Gee, the Houston Comical has yet another in a series of articles touting 18th century trains over 21st century cars...
Posted on 12/24/2002 11:42:12 PM PST by GOPcapitalist
DALLAS -- It's a problem that no one imagined the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority would ever have.
Too many riders.
When development of light rail lines began 20 years ago, critics and skeptics questioned whether anyone would actually ride the train.
When DART opened its newest, northernmost station in Plano earlier this month, a busload of commuters from Sherman, shuttled 55 miles south by the Texoma Area Paratransit Authority, was turned away.
"What a great problem for us to have," said DART spokesman Morgan Lyons.
For economic and planning reasons, he said, cities and regions that are not members of DART are required to have an agreement before they can bring riders to rail stations and "we have not developed a policy for dealing with non-member cities."
The TAPS bus service, which serves seven counties in North Texas, did not have an agreement. Not only had DART denied it permission to deliver passengers to and from the Parker Road station, the city of Plano has told the agency that it cannot load and unload buses on city streets near the station.
There are several issues involved; not the least is economic. An influx of passengers from non-DART areas -- those that have not contributed to the cost of the system -- could require the agency to purchase additional train cars or increase the frequency of trips. Those costs would be borne largely by DART members, communities that raised their sales tax rate to pay for the service.
Since the Parker Road station opened on Monday, Lyons said, the 1,300-space parking lot has been full every day and rush-hour trains fill up on the first few stops toward downtown Dallas. Allowing an influx of passengers from non-DART cities could strain the system and crowd out commuters who have been paying for DART development since 1983.
Ven Hammonds, executive director of TAPS, has told DART officials that, when allowed, his agency's shuttle buses would make six round trips each weekday, carrying a total of about 75 passengers.
"The issue is not how many people they might be bringing," Lyons said. "They work in our service area and they contribute to the sales tax (which partially funds DART). They also contribute to congestion (if they commute by car). We want to be responsive to that. The issue is letting non-DART agencies access our property. We still have to decide how to accommodate them."
"It's a very legitimate issue," Hammonds said. "We hope to have an agreement with DART soon. We would like to help with the air-quality situation and help decrease congestion on the highways."
Some Dallas suburbs chose not to join DART and other cities, such as Sherman, are ineligible for membership because they are too far away from the rail line or too sparsely populated to pay membership costs.
DART is still working on policies under which outlying areas could have access to the system and the cost they would pay. Besides the Texoma agency, at least four others are preparing to tie into DART.
The Trinity Express, the heavy rail line between Dallas and Fort Worth, has an agreement with nine cities along its route that requires them to pay $775,000 a year to help defray operating costs.
Lyons said that arrangement "could be useful" as a model for DART in dealing with non-member cities, but it is not necessarily the one the agency will adopt.
Hammonds said he hopes the policy DART adopts will distinguish between cities that chose not to join and those that were ineligible for membership -- an issue that he feels could affect the cost of access to the train stations.
Lyons said the issue of access is forcing DART and the entire region to "look more globally at transit solutions," including the possibility of creating a single agency to serve Dallas, Fort Worth and an expanded area of North Texas.
This bus from Sherman got turned away because they aren't a DART "member," meaning they don't cough up thousands in tax dollars annually to subsidize the stupid rail line. DART's idiotic government bureaucracy would rather deny busloads of potential paying passengers than let them ride and actually collect some fares on the stupid thing simply because they rode in on a bus that isn't part of the DART bureaucracy.
And to make the matter even more laughable along comes the Houston Chronicle, which has NEVER seen a rail car or transit agency it didn't like. Apparently to them the fact that some idiot bureaucrats at DART are sending potential customers home for failing to meet some bureaucratic regulation is "proof" that rail is so popular there isn't room on the trains to ride the thing.
That has to be a pretty expensive per passanger mile subsidiy.
That has to be a pretty expensive per passanger mile subsidiy.
Actually, its not. The TRE carries someting like 7000 riders per day for about 255 workdays. Those $775,000 payments are quite low per passenger or per passenger mile.
If you do ever get curious, you might consider comparing the cost of building and maintaining an expressway (including interest and lost property tax revenue), versus the revenue it creates through gas taxes based on vehicle miles travelled on the road.
