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.
There are several problems with that.
First, in order to ride a train downtown to work a train must go from the suburbs to downtown. Metrorail doesn't and Metrorail's planned expansions will not. Houston's suburbs are 20-30 miles outside of the city and Metrorail, both now and 20 years from now when Phase II is complete, will not service any area more than about 6 miles outside of downtown.
Second, Houston's urban center is not heavily populated, never has been, and likely never will be. It's a decentralized city with low population density. Nobody lives downtown save a few highrises and apartment complexes. It would also be an inefficient use of land to build more apartment complexes or highrises there as doing so would consume more lucrative real estate from commercial and hotel uses. Therefore your assumption about rail being an "intelligent alternative" does not hold.
Third, it does indeed matter what city it is. Houston is not New York and New York is not Houston. Take an example: Building a subway system in Houston, for example, would not work even if New York has it. Why? Because Houston's land is clay-based and prone to flooding. Take another example: building an oil refinery near downtown NYC won't work like it does for Houston because there isn't nearby oil pumping into NYC to be refined. You'd have to ship it over long distances from somewhere else.
Nope, because a tax is by definition a government usurpation of somebody's rightful earnings. By simply pledging to reduce the level of that usurpation a candidate does nothing more than correct the imbalance that taxes create to begin with.
Contrast that with Metro and STV. Metro is spending somebody else's money. STV is recieving somebody else's money. And the reason that money is being spent by each stems directly from the fact that Metro and STV colluded to pass a referendum that would permit them to do so.
Only to a pinhead does a legal, publicly disclosed contribution from a contractor to a political action committee become ethically conflicted .
Go ahead and complain to the ethics comission or whatever other unelected board you think might take your crap seriously. Apparently you failed to defeat the referendum at the ballot box, so you may as well resort to rat tactics to try and stop it.
Nonsense. The very purpose of requiring public disclosure on campaign finance forms is to permit the public to obtain them and look for ethically conflicted reciepts and expenditures! Why do you think politicians get hammered in campaign ads (and rightly so) for taking tobacco and trial lawyer money? Cause it's seen as ethically conflicted by the majority of the electorate!
If a single disclosure on page 96 of the government's required form somehow removes the ethical culpability of a contribution, then no contribution or expenditure of any form save those that are undisclosed has anything wrong with it. By your same measure, candidate Joe Schmoe can spend $20,000 from his campaign account on prostitutes and so long as he lists them on the form we can't ethically condemn him. That, of course, is an ethical absurdity and so is your argument about STV.
Apparently you failed to defeat the referendum at the ballot box, so you may as well resort to rat tactics to try and stop it.
First off, I was disenfranchised during that referendum (I was out of town that election day and requested a ballot by mail, which was then stolen and fraudulently filed somewhere en route to me at the post office) and yes - I did make a complaint to the Ethics Commission on that...as well as sending notification to the USDOJ Voting Rights Division. So I never had an opportunity to make my legally entitled attempt to defeat it at the ballot box. Second, the referendum passed on a 1% margin. Considering that its supporters benefitted from $28,000 in ethically suspect money from STV, plus another $50,000 in ethically suspect money from another contractor, Siemens, plus some $500,000-$1,000,000 in illegal political advertising and political collusion by a government entity, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that their 1% margin of victory was obtained by the advantages they recieved from those aforementioned means.
As a final point I will note that once again your curious appearance on yet another obscure Texas politics thread remains unexplained. Are you considering a move to the state, mac? If you are why not just say so. If you desire I might even arrange for somebody to greet you in the limo line at the airport with a "yankee go home" sign. Or, alternatively, do you simply like reading what I post? If so, I would be more than happy to save you the trouble of digging around FR for obscure Texas threads and/or personal profiles by adding you to my ping list. All you gotta do is say when.
So my contribution to the NRA (who then gives it to campaigns in key races) is ethically conflicted because a majoirty of Americans think so? Thanks for explaining CFR to me professor. I didn't realize you were such a big supporter of restrictions on the first amendment.
