Just As We Predicted
INFO
Three years ago, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory told CL he would demand answers. But weeks later, McCrory laughed at CL for asking questions about the competence of our rail contractors in an interview with WBT radio's Keith Larson. Needless to say, the mayor never delivered those "answers" he promised us.It took over a decade, but people across the country are finally beginning to figure out how the light rail scam works.
Consultants who stand to profit from building rail lines quote ridiculously low cost estimates, then later the cost triples, quadruples or worse. Politicians feign shock and the companies laugh all the way to the bank.
Parsons Transportation Group, the same company that designed our rail line, tried this scam most recently in Southern Nevada, but this time, it didn't go so well.
In December, Parsons attempted to convince taxpayers that a 33-mile line that would connect Henderson and North Las Vegas would cost a mere $713 million, or $22 million a mile. That didn't jibe with what citizens were reading on the Web, and they questioned the costs. Rather than act as a mindless cheerleader for rail, like the media in most cities, the Las Vegas Review-Journal took a good look at the estimate, calling it "absurdly low" when compared to actual costs in other cities -- which run as high as $80 million a mile.
Parsons quickly revised its projections upward by $400 million in response and was eventually forced to admit that with inflation factored in -- these consultants often "forget" to factor in inflation -- the real cost would be between $2 billion and $3 billion. (Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, an unrelated company that did the estimates for our mass transit project, conveniently "forgot" to figure in inflation, too.)
Within a month, the Vegas light rail plan was dead.
Charlotte wasn't so lucky. We're one of the cities that deliberately closed its eyes and bought the scam. In the late 1990s, consultant Parsons Brinckerhoff claimed that we too could have rail for a mere $29 million a mile, and that the South Boulevard rail line would come in around $230 million. Some city council members who doubted those numbers raised $5,000 and brought in their own consultant, Wendell Cox.
Using costs of other lines across the country for comparison, Cox predicted our rail line would cost over $400 million and have far lower ridership and much higher subsidization costs than predicted. The powers that be treated Cox like a mental defective and laughed him out of city hall. Cox and those who hired him were small-minded and lacked vision. As it turns out, Cox was almost dead on. It now looks like his estimates were actually a little low.
In 2003, Creative Loafing reported that the last time Parsons Transportation and Parsons Brinckerhoff worked on a large-scale project together, they were responsible for an 80-foot sinkhole along Hollywood Boulevard, thousands of lawsuits totaling over $1 billion, and a trail of fraud and corruption so long that even the FBI couldn't untangle it. Parsons Brinckerhoff, the firm that told voters in 1998 that our mass transit plan would cost about a billion dollars -- it is now forecast to cost over $6 billion and counting -- is the same firm that conspired with Massachusetts officials and the Federal Highway Administration to hide the true $14 billion cost of Boston's Big Dig from the public, bond investors and Wall Street.
This alarmed us here at CL, and three years ago, we demanded to know why these firms were hired to do work here and how we'd keep them from robbing us blind. Didn't this stuff turn up in the background check of these companies? And shouldn't we double check their cost estimates?
Through a spokesperson, Charlotte Area Transit System CEO Ron Tober told CL at the time that he was aware that there were problems on both the L.A. Red Line Project and on the Big Dig, but claimed that he was not aware of the details of those problems.
Other city and town officials who sat on the committee that vetted the companies told us they looked at the companies' "vision for the future," not their past histories.
And three years ago, after we ran all of this by him, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory told CL he would demand answers. But weeks later, McCrory laughed at CL for asking questions about the competence of our rail contractors in an interview with WBT radio's Keith Larson. Needless to say, the mayor never delivered those "answers" he promised us.
Now the nine-mile South Boulevard light rail line, which was supposed to cost $230 million, is at $427 million and costs are forecasted to go higher, though how much higher nobody knows because the city is still trying to untangle the mess. It appears that Parsons Transportation Group has fraudulently billed the city, and expensive new engineering snafus are turning up on a daily basis.
Now McCrory is outraged and he wants answers. He's demanding that someone bring him a damn report, NOW. Somebody better explain how this could have possibly happened, he fumed for the cameras last week.
For over five years, we tried, Mr. Mayor, and you mocked us. Cox and your fellow city council members tried, and you wouldn't listen.
But might we make a suggestion? Forget that report and try Google. It worked just fine for the people of Southern Nevada.
The future of rail here is pretty predictable, based on what's happened elsewhere. After massive cost overruns, the line will be completed only to open to ridership that's significantly less than what was originally forecast. The cost of subsidizing the line, meanwhile, will be far higher than forecast. The line will then suck so much money out of the system that bus service or other planned corridors will have to be cut.
It's a pattern that Professor Bent Flyvbjerg at Denmark's University of Aarlborg has made a career documenting. Flyvbjerg has a word for the bureaucratic and engineering phenomenon that has led to these problems across the globe: "lying."
Got a story idea? E-mail Tara at tara.servatius@ creativeloafing.com.
COMMENTS
RE: Just As We Predicted
Posted by Bill on 10.02.06 @ 06:37 PM
Forget either political party. Both are in cahoots, completely brain dead, and only political friends like Mr. Neal think that trains are new and exciting. I am just waiting to find out that like our brand new and not so improved coliseum, there are special exclusive rail cars that are for the privileged class of downtown (yes, I said downtown) bankers and elitists to get back and forth from their exclusive neighborhoods and not have to bother with the masses in traffic. Meanwhile, nobody else rides it because it just goes back and forth and forth and back.
