Tag Archives: mass transit

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney cuts the ribbon to launch the Pulse service last weekend.

The Pulse, Richmond’s new bus rapid transit system, is off to a good start. On Monday, the first weekday of service, GRTC Pulse counted 8,669 riders, far exceeding the daily weekday goal of 3,500, reports the transit company.

First-week performance at mass-transit roll-outs benefit from media attention and, in the case of the GRTC, free rides. The trick is to maintain the  momentum when the hooplah dies down and the novelty wears off.

The other measure of success is the level of re-development along the Broad Street corridor. A top goal for Pulse is to stimulate construction of mixed-use projects that generate higher property and sales tax revenues while encouraging ridership on the bus line. City Council has put the right zoning in place, and there seems to be no limit to the appetite of homeowners, businesses and retailers for walkable neighborhoods with access to mass transit. Here’s hoping that Richmond’s $65 million gamble pays off! 

Washington Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld has earned plaudits for his forthright management style and the improvements he has instituted since taking over the troubled commuter bus and rail system in 2015. But the latest news raises questions whether he, or anyone, has the grit to take on a deeply corrupt organizational culture.

Reports the Washington Post based upon a newly issued Office of the Inspector General report:

Metro crews copied and pasted language from prior years’ structural inspection reports for the Rhode Island Avenue station and in other instances skipped hard-to-reach areas, culminating in a steel beam and concrete chunks falling from the ceiling in 2016, the agency’s inspector general concluded in a report released Thursday.

No one was injured, but the Rhode Island Avenue and Brookland stations will be shut down for 45 days starting July 21 to permanently address the structural failures that came to light when debris tumbled from the station’s ceiling Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, 2016. …

The audit found 49 times over three years in which the annual inspection reports for Rhode Island Avenue contained identical wording to prior years, the IG concluded in its year-long review. In 29 of those cases, the inspector general could not determine what Metro crews had inspected, while in 20 other cases, inspectors simply said nothing had changed since the prior year’s inspection, according to the report.

The findings, reflected in three annual reports examining a single station, suggest broader problems within Metro’s structural inspection department.

The organizational rot runs deep in Metro. According to the WaPo, Metro fired a third of its track inspection department for widespread record fabrication contributing to a 2016 train derailment. At least there was a modicum of accountability in that case. But the track derailment represented incompetence so extreme that management had no choice but to respond forcefully.

It’s not clear what Wiedefeld intends to do about the latest revelations when nothing so visibly alarming as a train derailment occurred. His first instinct, it appears, is to minimize the significance of the abuses. Writes the Post: “Wiedefeld defended the agency’s inspection practices, saying that the situation differed from the problems within the track inspection department. But he declined to elaborate, pending an official response to the IG it plans to submit by June 1.”

Bacon’s bottom line: The private sector is a messy, messy place where corruption and incompetence can occur, just like in government and quasi-governmental agencies. The difference is that the private sector is a self-correcting system. If a corporation gets as corrupt, incompetent and inefficient as the Metro, it eventually goes out of business. It goes into bankruptcy, its assets are reallocated, and its failed organizational structure is extinguished forever. Not so with the Metro. Because commuter transportation is deemed “essential” to the functioning of the Washington metropolitan area, including of course Northern Virginia, the system simply extracts more wealth from taxpayers to paper over the corruption.

My sense from afar is that Wiedefeld is a good man doing the best possible job under the circumstances. But I fear that decay so permeates the organization that it is unreformable.

The question, as always, is what Virginia should do about it. The Northam administration has agreed to hand over more money with a few conditions requiring governance reforms and burden sharing from Maryland and D.C. Whether the governance reforms are forthcoming remains to be seen. Likewise, whether the contemplated governance reforms will give Wiedefeld the power he needs to carve out the rot also is an open question. Meanwhile, Metro continues to hemorrhage riders and revenue.