...I was disenfranchised during that referendum (I was out of town that election day and requested a ballot by mail, which was then stolen and fraudulently filed somewhere en route to me at the post office) and yes - I did make a complaint to the Ethics Commission on that...as well as sending notification to the USDOJ Voting Rights Division. So I never had an opportunity to make my legally entitled attempt to defeat it at the ballot box.
Waah! my dog at my absentee ballot.
Considering that its supporters benefitted from $28,000 in ethically suspect money from STV, plus another $50,000 in ethically suspect money from another contractor, Siemens, plus some $500,000-$1,000,000 in illegal political advertising and political collusion by a government entity, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that their 1% margin of victory was obtained by the advantages they recieved from those aforementioned means.
IOW, even though it was a relatively minor contributor to the PAC, and even though you can easily identify much more aggregious, illegal government activity, you chose to focus only on the contactor (STV) who wanted to win the bid should the project move forward. Yet, you make it seem like if it weren't for their support the whole referendum would have been defeated.
As a final point I will note that once again your curious appearance on yet another obscure Texas politics thread remains unexplained.
You seem to think that you're entitled to pick and choose who shows up and comments on threads you either start or participate in. Well you're not. As I've told you before, if you can't backup the words you post here then maybe you don't belong. Are we clear?
Second, Houston's urban center is not heavily populated, never has been, and likely never will be. It's a decentralized city with low population density. Nobody lives downtown save a few highrises and apartment complexes. All of Houston inside the "Loop" could benefit from a real mass transit system specifically because it is decentralized. It would also be an inefficient use of land to build more apartment complexes or highrises there as doing so would consume more lucrative real estate from commercial and hotel uses. If you built living quarters in the urban area you wouldn't need to transport the workers to the jobs, so therefore no need for extensive mass transit beyond the urban area. Therefore your assumption about rail being an "intelligent alternative" does not hold.
Third, it does indeed matter what city it is. Houston is not New York and New York is not Houston. Take an example: Building a subway system in Houston, for example, would not work even if New York has it. Why? Because Houston's land is clay-based and prone to flooding. No subway needed only "surface transportation". Take another example: building an oil refinery near downtown NYC won't work like it does for Houston because there isn't nearby oil pumping into NYC to be refined. You'd have to ship it over long distances from somewhere else. From personal experience; I, as a licensed "Tankerman" aboard an ocean going barge pumped crude oil to a refinery while looking at the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center under construction. That refinery was closer to Manhattan Island than Shell Oil's Deer Park, Tx. Refinery is to downtown Houston.
Yes, and this thread isn't referring to mass transit as a whole - just Metrorail's version of it.
All of Houston inside the "Loop" could benefit from a real mass transit system specifically because it is decentralized.
Not as currently designed, which I again remind you is the focus of this thread. It takes 20-30 minutes LONGER to travel across downtown via Metrorail than it does in a car.
If you built living quarters in the urban area you wouldn't need to transport the workers to the jobs, so therefore no need for extensive mass transit beyond the urban area.
I suppose that's a nice model for Hanoi or Stalingrad, but here in Texas they build those "living quarters" (we actually call them "houses") where people desire to live and where the demand for those houses is strong. Right now the strong markets are all outside of downtown. Some are near downtown and some are not, but the option is there for anybody who wants to live in a certain part of the city over another. Simply building high rises in the middle of downtown and saying "move here" won't work though, and at present it simply isn't the most economical use of those lands. The high rises that are already there are sufficient and companies want the land for other things.
Is the NRA a tobacco company or a plaintiff's lawyer firm?
Thanks for explaining CFR to me professor. I didn't realize you were such a big supporter of restrictions on the first amendment.
Did I ever advocate restrictions on NRA campaign ads?
Waah! my dog at my absentee ballot.
All I am saying is don't accuse me of substituting a failure to defeat the referendum at the polls with other means cause I never had my legally entitled opportunity at the polls no thanks to ballot fraud.