As a hint, I'll note the national "cost recovery ratio" of expressways hovers around 10-20%. Most of the gas tax revenue is created by the 75% of vehicle miles travelled on local roads, which are paid for out of your property taxes to your county and municipality, and not the gas tax. High property taxes subsidize low gas taxes on heavy users of the roadways such as truckers and travelling salesmen. And even at the state level, huge amounts of general fund revenue, especially sales taxes it seems, are used to prop up the low gas tax rate. If you shop a lot in a state like Virginia, you are subsidizing heavy users of the expressways.
A toll rate of about 5 cents per mile average is needed for breakeven conditions on an expressway for cars, with a much higher multiple of 5 to 10 times that amount needed for heavy trucks.
As a final bit of food for thought, the freight railways pay nearly $500,000,000 in property taxes on around 200,000 miles of rail lines. The Interstate and National highway system is of a comperable mileage. Ergo, municipalities are losing out on $500,000,000 in property taxes that must be made up by you and I on our houses and businesses because roadways are publicly held and not taxed.
This is hardly a unique situation. You might look into the mega billion dollar stakes out in the San Francisco Bay area over what is the proper buy-in amount for new counties to join the BART system and enjoy use of the 80 some miles of system built previously buy the money of original three counties.
There's always chislers trying to freeload off the hardwork and money of others. Its surprising to see someone with your handle support such welfarist tendencies.
has a lot of info & opinion refuting the "urban sprawl," "Lite rail/mass transit" and related items...
And more here:
-Independence Institute--"Rights" Research
Light Rail- Boon or Boondoggle? The Quest for the Holy Rail....
The difference is that the freight railroad rights-of-way are OWNED BY THE RAILROADS, the highway rights-of-way are OWNED BY THE STATES. You want the states to tax themselves (or be taxed by local government)?? Sounds ridiculous to me.
If you want mass transit, buy buses. Light rail is an expensive fiasco, crammed down our throats by the "no-sprawl" greenies/socialists.
I did so recently for a study on Houston roads. Freeways beat rail in every case. Whereas almost all of the freeway costs are regained in the totals raised through gas taxes, vehicle licensing, and toll roads where applicable, rail falls far short in the ammount regained by user fares. Highway beat rail in practically every single case hands down. If you'd like, I'll pull the stats for you on our line.
To the contrary. They ARE paying to use those facilities when they buy a rail ticket. What kind of mode they use to get to the station BEFORE they purchase that ticket and BEFORE they use any of its facilities is not a matter of properly seated concern for the rail operators. Essentially all this ammounts to is that (1) denying them access is IDIOCY because it turns away what would have been paying customers and (2) the fact that a bus was turned away for bureaucratic reasons does not prove that the rail line has too many passengers, as the Chronicle contends.
You can't have something for nothing.
Yeah, that's why DART charges its riders fares to use their lines. They have no business telling bus operators that they can't drop off potential passengers on a public street near the station, because those people do not become rail users until they enter the station, whereupon they pay their own user fee for the "service" by purchasing a ticket.
Its not right to expect the core Dallas area to shoulder the burden of paying for the increased mobility of people from a much wider region who are freeloading on the inner area's financial sacrifice.
First off, those people are not "freeloading" - they buy tickets like any other rider and recieve the exact same service as any other rider. Second, that the people of Dallas proper and in the DART system have to subsidize rail so outrageously beyond the revenue raised by its users is reason in itself that the project should either be shut down or privatized. Third, the marginal cost of accomodating an additional passenger on a train that is already travelling to a given destination whether that passenger rides or not is negligable, meaning DART actually BENEFITS from the ticket purchases of those people being dropped off by the bus.
The purpose of a commuter rail line is, above all else, to sell tickets and carry passengers who buy those tickets. Sending potential passengers home because they rode to the station on the wrong bus is stupidity of an unimaginable level to be expected only from the ranks of a poorly managed and heavily subsidized government bureaucracy...in other words, exactly what DART is.
No, as I do not support them. You on the other hand apparently do, as tax-subsidized rail itself is a system of welfare. In essence it does nothing more than provide a welfare subsidized transit service to a few users at the burden of a greater many non-users.
For the record, I would have little problem with a rail system that was cost effective and did not require heavy taxpayer funded subsidies to operate. Who knows, I may even be willing to tolerate a slight deficit. But in reality, rail systems all over the nation are a wasteful mess of millions in taxpayer subsidies. Part of it has to do with the fact that most of them are run by bureaucratic government agencies rather than government-franchised transit companies. This is the case with the 7 mile line we're getting right now in Houston. To give you an idea of how wasteful and costly it is, that 7 mile line's annual operating expenses alone are set to exceed the entire operating expenses for Houston's 90 mile streetcar system in 1923 when the latter is adjusted for inflation to current dollars. Back then rail ran a slight deficit, but was run by a franchised company that for the most part tried to keep within a budget. Now we're getting the exact same system on 1/10th the distance for a price that is higher than the original, all thanks to METRO - the government agency that is building and will operate the thing. And, as always, the $13.5 million annual deficit their operation will run is picked up by the rest of us, the taxpayers, even though 90% of us will never use the thing.
