Illinois Transportation Issues

Fin

2007-12-11T18:27:00.000-06:00

It was a fun sojourn.

Thanks for reading, cussin' and discussin'.

I learned a lot.

Hopefully, there will be a transit system left if and when I return.

GHG: Land Use vs. Transit

2007-12-10T19:56:00.000-06:00

At the recent Metropolitan Planning Council roundtable featuring Reed Ewing (summarized here) someone in the audience asked the question when are we going to stop providing an infrastructure platform--e.g., roads, sewers--for sprawl-like development in exurban areas as a sort of god-given right to developers and their local government enablers. There was a pained silence in the room at this idea--which smacks of taking some land-use authority from local governments and even the notion of an urban growth boundary in this region--and then a round of cynical murmurs from the 75 or so representatives from Chicago area transportation/land-use agencies.

Reed Ewing intervened before the poor questioner was washed out of the room in a tsunami of cynicism. His statement was to the effect that he expects changes to come extremely quickly and unexpectedly in our land-use and transportation practices. In his view, the growing evidence of climate change because of increased greenhouse gases that is perceived by the average person coupled with fears about the future if GHGs are not held in check will prompt rapid change.

I wonder if the historians among us agree with Ewing that changes in our land-use and transportation practices will be swift and far-reaching when this country becomes fully aware of the impact of global warming and the need to reduce GHG emissions. Is the transition from the horse and buggy to the private auto a model of such sudden and drastic change? If we do see a quick transformation, is it likely to be in the direction of pedestrian friendly urban villages nearly everywhere, as Ewing prescribes, or will people (and their developer/local government enablers) work together to use new technologies to extend sprawl-like development patterns, as seems to be the case over the past several decades? Is Ewing a prophet or just another planning/transit guru hoping for the birth of the planner's version of utopia?

In his talk Ewing made relatively scant mention of transit, focusing instead on development patterns that will reduce VMT through shorter trips between destinations and more opportunities to walk/bike. It is quite possible that Ewing believes that building communities with greater population densities and more mixed uses is more likely to rein in VMTs than attempting to increase public transit service in exurban areas (e.g., STAR Line).

So, one more set of questions: If you had $1 billion to spend and wanted to reduce congestion and air pollution in Northeastern Illinois most effectively would you spend the money expanding the public transit system or building "in-fill" mixed use developments around existing transit assets? Is it possible that land-use measures that reduce average trip lengths and promote walking/biking will do more for the region in terms of slowing the growth of GHG emissions than an expansion of the public transit system?

BLT For Sustenance

2007-12-10T19:48:00.000-06:00

The Business Leaders for Transportation, an affiliate of the Metropolitan Planning Council, periodically sends out a good listing of local and national articles about transportation issues. I've found it to be a good resource. I believe that you are added to the list when you sign up here.

Representative Hamos: Coal In Her Stocking This Year?

2007-12-07T17:28:00.000-06:00

Representative Julie Hamos has yoked her star to reforming and better funding public transit in northeastern Illinois. She led the House Mass Transit Committee through a series of hearings on transit issues that stretched over several years. She guided SB 572 through the twists and turns of the legislative process. When it became clear that SB 572 didn't have the votes, she took a deep breath announced her support of a rival bill, but it too failed to pass. As indicated by her latest communication to the public on transit issues, reprinted below, she now is advocating pushing for completion of a comprehensive state capital bill in order to secure passage of some sort of transit reform/funding package.

Do we think Representative Hamos is going to get her wish of a transit bill before 2007 ends or is she getting a lump of coal in her stocking this holiday season?

* * *

DECEMBER TRANSIT UPDATE

The General Assembly and Governor still have not resolved the upcoming transit funding crisis, and the clock is again ticking toward a doomsday scenario that is likely to be worse in 2008 than this year.

On November 28, we were called into special session by the Governor to consider transit funding. During the previous week both Republican Leader Cross and Governor Blagojevich had endorsed a different funding mechanism for transit than the funding that had been contained in my comprehensive bill, SB 572.

The transit funding in the Cross-Blagojevich plan was incorporated in House Amendment #2 to SB 307, and called for a vote. This funding would be a diversion of the gasoline sales tax collected in our region – about $385 million (combined with ADA paratransit funding from the state for a $440 million total). In addition, downstate transit would receive a higher reimbursement rate.

In this approach the combined $440 million for regional transit would be paid directly from the state budget. That's because gasoline sales taxes currently are deposited into the state treasury and used for state needs. Legislators expressed concern that there was no replacement for the lost revenues, and defeated the bill by a vote of 57-53-4 (71 votes were needed). Although Republican Leader Cross had proposed the plan, only 3 Republicans voted for it!

I sponsored House Amendment #2 to SB 307 as an act of compromise. It had not been my idea to shift responsibility for regional transit to the state budget, but I agreed to a new funding source in order to put an end to the months of anxiety the legislative infighting had placed on transit riders and workers. In fact, SB 572 that I have sponsored all spring, summer and fall would be a regional solution to a regional need -- with a modest increase in the regional sales tax along with a Chicago-based real estate transfer tax. This would produce $530 million of new revenues for transit operations, as well as to pay for the CTA pension reform plan.

Here's the real story. Throughout the excruciating debate on the House floor it became quite clear that the real issue is not with the funding. The House Republicans continue to hold transit hostage to another agenda: a capital infrastructure program that would also fund roads, bridges and school construction throughout the state. The leaders are discussing an expansion in casinos to pay for that. Since transit also needs capital dollars for new buses, rail and station improvements, I support a capital bill – although transit funding is a real emergency and should be resolved immediately.

Once again the clock truly is ticking toward doomsday. The RTA must adopt an austere budget on December 14th – over $400 million in budget deficits will have to be made up with fare hikes and massive service reductions. The one-time loan by the Governor last September has reduced next year's revenues even further. The pension and retiree healthcare reforms negotiated with the unions expire on December 31st. Over 2,000 CTA workers have been given layoff notices, just before the holidays.

I've come to the conclusion that the leaders and the Governor should be pressed to finalize details on the capital bill. Once that happens, our version of a comprehensive transit bill will be passed. Please write or call the legislative leaders and the Governor to tell them that we must take action now!

. . .

Best,

Julie Hamos State Representative,
18th District

CMAP: Compact As In Dense?

2007-12-07T13:51:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was the roundtable sponsored by the Metropolitan Planning Council that featured Reid Ewing, the leading author of "Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change." (Book available for free download here.)

Ewing's presentation, like the book, was very informative. He started by demonstrating the link between increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and an increase in world temperature. Ewing had some Chicago-specific data showing that the average temperature in Chicago has gone up significantly in the past 25 years.

After establishing the heavy contribution of the transportation sector to CO2 emissions, Ewing then focused on three factors that establish the level of those emissions: (1) vehicle fuel efficiency; (2) carbon content of the fuel used to power those vehicles; and (3) the miles covered by those vehicles. Ewing pointed out, like the authors of a study recently summarized here, that vehicle miles traveled have increased much faster than population growth. This VMT growth offsets the improvements in vehicle efficiency and the use of less carbon rich fuels, which leaves the transportation sector responsible for an unacceptably large and growing share of carbon emissions.

Ewing outlined how the Chicago area is sprawling and how that exurban growth is driving a VMT growth rate four times the rate of population growth. He said that the Chicago area has not done a good job of building up regional centers (e.g., Joliet, Waukegan) as relatively dense communities. He also said that his research shows that the Chicago area does not score well on measures of mixed use. In other words, the region is not generating the kind of walkable/bikeable communities where many of life's destinations (e.g., school, work, shopping) are a relatively short distance away from each other.

Ewing's central point is that the only way to significantly reduce CO2 emissions from the transportation sector is to replace sprawl with compact development. By replacing the current dominant form of suburban/urban development with more compact, mixed use communities we can cut down driving and hence carbon emissions significantly. Perhaps most provocatively, Ewing argues that the housing market is increasingly inclined in favor of higher density housing. If his charts are to be believed, then the value of the McMansions on the large lots is likely to stagnate at best in the years ahead while real estate in more compact areas should appreciate in value at a more robust rate.

Ewing believes, however, that one can't bet the future of the earth's environment on consumer preferences and real estate market trends. He stopped for questions before he could go through all of his federal, state and local policy recommendations. They are easily accessible in Growing Cooler.

During the Q&A session he did discuss two policy recommendations. The first is a carbon impact fee that would be imposed on developments that will generate high levels of CO2 emissions because of the VMTs required to utilize them. The second is a system for the regional transfer of development rights. This is a system designed to allow owners of farmland to collect some of the value in their land because of its development potential by transferring development rights to developers who could use the rights to build at a higher density elsewhere in the region, preserving the open space.

The seminar included short speeches by Sadhu Johnston, Chief Environmental Officer of the City of Chicago, and Randy Blankenhorn, Executive Director of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. Johnston was a fount of relevant information, including:

Per capita carbon emissions in Chicago is about 12 tons annually, compared to 7 tons in New York and 6 tons in London.
Buildings account for 61 percent of carbon emissions in Chicago and transportation 20 percent. Transportation accounts for 32 percent of carbon emissions in the suburbs.
The areas surrounding many Chicago Transit Authority and Metra stations in Chicago lack the kind of density associated with transit oriented development. The City is focusing on TOD around such rail stations.
City residents save over $2 billion annually because they generate fewer VMTs on average.
Some of the communities in the region are banding together in a Green Region Compact to address climate change issues.

Blankenhorn was the polar opposite of Johnson. Even though his agency is charged with spearheading land use planning for the region he provided no indication that CMAP doing much of anything to address Ewing's common sense notion that to deal with climate change we must suppress the growth in VMTs. Instead Blankenhorn relied on an arpeggio of rhetorical questions to the effect of "how are we as a region going to address this and that issue raised by climate change." Geez, I thought we were looking to CMAP to take the lead on answering those kinds of questions. No such luck if Blankenhorn's windy oration is any indication.

Maybe Blankenhorn was having a bad day. Maybe he was keeping CMAP's sustainability agenda under wraps until next Tuesday's CMAP-sponsored Innovation + Integration Summit on "Creating a Regional Agenda to Address Climate Change." Let's sure hope so.

Two other notes from the MPC roundtable. First, the State of Illinois (e.g., Illinois Department of Transportation, Illinois EPA) did not appear to have any representation at the roundtable, which is disappointing given the importance of the topic and the role State investment in infrastructure plays in creating or confounding compact development. The organizers also stated that MPC had organized a reception for legislators to meet Ewing that morning and only one legislator showed up. (Let's hope the MPC didn't make the mistake of inviting the legislators to a "special session" with Ewing!)

Second, the crowd was overwhelmingly white. How is it that this region is so diverse and the transportation professional sector is so unrepresentative of that diversity?

Parking Space Tax: Maybe It Was A Bolshevist Fantasy

2007-12-07T07:23:00.000-06:00

An earlier post argued that a tax on parking spaces that could be used to fund transportation improvements, including transit, was not a "Bolshevist fantasy" and should be taken seriously. Apparently, such a tax may be just such a fantasy. Under pressure from business groups (here and here) upset over the level of property taxes on businesses (in both an absolute sense and relative to the property tax paid by individuals), the provincial government of British Columbia abolished the parking space tax that was recently imposed in Vancouver to help fund its transit system. News reports (e.g., here) described the tax as "much despised."

Note, however, that rather than just abolishing the parking space tax, the tax now will be extended to all property owners. Thus, the action may not adversely affect the amount of revenue generated for transit and other uses. Indeed, it may be a good thing that property owners in a metropolitan region, whose property values are presumably increased by the presence of a public transit system, share in the cost of that system.

Do We Need An RTA For Transportation Seminars?

2007-12-04T19:25:00.000-06:00

This blog has lambasted the RTA and its oversight shortcomings on occasion, probably too much for the taste of readers given the tepid response to the last posting on the subject. However, it looks like the transit aficionado community could use some oversight, at least when it comes to coordinating schedules.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Metropolitan Planning Council have booked partially overlapping seminars this Thursday. It is a shame, because both seminars look interesting and likely appeal to similar crowds. Here's the information:

Planning Transit Routes that Meet Your Community’s Goals

Join us for a Webinar on December 6.

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/406268508
STPP and CNT are hosting the second "From the Margins to the Mainstream" webinar. This session will discuss integrating transit service planning with community planning and design in understandable terms for the non-technical person. Audience interaction will be a key part of this webinar. Please plan to join us on Dec. 6 at noon Eastern.

The webinar will feature leading transportation experts, including officials from transit agencies, local land-use/planning agencies, and the developer community.
STPP and CNT's goal is to give you the tools to participate more effectively in your community's transportation planning and decision making processes. This webinar is the second in a series of webinars CNT and STPP are hosting in order to improve public involvement in transportation decision-making. As part of the same project CNT and STPP will also be hosting two workshops and on-site pilot projects in 2008. Funding for this program is provided by the Federal Transit Administration, the Oak Foundation,and AARP.

Title: Planning Transit Routes that Meet Your Community's Goals
Date: Thursday, October 6, 2007
Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT

* * *
MPC ROUNDTABLE LUNCHEON

The Heat is On: Why hybrid vehicles won't save the planet
December 6
12:00 pm–1:30 pm
Mayer Brown, 71 S. Wacker Drive, 33rd Floor
Cost for MPC donors: $15.00
Cost for non-donors: $30.00

MPC 2007 Winter Roundtable Series. Reid Ewing comes to speak about his new, highly acclaimed study, which concludes that energy-efficient cars and low-carbon fuel technologies alone are not enough to reverse the damaging effects of climate change. Along with a panel of local experts, Ewing will discuss how we need to change the land-use patterns which create our auto dependency.

LA Learns From Its Loss

2007-12-04T18:18:00.000-06:00

Still smarting from its loss of an Urban Partnership Program grant, Los Angeles has apparently learned from the experience and is moving ahead with a plan to implement tolling on current carpool lanes in expressways in the region. The Board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved the tolling plan at its meeting last Thursday. There is even talk of devoting some of the toll revenue to transit improvements.

Locally, nothing but silence despite this region's loss of such a grant. Those who fail to learn from history. . . .

Does Increased Energy Efficiency Cause Sprawl?

2007-12-03T17:25:00.000-06:00

A short and clearly written recent article by Jeff Rubin and Benjamin Tal entitled "Does Energy Efficiency Save Energy" is worth a look. It examines the seeming paradox: Energy efficiency gains have not resulted in declines in energy usage in the United States. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true.

The article first documents that the United States is making significant gains in energy efficiency. Energy use per unit of U.S. GDP, for example, has fallen by almost 50 percent since 1975. The transportation and residential sectors of the U.S. economy have led the energy efficiency charge. Energy efficiency in those sectors has improved 50% faster than the pace in the rest of the economy.

Yet, paradoxically, the overall energy consumed by these same transportation and residential sectors has increased more rapidly than in other sectors. In the transportation sector, greater fuel efficiency has prompted people to drive more and bigger vehicles greater distances. In the housing sector, the energy efficiency gains are more than offset by larger houses filled with more gadgets powered by electricity. The size of the average house, for example, has increased from 1,000 square feet in 1950 to 2,500 square feet today.

It appears that we have a situation where the energy efficiency gains in the transportation and housing sectors over the past three decades have been handed over to developers and consumers in the form of McMansions and sprawling exurban development. There are credible views that this is a good thing, a happy expression of democracy, capitalism and consumer preferences. University of Illinois-Chicago Professor Robert Bruegmann, author of the book "Sprawl: A Compact History," is a leading proponent of this view.

If, however, one views reduced energy consumption as the key to averting future environmental problems from rising levels of atmospheric CO2 and/or are concerned about the environmental implications of paving over more land, then giving up the efficiency gains in this manner represents a colossal missed opportunity. Had consumption of road travel, land and houses held steady at 1975 levels, then the efficiency gains since then would have yielded significant reductions in per capita energy consumption. The average's person's environmental footprint would have been significantly smaller than it is today.

In light of the Rubin/Tal analysis, environmentalists and transit advocates might think twice before celebrati recent news of a compromise in the U.S. House that opens way for a new federal law that will increase auto fuel efficiency standards by 40 percent by the year 2020. If Rubin and Tal are correct, these efficiency gains will just prompt people to drive more miles in ever more souped-up vehicles. In other words, the cost of living in auto-centric areas will go down as a result of the efficiency gains, making the exurbs even more attractive. At the same time, transit's advantage over the private auto when it comes to per passenger energy consumption and pollution will continue to shrink. (Here and here.)

One way to deal with the energy efficiency paradox that Rubin/Tal discuss is to treat energy efficiency gains as a public good. After all, such gains are often prompted by political action such as laws increasing car mileage standards or mandating tougher limits on pollution. These energy efficiency gains would be protected through taxes (e.g., tax on carbon) and/or user fees (e.g., highway tolls) designed to tamp down demand for use of these efficiency gains in ways that increase energy consumption.

So, for example, had the improvements in energy efficiency in the past 30 years been matched by a gas tax increase or much more extensive use of highway tolling, we might not have seen the efficiency gains be eaten up to the same extent by sprawl-like development with its greater per-capita vehicle mileage rates. Imagine how much money might have been generated for the Illinois Department of Transportation and transit agencies like the Chicago Transit Authority if the public sector had kept even a small percentage of the energy efficiency gains over the past 30 years through such measures.

Until we address the energy efficiency paradox in some some fashion, transit's comparative disadvantages in the transportation market will continue to increase as cars get more efficient. Likewise, urban regions will continue to sprawl because energy efficiency gains in transportation and housing make detached houses on relatively sizable lots all the more attractive.

Those who think that more money for transit and hectoring local officials to embrace transit-oriented development will be enough to tame sprawl may be fooling themselves. Until energy efficiency gains are preserved through use of taxes and/or user fees or some other mechanism, we will all be watching the energy efficiency paradox play out as our built environment and transportation network continue to sprawl.

Maybe Professor Bruegmann will then write a "Sprawling History Of The Demise Of Compact Urban Areas In America."

RTA Innocent Victim in William Coulson's "Transit Follies" Piece

2007-12-01T22:28:00.000-06:00

William Coulson, a Chicago lawyer who joined the board of the Regional Transportation Authority earlier this year, has posted an article entitled "Transit Follies in Chicago" on the blog of Mass Transit magazine. It is generally rare for senior public officials like Coulson to get off the reservation established by their institution's PR team. This piece, however, reads like it may have been authored by Coulson.

The article is Coulson's historical perspective on the current transit funding situation in the RTA's service area in northeastern Illinois. In the piece he portrays the RTA and the service boards--Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace--as innocent victims of bitter political infighting by politicians unable to put together a deal.

This kind of revisionist history is disappointing from an RTA board member who has signaled at least a bit of an independent streak. It also suggests that the RTA continues to be unwilling to acknowledge its role in causing the current transit funding crisis. The RTA's unwillingness to acknowledge partial responsibility for this crisis no doubt makes it a less sympathetic candidate for additional public funding.

Coulson begins by stating that "the RTA and the service boards have been warning Illinois political leaders for years that the system was seriously underfunded and heading for a serious breakdown." Actually, until the Moving Beyond Congestion effort by the current RTA administration the RTA resisted efforts to bring transit funding challenges to the attention of the Governor and the General Assembly. There was significant inter-agency discord when the CTA attempted to do so on its own.

Coulson thus ignores two major RTA failures. First, the RTA's equivocation about whether there was a transit funding problem and its resistance to going to Springfield for a fix meant that the General Assembly and the Governor now are stuck with a major "crisis" to fix. Second, despite statutory requirements that the RTA only approve service board budgets that are balanced and reasonable, the Auditor General found that the RTA had allowed the service boards to expand their service levels beyond what they could afford for at least the past five years.

A year ago, the service boards thus faced major operating deficits going into 2007. Rather than press them to make the service cuts, increase fares and/or extract labor concession at that time, as it was required to do, the RTA made a third major mistake. It approved service board budgets that were balanced only by using a plug number for substantial hoped-for additional state funding. Here is Coulson's take on that decision:

Thus, there is no dispute that the financial crisis is real and that there is a long-term plan to significantly improve the system. Enter Illinois’ unique brand of politics.

The RTA is financed largely through fares, a sales tax imposed in the six counties and a state match of 25 percent of the sales taxes raised. So optimistic was the RTA board in December of 2006 that the 2007 budgets included as projected revenue more than $200 million in what was called “New Transit Funding.”

Coulson was not on the RTA board in December 2006 and neither was I. Nonetheless, if the RTA had had some reasonable basis back then for its optimism it has yet to reveal what it was. No bill increasing transit funding had been introduced at that point. The Auditor General had not yet released its audit report. No prominent political figure had publicly expressed support for a tax increase necessary to provide the RTA with more money. The RTA was like the kid hoping for an allowance increase based on a parental statement that "we will take care of that later."

While I'm not an expert in GAAP accounting, I very much doubt that optimism over increased revenue from the timely passage of a bill increasing taxes that has yet to be introduced in the legislature or be publicly supported by any significant political figure has the necessary certainty to count as revenue. Yet, that is what the RTA did when it approved the 2007 service board budgets.

After glossing over these compounding errors, which will mean that doomsday if it ever comes will be even tougher on transit users, Coulson goes on to summarize the back and forth over the various transit bailout bills and the rancor that exists among the political leaders. He ends his piece with a bit of bravado:

What to make of it all? I have tremendous respect for the elected public officials who face the daunting task of balancing the state budget in the face of competing demands from constituents. They will have to decide ultimately how important mass transit is to the well-being and economic vitality of Illinois. And the people — who elect them — will have the final word on all this.

As an appointed board member of the RTA, I share the responsibility to provide the best transit to the people of the six-county region that the allotted financial resources will responsibly permit. If our elected leaders want a second-rate system, that is what they will get.

What is missing from Coulson's piece is any acknowledgement that in recent years the RTA failed its "responsibility to provide the best transit to the people of the six-county region that the alloted financial resources will responsibly permit." The RTA let the service boards expand service beyond their financial means and then plopped the resulting crisis into the lap of the General Assembly and Governor.

How refreshing it would have been if Coulson had said something like "the RTA made serious errors, but we have learned from those errors and with the money and increased authority you give us we will provide the best system within the financial means you provide." RTA acceptance of its share of the responsibility for the current crisis certainly would go down better than yet another threat about a "second-rate system" from an key member of a financial oversight agency that failed to do its job.

Time To Say Something Nice: State Attacks Teen Driving Accident Problem

2007-12-01T11:11:00.000-06:00

In response to my recent Rant & Rave post (sorry readers), someone requested that I say something nice for a change. Here it is:

In the good news department, the Illinois State Police recently won an award from the Roadway Safety Foundation and the Federal Highway Administration for the ISP's Tazewell County Teen Initiative. (Press release; article) The Tazewell program was as follows:

The Tazewell County Teen Initiative was developed to address the number of teenage drivers that died between March 2005 and July 2006 on Tazewell County roadways. During that time, 15 teenagers lost their lives, sparking a cry for action. The Illinois State Police District 8, along with the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Tazewell County Sheriff and the Tazewell County Coroner, teamed up to form the multifaceted public awareness campaign targeted to schools, hospitals, emergency response teams, media and the private sector. Since the program was launched there have been no teen traffic fatalities in Tazewell County.

The ISP, the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Illinois Secretary of State, in conjunction with other public agencies and the Ford Motor Company, are expanding the program statewide. (Press release) The program is called Operation Teen Safe Driving
and is being funded by a $150,000 IDOT grant.

Teen drivers account for a disproportionate share of auto accidents and fatalities. In addition to Operation Teen Safe Driving, the State has enacted new laws directed at teenage drivers. SB 172 (P.A. 95-310) extends the time for a learners permit from three months to nine months, extends curfews for teen drivers and doubles from six to 12 months the time during which a driver under 18 with a graduated drivers license may carry only one unrelated passenger under the age of 20, excluding siblings. HB 518 (P.A. 95-201) authorizes the Secretary of State of establish a website so parents can check the driving records of their children.

This expanded program appears to be a nice example of a public-private partnership for a good end. It is disturbing that a single downed jetliner with the loss of a couple hundred lives gets front page coverage while the over 40,000 annual fatalities on our highways are treated as some sort of inexorable fact of nature. It is great to see IDOT and the ISP attacking the auto accident problem and the complacency that surrounds that problem.

Rant & Rave

2007-11-29T21:17:00.000-06:00

It is time for a Moderator whine fest. I get one once in a great while.

I was in D.C. recently and met with a senior person in the Department of Transportation. In the course of our conversation this person said that the toughest part of the DOT's job is convincing people that the United State's transportation network no longer is the best in the world. This person said that the United States no longer is a center of innovation in the planning, delivery and operation of transportation systems. This person said the complacency and cowardliness of the transportation professionals and politicians this person has encountered while working for DOT has been quite discouraging.

While other cities are implementing or considering the implementation of pricing measures (i.e., tolls) as a way to manage heavily congested highway systems, there is little or no indication that Illinois is considering tolling as a traffic management tool or revenue raising measure (or both). We'd rather have people stand in line for "free" roads than use tolling to spread demand more effectively. And just how is the State's refusal to use an effective tool of highway management going to make it more competitive in the world economy?

With the completion of the I-355 extension, it appears that the Illinois Toll Highway has nothing new or interesting on its plate despite its inherent ability to fund new transportation projects through relatively modest toll increases and its evident ability to deliver projects in a timely way.

IDOT can't get a bridge built over the Mississippi River in St. Louis. The hangup appears to be this State's refusal to consider tolling. Apparently, we would rather slow the flow of people and commerce in southern Illinois than charge people a couple of bucks to travel over a major, costly and presumably useful new bridge.

When IDOT is presented with projects like the Elgin/O'Hare Expressway--O'Hare By-Pass that will generate substantial economic and mobility benefits, it temporizes by using years of studies and analysis in a futile attempt to placate relatively few local opponents. Meanwhile, the benefits from the expansion of O'Hare are diminished for lack of a highway/transit infrastructure that will serve the expansion.

The Regional Transportation Authority, the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace face yet another doomsday with the recent defeat of a transit funding bill, this time featuring a diversion of the sales tax on gas sold in the six-county RTA region from the GRF to transit. The service boards brought on the current financial crisis by overextending their service levels beyond their financial means. Under the bailout plans so far, the very financial oversight agency that stood by while they did so, and then approved an unbalanced FY 2007 budget using a plug number for hoped-for new State funds, gets even more authority. Huh?

Metra's STAR Line, whose western leg would be on a rail line designed to avoid population centers and whose eastern leg would run down an expensive interstate highway ROW, can't seem to get out of the station. While Metra undoubtedly will someday produce studies showing robust projected ridership levels, few people will believe them, and certainly not the federal government, which has been burned by overly optimistic ridership projections on other new start rail projects.

The proposed State capital plan--Illinois Works--allocates a much smaller percentage of new capital money to transit than past State capital bills. This presumably means continued deterioration in the CTA system. Metra will finally join the CTA in being starved for capital, which is no consolation at all.