IOW, even though it was a relatively minor contributor to the PAC
Relatively minor? Not at all. STV was the second largest single donor IIRC. The largest was Siemens, another ethically conflicted firm. $27,000 from STV is enough to finance a piece of election mail to 25,000 households. On a vote that carried by less than half that amount a mass mailout of that size is substantial.
and even though you can easily identify much more aggregious, illegal government activity, you chose to focus only on the contactor (STV)
I already made issue of the illegal activity by Metro itself long ago, mac. Perhaps if you read the Texas threads you have been stalking more carefully you would know that. STV is just more of the same style graft on the public dollar. Call it icing on the cake if you will.
who wanted to win the bid should the project move forward.
Misleading. They already had the previous bid and were virtually guaranteed to get the next one IF it moved forward. With that very same knowledge in mind, they did everything they could to assist phase II in moving forward.
Yet, you make it seem like if it weren't for their support the whole referendum would have been defeated.
It's highly likely. The referendum passed on a one percent margin. Shift less than 5,000 votes the other way (a tiny fraction out of 1.5 million registered voters) and it would've failed. As I noted previously, the amount they gave was enough to reach 25,000 households (with multiple voters in each) so the impact of it, and of other corrupt donations from interest-conflicted firms like Siemens, indisputably gave Metro its margin of victory.
You seem to think that you're entitled to pick and choose who shows up and comments on threads you either start or participate in.
Have I ever told you that you cannot participate here or anywhere else? Absolutely not. I have simply raised the issue of your unusual habit for showing up on obscure threads about Texas politics where I happen to be posting on which you make comments to no other individual but me. I honestly don't care if you want to post here but I do think it odd that a non-Texan such as yourself would take any interest whatsoever in a thread such as this, much less repeatedly so, absent some other unstated reason to come here. Since you are not forthcoming about that reason I shall take the liberty to speculate upon it and publicly prod you for it. If you don't desire to answer nobody is making you, but neither will I cease from raising the issue.
As I've told you before, if you can't backup the words you post here then maybe you don't belong.
Let's see - you have now made that assertion to me twice.
You made it here in response to my perfectly valid statement that STV's contributions to the Metrorail PAC at a time they simultaneously held the status of likely contract beneficiaries for Metrorail was unethical. To date I've successfully fended off questions upon that charge and to date your only counterargument is the wholly irrational claim that since it appears on the PAC's contribution reports it must somehow be okay. Taken to its logical end, the same could be used to justify a campaign disbursement to a prostitute as "ethical" so long as it appears on the reports, which is absurd and for which you apparently have no counter.
The other time you made that assertion was on another obscure Texas thread upon which I was having a conversation with another poster about my personal preferences and demands for the amount and level of health insurance I desired. Seeing as health insurance is STRICTLY a decision of personal need and demand, what I have determined to work for myself has neither relevance upon you nor a need for me to "back up" my decision with anything more than the reasons I used to reach it (which IIRC I had stated publicly at the time). In one of your most bizarre escapades to date, you attempted to initiate an argument with me over my voluntarily chosen level of health insurance apparently premised upon your yankee-esque belief that you know my needs better than I do.
And oddly enough you seem at a loss for why I am questioning the strange characteristics of your posting patterns...
1/3 of truck traffic by revenue is under 50 miles in haul. Considering that longer hauls are necessarily more expensive, its not much of a stretch to posit that 50% of truck traffic is under 50 miles, while the vast majority is under 300 miles. The number of long hauls by trucks is miniscule compared to the aggregate total.
And yes, it is time for you to be surprised because there are many, many trucks that go from the petrochemical plants on the Gulf coast to customers all over the country with absolutely no rail involved.
I'm aware of this. I believe the chemical companies generally only reccomend use of rail for shipments over 750 miles.
There are many customers that either don't have a rail siding or their own raw material tanks can't handle the 20,000 gallons that would be in a rail car. Their level of usage of the material simply does not warrant them buying that much at a time.