What alternatives are there to a corrupt Metro? One is to build more road and highways. But fiscally speaking, that is not a remote possibility. The cost of adding more lanes of highway in a dense urban environment would be astronomical. Another is to ration scarce roadway capacity through pricing mechanisms like time-of-day tolls. That’s an elegant solution from an economist’s perspective, but it’s a non-starter politically. Yet another option is to encourage higher density development in walkable communities in the hope of getting more people to abandon their cars and, New York style, get around by walking, biking and mass transit. But overcoming NIMBY opposition and transforming land use patterns is an incremental, slow-motion process that takes decades to accomplish; land use reform is necessary but it is not a near-term or even intermediate-term solution.

That leaves the Uber revolution. Within a decade or so, self-driving cars will cut the cost of riding-hailing services by half. Passengers will have the option to ride solo or share rides with others, trading some time and convenience for even lower prices. Companies will be offering integrated services providing access to taxi-like services, van services, commuter bus services, car rentals, bicycles (both of the peddle and the electrified varieties), and other variants no one has thought of yet. I don’t know how it’s all going to shake out, but for a metro like Washington, I see no other hope.

Dara Khosrowshahi. Photo credit: Fortune

So, Uber decides to use Washington, D.C., as a test bed for its vision for urban mobility. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi visited Washington Wednesday to publicize company plans to expand its ride-hailing app so customers can access and pay for bike share, car rentals from private car owners, and eventually mass transit.

And what does Washington do? Mayor Muriel E. Bowser has proposed increasing the gross receipt tax on ride-hailing companies from 1% to 4.75%. The tax revenue would pay for about 10% of Washington’s $178.5 million share of increased funding for Washington Metro. (Virginia and Maryland and providing the balance — without taxing Uber.)

Interesting economic development strategy Bowser has there: Tax businesses in the growing innovation economy to subsidize enterprises in the stagnant, money-losing old economy.

Uber’s idea is potentially so transformative that slapping $18 million added tax on the ride-hailing industry may not prove debilitating. (Not for Uber anyway. I’m less sanguine about its weaker competitors.) But one thing we can say for sure: The tax will not accelerate Washington’s evolution toward the transportation future.

“What we want to make sure is that you’re not taxing one form of shared transportation for another form of shared transportation,” Khowrowshahi said in a public meeting with Bowser, reports the Washington Post. “We’re in this to promote shared transportation in general. We want to make sure that proposals like this are not unconstructive to that goal.”

City officials, notes the Post, say the ride-hailing services have benefited from Metro’s problems so it’s only fair that they be part of the solution.

Bacon’s bottom line: Hey, Uber, come look at Virginia — we won’t tax you!

Your one-stop-transportation-shopping app sounds like a fantastic idea. I can hardly wait until you develop AI that allows people to map multimodal trips integrating everything from walking and biking to gypsy vans and buses to hour-long car rentals. I’m eagerly waiting for a full range of transportation services at varying levels of convenience, comfort and price. If you put a few money-losing public mass-transit enterprises out of business, I won’t have a problem with that. I’d love to put an end to the drain on taxpayers. Likewise, if you force public enterprises to adapt by cutting costs and becoming more responsive to customers, I’m totally cool with that, too!

I regard Bowser’s logic — Uber is part of Metro’s problem, therefore you should be taxed to help fix it — as wildly illogical. You should be allowed to compete on a level playing field with all other transportation business models. I hope you understand, however, that does include paying your fair share of the cost of maintaining and building the road and highway infrastructure that you rely upon. Who knows, you might end up paying more in taxes that way. But at least you wouldn’t be subsidizing the competition.

One more thing, Virginia has localities that would love to cooperate with you. Take Virginia Beach. The resort city has plans for development of its waterfront that include a drop-off zone for ride-hailing services. How cool is that? If cities can provide drop-off zones for buses — typically referred to as bus stops — why not drop-off zones for ride-hailing services? That’s something that municipalities can do at next-to-no cost.

Here in Virginia, we want to accelerate the development of a 21st century model for transportation, not tax it. Use us as a test bed. Please!

Over the weekend the General Assembly agreed to give the Washington Metro $154 million a year in permanent new funding on the condition that Maryland and Washington, D.C., make up the balance of $500 million in new funding, reports the Washington Post. Maryland has passed its own $150 million funding bill, and the District will likely approve at least $150 million more.

