Transit Funding vs. Other Public Projects

Atlanta GA - Susan Gast had a very interesting article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution regarding how the funding of public transit is viewed compared to funding for other government projects.

She is correct in her assumption that public transit operating funding is dimly viewed by politicians. In her article she questions why politicians often say that public transit doesn't benefit everyone so it shouldn't be supported while items like parks, roads and other infrastructure are (and let's not forget the $10,000 taxpayer funded BBQ pit at a senior center if your in Pennsylvania).

She does miss this fact though: Funding for transit capital projects which do little beside raise the cost of providing service is quite easy to obtain and politicians fight to get in line to hand that money out.

A big part of the answer she seeks comes from political legacy. Build a park, create a new highway and the politician, after they bite the dust and often before, can get a shiny brass plaque with their name on it for all of eternity proclaiming they were the ones responsible for this park or that road, etc.

Her example of Gwinnett County Commissioner Mike Beaudreau's comments reminded me of many politicians I have come across. They all have the same disdain for transit and fail to understand its benefits. They only embrace transit if they think it can further their political career or shut up some noisy detractors of their work.

The excuse that public transit is expensive and used by few is just that, an excuse. I pay for schools I don't use and know many others that don't have children to use the public school system but we still have to fork over money for the indoctrination centers. I pay for roads in the boondocks that are lucky they have 5 cars a day on them and I know I'll never have to use that road. I know many that haven't been to a public park in decades, including myself. Yet these all get funded with a smile by the politicians who proclaim "everyone benefits". Hardly.

A viable public transit system is an important part to the city economy. Without a good system, you will lose business. Not just a few lost sales from people that can't get to town to buy from the stores but entire businesses that pack up and move to somewhere that their capital is treated better. Far more people benefit from a viable transit system than just those that ride. Politicians are either too stupid to understand that fact or so dedicated to creating something they can hang a brass plaque on with their name that they ignore it.

Susan's article is very thought provoking and brings up an excellent point. After reading it, I was already going through the list of projects that my local and state politicians are rushing to give money to and very few of the favored projects benefited everyone. In fact, many were self-serving and benefited only the politicians and a handful of their contributors.

The "it must benefit everyone" argument is always applied to operating funding for transit by the politicians and rarely to anything else they rush out to give money to. While public transit does need to do a lot of house cleaning to make itself more efficient, it benefits far more people, including those that don't use the system, than the neighborhood taxpayer funded meth clinic or a new taxpayer funded road into a private housing development.

PAT is still finding new ways to waste money

Pittsburgh PA - A columnist piece in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review really should be a news item. Columnist Eric Heyl informed the readers on Friday that the Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAT) is still finding new ways to waste money and offering feeble attempts at justifying the waste.

What is it this time? Another attempt at nickel and diming the money needed to run service so it can be spent on anything but providing service. PAT placed an ad in the Pittsburgh City Paper for $1,400 which is little more than political butt kissing using money that is needed to run the service.

The full page ad declared in bold face letters "THANKS TO THE LEADERS IN HARRISBURG, WE CAN KEEP YOU MOVING."

It then goes on with "We'd like to thank Gov. Rendell, the lawmakers in Harrisburg, and all those who have worked together on the funding crisis," the ad states. "Their hard work and vision have made it possible for us to continue to offer our riders the dependable transit they deserve."

PAT's spinmeister, Judi McNeil, went into high speed spin mode to defend the ad saying that it was to publicly thank the politicians for their efforts in passing the transportation bill. She was also quick to add that the money for the ad came from advertising revenues and not taxpayer money.

I'm sorry Judi, the ad is a waste of money and shows exactly what I have been saying for years. PAT will find any excuse to spend money on anything but providing service. These politicians don't need to be thanked for doing their job. The same could have been done for free at the PAT press conference where they announced the funding deal. Instead, PAT just had to find a way to waste more money so they went out and bought a newspaper ad in a free tabloid style paper that is used more for lining bird cages and paper training the family puppy than it is used for reading.

Also Judi, that advertising revenue is supposed to go toward the operating fund. Whether you think so or not, the taxpayer still has to foot the bill for that useless advertisement since that is $1,400 more the taxpayer must sink into the system to keep service on the street.

While $1,400 isn't even considered chump change in the grand scheme of the total amount needed to run PAT, it clearly shows how the mind set of waste is ingrained into the transit system's administration. This is just like the $700 or so worth of dinosaur books PAT bought for the board of director's children several years ago. It is something to simply waste money on and does absolutely nothing to keep service on the street.