Well, they certainly believe this, although it isn't necessarily true economically if they can use the tank car as a storage facility, like many consignees do. We recently converted a roofing copany up here to rail use, but first we had to get him to unthink truck. One of his difficulties was he couldn't see how he could unload tank cars of molten asphalt into his storage tank. After some talking, we were finally able to enlighten him that he didn't need to, because he could just park the tank car on his sidetrack and spend 2 days unloading directly from the tank car with his in-plant steam providing the necessary warmth for the product. It never needed to go and visit his tank, because he could hold onto the railcar, unlike an over the road trailer.
It isn't that expensive to ship by truck. From Texas to the Northeast or Northwest, it ran around 7-8 cents per pound.
$3500 per truck (50,000 lbs)? That works out to $14,000 per tank car at 100 tons per tank car. The rail rate is easily half the equivalent truck amount. I suppose the cost of that is relative to the expense of the product. That type of rate would never pay for something cheap like refined oil.
I had one customer in California that arranged his own shipments, and used backhaul services from truckers that hauled produce eastward and wanted to get their equipment back to California. For a truckload of drums, about 40,000 lbs, he paid only 3.8 cents per pound. It is more economical than one would think.
$1520 for a truckload, so $6000 for the equivalent in a rail car. Drums ship by boxcar. Boxcar rates from Texas to California would run you about $3000. Again, half the price.
However your points are well taken. Railroads are aware that they only have 20% of all chemical shipments. A big part of this is the chemical companies promoting trucks for anything under 750 miles. Another big part is the specialty chemicals market with its small lot shipments. Railroads specialize in large lot shipments.
And with trucks and our great interstate highways / infrastructure, you could get it to the customer AT LEAST a week sooner -- probably closer to two weeks.
That's the nature of the beast with carload freight. The cars have to be aggregated in yards and resorted enroute. Your much cheaper rate comes at the price of slower transit. If you want low rates plus fast transit, you go intermodal rail shipment, where your rate is generally 25% under the truck rate, and delivery times are comparable to single drive movement by truck. That's why railroads have 98% of the LA-Chicago market, for example, and trucks have 2%.
The railroads were so slow compared to trucks, and they were terrible about losing railcars for a few days and couldn't tell you where any one single car was.
That may have been the case 10-20 years ago. With modern internet technology, you can trace your railcars and get updates of their location pretty much every hour or two as they move around the system. Its very difficult to lose cars now.
Ah, that would explain the 250,000 barrel per day Bayway refinery in NJ, directly across the river from downtown New York City!
Thanks you for your enlightenment of us, o wise one!
Ps. shipping over long distances - like from Venezuela, Angola, or Kuwait? You do realize that we import something like 2/3 of our oil? Ocean shipping, however, is cheap.
You're north of the mason-dixon line, which is the traditional geographic boundary between yankeedom and the rest of us.
My mistake. It's a rather small point though so the general analogy still stands - there are things that work well for Houston but not for New York, and things that work well for New York but not for Houston. The "one-size-fits-all-and-every-city-must-have-transit-like-us" model simply doesn't hold any weight.
Train of Mass Descruction!
Will let's see now. You spent the first half of this thread trying to "prove" that you never use interstate highways and spent the remainder kicking and screaming about how horrible you think it is that we build them. Upon that one may accurately summarize your position as solidly anti-highway, so that part stands. WRT Israel, about the only other place I've seen you around this forum is on threads defending the so-called Palestinians and other mohammedan radicals. Since those groups are all avowedly dedicated to the eradication of Israel, those who offer support and arguments to their position assist, be it willingly or unwittingly, in their promotion of that end. Therefore it is a similarly valid summary to characterize your position, or at least its consequences, as anti-Israel (though that is a discussion for another thread).
As for truthful representation, I defy you to point out where anything I've posted about Metrorail, highways in Houston, transit in Houston, or any of its circumstances on this thread is intentionally untruthful or wrong. Considering that you arbitrarily offered figures out of thin air that violate the actual highway construction numbers for a current project in Houston, I will also note that you enter that challenge with a marked disadvantage of your own.
They got every other square mile I believe, which limited the usefulness of the land.
Government perks were a crucial element to building the vast majority of them.
