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.
I don't believe in that model at all. Rail transit only really makes sense in the larger and denser older cities with significant geographic challenges, as is readily shown by the ridership developed. This would be Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore-Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco.
If lines are built in an intelligent manner, they may succeed outside these regions, as in San Diego or Atlanta. Most of the new rail lines in places like Buffalo, Miami, Houston, Salt Lake City, San Jose, LA, (and comming soon! Phoenix and Charlotte) are unmitigated disasters and boondogles. I believe the jury is still out on Denver, Portland, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Dallas. Seattle should be successful were it done right, but looks to be an epic disaster in the making. Cleveland and Pittsburgh have moved their way out of the naturals column by shedding hundreds of thousands of people from their city core. The major problem is insufficient population density, and lack of a defined downtown. The only real purpose to rail transit is moving lots of people in a tightly defined corridor. This requires a large enough lineal density (say 3000 people per square mile for commuter rail and 10,000+ people per square mile for urban subways and the like) and a large downtown of at least 200,000 jobs in a tightly defined area. The major achievement should be carrying enough people to eliminate one or more freeway lanes at rush hour, meaning a rush hour one way ridership of at least 10,000 people for 6a-9a and 3p-6p. Even better is carrying enough people to eliminate two or more freeway lanes. For example, Washington Metro carries about 200,000 people at rush hour, the equivalent of 20 freeway lanes coming into the city.
The "Light Rail" fad is especially dire in its failure to produce results in many places. Lots of me-too-ism goes with it.
1) I do rarely use interstate highways. I don't think its horrible that they are built - designing them is approximately 1/2 of my companies annual revenue.
2) I do think expressways should be tolled, and we should move away from the gas tax. I don't see any reason why they couldn't be sold to private industry to be operated as for-profit companies.
3) I think Palestinians possess the same natural rights as any other person, including the right to their life, property, homes, self-expression, freedom of movement, etc. (Same right possessed by us and by Israelis.) Apparently, believing the universality of natural rights and upholding the Geneva Conventions on war makes me an anti-semite according to the Israel boosters. I personally think Islam is a backwards religion that the world would be better off without, and Jihadi's should be strangled with pig intestines.
Yet you express nothing but complaints about the fact that people want to build them. Don't backtrack now after spending an entire thread bashing highways.
2) I do think expressways should be tolled, and we should move away from the gas tax.
That's a legitimate position for you to advocate. It has little relevance to the unethical campaign contributions and contract peddling on Metrorail though.
3) I think Palestinians possess the same natural rights as any other person, including the right to their life, property, homes, self-expression, freedom of movement, etc. (Same right possessed by us and by Israelis.)
As I said, that's a discussion for another time and place. I will simply note for the time being though that the palestinians, as well as most mohammedans in that region, do not and will not respect those same rights for others around them if allowed greater self governance than they current exhibit. The israelis restrict their movement for a reason and that reason is the undeniable and violent hostility they exhibit to Israel when unrestricted.
...but still a government perk and still a substantial one at that. The robber barons that ran those railroad companies would also probably disagree with you about the usefulness of that land. Several of them made a very comfortable living off of it. But back to the original point: You claimed the RR's were built without government assistance and that is patently untrue.
Again, this is only true for the western trunklines, which accounted for about 1/10th of the total mileage built.
Not so. The eastern and midwestern lines were built on state "internal improvements" perks from the 1830's through 60's. It was a major and recurring part of the Whig Party and subsequent Republic Party Platform in those regions - states like Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and your own Pennsylvania.
Mostly because the west was still undeveloped. As development occurred between 1890 and 1930, they became very prosperous.
...which is again irrelevant to the original issue. You claimed that the RR's were developed free of government perks, which is patently untrue. In reality they took all they could off the federal and state government troughs and still came up bankrupt for the first several decades of their existence.
The total value of free and then discount shipping given far outstripped any money given by the government. This is a historical fact.
If it's fact you should be able to provide some figures.
Well, Houston being the small backwater that it was, was probably atypical.
Not from what I've read. It should also be noted that Houston had more streetcar mileage at its peak than most other cities in the nation: 100 miles of trolleys and another 60-70 miles of connecting electric railway passenger service to outlying communities.
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.
...yet you offer no example cities, no specific events, and no cases to support what you say. You fudged your stats on Houston's construction costs so why should I believe you here?
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.
It may be no different for RR, but once again that's not the point. YOU stated that no private highways exist, which is patently untrue. YOU stated that they don't exist because they are unprofitable, which is also patently untrue. When confronted with evidence of their existence, YOU stated that they were few in number because they are unprofitable, which is also patently untrue. They are few in number because of bureaucracy and that bureaucracy still harms them whether it applies in the same way to RR's or not.
Wrong again. The Southwest Freeway in Houston is an 8-lane road for most of its length between downtown and the outlying suburbs. It drops to 6 in some construction zones at present, including one just outside of downtown and several near sugarland. There is also a brief segment of 10 lanes when the extended onramps are included near its intersection w/ 610. This predominantly 8-lane Southwest Freeway is also one of Houston's busiest and the most recent estimates suggest it carries about 390,000 vehicles a day on weekdays.