Let’s assume for a moment that all the details are worked out, that all three jurisdictions come up with $450 million to $500 million a year for Metro, and that Congress adds $150 million a year to what the federal government has been contributing. Does this latest injection of money get the troubled bus and commuter-rail system out of the woods?

Metro has identified $25 billion in capital “needs” over the next 10 years. The bulk of these needs entail SGR (state of good repair) investments of $15.5 billion to maintain existing capital assets necessary for system preservation. The $25 billion figure also includes $7 billion in “new” needs which “address remediation of hazards or crowding on the rail system in core areas,” plus “unallocated” needs that include regular repairs and maintenance and services.

The added $600 million a year from Uncle Sam, the District, and the states will suffice to cover the critical state-of-good-repair needs and nothing else. Here’s what taxpayers will get for their money:

• Replacing the 1000-series rail cars, installing a new radio system and cellular infrastructure, and replacing track circuits and power cabling where necessary.
• Replacing power cable insulators on deep tunnels of the Red Line and other lines particularly where water intrusion occurs, which can disrupt service or cause the need for more frequent and costly repairs.
• Replacing worn components of track and tunnels on all lines, necessary for safety and service delivery.
• Upgrading the signaling system, which controls the movement and speed of trains, necessary for safe operations and on-time service delivery.

Nothing fancy here. Hopefully, these investments will reverse the deteriorating quality of service that has caused so many riders to desert Metro. But many desired investments will not be made. I have seen no analysis of what that portends for the quality of service.

The proposed FY 2019 budget for Metro includes no fare increases or service reductions. The operating budget assumes that management can limit spending growth to $12 million, or less than one percent “despite cost growth for legacy commitments, mandates and inflation.”

General Manager Paul Wiedefeld acknowledges that there are “substantial and ongoing risks” in the proposed 2019 budget. Foremost among these are ridership uncertainties in response to telework, gas prices, alternative transportation modes; collective bargaining; and unfunded pension and retiree healthcare liabilities.

Bacon’s bottom line: I continue to believe that the emerging Uber-like Mobility-as-a-Service transportation model poses an enormous threat to all existing transportation modes — both the own-it-yourself automobile model and fixed-route mass transit model. In an affluent society, there will always be some people who want to own their own automobiles allowing them to travel when they wish and with whom they wish, so privately owned automobiles will always be with us. But I’m not confident that there will always be people who prefer to ride in fixed-route, fixed-schedule buses and trains instead of flexible-route and flexible-schedule buses, vans, and cars.

I’m pretty sure that Metro, no matter how competently managed, will continue to loser riders, and that it will be coming back to taxpayers with tin cup in hand in another 10 years. If declining ridership doesn’t do the trick, unfunded retirement liabilities will.

The Uber revolution keeps on churning. The transportation service company has finally rolled out a service in the Washington region that resembles the kind of ride-hailing jitney service that I long predicted eventually would enter the marketplace. This service is potentially so disruptive that it could drive public mass transit out of the market for all but the highest-volume transportation corridors — although Uber denies that such is its aim.

From the Washington Post:

Beginning Wednesday … riders will be directed to pickup points within two blocks of their origin and dropped off within two blocks of their destinations, according to Uber. Riders will endure a slightly longer wait for a driver match — up to two minutes — while Uber works to place them along the optimal route. They then will be instructed where to catch their ride.

The perk for riders? Discounted trips. Express Pool is up to 50 percent cheaper than ride-splitting option UberPool and 75 percent cheaper than UberX, the door-to-door ride-hailing service, Uber says.

Finding rides won’t be a problem. Uber has 50,000 active drivers in the Washington region.

Hopefully, local governments will not throw roadblocks in Uber’s way to protect their local transit authorities. Rather, they should ask themselves what they can do to make the service operate more efficiently. In particular, they should proactively brainstorm with Uber to see how to make it easy for riders to congregate at loading spots and for Uber drivers to access them without blocking traffic.

