audit commission hearing

statement entered into record of Legislative Audit Commision hearing April 16, 2007, with attachments, and partially read orally

william wendt wrote:
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:17:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: william wendt
Subject: audit hearing


Illinois Transportation “Audit” Testimony
State Legislative Hearing April 16, 2007

In 1980, when I was putting together a proposal to
serve the southwest side with existing commuter
trains, I asked a state auditor if anyone was checking
whether the crews were putting in their full 150 mile
days. He said that was cost accounting, seeing how
well money is spent. The state only did compliance
auditing, to make sure the money was spent according
to law.

I eventually managed to get crew schedules showing
many crews putting in less than 150 miles a day, which
could have made extra trips to the southwest side even
in the rush hour, without exceeding that figure. There
were also underutilized trains and tracks which
together could have provided a rail service almost for
free. That was quite insufficient, however, to keep
commuter trains from being rejected for several
specious reasons and to stop a half-billion dollar
pork barrel.

What does the recent management and performance audit
do for a better bang for the buck in transit funding?
Beyond embryonic recommendations for fare integration
and fuller consideration of alternatives to projects,
and an embryonic discussion of disconnects in sales
tax funding, precious little. But then there is no law
in Illinois requiring the public to get its money's
worth on anything or even exhorting it.

How much is possible, considering the disconnect
between the parties paying for transit and the parties
benefiting from it? No one is asking, if we pay so
much, we get such-and-such, because the prevailing
notion is that someone else pays. Then everyone
wonders why everything is falling apart and where is
the fairy godmother to wave a magic wand.

In microcosm, to the tune of $2.3 million, the State
of Illinois funded a half-mile of sidewalk renovation
on the mid-north side of Chicago, according to a
neighborhood paper, Inside, October 25-31, 2006. A
half-mile of sidewalks ought to be funded by a good,
old-fashioned, pay-as-you-go Special Service Area.
This is a small area in which a tax is levied for
improvements within the area, in which the taxpayers
can keep an eye on what is going on and make
intelligent decisions. Chicago was built on Special
Service Areas, per Ann Durkin Keating, Building
Chicago. To make intelligent decisions about a state
funded sidewalk program, however, one has to know what
is going on in DuQuoin, Macomb, and Rockford too, just
for starters.

The disconnect continues on larger scales. For over
two decades a 1% sales tax in Cook County has supplied
the bulk of the Chicago Transit Authority’s operating
funds. For almost as long CTA has 1) complained of
city revenues, about 90% from the neighborhoods, not
keeping pace with the suburbs’, and 2) has
nickel-dimed the neighborhood off-peak service to
death. By some strange co-incidence, that is exactly
the service neighborhood retailers need. Is is so
strange then, that city dwellers hop in the old jalopy
to shop, and, of their annual $32 billion retail
business, $6 billion leaves the city? And, as I have
quoted CTA President Frank Kruesi at every CTA budget
hearing since 2000 in his presence, the marginal cost
of off-peak service is just about nothing.

The marginal cost of off-peak service being just about
nothing, that of rush-hour service is just about
everything. Who benefits from that? The downtown
office industry, which sends everyone home at 5, and
which will need 41% more CTA service for its
expansion, according to the Central Area Plan of five
years ago. Is the current CTA shortfall worth $110
million to this great economic engine? It can do its
own cost accounting on that. If it is unwilling or
unable to cough up, who else should? At least the
University of Chicago and UPS are funding their own
special CTA services. That is progress.

What is the public supposed to do with the vast array
of undigested material presented at an August 9, 2006
meeting of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for
Planning, in the draft 2030 Regional Transportation
Plan Update, the proposed Transportation Improvement
Program, the draft Air Quality Conformity Analysis,
and the revised 2030 forecasts, regarding projects all
over northeastern Illinois?

More to the point, what is the public supposed to do
with the $789,0000 “MovingBeyondCongestion” media and
lobbying effort for state funding by the Chicago
transit agencies, under the motto, “Leave no federal
dollars on the table”?

And under dire threat of transit service cuts and fare
increases, reinforced by an RTA letter just this
month? CTA deliberately passed a budget with a $110
million shortfall, knowing there would be service cuts
and fare increases if the legislature did not cough
up. And all the more severe, because of spending for
several months at the higher rate. This is playing
chicken with the legislature and a violation of the
appropriation power.

This is what the poor, innocent public gets for taking
transit projects as if they came down from the
mountain on tablets of stone and for not even making
an issue of transit messes in recent elections. In the
meantime CTA is MovingIntoCongestion and with far too
much moola, not too little. And the RTA would invest
in the past by plowing billions into obsolete
technology, quite ignoring at least one of the
entrants in its technology contest a decade and a half
ago. This is the rough equivalent of plowing $60,000
or more into fixing a 1979 Chrysler.

There is no such thing as free transit, to be sure,
but there is no excuse for money-throwing either. The
present CTA management has already plowed some $93
million into a disruptive airport express subway
station, before the rest of the utterly extravagant
project is funded, and while slow zones proliferate
for lack of track maintainence. In the previous
decade, the current RTA chairman pushed a $1.4 billion
McDome project, a loss leader supposedly to create
some 10,000 hotel and restaurant jobs, about the same
time one-third that figure in private investment
created that many actual industrial jobs in the
Stockyards industrial district. And the current RTA
executive director pushed a $775 million trolley
project when a $100 million busway would have provided
superior transportation, and after helping secure
federal funding for the same southwest side line that
rejected trolleys for too much cost and congestion.