The Chicago area continues to sprawl, which presumably means greater dependence on foreign oil and thus an larger outflow of dollars from the region. The auto-centric suburbs suck people out of the center area of the region, where population densities are high enough to support transit. There appears to be no way to brake this sprawl and no real interest is doing so. Before you know it Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins outlets will be sprouting along the Prairie Parkway. Just what we need.

Rant over. I feel a bit better. Pardon my bile. It is a temporary thing, I hope. I'm just discouraged.

Should The Metropolitan Planning Council Just Fold Up Shop?

2007-11-27T20:20:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Tribune recently published an article by Charles Leroux and Patrick Reardon entitled "Leaps of Faith Drive Ever-Expanding 'Burbs." The article explores why people are migrating to the so-called exurbs at the edge of the Chicago metropolitan region.

The answer is a familiar one. People get more house and lawn for their money. They get something new rather than a tired building decades old. They get to be part of a growing and dynamic community with lots of new faces and energy. The downsides, including long commutes on a highway system choking on they and their exurban compatriots, are not enough for most folks to opt for a smaller, more expensive house in a denser, transit-oriented urban area.

The article builds on the work of Loyola University-Chicago professor Kenneth Johnson. Professor Johnson in his paper entitled "Demographic Trends in Metropolitan Chicago at Mid-Decade" found that Chicago and suburban Cook County lost population (62,000 (-2.1%) and 27,000 (-1.1%) respectively) during the 2000-06 period, while the population on the suburban fringe (stretching from Northwest Indiana to southeast Wisconsin) increased by 500,000 (12.7%).

Johnson suggests that the population increases experienced by Chicago and suburban Cook County in the 1990s may have been a temporary pause in the decades-long migration of the region's population to the exurbs. Even in the 1990s, however, the growth rates of Chicago (4.0%) and suburban Cook County (6.9%) paled beside the growth rate in the suburban fringe (20.6%).

The current difficulties in securing an increase in operating subsidies for the Regional Transportation Authority, the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace may be in part attributed to a reluctance to increase the public investment in a transportation system whose market base appears to be weakening. This despite service board efforts to attract more riders by rolling out more service than they could afford, as the Auditor General found.

Another indication of public transit's relatively weak market position is found in the Illinois Policy Institute's recent analysis of the CTA, summarized in yesterday's post. This analysis found that the CTA is generating fewer riders per employee and per dollar of public subsidy than it has in the past. It is understandable why some public officials might be reluctant to increase public investment in a system that is not performing well.

As for the Metropolitan Planning Council, the Tribune article has the following:

"There's a joke in my profession that Rockford will be the next suburb," said John LaMotte, a land-use planner whose clients include developers and municipalities. "Now look at how close the edge is getting to Rockford. It's already out to Marengo."

Scott Goldstein, housing expert for the Chicago-based Metropolitan Planning Council, said he believes Rockford won't be the last stop. "I absolutely think it's going to expand for many, many more miles," he said. "It certainly goes to Indiana and Wisconsin. Are we going to approach the Iowa state line?"

If the Metropolitan Planning Council, that paragon of good planning, public transit and compact, transit-oriented development, has given up on taming sprawl then maybe it should just shut its doors and stop using its newsletters and seminars to prick the consciences of those who still believe that paving over paradise is not such a good thing.

More Money For The CTA: Hold On Says IPI Study

2007-11-26T21:52:00.000-06:00

From reading his column I have always imagined that Dennis Byrne, the Chicago Tribune columnist, channels the spirits of Lenora Helmsley and George Wallace. Yet, Byrne's column in today's Tribune lambasting the Chicago Transit Authority does us a real service by pointing us to a new analysis of CTA spending and operations by the Illinois Policy Institute.

We have recently compared the CTA's bus system's performance to the performance of Pace's bus system and found that Pace's system appeared to be more cost effective on every measure examined except public subsidy per passenger. The IPI analysis compares the CTA's performance today to its past performance. Here are some of the key findings:

Rail ridership is up 25%, from 152 million to 190 million since 1979.

Bus ridership has plummeted by 45%, from 552 million to 304 million since 1979 and overall ridership is down 23% since 1969/70. Bus operations are a key area ripe for improvement.

The average CTA employee today is less productive than the average CTA employee in 1969 or even 1979. This is illustrated in a number of ways. Spending (cost) per rider is up 41% from $1.55 to $2.19 since 1969/70 and up 31% (from $1.67) since 1979. Correspondingly, riders per employee are down, from 56,299 per employee to 45,292 since 1979. The bottom line is that today’s CTA spends more to deliver a rider and each employee delivers fewer per year on average. This is a root cause of the CTA financial crisis and most of it rests within the bus operations.

By achieving the 1979 spending benchmark alone ($1.67 per rider), the CTA would save $257 million and more than close the funding gap without having to ask the taxpayers for more.

By achieving the 1969/70 spending benchmark ($1.55 per rider), the CTA would save $316 million per year.

The CTA is earning more system (non-subsidized) revenue per rider today than it was in 1979, $1.13 versus $.88, an increase of 28% and certainly a step in the right direction.

Advertising and concession revenue are up 478%, from $4.3 million to $25 million.

The public subsidy per rider is up 35% since 1979, from $.79 to $1.07. The taxpayers are more than doing their part in subsidizing the CTA’s operation.

This 35% increase in the public subsidy on a per rider basis illustrates the fallacy of the CTA public relations and budget document claims that the CTA’s pubic subsidy has not kept pace with inflation. While that fact is true in total dollars, it is a misleading fact since the key data point is the subsidy per rider. In fact, one could make the case that the subsidy is excessive by $138 million ([$1.07 - $.79] x 494 million riders for 2007).

Bus operations are a key area for improvement. While ridership is down 45% since 1979, total miles driven per year is only down 14%, from 83.5 million to 71.9 million. Further, the total route miles covered (the aggregate miles of the route map) has more than doubled, from 1,042 route miles to 2,529 route miles in 2007. This is unsustainable and the underlying reasons for this must be addressed.

Today the CTA runs 154 bus routes versus 134 in 1979, an increase in routes and corresponding expense of 15% while ridership fell 45%.

The bus operations data indicate that in 1979 the CTA operated a tightly focused, more market sensitive route map with more traffic per bus per route operated and bus run made. Today, with the route miles up 143%, it appears the CTA is running too many route miles for too few riders, making the bus system inefficient.

The IPI then makes a series of recommendations that it claims can save the CTA more than the $158 million deficit it faces in 2008.

IPI's short and cogent analysis is well worth a read. It challenges the conventional wisdom that a series of unfortunate events has overwhelmed the CTA, Metra and Pace, necessitating greater public subsidies. Instead, the analysis suggests that the bailouts past and present have allowed the CTA to avoid taking the steps necessary to prudently manage its business.

SB 572 Revenue Measures Abandoned

2007-11-26T19:57:00.000-06:00

SB 572 and its combination of an additional 0.25% Regional Transportation Authority sales tax and an increase in the real estate transfer tax in the City of Chicago appears to be dead. In a letter co-authored by House Speaker Michael Madigan and Representative Julie Hamos, the moving force behind SB 572, they indicated that they would support the approach contained in HB 4161, namely, a transfer of most of the sales tax revenue on fuel collected in the six-county RTA region from the State General Fund to transit.

The slightly revised version of HB 4161 that they will put forth will retain--as does HB 4161--the "reform components of Senate Bill 572, which include substantial pension and benefit concessions from transit unions and other requirements to protect the best interests of taxpayers and transit riders."

The fact sheet attached to the letter states that SB 572 would have raised $530 million of new money. HB 4161 and the Madigan/Hamos alternative plan will raise $440 million in new money. It is unclear if the difference is to be made up by a fare increase, which some support, or is money not absolutely needed by the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace in the first place to maintain current fares and service levels.

It is way too soon for transit supporters to break out the champagne, however. Representatives from both parties, primarily from Downstate, have held up action on a transit funding package because they want a capital program for highways and schools. If the Madigan/Hamos bill comes up for a vote on Wednesday, as scheduled, and there is no such capital program in place, then it is quite possible that the successor of SB 572 could be voted down, just as was SB 572 in early September.

I bet those grunts in the Department of Revenue and elsewhere who are responsible for protecting the State's fisc are tearing their hair out at this development. Under SB 572 the State would be putting up $150 million in new money. Under the HB 4161 approach the State will have to come up with $385 million in new money for transit.

Stay tuned.

ARTBA's Concrete Vision For The Future

2007-11-25T11:00:00.000-06:00

The American Road and Transportation Builders Association ("ARTBA") has released a major report entitled "A New Vision & Mission for American's Federal Surface Transportation Program: ARTBA Recommendations for SAFETEA-LU Reauthorization." Not surprisingly, the report concludes that the nation's needs to increase its investment in transportation infrastructure.

The report lays out why traffic congestion levels have increased across the country over the past 25 years. Here are the relevant percentage increases during the 1982-2006 period:

Populations: 28.4%
Drivers: 36.2%
Vehicles: 52.4%
Vehicle Miles Traveled: 94.5%
New Lanes Miles: 6.6%
Hours of Delay: 171.4%

Not surprisingly, when you almost double VMT while increasing road capacity only 6.6 percent increased delays are inevitable. (The fact that congestion is not worse may even suggest that the nation had excess road capacity in the 1970s and 1980s.) The report states that over the next 30 years the U.S. population is expected to grow by 100 million and highway traffic will double again. If road capacity does not increase at a faster rate, then by 2035 "Americans can expect to spend 160 hours--four work weeks--each year in traffic congestion."

The ARTBA report states that the United States is falling behind Europe, China and India in terms of adding highway infrastructure. The projected new miles of interstate quality highways to be constructed between 2000 and 2020 are as follows:

China: 42,000
India: 25,000
Europe: 2,980
U.S.: 1,130

Freight tonnage shipped on roadways by truck in the U.S. is projected to double by 2035, putting even more pressure on the road system.

If that is not enough, the federal Highway Trust Fund is running out of money. Highway crashes in the U.S. alone kill 43,000 people and injure three million annually at a cost of $230 billion, which is more than two percent of the nation's GDP.

In response, among other things, the report recommends a $0.10 increase in the federal gas tax and indexing the tax thereafter at the rate of inflation. The successor bill to SAFETEA-LU should begin the transition from the flat motor fuels tax to a fee-based system based on the amount of miles traveled by vehicle. It argues that road tolling should be encouraged and expanded, as should the use of public-private partnerships to roll out new transportation investments. Further, the current 80:20 ratio of highway to transit investment should be maintained.

The report recommends that states be held more accountable when it comes to capital investment in transportation infrastructure. Among other things, earmarked funds would have to be expended during the life of the successor bill to SAFETEA-LU and increased federal funding would be contingent on states maintaining a minimum level of capital investment necessary to preserve its existing transportation infrastructure.

Finally, the report recommends that the federal government enact a "Critical Commerce Corridors" program to help ensure the safe and efficient transport of freight across the country. The 3C components would include trade corridors, international gateways, access routes to ports and airports, projects to eliminate freight congestion points, and the like. The report recommends that the 3C program be financed through user fees, and lays out a menu of such fees.

This is not a complete summary of the ARTBA report. The report is worth a look to see how a major industry group is staking out its position in what is sure to be a long, and protracted battle over the reauthorization of the federal transportation bill relatively early in the next presidential administration.

Todd Litman: Smart (Growth) Fellow

2007-11-24T14:34:00.000-06:00

Todd Litman, the head of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (here), has posted an article in Planetizen entitled "Smart Growth Safety Benefits." After perusing some of his work and from what I could tell about his presentation at the recent Lipinski Symposium, I'm just about convinced that the transportation and land use agencies in northeastern Illinois should just give him the keys, dictatorial powers, and a few billion dollars to spend and step back. He's my candidate to be the reborn Robert Moses of the smart growth/smart transportation set.

"Smart Growth Safety Benefits" looks at the safety consequences of the increased vehicular traffic in less densely populated areas dependent almost entirely on the private auto for transportation. His thesis is that "traffic safety is one of the most important benefits of smart growth and smart growth is one of the most effective ways to reduce traffic risk."

Litman first compares the traffic fatality rates in ten densely populated area with the rates in ten counties that he characterizes as "dumb growth" counties. He finds that accident rates are much (5x to 10x) higher in dumb growth areas, where per capita vehicle mileage is high.

Litman then establishes that traffic safety tends to increase significantly the more a community relies on non-auto forms of transport such as bicycles and transit. He notes in passing the health and environmental benefits associated with smart growth policies that complement the traffic safety benefits of such development.

Finally, Litman points out a flaw in our method of measuring traffic safety. According to Litman, while accidents per mile driven have dropped, the benefits have been almost entirely offset by the increase in the per capita vehicle miles traveled as a result of the dumb growth policies in place throughout most of North America. Consequently, the per capita accident rate has dropped only slightly over the past 40 years.

None of these conclusions are novel. In his typical fashion, however, Litman lays out his points crisply and in a nice commonsense manner. He doesn't scare anyone with his rhetoric and his writing doesn't drip with elitism.

I talked to him recently about his proposal for taxing parking spaces, which has been implemented successfully elsewhere, but was shot down without a fair hearing in this area. Litman was remarkably equanimous. Rather than making some caustic remarks about the Brezhnevian nature of our region's approach to transportation, he just said that good ideas take awhile to get established and aren't for all regions.

It would be great if Litman were a fixture here, rather than stuck in rainy Victoria coming up with good ideas. UIC's Urban Transportation Center or DePaul's Chaddick Institute could use a shot of fresh thinking that Litman would bring.

SB 572 Meets The Alternative

2007-11-23T08:45:00.000-06:00

In many quarters, including editorial boards, the notion that there is any alternative to SB 572 and its regional sales tax increase is treated dismissively. There is an alternative, however, and that is HB 4161, which was introduced by Representative Saviano, is co-sponsored by seven Republican colleagues, and appears to supported by Governor Blagojevich. HB 4161 uses a portion of the sales tax collected on gasoline sold in the six-county area that makes up the jurisdiction of the Regional Transportation Authority to fund public transit operations at the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace. At first glance, HB 4161 appears to contain many if not most of the so-called reforms of the RTA that are contained in SB 572.

The best description of HB 4161 I've seen is this letter to the editor in today's edition of the Lake County News-Sun from Representative Sandy Cole, reprinted in full below in the interest of giving a full hearing to an alternative to SB 572:

Equitable funding for mass transit

November 23, 2007

As a chief co-sponsor of House Bill 4161 (Regional Transportation Support Fund), I would like to take this opportunity to clarify an erroneous assumption made by your Nov. 20 editorial about the proposed redirection of the state sales tax on gasoline to mass transit ("Political dallying").

New construction for Lake County roads would not be impacted, as was concluded. There is a gross misconception by both the media and the public that the gasoline sales tax and the motor fuel tax are one and the same. They are not. As with all appropriation legislation, the devil is in the details.

In Illinois, gasoline and diesel are subject to a sales tax at a rate of 6.25 percent. The state retains 5 percent of the collected revenues and the remaining 1.25 percent is disbursed to local governments. The state's portion of sales tax revenue is generally deposited into the General Revenue Fund and used toward general government expenses.

HB4161 would redirect the state's portion (5 percent) of the tax revenues to a proposed Regional Transportation Support Fund. According to the Illinois Department of Revenue, that portion will be approximately $385 million in 2008. The difference left in the General Revenue Fund by this redirection of funds would be bolstered by other new revenue sources, such as additional gaming positions at existing casinos or closing corporate loopholes.

In addition, the state imposes a Motor Fuel Tax (19 cents per gallon of gasoline, 21.5 cents per gallon of diesel). This is a tax for state roads and the proceeds go toward road building projects, including those in Lake County.

In 2006, the state collected about $1.4 billion in Motor Fuel Tax revenues. All Motor Fuel Tax revenue is deposited in the Motor Fuel Tax Fund and is distributed per a formula set in state statute.

Combined with modest fare increases, the provisions of HB4161 offer the same level of funding as Senate Bill 572 without tax increases. HB4161 has proposed fare increases (10 percent in 2008 to generate $73 million and another 5 percent in 2009 to generate $50 million) that are both minimal and reasonable.

Between 2001 and 2006, the price of gasoline has increased 68 percent, but CTA cash fares have only increased 15 percent. It is fair to expect riders to pay for increased fares, just like motorists have to pay more for gasoline.

SB572 did not include a fare increase because it relied on tax increases. HB4161 is based on the premise that those who use the service should help pay for it. Of course, they cannot be expected to pay all of the costs of maintaining the mass transit system, but transit riders should pay a fair share.

Without a doubt, I support increased mass transit funding and believe that the gas sales tax proposal is a more responsible alternative for resolving the mass transit funding crisis than raising taxes on families and seniors. Raising taxes should always be our last priority, not our first.

Chicago Mayor Says Think Different

2007-11-20T21:23:00.000-06:00

The Mayor of Chicago has challenged the State to be "creative" when it comes to solving the public transit funding problem. Fresh from raising property taxes in Chicago, the Mayor also criticized the Governor for his opposition to increasing sales taxes in the six-county Regional Transportation Authority region So, let's get modestly creative and suggest that the following provisions be included in the final transit bill:

1. Indexed Fare Increases. Index fares to some reasonable measure such as the Consumer Price Index, perhaps capping increases at 4% annually to avoid sudden spikes. This provision will address the concerns of certain parties that a fare increase be part of a funding solution and allow the service boards--Chicago Transit Authority, Metra, Pace--to avoid the counter-productive cycles of putting off fare increases too long and then raising them too sharply. Indexing public transit fares provides a nice precedent for using a similar index to periodically increase the state gas tax to help protect its yield in real dollars.

2. Direct State Role In RTA . Take a board member from each of the three RTA subregions--City of Chicago, suburban Cook County and the collar counties--and make them gubernatorial appointments subject to Senate approval. Make the RTA Chairman a gubernatorial appointment. This State role is commensurate to the State's financial contribution to the public transit system in northeastern Illinois and the important role of that system in the State's transportation system.

3. Hold RTA Accountable. Currently, the RTA can reject service board budgets that do not meet the statutory requirements. The service board then suffers a financial penalty, namely, loss of their share of Public Transportation Fund monies from the State. The RTA, however, suffers no financial penalty if it is derlict in its duties by, for example, allowing service levels to grow faster than revenues over an extended period (as the Auditor General found) or approving unbalanced budgets with plug numbers for hoped-for contributions from the State to cover major deficits (as the RTA did in FY 2007). Some portion of the RTA's funding for its own administration should be subject to being withdrawn if the RTA fails to perform. This provision would apply only if the RTA remained as just a financial oversight agency. (See #5 below.)

4. Tie Transit To Land Use. Explicitly tie transit investments to land use. Write in the RTA Act a requirement that the RTA prioritize transit investment and service to regions and communities that support transit oriented development. (This is not necessarily a gimme for Chicago. Its embrace of big box retailing and minimum parking space requirements for new residential construction, for example, might put it below some suburban communities that are trying to build TOD developments around Metra stations.)

5. Restructure The RTA And The Service Boards. Combine CTA bus operations and Pace mainline bus operations into one operating unit. Pace's paratransit, vanpool and demand response service becomes another unit. CTA rail and Metra become their own units. These become purely operating units tucked into the RTA. This means that the separate boards of directors of the service boards would be abolished. Rather, the RTA and its board would have ultimate operating responsibility for public transit in the region.

Find a funding source, pass these provisions and be done with it. There certainly are more creative ideas--e.g., emergency oversight agency; combining RTA, IDOT District 1 and the Tollway; and heavy investment in alternative automobile technology (e.g., plug in hybrids)--but these provisions with the exception of #5 could be tucked into SB 572 or its successor pretty easily.

CTA Cost Structure: Background

2007-11-17T20:06:00.000-06:00

The previous post outlined how the Chicago Transit Authority's bus operations appears to be significantly less cost-effective than Pace's bus operations in terms of the cost of putting vehicles on the streets (because of its higher ridership the CTA does better on a per passenger cost basis).

This extensively researched article by Stacy Warden in Chi-Town Daily News outlines how the CTA's high pension costs and wages contribute to its overall high cost structure and the series of events that resulted in the CTA's unmanageable pension costs. This article briefly outlines the five year labor agreement that is embedded in SB 572 and attempts to address pension costs.

Pace Laps The CTA On Cost Effectiveness Of Bus Operations: Implications For Transit Funding Crisis

2007-11-17T17:41:00.000-06:00

A recent post indicated that Pace's financial situation is more dire than the Chicago Transit Authority's financial situation according to some basic measures such as unfunded operating deficit as percentage of revenue.

There is another side to the Pace story, however, and that is the relative cost effectiveness of its bus service. According to the Federal Transit Administration's National Transit Database 2006 reports for Pace and the CTA the "service efficiency" figures covering Pace and CTA bus service are as follows:

Operating Expense Per Vehicle Revenue Mile
Pace: $6.37
CTA: $12.50

CTA 96.2% higher

Operating Expense Per Vehicle Revenue Hour
Pace: $89.28
CTA: $123.17

CTA 40% higher

Operating Expenses Per Passenger Mile
Pace: $0.58
CTA: $1.11

CTA 91.4% higher

Operating Expenses Per Unlinked Passenger Trip
Pace: $3.87
CTA: $2.77

Pace 39.7% higher

Unlinked Passenger Trips Per Vehicle Revenue Mile
Pace: 1.65
CTA: 4.51

CTA 173.3% higher

Unlinked Passenger Trips Per Vehicle Revenue Hour
Pace: 23.07
CTA: 44.39

CTA 92.4% higher

Ignoring for a moment the costs associated with putting a bus on the street, CTA bus service is more effective than Pace's bus service because CTA buses carry more passengers per hour of operation and mile traveled. The greater number of CTA bus passengers per vehicle hour and per bus trip means that the CTA's operating expense per passenger ($2.77) is less than Pace's operating expense per passenger ($3.87).

Pace, however, is much more cost effective than the CTA in putting buses on the street. Its operating expense per vehicle mile and per passenger mile are only slightly more than half of the CTA's operating expense according to these measures. The CTA's operating expense per vehicle revenue hour is 40 percent higher than Pace's.

These results might be skewed in Pace's favor for at least two reasons. First, Pace's operating environment--suburban streets and highways--and lighter passenger loads result in fewer stops and starts that eat up fuel and equipment. Second, the CTA's bus fleet is older than Pace's bus fleet, so the CTA incurs higher repair costs because of the greater frequency of mechanical breakdowns.

So let's assume that Pace's bus service is 19.1 percent more cost effective than the CTA's bus service in terms of putting buses on the street. This 19.1 percent figure is conservative, representing less than half the lowest cost-effectiveness advantage that the FTA data shows that Pace has over the CTA.

Now apply this 19.1 percent cost savings figure to the 2006 operating expense for CTA bus service that the CTA reported to the FTA ($828,100,714). That yields $158.2 million, the very amount of the CTA's projected FY 2008 unfunded operating deficit that is behind the push to pass SB 572 and the many months of machinations connected therewith. In other words, if the CTA's bus service were as cost effective as Pace's bus service it appears there would be no unfunded CTA operating deficit.

Those opposing SB 572 might focus on finding a way to apply Pace's cost structure for its bus operations to the CTA's bus operations. Those supporting SB 572 might reflect on how the relative cost ineffectiveness of CTA bus operations compared to another public transit agency providing bus service in same metropolitan area dampens the appetite for a sales tax increase, and modify their legislative strategy accordingly.

Pace has already taken on ADA paratransit operations for the six-county region that makes up the Regional Transportation Authority's service area. Is there a way for that to happen for mainline bus service while preserving Pace's lower cost structure?

Grass Roots Anti-SB 572 Efforts

2007-11-17T17:08:00.000-06:00

The Moving Beyond Congestion/SB 572 effort has attracted the support of a variety of interest groups, ranging from the genteel (e.g., Metropolitan Planning Council) to those that position themselves more in the community activist mode (e.g., Campaign for Better Transit). These groups have sponsored rallies and email campaigns intended to push for passage of SB 572.

The Illinois Policy Institute, a think tank whose slogan is "free enterprise and limited government for a better Illinois," apparently has been engaged in a grass-roots effort against SB 572. According to a blog post in the Chicago Daily Observer entitled "Kiss that CTA Bailout Goodbye...For Now," the Institute did the following:

The Institute targeted state representatives who were being pressured to vote for the tax increase and called more than 30,000 voters in their districts to urge them to contact their legislators.
* We spread the word to leaders of Americans for Tax Reform, who contacted key members of the Transportation Committee to oppose the tax hike.
* We also notified our friends at the National Taxpayers Union, who subsequently sent out 16,000 emails to their Illinois membership urging their members to oppose this tax increase.
* Our team drafted and placed two op-eds explaining the impending tax hike and its implications.
* We informed both the State Republican Party and House Minority Leader Tom Cross on our strategies to educate policymakers, the public and the press on the threat this tax posed.
* Finally, we hit the airwaves on one of Chicago’s most popular talk radio stations, WLS. Both CEO John Tillman (you can hear his interview here) and President Greg Blankenship went on the air to flesh out the real issues behind the tax hike and to expose its inconsistencies and flaws.

* * *
What other interest groups, if any, have joined the Institute in fighting against the SB 572 and a "bailout" of public transit in northeastern Illinois?

$1.9 Billion I-94 Expansion Announced

2007-11-17T10:18:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin transportation officials have announced a $1.9 billion plan to reconstruct I-94 from Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee to the Wisconsin/Illinois state line and to add a fourth lane in each direction. In Illinois, the Illinois Tollway is expanding I-94 south of the Wisconsin border (the North Tri-State) to four lanes in each direction.

At the same time, the Wisconsin legislature recently killed a rental car tax increase that would have funded a Kenosha/Racine/Milwaukee commuter rail line (dated website here) that would be linked to Metra's North Line. That project would cost about $250 million to build according to news reports (e.g., here). Metra's financial troubles are well known.

This commentator questions whether it makes sense for Wisconsin (and by extension Illinois) to be pumping public investment capital into highways--with their adverse environmental effects--while neglecting alternatives such as commuter rail. This commentator takes the position that the transportation networks and economies of northeastern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin need to be better integrated and urges that both the highway and rail projects go forth.

Is there a ready-made solution: Toll the entire I-94 corridor from Chicago to Milwaukee and use a portion of the proceeds to upgrade both direct rail service (Amtrak) and commuter rail service (KRM and Metra)? With the heavy daily traffic volumes it would not be hard to generate plenty of revenue to fund such alternatives.

More On The Budget Holes: Metra

2007-11-17T08:10:00.000-06:00

Metra has adopted its 2008 budget and sent it to the RTA for its approval. (Reports here, here and here.) A $40 million projected 2008 deficit is prompting Metra to increase fares by 10 percent, commencing February 1, 2008.

The final version of Metra's 2008 is not yet available on Metra's website. An earlier draft, however, is available (here) and allows us to complete the analysis of the deficits of the three service boards, the Chicago Transit Authority, Pace and Metra.

