Light Rail $2.4 Billion

Maryland's Incredible Purple People Mover

How the state's proposed $2.4 billion light rail could take taxpayers for a ride. by Mary Anastasia O’Grady

 

With a $2.4 billion price tag, the Maryland Department of Transportation's 16-mile light-rail "Purple Line" won't be built without federal taxpayers as major underwriters. The state is asking them to kick in $900 million for construction costs—and that's before contractors, who are notorious for cost overruns, have even broken ground. That kind of money is a rounding error in Washington but it also seems to be a colossal waste of money.

According to transportation guru Sam Schwartz, who was retained by the town of Chevy Chase in 2008 to evaluate alternatives to the Purple Line, the most cost-efficient way to reduce road congestion and serve the area between the Washington suburbs of Bethesda and New Carrollton would be to enhance rapid-transit bus service and improve access to high-occupancy vehicle lanes. But that wouldn't create the urbanization of Maryland's D.C. suburbs that Purple Line planners, led by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, envision.

Nor would it lock in mass-transit routes that cannot be easily changed, something important to developers and land owners, like the Chevy Chase Land Company, which is backing the proposal. The company also needs the train to win rezoning that it wants from Montgomery County. On a website called "Chevy Chase Lake" it says that some of its properties "would not be eligible for redevelopment until the Purple Line segment between Silver Spring and Bethesda is fully funded."

Federal funding for the purple dream once seemed impossible. But Maryland has tortured the numbers (not in public, mind you) and gotten them to say what it wants. California has its "crazy train." Now Maryland wants its own loco loco.

When Gov. O'Malley took office in 2007 he admitted that unpublished ridership estimates that he had seen for the Purple Line were insufficient to win federal funding. The Montgomery County Gazette reported in March 2007 that Mr. O'Malley's secretary of transportation, John Porcari, called the estimates "too low, clearly too low." He blamed "flawed" models. According to the Gazette, Mr. O'Malley blamed his predecessor: ''I suspect given the previous administration's lack of commitment to mass transit, they probably did not mind the studies underestimated the amount of ridership."

Mr. Porcari pledged new studies and hired the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff to do an environmental-impact statement (EIS). In October 2008 Parsons Brinckerhoff issued a draft EIS with ridership estimates that satisfied Maryland's concern about federal funding. Local opponents of the project doubted the revisions. They asked the state for the data necessary to replicate the forecasts, warning that if the underlying assumptions were "overly optimistic," it would lead to erroneous conclusions.

The state refuses to make that information public, claiming that the "proprietary software used to compile the data and summarize it" belongs to Parson Brinckerhoff. The company says the same. In August 2013 the Parsons Brinckerhoff final EIS supported the conclusions in the draft version.

The ridership estimates are crucial. Henry Kay, head of project development at the Maryland Transit Administration, told me Wednesday that even though new investments in bus service would have lower capital costs, buses would be more expensive to operate because Maryland expects "heavy" ridership and that would mean many bus drivers. Yet he also said that no one at the MTA scrutinized how Parsons Brinckerhoff crunched the numbers. "They explain it to us, they go away and do it and they bring us back the results," he said.

Even using the Parsons Brinckerhoff predictions, the project seems misguided. According to the EIS, roughly two-thirds of the riders forecast to use the system by 2040 will come, not out of their cars, but from existing bus lines. In other words, reducing the number of cars on the road, which was once supposedly a key objective, is now a minor side effect of a system that will cost $150 million per mile—if it comes in at budget.

Mr. Kay plays down the goal of getting cars off the road. The purple people mover will provide "a shorter, more reliable trip" than a bus and because it runs on electricity will produce fewer greenhouse gasses than diesel buses, he says. But it is also true, according to the EIS, that traveling end-to-end on the Purple Line, with its 21 stops, will take longer than the same trip now takes on the Washington Metro subway. As to the environment, many buses in the Washington area now run on natural gas, which is cleaner than most kinds of electricity.

Even with the MTA's latest scheme to introduce private partners and the optimistic ridership estimates, Mr. Kay admits that the Purple Line will run in the red and need subsidies. Fares in such projects rarely cover more than 30% of operations. Some Maryland legislators have already expressed concern about the risks and uncertainty for state fiscal stability. In October, State Delegate Luiz R.S. Simmons (D., Montgomery) told the Washington Post, "My concern is if the project goes south and the state has to pony up. If it is a mistake, generations of taxpayers will have to live with it."

But Gov. O'Malley and his developer friends want it, and President Obama wants them to have it. The president put a cool $100 million in his 2015 budget for the Purple Line although the FTA has yet to complete the project development phase of its assessment and it hasn't even begun the engineering phase.

Whether Mr. Porcari has been able to help with all this is a matter of speculation. In 2009 he left the Maryland DOT to become President Obama's deputy DOT secretary. In December he left the Obama administration to become senior vice president and national director of strategic consulting at Parsons Brinckerhoff. He did not return requests for comment. But taxpayers could be forgiven for suspecting that he and all the other Purple Line planners are taking them for a ride.

Ms. O'Grady writes the Journal's Americas column.

 

Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/mary-anastasia-ogrady-marylands-incredible-purple-people-mover-1403910560 Wall Street Journal On-Line, June 27, 2014 7:09 p.m. ET