Fine with me. Privately owned tollways and even quasi-public ones run far better than government owned and taxpayer subsidized light rail lines.
I did so recently for a study on Houston roads. Freeways beat rail in every case. Whereas almost all of the freeway costs are regained in the totals raised through gas taxes, vehicle licensing, and toll roads where applicable, rail falls far short in the ammount regained by user fares. Highway beat rail in practically every single case hands down. If you'd like, I'll pull the stats for you on our line.
I find this hard to believe. First of all, a new freeway does not produce vehilce registration revenue. Nor do new FREEways produce toll revenue. How many vehicles per day are going down each mile of freeway? 100,000? 200,000?
Each 100,000 vehicles per roadway mile @ 20 mpg average @$0.40 tax per gallon is just $2000 per day in revenue, or $730,000 per year. At a 20 year roadway life, that produces a total $14.6 million dollars of gas tax revenue. Urban and suburban freeways are today going for costs of $50-$100 million per mile exclusive of major interchanges, bridges, etc. (rural and exurban freeways are less, but have far less traffic too, so less gas tax revenue). To this must be added the annual maintenance and police costs for the road (grass cutting, pothole repair, restripping, plowing, salting, appurtenance repair, signage updates, etc.), the lost property taxes, which must now be made up by other taxpayers (@ $1,000,000 per acre valuation and a millage of say 20 per thousand, and perhaps a minimum of 20 acres of land per mile, that's $400,000 per annum in lost taxes), and the interest costs on amortizing the bonds used to finance the construction (@4%, that's $2,000,000 per year for a $50,000,000 per mile freeway). A proper analysis would also include the opportunity cost of paying that annual amortization. Assuming $1 million per year for maintenance and police, we've got annual revenue of around $750,000 to 1.5 million vs. costs of $3.4 million or $5.4 million with opportunity costs.
The gas tax works out to aroun $0.02 per mile. Self financing toll roads like the turnpikes in some states charge about $0.05-$0.10 per mile for cars and much more for trucks for shorter distance passages. These roads do not include the complex interchanges most freeways do have at major intersections. These interchanges can cost $250 million each and more, while major bridges can easily cost billions, as will the new Wilson bridge on the Capital Beltway across the Potomac. This suggests a self-financing expressway system would cost drivers a minimum of 150% more than what they presently experience for lineal distance, with extra charges for bridges and major interchanges.
The freeway system is built upon the backs of people who do not drive on it - the people on the local roads and toll highways, and property tax payers in general. In this sense, it is little different than the mass transit systems you are decrying.
Urban personal transportation has never been a paying proposition. The first subways and trolleys were generally not successfull financial enterprises, which is why the City's were involved from the beginning. Similarly, the private sector simply did not come forth with modern roadways to improve our mobility in developed areas (unlike rural roads, which were built as private toll roads) because the capital costs are so enormous.
150 years of experience have shown that there are just two sectors of the transportation industry that private capital is willing to take on - freight railroading and pipelines. Everything else is socialized, and is going to remain that way. That said, the question is really how is public money best raised and spent on this endeavor?
Gee, the Houston Comical has yet another in a series of articles touting 18th century trains over 21st century cars...
The government has no more business running a railroad than it does running a motor freight line. But providing planning, capital, and maintenance for rail infrastructure is no more "socialistic" than providing the same for road infrastructure. Without government support (including funding), all forms of mass transport -- road, rail, water, and air -- would be unable to operate.
America needs high-speed intercity freight and passenger rail -- the sooner, the better. Projects like Gov. Perry's Trans-Texas Corridor system are the first step in the right direction.
You missed this one line in the original article:
and other cities, such as Sherman, are ineligible for membership
This looks like a catch-22 situation. The Sherman system isn't eligible for membership in DART, but they can't use the facilities until they become members.