Total miles is irrelevant. All that matters is the vehicles going over any 1 mile of road to compare to per mile costs.
Wrong again. If commuters travel further in a given city they use more highway space and with it more gasoline. Since highways don't fluctuate in length from day to day they may be considered a constant. 100,000 commuters travelling 30 miles on Highway X a day use up more gasoline than 100,000 commuters travelling 2 miles on Highway X a day. Since Highway X and its original construction costs remain the same whether they travel 30 or 2 miles a day, any measure of gasoline revenues generated by that freeway MUST take the commute length into account. Why? Because longer commutes generate more tax revenue even though the freeway's construction cost stays constant be it used for long or short commutes. Otherwise you introduce a severe distortion that underestimates longer commutes and cities with greater highway usage.
Driving on freeways is by definition not city driving. City driving is driving on streets with stoplights.
You must not visit Houston during rush hour very often then. To get the sticker rated mpg figure for "freeway" driving one has to drive on a relatively uncongested and smooth flowing freeway. Anything less pushes you closer to the city rating, and Houston's congestion does just that. I can testify from experience when I drove Houston's freeways as a commuter for a previous job. My car at the time was rated 23 freeway and 18 city. When I drove to San Antonio or Austin I got about 23 freeway. When I drove to work every day on Houston's freeways I got between 18 and 19 mpg. So once again, you severely overestimate the mpg expectations for our freeway system.
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.
Your equation is flawed because it leaves out trip length. 390,000 vehicles travelling a 20 mile highway commute on average is substantially different than 390,000 vehicles travelling a 3 mile highway commute on average. Houston's drivers come closer to the former number. When you figure in that those 390,000 vehicles travel about 20 miles each on the Southwest freeway (which is, after all, the AVERAGE trip length for a given commuter, meaning it is the sum of all the trip lengths divided by all the vehicles) they end up paying more. Let's use another example for clarification purposes:
We'll take the gas tax at 40 cents a gallon and say that each car gets 20 mpg. That means for every 20 miles travelled a driver pays 40 cents in taxes. Now if there are 390,000 drivers on the southwest freeway a day and the AVERAGE commute for each driver is 20 miles, that also means the average driver uses a gallon of gas per commute and thus pays 40 cents in taxes. If 390,000 drivers pay $.40 in taxes a day that means $156,000 in taxes are collected on that highway each day. Times 365 days that gives us a little over $56 million in revenue for that entire highway per year (I know, taking weekends into consideration gives us a little bit less but just to keep things simple we'll stay at 56).
Now apply that to the I-10 stats: 37.6 miles per day, 390,000 commuters, and 17 mpg at $.40 per gallon in tax. That gives us a use rate of 2.21 gallons a day, or 88 cents in tax per commuter. Times it by 390,000 and we get $345,035 a day (My apologies and please disregard the previous $800,000 figure I gave you - I doubled the commute length thinking it was 40 miles each way when on second glance at the figure that is the total round trip). Multiply that by 365 and we have about $126 million a year, or about $3.15 million per mile per year on a 40 mile highway. Subtract the maintanence from that and you get revenues of about $3 million a mile, which recovers construction costs @ $20 million a mile (current I-10 estimates say $800 million for the expansion's construction costs over 40 miles = $20 million a mile) in about 7 or 8 years.
They are accurate for freeways up here.
They may or may not be, but we're talking about Houston freeways, not Pennsylvania.
Only in the earliest sense of the term. Yankee first meant anybody northeast of New York State (meaning new england). It gradually came to encompass New York State and by the time the pre-civil war sectional divisions set in around 1840-50 was taken to refer to that north of the Mason Dixon line. The civil war and reconstruction pretty much set that line in stone.
That does not mean non-yankee people don't still live in rural PA or even NY. They do, and many are quite similar to their southern neighbors. But their states are still part of yankeeland and have been since about 1860.
I don't think this is worth pursuing further. I think I know better than you what my aim is. Its not to bash highways.
They ARE unprofitable. I've never heard of I-10 or I-95 "turning a profit". This is a very simple and basic point. Simply put, the road system is not set up as a private enterprise. Even private toll roads subsist on a regimine of exemption from taxation and the benefits of policing by the state.
Less than 1/10th of what LA had. A very small fraction of systems in Philadelphia, Boston, NY, Pittsburgh, Chicago, etc.
It is what one might expect for a small town like Houston was then. It may very well have been impressive given the size Houston was then - I'm not qualified to say yes or no to that.
No, you seem to totally misunderstand the point of the exercise. If we take the cost of constructing a mile of freeway as a constant per mile, the total length is irrelevant. The cars passing over any given mile upon it must pay for that mile. Saying a 30 mile freeway makes more money than a 5 mile one is besides the point. It may make six times as much, but obviously it also costs six times as long. Unit costs and revenues are identical.
Multiply that by 365 and we have about $126 million a year, or about $3.15 million per mile per year on a 40 mile highway. Subtract the maintanence from that and you get revenues of about $3 million a mile, which recovers construction costs @ $20 million a mile (current I-10 estimates say $800 million for the expansion's construction costs over 40 miles = $20 million a mile) in about 7 or 8 years.