Henrico County has flipped from a majority-Republican to a majority-Democrat board of supervisors. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending. If Democrats nudge the county toward more rational, Smart Growth-like land use patterns — more infill, more density, more mixed use, more walkability — it could be a good thing. If they push the county into ill-thought-out spending initiatives, it could be a bad thing.

Based on the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s coverage of a two-day board retreat, it looks like spending will top the list. The three Democratic members of the board indicated their desire to expand the GRTC (Greater Richmond Transit Company) Route 19 to the Short Pump retail center at an estimated cost of $800,000 annually.

The purported benefit is greater access for job seekers. Tyrone E. Nelson, representing the Varina district at the east end of the county, said he could not understand why a county with a budget of nearly $1 billion had not yet devoted funds to bring bus service to the employment center. “I still don’t understand why it’s like pulling teeth to get public transportation to Short Pump. This is a 2018 need.”

His fellow Democrats expressed the same sentiment. “We’re not doing enough for job access,” said newly elected Courtney Lynch. “When you look at things we should spend money on, this should be something where we can get creative and get things done.”

Democrats and Republicans alike can agree that helping people gain access to jobs is a worthy goal. We want people to work so they can support themselves and their families. In Henrico County, the poorest residents tend to live in the far east end of the county, far from the affluent Short Pump commercial district where many jobs are available. GRTC already runs buses out Broad Street to Costco, and the expansion would extend the service a few miles more at seemingly modest cost.

That makes sense as a starting point for an inquiry: Hey, extending the bus line just a couple miles more would provide passengers access to a whole bunch of jobs they can’t reach now. Let’s take a closer look and see if it makes economic sense. From what I glean from the Times-Dispatch article and county documents, however, the supervisors skipped that let’s-see-if-it-makes-economic-sense step.

Henrico County Public Works has posted a slide presentation online covering proposed investments in roads, highways, sidewalks, bike trails, and mass transit. The slides contain a lot of information, but not everything that we, as citizens need to reach an informed conclusion. Perhaps the speaker making the slide presentation had more to say about the economics of bus service, but there is no indication of it in the Times-Dispatch article.

Let’s start with the map at atop this post. The big blue circle on the right is Mr. Nelson’s supervisor district. The small blue circle on the left is the Short Pump employment center. To get there, Nelson’s job-seeking constituents must take the bus into downtown Richmond where they would transfer to another bus running out to Short Pump.

The first question is how many passengers avail themselves of the bus service to access retail and service jobs along Broad Street at present? One hundred a day? A thousand? Ten thousand? Presumably, existing passenger loads would give us an order-of-magnitude idea of what might be expected if we extended the line. Alas, existing passenger numbers are not provided.

The more pertinent question is how many additional passengers are projected to avail themselves of the bus service going all the way to Short Pump. Again, in orders of magnitude, are we walking about 100 passengers, 1,000, or 10,000? This would seem to be a critical matter because, if the new service costs $800,000 a year to operate to benefit 100 passengers daily, we’re talking about an annual subsidy of $8,000 per passenger — an extraordinary sum. Why not just buy each passenger a new car? If we’re talking about benefiting 10,000 passengers, then the subsidy is only $80 per passenger, a nominal sum in which the social and tax benefits clearly outweigh the expenditure. If we’re talking about something in between, then the decision is not so clear.

As always, we should ask if there are alternative expenditures of money that would yield greater social benefits. Eight hundred thousand dollars is a nice chunk of change. I were a supervisor representing Nelson’s district, I would convene a meeting of GRTC, Uber, Lyft, Bridj, and other transportation-service companies and ask them, what kind of service could you provide my constituents for $800,000 worth of subsidies? Could you provide more point-to-point service providing more convenient schedules and shorter travel times, making it even easier to make the trip and find a job? Can you come up with a more imaginative solution than simply extending the existing bus schedule?

When such basic questions go unasked, we can be assured that money will be ill spent. Truly, Henrico has entered a new era — from one in which it made lousy land use decisions to one in which it will make lousy spending decisions.