Again, this is only true for the western trunklines, which accounted for about 1/10th of the total mileage built. Apparently that is "vast majority" by Texas math.
Not sufficient.
Well, only according to you, whose view on the matter really doesn't matter, does it?
Most government-backed railroads including the first two transcontinentals teetered on the brink of bankruptcy throughout the late 19th century.
Mostly because the west was still undeveloped. As development occurred between 1890 and 1930, they became very prosperous.
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.
They didn't need to give the government profits, they gave them free shipping!
At best they gave the feds some minor perks that only went part of the way to filling the gap.
The total value of free and then discount shipping given far outstripped any money given by the government. This is a historical fact.
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.
Well, Houston being the small backwater that it was, was probably atypical. The streetcar firms in the midwest and northeast (where the vast majority of Americans lived up to the 1950's) generally had an adversarial relationship with the city government.
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.
Its no different with railway expansion. Burlington Northern has been working for 23 years to build a 103 mile railroad in Wyoming and Montana to tap more coal mines and shorten their existing route by over 100 miles. Its not been built because of bureaucratic inertia. There is now a second proposal by Dakota, Minnesota, and Eastern to build a 260 mile railroad extension from South Dakota into Wyoming coal country. This project also appears to be going nowhere fast.
The major cause of this is the beserk environmental review laws from the 1970's.
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.
I looked this up. It shows $233 million just for the awarded contracts including a couple still to be let (doesn't count design and DOT costs, nor any financing costs) for about 8 miles of freeway reconstruction as is (no expansion). That's $30 million per mile just to keep things where they are.
http://www.texasfreeway.com/houston/historic/newsletters/houston_newsletters.shtml
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
No, it appears pretty accurate. My estimate was for an 8 lane road. 12 lanes might haul 390,000 vehicles. Your 8 lane roads such as I 610 are under my estimate in vehicles per day.
that gives us, oh, about 14.6 million vehicle miles travelled daily on that corridor.
Total miles is irrelevant. All that matters is the vehicles going over any 1 mile of road to compare to per mile costs.
That's another overestimation, especially for city driving. You're probably looking at somewhere around 17-18 mpg.
Driving on freeways is by definition not city driving. City driving is driving on streets with stoplights. I suppose you might stretch it to include severe stop and go freeway driving. Driving at 40 mph on the freeway in rush hour though, is not city driving.
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.
Using your numbers, this implies really high gas taxes. 390,000 vehicles * $0.40 per gallon / 17 miles per gallon = $9200 per day = $3.36 million per year. $23,000 per mile would need $1 per gallon in gas taxes.
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.
They are accurate for freeways up here. US 202 in Chester County cost $250,000,000 to reconstruct and add one lane in each direction, and we paid another $250,000,000 for its new interchange with US 422 and I 76. Those costs worked out to $0.05 per mile per car and $0.25 per car traversing the interchange.
You mention cheap land as one factor in cost. I'd mention a much bigger one - lack of topography around Houston. Any idiot can pave a prarie for cheap.
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).
You are only off by a factor of 3 for the costs quoted by texasfreeways.com. What's $20,000,000 per mile among friends?
If you knew anything about the north, you'd know Yankees are people from north and east of Pennsylvania, and their kin in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota who went west. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, are all very distinctly not Yankee, mostly because they are very German and non-English. (To be fair, part of the far northern strip of these three states is probably Yankee.) Yankees are Episcopalians and Congregationalists - two very weak denominations here. Pennsylvanians are mostly Catholics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists.
I don't know of any Pennsylvanians who would describe themselves as Yankees (we use that term to describe people from northern NJ, NYC, upstate NY, and New England), while I believe that Pennsylvanians do fly as many Confederate Flags as down south, and we are the nation's leading state in the consumption of snuff and chewing tobacco. Its not for no reason that Pennsylvania is described as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. And our neighbors in southern New Jersey are definitely not Yankees.
Pennsylvania and Ohio are most similar to Virginia, North Carolina, and western Tennessee - essentially Appalachia.
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