Posted on 03/24/2016 7:45:56 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
In an unprecedented move to protect Washington Metro riders’ safety, the entire transit system was closed for a day last week in order to conduct emergency inspections of electric cables. This had to be done, since a rash of fires, fatalities and other breakdowns has raised concerns about the 40-year-old rail system’s continued capacity to deliver safe, reliable service.
Currently the Metro Rail fares cover only a portion of its operating expenses. The system is completely dependent on its parent jurisdictions for paying any capital costs. Without state support, the necessary money would not be available. Few events better highlight the importance for policymakers to have enough flexibility to adjust budgets based on changing circumstances than Metro’s new woes. The shutdown also underscores the folly of prioritizing new mass transit projects at the expense of maintaining existing transportation infrastructure that is undergoing continued deterioration.
Yet a Maryland Democratic proposal, HB 1013, attempts just the opposite approach. The “Maryland Open Transportation Investment Decision Act” would establish a formula of metrics intended to restrict the ability of Governor Hogan and the Department of Transportation to set capital project spending priorities. Among the Democratic scoring systems’ flaws is that “system preservation” gets little weight. Consequently, projects to repair or replace structurally deficient bridges – or aging mass transit systems such as Metro – receive a lower priority. This over weighting of new projects results in critical safety issues not getting required or needed attention. Therefore, drivers on aging bridges and roads and Metro riders are placed at risk.
Supporters cloak HB 1013 with claims about “taking politics out of the budget process.” Yet the bill’s formula would produce skewed results. For instance, had this bill been in effect a year ago, Anne Arundel County alone would have lost out on over $170 million in projects, Baltimore County would have missed out on $39 million in projects, and Howard County would have lost out on $133 million. Under the scoring process there is no special weighting given to projects identified as county priorities. At a result, it throws out the ability of counties to set local priorities for transportation projects. For example, the bill would hurt BWI and Baltimore’s Port because the scoring process steers dollars away from transportation projects benefiting economic development.
On the other end, Montgomery County’s projects could receive nearly $3.5 billion because their current priority projects fare so well under the Democrats’ scoring scheme. Yet despite the extra dollars targeted for Montgomery County, the benefit to most county residents remains fairly limited. The projects benefiting the most from the scoring system are new mass transit projects. Consequently, more popular transportation priorities, such as fixing Washington Metro or addressing I-270 congestion would get less attention.
Under Governor Hogan and State Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn, all of Maryland, including the suburban and rural areas, is getting money for desperately needed projects.Just this year Governor Hogan has invested an unprecedented $2 billion into “shovel ready” infrastructure projects to fix every single structurally deficient bridge in the state, and to move us forward on the top-priority road projects in every single jurisdiction in the state.
Metro’s shutdown last week highlights the potential risks of imposing budgetary formulas to lock in government spending on long-term “auto-pilot” systems.State education spending formulas have evolved to severely limit the ability of current leaders to respond to current needs. Placing still more state spending on autopilot, especially using flawed metrics, defies common sense government.
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
I actually feel sorry for the Upper Mid-West and Northeast states. To be sure, we have our infrastructure issues out here in the West, but those areas have not only had arcane DemoRat governments who have skimmied off infrastructure bucks to buy votes for years, but also their infrastructure itself is 100 to 150 years older than ours. I think our time will come, but armageddon as far as infrastructure maintenance and replacement has already arrived there. Here in San Francisco, we’ve just replaced half of our Bay Bridge (which was very well maintained but deemed to be unsafe for earthquakes), and it was built originally in the late 1930’s. Back east everything is older than that.
Choo-choo Willy, front and center in whatever guise you have this time.
Actually, I’d suspect they had gotten a “credible threat” and shut down the Metro to prevent what happened in Brussels. You don’t do a last minute shut down for a long standing problem.
“Currently the Metro Rail fares cover only a portion of its operating expenses.”
I’ll bet if they audited the organization, it’s budgets, it’s employees, and it’s compensation structure they’d find that they actually do cover their operating expenses if they didn’t overpay their employees and award contractors work without kickbacks.
Monkey County screws the state AGAIN!
And less than a week later the Metro was attacked.
In Belgium.
Who knows what sabotage was corrected in DC just in time?
As you say...
Wasn’t that part of the FBI HQ plan? They were wanting to move out of DC to the outer region of Fairfax. There’s dozens of organizations in decaying buildings in DC who’d like to move out thirty to forty miles. They should just go ahead and allow them to move. If just a quarter of the offices were out of DC, it’d help with the transportation issue.
Look beneath the veneer and DC is a third world hellhole. As to Metro, consider that most of DC sits on swamp land and a significant portion of it lies below the level of the Potomac River.
The WMATA is an employee benefits clearinghouse masquerading as a regional transportation authority..
The only thing that sustains the Metro, MARC, VRE is the fact that the federal government GIVES employees vouchers to ride these for free.
I agree with you. The inspections were a convenient excuse and I hope they took the opportunity to do them.
That said, it’s interesting that the article noted that the Metro system is not self sufficient based on fares alone, yet it’s the second most used system in the country.
I ran some basic numbers on the break even amount for the Red Line the libs want in Baltimore. Using the assumption of full ridership of 59,000 per day from day one, 365 days a year over the federally mandated life of the rail cars of 25 years, the system payback cost per ticket would be about $9 per ride. That factors in zero maintenance or labor costs and they admit that it will take 15 years to get to full ridership. Hogan was absolutely right to kill that puppy.
I think there are other costs to the city that need to be factored in, ranging from parking to cleaning to the loss resulting from discouraging visitors and commerce. I live in a tourist town, and one of our biggest problems is that we don’t have an effective public transit system, either for people arriving from out of town or for locals.
I grew up in NYC, and one of the great joys of life was not to have to pay for a car, its parking,its fines, etc., because you could get everywhere on public transit (which is pretty expensive still, but less than a single fine...).
Mass transit works in places where the city grew around the system. It fails every time where the system is built in an existing area.
I think they usually don’t do it well. In Florida, we had a perfect route (connecting north Florida, central Florida and the Gulf, meaning Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa) but the state went with a totally flaky route to nowhere (funded by Disney, but they made a mistake on that one!).
There’s a lot involved in this, but nothing has anything to do with common sense.
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