RE: Just As We Predicted
Posted by DD on 09.21.06 @ 05:58 AM
The Romance of the Monorail The mass transit technology of Tomorrowland finally reaches today. By Brendan I. Koerner Posted Friday, Nov. 1, 2002, at 1:28 PM ET There's an episode of The Simpsons in which a smooth-talking huckster named Lyle Lanley, patterned after Music Man charlatan Harold Hill, persuades Springfield's gullible townsfolk to build a $3 million monorail. The transit system debuts to tremendous fanfare—Star Trek icon Leonard Nimoy shows up for the christening—but the euphoria is short-lived. Minutes into the maiden voyage, a brake line snaps, and the cartoon passengers nearly suffer a violent fate. The show's core joke is easy to get: How could these rubes not have realized that "monorail" is synonymous with "boondoggle"? One-track trains, after all, are a relic of the same Tang-fueled, Jetsons-era futurism that predicted the rapid rise of hover cars and holographic spouses. But a decade after "Marge vs. the Monorail" first aired, monorails are no longer mere punch lines. Las Vegas is spending $650 million on a seven-mile monorail designed to ferry gamblers from one end of the Strip to the other. On Election Day, Seattle voters will decide yea or nay on a proposed $1.7 billion, 14-mile expansion of that city's one-mile monorail, a leftover from the 1962 World's Fair. And in northern Delaware, transit planners are championing a 15-mile monorail as the best solution for alleviating the region's traffic jams and worsening air quality. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The fad may provoke laughter in those who chiefly associate monorails with Disney World, but the technology's history is longer and more distinguished than most people realize. A suspended version known as the "Swinging Railway" has been gliding through Wuppertal, Germany, since 1901, and monorails flourish in such metropolises as Tokyo, Osaka, Singapore, and Sydney. Just a quick I-5 jaunt from Seattle finds Vancouver's SkyTrain, originally built as a gimmick for the 1986 Expo but later expanded deep into the suburbs. The line now handles nearly 150,000 boardings each weekday. Why, then, is America a virtual monorail abstainer, save for the occasional theme park or zoo? The nation's automotive fetish is an easy culprit, but Walt Disney deserves a fair share of the blame, too. In 1959, the "Happiest Place on Earth" unveiled a miniature monorail that snaked along the park's edge. Visitors dug the ride, but they also figured that such trains would never work outside Mickey's domain—if it was in Disneyland, well, then it must be a kiddie thing. The monorail's image wasn't helped by two successive World's Fairs—Seattle in 1962 and New York in 1964—that featured monorails as futuristic centerpieces. The technology just couldn't shake the stereotype of being too fanciful for real-world straphangers. For the "Train of Tomorrow—Today!" tomorrow never seemed to come. A few decades and massive gridlock later, folks are wising up to the monorail's many perks as they grope about for mass-transit alternatives. New underground subways have been dinosaured by dizzying construction costs, not to mention the legal and engineering headaches of digging through built-up cities. This is a lesson that Los Angeles learned the hard way with its superexpensive Metro Red Line, which hasn't helped a whit in lessening rush-hour congestion on the city's freeways. Light-rail options are the current vogue, hailed as low-cost and easy to build. But laying trolley tracks on busy urban streets is more labor-intensive than it sounds. A separate lane must be created, electric wires must be hung to provide power, and streets often need to be widened to accommodate both trains and autos. There's also the issue of providing crossing points for pedestrians and vehicles. No matter how many safety precautions are put in place, sooner or later an unlucky driver or walker gets smooshed. True, monorails cost more than light-rail systems: Estimates in Seattle range upward of $124 million per mile. At least for short-haul routes, however, that's where the disadvantages stop. Monorail tracks are prefabricated and can be erected relatively quickly: Simply dig a hole every 120 feet or so, plop down a column, and lift the track into place. Because the systems operate above traffic, collisions with errant motorists are never an issue. The trains are automated, saving millions in labor costs in the long run. And rubber wheels mean that Simpsons monorail salesman Lyle Lanley spoke the truth when he sang, "It glides as softly as a cloud." This is not to suggest that Seattle's monorail plan is faultless or that any auto-jammed city need only go monorail to solve its every transit headache. They fit best in still-nascent cities where the columns won't disrupt bustling sidewalks and where commuters aren't too wedded to the freeways already. A big knock on monorails, favored by opponents of the Seattle initiative, is that they're eyesores that cast shadows upon sidewalks and obscure views. That critique was valid during the monorail's World's Fair heyday 40 years ago, but today's tracks and columns are far less obtrusive. Some monorails get by with tracks just a shade over two feet wide. Support columns are thinner than ever and can be designed to blend into the surrounding environment. Besides, if you want a lovely view in a monorail town, simply fork over your fare and watch the scenery zip by at 50 miles per hour. It's a heck of a lot more entertaining than slogging through a city center via light rail. As crazy as it may sound, that fun factor counts for something—a lot, in fact. The goal of mass transit is to convince people to abandon their cars, which feature such enticing accessories as CD players and elbow room. Light rails are too buslike to impress most commuters, too squished and close to the ground. Monorails, by contrast, strike a chord with travelers. There's something about the sleek designs, the pillowy rides, and the panoramic views that just enchants. Monorails have their own fan club, which claims more than 2,500 members who swap monorail toys and trinkets. Modern light rail can claim no such devoted fan base. So, maybe the technology isn't quite as lampoon-worthy as The Simpsons would have us believe. Forget about Disneyland, the World's Fairs, and remember that snappy number from "Marge vs. the Monorail": "Is there a chance the track could bend?/ Not on your life, my Hindu friend." back to top
RE: Just As We Predicted
Posted by leaving on 09.19.06 @ 07:57 AM
I found a job in Raleigh, I'm getting the hell outta here, buncha money hungry wierdo's here anyway. CYa!