Over at the New Republic, David Jackson asks:
If a state gas tax is dedicated to “highway purposes,” can you build light rail on Interstate lanes presumably funded with said tax?
We’ll find out in Washington state, where a prominent developer is suing the state over the question.
The litigants include the Puget Sound regional transportation agency, which wants to build a light rail system on the HOV express lanes of Interstate 90′s floating bridge over Lake Washington. The goal is to create a way for Seattle’s many commuters to get to the Eastside, the suburban home of such job-heavy companies as Microsoft and T-Mobile. Jackson describes the details of the case as follows:
Under an amendment to the Washington State Constitution, state gas taxes can only be used for highways (and the extensive state ferry system).[SButtonZ button="digg"]
The developer, Kemper Freeman, argues in his lawsuit that would prohibit the conversion of the I-90 HOV lanes to transit use.
Opponents counter with the fact that no highway capacity is to be eliminated, that federal monies paid for the vast majority of the original project, and that under the agreement to build the lanes they are considered “high capacity” transportation improvements which would include light rail.
The state supreme court will hear the case this fall, and the decision will have ramifications for more than just Washington’s future transportation policy. Basically it’s a question of whether the U.S. will continue in a pattern of highway-specific funding from transportation taxes, or will shift to include mass transit as an equal party in need of cash. There’s really not much legal precedent here for what the definition of “highway” is — rather, the court needs to base its decision on the policy implications of restricting every penny of gas taxes collected to the construction and maintenance etc. of new roads. Will passenger rail, and all of its energy-saving, traffic-reducing, efficiency-enabling goals be prioritized on the state court level? Or will we simply keep on building more roads and hoping everything works out ok?
Tags: Loopholes, Passenger Rail
Kemper Freeman is also about as pro-auto as one can get, he doesn’t seem to see the value in having HCT basically bisect his two massive retail properties in Downtown Bellevue. BTW, the above image is of the SR-520 floating bridge on lake washington, just north of I-90 (Although there is plenty of transit-related drama in the plans for its replacement). Seattletransitblog.com is a great resource for the many transit plans in the puget sound region and a great forum for discussion as well.
Ohh, maybe while they’re doing I-90 bridge work they’ll take my suggestion into consideration:
http://www.ideasforseattle.org/forums/27772-city/suggestions/694496-a-noise-barrier-on-the-i-90-bridge-s-cycle-lane
Why don’t they fund the line with a light rail ticket tax?
not enough people take light rail yet for the tax to work. The lawsuit is a nusance case anyways, the funding for the rail on I90 is federal, so its not subject to that law. No one really understands why he hates rail and mass transit so much, racism has been thrown around as a possibiltiy.
I didn’t know the trains had a race. I think he might be watching too many episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Eric F: funding public transit through user fees doesn’t work because so many of the benefits are externalized (e.g., drivers reap a huge reward through reduced congestion) and transit is a monopoly providing a public good. Matt Yglesias makes the case for pricing public transit at the marginal cost of a ride (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/01/marginal-cost-pricing-for-mass-transit.php), but these externalized benefits actually mean the price should be LOWER than that.
I would argue that transit is a congestion-reducing project and therefore a highway purpose.
I’ve commented in a couple of places here that much support and/or criticism of rail transit seems to be generational in nature. Briefly put, old-timers currently over 85 or so remember what we used to be and wish it was back, the young crowd under 55 or 57 takes cars for granted and has other things to like tweet that you can’t do and drive at the same time, and the group in the middle, between 55 and 85, still thinks the future should look like the Jetsons, and that doesn’t include trains or trolley cars.
How old is this guy?
“funding public transit through user fees doesn’t work because so many of the benefits are externalized”
That’s a premise on which you can expand transit subsidies pretty much inifintely. Aren’t there huge externalized benefits from roads as well? Either way, you can talk about externalized benefits, but at some point you have to actually finance the system you want, seems to me that the best place to look is to the users of it.