PAT earns itself yet another Lance for continuing to waste money and I'm tossing in another Lance for PAT's mouthpiece, Judi McNeil, for trying to once again defend the waste.

Pennsylvania eliminates senior ride restrictions

Johnstown PA - The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat has a story regarding a change in the Pennsylvania State law regarding the times Seniors are allowed to ride for free on the buses.

Prior to the law changing, seniors could not use their transit identification card during rush hours. The CamTran general manager, Rose Lucey-Noll indicated that was to spare larger operations the problem of over-crowding during rush hour. Actually she is partially wrong. The original law was set up in part for that but it also dealt with the payout to the transit systems from the State Lottery fund which funds the free ride program for Seniors.

For small systems, such as CamTran in Johnstown, it won't have much of an effect on rush hour ridership and is a welcome change since they don't have much of a rush hour to start with. Now with larger systems, it may create a small problem.

That problem will be that larger systems may still restrict travel times for seniors using the transit identification card because of rush hour crowds. This will create unneeded hassle for the drivers that have to enforce company procedure while the law has no restrictions.

Overall, eliminating the restriction on senior riding makes sense. Currently in both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, there is the "third rush hour" which consists of seniors trying to get where they are going before the real rush hour starts in the afternoon. This mini-rush hour has created some problems as both PAT and SEPTA still are running in off-peak mode. By eliminating the restrictions, that mini-rush hour will disappear and the crowd will be scattered out. Seniors, for the most part, will tend to avoid rush hour travel anyway due to the more crowded conditions.

While this change in the law won't bring in any more money from the State Lottery fund because the formula used to calculate how much each transit system receives will not change, it will be beneficial to the many seniors that depend on transit service to get around.

Chastain insists his plan will work

Kansas City MO - Clay Chastain, the former KC resident that now resides in Virginia but still meddles in Kansas City affairs, insists his rail plan for KC is workable.

Once again however, Chastain pinned his belief about his rail plan on hopes and dreams rather than reality. At a meeting between Chastain and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of Kansas City, Chastain did little to prove that his plan was workable beside suggesting more local taxes be imposed to pay for it.

Chastain told the committee he expected the pie of funding for public transportation to get bigger. “I think the pendulum of the federal government is swinging in the right direction,” Chastain said of the Democratic shift in Congress.

In my experience, the Democrats talk a good game but fail to deliver on their lip service. KC won't see any more money under a government controlled by Democrats than it received under a government controlled by Republicans.

You can't build and fund anything just on the hope that someone in the government will take pity and hand you a big check to pay for it. Chastain just can't seem to understand that simple point. He wants KC to jump to the head of the line and not have to follow any rules or regulations that the rest of the country must follow.

Chastain reluctantly agreed that you can't decimate the bus system and expect the Feds to pony up the money. However, that won't stop him for pushing for his personal legacy line. Another threat of an expensive lawsuit was also issued by Chastain at the meeting if he doesn't get his rail line with gondola ride built as he wants it, proving he doesn't care if the bus system does get destroyed in the process.

Clay Chastain's rail proposal is the perfect example of a personal legacy project that he wants everyone else to pay for. It's his way or he'll sue to get his way.

Environmental Impact of Light Rail

Seattle WA - An article on the Crosscut web site brings to light an interesting slant to the rail debate. The environmental impact of building a light rail line.

The writer, Emory Bundy, does a rather good job in pointing out that building a rail line has a much more serious impact on the environment than the pro-rail and environmentalist crowd would have you believe. Remember, rail is sold to the public as being good for the environment but the environmental costs are completely ignored.

Bundy states: "As an offset, Sound Transit claims it will save 14,000 tons of CO2 annually by running light rail trains on electricity, sparing the region emissions that otherwise would be generated by automotive traffic. Even if granted, it would take 90 years from completion of the line to break even on the energy transaction. If Sound Transit should manage to cut tunnel-related greenhouse emissions in half, by aggressive use of hydro electricity and human labor, an implausible proposition, it still would take 45 years to break even."

That's a long time to just break even on the environmental carbon footprint but Bundy failed to mention that even in the time frame given, the line still wouldn't break even on the environmental costs. Why? Even taking the shorter of the two times, 45 years, the line would have been rebuilt several times over. Each rebuild making more of a carbon impact and adding more time before the line breaks even on it's carbon footprint. The number also doesn't take into consideration the day to day maintenance on the line which also will add to the carbon footprint. In short, the Sound Transit extension will never pay for itself environmentally but will continually add carbon debt that will never be paid off. And no, buying carbon credits from Ozone Al won't cover it.