Not surprisingly, the data (see below) show that Metra's deficit is less severe than the CTA and Pace deficits when measured as a percentage of revenue and operating expense. Metra's per trip unfunded deficit ($0.49) is between the CTA's per trip unfunded deficit ($0.32) and Pace's per trip unfunded deficit ($0.85). Note that the service board ridership data appear to define "trip" as an unlinked trip (e.g., getting on and off a bus/train) rather than the full journey, including transfers, between the customer's origin and destination. Metra's customers probably are more likely to take one ride to their destinations than Pace and, especially, CTA customers. Thus, if "trip" is defined as the travel necessary for a customer to get from their origin to their destination the Pace and CTA per trip unfunded deficit figures would likely rise more than the Metra unfunded per trip deficit figure.

CTA
Unfunded 2008 Deficit: $158,000,000
2007 Expenses $1,079,052,000
2007 Revenue: $541,800,000
2007 Ridership: 493,600,000

Unfunded deficit as a percentage of expenses: 14.6%
Unfunded deficit as a percentage of revenue: 29.2%
Per trip unfunded deficit: $0.32

Metra

Unfunded 2008 Deficit: $40,000,000
2007 Expenses $553,980,000
2007 Revenue: $285,060,000
2007 Ridership: 82,000,000

Unfunded deficit as a percentage of expenses: 7.2%
Unfunded deficit as a percentage of revenue: 14.0%
Per trip unfunded deficit: $0.49

Pace
Unfunded 2008 Deficit: $32,900,000
2007 Expenses: $164,757,000
2007 Revenue: $56,435,000
2007 Ridership: 38,900,000

Unfunded deficit as a percentage of expenses: 20.0%
Unfunded deficit as a percentage of revenue: 58.3%
Per trip unfunded deficit: $0.85

Sheriff Wyatt Yawp Rides High In Kane County

2007-11-15T18:47:00.000-06:00

The Daily Herald reported the recent comments of Kane County Board member Bill Wyatt. According to the report, Wyatt "railed" on the Chicago Transit Authority as a "brother that you can't control" at the expense of its suburban siblings Metra and Pace.

Wyatt went on to say: "'People in the suburbs, in my opinion, need to know that Pace is not the problem. Metra is not the problem. The problem's in the city of Chicago,'" Wyatt, an Aurora Republican, said at Tuesday's Kane County Board meeting."

Wyatt's assessment that "Pace is not the problem" doesn't bear scrutiny. By any measure except raw dollars, Pace is in a much deeper in the financial hole than the CTA:

CTA
Unfunded 2008 Deficit: $158,000,000
2007 Expenses $1,079,052,000
2007 Revenue: $541,800,000
2007 Ridership: 493,600,000

Unfunded deficit as a percentage of expenses: 14.6%
Unfunded deficit as a percentage of revenue: 29.2%
Per trip unfunded deficit: $0.32

Pace
Unfunded 2008 Deficit: $32,900,000
2007 Expenses: $164,757,000
2007 Revenue: $56,435,000
2007 Ridership: 38,900,000

Unfunded deficit as a percentage of expenses: 20.0%
Unfunded deficit as a percentage of revenue: 58.3%
Per trip unfunded deficit: $0.85

In other words, Pace's unfunded 2008 deficit is much larger than the CTA's unfunded deficit when measured as a percentage of operating expense or revenue or on a per trip basis.

By way of comparison, if the CTA's unfunded deficit percentages were the same as Pace's unfunded deficit percentages then the CTA's unfunded operating deficit would range from $215,474,000 (% of revenue measure) to $417,466,000 (unfunded deficit per ride measure.)

Note that Pace's funded operating deficit is higher on a percentage basis than the CTA's funded operating deficit as well. Pace is only required to generate about 40 percent of its revenue from its operations while the CTA (like Metra) has to generate over 50 percent of its revenue from operations. In other words, big brother CTA and little sibling Metra are subsidizing Pace even in the best of times.

Wyatt's comments came at a Kane County Board meeting attended by Metra and Pace representatives, but apparently not the CTA. There is no indication from the report that the Metra or Pace representatives stood up for their CTA "sibling" in the face of Wyatt's verbal onslaught.

Wyatt's apparently unchallenged statements are yet another reason why the RTA (but not CMAP) should be scaled back to possibly two counties (Cook, DuPage) and no more than four counties (add Lake and Will) that have the interest and political will to support a regional transportation system. Once cut loose from the RTA, Kane, McHenry and perhaps other counties could contract with the RTA for service (e.g., Metra service to Elburn) and/or put together self-made and self-funded transit systems on their own. In a time of financial distress, why shouldn't the RTA be scaled back to its core service area, sparing it the potshots and endless yawping from knuckleheads in Kane and McHenry Counties.

Shifting Population Landscape: Implications

2007-11-14T18:21:00.000-06:00

While the Chicago region's population as a whole is expected to grow at a decent rate over the next 20 years, this general growth masks population shifts within the region that have important implications for the region's transportation system.

This article indicates that the congressional districts represented by Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Rahm Emanuel are among the ten districts in the nation with the fastest shirking populations in the 2000-05 period. Schakowsky's district lost 51,906 (7.9%) of its population during that period, the third greatest decrease in the nation. Emanuel's district lost 33,260 (5.1%) of its population during that period, the eighth largest decrease in the nation.

The national map (here) based on Almanac of American Politics (site) data showing population changes indicates that the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 7th congressional districts also lost population during the 2000-05 period. All of these districts cover the City of Chicago and nearby suburbs.

These congressional districts have the highest population and employment density in the region. For the most part they embody the kind of transit-oriented development so prized these days as an antidote to everything from obesity to global warming. The current level of transit investment and infrastructure in these districts is higher than in the congressional districts farther out from Chicago.

The shift in population away from these high-density, transit-friendly areas to the urban fringe does not bode well for public transit (or the environment) in this region. The loss of population in the urban core cuts away at the sales tax funding base for the Chicago Transit Authority. Transit is harder and more expensive to provide in sprawling exurbs. It also is harder to make the business case for heavy new capital investment in transit when the ridership base of the CTA, which still carries about 80% of the region's transit customers, is shrinking.

Could the current difficulties in finding increased capital and operating funding for the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace be driven in part by an almost unconscious recognition that the demographic trends in this region are pointing us in the direction of becoming a sprawling, auto-centric region like Detroit (but with a more vibrant downtown) instead of a city like London or Paris with a strong public transit system?

Speaking of which, are there any provisions in SB 572, the long-stalled bill to provide more operating funding for the service boards and "reform" the Regional Transportation Authority, that will help counteract the centrifugal forces that are pulling this region into a development pattern largely inhospitable to transit?

Setting STAR Line?

2007-11-12T18:10:00.000-06:00

Crain's reports that a group of suburban municipalities is gearing up to oppose the Canadian National Railway's purchase of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway's line that stretches in a giant circle from Waukegan to Gary. CN is going to use this line to reroute freight trains that currently have to travel through the City of Chicago. This will allow railroad properties in the City to be developed for other uses. As anyone who had taken Metra's Aurora and Geneva lines to Chicago can observe, railroad property in Chicago has been extensively developed with relatively high density housing.

As previously reported, Metra has designs on part of the EJ&E line for the western branch of its much-anticipated STAR Line. Metra will find it much harder and certainly more expensive to acquire this right of way if CN proceeds with transforming it into a key link in the nation's rail transportation network. It will be interesting to see if Metra gives aid and comfort to the suburban NIMBY group (meant only to be descriptive in this case). According to the article, the opponents of the CN move are unlikely to be able to block CN's acquisition of the EJ&E line.

The juxtaposition of a group of suburban municipalities with low density/auto-centric development patterns opposing the expansion of a rail line that will free up space for higher density, more transit-friendly development elsewhere in the region is instructive. It does not appear that there is any public body--be it the RTA or the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning--whose job it is to weigh the cost and benefits of the CN takeover from a regional perspective. In terms of CO2 emission reduction, for example, which will do more--build the STAR Line in areas that are mostly sprawling and auto-centric or build walkable, transit friendly development is an area already comparatively well served by transit (at least until the 1/20/08 Doomsday).

Even if the STAR Line wins that contest, is it time for Metra to put the STAR Line to rest anyway? Metra seems to be having a hard time developing believable projected ridership numbers that would support such a major new capital investment. The fact that the proposed State capital plan has a 10:1 highway/transit funding ratio (compared to a 2:1 ratio in the last capital bill) certainly does not indicate strong support for the STAR Line specifically and public transit generally. Metra can't pay its bills now without raiding its capital funds. Adding a new line that will surely operate at a substantial operating loss would only make its financial position worse.

Put these all together--a weak business case, lack of public/political support for the STAR Line in the State capital bill, Metra's operating funding challenges, and arguably other transit investments that will do more to reduce congestion and auto travel than the STAR Line--and maybe it is time for the STAR Line to be mothballed.

I-355 South Extension Opens: Cause For Celebration Or Mourning?

2007-11-11T15:41:00.000-06:00

The South Extension of I-355 opens tomorrow after today's festivities. The South Extension runs about 13 miles from I-55 to I-80 in New Lenox, mostly in Will County. While much of the corridor is still rural in character, subdivisions are replacing cornfields and there is much commercial development along the corridor, including at least two developments of around two million square feet apiece. In short, the Chicago metropolitan region is sprawling some more.

From all accounts, Will County residents are generally in favor of the South Extension. A Sierra Club lawsuit stopped construction in the mid-1990s, but no environmental group filed such a challenge this time. (Timeline here.)

Should we view the South Extension as a welcome addition to the region's transportation system or is it an investment in auto transportation that is a reckless gamble when oil prices are continuing their climb to $100/barrel and beyond? Is the increase in convenience for Will County residents outweighed by the environmental costs associated with ramming an expressway through a rural area and the sprawl-type development that will inevitably result? Why did the Sierra Club (and other such groups) take a pass on challenging the South Extension this time around?

Final question: The South Extension cost about $750 million. Is the region better off with this investment or would the money have been better used on fixing the region's public transportation system?

The Regional Distribution Of IDOT's Highway Capital Dollars

2007-11-10T07:53:00.000-06:00

Introduction

This post looks at the allocation of highway capital dollars by the Illinois Department of Transportation throughout the State of Illinois, using factors such as population, highway miles, and daily vehicle miles traveled in each IDOT district. Likely to no one's surprise, it shows that District 1, which encompasses the six counties of northeastern Illinois, receives less than any other district on a vehicle miles traveled basis and is second lowest on a per capita basis, although it tops the State in terms of investment on a per highway mile basis. This analysis indicates that northeastern Illinois subsidizes highway capital investment in the rest of the State, a fact that may have some relevance in the ongoing debates over the "bailout" of the public transit agencies operating in District 1.

Methodology

The Illinois Department of Transportation has posted its FY 2008-2013 Proposed Highway Improvement Program (here). Such detailed capital program documents were long shrouded in bureaucratic secrecy by IDOT. Governor Blagojevich's administration should get some credit for posting the Program in the public domain and, in general, making more information about IDOT and its programs publicly available.

The Program allocates capital dollars for highway improvements among each of IDOT's nine districts (district map here). District 1 covers the same six counties in northeastern Illinois that make up the service area for the Regional Transportation Authority and its three service boards--Chicago Transit Authority, Metra, and Pace. The remaining districts are Downstate. Generally speaking, the higher the district number the further south the district.

I pulled highway miles, daily vehicle miles traveled, and FY 2008-2013 capital investment data from the Program. I aggregated 2000 Census data for each Illinois county into district population figures. Then, I utilized my primitive Excel skills and went to town.

Summary Results

Per Capita Highway Investment

District 1 $382.44
District 2 $917.26
District 3 $1,649.3
District 4 $1,058.47
District 5 $600.11
District 6 $313.74
District 7 $1,011.16
District 8 $1,175.02
District 9 $1,425.75

Statewide Average $621.75
Downstate Average $935.20

Investment Per Highway Mile

District 1 $918,623.88
District 2 $387,403.45
District 3 $446,224.26
District 4 $350,153.85
District 5 $206,870.80
District 6 $147,072.82
District 7 $241,463.41
District 8 $466,703.66
District 9 $344,217.69

Statewide: $432,536.06
Downstate: $322,941.53

Investment Per Daily Mile Traveled

District 1 $26.96
District 2 $52.16
District 3 $66.67
District 4 $60.53
District 5 $28.85
District 6 $29.71
District 7 $43.04
District 8 $54.26
District 9 $58.84

Statewide Average: $37.42
Downstate Average: $49.83

Analysis

This summary lends itself to two related conclusions. First, it appears from both the per capita and vehicle miles traveled data that the denser land-use patterns in District 1 lend themselves to more cost-effective highway transportation than in the less densely populated areas Downstate. This was a bit of surprise to me, given the higher land acquisition and construction costs in an urban area, but it makes sense when one considers the higher level of use of urban roadways.

Second, because of that higher level of cost-efficiency, IDOT is able to shift money from Northeastern Illinois to fund Downstate highway projects. District 1, after all, accounts for 63.52% of the population and 54.24% of the daily vehicle miles traveled in Illinois, yet it will receive only 39.07% of IDOT's highway capital dollars under the Program. Presumably, the percentage of vehicle miles traveled in a district approximates that district's contribution of gas taxes and other revenues for IDOT's highway program. The major difference between District 1's revenue contribution and its return in the form of IDOT highway capital investment is highly significant.

Some caveats. First, this analysis does not consider IDOT's investment in other transportation modes such as airports and public transit. When IDOT's investments in those other modes are factored in--something I hope to do down the line--District 1 may not be such a heavy donor region after all. Second, the Illinois Tollway system, which is centered in District 1 and is completely funded by user fees--frees up District 1 money for use Downstate. It is quite possible that these two effects cancel each other, leaving District 1 as a major donor region.

Third, it is possible that the distribution of IDOT's capital investment reflects a certain ebb and flow among the districts. Maybe the 2008-13 period is a down period for District 1 and that it might even become a donee district at some point in the future when it finally undertakes expensive new projects like the Western O'Hare Bypass. Finally, this analysis does not consider the value of the products being carried on the highway in each district. It is possible, although I don't think it is likely, that the value of goods carried on Downstate highways is higher than the value of goods carried on District 1 highways.

The purpose of this analysis is not to incite more Chicago vs. Downstate antagonism. Every great urban region, after all, needs to be linked effectively to its hinterland. The notion that "Chicago" is soaking up a disproportionate share of the State's transportation dollars, however, appears to be a myth.

Detailed Results

District 1
Population 7,261,176 63.52%
Highway Miles 3,023 18.40%
Daily Vehicle Miles 103,000,000 54.24%
FY 2008-13 Investment $2,777,000,000 39.07%
Per Capita Investment $382.44
Per Mile Investment $918,623.88
Per VMT Investment $26.96

District 2
Population 710,814 6.22%
Highway Miles 1,683 10.24%
Daily Vehicle Miles 12,500,000 6.58%
FY 2008-13 Investment $652,000,000 9.17%
Per Capita Investment $917.26
Per Mile Investment $387,403.45
Per VMT Investment $52.16

District 3
Population 472,901 4.14%
Highway Miles 1,748 10.64%
Daily Vehicle Miles 11,700,000 6.16%
FY 2008-13 Investment $780,000,000 10.98%
Per Capita Investment $1,649.39
Per Mile Investment $446,224.26
Per VMT Investment $66.67

District 4
Population 537,568 4.70%
Highway Miles 1,625 9.89%
Daily Vehicle Miles 9,400,000 4.95%
FY 2008-13 Investment $569,000,000 8.01%
Per Capita Investment $1,058.47
Per Mile Investment $350,153.85
Per VMT Investment $60.53

District 5
Population 461,585 4.04%
Highway Miles 1,339 8.15%
Daily Vehicle Miles 9,600,000 5.06%
FY 2008-13 Investment $277,000,000 3.90%
Per Capita Investment $600.11
Per Mile Investment $206,870.80
Per VMT Investment $28.85

District 6
Population 984,879 8.62%
Highway Miles 2,101 12.79%
Daily Vehicle Miles 10,400,000 5.48%
FY 2008-13 Investment $309,000,000 4.35%
Per Capita Investment $313.74
Per Mile Investment $147,072.82
Per VMT Investment $29.71

District 7
Population 391,631 3.43%
Highway Miles 1,640 9.98%
Daily Vehicle Miles 9,200,000 4.84%
FY 2008-13 Investment $396,000,000 5.57%
Per Capita Investment $1,011.16
Per Mile Investment $241,463.41
Per VMT Investment $43.04

District 8
Population 715,734 6.26%
Highway Miles 1,802 10.97%
Daily Vehicle Miles 15,500,000 8.16%
FY 2008-13 Investment $841,000,000 11.83%
Per Capita Investment $1,175.02
Per Mile Investment $466,703.66
Per VMT Investment $54.26

District 9
Population 354,901 3.10%
Highway Miles 1,470 8.95%
Daily Vehicle Miles 8,600,000 4.53%
FY 2008-13 Investment $506,000,000 7.12%
Per Capita Investment $1,425.75
Per Mile Investment $344,217.69
Per VMT Investment $58.84

CTA Doomsday Clock Reset

2007-11-08T21:19:00.000-06:00

January 20, 2008.

Tick, tock. . . .

Voters And Transit Funding: Why Is This Region So Skittish?

2007-11-08T18:38:00.000-06:00

The notion of asking voters in the six county area to approve a regional tax increase to fund public transit seems anathema to transit supporters in this region. Presumably, transit supporters fear that voters will turn down such a tax increase and believe that public transit will fare better in Springfield in the General Assembly. The doomsday cycles of the last few years and the success of transit funding referenda across the country should prompt a re-evaluation of that assumption.

The Center for Transportation Excellence tracks the success of transit funding ballot measures and has found an approval rate of over 50 percent nationwide. The elections earlier this week were no exception. Of the 19 transit funding measures on the ballot 13 were approved by the voters.

The biggest wins for transit came in San Francisco, where voters approved a measure that will increase funding and allow reforms of Muni, and in Charlotte, North Carolina, where voters rejected a repeal of the existing sales tax for transit.

The biggest loss came in Seattle, where voters rejected a measure that would have increased taxes to fund 50 miles of new rail transit and 186 miles of new road lanes. According to this article, however, the defeat might have been because the measure was insufficiently supportive of public transit and thus did not do enough to address global warning. Indeed, the Sierra Club opposed the measure.

Given the tough sledding in Springfield and the national success rate for transit funding referenda, why are transit officials and regional leaders here reluctant to proceed with a transit funding referendum to provide additional funds to the RTA and the three service boards, Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace? After all, public transit has a larger market share here than in most if not all of the areas that have approved transit funding referenda over the past decade.

I suspect that there are two answers. First, transit supporters fear that voters won't agree that the additional funding necessary to stave off doomsday and provide sufficient capital is worth the congestion relief and other benefits from public transit. Second, they fear that the State would not increase its Public Transportation Fund match of the new revenue generated regionally if the referendum did pass.

What would be the result if SB 572 were packaged into a regional referendum? How would you vote?

What's Got Into IDOT?

2007-11-07T20:40:00.000-06:00

The Illinois Department of Transportation has announced a series of public hearings on its Illinois State Transportation Plan. You can get a draft of the Plan here.

The Plan has some bad news. Vehicle miles traveled in Illinois continue to grow faster than the rate of population. Yet, IDOT has no money to expand the transportation system, spending 95 percent of its money on maintaining the current system. Existing funding sources like the gas tax are expected to show anemic growth in the years ahead. If that is not bad enough, construction costs in the Chicago area are growing significantly faster than the already robust rate of increase nationally. In short it looks like more of the same Soviet-style management of our limited road capacity lies ahead, namely, long, slow lines of cars on busy highways inching through the roadway chokepoints.

Yet, there are some glimmers of hope in the Plan. Might IDOT be ready to emerge from an extended slumber that has kept it well behind innovative departments of transportations in other states? Several examples:

-- Intelligent Transportation Systems: The Plan tips its hat toward intelligent transportation technologies that increase highway capacity without increasing lane miles and improve safety.

-- Congestion Pricing: Despite indications that the Governor opposes congestion pricing, the Plan treats congestion pricing as a viable transportation system option and calls for "explor[ing] the effectiveness of congestion pricing as a to reduce congestion." Wow.

-- Public/Private Partnerships: The Plan states that a goal is to "support joint public-private partnership and private sector initiatives to provide transportation facilities and services where public expenditures can be reduced and the quality, quantity and long-term stability of service is maintained."

-- User Fees/tolling: More IDOT surprise goals: "Extend user-pay financing to new technologies [and] . . . explore toll opportunities and innovative financing methods, including value capture pricing, to fund transportation facilities and services."

Maybe IDOT is learning from its recent loss of an Urban Partnership Program grant because of its failure to embrace congestion pricing and other such transportation management techniques. Or is this just window dressing to keep civic groups focused on Chicago area public transit--a tiny part of the State's transportation system--while IDOT and the roadbuilders go to town slinging asphalt Downstate?

I prefer to be optimistic and hope that members of the transportation, business and environmental communities press IDOT to make good on the innovations hinted at in this draft Plan.

SB 572: Hope Springs Eternal For Representative Hamos

2007-11-06T20:29:00.000-06:00

Representative Julie Hamos has circulated a newsletter discussing SB 572 and the transit funding situation. She describes why SB 572 failed to advance out of the Illinois House as follows:

The House of Representatives returned to Springfield last Thursday with the expectation that there would be a vote on SB 572, our comprehensive transit plan. However, the House Republicans again held firm that they were unwilling to support transit legislation without a capital infrastructure bill. Since transit is a truly regional, bipartisan issue that deserves bipartisan support, it was impossible to pass the transit bill with hardly any Republican support.

The newsletter goes on to note that the Governor and three of the four legislative leaders have pledged to work hard over the next two weeks to craft a long-term transit funding solution by coming up with a state-wide capital plan. (You can access the letters through the Hamos newsletter.) The lone holdout is Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson, perhaps smarting over the less than complete description of SB 572 contained in a letter he received from the RTA recently.

In any event, Representative Hamos closes her newsletter with the following: "I remain hopeful that the leaders will fashion a capital infrastructure bill that will pave the way for a successful vote on SB 572 in the next two weeks."

What, if any, of SB 572 will survive the legislative back and forth over the next days or weeks?

Is transit funding the only issue that needs to be resolved by the Governor and the legislative leaders or are the RTA "reform" provisions also up in the air?

Will the CTA unions agree to honor their concessions if a solution is not enacted before 2008? Are greater concessions possible in 2008 if the CTA's 2008 doomsday is even worse than the 2007 doomsday that was just averted?

Is the Governor or any of the legislative leaders inclined to radically reform the Chicago area public transit system by, for example, combining the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace into the RTA as operating units of the RTA?

Will enough of SB 572 pass so that Representative Hamos can feel like the effort she has put into this issue has been worthwhile?

Shake Your Spunky Bottoms For The WRDA!

2007-11-05T21:31:00.000-06:00

It is easy to forget in the welter of highways and railroad tracks that water transportation was the key to the economic development of Illinois. William Cronon in the book Nature’s Metropolis and others have argued that Chicago’s rise was on account of its perch between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds that was ably exploited via the I & M Canal. Water transportation of bulk goods is still a significant part of the Illinois transportation network.

Congress recently passed the $23 billion Water Resources Development Act. (Summaries here and here.) The WRDA provides about $3.6 billion for navigational improvements and ecosystem restoration projects in the Upper Mississippi River region. Here’s a description from the Conference Report:

Upper Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway System

The upper Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway system is an important waterway, used to ship grain, predominantly from the heartland, all across the country. The conference report will:

Authorize $256 million for near-term navigation improvements and ecosystem restoration along the system;
Authorize $1.95 billion for new locks;
Authorize the Army Corps to address the cumulative environmental impacts of operation of the system and improve the ecological integrity of the Upper Mississippi River and Illinois River through a $1.7 billion program; and
Create an advisory panel to provide independent guidance in the development of environmental and navigation improvements.

Illinois appears to be a big beneficiary of these dollars. According to a weekend story in the Peoria Journal Star $2 billion of this money will be used to rebuild locks on the Illinois River in Peoria and LaGrange. The bill also authorizes $16 million to build three islands from 1 1/2 million cubic yards of dredged sediment along East Peoria's banks of the Lower Peoria Lake, which is filling with silt. Beardstown’s marina, which has been silt-choked since the Sangamon River’s course was changed the last time such a bill was passed, will see another revamping of the river’s course, which may enhance the prospects for marine recreation in this city on Route 67.

The full list of authorized Illinois projects in the WRDA is as follows:

Sec. 3058. Beardstown Community Boat Harbor, Beardstown, Illinois.
Sec. 3059. Cache River Levee, Illinois.
Sec. 3060. Chicago River, Illinois.
Sec. 3061. Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal dispersal barriers project, Illinois.
Sec. 3062. Emiquon, Illinois.
Sec. 3063. Lasalle, Illinois.
Sec. 3064. Spunky Bottoms, Illinois.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal dispersal barriers are the barriers designed to prevent the Asian carp and other non-native species from traveling from the Mississippi River watershed to the Great Lakes.

The $7.5 million Spunky Bottoms project is for production of a series of aquatic exercise videos of the same name for the federal anti-obesity program using the generously proportioned men and women of that area. No, really, it is a very cool 2000 acre wetlands restoration project on the Illinois River.

President Bush barely had a chance to sheath his veto pen after vetoing a bill that would provide hundreds of thousands of uninsured kids health care before he used it to veto the WRDA on Friday. Bush may have been responding to criticisms that the WRDA is full of “pork.” Urged on by the National Corn Growers Association, the Illinois Farm Bureau and other supporters of the transport of goods by barge, Congress is expected to override the President’s veto soon, since the House voted 381-40 and the Senate voted 81-12 in favor of the WRDA.

The likelihood of a veto override has prompted some observers to suggest that the President used the veto as a publicity stunt to portray a sense of fiscal discipline without interfering with the transfer of such “pork” as we roll into an election year. Indeed, the President signaled that he was "fine" with the veto override.

While we wait for the veto override, shake those spunky bottoms!
.

The Farebox Recovery Ratio, Senator Watson And RTA Candor

2007-11-04T14:12:00.000-06:00

Section 4.09(g) of RTA Act contains a requirement that the service boards--Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace--recover half of their operating costs from fares and other system generated revenue. The three service boards must generate sufficient revenue to meet 50 percent of their operating expenses. This is the so-called farebox recovery ratio. Because of existing exceptions already written into the RTA Act, the actual farebox recovery ratio is significantly lower than 50 percent. That is, public subsidies--i.e., tax revenue--cover significantly more than 50 percent of the cost of operating the RTA system and customer fares (and other system-generated revenue) cover significantly less than 50 percent of those costs.

The purpose of the farebox recovery ratio is to require the RTA and the service boards to step up and raise fares when necessary to keep the public subsidy of the public transit system at roughly 50 percent of the cost of providing the service. It is meant to provide an objective standard upon which the service boards can rely when going through the difficult and unpopular task of raising fares. The recovery ratio reflects the General Assembly's public policy judgment about how much public support the transit system in northeastern Illinois deserves and how much should be paid by the public transit customers.

Senate Minority leader Frank Watson has indicated that he views fare increases by the service boards as a necessary part of the solution to the transit funding problems that have occupied so much time and attention over the past year. He sent a letter to that effect to Jim Reilly, the head of the RTA, about a week ago.

