Streetsblog San Francisco

The conservative "tea party" movement, last seen complaining about the government-funded local transit system that they took during an anti-government march in Washington D.C, is veering back to form in Florida with an organized protest against the state's proposal for broad new investments in rail transit.

The Florida chapter of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), one of three national conservative groups driving the "tea party" effort, has asked its members to protest on Monday in Tallahassee.

The date coincides with an anticipated state House vote on rail legislation with multiple goals: setting up guaranteed funding for South Florida's popular but cash-strapped Tri-Rail, authorizing a similar commuter network called SunRail in Central Florida, and creating two new agencies to oversee a potential state-wide high-speed rail system.

The Orlando Sentinel reported a statement from Adam Guillette, director of AFP in Florida:

This train boondoggle is the wrong proposal at the wrong time. Our legislature should focus on ways to cut wasteful spending, not increase it!

According to the Sentinel, AFP's anti-rail protest is set to feature a high-profile guest: state senator and GOP gubernatorial hopeful Paula Dockery, who helped kill an earlier incarnation of the Florida commuter rail plan in 2008.

Dockery describes herself as a rail proponent, but claims that the current legislation would generate excessive profits for CSX, the freight company that controls more than 60 miles of rail tracks slated for purchase by the state. Still, her rhetorical approach to attacking the Florida rail bill appears straight out of Washington's pro-roads playbook.

The Miami Herald yesterday transcribed the following exchange between Dockery and fellow state senators who support the rail plan:

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Virginia Railway Express (VRE), the commuter network that links northwest Virginia to Washington D.C., today refused
a challenge by Amtrak to its decision to switch operating providers to
the U.S. arm of Keolis, a private French transit company.

Although
Amtrak based its challenge on Keolis’ inexperience operating American
rail lines, the latter company maintains a sizable transit presence as a subsidiary of SNCF, the French national high-speed railway.

Moreover, Keolis submitted a
markedly lower bid to take over VRE operations, undercutting Amtrak by
$500,000 on first-year transition costs and $300,000 in annual
operating costs. The French-owned company’s winning bid totaled $85
million for five years, offering VRE workers the option of shifting to
another Amtrak line or staying on under the new management.

Looking
beyond the local implications of VRE’s switch to Keolis, the new
contract is part of a larger trend toward transit privatization that has seen recent deals struck in New Orleans, Savannah, and Phoenix. The Obama administration is encouraging
greater use of public-private partnerships to help fund and operate
transport networks, making these agreements something of a portent.

But
substantial hurdles remain to the effective participation of private
companies in the business of transit. Independent auditors at the
Government Accountability Office submitted a report [PDF]
to Congress last week after taking a yearlong look at how the federal
transit funding process affects the ability of local officials to join
forces with the private sector.

And what the GAO found was a whole lot of hurdles, many of them unique to the cumbersome rules of Washington’s New Starts transit program. From the report (emphasis mine):

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The financial world was riveted this morning by billionaire investor Warren Buffett's move to take full ownership of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad, a $34 billion deal that ranks as the largest ever executed by Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway.

But what does Buffett's purchase mean for the nation's energy future? The so-called "Oracle of Omaha" told CNBC today that his decision was "a bet on the country" as well as a bet on the viability of cleaner transportation:

BNSF last year ... moved a ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of diesel. It releases far fewer pollutants into the atmosphere. It saves enormously on energy consumption and ... it diminishes highway congestion. Rails last year moved 40 percent, more than 40 percent, over the country. They moved more than all those trucks, just the four big railroads. It's a very effective way of moving goods. I basically believe this country will prosper and you'll have more people moving more goods 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, and the rails should benefit.

That environmental rationale for Buffett's deal struck some in Washington as dubious. Frank O'Donnell, president of the green group Clean Air Watch, wrote on his website that the BNSF deal was "the biggest climate story of the day," bigger even than the political maneuverings of the Senate environment committee:

This is a $34 billion dollar bet that coal will remain the centerpiece of American energy policy in the future. Buffett clearly believes that coal use will remain strong - and possibly grow. So he is putting his money on a vision of America with no effective climate policy at all – or at least one that doesn’t slow coal growth.

BNSF's reliance on coal is indisputable; the black stuff has accounted for nearly half of its tonnage this year, and MarketWatch estimates that 10 percent of U.S. electricity comes from coal hauled by the railroad.

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The transportation spending bill passed by the Senate this week includes $50 million in rail safety grants sought in June by environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) -- but the bill may not become law for months, and today Boxer told California's Metrolink commuter rail that interim safety protections would have to stay in place.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Metrolink crash that left 25 people dead and prompted a federal mandate to install the safety monitoring system known as "positive train control" on all commuter rail systems. The accident also helped advance the push for a national ban on on texting while driving, the activity that was found to contribute to the accident. 

A recent report in the Los Angeles Times found that while Metrolink was making progress on some of the changes its officials vowed to make in the wake of the crash, other promises remained unfulfilled. In a letter sent today to Metrolink chairman Keith Millhouse, Boxer said she "was pleased" when the rail network started adding a second crew member to train operating teams, adding: "As we work together to ensure that positive train control is implemented as quickly as possible, safety must not be compromised in the interim."

This week's transportation spending bill also includes $500,000 Boxer set aside for Metrolink to help pay for installation of "positive train control," a computer-based system that helps prevent crashes by automatically detecting when two trains travel too close to one another.

