Public transportation is a money sink regardless of how you look at it. Busses work great but they are not the new sexy thing. Light rail is The Next Big Thing these days and it is us taxpayers who are paying the price. From The Seattle Times:
Sound Transit faces a $11.5 billion shortfall. Now what’s it going to do?
When Sound Transit unveiled a $54 billion tax measure in 2016, even its most tenacious critics said the rail and bus budgets were so larded with financial cushions the agency couldn’t possibly run short on cash.
Only five years later, Sound Transit faces an $11.5 billion budget shortfall caused by soaring land costs, alignments in sloppy soils, community requests for add-ons and a projected $6 billion reduction in tax revenue due to the COVID-19 recession.
The shortage was revealed last month in the midst of environmental studies of the voter-approved Sound Transit 3 projects. Transit board members face difficult decisions to close the budget gap, such as delaying lines or stations, raising taxes within Seattle or amassing more debt for a half-century.
To put those three paragraphs into plain English:
#1) - Sound Transit decided to cut to the chase, ask for everything it wanted and then to keep asking for more so there would be zero chance of running short. This was their one-time letter to Santa and by God, they were going to get that pony they were wanting.
#2) - five years later, their spending was so high, their inability to follow a budget, their lack of fiscal sense caused them to go into the hole by 21.3% of the total budget -- and --
#3) - now, their only options are to delay the implementation (causing costs to rise), raising taxes (on an already burdened base) or, kick the can down the road (causing costs to rise).
I do not have the link handy but someone did a nice study of the light rail implementation in Albuquerque, NM and found that for the cost of this program, they could have given each regular rider a Prius and for the annual cost of maintenence of the lines, they could have given each regular rider (now a Prius owner), $10,000 for maintenence costs and gasoline. Public transportation is a financial burdon on everyone. The cost to ride is just a fraction of the total cost to operate.
I understand the need. What gets me is that busses are the most cost-effective way to handle this - why do city planners keep looking at fancier and fancier alternatives. They need to stick with what works.
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