Reilly's reply, available through the Capital Fax Blog (here) or upon request, urges Senator Watson to support SB 572. Reilly responds to Watson's request for a fare increase as follows:

You suggest that a moderate fare increase might be part of the solution. Certainly if the Governor and four leaders agree on that approach we would most definitely implement it but again the Auditor General's report makes it clear that a fare increase alone does not come close to solving the problem. SB 572 does continue the requirement that 50% of the costs of operating transit be received from the farebox so there will be a requirement for fare increases over time.

This statement is incomplete under even the most charitable interpretation of the letter. The RTA, speaking through its Chairman, seems to be telling Senator Watson that SB 572 retains the 50% farebox recovery ratio requirement of the current RTA Act and thus preserves the General Assembly's current policy balance between fares and public subsidies for the support of transit operations.

What the RTA failed to tell Senator Watson is that the current version of SB 572 contains major new exemptions that will mean in practice the actual farebox recovery ratio will fall even farther below the 50 percent farebox recovery ratio that will remain on the statute books. (See pages 206-08 of the bill.)

First, in calculating the farebox recovery ratio, the CTA and Metra (which SB 572 authorizes to issue up to $1 billion in debt) can exempt debt service from their operating expenses for purposes of calculating the farebox recovery ratio.
Second, SB 572 provides that all passenger security expenses can be exempted from operating expenses, removing the current $5 million cap.
Third, Pace can exclude from revenue grants it receives from the Suburban Community Mobility Fund, which should average $20 million each year under section 4.03.3(c)(i) of SB 572.
Fourth, SB 572 lops off $200 million in costs from the calculation of the farebox recovery ratio in 2008. This amount of excluded costs reduces by $20 million a year over the next decade (e.g., $180 million in FY 2009).

The combined effect of these exclusions is to make even more illusory the notion that public subsidies and fares will provide equal measures of support for the region's public transit system. These new exclusions also will reduce the pressure on the service boards to raise fares in step with rising costs.

While the RTA may have been technically correct in telling Senator Watson that SB 572 retains the 50 percent farebox recovery ratio, it did its reputation for candor no service by failing to inform him of these major new exclusions and their effect on the proportion of public transit operations paid for by fare-paying customers and the proportion covered by public subsidies via regional and State tax revenue.

Smart One: Doomsday Averted Once Again

2007-11-04T13:29:00.000-06:00

Just as the first doomsday was set to arrive for the Chicago Transit Authority and Pace, transit apocalypse was averted when the State of Illinois and the federal government found a way to free up $27 million to keep Pace and the CTA afloat at current service/fare levels until at least the end of the year. From published reports (e.g., here), I hesitate to attempt to describe how the solution works. It appears that the FTA authorized the use of $27 million of federal capital funds for transit operating purposes. The State agreed to step up with $27 million of its capital dollars to fill the resulting hole. Essentially, this solution exploits the more liberal rules governing the use of federal capital funds for transit operations compared to State rules on the use of capital funds, a neat bit of arbitrage.

This last minute fix has all the earmarks of some smart person being creative and thinking outside of the proverbial box. It was a solution no one had discussed and "seemed to appear out of nowhere." Despite plenty of fulminating (here and here) about how the RTA no longer should accept short-term funding bailouts, the RTA and the service boards wasted no time in embracing this solution once the federal government gave the green light.

Who can we thank for this creative solution? Let's hope they get a raise and the opportunity to use that creativity on the many other challenges facing the Chicago area transit system even if a long-term operating and capital funding solution is enacted over the next few months. Of course, using capital dollars to fund operations is like eating your seed corn and is not sustainable in the long term. Nonetheless, the simple elegance of this latest short-term fix should be recognized.

Post-Doomsday: Will The Equity Questions Reemerge?

2007-11-01T21:33:00.000-06:00

The Metropolitan Planning Council is alerting public-spirited folks with time on their hands next Monday to attend the following:

Chicago Transit Authority Press Event

What: A press event to highlight the impact of the cuts and fare increases

When: Monday, Nov. 5, 11 a.m.

Where: Ogilvie Station, at Jefferson and Madison streets

This press event could be a real hoot if doomsday arrives on schedule. CTA management and its customers will be reeling from their first work day post-doomsday. They will be camped outside Ogilvie Station, from which puzzled Metra commuters will emerge wondering what the fuss is all about. After all, unlike Pace and the CTA, Metra is neither cutting service nor raising fares in this first doomsday. As for the second doomsday in January, when the CTA will truly gut its bus system and Pace becomes a shadow of its former self, Metra will raise its fares all of 10 percent and increase its unlimited ride weekend ticket from $5 to--you better sit down--$7.

The juxtaposition of the CTA folks standing in the street outside a Metra station highlighting the impact of the cuts and fare increases that affect everyone but Metra and its customers is striking. Maybe, just maybe, at this press event someone in attendance will raise the question, where is the fairness in that only two of the three service boards have to go through the first doomsday? Who was responsible for the financial oversight of the region's public transit system and how did they allow doomsday to fall so unevenly on the service boards? How is it that the service board with the most prosperous ridership base was spared the first doomsday round of service cuts and fare increases while the service boards serving the most transit-dependent populations must feel the pain? And when one looks at the racial composition of the customers served by the three service boards, which racial groups are bearing the brunt of the first doomsday cuts and fare increases and which are not?

Both the Moving Beyond Congestion effort and the SB 572 process were designed to steer clear of these kinds of questions. If they fail and doomsday does descend on two of three service boards, then maybe it is time to start asking those equity/justice questions.

SB 572 Sallies Forth Again

2007-11-01T21:09:00.001-06:00

The House Mass Transit Committee has approved a revised version of the SB 572, in the form of Amendment No. 10 (here).

Please post in comments any significant changes you find in Amendment No. 10.

Gas Tax vs. Sales Tax: Which Wins?

2007-11-01T15:14:00.001-06:00

In his statement today concerning public transit the Governor Blagojevich outlined his preferred plan to increase the level of transit funding:

The plan that I prefer would redirect – not increase – revenue from the existing sales tax on gas in Cook and the collar counties for the RTA. That’s money that is already collected from drivers who contribute to congested roads and air pollution in our region. It makes sense to dedicate that revenue to mass transit, and it also helps reduce congestion and air pollution.

The remaining hole in the state budget can then be filled with revenue from an expansion of gaming in Illinois – an expansion that every one of the legislative leaders has already agreed needs to get done to fund a statewide infrastructure plan.

There are some things to like about this approach, which appears to have the support of the Republican leaders and perhaps Senator Jones. The Governor recognizes that linking the gas tax (or more precisely the sales tax on gas) to transit makes good public policy. Drivers who create congestion, who benefit from the congestion relief benefits of public transit, and who contribute a large measure of air pollution, including greenhouse gases, properly are called upon to subsidize transit service. Those who drive the most tend to pay the most, which creates a bit of an economic incentive against sprawl.

While the Governor appears unwilling to increase the gas tax (or embrace congestion pricing for that matter) to reduce the congestion and pollution resulting from excessive private auto use relative to road capacity, linking transit funding to the gas tax is something that his successor can build on to start pricing auto travel in a way that promotes the most efficient use of the Chicago region's highway and transit systems.

The Governor's gas tax plan takes existing gas tax revenue from the six-county Northeastern Illinois region and applies ("diverts" in some eyes no doubt) that revenue to the region's public transit system. Filling the resulting hole in the State budget becomes someone else's problem while the RTA, the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace spend their new money. This is not a bad scenario if you are a transit supporter.

The Governor recommends that revenue from expanded gambling can fill the hole in the State budget created by the application of the gas tax monies to transit. There is something to like here as well, especially if you live in northeastern Illinois. A fair amount of that revenue will be generated from people from outside northeastern Illinois or even Illinois itself who gamble when visiting Chicago or other Illinois gambling facilities. The burden of transit funding thus is spread outside of the six-county region, another nice benefit for that region. The region gets the gas tax revenue for its public transit system but is not completely on the hook to fill the resulting hole in the State budget.

Using gambling revenue to replace the gas tax monies used for transit could put the City of Chicago is a difficult spot, however. On the one hand, the City presumably wants to find a source of funding for CTA and Metra service that serves the City. On the other hand, if that source of money requires the City to give up proceeds from a Chicago casino that would otherwise go to the City, then transit doomsday might not look so bad to the City.

In contrast, the sales tax built into SB 572 is not as directly tied to transit or driving. Charging a bit higher sales tax on a big screen TV, for example, is not likely to prompt anyone to change their driving habits. The sales tax has proved insufficient to keep up with transit agency costs, so it is a matter of time--likely only a few years--before the proposed sales tax increase in SB 572 proves inadequate for the transit agencies to maintain their current service levels. The increased reliance on the sales tax does not help the RTA diversify its funding base, even though such diversification is key to the long-term financial health of the public transit system.

When it comes to the predictability of revenue the sales tax wins. One virtue of the sales tax is that is does not vary that much from year to year. In contrast, a sales tax on gasoline sales is likely to bounce around with the changes gas prices.

On balance, however, taxing driving to pay for transit is at least as good an alternative as the sales tax to provide funding for transit. In many respects, a gas tax is superior.

Surely it is possible to amend SB 572 to swap out the sales tax increase in favor of the redirection of the sales tax revenue on gas, leaving in the CTA union concessions and the much ballyhooed RTA reforms. Hopefully, someone is work on that right now.

Governor's Statement On Public Transit Funding

2007-11-01T14:55:00.000-06:00

Here's the link.

Here's the statement:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 1, 2007

Statement from Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich
On effort to provide long-term mass transit funding for RTA/CTA


	CHICAGO – “The General Assembly is running short on time to pass a long-term funding plan for mass transit before the CTA and other transit agencies will take actions that hurt their riders in order to balance their budget. “I’ve stated my position on many occasions that increasing the sales tax is the wrong approach. “I know I’m not the only one who feels this way – both the Republican legislative leaders and Senate President Emil Jones have also expressed concern with the proposed sales tax increase. “They’ve also expressed concern that increasing the CTA’s operational funding does nothing to address the CTA’s infrastructure needs – it’s no secret that buses, trains and tracks are in desperate need of repair. Without those fixes, commuter times are not going to improve. “The three legislative leaders have also said that members of their caucuses from outside of the Chicago area are unwilling to support the funding to bail-out the CTA unless the downstate legislators’ communities will also get the funding they need to repair roads and bridges in their areas. Their message has been clear: address infrastructure and transit needs across the state at the same time we address mass transit needs in Chicago. “That’s the reality of the legislative climate right now. “And so if we are going to be able to help the CTA before the Sunday deadline they’ve set, it is imperative to embrace a plan that provides long-term transit funding and meets statewide infrastructure needs. “A number of options have been raised and discussed among the Republican leaders, the Senate President and myself. The plan that I prefer would redirect – not increase – revenue from the existing sales tax on gas in Cook and the collar counties for the RTA. That’s money that is already collected from drivers who contribute to congested roads and air pollution in our region. It makes sense to dedicate that revenue to mass transit, and it also helps reduce congestion and air pollution. “The remaining hole in the state budget can then be filled with revenue from an expansion of gaming in Illinois – an expansion that every one of the legislative leaders has already agreed needs to get done to fund a statewide infrastructure plan. “If there are other options, I’m willing to hear them. But time is running out. We should not add to the tax frenzy working and middle class families are already facing. And we mustn’t turn our heads and ignore the importance of having a healthy and stable mass transit system in the Chicago area. “This is all doable and immediately within our grasp if all four legislative leaders are as serious as I am about fixing mass transit in a way that doesn’t hurt taxpayers. That will be the focus of our meeting later today in Springfield, and I hope we can report progress tonight.”

SB 572: Let The Bidding For Votes Begin?

2007-11-01T06:40:00.000-06:00

It's time to check back in with SB 572.

Representative Sidney Mathias filed House Amendment No. 7 to SB 572 on October 11, 2007. The amendment will obligate the RTA to make an annual grant of $250,000 to the Intertownship Transportation Program for Northwest Suburban Cook County. The ITPNSCC was created in 2004 as part of the the Illinois Transit Ridership and Economic Development (TRED) Pilot Project Program. ITPNSCC provides medical care related trips for senior citizens and disabled persons.

Representative Mathias is a Republican. He signed on as a co-sponsor of SB 572 at the end of May. In contrast, most of his suburban Republican Party colleagues opposed SB 572 when it came to a vote in September.

Does Mathias' Amendment No. 7 provide a model of what will be necessary to get suburban politicians on the SB 572 bandwagon? Will we see a string of $250,000 van pool service grants written into the RTA Act to encourage other suburban politicians to support SB 572?

SB 572 Amendments: O'McHenry Has To Go

2007-11-01T06:38:00.000-06:00

I've argued before that McHenry County (and possibly Kane County) should be booted from the RTA family for chronic whining and ingratitude. Representative Jack Franks, a suburban Democrat representing McHenry County who voted against SB 572, has introduced two amendments to SB 572 that help make my case that McHenry County should be granted its wish to leave the RTA.

Amendment No. 8 exempts McHenry County from the increase in the collar country RTA sales tax from 0.25% to 0.50%.

Amendment No. 9 provides that individual counties can block tax increases adopted by the RTA Board pursuant to SB 572.

Let's just take McHenry County out of the RTA. Its contribution of sales tax revenue is relatively small. Due to the County's embrace of sprawl-type development the cost of providing transit service in the area is very high. If McHenry County wants transit service, let it contract with Metra or Pace for such service or figure out a way to provide it on its own. The County's incessant digs at the RTA beg for (a) calling the County's bluff by threatening to cast it out of the RTA family or (b) casting it out and letting the County pay for whatever level of public transit service it deems fit for itself.

Isn't it time to focus public transit on counties that have a commitment to fund such service and who embrace land use policies that support the kinds of densities required for a viable public transit system? Let McHenry County go. Let's make Cal Skinner's day. He is a McHenry County figure who was a major opponent of the RTA in 1983. In this post he reports that George Ranney, one of the key supporters of the RTA back then (and now), stated during the run-up to the referendum that led to the creation of the RTA that it was a mistake to include McHenry County in the RTA. Someone please use SB 572 to fix that mistake.

Transit Rally Monday 11/5/07

2007-11-01T06:37:00.000-06:00

News of this upcoming rally is circulating through the usual channels:

There are just a few days left before communities across Northeastern Illinois face severe transit cuts and huge fare increases. We need your help to hold lawmakers accountable for failing to act to adequately fund transit and reform the transit agencies.
Join Illinois PIRG and other transit advocates at a rally to save transit.
What: A rally to save transit – and hold our elected officials accountable!
When: Monday, November 5th at 12:00 Noon
Where: Thompson Center Plaza at the corner of Randolph and Clark

Organizers include Illinois PIRG, TransitFuture, and SaveChicagolandTransit.

RSVP here.

Politician Scorecard: Who Supports SB 572

2007-10-31T06:40:00.000-06:00

Kind reader Matt Maldre has created a map showing where the votes for SB 572 came from when it was voted on by the House in September. His accompanying commentary browbeats the suburban Republicans who voted no despite the high per-ride public subsidies for Metra and Pace.

He has also prepared a downloadable flyer targeted at the representatives who voted against SB 572 but who represent areas served by Metra's line to Elgin. He asks that you print them out and distribute them.

Those representatives who voted against SB 572 even those they and their constituents benefit from the Elgin Metra line and other public transit services are: Timothy Schmitz, Ruth Munson, Harry Ranney, Fred Crespo, Franco Coladipietro, Dennis Reboletti, and Angelo Saviano.

It may make folks feel better to yell at Ron Huberman, but these seven representatives are key to getting SB 572 through the House. Act accordingly if you want SB 572 to pass.

Local 241: Inside Track Or Taken For A Ride?

2007-10-31T05:39:00.000-06:00

As we get closer to the first transit doomsday the rhetoric is heating up. The Mayor of Chicago tells Springfield that it is do-or-die time and to get its act together, but adds not a dime to Chicago's $3 million annual contribution to the Chicago Transit Authority's operating budget, which has not changed for almost 25 years. The CTA lines up 39 buses representing each of the bus routes that will be cut in the first doomsday. The Senate Minority leader, Frank Watson, sends a letter urging fare hikes. Federal legislators warn that the CTA's troubles may keep Chicago from ascending to the Olympian heights. The looming doomsday finally prompts a spirited public hearing at Lane Tech High School.

What may be most interesting, however, is yesterday's U-turn by the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 241. Local 241 represents the CTA's bus drivers and will lose approximately 600 members if the cuts go through. Like the CTA's other unions, Local 241 has agreed to significant concessions as part of the SB 572 process.

According to reports (here and here) Local 241 was preparing a press conference to roll out a plan to file a lawsuit and take other aggressive action intended to forestall doomsday. At the last minute, Local 241 dropped these plans. Its spokesperson cited promises from legislative leaders that the transit funding problems would be fixed in time to avert doomsday.

Here is Channel 2's take:

by the time their 1 p.m. news conference finally got going at nearly 3:30, union officials had backed way off because, they said, of promises from key legislative leaders.

"The legislature will take action and will be responsible and not allow one of the largest mass transit systems become paralyzed," Melvin Caldwell, ATU Local Union 241, said.

No details were offered either by the union or state politicians. For his part, Mayor Richard M. Daley expressed sympathy with the angry bus drivers, noting that they had recently ratified a new contract that provides no immediate pay raise and makes long-term concessions on the cost of health care and pensions.

"They've done their part. Sure they're upset. This is ridiculous. Now, this is the week that adults in Springfield have to do their job," Daley said.

A spokesman for House Speaker Mike Madigan says he's not aware of any breakthrough.

Does Local 241 have an inside track to a transit funding solution, or has it been taken for a ride?

Do Americans Embrace Smart Growth And Tolls?

2007-10-29T17:30:00.000-06:00

Smart Growth America has released the results of an opinion poll assessing the public's attitudes concerning some land use and transportation issues. The national survey of 1,000 adults has a 3.7% margin of error. Some of the results are interesting.

The study found relatively strong support for public transportation. In response to the question "which of the following proposals is the best long-term solution to reducing traffic in your areas" the results were as follows:

Improve public transportation (49%)

Develop communities where people do not have to drive as much (26%)

Build new roads (21%)

Do you think these results will send a chill through road builders associations, or do they know that when the public says it favors public transportation it really means public transportation that the other guy has to take?

The respondents clearly favored improved fuel efficiency over increased taxes as a way to reduce energy use. When asked if they strongly approved of the following solutions to climate and energy problems, they responded:

Regulate the car industry to make vehicles more efficient (74% strongly approve/90% total approve)

Provide improved public transportation (62%/88%)

Require homes and other buildings to be more energy efficient (62%/88%)

Build communities where people can walk places so that people can use their cars less (49%/83%)

Increase taxes on gasoline to discourage driving (8%/16%)

Clearly, the public values existing levels of mobility.

When is comes to land use, 81% said they preferred that new housing and commercial development be placed in already developed areas rather than continuing to build suburbs on the edge of existing suburbs (14%). When it comes to more specifics, 61% favored limits on new home construction in outlying areas and investment in very urban areas, 57% said they favor building businesses and homes closer together, within walking distance (57%) and to shorten commutes (55%).

Respondents strongly opposed (72%) privatization of existing public roads and using toll concessions to private companies to build new roads (52%). Total oppose percentages were 84% and 66%, respectively.

Interestingly, the percentage of respondents who strongly approved charging tolls on more roads if the result was better roads and reduced traffic congestion (26%) almost matched the percentage of people of who strongly disapproved (33%). In all, 55% approved of tolling and 44% disapproved. In the Great Lake states, the approval rate was 58% and the disapproval rate only 41%.

What to make of these numbers? The percentage of people strongly approving of tolls (26%) was over three times as high as those who strongly approved of an increase in the gas tax (8%). Some of all of the difference might be how the questions were phrased. People were asked if they supported a gas tax to reduce driving or tolls to improve highways and reduce congestion. Perhaps the approval rate would be higher for the gas tax if respondents had been asked if they supported such a tax if it resulted in better roads and reduced congestion.

Nevertheless, the results suggest more public support for--or at least tolerance of--tolling than for gas taxes. This is too bad in at least one respect. It is much cheaper to collect gas taxes than it is to collect tolls.

Another interesting finding is the relatively strong public support for using toll revenue on transportation uses other than the toll highway on which the tolls are collected. When asked whether they approved of spending toll revenue on the following uses, the respondents responded as follows:

Toll money would be spent on maintaining all roads (48% strongly approve/77% total approve)

Toll money would be spent on public transportation as well as roads (41%/70%)

Toll money would be spent only on building and maintaining the toll roads (26%/47%).

Perhaps the respondents didn't realize that higher tolls will result if toll money is "diverted" from the toll roads to other uses. But perhaps the public recognizes that some roads add sufficient value that relatively high tolls are appropriate and can be used in part to subsidize other parts of the transportation network. Maybe this suggests that it is politically possible to increase the tolling of roads so long as the the proceeds are used to fund public transit and improvements in arterial roads.

Despite some significant support for tolling, the respondents were less enthusiastic about congestion pricing. When asked if they supported charging tolls to reduce congestion during rush hour 47% strongly opposed the idea and only 20% strongly supported the idea. In all only 37% supported the idea and 61% opposed the idea. When asked if they favored congestion pricing if the money were spent on transportation alternatives to the highway, the strongly opposed percentage dropped from 47% to 35% and the strongly support percentage went from 20% to 26%. The public was evenly split--49% to 49% on whether they approved or disapproved of congestion pricing if proceeds were used to support travel alternatives.

For me the most surprising result was the level of support for (a) concentrating investment in existing built-up areas and restricting greenfield sprawl and (b) higher fuel economy limits. The level of support for tolling and "diverting" toll revenue from toll roads to other uses was also surprising, especially in light of the reluctance to embrace congestion pricing.

Is there a common theme in these results? If I had to pick one it is that policies or rhetoric that appear designed to reduce use of roads (e.g., gas taxes and to lesser extent congestion pricing) are disfavored while policies that do not seem intended to restrict freedom but may nonetheless raise the cost of driving (e.g., road tolling, increased fuel economy standards) are more heavily supported.

Dan Ryan Project Complete: Assessment

2007-10-28T19:39:00.000-06:00

The Dan Ryan project is complete. The final cost ($975 million) is way over the original budget ($550 million), but the project was completed on schedule. Some questions to consider:

1. What accounts for the cost overruns and was the project a worthwhile investment of almost $1 billion of capital dollars?

2. How do you assess the outreach effort to motorists concerning the project?

3. There was a great deal of controversy over the level of minority participation in the project--How do you assess IDOT's efforts in this regard?

4. What lessons can be learned from the project?

5. Did IDOT blow it by not installing a high occupancy toll (HOT) lane?

6. The average daily traffic volume was 300,000 before the reconstruction: How soon before traffic volume (a) returns to that level and (b) reaches a level where the congestion is as bad as is was before the project?

Herald Of The Apocalypse

2007-10-27T08:36:00.000-06:00

West North blog has a recent post by Payton Chung entitled "CTA Bus Cuts In Perspective" that got picked up Friday by Capitol Fax Blog to leaven its discussion of transit funding issues.

The post starts with the ridership on the 84 CTA bus routes that the CTA will cut when implementing the November and January doomsdays (308,262). Since cars on average carry only 1.2 passengers, this is the equivalent of "256,885 cars a day of capacity." The author points out that this figure is higher than the traffic volume at certain points on major local expressways and even approaches Metra's daily ridership.

The author then zooms in for the kill:

If the Kennedy bridge at Fullerton collapsed, or if terrorists took out both I-55 and Lake Shore Drive, or if Metra just up and died, how would this state’s government react? I bet they wouldn’t spend years squabbling, dilly-dallying, grand-standing, and pork-padding.

Sure, people will adapt to bus route elimination (reducing trips, taking alternate routes and modes), but they’d adapt to a freeway shutdown, too.

This is over the top, and not in a helpful way. It is wrong to assume that each trip on a bus route that is being eliminated will result in a new car on the road. If the typical trip on transit is to and from a work, school or other location, then 308,000 trips would represent about 150,000 new cars even if we assume that everyone taking the bus is going to use a car if the bus route is cut.

This assumption, however, doesn't stack up either. First, as the author recognizes, at least some of those taking bus routes that will be eliminated will switch to other public transit routes. Second, others will switch to different transportation modes, such as biking, scooters, car pools, taxis, and walking. Third, a certain percentage of people currently using the bus routes being eliminated will take fewer trips overall.

While it is dramatic to suggest that an inflated projection of new autos on the road is higher than the number of vehicles that pass through certain points on major highways, that observation overlooks the fact that the CTA bus lines being cut are spread around Chicago and the inner suburbs. Not all the folks whose bus lines are being cut, for example, will be traveling on the Kennedy Expressway at Fullerton. Some are going to the Loop. Some are going to the suburbs. Some are going to other parts of Chicago.

What is the capacity of the Chicago streets and highways to absorb the additional traffic generated from the elimination of these CTA bus lines? I haven't found a source for how many miles of streets are in Chicago. The Encyclopedia of Chicago says that "by the 1990s, the Chicago metropolitan area had 54,600 miles of streets and roads, including 2,500 miles of expressways, 17,300 miles of highways and arterial streets, and 34,800 miles of local streets."

Let's assume (a) that Chicago has 10,000 miles of streets and roads, a figure likely less than its actual complement, (b) 100,000 of the riders on the CTA bus routes being cut switch to cars, and (c) all their trips are in Chicago. This means that we have 10 additional cars per mile of available street. But, of course, we don't all travel at the same time. If we divide by 24 hours in the day, this results in 0.42 new cars per mile. Let's divide by 10, however, which leaves 1 additional car per mile.

Overstating the "devastating" consequences of the impending cuts and engaging in overblown rhetoric (e.g., equating the effect of the cuts to "terrorism") will further undermine the credibility of the public transit providers and their supporters. Folks are already suffering from "doomsday fatigue" after several years of doomsday scenarios. If the apocalypse fails to materialize when the doomsdays finally arrive, who is going to believe the public transit proponents the next time doomsday fever hits the town.

Let me be clear: There are going to be adverse consequences from the CTA bus line cuts and in some areas these consequences are going to be quite noticeable. In most of the city, however, these effects are going to be barely felt during most or all of the day because the current level of transit ridership in those areas is not that high. In denser areas already facing traffic congestion challenges and with heavier existing transit ridership, the effects will be more severe, especially during rush hour. These localized impacts, however, hardly add up to a city-wide apocalypse.

Rather than fear mongering, we should focus on dealing with those localized effects. There are a range of tools, including encouraging private sector transit (e.g., van pools), improving bike commuting options, and more efficiently utilizing our stock of automobiles through shared vehicle services like I-Go and ride-sharing social networking platforms like GoLoco.

The key problem is that our transit agencies are neither empowered nor inclined to roll out such alternatives to their services. Their hopes lie with SB 572 and its continuation of business as usual with an RTA twist or two and lots more operating subsidies.