In the meantime we have to figure out how to get the
indirect beneficiaries of transit to cough up, which
is maybe not to fund anything until they figure that
out.

Attached are my two modest efforts at transit cost
accounting, an item from the Chicago Journal, February
23, 2006, and a March 21, 1995 letter from CTA.

William F. Wendt, Jr. http://beyondcongestionbetweenears.blogspot.com/

To: CHICAGOTRANSIT@yahoogroups.com
From: "wholelephant"
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 19:43:30 -0000
Subject: [CHICAGOTRANSIT] transit buffery, transit buffoonery

printed Feb. 23, 2006, southern edition, Chicago Journal, under the
title, CTA throws away money on Paulina Connector

A THIN LINE INDEED
Between "Cece on the CTA," Jan. 26, and "It's time
for the Circle Line," Jan. 5, Chicago Journal, the
usually erudite Haydn Bush proves there is a thin line
between transit buffery and transit buffoonery.
Wax nostaligic about bygone days on the elevated all
you wish, but let's not advocate a disruptive, billion
dollar Circle line to offer neighborhood trips better
provided by an express bus or even dial-a-van. Or call
CTA rapid transit projects, at a half-billion each,
over the past decade or so, "impressive" in the
positive sense, when less expensive and more effective
alternatives would have been far more so.

He did not even mention the official rationale for
the boondoggle, to make connections with commuter
trains. That alone would require new commuter stations
along Ashland in awkward locations and boondoggles
themselves.

The lesson from the 33 Mag Mile express fifteen years
ago ought to put the kibosh on this. CTA instituted it
between the Western stop on the Milwaukee District and
the Clybourn stop on the then Chicago & Northwestern,
via the Magnificent Mile. The afternoon service was
quickly discontinued because commuters want to board
downtown and get first crack at seats.

What all these projects, or, rather, their underlying
mentalities, omit is cheaper, simpler alternatives.
The half-billion on the Ravenswood, recently
aggravated by station closings, is to cure a rush hour
overcrowding problem and make the stations ADA
compliant. This is largely a south of Belmont problem,
yet CTA has yet to restore the parallel 11 Lincoln bus
from North Ave. to downtown.

The Douglas load, some 3,000 rush hour passengers,
could have been handled by 60 buses at a quarter mil
each. Ogden is a fast, wide street that I have never
seen stopped up except for Douglas reconstruction. Now
CTA wants to put in an Ogden trolley, ridiculous
enough in itself, but largely paralleling the Douglas.

Western Electric and International Harvester, the
original reasons for the Douglas, are long gone.
Meanwhile 26th St., a half-mile south, the busiest
neighborhood retail area, is often a parking lot in
the rush.

There was no need to rebuild the Paulina Connector to
Lake St. at some $35 mil, except to facilitate the
"Silver Line" rerouting, that merely a stalking horse
for the Circle Line boondoggle.

What car culture has that transit culture lacks is
the word "totaled." What do you do when the repair
shop tells you the old jalopy needs $45,000 in
repasirs? For that kind of dough the Mercedes or Lexus
dealer is happy to talk to you. Yet the transit
agencies keep pouring billions into a third rail
technology that has not been substantially improved in
over a century and commuter trains in half a century.
And to the tune of the Green, no, Greed, Line
coalition trying to cash in on the pork. Meanwhile
there is a technology that can do a lot more for a lot
less. The vehicle is both propelled and suspended
beneath a standard steel beam by a linear induction
motor, a straight-line version of the rotary motor in
fans, blenders, old-fashioned clocks, etc. It makes
about as much noise as an elevator but costs about as
much as a bus, one-half or one-third as much as a rail
car. The structure casts a shadow two or three feet
wide and costs one-tenth as much as an elevasted. The
vehicle mig;ht be a skid that a bus can drive on and
off, thus allowing thirty mile one-seat rides with
computer matched riders, bus stop to bus stop, in one
hour.

It is a larger subject, but transit is planned on a
four year old mental level. As long as it is an excuse
for federally funded pork barreling that converts
economic costs into political benefits, it will
continue to be.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

To: CHICAGOTRANSIT@yahoogroups.com
From: "william wendt" View Contact Details Add Mobile Alert
Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was sent by yahoogroups.com. Learn more
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:02:04 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [CHICAGOTRANSIT] CTA accounting

Chicago Transit Authority
Merchandise Mart Plaza P.O.Box 3555
Chicago, Illinois 60654312 664-7200
March 21, 1995

Mr. William F. Wendt, Jr.

Chicago 60622
Re: Freedom of Information Act Request

Dear Mr. Wendt:

This letter is in response to your request for records of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) under authority of the Freedom of Information Act. Specifically, you requested the following documents:

1. Avoidable costs of off-peak service (rail and/or bus), particularly as it relates to avoidable costs of rush hour service.

2. Likewise, avoidable costs of rush hour service.

3. Aggregate avoidable costs and recovery ratios of the bus operations as a whole and of the five classes of bus service, crosstown, downtown, downtown express, feeder and circulator (which are not given in the periodic route performance reports).

4. Avoidable costs and recovery ratios of the rapid transit operation, as a whole and broken down by line.

5. Allocation of fixed costs to the various services and times of service.

Please be advised that I can neither grant or deny your request for these records becasue CTA does not maintain such records.

If you have any questions regarding this matter you may call me at ...

Very truly yours,

s/
Jerome M. Butler
Assistant Managing Attorney
Corporate Law