The senator's full letter to Millhouse follows after the jump. Read more...

When it comes to the carbon consumption of cars, trains, and buses, the
U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) Transportation Energy Data Book [PDF] is an indispensable resource. But this year’s Data Book contains an eyebrow-raising error in its analysis of rail’s energy use.

Page 66 of the Data Book, reprinted
on the DoE’s website on Inauguration Day, contains a table ranking the
energy intensity of various light rail systems across the country.

The
DoE lists the "average" energy efficiency of all light rail systems as
7,605 Btus per passenger mile, while the average for cars was 3,514
Btus per passenger mile.

Those numbers were enough to spark inflammatory headlines about the energy consumption of light rail. The only problem: The rail data is wrong.

An
eagle-eyed Streetsblog Capitol Hill reader discovered that the DoE used
simple averaging to obtain its light rail number, without weighting
each city’s light rail network based on how many passengers it carries.

So Kenosha’s streetcars, which carry a bit more than 60,000 passengers annually, were treated the same as Seattle’s light rail, where ridership is exceeding 60,000 every week.

Even famously anti-transit Randal O’Toole
recognized the DoE’s error and pointed out the actual average energy
efficiency for light rail is 3,642 Btus per passenger mile –
comparable with the numbers for cars, which don’t fully account for the
choice of auto driven.

The same averaging error is made on
page 67 of the Data Book, which states that the "average" energy
efficiency of heavy rail is more than 3,600 Btus per passenger mile.
That average put Cleveland’s energy-chugging system, which carry
about 30,000 passengers on an average weekday, on equal footing with
the New York City subway, where the average weekday ridership tops 7
million.

When the Streetsblog reader contacted the DoE to
inform them of the error, he got a quick acknowledgement and a promise
to correct the data as soon as possible. The incorrect averaging should
never have been used, the DoE said.

One wonders how many misleading commentaries transit critics can publish using the false data before the government corrects it.

Some of you saw the Examiner piece yesterday about SkyTran's personal rapid transit (PRT) project and were probably looking for a response from us (one of you even asked in comments why we didn't touch it), but I've been very leery of the topic since I saw the "Pod People" post over on New York Streetsblog blow up with 227 polarizing and dogmatic comments for and against PRT (Personal Rabid Transit?), before the editors shut comments down. I'm pretty skeptical of anything taken on faith as good or bad, so why get into the fray, especially with a technology that hasn't been proven at scale?

Then there's my personal bias against the aesthetic clutter that would ensue with multi-level guideways two stories high running down quiet residential streets to whisk people to their front doors? I don't know about you, but I like walking those quiet streets and looking up at the sky.

And isn't a transit system that costs at least five times less than freeways and light rail called a bus? If the problem is competition with traffic from cars, then make a serious policy commitment to segregated roadways for buses. Or why not spend public money for innovations like bike-share, which would have the added benefit of keeping you healthy?

One of the issues the Examiner didn't touch in its promo for SkyTran was feasibility. Where in the world would the money come from to build a workable system less marginal than the monorail at Epcot Center?

"The most likely source of major public funding would be federal funds that are targeted toward new rail projects," said Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) spokesperson Randy Rentschler, whose agency would be responsible for finding public funds for PRT, should that ever be mandated by the public. He explained that the New Starts federal fund typically doles out $1.5 - 2 billion annually, though that goes to projects all over the country. In San Francisco, the Central Subway is one of the projects competing for the money, for example.

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The D.C. Metro accident that killed nine riders this week has renewed calls for rail safety upgrades and reminders that car travel remains far riskier than transit. But the crash is also shedding light on a problem that goes beyond Washington: tax shelter deals between banks and struggling transit agencies -- deals that were given a retroactive pass by Congress even though the IRS considers them illegal. 

The tax shelters at issue are called "sale in, lease out" deals, also known as SILOs. Starting in the 1980s, local transit agencies began selling rail cars and other equipment to Wall Street firms, which would then turn around and lease the goods back to the agencies.

Why would either side want to get into such arrangements? Sarah Lawsky, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School, has explained the situation in detail. But the short answer is that banks got tax write-offs for their newly leased transit equipment, while local agencies got a cash benefit for giving away tax deductions they could not use.

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High-speed rail is one of the Obama administration's most prized policy goals, with $13 billion getting earmarked in the coming year alone to help break ground on up to 11 proposed regional corridors. But what will the U.S. get for its money? A lively Senate hearing yesterday attempted to answer that question.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), the co-chairman of Building America's Future and an unabashed high-speed rail evangelist, urged senators to shrug off their post-bailout reluctance to approve large spending projects. The White House's $13 billion commitment, Rendell argued, is only a down payment on a workable system.

"We can't do infrastructure on the cheap," Rendell said. "We have to find the political courage to find a way to pay for it."

Building high-speed rail along the California coast, he added, is estimated to cost as much as $40 billion. A northwestern network is projected to cost $25 billion. Similar long-term funding problems, as it happens, are also haunting lawmakers who aim to overhaul federal transportation policy.

Rendell suggested that a national infrastructure bank, independent of the government, should be tapped to direct money to high-speed rail proposals without political concerns influencing the process. "The public wants that," he said. "The public doesn’t want transportation dollars authorized through [the existing] system."

That outcome is highly unlikely, however, given that the federal DOT already has released its guidelines for an internal ranking of regional rail plans. And Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo was on hand to defend the administration's methods.

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