The Great Train Robbery circa 1998

The Tampa Tribune's Misleading Rail "Taxatorial" Inaccuracies

"Cities and counties are finding it less costly to build rail lines than to depend totally on streets and highways…. Soon, cities without rail will be seen as either backward or politically inept."

-- The Tampa Tribune, editorial, Dec. 28, 1997

Vs.

The Facts

"The proponents of rail often mislead decision makers and the public by claiming non-existent advantages…. Left unchallenged, these arguments have gradually bored their way into conventional wisdom. However, a close examination reveals that the rhetoric of rail tends to involve sweeping assertions, uneconomic thinking, and assumptions that range from difficult to impossible to verify."

-- The Reason Foundation, Ten Transit Myths, 1996

By: John F. Sugg

(Last of a two-part series)

January 11, 1998

Updated: 7.13.98

Updated: 1.6.05

There was a small – but very telling – drama Nov. 6 in Brandon. The federal government has decreed that before politicians can launch massive transportation projects, they must venture among the toiling masses and explain their plans to the people who will pay the freight. So, a brigade of bureaucrats took the good tidings of a commuter rail plan to a public meeting in east Hillsborough.

The transit plan included a recently added spur, running from Lumsden Road south to Bloomingdale Avenue. Along this line, planners envisioned high-density housing, often referred to as "trainominiums." It was to be the brave new world of the "New Urbanist's," an elitist movement that, according to Washington Post writer Joel Garreau, "would increase dramatically the real residential population … raise the gasoline tax by 300 percent … raise the price of automobiles enormously … limit movement completely … put enormous costs on parking."

Garreau, a prolific writer on the future of cities, said of the New Urbanists, whose philosophy is the underpinning of crusade to build rail transit systems, that they "would force Americans to live in a world that few now seem to value."

Brandon residents might not have heard of New Urbanism. But they know what kind of world and neighborhood they value.

Word of the planned rail extension spread among the Brandon neighborhoods, and one citizen activist, Les Seright, mailed 700 letters to his neighbors, people who had moved to the suburbs to escape the sort of high-density anthills planners now want to cram into their community.

About 250 angry taxpayers showed up. "It was tar and feather night for those rail guys," Seright recalls brightly.

The Bloomingdale spur will likely be pulled from the transit plans, a small victory for citizens. Unfortunately, the war has probably
already been lost.

Most people in Hillsborough County are blissfully unaware of the rail plans. The transit meetings usually attract only a few people, typically advocates of one side or the other. There are intermittent news reports, usually buried on inside pages, mostly about some minor threshold in the arcane process of transportation planning. And, an occasional Tampa Tribune editorial trumpets trains – and never, ever raises any skepticism about rail or notes that there is considerable national debate on the issue.

Certainly, many local citizens would be surprised, perhaps horrified, to learn that a small group of politicians and planning wonks already has committed Hillsborough to a rail system – something that will cost every county resident about $80 a year. That's a number based on enormously optimistic estimates of the train advocates; the real price tag almost certainly will be much, much higher.

The plan, pretty much engraved in stone, is chugging rapidly toward a March completion date. All aboard!

Last week, I told of Miami's experience with a rail system. Here are some comparisons with Tampa's plan:

In Dade County, the rail project was initially pitched as being a cheap transportation alternative because the major route would run along existing railroad right-of-way. In Hillsborough, exactly the same claim is being made.

Miami planners said traffic congestion would be measurably alleviated by rail. Projected ridership was pegged at a significant percentage of commuters. Planners dismissed the relationship between high population density and ridership as largely irrelevant. Ditto all of that in Hillsborough.

Dade’s Metrorail was supposed to be much more cost-efficient and energy efficient than building roads. Metrorail would dramatically reduce air pollution. Hillsborough's rail proponents are making the same claims.

What has transpired in Miami is a debacle that has brought the city national ridicule. Cost overruns were staggering. Fourteen years after Metrorail opened, only about 20 percent to 25 percent of the projected riders click through the turnstiles. Dade’s government faces a financial crisis, and a major contributor is the rail system.

The Miami experience is what we’re about to repeat here.

The national evidence against building rail projects is staggering. The most misleading justification for building "light rail" systems (essentially, 20^th Century versions of 19^th Century trolleys) is the supposed economic savings. Ed Crawford, a leader of Hillsborough's train efforts, has said that "typical new four-lane roads" cost $15 million to $25 million a mile to build, compared with $5 million a mile for rail.

Those numbers are vastly wrong on two counts.

First, with a road there is little operating cost. You build it, you fix potholes. With rail, huge public subsidies are needed year after year after year to pay for operations. In Hillsborough – again based on the rosy projections by officials – annual operating costs of a train would be about $46 million, and passengers would pay only about $16 million in fares. Add to that the annual cost of a feeder bus system ($20 million) and the projected yearly bill for the construction debt of the commuter rail ($31 million), and the deficit grows to more than $80 million each year. That sum would have to be paid through gas, sales or property taxes.

