorporated, to Citizens For Public Transportation, $3,000.00 03-JAN-03 http://204.65.203.2/public/216570.pdf
Stv Incorporated, to Citizens For Public Transportation, $25,000.00 26-JUL-03 http://204.65.203.2/public/230485.pdf
NOTE: Citizens for Public Transportation was the pro-Metro Political Action Committee that ran the referendum campaign for the light rail expansion that STV just got.
Is it required? No, of course it isn't
Was this technically legal?
Of course it was. There's nothing technical about it. In fact if you have such a problem with it, (and are so connected in Houston) why don't you file a lawsuit and have your day in court? Otherwise, your protestations that a legitimate contractor didn't file a press release announcing their contribution to Metro's PAC are just so much meaningless hot air.
Is it required? No, of course it isn't
That was not the original issue. The issue was whether or not STV had been forthcoming on an ethically conflicted political contribution. The other poster said that they had publicly indicated their support, to which I responded that their "public notification" was nothing more than an involuntary single line entry buried deep in the PAC's ethics commission filing - i.e. they intended that nobody but the most astute political observers would ever know about it.
Of course it was. There's nothing technical about it.In fact if you have such a problem with it, (and are so connected in Houston) why don't you file a lawsuit and have your day in court?
Lawsuits take time and money, and in this case the proper route would be a complaint to the ethics commission, not a lawsuit. It is doubtful at this time that they would take much interest in a moot case over an election that was conducted 6 months ago.
There is a problem with this. Some states, like my state of Pennsylvania and Virginia for example, see far more highway traffic pass through than we actually generate, because of our proximity to the Port of NY/NJ. On the other hand, NJ generates far more traffic that it pays for. Therefore, NJ loses some of the gas tax it pays, and it is routed to PA and VA to pay for roads there. That's the reason there is a federal program with a complex formula for distributing gas tax money.
That being said, I'm certainly in favor of other methods of payment than a gas tax. I personally would like to see a ton-mile fee, where you pay something like $0.02 per ton mile every year when you renew your registration. So if you own a typical car or light truck and drive 20,000 miles, you might pay $00. For vehicles above 4 tons (above the heaviest SUV's), the fee would become exponential, to recognize the extreme damage caused by over the road trucks in comparison to cars. This would recognize both the volume and damage your vehicle does and make you pay directly for it.
Not as much as you are trying to make out. Let's see.
Last time you bought something at the grocery store
More and more meats and perishables are now shipped again across country via rail in intermodal trucks and refrgierator cars. Local distribution on both ends is the domain of the truck. Companies that make cookies, flour, sugar, crackers, snack foods and the like also ship their raw materials to bakeries, mills, and refineries and frequently ship finished goods out by rail too. Its quite rare for a bulk commodity like flour or sugar to be driven very far.
or filled your tank up with gas
Gas is shipped by ship and pipeline around here except for local distirbution. The ethanol being added to it is shipped by rail directly from the plant to the tank farm.
how do you suppose those items showed up in those places in an efficient manner?
Well, as I showed, frequently by rail, with only final distribution by truck.
That accountant
Don't us an accountant.
barber
My barber lives in the neighborhood. He walks to work from his house nearby. I walk to the barbershop.
financial planner
Don't need a financial planner. I can handle that myself with my wife's help (she was a financial planner, now retired to be a mom).
repairman
I'm the repairman around here.
etc that you use, how do you suppose they were able to get to work or show up at your home on a service call?
The one guy I did use walked on a sidewalk paid for with his property tax money.
How did they get the equipment and tools that they use?
Do you ever mail a letter or a package? How do you think it arrives at the final destination, sometimes clear across the country, for as little as $0.37. You depend on those highways whether you use them or not.
Letters I mail go by air if they are going cross country. Packages are mostly on the railroads in intermodal trucks or boxcars. The USPS mostly does not use over the road trucking except for short distances and of course, local delivery.
Oh, and I walk to the post office to mail my letters. Its on my way to work between my office and the train station.
Only because it is owned by the government and exempted from taxes, and has a monopoly on Marin-San Francisco travel.