Actually, this whole carbon footprint nonsense is just that, nonsense. I am pointing this out the way I am simply to show people that rail isn't as environmentally friendly as proponents like to make it out to be. Those who are rushing out to buy "carbon offsets" (I could do a whole series on that scam) for a trip to the store will be shocked to see that the environmentally friendly rail line they take to work isn't as eco-friendly as they thought. As green is one of the big selling points for expensive rail projects, the public needs to understand that it isn't as green as the proponents say it is.

Getting back to Bundy's article. Bundy should have just left the article as a relatively decent informative piece. Instead he turned a good and informative article into a joke by going off in the last third of the article about how everybody should be riding bicycles to work. Over the years, I've worked next to people that biked to work and let me tell you, they stunk from their sweat in the summer, looked like a drowned rat if it rained and on some occasions, looked like they stopped off to do some mud wrestling on the way in. I'd rather take the bus.

While Bundy does miss a lot of points such as not comparing the impact of road building to rail as well as making assumptions on demographics, he brings up some valid points. Rail won't really help reduce the problems that its proponents say it will. In Seattle's case, hydro-electric power helps but in other parts of the country, all rail does is move the pollution from one location to another; namely to a coal-fired power plant in an already near capacity electrical power grid.

I could go on for days as each item in Bundy's article brings up two or more items that need to be covered. Slapping a rail line down isn't as simple as it may seem. The same goes for a busway or highway as well. Rail however, has more of a direct negative financial impact to it due to its much higher cost and as shown by Bundy, rail also has much more of a negative environmental impact than the general public is led to believe.

Beside the major distraction of his bike speech at the end, Bundy's article is pretty good. It brings up some good and valid points about the environmental impact of rail that are rarely mentioned. Many of these things I have been saying all along but there was some new information as well as a new way of applying what I already knew to better counter the pro-rail environmental rhetoric.

Tacky Trolleys proposed

Winston-Salem NC - Winston-Salem is considering adding night time, weekend trolley service (with the tacky trolleys) to the city. The trolley service, tried once before during lunch hours and fizzled, is stated to help drum up business during the evening hours as well as spur the night life of the city.

Normally with such a news story, I would just read it, roll my eyes and forget it but a comment by the Art Barnes, General Manager of the Winston-Salem Transit Authority (WSTA), caught my attention. That comment was this: “just because something doesn’t work in one venue doesn’t mean you should give up on it."

Upon reading that comment, I immediately thought of all the waste done by transit systems and city leaders across America based on that very philosophy. Try, try and try again until the idea can be force fit into the fabric of the city just doesn't spell good fiscal management nor does it spell success.

I like Art Barnes and have corresponded with him in the past but his comment is a philosophy that I see practiced almost daily and I must disagree with him. The philosophy he states usually fails with costly results. The philosophy is almost ingrained into the thinking of public officials who give little thought about spending taxpayer money.

Just like with my local transit system who mastered the technique of trying to get a failed strategy to work and literally crippled the operation due to the excessive costs, the Winston-Salem trolley plan is similar. It is a plan that has failed in the past and should be left to rest in peace.

What we hear though is that "such trolley services have been successful in other cities". Wow, then let's jump on the bandwagon! What works in one city doesn't mean it will work in another city if tried. A point often ignored and ignored in this case as well. Lunchtime trolley operations work in other cities but failed miserably in Winston-Salem.

If the venture is funded strictly through private money, it's a whole new ball game but it won't be. What will happen is that more and more public money will have to be sunk into the plan if it gets up and running. The WSTA will most likely end up on the short end of the financial stick as money that should go for regular WSTA service on it's many routes will be siphoned off to pay for the night time tacky trolley operation that will not even come close to being cost effective.

The comment toward the end about extending the proposed service to colleges and having them pay for it is laughable as well. Oh you may get them to pay a small portion of the service but nowhere close to what is needed to run the service. Colleges will insist on free service for the students as well for a fraction of the actual cost of the service.

I say, let a proven failure rest in peace. Resurrecting a tacky trolley operation on the public dime, when it has failed before, will do nothing to improve business at the bars and clubs nor will it keep the roads free of drivers that have had too much to drink.

PAT's costs are over budget already

Pittsburgh PA - The Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAT) is struggling to come up with excuses on the much touted (by PAT at least) North Shore Connector rail project. The project, which just recently started a few weeks ago, is already positioned to go through half of its $9 million dollar contractor contingency fund due to unexpected problems.