Funding for Washington’s Metro commuter rail system is shaping up as a bruiser of a fight in the 2018 General Assembly session.

Metro’s management says it needs at least $500 million yearly in government support — $150 million from Virginia — to meet pressing maintenance needs. Without the money, Metro will continue its slow-motion death spiral of cycle of deteriorating safety, schedule delays, eroding ridership, and declining fare revenue. Without the money, Metro’s General Manager has said he will need to cut service in July 1 this year.

While Northern Virginia legislators are eager to patch up the ailing transit provider, which moves hundreds of thousands of commuters, downstate lawmakers won’t be happy about any solution that reduces funding for downstate projects. And Republicans won’t like any remedy that perpetuates the status quo of a broken, dysfunctional rail system hampered by a featherbedding union contract.

In his proposed biennial budget for FY 2019-2020, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked for $150 million in dedicated funding for Metro; $84 million would come from Northern Virginia regional transportation funds, while $65 million would come from new taxes on real estate sales, hotel stays, and wholesale gasoline. Providing the money would be contingent upon Maryland and Washington, D.C., funding their share, and a streamlining of Metro’s governing board from 16 members to five.

“The Metro system is a lifeline for the Northern Virginia economy, and it remains critical to our economic competitiveness,” McAuliffe said. “But we all know that system is just plain broken. And it represents a significant threat to our economy if we don’t fix it, and quickly.”

Notably absent from McAuliffe’s list of requirements is any reform of the Metro’s labor contract. That shouldn’t come as a surprise given the Democratic Party’s pro-union orientation generally and its close ties to the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) in particular.

According to the Virginia Public Access Project, the Alexandria office of the ATU has donated $75,300 to Virginia political campaigns since 2007 — all but $2,000 to Democratic campaigns and funds. The Maryland office of the ATU has donated $44,000, all to Democrats. And Local 689 representing Metro transit workers, has donated $132,269 — all but $250 to Democrats. From all sources, the union contributed $30,000 to the Northam for Governor campaign.

Republicans won’t be happy about funneling $150 million a year more into an organization unwilling to extract concessions from a labor union that in turn funnels money into Democratic Party coffers. Crass political considerations aside, the GOP also has to be concerned that the alliance between Democrats and labor unions is the essence of the Blue State governance model that cements Democratic Party primacy in states like Illinois and New Jersey while pushing them to the brink of fiscal insolvency.

McAuliffe is shrewd enough not to ask downstate Virginians to share the hefty burden of supporting Metro. Virginia’s dispensation of mass transit funds already favors Northern Virginia by lopsided margins. If Metro has problems, that’s because short-term political considerations over the decades have driven Metro to its perilous predicament. Motivated by social justice concerns, the board has refused to raise fares sufficient to meet the organization’s needs. It has allowed the maintenance backlog to build to billions of dollars, and unfunded employee pension obligations to accumulate billions more. All the while, the board has assented to labor contracts that have crimped productivity and inflated costs. Downstate Virginians would be infuriated by any proposal requiring them to help pay the bill for such a dereliction of management.

The question is how Northern Virginia legislators will receive McAuliffe’s proposal. Only a fraction of Northern Virginia commuters ride Metro rail and buses — most commute by car. Tens of thousands of motorists who use the Dulles Toll Road pay additional tolls to help fund construction of the Silver Line to Washington Dulles International Airport — indeed, they pay more to subsidize the Silver Line than Silver Line passengers pay in fares.

McAuliffe shrewdly rejected the option of a new regional sales tax, a move that surely would have infuriated non-Metro-riding voters. His ploy is a classic one of imposing a series of opaque indirect taxes — levies on real estate transactions, hotel stays, and whole gasoline — that voters will not readily connect with the Metro. But dipping into Northern Virginia’s regional transportation fund will deny money for other projects. Metro could yet trigger an electoral revolt. But most of NoVa’s legislators are Democrats now, they are philosophically inclined to support mass transit, and they are likely to fall in line behind a Democratic governor.