While I applaud these efforts, they are piggybacked on previous government boondoggle roads. Therefore, the major land/row costs were frequently already dealt with and thus excluded from the project. They also don't pay taxes (the private financiers do indirectly, but their road doesn't pay property taxes - railroads do), nor do the private companies provide maintenance/police.
If you'd ever go and try to live there (something everyone ought to try at least once to get over their prejudices about the place), you'd find there is a good reason to go to or pass through both these areas. As it happened, in the year I lived in Manhattan, my wife's obstetrician was in Soho, while we have friends in Harlem (in case you don't know, Harlem is a vast rennovation zone right now, with large 4-5 story brownstones going for $500K to $1 Million). Also, our parish we joined, Corpus Christi, is on 123rd St. near Columbia, which is essentially Harlem. We used to ride to the 125th St. Subway stop to go to Church.
I found it interesting that NY is the last bastion of small-time indidividual entrepreneurial capitalism. Literally every block is covered with independent small businesses and restaurants (with apartments above of course). Even many of the few larger stores were not part of the typical American chain conglomerates in areas like groceries or electronics or clothing, but were independent NYC entitities. Its something that should make every good American Capitalist proud.
The Great Northern. It was built without Land Grants or government assistance. Now for some perspective, the Land Grants were on the same land being given away free to anyone, so there was no differential treatment of the railroads. Government assistance was given to construct transcontinental railroads through the wilderness to link the country up. This was done in the form of low interest loans. The railroads repaid this many times over by hauling government consigned freight first for free, and then for very deep discounts. They still give special rates to government movements (such as military equipment), even over railroads that revceived no assistance.
That said, most railroads are in the midwest and east and were not built with any assistance beyond use of the incorporation laws and eminent domain. This is especially true for the trolley lines in cities and for electric interurban railways (rather like your light rail line in Houston) dedicated mostly to hauling people.
It started in the 1870's when a group of businessmen went down to city hall and asked the government to give them free land on city streets for their tracks. City Hall gave them the perks they wanted and from then until 1940 government constistently subsidized and built the Houston streetcar system.
I don't know about Houston, but common practice up here was for the right to build tracks in the streets came with the obligation to perform all streets maintenance along side of and between the tracks. This obligation is maintained today, and SEPTA, our transit agency, is still liable for all street repairs near its tracks.
There are actually quite a few of them throughout history. Several of the old roads that we know today by the name of "turnpike" were originally trails that private citizens and companies cleared out in previous centuries (they also charged users a fee on several of them).
Private industry was willing to finance gravel and corduroy roads. It was not willing to spend the billions that would be spent starting in the 1920's for modern paved roads with modern engineering standards. Thus, in came the government.
In modern times there have been several private venture tollroads where companies have come in under public-private partnership laws, bought the land, and built the roads on their own. Some of the tollways in CA and the Leesburg Greenway outside of Washington D.C. are prime examples of this.
Bravo to the few. You can count them on one hand. Why not apply the same model by selling the interstate highway system and making it tolled? You could even collect taxes on their profits and property, just like done with the railroads.
Unfortunately it is actually the government that impedes this the most - to build a private road you have to go through ridiculously complex bureaucracies before they will give you the land use approval that is necessary to begin construction.
The Railroads have to jump through the same hoops for new construction. The reason is the need to use eminent domain powers. Granting such powers to private corporations needs to be strictly regulated.
Whereas highways recover the majority of their expenses through user fees and user taxes, public transit doesn't even come close to the 50% mark. Houston's metro is on pace to take in maybe $5 million in ticket sales this year, which is less than ONE QUARTER of what it costs them to simply keep the trains moving.
You think so, but you are wrong. Lets posit a modern freeway through an urbanized area, as in Houston. Cost of land aquisition and construction is about $100 million per mile per lane couplet. So if it has 8 lanes, it would cost $400,000,000 per mile. Lets say each lane is packed with an average of 1500 cars per hour all day long (recognizing less traffic at night and more at rush hour). That is 288,000 vehicle miles per day. If we make gas mileage 25 mpg and $0.40 of the cost is taxes, 1/25 of 40 cents is collected per vehicle per mile per day, or $4608 per day per mile of 8 lane freeway. This works out to $1,681,920 per year.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that $1.7 million per annum is going to finance and pay for $400 million in construction? To say nothing of paying for maintenance and police and lost property tax revenue? Over the 35 year life of the road before a total reconstruction is needed, you'd collect about $60 million to pay for a $400 million facility. The actual return is under 10% of costs paid for by direct users (much worse than most rail systems). You will find this holds true for nearly every major highway.