Pace's Doomsday--Shrug & Yawn

2007-10-25T17:40:00.000-06:00

Pace reminds me of the tall, gawky kid wearing too short pants who always seemed out of place in high school, a kind of social embarrassment that no one knew what to do with. Pace runs big, central-city style buses through suburbs largely built and populated by folks who actively want to turn their back on urban life and prefer the rolling cocoon of a private auto over the--gasp!--social mixing required to ride in a bus. Pace's buses just don't fit in well in this milieu.

Despite all the moans and groans about traffic congestion in the suburbs, Pace can't compete against the private auto. As a result, its buses rarely carry full loads, which mean that they embarrass and anger many suburbanites. It has to be tough to try to run a public transit service in an region demographically, culturally and geographically stacked against you.

In the face of these odds, Pace has clung to life. In recent years it even took on the huge job of picking up the CTA's paratransit operation. This gave Pace full responsibility for coordinating and supplying paratransit services for the entire six-county region. Paratransit is another thankless job because it is an unfunded federal mandate. Fares cover only a fraction of the $25-$30 per trip cost and ridership demand is growing much faster than the rate of population growth or transit operating subsidies.

You would think that such a plucky agency would have earned some public support over the years. After all, American's like an underdog do they not? Think again.

Pace faces a doomsday scenario in a matter of days that appears to be at least as bad in the relative sense as the CTA's doomsday scenario, featuring fare increases, route cuts, job eliminations, and the like. Pace held a public hearing on its looming doomsday in Joliet earlier this week and here is what happened per the Joliet Herald News:

JOLIET -- Even though a Pace bus stopped right behind city hall Monday night, fewer than 10 people attended a Pace 2008 budget hearing to comment on cuts that could eliminate bus service on weekends and after 7 p.m. weeknights.

Amazing. The dismantling of what is portrayed as being a vital public service looms and fewer than 10 people show up to squawk or gawk at a public hearing held in a city of over 100,000 people that is the seat of a county of about 700,000. What has Pace done to merit such a striking lack support from the public, the politicians and the business community?

In light of this non-response to Pace's impending doomsday, do we have to assume that the suburban public would just as soon let Pace's mainline (i.e., non-paratransit) service die on the vine? And what if it did?

Moderator's note: Pace might have gotten a few more people at the hearing at its headquarters the next day, although the article does not mention the number of people who attended.

Get Your Kicks On Route 67

2007-10-24T18:04:00.000-06:00

The Illinois Department of Transportation, which has taken a drubbing on occasion in this blog (e.g., here and here), nonetheless seems to be making an effort to keep folks informed about major highway projects via a set of project websites. Link to index of project websites is here.

The latest project to get its own website is the U.S. Route 67 project. The Route 67 project corridor goes 223 miles from Interstate 280 (I-280) at Rock Island to I-270 south of Alton. The communities along the way include Monmouth (pop. 9,900), Macomb (pop. 18,600), Beardstown (pop. 5,800) and Jerseyville (pop. 8,300). According to IDOT's traffic volume maps (here and here), daily traffic volumes on the corridor range from a low of 1900 to a high of 26,000.

Here's the project description from the website:

The existing US 67 Corridor extends nearly 220 miles from Rock Island south to Alton. The two and four lane corridor improvement costs awarded to date total more than $700 million and $142.6 million in projects are programmed during FY 2008-2013. Of this total, $11.4 million is programmed in FY 2008. The estimated unfunded cost to complete the four-lane sections in the US 67 corridor from Macomb southward to the Alton Bypass exceeds $1.5 billion.

More information here.

Given the traffic numbers in most of the areas in the corridor--a fraction of the traffic volumes on the existing rural interstates--one wonder why IDOT is not using a series of passing lanes rather than a full-fledged four lane expressway configuration to serve this corridor.

I guess it is all too easy, however, for folks in northeastern Illinois to be snide and decry the perceived waste of pouring $1.5 billion into a road that serves a collection of small communities and meanders down the state like a riled up snake. Why is IDOT sinking money into concrete in rural Illinois but devoting years and years of wheel-spinning studies to projects in high-volume corridors like the O'Hare Western Bypass and the Elgin O'Hare Expressway?

Presumably, there must be decent economic and social development rationales for putting a four lane highway in stretches of road carrying 100 vehicles per hour in each direction on average. (I'm told the maximum capacity of a highway lanes is about 2,000 vehicles an hour, at least on interstates. I assume this figure is significantly less on two-lane roads, where passing is restricted.)

That is an issue for another day. In the meantime, IDOT's project corridor websites seem a step in the right direction.

National Infrastructure Bank?

2007-10-23T18:34:00.000-06:00

Here's a link to an interesting article on Sarah Goldhagen, an architectural historian, who proposes a national infrastructure bank to help fund and oversee the restoration of the nation's infrastructure.

Goldhagen's analysis of the infrastructure problems is as follows:

As Goldhagen points out, and as any traveler knows, countries in Asia and Europe often do a much better job than we do. In Vienna a couple of years ago - a city that experienced far more disruption in the 20th century than any American city - I was shocked by the superb public transportation system. Yet New York, despite decades of effort, still hasn't got its Second Avenue subway built. Boston can't put together its Urban Ring. Goldhagen contrasts our decline with the success of places that have renewed themselves, like Vancouver, in Canada, and Barcelona.

So what's the answer? Goldhagen has first a diagnosis, then a suggestion.
"The problem," she says, "is that our political world is organized into towns, cities, states, and the federal government, but the practical world is organized differently. We are now a nation of metropolitan regions. The way we govern doesn't fit the way we live."

Metro regions are chopped up into many municipalities, none of which can accomplish much by themselves. They may even bleed across state lines. No branch of government has either the funds or the power to deal with infrastructure - except for one: the federal government.

Her proposed solution is a national infrastructure bank that would function as follows:

It would have a capital budget, like any well-run private institution (and like many nations). It would allocate money over the long haul, pursuing goals that now get sacrificed for short-term advantages, like tax cuts. The agency's purpose - again, like that of a private institution - would be the care, maintenance, and renewal of our society's physical plant.

Is a national infrastructure bank the way out of the fragmentation of infrastructure investment decision making and infrastructure maintenance responsibilities or is it a recipe for Halliburton style public contracting hell?

Transit Funding Alchemy?

2007-10-23T17:48:00.000-06:00

Crain's reports that the Governor and some legislative leaders "are talking about a long-term funding plan to bail out Chicago-area mass transit agencies." According to the Governor, the plan will not include a tax on working people, i.e., the sales tax increase that is built into SB 572.

WBEZ' report on the mystery plan includes:

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich says he's backing a new plan to fund mass transit without raising sales taxes. The plan, supported by House Republican Leader Tom Cross, has not been released. Blagojevich declined to give any details.

BLAGOJEVICH: You'll hear about it when we work it out with our... We got a coalition of other legislative leaders that we're working with and I just think it's important for all of us to agree to do it at the same time.

Blagojevich says he wants to announce the mass transit plan with State Senate President Emil Jones. But a spokeswoman for Jones says the president has only heard rumors of the plan.

The smart money at the office is that the mystery plan is to tap into money from new casinos.

An earlier WBEZ report quoted Representative Tom Cross as suggesting that fare increases may be part of the mix: "Cross says it's not unreasonable for the CTA to raise fares since gasoline prices have also gone up."

Information, ideas and speculation (but not snark) welcome.

Take It To The Bank: The Universal Fare Card

2007-10-22T17:40:00.000-06:00

The Bay Area is now implementing a universal fare card system called TransLink. When fully implemented in 2010, the TransLink fare card will work on the services provided by 26 transit agencies.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area's revved up version of the RTA, is in charge of rolling out Translink. The system has been under active development for years. News reports (e.g., here) indicate that software glitches and other problems have slowed the implementation. Securing the cooperation of all 26 transit agencies has been tough. The cost of the system has grown from $25 million to $130 million.

Despite these challenges, a universal fare card is coming to the Bay Area. TransLink will cover almost 10 times as many transit agencies as it would take to bring a universal fare card to this region. So why doesn't this region have a universal fare card system despite years of promises?

It is reported that at the recent Lipinski Symposium there was general agreement that the reason this region doesn't have a universal fare card system is because the RTA and the service boards cannot agree on who will act as the "bank" for the system. Can this be true? What exactly does it mean to serve as the "bank" for a universal fare card system? Why can't the costs and benefits of serving in that function be apportioned among the RTA and the service boards using some reasonable formula?

Why is having a universal fare card important, anyway? First, such a fare card would allow seamless travel between CTA, Metra and Pace service, increasing ridership and the perceived quality of the transit system. Second, such a fare card would help foster the notion that the public transit system in northeastern Illinois is a single system. This would undermine the current perception that Metra and Pace are for the suburbs and the CTA is for the City, a balkanization that has adverse political and operational consequences.

Third, a universal fare card with associated user accounts is a potentially powerful platform that transit agencies can leverage for a profit. Such a fare card, for example, might morph into a card that commuters could use like a credit card to make purchases. This is what has happened in Hong Kong, for example, where the local transit card--the Octopus card--is used for all sorts of non-transit transactions. The user accounts associated with each fare card could be used to deliver transit subsidies for the needy. For example, a low-income rider could be given ride credits to help ensure that their transportation needs are met, while more prosperous riders pay more through peak-period pricing and distance-based pricing. Finally, there may be cost-savings from switching to electronic fare collection, although these savings may be limited given the high upfront software and hardware costs.

Maybe the RTA should turn loose one of its cost of congestion consultants to examine how much time is wasted each month as people stand in long lines at the train stations to get their monthly Metra passes. Talk about congestion and a pointless waste of time because of a transit agency that stubbornly refuses to adopt electronic fare collection.

If the RTA and the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace cannot figure out who will serve as the bank for this region's universal fare card, then maybe they should outsource the job to TransLink. If the good folks of TransLink can get 26 squabbling transit agencies to adopt a universal fare card, they probably won't mind adding three more to their family.

* * *
Phil Pagano, Metra Executive Director 4/15/07:

Pagano said officials hope to have a working proposal completed within the next 30 days so it could be presented to CTA, Metra and Pace directors. He acknowledged that having better fare coordination among transit agencies has long been a concern of the public.

"If we can work this through, I think it's a good first step" toward providing fare coordination, Pagano said. "Fare coordination and [system] integration are important for our riders."

Source: Chicago Tribune

Complete Streets Bill Passes--Challenges IDOT To Think Different

2007-10-20T06:36:00.000-06:00

Illinois has joined the Complete Streets movement through the adoption of SB 314. The law (pasted in below) provides that "bicycle and pedestrian ways shall be given full consideration in the planning and development of transportation facilities, including the incorporation of such ways into State plans and programs." Within one mile of an urban area, "bicycle and pedestrian ways shall be established in conjunction with the construction, reconstruction, or other change of any State transportation facility."

The new law is an effort to improve pedestrian and bicycle safety and to increase the efficiency of the transportation system by better incorporating walking and biking with vehicular transport. It also challenges the deeply entrenched view in many transportation agencies that bicycles and pedestrians only get in the way of effective vehicular transportation, which they view as their only mission.

The devil thus will be in the details of implementing the new law. The law charges the Illinois Department of Transportation with developing design and construction standards for bicycle and pedestrian ways. IDOT, however, was presumably the moving force behind the Governor's amendatory veto of the bill. If IDOT does oppose the new law, will it be able to muster the creativity and open-mindedness to develop standards that will effectively integrate bicycles and pedestrians into our State transportation system?

Proponents of the complete streets bill such as the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation thus have their work cut out for them during IDOT's standards-setting process.

* * *
(605 ILCS 5/4-220 new)
Sec. 4-220. Bicycle and pedestrian ways.

(a) Bicycle and pedestrian ways shall be given full
consideration in the planning and development of
transportation facilities, including the incorporation of such
ways into State plans and programs.

(b) In or within one mile of an urban area, bicycle and
pedestrian ways shall be established in conjunction with the
construction, reconstruction, or other change of any State
transportation facility except:
(1) in pavement resurfacing projects that do not widen
the existing traveled way or do not provide stabilized
shoulders; or
(2) where approved by the Secretary of Transportation
based upon documented safety issues, excessive cost or
absence of need.

(c) Bicycle and pedestrian ways may be included in pavement
resurfacing projects when local support is evident or bicycling
and walking accommodations can be added within the overall
scope of the original roadwork.

(d) The Department shall establish design and construction
standards for bicycle and pedestrian ways. Beginning July 1,
2007, this Section shall apply to planning and training
purposes only. Beginning July 1, 2008, this Section shall apply
to construction projects.

Report on Hearing on Illinois Works and Transportation

2007-10-20T06:17:00.000-06:00

Here is the link to an article in the State Journal Register describing the testimony relating to transportation at the recent hearing on Illinois Works, the proposed capital funding bill (SB 1110).

Representative Hamos Transit Funding Status Report

2007-10-20T06:02:00.000-06:00

Below is the latest from Representative Julie Hamos, the leading proponent of SB 572, the transit funding/RTA reform bill, on the transit funding situation. Note the following points she makes:

The capital funding bill that passed the State Senate (Illinois Works) divides transportation funding 10:1 in favor of roads. The previous capital bill (Illinois First) had a 2:1 ratio.
The RTA will not accept another short term loan or bailout. (Ed. note--We'll see about that.)

Here is Representative Hamos' update in full:

THE TRANSIT CRISIS: WHERE WE ARE TODAY
Transit Update, October 19, 2007

As you know, the clock is ticking toward the “doomsday” scenario on November 4th when the regional transit system will face the first round of service cuts, fare increases and layoffs. CTA, Pace and Metra will have run out of available funding by that date.

What action needs to be taken by the legislature?

In the Illinois House of Representatives: Senate Bill 572 continues to be the comprehensive solution, coupling long-term funding with accountability and reform. Senate Bill 572 was voted on in the House on September 4th but was defeated by 10 votes (the bill needs a 3/5ths vote, or 71 votes, but received only 61). It is currently on “postponed consideration” and can be called for another vote at any time.

Regretfully, only 5 Republicans supported SB 572, although this bill was crafted through an open, collaborative process by our bipartisan House Mass Transit Committee. Rather than voting for the transit bill on its own merits, the bill was “held hostage” by the House Republicans for another agenda: a public works construction program funded by a major new bond.

In the Illinois Senate: The same comprehensive bill as SB 572, with just a few minor changes, has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. John Cullerton as Senate Amendment #3 to HB 3667. The bill was not called for a vote on September 10 and 11 when the Senate convened in Springfield. Instead, they passed HB 2035, which includes new casinos and gaming revenues to fund a large capital bond program. It also includes a one-time $200 million loan to the regional transit system as a short-term solution to the transit funding crisis. HB 2035 is now pending in the House, but it does not seem likely that we would go along with a one-time loan to fund transit.

The Senate also passed SB 1110 incorporating a $24.6 billion capital budget to fund road programs, school and university construction, early childhood facilities, environmental facilities, local economic development projects, and more. Within SB 1110 is funding for “transit capital”, pegged at $425 million in new state funds – only 1/10th the amount included for roads. This is quite a contrast to the last capital bond program in 1999, when roads received twice as much as transit – not 10 times as much!

A recent public hearing of the House Mass Transit Committee on October 9th reached three conclusions:

(1) The capital bond program passed by the Illinois Senate in SB 1110 is totally inadequate to replace broken-down buses, or fix the CTA “slow zones”, or allow Illinois to compete for federal transit expansion dollars -- even if SB 572 is passed for transit operating budgets.
(2) There are no convenient or easy new funding sources for transit, although increased gasoline taxes or parking space taxes were debated (see testimony of Metropolitan Planning Council with interesting new possibilities). The other funding sources were sufficiently controversial that the modest regional sales tax and Chicago-based real estate transfer tax in SB 572 was validated as the only fair, balanced and regional resolution.
(3) The Regional Transportation Authority will not accept another one-time or short-term loan or bailout. The November 4th “doomsday” deadline is real.

Handouts from the October 9th public hearing are posted on my website:
http://www.juliehamos.org/news/newsitem.aspx?newsitemid=129

In the next few weeks, it seems imperative for the four legislative leaders and the Governor to set aside their differences and agree on a plan to move Illinois forward. The plan ideally should include the comprehensive, long-term solution for transit embodied in SB 572 and HB 3667, and it should include a capital bond program that makes necessary investments in the state’s infrastructure, including transit.

The State of Illinois is in the process of tackling a number of significant, serious needs: education, health care, pensions, public works and transit. But only one issue has a looming deadline -- transit. We need civic and regional leaders, transit riders and community residents to actively work to persuade their own legislators, the four legislative leaders and the Governor to take action to save the mass transit system before November 4th.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Rep. Julie Hamos

Governor Blocking Congestion Pricing In Illinois?

2007-10-18T05:54:00.000-06:00

Ed. Note: By now congestion pricing is hardly a new thing, in transportation or in other areas. The basic notion is that you use price to efficiently allocate a high-demand resource. It costs more, for example, to attend a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert than it does your local school's band concert (unless Frances Parker is your local school!). Utilities price their product higher during peak demand period. You pay more for parking during special events than during off hours.

When demand for highway space exceeds supply, price can serve such an allocative function. Pricing can be set dynamically to maximize traffic throughput and travel time reliability. These benefits are not limited to just the private auto. The service offered by public transit buses using the priced route improves significantly because travel times are both faster and more certain on the route.

The federal Department of Transportation has embraced congestion pricing. (FHWA Congestion Pricing Primer here.) The five recent winners of Urban Partnership Program grants, ranging from from $63 million to $355 million each, all promised prompt implementation of congestion pricing programs. In contrast, this region's application didn't even make it out of the first round of the Urban Partnership Program competition because it lacked any credible congestion pricing plan.

Posted in below is a slightly edited report about the recent Lipinski Symposium from someone who currently works in Springfield. Note the bolded discussion indicating that the Governor opposes congestion pricing. If this opposition holds, then over the next few years congestion pricing efforts on major congested State roads and interstates in the State appear doomed to failure. The State can forget about tapping into future federal programs like the UPP designed to encourage implementation of perhaps the most effective way to counter traffic congestion, namely, congestion pricing.

But who needs a few hundred million dollars of federal money and a steady revenue source for transportation purposes anyway?

* * *
LIPINSKI SYMPOSIUM REPORT

Representatives Coulson, and Nekritz attended part of the Symposium. However, there was not much outreach to the legislators for the Symposium. Peter Skosey from MPC was pleased with the nearly 200 people who attended. Many were transportation policy experts. IDOT sent their chief of staff and their planning director. The service boards were represented, along with rail union and rail government liaisons. Planning agencies were in attendance as were lobbyists. The right people needed to be there.

The political environment in Springfield was somewhat of a sore spot throughout the symposium, with presenters taking gentle jabs at the topic throughout the day, until the last panel. [The last panel included several elected officials.]

It was productive in the sense that programs throughout the United States and even Stockholm, Sweden (congestion pricing through referendum) was discussed. There are some viable options out there if only our leaders would simply step back and consider these noteworthy options to save the crippling infrastructure in the State of Illinois.

I felt that William Lipinski along with Chairman Obsterstar were almost pleading with the audience to make things work in Illinois, for state officials to come together. Millions of dollars are out there in earmarks for the taking only, and only if, the State of Illinois gets its act together and come together on this issue.

I've asked the Chief of Staff at IDOT about congestion pricing in the past. I was told that the Governor does not support congestion pricing.

There was also some discussion to the need for raising the federal motor fuel tax by a minimum of 10 cents, not 5 cents (and this was mentioned in at least 3 of the 4 panels). Obsterstar even supported raising the motor fuel tax by a minimum of 10 cents.

I wouldn't say it was a waste of time necessarily. These ideas needed to be discussed.

However, with transit being held hostage in our current political environment, the Chicago region remains doomed.

The only thing I didn't want to hear was Lake County Chairman [Suzi Schmidt] stating the system needed to shut down. I've heard this in Springfield. If I was on the other side I would definitely start protesting the mass transit crisis facing the region. Say, shut down the system one morning to show everyone the effect of fewer buses on the street, etc.; and not wait until November 4th for the first doomsday and January 6th for the second doomsday.

Here are some links to check out:

http://mobility.tamu.edu
www.brookings.edu/metro - Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program
www.atri-online.org - A May 2007 report regarding motor fuel tax
www.vtpi.org - Victoria Transport Policy Institute

Lipinski Symposium: Materials Online

2007-10-17T17:42:00.000-06:00

Here's the link to the presentation materials from the Lipinski Symposium. Those of us who didn't get the coveted invitation or missed parts of the symposium can play catch up.

I'm promised a full-fledged report on the Symposium in the next day or so from a participant who disagrees with the snarky comments posted thus far. In the meantime check out page 3 of 4 of David Horner's presentation. Then consider how likely it is that the description of SB 572 and its sales tax increase as a long-term operating funding solution for public transit will prove to be correct.

Lipinski Symposium: Reactions

2007-10-16T17:35:00.000-06:00

The Lipinski Symposium on Transportation was an invitation-only event on Monday designed to encourage Chicago area transportation leaders to think outside the box. Pasted in below are two reports. Add your own in the comments or send them to moderator1stc@yahoo.com and I will post them.

Comment #1

The >Lipinski Symposium was pretty much what I expected. There were exhortations from a couple of politicians, William Lipinski and James Oberstar (someone described them as the "bring home the bacon twins"). The panels of experts covered familiar transportation management techniques (e.g., congestion pricing) as if these things had just appeared on tablets on the mountaintop. There were a couple clunkers (e.g., the fellow who was very excited about logistics). At the end there was a panel of politicians who treaded carefully through questions about the current transit funding crisis.

The audience was pretty passive. There were few politicians there to convert to the "progressive" cause. Those that were, such as Representative Julie Hamos, Lake County Board Chairman Suzi Schmidt and DuPage County Chairman Robert Schillerstrom, weren't biting on the ideas of congestion pricing and a tax on parking spacings that were being discussed.

I thought that some of the day might be spent on breakout sessions with the goal of developing a set of principles/priorities that might be adopted, or at least voted upon, by the group. Instead, we were pretty much pumpkins for the day.

* * *

Comment #2

Moderator--

I don't know if you got in the Lipinski symposium. I strapped on a tie and snuck in for the afternoon session (even got a cookie).

What struck me is how male, pale and stale the group was. This is a highly diverse region, but you would never know it from this group. A large majority were white men over 50. There was a smattering of women, maybe 10% in all, and even fewer minorities.

There were some good ideas thrown out during the day, but this group seemed stuck in a Fifties/Sixties time warp. They clearly are oriented (indoctrinated?) to think that minor changes to existing institutions, lots more money, and some engineering fixes will allow Chicago to continue on its merry way.

Have the well dressed tushes of these fellows ever felt a bike seat for a commute? Have concepts like global warming and reducing the carbon footprint penetrated their consciousness? Are they aware of the potential of ride-sharing programs using a mesh network model?

The pivotal moment came when Todd Litman, who is to transportation what Eric Clapton once was to the electric guitar (i.e., god), was speaking. Litman outlined why reducing vehicle miles traveled is by far the preferred solution to our transportation system woes. This approach generates the most benefits--congestion relief, accident reduction, environmental improvements, etc. Litman then laid out some strategies involving little or no new infrastructure, such as pricing insurance on a VMT basis and a tax on parking spaces, that together could reduce VMT by 20 percent.

The audience was dumbfounded. These guys clearly didn't get it. Their brains were spinning because they can't think outside of what Litman called the reductionist mindset that says that only a transportation solution can solve what is being perceived as a transportation problem. The more cynical among them were probably thinking that Litman's approach will never fly because there are not enough construction contracts involved.

I'm sorry, but all these good ideas were largely wasted on a group that is clearly set in its ways and fighting hard to preserve the status quo. I never realized what such a stodgy group is the public's custodian/advocates for our transportation system. Scary.

The RTA Sales Tax And Its Limits: Lack Of Diversification

2007-10-15T18:29:00.000-06:00

The following comment to a recent post on the risks associated with fixing the current transit funding problem with more of the same--namely, a hike in the RTA's sales tax--struck me as right on:

Justin said...

An excellent argument for the inadequacy of the sales tax. Here's another argument against SB572: it puts all the RTA's eggs in one basket.

Practically, any good investor will distribute her capital across a number of stocks or bonds to spread her risk, and transit agencies are no exception. Theoretically, public transportation provides measurable benefits to a variety of beneficiaries, implying that a "rational" or tailored subsidy structure would include a similar variety of revenue sources. Most agencies, like the RTA boards, have some control over their fare revenues, yet depend on others for the rest. To spread the risk of one funding source going sour, transit agencies should seek to derive major revenues from at least two or three different sources, preferably even more.

For instance, the MBTA gets revenues from roughly two sources: state sales taxes, and local assessments which are largely paid from property taxes. Many European transit agencies' funds originate from multiple levels of governmental jurisdictions, many of which share revenues and which are derived from a mix of Value-Added Tax, income tax, and business taxes. New York's operating subsidies come from a wide variety of taxes and jurisdictions ultimately based on the real estate market, businesses, petroleum use, and a sales tax in southern Connecticut, suburban New York State, the outer boroughs, and Manhattan itself. (There's an even an old post on this blog somewhere about the variety of MTA's subsidies, I think). [Old post here.]

By contrast, excessive reliance on a single source for operating subsidies is theoretically less than ideal, and risky and frustrating in practice. By continuing to rely solely on the sales tax, the RTA may soon regressing to doomsday.

Indeed, other robust transit agencies have been able to respond to cutbacks in subsidy from one source by substituting other sources. In Europe, these shifts often took place in the context of political decentralization, where the devolution of fiscal autonomy from central governments to regions appears to have caused an increased level of transit capital funding. U.S. transit agencies have responded to the cutback in federal operating subsidies with gradually higher state and local funds.

To echo Davey's comment, discretionary spending on consumer goods may decline quickly during an economic slowdown, yet cities rely on public transit to provide low-cost mobility even in hard times. In addition, sales taxes tend to be regressive, exacting a higher proportion of income from those least able to pay.

I agree with the Moderator that a long-term funding solution should look beyond the sales tax for theoretical and practical reasons. Taxes on real estate, parking, or (even better), road tolling are the way to go. Or the RTA comes hat in hand in a few years to a populace that won't want to hear it.

Don't Forget The Capital Funding Side

2007-10-15T17:29:00.000-06:00

With all the hullabaloo over increasing operating funding for public transit via SB 572 we should not forget the issue of capital funding for transit. Chicago Metropolis 2020 recently sent the General Assembly a letter, co-signed by a group of business/community leaders, focusing attention on the capital funding bill (SB 1110).

The letter states that the proposed capital funding for transit is inadequate. (At today's Lipinski Symposium Representative Julie Hamos said that the ratio of transit to highway capital funding in the bill is a paltry 1:10.) The letter characterizes SB 1110 as a "grab bag" of projects that "lacks a coherent sense of purpose or direction."

Read it here.

Transportation Lessons from Massachusetts: Integration and Accountability v. Diffusion and Chaos

2007-10-15T06:13:00.000-06:00

Note: The following is a guest column from Paras Bhayani. Please submit guest columns to moderator1stc@yahoo.com

When thinking about transportation issues in Illinois, it can often be useful to look around the country to see what other American cities are doing to improve their transit systems and how they are working to place transit in the broader context of regional transportation.