The totally unneeded $425 million project, pushed for by former PAT Executive Director, Paul "Captain Scuttles" Skoutelas, will connect Downtown Pittsburgh to the North Shore across the river. That, boys and girls, is less than a mile walk.

Overall, PAT has a $19 million dollar contingency fund for overruns. $9 million of that is for contractor overruns. Considering that the work just started and over $4 million has had to be drawn against the contingency fund already, prepare of one hell of an expensive project.

It is obvious that PAT's contractors, engineering and consultants failed to do their job. Soft ground? Ummm, why didn't you take core samples before you started work. What a bunch of idiots.

What will really make this North Shore Connector a disaster in the making is that no more Federal, state or local money will be pumped into the project. The public and political backlash from the lies of PAT's management have cost them dearly. When the plan was being pushed and even right up until work started, PAT claimed everyone wanted it. Management waved studies and polls around which weren't worth the paper they were printed on as they were totally fabricated. The truth is that only PAT wanted this subway extension. The public didn't want it, politicians were against it but yet the false studies and polls were accepted by the FTA for funding the project. The FTA stated earlier in the year that they wouldn't have approved the project had they known the truth which was that the politicians and public didn't want this project done due to PAT's financial crisis (which PAT officials also lied to the Feds about).

If this project runs through its $19 million contingency fund, work will have to cease regardless of how far along it is. Given that most every transit project out there goes way over budget, I'm projecting that when all is said and done, the North Shore Boondoggle will go from a $425 million project to a minimum of a $600 million dollar project. Where will that additional money come from? You got it, PAT officials will cry and whine about it before punishing the riders once again by slashing existing service and raising fares even though they can't use the money from that to pay off the project due to different funding types (but they'll punish the riders anyway). They must complete it or the Feds will want their money back on the project.

By the time that Steve Bland arrived at PAT in 2007, it was too late to stop the project without losing millions of dollars through having to pay contractors, engineers and consultants for something never delivered. PAT still should have stopped it. It would have been far less costly for the cash strapped agency to cancel it than to go ahead with it.

In the end, Paul "Captain Scuttles" Skoutelas will get his personal legacy line that he pushed so hard for. Ironically it will not be the legacy he wants but a new legacy. One of excessive greed, mismanagement and plain incompetence. Congratulations Paul, you've earned it!

Audit on PAT offers no surprises

Pittsburgh PA - A county audit ordered by Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato showed no surprises when it came to the Port Authority of Allegheny County's (PAT) fiscal picture. Waste and inefficiency in the transit system are still present and the previous administration spent money like a drunken sailor that just came in from months at sea.

The Allegheny County Controller, Mark Patrick Flaherty, also compared PAT to 11 other comparable transit systems and PAT. While the names of the systems weren't released (I am trying to find out), PAT finished up at the bottom in most all of the categories.

Flaherty traced some of the agency's current financial woes to its "Ride Gold" program, which the authority retired in 2006. I have been saying that since the inception of the program in 1999. Former PAT head, Paul "Captain Scuttles" Skoutelas and his marketing guru Smilin' Deb followed the golden Liberal rule when the marketing program initially bombed. That rule was to just throw good money after bad and they did just that by ramping up the marketing campaign and pumping millions more into it even though it was a proven failure.

While PAT has been saddled with many long term costs over the years, waste and inefficient operations have become ingrained into the culture of the system. That is quickly draining the money needed to run service. Many things that PAT management feels are mandatory to do the job really are luxuries that can be done away with. They have management positions in place which literally were created to give someone a title along with additional perks.

The geography of the area also helps to increase costs. In order to service the various communities along a major corridor, you literally need multiple routes that converge once they begin funneling themselves into the city through the ever narrowing geographical corridors. Other cities don't have this issue but the cure many are suggesting is to turn PAT's operation into a mirror of what other cities run. That won't work well here and fails every time it has been tried.

Current PAT CEO, Steve Bland, is working on trying to eliminate some of the waste but has often focused on the wrong things. Cutting service and hiking fares isn't the way to do it. What is needed it so overhaul the administration, lay down new work rules for any new employee that is hired so that they aren't covered by the current contracts that are bleeding PAT dry but a newer contract that is more fiscally responsible as well as going back to the basics of providing service.

While Steve Bland feels the critical audit report shows PAT is on the right track now, he's wrong. Flaherty stated cutting service should be the last thing to be done yet that was among the first things Mr. Bland did. What Bland has done is help set PAT up to continue the downward trend by hacking 15% of the service before cleaning up the management's wasteful ways.