The reason gas taxes come close to even paying for part of the highway system is that they are restricted to use on less than 5% of total milage where just 25% of vehicle miles are driven.
We had a major highway reconstruction up here recently, where five miles of lane couplet was added, and a major interchange rebuilt at a cost of $250 million for each item. Given the number of vehicles using these facilities per day, they would have to pay $0.05 per mile plus a $0.25 surcharge for passing through the interchange each way every day - just to break even on construction/finance! You needed to collect $0.10 per mile for the 5 miles of road/interchange, but the gax tax only collects $0.016!
Somebody in Houston is going to have one hell of a smug look on his/her face when gasoline hits $3 a gallon and they are riding that train downtown to work. Public transportation in heavily populated urban centers is the intelligent alternative. I don't care what city it is.
Obviosuly not.
Very few businesses have rail sidings. I have never seen a bakery with one like you mention.
Every major bakery and snack food manufacturer around here receives their inbound flour and sugar by rail (Hostess, Tastycake, Amoroso, Herr's, Bachman, etc.). These are bakeries that use 1-3 railcars per day of flour (200,000 lbs.). The smaller ones tend to either get more expensive flour from a local mill, or truck in flour from the railroad bulk terminal. Corn Syrup is brought in by rail to three large distribution centers nearby and trucked locally. Edible oils come to the railroad's bulk terminal near the port and are trucked from there on an as needed basis using the tank car as mobile storage.
This type of pattern is typical for the whole northeast.
Your town must be heavily industrialized with tank farms everywhere. Here, our gasoline terminals are about 50 miles away, on the other side of Houston, and trucks are contstantly in there filling up to serving thousand and thousands of gas stations not only all the way on my side of town but also the far reaches of the state where there are no tank farms.
We have six major refineries in and around Philadelphia - Sunoco (Marcus Hook, Westville, and Philadelphia), Valero (Paulsboro), Conoco-Phillips (Trainer), and Motiva (Delaware City). They have pipelines all over the place and send out most product to suburban and rural tank farm terminals around the northeast (there are 11 in just 1/4 of the arc surrounding Philadelphia inside Pennsylvania to a radius of 50 miles). LPG and ethanol is moved in tank cars, however, as are by products like cyclohexane and molten sulfur. Some fuel oil is moved to a nearby power plant by rail. We don't truck oil products across the state - that's what pipelines were built to do so we don't clog our highways with Hazmat tankers. Product is also sent by barge as well to marine terminals between Virginia and Maine and inland up to Albany.
Want 80 drums to ship from an east Texas chemical plant to Seattle? It is sent by truck, all the way. Send it by rail, it could take more than a week longer to get there.
I'd be very surprised if a truckload from Texas to Seattle was not sent by rail as an intermodal shipment. Its simply too far to truck economically when a train can haul hundreds of trailers for less in the same amount of time. It doesn't take a week for the intermodal shipment either.
The BEST distributor in any US business BY FAR is Walmart. Other retail businesses have tried to hire their employees to find out their secrets. And they move everything around (once it gets here from China '-) ) by TRUCK. Those damn things are all over the highways.
All those Chinese goods in overseas containers come into the Port of LA and Long Beach, are put onto a train, and sent to the nearest intermodal yard to the distribution centers. From there they are trucked locally to Walmart. Walmart only delivers to its stores. This same pattern is evident with most large retailers (Home Depot, Lowes, Target, Sears, GE, etc.).
We all depend on goods and services that depend on effecient distribution and highways are a crucial part of that. No matter what you say, I know you are no different than anyone else in this regard. Your own supply chain in your little world might be simple, but there is a big infrastructure behind it that makes that possible, and it depends heavily on our highways.