Is the construction being financed with revenue bonds (normal method of construction of public works)? If so, you need to add the interest charges. Presumably the property underneath the road was once privately owned. You need to add on the foregone property tax revenue on that land. You need to add in the cost of policing the road and responding to accidents and incidents. Lastly, is the construction estimate in current year dollars, or year of expenditure?
I will grant the basic point - freeways in Houston are very heavily used but cheap to construct and therefore generate an atypical amount of money versus what occurs elsewhere in the country.
...which is an erronious and distorted methodology in itself. Your formula is flawed, plain and simple. Highway construction costs as a whole are constant. The number of trips AND the length of those trips are the variables. Since a car travelling 20 miles uses more gasoline and thus pays more taxes than a car travelling 1 mile, trip length MUST be considered in ANY attempt to estimate gasoline tax revenue for a given road. There is simply no way around it.
The cars passing over any given mile upon it must pay for that mile.
Wrong. Highway costs are incurred for the segment as a whole and simply averaged out by mile. Some miles technically cost more than others to build, but accounting for that in a formula that considers total usage for that segment is virtually impossible. So instead we average. If a 20 mile segment costs 100 pesos we divide 100 by 20 and get 5 pesos per mile ON AVERAGE. We then assess the tax incidence based upon (a) the number of cars and (b) the length of their trip. Part (b) MUST be included because trips vary in length - a fact for which there is no way around.
Saying a 30 mile freeway makes more money than a 5 mile one is besides the point.
Nobody's saying a 30 mile freeway makes more than the 5 mile one, less than the 5 mile one, or anything else about it. What I am saying though is that tax revenues for a specific fixed segment of freeway, be it 5 or 500 miles in length so long as that length is identified and held constant in the model, depend upon not only the number of vehicles but the length of their trips. There's no way to escape that fact so it must be included for a model to be valid.
Is the construction being financed with revenue bonds (normal method of construction of public works)? If so, you need to add the interest charges.
The $800 million is the raw number for construction itself. I don't recall the exact financing, though a substantial portion of it is federal returns. But go ahead - add whatever additional costs you desire into the mix. The freeway STILL pays for itself from the gasoline tax well within its lifespan.
Presumably the property underneath the road was once privately owned.
Not since about 1855, if even then. I-10 was built on the old Houston-Beaumont railroad line's Columbus spur. The highway was put in during the 1960's on adjacent right-of-way from the railroad plus some older roadways. As I detailed for you previously, the overwhelming majority of it's expansion is being built upon remaining county-owned right of way, the county-owned stretch of what was left of the RR line, and a county-owned parallel roadway. The only parts they are eminent domaining are a few commercial properties that extend to the corners on existing crossroads and they compose a minimal portion of the loss.
You need to add on the foregone property tax revenue on that land.
No need, because the county does not pay taxes to itself on its own land. What little of your precious tax revenue that may be lost from the tiny fraction of eminent domain acquisitions will be more than offset by the boost to other property value along the freeway when complete.
You need to add in the cost of policing the road and responding to accidents and incidents.
As previously noted, most policing costs on the Katy Freeway are from congestion-induced accidents. The expansion will therefore likely REDUCE policing costs.
Lastly, is the construction estimate in current year dollars, or year of expenditure?
I'll have to look it up to be certain. Either way, the revenues generated are more than sufficient to pay it off well within its lifetime.
I will grant the basic point - freeways in Houston are very heavily used but cheap to construct and therefore generate an atypical amount of money versus what occurs elsewhere in the country.
They are not at all atypical for Texas. I would venture to guess that the same is probably true in most southern and western states save the left coast. The exhorbitant costs you state, if true at all, seem to apply only in the northeast and on the left coast. When considered from terms of geographic land size, that would also seem to make your costs atypical for the nation, not mine.
Post the figures if you got em. A quick google search reveals the following mileage in the first decade of the 1900's, which is when Houston's total mileage peaked at about 170
Denver: 164 miles
Detroit: 202 miles
New Orleans: 169 miles
New York: 357 miles (appears to include all rail-based modes)
That places Houston in comparable range to other cities of the era.
We're not talking about I-10 or I-95. We're talking about privately constructed highways such as the Leesburg Greenway and the toll lanes in California. And contrary to your claims they are turning a profit.
Yet bashing highways is what you have done and what you are doing, ironically enough, on a thread that originally had absolutely nothing to do with highways. If that is not your aim then you need to consider revising your message so that you accurately convey your aim, whatever it may be.
[HC] Ah, that would explain the 250,000 barrel per day Bayway refinery in NJ, directly across the river from downtown New York City!
Lol! Thanks for setting the record straight, Hermann. It's amazing what some folks think they know...
Nov. 5, 2003, 1:20PM (Houston Chronicle)
These election results reflect 100 percent of precincts reporting, but they remain unofficial.
METRO BOND REFERENDUM ( FOR 51.7% AGAINST 48.3% )
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