A job interview I went on once many years ago at PAT said it all. I will remember these words until the day I die. "You know too much about how transit should be run. We need someone that doesn't understand so they can be trained to do it our way".

Another flawed rail study?

Charlotte NC - Critics of Charlotte's light rail line charge that a study done by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) and commissioned by the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce is skewed to favor rail. The report, used to bolster public support for a controversial tax, has critics of Charlotte's rail operation and tax to support it questioning the fairness as well as the accuracy of it.

Questions surrounding the study and report center around the fact that it was commissioned by a group favorable to the rail plan and tax. Records indicate that the President of the Chamber of Commerce, Bob Morgan, may have influenced how the rail study was handled by the UNCC.

The UNCC is investigating the matter but it's like in Washington DC when politicians police their own members. They won't find much that they did wrong. Even if researchers purposely ignored certain facts, the study was more than likely handled properly within the realm of the UNCC policy.

The policy prohibits "serious deviation" from commonly accepted research practices, including fabrication, falsification or plagiarism. Even ignoring key data and cherry picking the results would not fall within the grasp of the policy. Only making up their own data in lieu of gathering the data properly, deliberately changing results or stealing results from another source would violate the policy. I don't believe that happened here.

What I believe may have happened was that key data was ignored and not even looked at as well as results being cherry-picked to create at report that the people, who commissioned the report, wanted to see. The UNCC did nothing wrong beside possibly not looking at all information and not including information that didn't meet the study criteria. Research is like statistics, data can be viewed and even ignored in a variety of ways while not violating any ethics policy.

This isn't the first time such a thing happened. Studies generally tend to slant toward the views of whoever commissioned the study, regardless of who does the study. This is why I tend to question all the various studies that are being waved around by various groups and government agencies. The studies to believe lean more toward those studies that end up being buried by the groups that commissioned them as it doesn't say what they want it to say.

Personally speaking, the various studies being done for anything and everything these days aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Few produced are done without being commissioned by some group that is paying for the study to be done and setting the study criteria. Of course the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce will get a report favorable to their position when they are the ones setting the criteria of the study. I would bet that if the rail critics commissioned a study and set the criteria, they'd get one that supports their views.

Using commissioned studies to sway popular opinion has become a big business these days. Few are accurate and even fewer are non-biased. While the UNCC study will hold up to the internal investigation since it most likely didn't violate any internal policy, it is still a highly questionable report given the fact that it was a commissioned study which had the study criteria set by the group paying for it.

Someone woke up to the RTD FasTracks boondoggle

Avarda CO - Denver suburbanites are beginning to take notice that the RTD's FasTracks program was over-hyped, full of lies and is costing them plenty. An opinion piece in the Mile High News by Tom Graham expresses many of the concerns that I have long held about rail and many other public transit projects.

Graham appeared to be a supporter of the FasTracks project to place new rail lines in the suburbs that would connect to Denver. Today he calls it a boondoggle. Why the change? The Utopian facade of rail is starting to fall apart with rapidly escalating costs, promises that weren't fulfilled, total lies and plans to take even more money from the residents to pay for it all.

RTD planners originally touted the project as a relief to the mounting traffic congestion in the Denver area. I could have told Mr. Graham from day one that reason was just spin to garner support by the traffic weary residents. There isn't one study, that anyone can produce, which shows rail will have a significant effect on the reduction of traffic. In most cases it is just the opposite and traffic congestion increases after a rail line opens for passenger traffic.

As Graham feels his wallet getting lighter by the minute, he has woken up to the fact that rail isn't the answer for Denver, or for many areas for that matter. He states that Avarda residents are already paying $2,600 each per year and not even one train is running. He fully expects that amount to increase and I agree.

He then complains that what is happening isn't what the people voted for. Again, I have to agree but also add this; What did he expect to happen when government is involved? What the voter wants rarely coincides with what they actually end up with. The Utopian vision painted by the supporters makes it easy to say "I want that" and cast a vote in favor of the plan. The reality is that what is presented is just spin. The ballot initiatives are written to encourage a yes vote as well.

Reality is like a slap in the face with a dead fish but the voters in Avarda and other Denver communities got exactly what they voted for because they didn't do their homework and find out more. Just listening to the RTD, politician and activist spin without bothering to take the time to look at the opposite side of the issue just played right into their hands. It's exactly what they were counting on.

Tom Graham has nailed the situation in the Denver area pretty good. It's just too bad he didn't see the light before now since it's too late to do anything about it. It's an expensive lesson that too many people learn after its too late simply because they believe the Utopian spin that rail is the Saviour and everything will be fine once a rail line is slapped down.