I never said it didn't, but that is hardly a justification for spending my gas tax money subsidizing the commute of highway drivers. I pay my fair share for that use if/when I chose to buy those products.
I'm an engineering consultant. Is it "ethically conflicted" of me to support financially candidates who want to build more roads, schools, airports, ports, and subways?
This is rather like saying it is ethically conflicted for taxpayers to give money to candidates who support lower taxes.
Not so. Homesteads were limited acreage giveaways that contained provisional contingencies WRT the land being farmed and used. Railroads got adjoining lands to their tracks as an incentive and could use those free lands to reap profits. Either way though, it still demonstrates the error of your original claim about RR's not recieving government perks. Government perks were a crucial element to building the vast majority of them.
This was done in the form of low interest loans. The railroads repaid this many times over by hauling government consigned freight first for free, and then for very deep discounts.
Not sufficient. Most government-backed railroads including the first two transcontinentals teetered on the brink of bankruptcy throughout the late 19th century. They turned no substantial profit to give back to themselves much less the government for all the free track land and adjoining right of ways they got. At best they gave the feds some minor perks that only went part of the way to filling the gap. And of course, whether they paid back or not it still remains that your initial statement was wrong.
This is especially true for the trolley lines in cities and for electric interurban railways (rather like your light rail line in Houston) dedicated mostly to hauling people.
It wasn't true of Houston by any sense. Look at city council's transit policies from 1870 straight on through to 1940 and you will see nothing but protection, perks, incentives, bailouts, and regulations all to the benefit of the streetcar operator.
I don't know about Houston, but common practice up here was for the right to build tracks in the streets came with the obligation to perform all streets maintenance along side of and between the tracks.
That "obligation" is generally the case in most cities, I suspect, but if one looks at it carefully it is shown to be neither an excessive burden nor anything that the streetcar operaters shouldn't have been required to do in order to "earn" the perk they were given. Very few if any cities required them to pave the whole street - only that slender portion of it to either side of their tracks often extending not more than a foot. This made the streetcar tracks safer from an engineering perspective and it made them more user friendly (stepping onto pavement while exiting is a lot easier than stepping into a mud puddle). The city came in and paid for the rest of the roads.
This obligation is maintained today, and SEPTA, our transit agency, is still liable for all street repairs near its tracks.
As it should be within reason. It's in the interest of transit user safety that the tracks rest on a stable and easily accessed foundation. If a pothole emerges a foot away from the track in a loading area the agency has a safety obligation to fix it.
It was not willing to spend the billions that would be spent starting in the 1920's for modern paved roads with modern engineering standards.
The Leesburg Greenway outside of Washington and several privately financed tollways in CA say otherwise.
Bravo to the few. You can count them on one hand.
And you know why? It ain't because they don't want to build them. It's government itself. Very few states have provisions in place that even allow private companies to build roads. To my understanding, VA and CA are among those few, and they are extremely bureaucratic. It takes years to get through the bureaucracy so otherwise willing builders are deterred and delayed by government. In Virginia for example there are probably a dozen or more proposals for private bridges or roadways or tunnels under the state's public-private partnership laws in any given year. One, maybe two, will make it through the bureaucracy before they even obtain various use permits on property that they themselves pay for and own.
Why not apply the same model by selling the interstate highway system and making it tolled?
VA and CA are evidently heading in that same direction. The Leesburg Greenway, for example, is a strong case to go by. It's a full-sized multi-lane highway that serves hundreds of thousands of people. But other states have to first adopt provisions that let private companies do that sort of thing and then lower the bureaucratic barriers to building one.
The Railroads have to jump through the same hoops for new construction.
...yet most of the major railroad lines are already in existence and have been for a century. Private highways are almost always a new startup and most states don't even have the process that allows companies to build them, let alone a bureaucracy to go through.
You think so, but you are wrong.
Oh, I'm correct to be certain. The statistics back up everything I've said.
Lets posit a modern freeway through an urbanized area, as in Houston. Cost of land aquisition and construction is about $100 million per mile per lane couplet.