Unfortunately, there are only a handful of cities from which Chicago can draw meaningful lessons. The American cities with transit systems like Chicago's—buses and non-surface trains in the city, commuter rail for the suburbs—are New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston. While many readers might be familiar with the excellent networks of New York and D.C., Boston—a city with normal levels of tourism and federal funding—can serve as a more useful model in terms of how it organizes and thinks about transportation.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) is responsible for all transit in Boston and its suburbs. Much like the CTA, the MBTA operates a subway system in Boston and its inner suburbs—cities like Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and Newton. The MBTA also operates commuter rail lines that extend to the limits of the metropolitan region—Worcester, Lowell, and Providence, R.I.—much like Metra does in Chicago. Finally, the MBTA—yes, the same agency—runs buses in many of the suburbs, though the far-flung parts of the metropolitan region (Worcester) have their own bus systems.

Organizationally, Illinois has much to learn from Massachusetts. The latter abolished county governments in late-1990s—for those following the Stroger chronicles, this doesn't sound like a bad idea for Illinois, but I digress—meaning that the composition of the MBTA board of directors is removed from local county boards chiefs and/or blocs of commissioners.

The board of directors, appointed by the governor and serving coterminous with him, ratifies all planning and budget decisions for the MBTA. The board also chooses the general superintendent—the effective czar of the region's transit system. The effect is that the system is highly-centralized, integrated, and accountable; all blame for MBTA's failings can be laid at the feet of the governor and his superintendent.

I would be the first to admit that talent—and not just institutions—matters a great deal. Massachusetts has benefited recently from a reformist, Huberman-like general superintendent who has made substantial capital improvements to the system. But anyone who has taken a serious look at Illinois transit would acknowledge that diffuse authority across the service boards and a lack of accountability—the buck clearly does not stop with either Daley or Blagojevich—have been two key factors in creating the mess that is Chicago transit.

The centrality and cohesiveness of the Massachusetts transportation agencies will be taken to a new level if a plan being crafted by Governor Deval Patrick, a native of Chicago's south side, is enacted. Under Patrick's plan, the boards of both the Mass Pike—the Illinois equivalent of IDOT—and the MBTA would be abolished, and a new "Massachusetts Transportation Authority" would be responsible for all transportation in the state.

Like the MBTA and the Massachusetts Turnpike today, the board of MassTrans would be appointed by the governor. But the new agency would have an exceptionally large mandate (everything that affects how people move on the surface) and exceptionally wide budgetary authority (every dollar spent on transportation). The massive centralization of power within the governor's office has no precedent in the United States.

While the plan is in its early stages, an agency like MassTrans would allow for a great deal more coordination in transit and road construction—projects like the Dan Ryan median could become commonplace—as well as a tighter integration of surface transport with the region's three airports. The new agency would also be able to refinance the Commonwealth's transportation debt at more favorable rates, thereby reducing long-term borrowing costs and making new bonds—and new expansions—less costly.

The bold thinking evidenced by this plan is necessary given that Massachusetts must invest $19 billion over the next 20 years to simple maintain current standards of performance.

If IDOT, which is in better financial shape than the transit system, were merged with the RTA and its three sub-agencies (CTA, Metra, Pace), the sky would be the limit for synergy, greater efficiency, and improved coordination. Such a superagency would not just allow for broader strategic thinking, but could use its fiscal power to focus dollars on the weakest areas of the region's transportation grid. One could imagine a case where tolls or gasoline taxes are used, for the first time, to subsidize transit. And for those of us who would love to see congestion pricing implemented in the Loop, determining what to do with those dollars—and how to reduce the strain on suburban and peripheral city residents—is a job that could only be handled well by an agency with a broad focus and a broad budgetary portfolio.

I want to take care not to glorify too much the state of transit in Massachusetts. To be sure, the region faces challenges, many of them stemming from former Governor Mitt Romney's decision to drop billions of dollars of legacy costs from the "Big Dig"—a project that principally benefited drivers—onto the back of the MBTA. As a result, the MBTA is currently spending 27 percent of its budget, or its entire take from fares, on debt service, and hiked subway fares from $1.25 to $1.70 this past January.

Still, it's worth noting that in a city as expensive as Boston, the subway is still less expensive than in Chicago. And politicians seem to be getting the message: In addition to Patrick's massive reform bill, which has not yet been unveiled, legislators from Cambridge and Somerville are pushing a bill that would make the Commonwealth responsible for $2.9 billion of the MBTA's $5.7 billion in debt—an effort to stave off fare increases and allow more money to be spent on maintenance. The bill has already received the blessing of both legislative leaders and the governor.

Links:
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/regional/politics/view.bg?articleid=1035555
http://www.eot.state.ma.us/downloads/tfc/TFC_Recommendations.pdf
http://www.eot.state.ma.us/downloads/tfc/TFC_Findings.pdf

Paras Bhayani, a native of Palos Heights, Ill., currently lives in Cambridge, Mass. He has long been active with the Illinois and Massachusetts chapters of the Sierra Club, and closely follows transit politics and politics more generally in both states.

Can The RTA Impose A Parking Space Tax?

2007-10-14T07:34:00.000-06:00

A meme is starting in the comments to a previous post on a parking space tax to the effect that the RTA already has the authority to impose such a tax. This is based on the recent testimony (pg. 3) of Peter Skosey of the Metropolitan Planning Council that the "RTA has long had the authorization to levy a property tax on commercial parking spaces in the region."

Hold on to your shorts. It appears that Skosey misspoke. The RTA cannot currently impose a parking tax and the parking tax referenced in the RTA Act is not the kind of broad-based tax on non-residential parking spaces that will do the most good from a transit/land use perspective.

Section 4.03(d) of the current RTA Act provides in relevant part as follows:

(d) The Board may impose a motor vehicle parking tax upon the privilege of parking motor vehicles at off‑street parking facilities in the metropolitan region at which a fee is charged, and may provide for reasonable classifications in and exemptions to the tax, for administration and enforcement thereof and for civil penalties and refunds thereunder and may provide criminal penalties thereunder, the maximum penalties not to exceed the maximum criminal penalties provided in the Retailers' Occupation Tax Act.
. . .

As used in this paragraph, the term "parking facility" means a parking area or structure having parking spaces for more than 2 vehicles at which motor vehicles are permitted to park in return for an hourly, daily, or other periodic fee, whether publicly or privately owned, but does not include parking spaces on a public street, the use of which is regulated by parking meters.

First, this provision appears to authorize only a tax on paid parking ("motor vehicle parking tax upon the privilege of parking"), such as the per parking transaction tax already imposed by the City of Chicago. As outlined in the previous post, this kind of tax is much less beneficial than a tax on all non-residential parking spaces, regardless of whether parking fees are charged.

Second, the RTA Act forbids the RTA from imposing the parking tax set out in section 4.03(d). This is because the RTA has imposed its sales tax pursuant to sections 4.03(e) - 4.03(g). Section 4.03(p) of the Act provides as follows:

(p) At no time shall a public transportation tax or motor vehicle parking tax authorized under paragraphs (b), (c) and (d) of this Section be in effect at the same time as any retailers' occupation, use or service occupation tax authorized under paragraphs (e), (f) and (g) of this Section is in effect.

In other words, having imposed the sales tax pursuant to 4.03(e) - 4.03(g) the RTA cannot impose the parking tax provided for in section 4.03(d) or, for that matter, a tax of up 5 percent of the gross receipts from the sale of fuel (4.03(b)).

4.03(p) goes on the provide that once the RTA has opted to adopt a sales tax, it lacks the power to switch back to a parking tax and/or fuel tax:

(p) At no time shall a public transportation tax or motor vehicle parking tax authorized under paragraphs (b), (c) and (d) of this Section be in effect at the same time as any retailers' occupation, use or service occupation tax authorized under paragraphs (e), (f) and (g) of this Section is in effect.

In other words, having imposed its sales tax the RTA cannot now add on a parking (or fuel) tax. Section 4.03(p) goes on to forbid the RTA from switching from a sales tax to parking and fuel taxes:

Once any tax authorized by paragraphs (e), (f) or (g) is imposed the Board may not reimpose taxes as authorized in paragraphs (b), (c) and (d) of the Section unless any tax authorized by paragraphs (e), (f) or (g) of this Section becomes ineffective by means other than an ordinance of the Board.

It would be easy to draft an amendment to the RTA Act to allow the imposition of a tax on all non-residential parking spaces even with the sales tax in place. Proponents of SB 572 seem unwilling to consider such an alternative, unfortunately.

The Puzzling Persistence Of The Sales Tax Increase As The Preferred Funding Solution

2007-10-13T17:55:00.000-06:00

Tuesday's apparently desultory hearing by the House Mass Transit Committee into alternatives to an increase in the RTA sales tax and the continued efforts to push for passage of SB 572 with that tax increase in place prompts the question--what is so great about relying on the sales tax as the primary source of transit funding in Northeastern Illinois?

As the CTA points out, its sales tax funding base has failed to keep pace with inflation over the past twenty years:

CTA has grappled with a steep decline in inflation-adjusted funding levels. CTA’s public funding for mainline bus and rail operations trailed inflation by approximately one percent every year. If funding since 1987 had kept even with inflation, the CTA would have received cumulatively $1.6 billion more to operate its buses and trains.

The situation has been deteriorating in recent years:

The CTA’s public funding is growing at a much slower rate than related expenses. Public funding levels only increased by four percent over the past five years and trailed inflation, which increased by 11.3 percent in the same time period. By comparison, CTA has also experienced substantial cost increases in fuel, materials (due to a lack of capital funds) and security.

If that is not enough, the RTA is reducing the CTA's public funding mark for 2008 by $14 million compared to this year's mark, surely a reflection of larger problems with the adequacy of the RTA sales tax as a funding source.

The CTA accounts for about 80 percent of the transit ridership in the region. Pace's financial condition is no better and it is on the path to a doomsday of its own. Even Metra, which for years was living high on the hog with more sales tax money than it could spend on operations, is making dark threats of a 20 percent fare increase and major service reductions. Clearly, the existing sales tax funding base is insufficient to serve the current needs of the transit system.

The inadequacy of the sales tax as the near-exclusive funding base for public transit in this region is illustrated by a simple fact. The RTA system relies on the same sales tax funding base that it did in 1985. Yet, even though that system now carries 20 percent fewer passengers than it did then, it is in a financial crisis. In other words, the same sales tax base cannot support a transit system that is 20 percent smaller than it was 20 years ago.

The inadequacy of the sales tax base is even more dramatic when considering the transit system's market share. Given the growing and sprawling population in the region, transit's market share declined even more sharply than its 20 percent decline in ridership. Clearly, the current sales tax funding base could not support transit's more robust 1987 market share if that market share magically reappeared since it cannot support even today's shrunken market share.

There is nothing wrong in the short term to increasing an already inadequate sales tax. Yet, the same factors that have made the growth in the existing sales tax inadequate will continue to work on the increased sales tax as well. The same cost factors--labor, fuel, pension, security--and possibly a few others that have outpaced the growth in sales tax revenue will almost certainly eat up the sales tax increase before too long. SB 572, if enacted, only postpones the day of reckoning resulting from the region's over reliance on the sales tax to fund public transit.

The real estate transfer tax built in SB 572 is a good starting point to diversifying the public transit funding base. Maybe that tax should be expanded throughout the six-county region under the rationale that travelers and property owners in all counties benefit from the congestion relief and other benefits associated with transit. A parking lot tax, increased auto registration fee, congestion pricing, a gas tax increase, and the like make up a menu of alternatives to a sales tax increase (or supplements to a smaller sales tax increase).

Let's for the moment assume, however, that SB 572 passes as is. How long will it be before the service boards and the RTA eat up the incremental sales tax revenue generated by the tax increase and start rolling out the next set of doomsday scenarios?

Predictions please.

Savage Shove: Is SB 572 A Preemptive Counter-Reformation?

2007-10-13T17:02:00.000-06:00

If his recent Tribune column is any indication, Professor Ian Savage of Northwestern University is trying to become to the transportation community what "Savage Love" columnist Dan Savage is for the rest of us--a source of trenchant, iconoclastic and often right-on advice.

Professor Savage's argument distills down to this. The current public transit funding crisis and its proposed solution (SB 572) is much more about preserving the existing institutional structure than it is about maximizing the quality and quantity of transit service in Northeastern Illinois. The SB 572 fight in his view is about preserving the same level of service by the same publicly owned and operated service providers--Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace with the RTA perched precariously (and expensively) in its financial oversight role.

Savage points out how outsourcing some transit service through competitive contracting could yield more transit service at less cost:

The situation in Chicago is not unique. Throughout the developed world, the introduction of transit subsidies in the 1970s was accompanied by a run-up in costs. A political backlash ensued with efforts to introduce competition into the market. In a few places, such as the provincial cities in England, this has taken the extreme form of deregulation and competition on the street. Much more common, and more relevant to Chicago, is a competitive contracting model that was adopted in London in 1985.

If Chicago followed London's model, the existing CTA bus division would be broken up into smaller units, and the assets would be sold to companies in the private sector. These companies would then compete against each other and against existing private sector firms to win the contracts to operate individual bus routes. Typically, the contracts are for three to five years. And if a route isn't making money, bids are decided based on who requires the least amount of subsidy. While operations would be in private hands, the CTA would set the routes, specify how frequently the buses run, what color they are painted, and what fares are charged. The CTA would continue to exist, but as a marketing and procurement organization.

It may surprise many readers to learn that the iconic red buses in Britain's capital have not been owned by the government for more than 10 years. Yet, as visitors will testify, the network is marketed as a seamless system, with electronic fare card options that Chicagoans can only dream of. This form of organization has found favor in Scandinavia, Australasia, South America, and, rather ironically, the former Soviet-bloc countries of Eastern Europe. Large multinational companies have developed to meet this maturing market. Some of these companies are already active in the United States, owning extensive school bus holdings and Greyhound Line Inc.

Another option might be a taxi-like system allowing licensed jitney vans to provide service on routes that CTA and Pace may be abandoning in January if the status quo is not preserved. Such vans would be tied into the nascent real-time bus locator systems. They would be allowed to charge market prices and try alternatives to the CTA's big bus/big street model (e.g., premium priced door-to-door service).

The fact that no transportation agency is giving serious consideration to alternatives to the current transit service delivery and institutional models lends credence to Savage's argument. Rather than being a "liberal" attempt to preserve vital transit service to transit dependent communities, Savage implies that the Moving Beyond Congestion/SB 572 effort is a profoundly conservative effort to preserve a status quo that delivers significantly less transit service than might be obtained using a different operating model that features a trimmed down public transit institutional structure.

For this most troubling and challenging analysis, Professor Savage should stay away from the windows if he attends Monday's Lipinski Symposium on Transportation Policy. He might find himself the victim of a savage shove from one of the ranks of the many who are fighting so hard to preserve the transportation status quo.

Biting The Hand That Feeds You--Republican Sues RTA

2007-10-13T15:57:00.000-06:00

The RTA long has been viewed by many as a Republican/suburban preserve. It was foisted on the City of Chicago early in the Harold Washington administration, when the City was divided (and weakened) politically and the CTA was desperate for cash.

The provisions of the RTA Act were stacked in favor of the collar counties and remain so to this day. Three examples. First, RTA Board seats are allocated based on population rather than transit ridership or financial contribution to the system. This approach guarantees collar county representation in excess of their contribution to and consumption of transit. It created no incentive for the collar counties to either adopt land-use policies that would generate transit use more than their default model of transit-hostile sprawl or increase their financial support for the region's transit system.

Second, the RTA sales tax rate in the collar counties was and is only one-quarter the rate in Cook County. Third, the seats on the Metra Board are allocated based on morning boardings, which of course means that the suburban counties control the commuter rail system that is of vital importance to the City of Chicago.

For years, the primary goal of the RTA administrations appeared to be to protect and expand the Metra system. The sales tax funding formula delivered more operating subsidies to Metra than Metra was able to spend, so Metra was able to convert millions of dollars of operating subsidies each year into capital expenditures. The RTA also allocated a disproportionate share of capital dollars to Metra, which has resulted in the CTA system infrastructure being in much worst shape than the Metra system. The CTA also faced a structural funding deficit on the operating side because its sales tax base was not keeping up with inflation. For years, the RTA resisted all efforts to revisit the funding formula, protecting Metra's privileged status.

If critics are to be believed, the RTA itself even was a source of patronage jobs, consulting contracts and RTA Board seats for State and DuPage County Republican allies. It certainly is indicative of the RTA's commitment to public transit that one of its long-standing Board members was a prominent opponent of the formation of the RTA and presumably of the ideals of regional transit.

That was then. Now we have the odd specter of Andy Martin, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senator in 2008, suing the RTA because it accepted the short-term bailout offered by the Governor to stave off transit doomsday until November 4th.

The pro se lawsuit is Martin v. Blagojevich, et al., 2007 MR 001310 (DuPage Cty.). It was filed on September 14, 2007. (Copy sent upon request.)

The bare bones complaint alleges that the Governor engineered the advance of funds "to satisfy the CTA's need for cash," neglecting to mention that Pace especially also has relied on these advanced funds to stave off its doomsday for its suburban riders. The gist of the complaint is as follows:

The governing statute mandates that the RTA operate in a "reasonable and prudent manner." The borrowing of money form [sic] 2007, [sic] to fund deficits in 2007, without nay [sic] assurance of repayment is irrational, illogical and contrary to any concept of reason and prudence, and therefore violative of the governing statute and the Illinois Constitution.

This lawsuit is unlikely to gain any traction, even in the favorable confines of the DuPage County court system. (Readers, please email me any subsequent filings so I can avoid a repeat trek to Wheaton.) Nor does the lawsuit appear to have had much of an impact so far on the court of public opinion.

There is, however, something strangely fascinating, even satisfying, about seeing a Republican sue the RTA. It is like a real life demonstration of biting the hand that feeds you!

Parking Space Tax: Is It Really Such A Bolshevist Fantasy?

2007-10-12T20:40:00.000-06:00

It appears that Tuesday's Mass Transit Committee hearing into alternatives to the sales tax increase built into SB 572 was a bust. I wasn't an eyewitness, but it seems the transit agency representatives and other interested parties came to bury rather than praise possible alternatives to an increase in the regressive RTA sales tax, whose limitation as a funding base is as evident as the current transit funding crisis.

Per the Chicago Tribune article, a tax on parking spaces, an idea that had created some buzz in the days leading up to the hearing, lacked an effective advocate and was treated like it was the fevered fantasy of an unreconstructed Bolshevik:

The alternative tax proposals, however, elicited no apparent support from lawmakers or civic groups at the hearing. No sooner was the parking-space tax proposal raised than it drew withering fire from civic groups and organizations representing retail merchants and manufacturers, who labeled it a levy on jobs and an extension of the property tax.

Skeptical lawmakers also raised numerous questions, such as who should pay the tax -- owners or users of property -- and how it would be collected. The questions remained unanswered, largely because such a tax has never been enacted elsewhere, officials said.

Two observations. First, the zeal with which transit funding advocates push a sales tax increase via SB 572 is puzzling. The RTA funding system has been based primarily on a regional sales tax for over two decades. The current funding crisis indicates that such heavy reliance on the sales tax at the exclusion of other funding sources is a bad idea. Raising the RTA sales tax may push off this structural funding problem for a few years, but even with the increase it will be deja vu all over again in the few years with more doomsday scenarios and the like.

Successful transit systems like the New York MTA have much more diversified funding sources. The Governor's opposition to an RTA sales tax increase but professed willingness to consider other options gives transit funding proponents a chance to diversify the public transit funding base in this region. They are squandering that opportunity by holding fast to SB 572 as drafted.

Second, a parking space tax to provide transit funding did not get a fair hearing. The statement by unnamed "officials" that "such a tax has never been enacted elsewhere" was false.

As capably outlined by Todd Litman in an article entitled "Parking Taxes: Evaluating Options and Impacts," a tax on parking spaces has been enacted in Vancouver to help fund its transit agency. Litman outlines parking space taxes in several Australian cities. There also are recent news reports of parking space tax initiatives underway in numerous places in Great Britain. Again, I wasn't at the Committee meeting so I hesitate to point fingers, but it was inaccurate for these "officials" to signal to the Committee that a parking space tax was untested if in fact they did so.

The parking space tax has some merits that bear serious consideration. In his article, Litman outlines two general kinds of parking taxes. The first and more common form of parking tax is imposed on commercial parking, typically a percentage or flat fee tacked on top of parking charges. The City of Chicago has imposed just such a tax. The second and for current purposes more interesting kind of parking tax is imposed on a range of non-residential parking spaces. The determination of the amount of parking spaces subject to tax generally is done as part of the property tax assessment process.

According to Litman the commercial parking tax has at least two undesirable consequences. First, it puts city centers with their paid parking and added-on tax at a competitive disadvantage against outlying areas with free parking and no tax. Second, the tax makes free parking more valuable on a comparative basis and stimulates the creation of more parking spaces in areas where some parking is priced and taxed.

In contrast, a tax on parking spaces that is applied widely to non-residential parking puts all areas in a region on a more level playing field. According to Litman, a per-space parking tax also:

encourages property owners to reduce parking supply (particularly seldom-used spaces) and manage their parking supply more efficiently, and it encourages pricing of parking. As a result, it encourages more compact, accessible, multi-modal land use patters and reduces sprawl. Its cost burden is more evenly distributed.

Free parking offered by employers is a major contributor to travel by car during peak travel periods when traffic congestion is endemic. A tax on parking spaces encourages employers to offer less parking and/or to price parking. Such a tax would also encourage employers to take advantage of existing employer-administered programs that allow employees to get a substantial tax break by purchasing transit tickets using pre-tax wages. These programs (e.g., here, here and here) allow employers to shift employees out of their cars and the now more expensive (because taxed) parking spaces and into the transit system. The revenue from the parking space tax helps fund the increased transit usage. It's a virtuous circle between tax and transit use in a way that the much more broadly based sales tax can never achieve.

Litman's article thus demonstrates that a regional tax on parking spaces is not a crazy Bolshivist idea, as the recent hearing seemed bent on establishing at the expense of both the facts and the putative merits of such a tax. He will be in Chicago on Monday to participate as a panelist in the Lipinksi Symposium on Transportation Policy. Maybe Litman will be prove to be a Gorbachev to our transportation system apparatchiks, whose approach to our transportation system challenges sometimes seems positively Brezhnev-like in nature.

I-70 Project: More Background

2007-10-12T18:14:00.000-06:00

Small world department. On Tuesday this blog covered the mid-September announcement by the FHWA that a team consisting of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri had won a Corridor of the Future grant to study truck-only lanes on I-70 through these states.

On Friday the Tribune finally covered the story or, to be more accurate, reprints an Associated Press article that relied upon a story in the Indianapolis Star.

The Star article is more complete than the Tribune article, which I guess is appropriate since Indiana not Illinois is the moving force between this project.

Countdown To The Lipinski Symposium

2007-10-12T17:30:00.000-06:00

The exclusive, by-invitation-only, hottest-ticket-in-town Lipinski Symposium on Transportation Policy is on Monday. You can download a program and reading list here.

The symposium is supposed to be webcast through a link on the Northwestern University Infrastructure Technology Institute webpage. Such a link is nowhere to be found. But if your taste in entertainment is watching our local transportation elite respond to contemporary transportation management/funding ideas (e.g., red-faced hoots of "Mais Non! No congestion pricing in our town" and vigorous waving of placards "SB 572 or Death") then try to tune in Monday morning. The phone number of the Infrastructure Technology Institute is 847-491-8165. Bug 'em if the webcast link isn't up by then.

Thanks to a kind reader for these links, which are tucked into one of the highly coveted invitations.

Win For Transportation Team

2007-10-09T20:42:00.000-06:00

The State's transportation team has been notably unsuccessful in tapping into federal dollars for innovative transportation programs. (Survey here.) That sorry record makes a recent win all the sweeter.

The FHWA recently announced that the proposal by a group consisting of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri was one of six winning proposals in the FHWA interstate highway "Corridors of the Future" program. According to the FHWA:

The proposals were selected for their potential to use public and private resources to reduce traffic congestion within the corridors and across the country. The concepts include building new roads and adding lanes to existing roads, building truck-only lanes and bypasses, and integrating real-time traffic technology like lane management that can match available capacity on roads to changing traffic demands.

Illinois et al. will get $5 million to develop a plan for the I-70 corridor. The FHWA describes the plan as follows:

This project proposes dedicated and segregated truck lanes along I-70 from the Interstate 435 beltway on the eastern part of Kansas City, Missouri to the Ohio/West Virginia border near Bridgeport, Ohio/Wheeling, West Virginia.

The concept proposes adding four dedicated truck lanes to the existing infrastructure, two in each direction, with at least one interchange per county providing access to the truck lanes and includes, conceptually, truck staging areas. These lanes present the opportunity to pilot size and weight increases on a facility dedicated to trucks. The dedicated truck lanes are seen as a way to reduce congestion, improve safety, and offset the maintenance costs of general purpose lanes.

One can only hope that the I-70 team consider some innovative approaches, including leveraging the Illinois I-PASS platform to use tolling to raise money to build and maintain the truck-only lanes and, perhaps, even the entire I-70 corridor. One can envision the truck-only lanes being available only to trucks that have advanced safety equipment, such as adaptive cruise control and out-of-lane warning signals. This safety equipment plus dedicated truck lanes might allow higher truck speeds, a money-saving approach for which the trucking industry would be willing to pay a fair price in tolls.

To be fair, it appears from the FHWA's description of the project that Indiana is the lead partner in the I-70 group. It is a sad reflection on this State's transportation team that Illinois has become the "tag-along" state to Indiana of all places when it comes to innovative transportation projects. Nevertheless, a win is a win.

New Funding Sources--Quick Ideas

2007-10-08T18:42:00.000-06:00

Representative Hamos has issued a challenge to identify public transit funding sources other than an increase in the regional sales tax that the Governor has pledged to veto. Many of the comments thus far have been of the crackpot "tax the Machine" variety. Here's a few quick ideas before I attend to the chores.

Real Estate Transfer Tax: The Governor's opposition to SB 572 seems focused more on the proposed sale tax increase than on the imposition of a real estate transfer tax in the City of Chicago. The proposed real estate transfer tax covering all of the City of Chicago thus remains. The tax is extended to the collar counties in a limited fashion, applying only to real estate located within one mile of a CTA or Metra train line that is in operation or identified as a project in the FTA's New Starts program (e.g., STAR Line). Such a tax recognizes that public transit rail investments increase property values in the surrounding area and captures a small portion of that increase. Yield: $150 million.

Parking Lot Tax: For reasons that will be covered in a later post, a tax on parking spaces might make good sense. The RTA estimates that a $100/year tax on unpaid commercial parking spaces alone would raise $100 million. There may be better approaches as well. Such a tax promotes more efficient use of parking spaces, which has positive environmental benefits (parking lots have terrible environmental consequences and are empty most of the time). Such a tax encourages employers to provide "Commuter Choice" tax benefits to employees--allowing employees to buy transit using pre-tax dollars at a substantial saving and allowing employers to reduce their investment in parking spaces. Yield: $100 million.

