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(Commuter) Railroading Taxpayers February 7, 2008 In her State of the State address last week, Governor Rell lectured lawmakers that “fiscal caution, fiscal restraint, is needed” in this era of economic shakiness and possible tax-revenue declines. Lucky for Rell -- who in three and a half years in office has exhibited little willingness to control state expenditures -- Connecticut’s budget is a target-rich environment for cuts. Extravagant public-employee pay and benefits must be curbed. Corporate welfare, arts-and-culture pork, and subsidies to left-wing lobbyists and “research” centers are overdue for elimination. But two programs stand above all others as no-brainer candidates for the chopping block: Shore Line East (SLE) and the plan to establish commuter-rail service between New Haven and Springfield, Massachusetts. Bureaucrats, rail contractors, politicians along the I-91 corridor, Connecticut’s environmental left, and choo-choo hobbyists have salivated over the prospect of a New Haven-Hartford-Springfield line for decades. And the Rell administration finally granted their wish, with bond allocations for environmental analysis and the initial purchase of passenger coaches. (The total price tag for the project will be hundreds of millions of dollars.) Last year, Wendell Cox, a transportation scholar and consultant who has studied rail systems all over the world, crunched state bureaucrats’ numbers and reached some frightening conclusions: • fares will provide less than five percent of the commuter line’s capital and operating expenses -- taxpayers will pick up the rest • taxpayer subsidies “are projected to be more than enough to lease each new rider a top of the line Lexus or BMW” • ridership is projected to be so low that “it would not even approach taking 0.5 percent of the traffic” from I-91 If the other commuter-rail line operated entirely by the state is any indication, Cox’s analysis is on target. SLE, which runs along Connecticut’s eastern coast, was established in 1990. “Failure” is too kind a word for the railroad. As the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole notes, SLE “is costly to operate and carries an insignificant number of passengers and less than 0.1 percent of the region’s commuters. While service improvements led to ridership gains in the 1990s, [its] operating cost … is the highest of any commuter rail line in the nation, and nearly four times as great as the average commuter rail system.” SLE’s per-trip taxpayer subsidy is nearly six times that of Metro-North’s New Haven line. And while commuter rail in southwest Connecticut has plenty of problems -- and is in serious need of reforms -- at least it removes a significant amount of drivers from local highways. SLE has not achieved that goal, and neither will the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield line. The finger-wagging of Connecticut’s Nanny Staters escalates every year, but commuters continue to prefer the automobile. A 2005 poll of Nutmeg State citizens found that 95 percent believed it wouldn’t be practical for them to take a train to work, and 85 percent said the same for commuting by bus. Amazingly, Connecticut, which has a population density higher than 46 states, now has a smaller portion of its commuters using government trains and buses than the national average. Transit simply doesn’t provide a viable alternative to the way most people get to and from work in 2008. “Most jobs are not clustered around a rail line or bus route,” writes the Reason Foundation’s Ted Balaker. “Rather they are scattered throughout a metro area and that makes the kind of point-to-point travel offered by the automobile particularly helpful.” Transit’s suitability for other types of trips -- running errands, school-related activities, evening social events -- is nil. “When opportunity costs are taken into account,” argues transportation analyst John Semmens, “there can be no question that putting money into public transit lowers the rate of economic growth, consumes capital, reduces job opportunities, and worsens [government] finances.” Unfortunately, the assumption that cars are the enemy still undergirds transportation policy in the Nutmeg State. And this costs taxpayers -- a lot. Forty percent of the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s operating budget is spent on transit, despite the paltry market share of government buses and trains. If Governor Rell is serious about changing Connecticut’s spendthrift ways in order to weather a slowing economy and long-unaddressed state liabilities, trendy but counterproductive programs have got to go. There’s no better place to start cutting than Shore Line East and the doomed-to-fail commuter service between New Haven and Springfield. D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. He can be reached at muskacolumn@cox.net. # # # # # |