You are severely overestimating for Houston, where land is (a) generally cheaper than the national average and (b) is in some cases already owned by the government along the highway expansion corridors being considered. A major interchange on I-10 for example was recently estimated at $59 million and as a rule of thumb interchanges cost several times that of flat mileage. They've been reconstructing and building up sections of Loop 610 in Houston for the last several years at a cost of about $30 million per 3-4 mile segment.
The biggest current expansion project is on I-10 where they are going from 11 lanes to 18 or 20 lanes (including HOV and feeders). It is a 40 mile corridor expansion. 100 feet of defunct freight railroad right of way plus 300 feet of existing I-10 right of way plus 35 feet of county-owned right of way on Old Katy Road give us a total of 435 feet of government owned right away ALREADY EXISTING to build the expansion. The remainder will come from property acquisition - mostly at existing feeder intersections and the sort - along the route and is estimated at $180 million. And that is not per mile. It's $180 million spread out across the entire 40-mile corridor! Construction itself is estimated at about $850,000, so you're looking at just over $20 million per mile plus $4.5 million a mile in ROW giving us just under $25 million a mile to add some 8 new lanes in each direction over a 40 mile stretch. That means you overestimated the total fourfold.
So if it has 8 lanes, it would cost $400,000,000 per mile. Lets say each lane is packed with an average of 1500 cars per hour all day long (recognizing less traffic at night and more at rush hour). That is 288,000 vehicle miles per day.
You severely underestimate Houston highway usage. Our major freeways approach some 390,000 vehicles a day, each travelling on average a commute in the 20 mile range both too and from work (which is more than southern CA and probably makes them the most travelled roads on the north american continent) for a total of about 40 VM/D per driver (the most recent govt estimate said 37.6 IIRC). So if we have 390,000 vehicles on a major Houston freeway each travelling 37.6 miles a day that gives us, oh, about 14.6 million vehicle miles travelled daily on that corridor.
If we make gas mileage 25 mpg
That's another overestimation, especially for city driving. You're probably looking at somewhere around 17-18 mpg.
and $0.40 of the cost is taxes, 1/25 of 40 cents is collected per vehicle per mile per day, or $4608 per day per mile of 8 lane freeway.
Wrong again! Per our previous calculations, you're looking at $862,588 in gas taxes on average. Divide that by 37.6 and you're looking at $23,000 per mile per day. Times that by 365 and we get $8.4 million in revenue per mile per year. Maintenance costs on the Katy Freeway are currently about $200,000 per mile, or $8 million total for the 40 mile stretch. That leaves us ahead by $8.2 million per mile, meaning the construction costs are recovered in about 3 years.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that $1.7 million per annum is going to finance and pay for $400 million in construction?
No, because your stats are so far out of sync with reality as to render them no better than arbitrary numbers drawn from thin air (which is likely where you got them to begin with). As shown above using the actual cost figures for the Katy Freeway, you severely underestimate usage and revenue while severely overestimating costs.
To say nothing of paying for maintenance and police and lost property tax revenue?
Most of the Katy Freeway's ROW property is already government-owned and therefore does not pay taxes. That small portion which does is more than offset by increased property values subsequent to the expansion as is generally the case with all freeways. Maintenance currently is a tiny $8 million a year over 40 miles. Even if you double that figure you're still ahead by $8 million per mile. It is also not unreasonable to expect that police and emergency costs will DECREASE following the expansion because of a decrease in congestion-induced accidents, which otherwise consume the majority of policing and emergency expenses.
Over the 35 year life of the road before a total reconstruction is needed, you'd collect about $60 million to pay for a $400 million facility.
Wrong again. See above. It should also be noted that you overestimate reconstruction costs. Loop 610 has been reconstructed at about $10 million a mile give or take a few (divided out at roughly $30 million per 3 mile stretch).
If the candidate you are financially supporting has winked at you indicating upon his win you will be first in line for a $61 million contract to build them, yes. It is.
Been there, discovered they both smelled like urine, decided that I do not like to live with the stench of urine permeating my sidewalks, and therefore will never choose to live in either. Nor is it a matter of prejudice - I physically went to each, found them extremely unappealling for a number of perfectly valid reasons, and opted not to return.
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