Pulse construction on Broad Street — at a location where construction is actually occurring. (Photo credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch)

One of these days, when Richmond’s Pulse service is running buses up and down the Broad Street corridor, and investors are redeveloping properties around the transit stops, Richmonders will be really glad they have a bus rapid transit system. But until then, residents of the entire metropolitan area can be forgiven for roundly cursing the project.

Construction, which began in August 2016, is still ongoing. The contractor hopes to complete work by the end of the year. In the meantime, the city has closed off two lanes (one lane each way) from automobile traffic, significantly adding to the hassle factor of driving on the transportation artery.

This has been a pet peeve of mine from the very beginning. Miles of Broad Street are afflicted with traffic cones. That would be fine if construction work were actually occurring the full length of the corridor. But it’s not. Work appears to be occur, in a most desultory manner, only at a few locations at a time.

Now, I don’t expect anyone to lose any sleep over Henrico resident Jim Bacon incurring an additional five or ten minutes driving time. But the businesses lining the corridor do warrant consideration, and many of them have suffered a marked decline in business. Richmond City Councilwoman Kimberly Gray has proposed compensating those businesses from a $3.2 million pot of money set aside to reward the contractor, Lane Construction, as an incentive for early completion of the project. The prospects of early completion are fading rapidly, so the idea, it seems to me, does have merit.

Putting up with street construction is an inevitable hazard of living in the city — someone always seems to be patching asphalt, accessing water lines, laying cable — and businesses have to grin and bear it. But cordoning off two lanes along miles of Broad Street for nearly a year and a half seems mind-numbingly unnecessary. I can think of no reason why Lane Construction couldn’t close only those street segments it’s working on when it’s doing the work.

Virginia Department of Transportation contractors put down traffic cones when they’re doing work and pick them up when they’re not. Presumably in adherence to VDOT guidelines, they keep lanes open as much as they can. Why can’t Richmond do the same thing?

Gray could do the public a service by tracking down who in the city public works department approved a construction plan that so unnecessarily inconvenienced drivers and hurt local businesses.

Washington Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld has been pushing for $15.5 billion in additional contributions from participating states and localities over the next 10 years, including $500 million in dedicated funding, to make the ailing commuter rail system safe and reliable.

That request has set off serious jockeying between Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia over who should pay how much, and which reforms the Metropolitan Washington Area Transit Authority (MWATA) must make before anyone trusts it with more money.

But at a recent MWATA board meeting, reports the Washington Post, Chairman Jack Evans enumerated $9.5 billion in anticipated needs not covered in Wiedefeld’s $15.5 billion figure.

Wiedefeld’s proposal “will only keep us where we are right now, which is not a good place to be,” Evans said. “What the region does, what the elected leadership, the business [community does] — they will seize on the easiest approach. So when he put out the number ‘500,’ everybody seized on ‘500,’ which gets you to $15 billion — which gets you to where you are today. Nobody wants to be where we are today.”

“We’re asking for the wrong number,” he said. “I think it was a mistake on behalf of the GM . . . to ask for the lower number.”

Bacon’s bottom line: Well, you have to appreciate Evans’ honesty. No one wants to hear that revitalizing the Metro will cost an astonishing $25 billion, not a mere $15 billion. As Virginians discuss how they will find their multibillion-dollar share of the Wiedefeld proposal, they should be acutely aware that they would be meeting only the Metro’s most urgent needs — “nonnegotiable” safety and system upgrades. They to ask themselves, will $15.5 billion be enough, or will it just paper over the problems?

Metro is “too big to fail.” Its collapse would throw the Washington region’s transportation system into turmoil, with endless repercussions for the economy and economic development. For instance, the Washington region would be an attractive location for the Amazon second headquarters in many ways, but the company is sure to ask itself, does it want to locate 50,000 employees in a region whose commuter rail system is falling apart and a proposed $15 billion fix merely preserves a deficient status quo?

Metro must be salvaged. But Virginia needs to hang tough and demand comprehensive management, labor, and governance reforms before coughing up hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a bail-out that may not accomplish much.