Second, and more important, there is no way that the plan being touted by Hillsborough Commissioner Ed Turanchik and county planners will be built for anywhere near $5 million a mile. A U.S. Department of Transportation study of 10 urban rail systems showed that only one came in under budget. Construction costs for the other nine ranged from 33 percent to 106 percent more than the original estimates.

Turanchik's guesstimate of the train system's capital cost is somewhat of a moving target. Most often quoted as saying it would cost $350 million, he told the St. Petersburg Times last March the price would be $259 million.

However, critics who have analyzed Turanchik's numbers point to a number of omissions.

A proposed four-mile track from downtown to Westshore would cost $95 million more than anticipated.

Doubling the bus fleet – any chance that the system has of working depends on a huge fleet of feeder vehicles – would add almost $50 million.

New stations, garages, rebuilding tracks and other costs bring the total to about $575 million.

But even that is likely a lowball estimate. The experience of other systems very similar to what is proposed in Hillsborough show that the costs are much closer to $15 million a mile. Seattle, for example, is building a 60-mile commuter light rail along an existing train corridor that will connect the city with Tacoma. The cost is just shy of $1 billion, or a little less than $17 million a mile.

The planned Hillsborough light rail system would stretch about 90 miles, from Lakeland to Odessa, South Tampa to Lutz – that it will top $1 billion is almost a dead certainty, if the experience of other cities holds true.

Other variables haven't been thought through.

The proposed train system would have more than 140 street crossings. Either traffic would be terribly disrupted every few minutes, including emergency vehicles, or millions more will be spent on bridges.

A final tab of $1.5 billion is a distinct possibility.

The projections of ridership are equally fungible. Train promoters at one time quoted the anticipated number of daily trips as high as 71,000 – a ludicrous figure compared with even Dade County, where the population is more than double that of Hillsborough yet only about 45,000 to 50,000 trips a day are tallied. More recently, rail planners have scaled back their forecasts to about 27,000 trips a day. That's not the same as 27,000 people using rail. Home to work is one trip. Back again is two.

Thus, maybe 10,000 to 15,000 people would use the rail each day – perhaps only a scant 1 percent of the population.

Do you believe even those ridership guesses? You shouldn't. An U.S. Department of Transportation study of nine commuter rail systems found that ridership fell below projections in every one of the cities, and only one achieved even half the predicted passenger levels.

"Forecasts are cheap and mysterious enough to most voters that agencies can manipulate forecasts with little risk of getting caught," states Ten Transit Myths, a 1996 policy study by the Reason Foundation.

If the current county budget and passenger estimates should miraculously come true, each trip would cost about $9.86, yet the fare would be only $1.75 – you and I pay the difference. If the system costs a more realistic figure, say $1 billion, each ride would be worth about $15.22 with, again, the ticket costing only $1.75. Such a deal!

Turanchik and his supporters point to what they say are public subsidies of cars to offset the criticism of rail. Sorry, but that doesn't work. Nationally, subsidies to motorists not offset by gasoline taxes work out to about $10.5 billion a year, or one-quarter of a penny per passenger mile. Meanwhile, urban transit costs not offset by fares result in annual subsidies of about $16.6 billion, $6 billion of which is paid by highway users. On a per-passenger-mile basis, the transit subsidy is roughly 150 times greater than that for cars.

But the problems for Hillsborough's plan are much easier to understand than statistical analyses.

First, people just won’t easily give up their cars. That's why social engineers such as the New Urbanists try to find ways to make driving very unpleasant. As an example, millions of dollars have been cut from local road funds to pay for rail studies. That traffic snarl you hit this morning may be serving two purposes – funds needed to fix it may have been diverted to rail, and it may soften you up to the prospect of a train ride.

Second, people just aren't packed tight enough into the county to make rail feasible. "Unless there are dramatic changes in density in Hillsborough County, the system won’t function at a level sufficient to produce benefits," says Steve Polzin, deputy director of the University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR). The whole concept of rail hinges on having very dense population centers. They just don’t exist around here. Tampa's downtown has about half the workers of the central business districts of most cities that have built rail. Most successful transit systems – rare phenomena that exist mostly in Europe's densely packed cities or urban hives such as Hong Kong – depend on having large numbers of people within walking distance of stations. That means housing densities on the order of 10 homes per acre. A look at a map of the Hillsborough plan shows that stations don’t even come close to serving a large portion of the population if the idea is to have people stroll to a station. And, as has been evident in the failure of one rail system after another, people resist the concept riding a bus to the train and then connecting with another bus to get where they're going.

Another nail in the coffin: Rail assumes that people want to get from the suburbs to downtown. Yet, studies show that for every such trip, there are two journeys from one suburban location to another. Hillsborough's planned rail doesn't address such travel patterns, and even doubling the bus fleet, as envisioned by the planners, wouldn't enable people to do what they do now and go where they want to go. You won’t be able to get there from here, at least if you take the train.

Other thoughts: Does rail have a serious impact on traffic? Nope.

Alan Altshuler, author of The Urban Transportation System, calculates that if transit ridership were doubled and the ridership gain came entirely from drivers who left their cars to ride transit, the number of vehicle miles traveled by car would decline by less than 3 percent. "Transit systems have for the most part added to costs … without attracting riders from cars," according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office.

