rta budget december 2006
Date:
Fri, 15 Dec 2006 14:19:19 -0800 (PST)
From:
"william wendt"
Subject:
rta budget
To:
CHICAGOTRANSIT@yahoogroups.com
RTA Budget Statement December 2006
Here the State of Illinois is head over heels in debt. Its employee pensions are underfunded. It is way behind on Medicaid payments. And the schools want more money, as always.
So what do the transit agencies do? Let out a $789,000 contract to push a funding bill through the legislature. Sing the blues about the systems falling apart while voting $93 million for an airport express subway station. Pass budgets for next year presuming the legislature will bail them out. Sell capital investments on cutting highway congestion. Call a press conference about the system needing $57 billion over the next quarter century, that rebuilding the system in kind is investment in the future.
CTA says it will take $8.5 billion to get the system in good shape. 2000 buses @ a quarter mil apiece will buy a whole new bus system, so figure $8 bil for the once great third rail. There is no longer the private cost-benefit comparison that resulted in electric traction a century ago or push-pull commuter trains a half-century ago. But maybe it is a good thing the RTA is not fooling with new technology, considering the $80 million PRT fiasco a decade and a half ago. In your car culture mode, however, you talk to the Mercedes or Lexus dealers when the repair shop says it will cost $80,000 to fix the old jalopy. In your transit culture mode you take the Jerry Rubin approach, just do it.
Present technology is not that competive with the automobile, but the funding raid is sold largely on reducing highway congestion. To reduce highway congestion, however, I recommend the talk on congestion pricing last month by Jack Wells, chief economist for the US Dept. of Transportation.
Who should believe this, other than the magnificent expenditures? What confidence should anyone have in the people running things? What kind of value will the taxpayers get out of it?
RTA executive director Stephen Schlickman helped procure funding for the southwest transit project and then headed the downtown trolley project. Never mind that light rail was rejected at length by the southwest project because of high costs and street congestion. Nor that the $775 million trolley project was to achieve an 11,000 per hour capacity on two minute headways, with 19 trains on 19 track miles, a mile apart. For trains a mile apart to maintain two minute headways they will have to average 30 mph. The Dan Ryan rapid transit averages 24 mph in an exclusive right of way.
The southwest project also rejected transit lines along the Rock Island commuter line on grounds Deaborn Park could not be sandwiched between two transit line, when Dearborn Park had barely turned a spade of dirt. It said in so many words that all traffic would be concentrated on the existing line. That was the same line shut down for several days last October because of a fire.
That same project also rejected commuter trains. Figure, however, that the Metra line to O'Hare could be extended to Midway quite easily, for little more than the cost of a commuter station next to the CTA terminal, considerably less than merely the airport express subway station.
Schlickman was also at that talk about congestion pricing, at least the beginning.
Fifteen years ago RTA chairman James Reilly was pushing a $1.4 billion proposal for a domed stadium and an exhibition hall. At IIT I objected to such a sum and he said it was a good thing I was not a business executive, because anyone could see it was only $80 million a year in debt service. The next evening he and McPier chairman John Schmidt were at St. James Church. I asked if that $80 million were principal and interest. They said yes. I said an affordable house went for some $60,000 back then. Call it 70 and figure 20,000 houses for that $1.4 billion. 20,000 houses into $80 million is $4,000 per year per house or $333 a month. People in CHA collect rent receipts for that much. They only said the law does not allow tax-free bonds for housing. The exhibition hall was built for $675 million, to to create 11,000 jobs. That comes to some $61 thousand per hotel or restaurant job, and only for a loss leader, not the job itself. About then the Sockyards Industrial district announced some $47 million private investment that created 10,000 jobs, or $47 thousand per actual industrial job.
It takes two incomes to support a family, largely because of wasteful government spending. The problems of youth are caused largely by absent parents. The transit agencies richly share the guilt.
William F. Wendt Jr.