Vehicle Registration Fee: Cars in the six-county region impose a cost that they generally don't elsewhere in the State, namely, they add to congestion that is adversely affecting the region's--and hence the State's--economy. Thus, vehicles in the six county region pay a higher registration fee. According to the RTA, a mere $10 increase raises $50 million. Let's add a $30 fee and raise $150 million. It is a condition of registration that each car in the six-county region have an I-PASS (see below). Yield: $150 million.

Bridge Program: The Illinois State Tollway would be directed to install I-PASS toll collection points on bridges on state highways and the interstates (to the extent allowed by federal law) over major rivers (e.g., Fox, Des Plaines, Chicago). After deducting its fully loaded costs the Tollway would turn the money over to the RTA. The net proceeds would be distributed as follows: (a) one-third goes to a fund dedicated for the repair, rehabilitation and replacement of highway bridges; (b) one-third goes for transit; and (c) one-third goes to the municipality or municipalities in which the bridge is located for local highway or transit (e.g., demand response service) purposes. Local governments could toll other bridges in their jurisdiction if (a) the RTA approved of the toll rate as consistent with regional bridge toll rates and (b) the proceeds were shared as described above.

The bridge program provides a framework for congestion pricing and a steadily increasing revenue stream as more cars over more bridges get tolled. Raising money for bridge repairs is a relatively easy sell these days, after the Minneapolis bridge collapse. The fact that the locals would get a cut of the bridge tolls would help make the program more palatable in the trenches. Yield: Substantial. Potentially several hundred million dollars each year.

These four approaches to raising money are much more closely tied to transportation than a sales tax increase. The real estate transfer tax captures a portion of the value generated by transit investment and service. The parking lot tax passes on to property owners and ultimately drivers the externalities associated with parking lots and, by extension, driving (e.g., runoff from parking lots). The same holds true with an increase in the vehicle registration fee. The bridge tolling program allows the region to develop an infrastructure for congestion pricing, possibly the most effective tool of traffic management, as well as fund key infrastructure, transit, and locally-run transportation programs.

RTA Gamble--RTA Consequences?

2007-10-08T11:48:00.001-06:00

In his "Getting Around" column in today's Chicago Tribune Jon Hilkevitch looks ahead to the 2008 doomsday scenario that the CTA will unveil on Wednesday. To set the stage for how the region got to this point, Hilkevitch looks back at the budget the RTA Board almost a year ago:

Early this year, RTA officials ordered the CTA, Metra and Pace to pass 2007 budgets based on the risky assumption that the state would approve $226 million in new operating subsidies for transit. It was a questionable move at the time by the RTA, which is responsible for providing financial oversight.

Today, the RTA's gamble looks much, much worse. Relatively mild service cuts and fare hikes that would have taken place earlier this year to balance transit agency budgets -- if indeed such measures were really necessary to convince state lawmakers of the pending transit meltdown -- will pale in comparison to what may lie ahead.

This "gamble" by the RTA Board was not only risky, it likely was in violation of the RTA Act, which requires the RTA to approve only balanced budgets based on reasonable and prudent assumptions. As noted previously (here and here), section 4.11(b)(2) provides in relevant part that the RTA Board:

shall approve the budget and plan if:
. . .

(ii) such budget and plan show a balance between (A) anticipated revenues from all sources including operating subsidies and (B) the costs of providing the services specified and of funding any operating deficits or encumbrances incurred in prior periods, including provision for payment when due of principal and interest on outstanding indebtedness;
. . .

(v) such budget and plan are based upon and employ assumptions and projections which are reasonable and prudent;

(vi) such budget and plan have been prepared in accordance with sound financial practices as determined by the Board.

The RTA Board failed to follow these statutory requirements when it approved a budget with a $226 million plug number for operating subsidies to come from some undetermined State source(s). The RTA gambled that the State would come through with that money and, as Hilkevitch notes, that gamble makes each doomsday scenario worse than its preceding scenario.

(Perhaps someone should submit a FOIA request to the RTA seeking something like "all documents that refer to or relate to the $226 million in additional state funding that is contained in the RTA's 2007 budget, including but not limited to any communications with the Governor or any legislators, or representatives thereof, concerning increased State funding for public transit in the six-county RTA region in 2007." Faced with ever more dire doomsday scenarios, the public deserves to know on what basis--if any--the RTA Board voted to approve its 2007 budget with a sizable uncovered operating deficit.)

Rather than base its budget on a large plug number, the RTA should have fulfilled its fiscal oversight responsibility by prompting the service boards to begin in January 2007 making service cuts, implementing fare increases, and taking other steps necessary for they and the RTA to live within their means. These actions may have prompted a quick resolution of the transit funding situation or by now we would have learned to live with a scaled down transit system. Either way, the RTA would have complied with its statutory responsibilities.

Supporters of increases in public transit funding (e.g., Richard F. Harnish's well done commentary) make much of the fact that the CTA and the other service boards are attracting a growing middle class clientele and no longer should be viewed primarily as a social service provider for the poor. At the same time, the RTA presumably justifies allowing the service boards to provide roughly 10 percent more transit service than they can afford on that ground that such transit service is a vital social service. Which is it?

Even if the RTA has the noblest of intentions in allowing the service boards to continue supplying more transit service than they can afford, the RTA Act does not give the RTA Board the power to exercise financial oversight based on its good intentions. The Act is quite specific that the RTA Board is not allowed to approve budgets that contain an uncovered deficit, which is just what the RTA did here. Clearly, the legislature wanted to get Illinois out of the cycle of rolling out more transit in northeastern Illinois than the service boards could afford, with doomsday scenarios as an inevitable result.

The cuts and fare increases necessary to balance the 2007 budget would have been less severe and less painful if they had been implemented early this year. Certainly, the Auditor General's report in March 2007 finding that the service boards had expanded service levels well beyond their financial means should have galvanized the RTA into action. Instead, the RTA's delay in matching transit service to available financial resources has created the very kind of crisis that the RTA Act was designed to avoid.

When a board fails to follow the spirit if not the letter of its governing law and when its "gamble" results in the creation of the very fiscal crisis that board was charged with preventing what can be done? One option is for the board to resign, allowing for a quick change in leadership. Another option is for other powers to step in and take over via an oversight agency.

It does not appear that the RTA Board is taking any responsibility for gambling away its financial oversight duties. Nor does replacement of the Board through a a temporary oversight agency seem on the horizon.

Why not? Is there such a high degree of confidence in the RTA Board despite this gamble and other missteps and failures to exercise its current oversight powers that holding the Board accountable is unthinkable?

MPC Has The Hottest Ticket In Town

2007-10-05T12:24:00.000-06:00

Forget about Cubs playoff game tickets. (And forget about the hapless Cubs.) The real hot ticket in town is to the Metropolitan Planning Council's upcoming "invitation only" event. Transportation aficionados, public officials, academics and transportation industry representatives are all clamoring to get a precious invitation. Rumor has it that folks are lining up at the MPC's door, hoping to obtain a ticket. To escape the shame of not receiving an invitation, others are arranging urgent appointments that require them to leave town that day.

Here's the MPC's description of the event:

On Monday, Oct. 15, decision makers will connect with global, national and regional transportation experts at "Moving the Region in a New Direction: the Inaugural William O. Lipinski Symposium on Transportation Policy," a day-long, invitation-only forum, co-sponsored by McCormick Tribune Foundation, Metropolitan Planning Council, and Northwestern University, to build consensus on new ways to plan, manage and finance metropolitan Chicago's transportation network in the coming decades.

The guest list includes the following:

Hon. William O. Lipinski, former U.S. Representative and former Ranking Minority Member, Aviation, Rail, and Highways subcommittees

Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), Chair, U.S. House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure

Rep. Julie Hamos (D-Evanston), Illinois House of Representatives and Chair, House Mass Transit Committee

Randy Blankenhorn, Executive Director, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning

Edward Hamberger, President & CEO, Association of American Railroads

Todd Litman, Founder & Executive Director, Victoria Transport Policy Institute

Timothy J. Lomax, Research Engineer, Texas Transportation Institute

Hani S. Mahmassani, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northwestern University

Daniel Murray, Vice President of Research, American Transportation Research Institute

Robert Puentes, Scholar Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Author, Taking the High Road: A Metropolitan Agenda for Transportation Reform

Robert J. Schillerstrom, Chair, DuPage County Board

Suzi Schmidt, Chair, Lake County Board

Gunnar Soderholm, Director, Stockholm, Sweden 's Congestion Charging Program

Hope springs eternal each day as I rummage through the mailbox.

A Resumed Search For Transit Funding Alternatives

2007-10-04T19:10:00.000-06:00

This blog urged weeks ago that the proponents of increased transit funding take the Governor's resistance to a sales tax increase seriously and look for other funding options. The House Mass Transit Committee is set to do just that. It has scheduled a public hearing next Tuesday, October 9th, at 10:00 a.m. at the Harold Washington Community College, 11th floor, at Lake and Wabash Streets in Chicago.

In an email to interested parties Representative Julie Hamos, the chair of the Committee, stated that "the subject matter of this hearing is the 'Need for Long-Term Operations and Capital Funding for State Mass Transit Systems'”.

Representative Hamos states that the Committee is looking for alternatives to an increase in the RTA sales tax:

We will welcome specific suggestions for revenues to replace the sales tax increase contained in SB 572 to fund RTA operations for the long-term. As you know, the Governor has taken a public position against the modest 1/4 of 1% sales tax increase in SB 572, which would be added in the 6-county RTA region to the existing regional sales tax that has been in place as the chief revenue base for transit operations for the last 24 years. Any suggestions for a sales tax alternative should meet the following requirements:

Must generate $280 million in the first year, beginning immediately, with some growth each year

Must be relatively stable, without great fluctuations from one year to the next

Must maintain regional balance – without one area of the region bearing disproportionate responsibility for producing the revenues

Should be generated from within the region – unless it is logical, practical and politically feasible to have downstate or statewide sources support RTA operations

Should not be subject to the unpredictable state budgeting or appropriations process

Note that one of Representative Hamos' prerequisites is that the funding source "must generate $280 million in the first year, beginning immediately, with some growth each year." It appears that "some growth" is a bit of an understatement. The RTA announced today that the CTA, Metra and Pace are facing a $408 million operating deficit in 2008. This deficit represents 20% of the combined operating budgets of the service boards and is double this year's deficit.

Representative Hamos' invitation to search for funding alternatives is a bit snippy. Note in this regard the statements that the Governor's "public position" is against a "modest" increase in the RTA regional sales tax "that has been in place . . . for the last 24 years." The failure of SB 572 to gain political traction no doubt is very frustrating. Nonetheless, let's take seriously her request for bona fide alternatives to a sales tax increase that is unpopular in some quarters. (Bake sales don't count.) Post your ideas here, send them to Representative Hamos at julie@juliehamos.org and show up at the hearing and testify.

Unlinked Trip: Transit Funding And The Olympics

2007-10-04T18:41:00.000-06:00

Proponents of increased transit funding have often linked the success of their effort to the region's selection to host the 2016 Olympics. In their view, an expanded and improved public transit system is as necessary as an Olympic Village.

Peter Ueberroth, the Chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, cut this link between increased public transit funding and the Olympics in a pretty decisive fashion during a recent visit to Chicago. The media generally focused on his assessment that Chicago is running third or fourth behind other cities for the 2016 Olympics. (Here and here.)

That assessment is discouraging enough, but the Sun-Times went on to report this exchange with Ueberroth about the impact of the current public transit funding imbroglio on the region's Olympics prospects:

As for logistics, the USOC chairman insisted that the CTA’s financial crisis—and the possibility of fare hikes and service cuts without a Springfield bailout—would have no impact on Chicago’s chances.

“Any Olympic Games can make the adjustments in its transportation system for a three-week period in order to accommodate the world athletes. There are bigger conventions that come to this town,” he said.

Oooof!

Increased public transit funding and the Olympics may now be an unlinked trip. Certainly paying Laidlaw (now First America) or some other private transit operator for three weeks of premium bus service would be a bit cheaper than the RTA's "Enhance and Expand" option for the next decade.

More Schwieterman On CTA Value Pricing

2007-10-03T11:53:00.000-06:00

Professor Joseph Schwieterman graciously submitted a lengthy response to my recent post discussing his Chicago Tribune commentary advocating that the CTA adopt value pricing. In view of the importance of the issue and the thoroughness of the comment, I've reprinted his comment here:

The central message of my Chicago Tribune article is that the CTA has not, despite its rapidly deteriorating financial condition, pursued opportunities to improve its revenues through “value-based” pricing.

You are correct that no major big-city transit system in the U.S. has made the conversion from a flat-fare system to a distance-based system. However, I am unwilling to let the CTA off the hook so easily for its relatively primitive pricing practices. Outside the U.S., nearly all major systems have made the conversion to more sophisticated pricing structures, and as I explain below, other agencies in the U.S. have been more vigorous in pursuing “value-pricing” options than the CTA.

Of course, the CTA’s options for adopting value-based or distance-based pricing are now greatly constrained due to its decision to invest in the present farecard/turnstile system. This huge investment was made in 1997 without, to my knowledge, a serious evaluation of its entire fare system. I have spoken to numerous people, including some transit insiders, who share my view that this was a major mistake.

The recent actions of New York, however, suggest that the CTA still has many viable options. The MTA has a large system of express buses in which prices are set at $5; it also charges a hefty price ($5) for passengers riding its “Air Train” to JFK. Last week, the agency unveiled a proposal to adopt peak/off-peak pricing for the entire system, touting it as an effective way to both raise revenue and smooth out traffic patterns (see link below).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/nyregion/25fare.html?ref=todayspaper

The board will apparently vote on this proposal sometime this fall. Why aren’t we seeing a comparable debate in Chicago?

In Los Angeles, the local transit provider (LACMTA) charges a premium of up to $1.20 for bus routes that use local expressways. A study by Matt Smith, a researcher assistant at UIC, shows that many systems around the country have adopted some form of value-based or distance-based pricing. Although I’m not familiar with the measurement criteria that Smith uses, he offers an interesting discussion about the benefits of value pricing that can be accessed via the link below. There is table (pg 16) comparing the status of various pricing strategies in U.S. cities that helps illustrate my point.

http://cta21.utc.uic.edu/Presentations/TransportChicago07/Matt%20Smith.pdf

As the CTA sinks into deeper financial trouble, it is frustrating to me that we are not having a serious debate about creative ways to improve its revenue, outside of draconian “doomsday” budgets. The CTA has far more pricing power than most other transit agencies due to the size and strength of Chicago’s central business district. Plus, we face significant congestion on certain rapid-transit lines at the height of rush hour, which makes providing additional capacity costly.

Value-based pricing is less viable in cities with a smaller rapid transit system, where the price elasticity of demand is higher (partially due to the lower price of downtown parking) and congestion is less severe on trains and buses at peak times. (I did not mention Pace Suburban Bus in my article since I do not believe the agency, with its present route system, has much pricing power.)

This blog raises an excellent point that, even if the infrastructure issues associated with distance-based fares (including the need to install turnstiles that read farecards when passenger exit stations) could be resolved, Chicago’s economic geography makes this type of pricing politically and socially complicated. Some of the poorest neighborhoods, such as Austin and Englewood, are a considerable distance from downtown, which makes the distributional consequences of distance-based fares more than a trivial concern. The economic geography is less problematic in Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, where the poor tend to be concentrated in close-in neighborhoods.

However, the stations that are the farthest out from the city on the CTA “L” system, including O’Hare Airport/River Road, Evanston, and Oak Park/Forest Park, could easily support high fares. (It is my understanding that years ago the CTA dropped its surcharges on several routes, including the Evanston Express, for political rather than economic reasons.) Express bus routes using Lake Shore Drive are also good candidates for higher fares, while short routes in the downtown should probably have lower fares.

It is not clear whether it would be cost-effective for the CTA to modify the present farecard/turnstile system (presumably by installing the previously-discussed exit farecard equipment) at certain stations, such as O’Hare, to allow it to impose higher prices. However, this would be the simplest way to make the fare system more rational. Passenger exiting at these stations would pay a surcharge; those starting their journey at these stations would pay both the basic fare and the surcharge all at once.

Alternatively, the CTA could simply still charge premium prices only for originating passengers at certain stations (while allowing arriving passengers to pay only the basic fare), which would obviate the need for installing new turnstile equipment. I agree that this approach is imperfect, but it would be administratively simple and easy for travelers to understand. (Some highways have different tolls based on the direction of travel).

Moreover, the Chicago Card, introduced in 2000, provides an excellent opportunity for building greater pricing flexibility into the system and could help alleviate the pain of collecting surcharges if the CTA were to reinstitute the practice of collect surcharges on certain routes, such as the Evanston Express (Purple Line) times.

It is true to that value-pricing would result in some travelers either opting for other modes of transportation or traveling less. The assumption behind value-based pricing, however, is that the benefits, in the form of increased financial solvency of the transit provider and less severe “peaking” of demand, exceed the social costs.

It will take a lot of political will for the CTA to adopt value-based pricing in a large-scale way. When evaluating the actions of other cities, I was struck by the propensity for some cities to build new light-rail routes with flat-rate fares. Los Angeles has built an entire light-rail system around a flat-fare system. The cost of riding the Los Angeles-Long Beach Blue Line, which stretches 22 miles, is just $1.25. (It is not surprising that its farebox recovery ratio is so poor!). This seem absurd to me, considering the relative ease of zone-based and time-of-day-based pricing on these systems, which can rely on the “honor system” (with enforcement).

The new light-rail system in Minneapolis has both distance-based and time-of-day based pricing, making it a prototype for other to emulate.

None of this is intended to suggest that distance-based or value-based pricing would be a quick fix. It would probably increase revenues only modestly until a general retrofit of station equipments becomes possible, which is hard to imagine right now. Adopting it system wide would be a long, difficult road. But incremental steps could pay dividends, and give us hope that the CTA is waking up to the need for run itself more like a business.

Elgin X-Way/O'Hare Bypass--Update

2007-10-02T17:38:00.000-06:00

Joe Ryan has an article in today's Daily Herald that outlines the long and tangled history behind the non-completion of the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway and the O'Hare Bypass.

The gist of the story is that almost 20 years ago the communities nearest O'Hare, especially Bensenville and Elk Grove, fought off these projects as part of their effort to halt the expansion of O'Hare Airport, perhaps the most important economic asset of this State. At that, IDOT threw up its arms and focused on more important things, such as building airports in places where no one wants to fly (MidAmerica Airport) and not building airports at all (Peotone Airport).

As Ryan recounts:

For the last 17 years, state officials have done nothing to plan for that extension or the connecting western bypass, which would head south from I-90 along the western edge of the airport, creating a ring road with the Elgin-O'Hare.

IDOT apparently hopes to lull the recalcitrant local communities into acceptance of major transportation improvements serving the O'Hare area with years of hearings and public meetings:

Instead of moving right into designing the new routes -- which have been on the books since the 1970s -- state officials have decided to spend the next three years talking to local leaders and coming up with a variety of projects to address traffic issues. The final list could range from new transit to small expressways or large privately-owned toll roads.

In 2011, state planners will then start working on how to pay for the projects and precisely where they would be placed. That means actual construction might not start until 2016 or later, nearly 30 years after the original battles over the Elgin-O'Hare extension.

It will be all but impossible to placate the community holdouts, which are nothing if not vociferous in their efforts to save the State from thousands of new jobs and a shot at nurturing a global city within its boundaries. According to Ryan, the O'Hare expansion project will be done by 2016. It makes good engineering sense to get the associated road and transit improvements in place--or at least well underway--by that point. After all, why move dirt twice and draw out the adverse construction impacts over many years rather than just a few?

"Rick Powell," who commented on yesterday's post, argues that IDOT's seemingly glacial pace is in fact required by law:

These days, however, it is very difficult to wind through the maze of NEPA regulations and state-mandated "Context Sensitive" processes that are designed to consider all reasonable alternatives, to examine every possible environmental impact, and to involve the community extensively in the process. Can you think of any communities that might have issues with this potential project? You may not like it, but this is the legal and political environment for large scale transportation projects today.

It may be that the pendulum has swung too far to the side of "paralysis by analysis" but if so, it will probably take awhile for it to swing back the other way. Meantime, "public private partnerships" do not yet have the legal standing in IL to do a slash-and-burn design/build highway project with eminent domain powers, and even if they did, they would likely be subject to the same procedural issues as the public agencies must operate with.

Is this assessment accurate? Can it be that the federal government accepts that its $140 million earmark will be used to fund years of studies and public meetings and not a single transportation improvement in the area?

Elgin X-Way/O'Hare Bypass--"Very Theoretical"

2007-10-01T18:19:00.000-06:00

It looks like the $140 million earmark the region got in the currrent federal transportation bill (SAFETEA-LU) for the construction of (a) an extension of the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway to one or both of those destinations and (b) a western bypass road behind O'Hare Airport connecting the Northwest Tollway and the Tri-State Tollway will be used to fund plenty of studies and plans over the next decade. Just what we need.

The three major papers in the Chicago area all had stories today (here, here, and here) that IDOT is going to do a very thorough study that will take until at least 2010 to put together a "priority list" of highway and transit improvements in this land beyond O'Hare. "Then, for three years, they will look at how to finance the top projects and identify the general areas to locate them." After that, if the financing comes through, "the officials will start the long process of further engineering, alternative studies, environmental impact analysis and land acquisition."

Clearly this is not a project on a fast track and the question is why not. After all, the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway and O'Hare Bypass projects already have been the subject of years if not decades of studies and debate. One would think that our transportation officials would have a pretty good idea by now about what to do. And why have they not viewed the $140 million earmark from the current federal transportation bill as a clear federal direction that the State and region should get cracking on these transportation improvements, which are expected to deliver major economic and transportation benefits to the region and thus the nation. (See 2006 West O’Hare Corridor Economic Development Study here.)

The State already has spent $5.4 million of this $140 million earmark. Rather than spending more years and substantially more dollars putting together a "priority list," then more years and more money looking for financing, and then still more years and more money doing alternatives analysis and the like, maybe the State should be looking for ways to compress the process and do these tasks as simultaneously as is legally possible. Why not shoot for a big slug of federal transportation dollars in the next federal transportation bill for serious engineering and construction work rather than wait on two more six-year federal transportation bill cycles to get construction going full bore as seems likely given IDOT's current plan?

Business Leaders for Transportation proposed last year that the Expressway and the Bypass be constructed in a much more timely fashion using a public-private partnership. (Report here.) Certainly there are fully public options as well (e.g., public operating authority financing construction by charging tolls).

Senator Don Harmon's bill (SB 378) to give IDOT and the Toll Authority the power to enter into public-private partnerships is stalled in the General Assembly. Given IDOT's go-slow approach to the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway and the O'Hare Bypass, such power likely would be wasted on that agency anyway.

$140 million is a lot of federal money. Is it a worthwhile investment of those valuable transportation dollars to pursue a plan that makes it just a "very theoretical" possibility, according to Pete Harmet, an IDOT area programming bureau chief, that construction will even begin by 2016? After all, the earmark is for "Construction of O'Hare Bypass/Elgin O'Hare Extension" and presumably not for a decade's worth of expensive priority lists and preliminary plans.

As IDOT knows all too well from its Dan Ryan project, construction costs in recent years have risen significantly faster than the rate of inflation. Waiting to do these projects are not going to make them any easier or cheaper.

Value Pricing of Transportation Services

2007-09-29T19:28:00.000-06:00

The Value Pricing Argument

Professor Joseph Schwieterman is the director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul Univeristy. His recent commentary in the Chicago Tribune urged the CTA to adopt value pricing, namely, fares that vary by the time of day and the distance traveled. Referring to the latest CTA "doomsday" plan, Schweiterman observed:

If there was any silver lining in the doomsday budget, it was the reluctant acknowledgment that its archaic one-price-fits-all fare structure cannot effectively serve such a massive system. The plan called for higher cash fares ($3) during the rush hour than other parts of the day ($2.50).

According to Schweiterman:

it's a promising sign that the CTA now recognizes that charging all riders the same fare is as obsolete as a steam locomotive. Not only does this practice turn a blind eye toward basic economics and compound the agency's financial woes, it discourages short trips and makes fare increases more politicized than necessary. Yet it has stuck with us like a bad dream.

Schweiterman doesn't stop with the CTA. While strangely he fails to mention Pace, where one can travel for even greater distances for the same fare than on the CTA, he criticizes the failure of Illinois governments to make effective use of variable pricing in both transportation and non-transportation contexts:

Why has it taken so long? Perhaps because other local agencies set a notoriously bad example. Chicago is the only major city in the country that still charges most residents a flat fee for water, regardless of usage. In 2005, the tollway authority adopted a system that apparently makes the average fee paid by rush-hour commuters lower than that for those who travel at off-peak times due to their varying use of I-Pass. And we do virtually nothing on our roads to reward carpoolers. Those who doubt the impact of such incentives need only look at the effects that time-of-day pricing is having on trucks using the tollways.

Analysis

This blog already has featured discussion of the pros and cons of value pricing of transit service. (Here and here.) While Schweiterman's case for value pricing is strong, his commentary has several weaknesses.

First, Schweiterman supports his argument with the assertion that "the CTA remains one of the world's largest rapid-transit systems that doesn't set fares based on distance." This statement may be literally true (I haven't checked), but it lacks nuance. What I have checked is the fare policies of the ten largest U.S. rapid transit system. Only two of those ten systems--WMTA in Washington D.C., and BART in the Bay Area--appear use value pricing. Thus, the flat fares charged by the CTA are not nearly as aberrational as Schweiterman portrays.

Second, Schweiterman states with respect to the higher fares the CTA would charge during peak periods that "these fares would be too high for many who are dependent on mass transit." Yet, Schweiterman fails to address how the CTA or someone else should respond to the needs of the transit dependent who Schweiterman says can't afford a $3 fare during rush hour.

Had he addressed this issue Schweiterman might have argued that there are many government services that not all people can afford. There presumably are plenty of people, for example, who cannot afford U.S. Mail overnight express mail for their primary mail service but can afford a first class stamp. Schweiterman might have argued that the population unable to afford a $3 fare is relatively small compared to the population benefiting from a more economically efficient transit agency and, well, life is tough sometimes.

Alternatively, Schweiterman might have addressed the social justice issue by arguing for some form of social program that would provide financial help to impoverished transit-dependent people. One way would be through reduced fare cards targeted at low-income commuters.

His failure to address the serious social justice issue he raised unfortunately plays into public perceptions that the the advocates of value pricing are callous bean counter types who don't appreciate the challenges facing poor people. That perception makes it difficult to shift from flat fares to value pricing. (It would be an interesting academic study to determine if poor people in Chicago would be better or worse off on average if value pricing were adopted. Perhaps based on their residential locations and travel patterns they would be better off.)