Is mass transit energy-efficient or a boon to the environment? Again, nope and nope.

On average, 80 percent of the seats on public mass transit go empty – a real waste of resources – and it often consumes more energy to build a train system than any savings that result.

As for the environment, so few people give up their cars, there is no measurable impact on air quality from rail – cities such as Portland, Oregon, concede that in their impact studies.

Its interesting that local rail promoters often glorify Portland as the example of what Tampa should emulate. Sorry, but the proof just isn't there. Here are some facts:

Portland's Tri-Met transit system has never reduced traffic to any great degree. Two-thirds of the train riders were attracted from the bus system, only one-third from cars. The number of automobile commuters who switched to light rail in Portland was less than 0.5 percent of daily commuters in the metropolitan area, a percentage quickly nullified by the rate of growth in employment, according to a study by the Cato Institute.

The Portland systems popularity is waning. Tri-Met carried about 10,000 fewer commuters to work in 1990 than it did in 1980 – this during a decade when 97,000 jobs were added to the city.

Finally, there's this quandary for those who praise Portland: If transit is so great, why did Oregon voters turn down an extension of the light rail system in November 1996?

Other cities have been embarrassed by their systems. Miami we know about. Here are some more.

The Tampa Tribune lauds Buffalo. Yet, after completing a $600 million train project, the city's combined rail and bus network had 20 percent fewer passengers in 1989 than the bus-only system had had a decade earlier. Miami and Sacramento had similar experiences, according to a 1990 Department of Transportation report.

Or, take Denver, another city cited by the Trib for its transit enlightenment. A strange choice considering that the Colorado city's voters just two months ago deep-sixed a $3.5 billion, 93 mile rail system – despite the fact that rail supporters outspent foes 10-to-1 during the election campaign.

And, in a recent editorial, the Trib sent this implied threat to local politicians: The newspaper claimed 58 percent of Seattle voters had voted to "force the city" to build a monorail. If Seattle's city council doesn't come up with a plan, their salaries will be cut. Well, that's not quite the story. First, it was a 53.5 percent majority, according to the Seattle Times, and no one seriously believes the pay-cut idea is even remotely constitutional. More important, the monorail is likely to cost $3 billion or more – a detail that wasn't on the ballot. When that sort of funding is put to Seattle voters, it will be interesting to see the outcome.

Speaking of voters, here's my final point. So far in Tampa's quest for rail, your opinion hasn't counted for much. Turanchik claims popular support for rail – he told me in 1995 that a study had shown 65 percent of Hillsborough citizens wanted a train. Where’s the study? No one seems to have a copy.

However, another study does exist. About 63 percent of Floridians have no interest in boarding public buses and trains, USF political science professor Susan MacManus found when she conducted a statewide survey last June for Florida's Department of Transportation. "Most of these people said public transit is not even a viable option in even the most adverse situation," MacManus told the Wall Street Journal.

So, who does want rail? The people who build the train systems, multi-national corporations that are very good at getting their richly moneyed hooks into local politicians. And, big landowners and developers. The St. Petersburg Times noted in 1996 that "some of the biggest supporters of the rail system are the planners of the 14 private commercial and industrial parks on Interstate 75, along which part of the rail system would run." The rail project is like throwing gasoline on the flames of land speculation.

Knowing that public support probably isn't there – if citizens have the full story on commuter trains – Turanchik has tried to push the project along by other means. Last year, he made a pitch for $243 million in federal funds. The federal dollars would have kicked the rail project into high gear – they would appear to pay for almost all of the construction. Later, if the costs ballooned – well, once you drive the first rail spike, its almost impossible to stop a train project. Unfortunately for Turanchik, the program that would have supplied the cash, Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), has been put on hold by Congress.

The latest gambit is Turanchik's scheme to grab near dictatorial control of civic priorities for the next 14 years by launching a bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. Its no secret that the Olympic plan is tightly woven with the rail program. The Trib dutifully predicted "federal money by the boxcar load" would materialize to speed the rail-Olympic tandem along. Right!

Actually, the boxcars are being filled with local taxpayers’ money. The Community Investment Tax (CIT) is generating cash at a rate that will double the original projections of $2.7 billion over 30 years. It won’t require a referendum to divert some of that money, say $1 billion or so, to the rail project.

Did I say "referendum?" That's a nasty word to some rail promoters. A couple of years ago, Turanchik said a referendum was necessary, and the county commission even passed a resolution to that effect.

Now? Turanchik, when I pushed him on the issue last year, said he thought a "straw ballot" might be fine, but he wouldn't commit to a binding referendum.

And that's a tragedy.

Over the years, I've been transformed from an ardent rail supporter to a skeptic. That's because I have access to a lot of information on the subject that most people don’t. I could still probably be swayed to vote for a train. I’d certainly be willing to listen.

But what the community lacks is a debate, a discussion, a search for some common ground. The little public meetings don’t count. They're window dressing at best. The decision has already been made. The process is just a formality.

Put the commuter rail project on the November ballot, Mr. Turanchik. Let both sides have their best shot. Then, let the people decide if they're going to catch the train.

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