American Dream

A last-minute insertion into the federal transportation reauthorization bill exempts four loser rail transit projects from Federal Transit Administration cost-effectiveness criteria. Earlier this year, the Federal Transit Administration proposed to give a "not recommended" rating to any transit project that received less than a "medium" cost-effectiveness rating. In effect, this meant that no funding would be available for projects that cost a lot of money for each new transit rider they gained.

Many projects were threatened by this decision, but Congress decided to exempt only four:

• Dulles rail;
• San Francisco Third Avenue light rail;
• San Jose Silicon Valley light rail; and
• Portland's Wilsonville-to-Beaverton commuter rail.

Of course, these are all big losers:

• The Dulles extension of DC's Metro Rail received a "recommended" rating from FTA when it was expected to cost $1.5 billion and gain 15,000 new daily riders, but huge cost overruns led to a fall-off in performance;
• San Francisco is proposing to spend nearly $1 billion on a line that is a mere 1.7 miles long;
• The agency building the Silicon Valley light rail is nearly broke and doesn't even have the funds to run this billion-dollar rail line;
• The Portland commuter-rail line has a low cost-effectiveness rating because it is expected to attract only 1,900 new riders per day.

Ironically, the FTA introduced this new criterion after the House Appropriations Committee criticized the agency in late 2004 for its lousy cost-effectiveness rating system. Of course, the members of Congress who inserted these exemptions--and we can only guess who they are--were probably not among the majority of the committee that made this criticism.

The above link goes to a PDF document that contains a portion of the federal legislation. The exemptions are on the bottom of page 123 ("(f) Adjustments") to the top of page 124.