“transit is a monopoly providing a public good.” The only monopoly I see is when it comes to the right of way. You can force a public monopoloy by holding down fares so that only the gov’t can participate, but there’s no inherent monopoloy in transit. You can build a HOT lane and let private buses run on it, for example in the same way that private airliners use publicly owned airports.
“I didn’t know the trains had a race. I think he might be watching too many episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine.”
A common perception is that mass transit (rails and buses) is something built for and utilized by racial minorities and the economic underclass, and is therefore is an undesirable use of funds.
The externalized benefits of rail (reduced pollution, reduced energy usage) are not seen in highways, therefore their benefits can be considered unique, justifying their subsides.
The reason a tax on tickets wouldn’t work is because ticket prices already don’t even cover the cost of a ride! Los Angeles, for instance, recovers less than 20% of operating costs from ticket revenue. Adding a tax on top of that would only decrease ridership, and if there weren’t enough riders, then the tax wouldn’t fund anything at all, and the agency would be in even worse financial shape in this period of budget nightmares and cutbacks.
Projects like this should be funded in a way that encourages people to switch from driving to transit, like a gasoline tax! Are you listening, Congress?
“ticket prices already don’t even cover the cost of a ride!”
No way?!? I buy stuff that moves by freight trains, and the freight train people seem to cover thier costs. Why can’t that work for transit? I guess it just can’t. Don’t worry, ou guys have a big champion in the Congress in the form of David Obey, a Congessional fixture who will ensure endless transit subsidies for you. That guy has a safe seat and isn’t going anywhere.
A couple of reasons.
1. The freight railroads engage in massive rent-seeking. They have to pay property taxes, but they also bully local governments into subsidizing their unprofitable lines. They also engage in monopoly pricing on routes where they have no competition. (In fact, in the early 1900s rural populists argued for government investment in roads as a way of allowing farmers to get their goods to more than one railhead.)
2. The FRA regulations are optimal for cheap freight railroad operation and pessimal for high-ridership passenger rail operation. Part of it is genuine preference for freight; most of it is just not-invented-here excuse making.
3. There’s no local stigma that only poor people use freight rail.
4. Mile-long freight trains have such a huge cost advantage over trucking that they have captive markets, namely cost-sensitive, time-insensitive goods. Transit has a captive market of people who don’t own a car, but this captive market is small.
The actual subsidy part for passenger rail is annoying and should be eliminated where possible, but it’s not that big a deal. Transit users pay fares that don’t cover the true cost, and drivers pay tolls and gas taxes that don’t cover the true cost. Which mode has a higher recovery ratio depends on which study you read; Amtrak’s a wash with the best-case estimates for US federal highways, and the major transit systems are in between the best case and the worst case. For state highways I only know one study, which makes roads look really bad, on a par with the below-average transit systems in the US.
“That’s a premise on which you can expand transit subsidies pretty much inifintely. Aren’t there huge externalized benefits from roads as well?”
Yeah, that’s why the premise *is* applied to roads. The gas tax doesn’t even cover highway maintenance let alone construction. Local roads are generally paid for by property taxes which isn’t the same as “user pays” either (e.g. if you don’t have a car because you use the subsidized rail line).
I completely forgot reason 5 for the freight/passenger discrepancy in America: freight railroads are better coordinated than passenger railroads. Passenger railroads suffer from agency turf battles, with uncoordinated fares and schedules and no bulk buying. Freight railroads have aggressively consolidated, and where they haven’t, they negotiate trackage rights and haulage rights agreements.
In Europe, the opposite is true: passenger rail is well-coordinated within metro areas, where most of the traffic is, and even across national borders; freight trains have to wait hours at each border because of pre-EU labor rules. This is one of the main reasons why in Europe regional rail is good while freight rail is a small market.
The federal money used to build the I-90 bridge had strings attached: it was required that the bridge be converted to rail when the locality demanded it.
So the lawsuit is pure unadulterated bullshit: if it wins, the Washington state government must immediately pay back hundreds of millions of dollars to the Federal government. It would be significantly cheaper to simply reimburse the miniscule amount of gas tax money which went into the bridge, so if the lawsuit succeeds that’s what will happen and the light rail will get built.