A coalition of light-rail advocates is planning a publicity event to be held at Shady Grove Metro at 8:00 am next Monday, October 23. From their press release:
On Monday 10-23 at 8:00 AM, coalition representatives including business leaders, community activists, and city, county, and state officials will be at the Shady Grove Metro station to officially announce their campaign support for the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT), an extension of the Metro’s Red Line that goes from Shady Grove to Clarksburg. They seek the support of commuters and other citizens for county, state and federal funding of the service.
I also received an email from Ben Ross, of Action Committee for Transit, informing me of what I assume is the same event. But more interesting, to me, was an article by Mr. Ross that was linked to from ACT’s website, entitled “Stuck in Traffic: Free-Market Theory Meets the Highway Lobby”. Quoting,
Put a conservative in the driver’s seat, and he can sound like a utopian Marxist. If you ask him about food, housing, or health care, he’ll explain how buying it and selling it in the marketplace creates the best of all possible worlds. But his car has an inalienable right to free parking and open roads. “To each automobile according to its needs” is a truth so self-evident that it need not be uttered.
One of [public policy consultant Wendell] Cox’s favorite arguments against new light rail lines, for example, is that the cost of construction is enough to buy a Mercedes for each future rider. Not factored into this computation is the price of the road the Mercedes will drive on — no small item when a new highway in the Washington, DC, suburbs is expected to cost $39,000 for each daily round trip that crosses its busiest point. But since roads — as Cox likes to see the world — are as free as the air we breathe, railroads must be wasteful because they run on expensive tracks!
On one project that has just broken ground, the widening of a ten mile stretch of I 95 north of Baltimore, the tolls won’t even raise enough money to cover the extra costs of building toll lanes instead of free lanes. A trip is expected to cost around $1.50 in rush hour and 50¢ at other times. The revenues these charges will yield can be estimated from experience on [California] SR 91; both have the same length and number of toll lanes, and tolls will be adjusted so both carry the same number of paying vehicles. Current tolls on SR 91 run four or five times higher that what is predicted for I 95 and bring in $39 million a year, so annual revenues for the I 95 toll lanes should be in the vicinity of $8 to $10 million. But putting toll lanes on the highway requires extra access ramps, so construction will cost $270 million more than adding the same number of free lanes. The toll revenue won’t even be enough to cover the interest on the extra $270 million, let alone pay the entire $830 million price of widening the highway.
I highly recommend that everyone interested in these issues go read the rest of Mr. Ross’s article.