That's not necessarily so. New freeways can and do help the construction of new subdivisions, which in turn draw new residents who, as a result of a move, may be inclined to purchase a new automobile to suit their mobility needs. That aside, the vehicular registration alone, whether it increases or remains constant, provides a solid revenue-generating device that applies to users of roadways, which in turn generates a large ammount of regained roadway funding.
Nor do new FREEways produce toll revenue.
Again, that is not necessarily so. What are to be freeways are often constructed by issuing municipal revenue bonds to be repaid by user fees in the early years of their existence. To collect those fees they put in toll booths, which operate until the bond is paid off, and then the road enters into operation as a freeway. In the end you're left with a self-financed freeway construction project.
How many vehicles per day are going down each mile of freeway? 100,000? 200,000? Each 100,000 vehicles per roadway mile @ 20 mpg average @$0.40 tax per gallon is just $2000 per day in revenue, or $730,000 per year. At a 20 year roadway life, that produces a total $14.6 million dollars of gas tax revenue.
Now that's an interesting little financial game you're playing. Too bad it doesn't add up in reality. Why don't you try looking at the real numbers, as in the actual gas revenues collected and actual expenditures on freeway construction?
Here are the 2000 figures. Total revenues raised by taxes, licensing, and user fees totalled $101.5 billion. Maintenance and administration cost $59 billion while about $65 billion was spent as new construction capital. That leaves you with about $22 billion in net shortfalls, or less than a cent losses per passenger mile travelled on highways. By comparison, $1.8 billion was spent on light rail in the same year with revenue returns of only $200 million on that. That translates into $1.23 in losses for every passenger mile travelled on rail.
To this must be added the annual maintenance and police costs for the road (grass cutting, pothole repair, restripping, plowing, salting, appurtenance repair, signage updates, etc.)
Yeah, and by 2000's figures, annual administative costs were barely half the regained revenue from taxes, licensing, and user fees. Absent new construction, there would have been a $40 billion surplus.
the lost property taxes
This is just a guess on my part, but I would venture to say that the loss in property taxes caused when a new roadway takes up a small strip of right of way or frontage area are negligable when compared to the gain in revenue from the property value increases along that new roadway. Freeways make new land easily accessable, which leads to development. When land is developed, evaluations go up and the property tax base increases.
Assuming $1 million per year for maintenance and police, we've got annual revenue of around $750,000 to 1.5 million vs. costs of $3.4 million or $5.4 million with opportunity costs.
That's a lot of assuming on your part, but as I just demonstrated, there's a big difference between your assumptions and the figures as they actually happened in 2000.
These roads do not include the complex interchanges most freeways do have at major intersections.
Really? Cause the toll road network in my city has some of the most developed interchanges of any road in our highway network. And it operates on budget without difficulty. Once again, you assume a lot of stuff that simply doesn't happen in reality.
The freeway system is built upon the backs of people who do not drive on it
Nonsense. Most drivers in an urban area use a freeway at some time or another on a frequent basis, even if not daily. While it is true that there are some costs associated with road construction, they are minimal in comparison to the alternative. In 2000 it was less than a cent in net costs per passenger mile travelled on freeways. Compare that to light rail, which is truly a system built upon the backs of people who do not ride it - our taxes paid $1.23 per passenger mile of rail use in 2000 for a portion of the population that is so small it can be considered negligable in transportation measures.
Urban personal transportation has never been a paying proposition.
Much to the contrary. Between the 1880's and 1915 many cities across the nation had financially successful private transit companies with city franchises. Ours in Houston operated on budget for most of this period, save some business dispute-induced shortfalls in some years. From about 1915 to the 1930's they continued operating streetcars on a budget that was either met or fell slightly short. In the 30's and 40's finances on rail dropped, so they switched to busses which continued as a financially viable enterprise until about 1970.
The first subways and trolleys were generally not successfull financial enterprises
Again, that was not the case at all in Houston. Save business dispute shortfalls, the first big financial hits did not occur until 1915 when taxi cabs became a competitor. The city responded by regulating the taxis into non-existence, and rail continued on or near budget for another 15 years. Try again.
which is why the City's were involved from the beginning.
Houston got rail in 1874. Aside from the city giving the rail company a franchise to build on its streets, no real government assistance came until 1915, over 40 years later. Try again.
That said, the question is really how is public money best raised and spent on this endeavor?
Fair enough of a question. And as I have noted, highways are statistically preferable to rail in practically every case. My additional position is that this could be improved upon by permitting private and quasi-public highway projects when and where it is viable (i.e. toll roads, auction of certain right of ways for private fee-based roadways etc.)
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