Finally, Schweiterman suggests that value pricing will make the CTA better off financially than a uniform increase in flat fares. This conclusion is not immediately obvious, especially when Schweiterman lauds programs that give away transit rides in central business districts (a practice that has social justice implications of its own). Schweiterman should have explained why. Perhaps it is because value pricing will reduce demand during peak periods, cutting costs. Perhaps it is because value pricing rectifies below market pricing of peak period and long distance transit travel. Whatever Schweiterman's theory for why value pricing will lead to a financially stronger CTA, it would have been nice to have heard it explained.

Despite these shortcomings, Schweiterman's commentary is a welcome addition to what hopefully will be a vigorous debate over the hows and why of pricing both highway and public transit services in Illinois.

STAR Crossed?

2007-09-11T20:08:00.000-06:00

Crain's Chicago Business reports in its September 10th edition that the Canadian National Railway is in talks with U.S. Steel Corp. to buy the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern tracks for as much as $1 billion.

The EJ&E tracks run from Waukegan to Northwest Indiana, passing through numerous suburban communities including Lake Zurich, Naperville and Joliet. CN plans to use the tracks to reroute rail traffic that now goes through Chicago. This will help speed rail traffic through the region, a top economic and transportation priority.

Hasn't Metra based its STAR Line plans on this same EJ&E corridor? Metra's description of the STAR Line states that:

The 55-mile route, connecting Joliet to O'Hare International Airport, calls for the use of two dedicated transportation corridors. The first corridor is known as the Outer Circumferential Corridor and runs approximately 36 miles along the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern (EJ&E) railroad corridor. The route starts in Joliet, goes north through Plainfield, Naperville, Aurora and West Chicago and continues to Hoffman Estates at Prairie Stone.

The line would then connect to the Northwest Corridor Segment from Prairie Stone, heading east via Schaumburg, Rolling Meadows, Arlington Heights, Elk Grove Village and Des Plaines and on to O'Hare International Airport.

If CN is successful in acquiring the EJ&E and using it as the "key bypass route" for rail traffic in the region, what does this mean for Metra's plans to use the same right of way for its STAR Line?

At a minimum, CN's purchase of the EJ&E, its investment in improvements to that railroad and the heavy rail traffic that the line will carry under CN's ownership would make it much more expensive for Metra to acquire track access or actual right of way in the corridor. More dramatically, the region may have to decide whether the EJ&E is more useful to the region if it carries boxcars rather than well-fed folks in boxer shorts.

Predictions Please

2007-08-28T18:21:00.000-06:00

One final post before focusing on departure: What are your predictions concerning (a) how SB 572 will fare and (b) the outcome of the current transit funding/governance imbroglio?

Let's refrain from snark and focus on the facts and reasonable inferences supporting your predictions.

In Transit

2007-08-28T18:09:00.000-06:00

I'm soon in transit to a place with no Internet access and where my muscles will furnish the only means of locomotion. Postings will be sporadic and likely nonexistent until at least September 10th.

Post in the comments your news and commentary on the transit-related events as they unfold.

Finding A Path To Resolution

2007-08-26T20:38:00.000-06:00

Disputes And Their Resolution

In my job I have some experience with dispute resolution. There are common characteristics to disputes. The parties tend to wear emotional blinders, convinced that their position is right and that the other side's position is unreasonable and irrational. They literally don't hear each other, talking past one another with argument after argument. Many times the conflict is complicated by status issues--one party will consider itself to be economically, socially and/or intellectually superior and not be shy about projecting their sense of entitlement. Not surprisingly, this patronizing attitude will rub the other party the wrong way and cause them to cling even more strongly to their position.

Yet, often it turns out that there is more common ground than what meets the eye. The challenge is finding a path for both parties to walk to get to that common ground and then build a settlement of the dispute on that ground. Many times this requires the parties to take bolds steps that would seem unthinkable to them when they entered the dispute resolution process. Seemingly intractable disputes do get worked out. This is the Midwest not the Mideast after all!

The Transit Funding Imbroglio

The current transit funding imbroglio strikes me as a textbook example of the kind of seemingly intractable dispute for which there is a common ground and creative solutions available to craft a resolution. That resolution will require everyone to get out of their comfort zones. But just as wars stimulate technological innovation, disputes such as this can sometime spark creative resolutions that exceed everyone's expectations.

The Moving Beyond Congestion group has worked hard and long putting together a transit funding and RTA governance package embodied in SB 572. That package has gotten the stamp of approval from the editorial boards. A coterie of advocacy groups and influential experts are speaking out in support of the bill. The Mayor of Chicago and the Chairman of the DuPage County Board, among other political figures, have spoken up in support. In other words, SB 572 has the stamp of approval from the local establishment.

Yet, as is the case is so many disputes, the proponents of SB 572 seem to have failed to listen and take into consideration important contrasting views. The Governor has been insistent that sales or individual income taxes will not go up on his watch. He has been equally insistent that the State tax structure is unfairly tilted in favor of the business community and against "working people." His spokesperson was recently quoted as saying that funding for transit should come from closing some of these corporate tax loopholes. Many may disagree with the Governor's position, but that position is neither irrational nor without precedent.

Even though they certainly knew that the Governor feels very passionately about no increases in sales taxes, the Moving Beyond Congestion effort has persisted in pushing for a significant sales tax increase in the region where two-thirds of the State's population lives. It is as if the proponents either failed to listen to the views of the Governor or just chose to dismiss the Governor's views as beneath serious consideration.

Using regional sales taxes to fund public transit is not, however, something mandated by a long lost Eleventh Commandment. Sales taxes for transit are criticized for two good reasons. First, sales taxes are regressive, which may explain why the Governor opposes sales tax increases. Second, sales taxes are not directed at the conduct--driving--that we want to switch over to transit use. Unlike alternatives such as gas taxes or tolls, sales taxes are too diffuse to incentivize people to take transit or reduce their driving.

Further, Governor signaled through a late and rejected amendment to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) bill (SB 1201) that the State should have a direct role in transportation and other kinds of infrastructure planning in this region. Yet, when the Moving Beyond Congestion proponents put together the RTA governance piece of SB 572 weeks later, they expanded the RTA Board but gave neither the Governor nor the State a role on that Board. This despite asking the State to increase its already substantial financial support for public transit in this region.

In short, we have a classic dispute. One side, apparently buoyed by a sense of entitlement, is pushing a transit funding and governance package that the other side has said is unacceptable.
The other side undoubtedly feels aggrieved and put upon by the first side's refusal to take its interests and priorities into account when putting together SB 572. This side likely views the current SB 572 publicly campaign as designed to shame and bludgeon the Governor to adopt policies starkly inconsistent with the Governor's clearly stated political agenda, and their backs get up. Add the fact that SB 572's most public advocate, Representative Hamos, is a House Democrat, a species not exactly in favor with the Governor's office at the moment if news reports are to be believed, and you have a difficult, rock-and-hard-place situation.

The Common Ground

What is striking is that both the proponents of SB 572 and the Governor have indicated that something must be done about the public transit situation in Northeastern Illinois. Sometimes the Governor has appeared to limit the scope of his remarks to the CTA, but he and his staff have signaled on other occasions that the Governor recognizes the need to do something about the challenges facing the RTA.

Such a shared goal is critical. Once the parties involved in a dispute like this recognize that they share roughly the same goal and will all pay a big price if they fail to resolve their differences, resolution is within reach. That not to say resolution is easy, just possible.

Outline Of A Transit Solution

The elements of a solution to an intractable dispute are often lying around in plain view. The parties locked in the dispute cannot see them for two reasons. One, they are too fixated on their grievances to be able to search for alternatives to their position. Second, often solutions require parties to step outside the box of what they think is possible. While such solutions may be impossible for either party to implement on their own, when brought together via a settlement they sometimes are able to surmount barriers each of them previously thought were insurmountable. Here is an outline of a path to resolution:

1. No sales tax: The Governor has made clear that he will veto a bill that contains a sales tax increase. Do the proponents of SB 572 really want to find out if they have the votes to override that veto, especially now that the House and Senate appear to be at odds in connection with the Governor's vetoes in the State operating budget?

The Governor has signaled that he would support transit funding that comes from closing corporate tax "loopholes." Here is one of his spokespersons quoted on public radio recently on the subject of transit funding:

Public transit boosters took months to hammer out a deal to provide money to keep trains and buses humming and please downstate lawmakers. The idea was to have the region itself pick up more of the tab. An Illinois Senate bill would hike sales taxes in six counties.

But Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich won't have it. The Office of Management and Budget's Justin DeJong says the governor wants someone else to pay.

DeJONG: This comes back to the fact that there are many corporations in Illinois who pay little or no taxes to the state. Businesses clearly benefit from having a strong public transit system, and it's only right that they help to support the system.

There is not much ambiguity here. The sales tax increase won't fly but the Governor is willing to consider other tax measures to raise money for transit.

The Governor already has signed one bill that originated in the State Senate closing such loopholes. Might there be other "loopholes" that could be closed via a Senate-initiated bill that would provide some additional operating revenue for the public transit system?

Given (a) the Governor's emphasis in his budget address on closing corporate income tax loopholes and (b) the recent statement by a spokesperson that this is where the transit funding solution should come from, it behooves the supporters of increased transit funding to find some plausible corporate tax loopholes that could provide a funding source for transit. The SB 572 proponents may not agree with this approach, but it is the best way to find a politically viable partial solution to the transit funding problem.

2. Time for User Fees: The Governor is also no stranger to using increased user fees to raise revenue. This was a key feature of his early budgets. He also supported increased tolls on the Illinois tollways to help fund improvements on that system.

There are two user fees that come to mind. First, the Moving Beyond Congestion Final Report identified vehicle registration fees as a potentially rich source of operating revenue. (Pg. 91) A $10 increase in vehicle registration fees in the RTA region would generate $50 million annually. Given the congestion-related burden each new car places on the regional transportation system, is doubling the current $78 per vehicle charge that unthinkable? That step alone would raise almost $400 million in new money annually.

Another option is expanding tolling to more roads in the region, a pure user fee. Rather than highly unpopular (but effective) cordon tolling (e.g., tolling access into the Chicago Loop) toll collection would be dispersed throughout the six-county region. The idea would be that those who use the major roads and bridges in our region would pay a user fee. The existing I-PASS system could be expanded and used for toll collection.

Let's assume that there are 70 billion vehicle miles traveled in this region, and that half of these miles are traveled on interstates and principal arterial streets. If tolls were set to generate just 2 cents of revenue per vehicle mile on interstate and principal arterials--a rate well below that on any toll road--$700 million would be generated annually.

Tolling appears to make everyone crazy locally, which is why the region is taking years to study its feasibility. Pitched as a user fee designed to fund transit and pay for some highway improvements (e.g., HOT lanes open to express buses), tolling might fly. The Governor was persuaded once to raise tolls to improve a portion of the region's transportation system. Maybe this example predisposes him in favor of a similar user fee to fund improvements to other important parts of the system.

3. The State joins the RTA Board. The RTA governance package should be amended to give the State of Illinois some active role on the new, improved RTA Board. Perhaps the Governor gets to pick the RTA Chairman with the advice and consent of the State Senate. Maybe the Governor and the 4 legislative leaders appoint the members of a reconstituted RTA Board. Maybe the Govenor and the legislative leaders each get to appoint one member to the Board. There are many possibilities.

The key is that the State and, specifically, the Governor, gets some substantial role on the RTA Board. It is frankly embarassing how the proponents of SB 572 constantly refer to the crucially important role of public transit to the State's economy and environment, how they want to substantially increase the State's financial support for transit, and yet they freeze out the State from any role on the governing board the public transit system.

Getting To A Transit Solution

Anyone who has gotten this far is probably sputtering. "Tolling, impossible." "I can't advocate for higher corporate taxes, there goes my funding base." "The Governor is completely unreasonable." "What don't the RTA and the House Democrats understand about the statement 'no new sales taxes'"? On and on.

Parties in disputes always go through the sputtering stage. It generally comes after they have a shared recognition of some common ground, when they first turn their attention to how to get to resolution. This is a good point to remind the various parties involved in this dispute of the consequences of continued deadlock and inaction.

In this case, further inaction means the shrinkage and deterioration of the region's public transit system. These developments, so contrary to the heavy investment in public transit in most other "world class" cities, will undercut Chicago's efforts to attract the Olympics. A diminished public transit system will be a roadblock in the City of Chicago's attempts to "green" the city. Congestion will increase in some corridors, as will air pollution. As the transportation system becomes less efficient the region becomes less competitive economically and less attractive from a quality of life perspective. Someone will be held responsible if the transit funding/governance package fails and that someone may be just about everyone in Springfield and in the city halls and county boards in this region.

Getting to agreement means recognizing the merit in the other side's position, understanding that both sides share some common ground, and being flexible, creative and brave when building solutions on that ground. It looks to me like the elements for a resolution of this matter lie around us. That solution might be vastly different from what anyone involved ever expected or thought possible. But better such a solution than continued impasse as a valuable public asset deteriorates around us.

House Mass Transit Committee Hearing Wednesday

2007-08-26T19:44:00.000-06:00

The House Mass Transit Committee is meeting this Wednesday, August 29, to discuss SB 572. The hearing will be at 10 a.m. in the Thompson Center in room 16-503.

Busy News Day For Transit: What Does It Mean?

2007-08-23T18:32:00.000-06:00

Operating Budget

The Governor has exercised his veto powers and squeezed about $463 million out of the operating budget approved by the Illinois House and the Senate. (Veto message here.) The approved State funding for transit escaped gubernatorial trimming. The amounts for paratransit ($54,251,555), reduced fare reimbursement ($37,318,100), the Public Transportation Fund match of the RTA sales taxes ($193,000) and RTA bonds ($135,300,000) have changed little since the Governor's budget proposal in the Spring.

It's A Rally!

Representative Julie Hamos has announced a transit funding rally for Tuesday, August 28, at 11:30 a.m. at the Thompson Center Plaza. Mayor Daley, DuPage County Board Chair Robert Schillerstrom, Representative Hamos and Representative Sid Mathias (House Mass Transit Committee Minority Spokesperson) are the featured rally rousers. (Note that Rep. Hamos' Mass Transit web page lists the date as August 27, which is wrong.)

At the time of this posting I did a quick search of the websites of the Moving Beyond Congestion project, the RTA, the service boards, the Metropolitan Planning Council, Illinois PIRG, CNT-Transit Future and Save Chicagoland Transit. There was no mention of the rally on any of their homepages. Consequently, it appears that the "rally" is intended to provide a backdrop of a small and photogenic crowd for what amounts to a press conference rather than mark the kick off any sort of mass movement in support of SB 572.

In light of this puzzling lack of publicity about the rally--by groups and service boards who to date haven't been shy about publicizing their support of SB 572--can someone shed light on the intended purpose of the "rally" and the target size for the crowd?

In light of the slim return thus far from all the speechifying, editorials and Op-Ed pieces, one wonders if the rally will bear the same relation to increased transit funding that a rain dance does to more rain.

Dour Dorval

The CTA's Executive Vice-President Dorval Carter, generally known for his pleasant disposition, was Mr. Gloom at today's RTA meeting, warning that the coming 2007 CTA "doomsday" cuts are but a preclude to a 2008 transit apocalypse unless more operating subsidies are found, and quickly:

“CTA service would be completely decimated,” cut as much as 75%, CTA Executive Vice-president Dorval Carter said at the Regional Transportation Authority board meeting. “You’ll see CTA customers stranded as their transit options disappear.”

Without a new transit funding package from state lawmakers, the CTA could also raise cash fares next year to as high as $6 to plug what could be a $250-million hole in its operating budget, Mr. Carter said. Single-ride cash fares are currently $2.

The Mayor's new 21st Century Commission may point the way out of this mess. Keep your eye on this ball folks. From the Commission could come all sorts of interesting funding and operational ideas. The CTA is within the scope of the group's work.

SB 572 Moving Ahead?

The same article states that the House Mass Transit Committee will take up SB 572 on September 4th. There is no such meeting on the Committee's website, however. Note that the next round of Pace cuts go into effect on September 1st and the CTA has set September 16th as the dawning of its doomsday.

Kane 'Em

The good burghers of Kane County are still unhappy. Here's an overview of their grievance:

On Wednesday, Kane County Board Legislative Committee Chairman Bill Wyatt, R-Aurora, spoke out against a proposed House amendment that, he said, would cause the collar counties to pay for Chicago Transit Authority improvements. Metra and Pace – used most frequently by suburbanites – would not benefit as much, Wyatt said.

Committee member Gerry Jones, D-Aurora, said local funds raised by a proposed regional sales-tax increase would be filtered through the Regional Transportation Authority system rather than staying local.

“Metra is what we want,” Jones said. “RTA is not.”

Kane County also doesn't like SB 572 because it (and McHenry County) would get less representation on the RTA Board than some of the other collar counties:

Wyatt also expressed concern in a proposed change to the RTA board of directors that would put 16 people on the board instead of the current 13.

The current 13-member board has three members picked by the collar counties. DuPage County picks one member and Kane, Lake, Will and McHenry counties work together to pick the other two.

The new board would increase the collar counties’ representation from three to five, but Wyatt was concerned about how those picks were distributed. Under the new plan, DuPage, Lake and Will would each pick one member and those three counties would work together to pick a fourth member. The fifth slot would be picked jointly by Kane and McHenry counties.

This is not enough representation for Kane and McHenry compared to the other collar counties, Wyatt said.

“They get 11⁄3 [picks], we get 1⁄2,” he said. “There’s no way we can accept a marginalized seat.”

As discussed previously (here , here, here and here), the many complaints from Kane County and McHenry County about the RTA are in inverse proportion to their contribution to the region's public transit system. After all, these counties pay relatively little into the RTA system through sales taxes. At the same time they burden the region with development patterns inhospitable to public transit. These development patterns make the cost of supplying transit in these counties prohibitively expensive. Exhibit A is the Metra's extension of service to Elburn, which cost several hundred million dollars yet serves relatively few people.

The proponents of SB 572 should amend the bill to exclude Kane and McHenry counties from the RTA Act. The revised bill would require Metra and Pace to provide service to those counties at cost, paid in advance. Kane and McHenry counties would no longer have to pay any RTA sales taxes and they and their elected representatives could figure out how to pay for whatever level of public transit service they desire.

It is time to call the bluff of these two collar counties. Of course, maybe they won't come back to the fold even after they understand just how much more it would cost them to retain the current Metra and Pace service levels. If they prefer to go their own way, then let's happily downsize the RTA to include only those counties that want to be a part of the RTA "family" and won't be a constant political and demographic drag on improving the public transit system in this region.

I know that full-funding grant agreements and the like may require Metra to continue running some service in Kane and McHenry counties. My guess is that there is sufficient room in those agreements to allow Metra to scale back its service in those counties to a level commensurate to what these two whiny counties are willing to pay for after arms-length bargaining with Metra.

* * *

What does it all mean? I agree with Jim Reilly's assessment.

Let's Go For Another Spin

2007-08-22T19:28:00.000-06:00

At its November 2006 meeting the RTA Board approved the retention of Resolute Consulting LLC " to manage and implement the community outreach and public relations element" of the Moving Beyond Congestion effort. The contract amount was $789,862.

On the agenda for the August 23d meeting of the RTA Board is a resolution extending Resolute Consulting's contract. The agenda unhelpfully does not specify either the length or amount of the extension.

What's your assessment of the "community outreach and public relations" work done on behalf of the Moving Beyond Congestion effort by Resolute Consulting?

I must confess that when I saw that the posted information about the public hearings about the preliminary Moving Beyond Congestion plan (remember those?) contained driving directions but no information on how to travel to the hearings by transit I formed a quite negative impression. (Post here.) But who's perfect?

New California Budget Cuts Transit--A Preview?

2007-08-22T15:52:00.000-06:00

After many weeks of wrangling the California legislature has approved a FY 2008 budget.

The budget increases funding for education but cuts money for transit. Here is a excerpt from an article describing the budget deal:

The fiscal 2007-08 budget, considered by most a victory for conservatives because of its austerity, provides a record reserve of $3.5 billion, pays off $2.5 billion in bond debt early and largely satisfies the needs of all major state services, including education, public safety, and health and welfare programs.

It also transfers $1.3 billion from public transportation programs to general fund spending while delaying a cost-of-living increase for the disabled.

Here's more from the same article:

Public transportation also lost in the budget battle - $1.3 billion in gasoline tax money was siphoned away from transportation programs and projects and put into the general fund to help pay for schools, public health and other programs.

In the past, Bay Area leaders worried that the transfer could delay the seismic retrofit of BART's Transbay Tube, but officials said the impact is not clear.
Linton Johnson, spokesman for BART, said officials are still evaluating how the cut will affect the agency.

"At first blush, it does not look as devastating as we thought it might," he said. "We still need to crunch the numbers, but clearly this is not good news overall for public transportation."

Might California's transfer of money from transit to fund other priorities like education turn out to be a model for Illinois? Governor Blagojevich, after all, reportedly is a fan of Governor Schwarzenegger.

What I Am Reading These Days

2007-08-21T20:11:00.000-06:00

-- An overview of the five winning Urban Partnership Program entries, with pictures and links to the agreements between the feds and the locals.

-- A readable, well-documented discussion of privatization in the public transit sector. The RTA Act as written appears to provide a method for the region to tap into private sector transportation resources to provide service that it is not economical for the current public transit providers to supply. This avenue has not been explored by the Moving Beyond Congestion proponents or anyone else as a way of extending the limited operating funds available to public transit providers in this region. We'll explore in a later post.

-- A comparative survey (Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago) of how supportive cities are to travel by non-auto means of travel--transit, bicycling and walking.

-- A new Transportation Research Board report on transit oriented development commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration. It takes almost 150 well stuffed pages to conclude that dense, heavily mixed-used development near transit stations can increase transit usage and reduce auto dependence. The positive effects of TOD are magnified when parking is constrained physically and/or through price. The study also supports the common sense conclusion that transit ridership levels are highest nearest a transit station and ridership drops off the farther the home or job site is from the station.

What's on your reading list?

Who Will Wear The Suit If SB 572 Fails?

2007-08-20T20:45:00.000-06:00

The Bombast

In today's Capitol Fax Blog, Rich Miller excoriates Metra board members and Metra's Executive Director, Phil Pagano, for venting at a recent board meeting at the lack of progress in Springfield on the the SB 572 transit funding package. (Coverage of that board meeting here, here and here.)

This excerpt from the Daily Herald gives you a sense of that meeting:

The frustration of Metra officials, who have been waiting for action on the measure by lawmakers for months, spilled out at the board meeting Friday in an hourlong, round-robin rant.

Metra Director Phil Pagano, visibly angered at times, lamented the attention lavished on the CTA over its threatened fare hikes and service cuts while also blasting lawmakers who believe Metra riders can afford drastic fare hikes.

“I’m sick and tired - in blunt language - of people thinking our ridership is lily white making $250,000 a year,” he said at the public meeting. “We provide a very wide range of service for a wide range of people.”

On the CTA, he snapped, “I’m getting really tired of the CTA and their service cuts. This isn’t a one-agency issue.”

On the heels of the Metra board meeting a McHenry County group entitled the McHenry County Better Roads Coalition held a spirited rally in Algonquin. (Here, here and here.) The rally featured plenty of speeches and placards attacking the Governor for failing to fund McHenry County road improvements. Some of the loudest voices at the rally belonged to Republican public officials, which is rather ironic since it has been Illinois Republicans who have repeatedly torpedoed transportation capital bills, including a major capital construction bill less than two weeks ago.

Could this highly publicizing fingerpointing by Metra and McHenry County bigwigs be the start of a concerted effort by these folks and their allies to put the jacket of public transit fare increases and service cuts and increasing highway congestion on the Governor and the Democratic leaders in the General Assembly if SB 572 fails to pass? Are these folks telegraphing their belief that SB 572 is unlikely to pass and that it is time to secure a good position for when the blame game begins?

Rich Miller points the finger back at Metra and its suburban Republican political base:

Whining about the lack of publicity or the inattention by Springfield is not Metra’s answer. Their problem is that too many Republicans, particularly in the House, bought into an “easy fix” for transit that was based on gaming expansion. That package is now on life support. It’s up to Metra, PACE and the RTA to convince those recalcitrant suburban legislators - most of them Republicans - to get back on board the negotiated agreement for a sales tax hike which fell apart when the easy gaming money was dangled in front of them.

Let's look at the data we have to see if he is on the mark.

The Numbers

By my rough calculations there are 78 State representatives who have districts that include a significant part of the six-county RTA region. Twenty-eight are Republican and 50 are Democrats.

Four of the 28 Republicans (14%) have signed on as sponsors of SB 572. The four Republican sponsors are as follows:

Suzanne Bassi (54th District--Northwest Cook County--District office in Palatine)
Elizabeth Coulson (17th District--Northern Cook County--District office in Glenview)
Mike Fortner (95th District--Western DuPage County and a bit of Kane County--District office in West Chicago)
Sid Mathias (53d District--Northwest Cook County and smidgen of Lake County--District office in Arlington Heights)

Note that with the exception of Representative Fortner not a single Republican representative from the collar counties (Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage and Will) has signed on as a sponsor of SB 572.

Nineteen of the 50 Democrats (48%) have signed on as sponsors. One can only speculate why more have not signed on as sponsors. In all, only 23 of the 78 representatives from this region (28%) are listed as SB 572 sponsors.

In the Senate, there are 28 Democrats and 7 Republicans from the six-county RTA region. None of the Republican senators have signed on as a sponsor of SB 572. Just four of the Democrats (14%) have signed on as sponsors. This means that just four of 35 senators in the region (11%) are sponsors of SB 572.

Bill sponsorship may mean little or nothing for most bills. In a major bill like SB 572, however, the level of sponsorship may be a more accurate indication of the support for the bill in the legislature. After all, elected officials in this region likely have heard plenty from their constituents, transit interest groups, and editorial boards concerning the merits of SB 572. It pains one to recall that the Moving Beyond Congestion effort has been in high gear for the past year or so. The House Mass Transit Committee has spent a significant amount of time on transit funding/governance issues over the past several years. If an elected official strongly supported SB 572, or at least wanted the repeated visits from lobbyists on the issue to cease, then presumably they would have jumped on the sponsorship bandwagon long ago.

If and when it comes time to "wear the jacket" for the failure of SB 572, it looks like there had better be plenty of cloth, both red and blue, to make all the appropriate garments.

Representative Hamos Honked Off

2007-08-20T20:44:00.000-06:00

Metra officials are not the only public servants upset at the lack of action on SB 572. Representative Julie Hamos is quoted on public radio "blam[ing] party leaders for blocking a vote on a transit bill." Here is a transcript of her statement and commentary from the reporter:

HAMOS: There's public mudslinging, they're fighting with themselves and it's so sick that they se [sic] beyond themselves to see that there are 2 million rides a day that will be impacted by our actions in Springfield.

Hamos says she has to votes to pass the bill. Her proposal would help to fund local transit by increasing sales and real estate transfer taxes.

Note that Representative Hamos repeats what she posted in this blog, namely, that she has enough votes to pass SB 572.

Does Representative Hamos' public fingering of the leadership of her own party as the reason that SB 572 is stalled affect the prospects that the bill will pass?