Bus rapid transit system could boost metro Detroit, experts say

[begingri]

By Matt Helms

Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

It won't be easy or cheap, but creating a new bus rapid transit system could help metro Detroit restore reliability to public transportation, attract new riders and spur economic redevelopment, national experts said at a forum this morning in Royal Oak.

Gov. Rick Snyder's office and other regional leaders hosted the meeting at the Ford Education Center at the Detroit Zoo to encourage support for the proposal to build a bus rapid transit, or BRT, network on 110 miles of major roads in southeast Michigan and establish a regional agency to operate it.

Supporters say the idea is a strong, regional agency that would force coordination and efficiency on overlapping city and suburban bus providers and create the basics of a greatly improved public transportation system connecting Detroit to key suburbs, Metro Airport and Ann Arbor.

It would provide a new form of rapid transit the region has never had, but supporters say one of the biggest benefits of the proposal is the promise of greater stability and coordination among existing bus providers. The regional agency would have broad power to manage and coordinate routes among Detroit's existing city and suburban bus systems and could withhold federal funding from those that don't cooperate.

Representatives from transportation agencies in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Cleveland told how the speedy, modern rapid transit buses helped improve service and boost ridership. Cleveland, like Detroit a Rust Belt city many had written off, has seen $4.3 billion in economic development along Euclid Avenue, equivalent to Woodward in Detroit.

Continued at: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a...=2012120224042

[stasu1213]

A year ago today Bing, and others were pushing and promoting light rail. Snyder played politics and didn't really give his support behind it. The idea of rapid busses were floating around at the time. I had said that rapid busses will be pushed instead of light rail. Now rapid busses is the main idea instead of light rail. Who profits from this decision. Follow the money! Bing is just a puppet. Snyder and others are calling the shots for the ones who had planted him there

[Jason]

No, the switch to buses was a pragmatic one. In order to fund improved transit you need an RTA and in order to get different areas to join an RTA you need to provide service to them.


Now part of the problem is that the region is just plain cheap. If the RTA had a .5% [[half a percent) income tax, and 15 years of that tax was borrowed against, you could build the entire 110 mile BRT route as light rail right now. And that doesn't include any federal money.

The RTA's total income is 105 billion dollars, and 110 miles of light rail would cost about 6 billion [[at 55 million per mile).


That doesn't cover operating costs, but the Vancouver SkyTrain actually makes money [[not counting capital costs). Fares and advertising is more than the operating costs. It's completely grade separated, which means it can go faster and it can be driverless [[don't have to pay drivers), and because it's driverless you can run trains every 5-10 minutes all day long [[even off peak hours) without spending tons of money. So you get higher quality service, and very low [[possibly negative) operating costs, which is great. The problem of course is that the SkyTrain is the same technology as the People Mover, and no one would ever go for that...

[DetroitPlanner]

$105 billion!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Where did you get that from??

[mwilbert]

I assume that is meant to be a measure of taxable income for people inside the area covered by the RTA, not the RTA's income. I don't know what the actual number is, but that is in the ballpark of what it should be.

[Jason]

Population x per capita income, for each of the 4 RTA counties, added together.

That's the total amount of income in the RTA area, so if income were taxed at 100% that's how much money you would collect.

You only need to tax a fraction of a percent to get enough money to build the entire system from scratch immediately.

Edit: Yeah mwilbert that's what I meant, you beat me to it. I just used the population and per capita income stats on wikipedia to come up with that number. It's not a perfect number since not all income is taxable, but like you said it's in the ballpark.

[Hypestyles]

...All the regional/state leaders sold us out, and regarding any BRT planning, likely will again by the time the year is up..

[erikd]

I will start off by saying that I have been a strong supporter of BRT since the Speedlink proposal was promoted by SEMCOG and TRU more than a decade ago. I would love to see a BRT system like the one proposed by Snyder and Bing come to fruition, but the proposal advocated by Bing and Snyder is simply not based on anything even close to reality, unlike the very realistic Woodward light rail proposal.

First off, the catalyst behind the Woodward light rail project was the M-1 initiative, which was a proposal for a completely privately-funded 3.4 mile light rail line on Woodward. As a result of this proposal, the Detroit/Michigan representatives in Washington went to the US Department of Transportation and asked if this private light rail funding could be considered as the required local funding component needed to qualify for matching federal grants under the "new starts" program. The US DOT approved the use of this private funding as the required local match, and agreed to kick in enough federal funds to extend the light rail line all the way up to 8 mile road.

Due to the private funding and federal matching, the city, county, and state governments would only have to contribute a very small amount of funding towards the construction of the Woodward light rail line. Depending on the final cost and the actual amount given by the private M1 backers, this would result in the total city/state government paying for 0% to 15% of the total construction cost, which is a very insignificant amount in terms of the city and state budget.

On April 11, 2011, the Detroit City Council approved the issuance of bonds to finance the construction of the Woodward light rail project. According to the approved proposal. the project had an estimated cost of $530 million, and would be funded by these sources:

-$60 million in capital grant revenue bonds backed by 5307 federal grant funds
-$25 million federal TIGER grant
-$100 million from the M-1 group
-$317 million from Federal New Starts 5703 grants
-$17 million from state match for 5307 grants
-$10 million from DDOT 5307 grant

http://www.detroitmi.gov/LinkClick.a...=3138&mid=4444

This official document assumes a conservative contribution of $100 million from the M1 group, even though most sources report $125 million as the amount that the M1 group has committed to. The $530 million dollar estimated cost is $20 million short of the most common estimate of $550 million so, at most, the city and state [[combined) could possibly be responsible for a total of $87-$92 million in investment costs. Due to the fact that the vast majority of this local funding is backed by federal bonds and funds, the actual annual outlay by the city and state governments would be fairly small.

Just for the sake of argument, let's imagine that the federal government would not back the $60 million in capital revenue bonds, and we had to produce the cash up front. Hell, let's say that we have to cut a check for the $17 million in matching state funds, and we have to produce $10 million in up-front cash to cover the DDOT grant as well...

Of course, this scenario is quite ridiculous, as long-term federal bonds don't have to be paid up-front, in full, but if they did, how could we afford to pay for them?

According to popular belief, there is no way that Detroit and Michigan could ever afford to come up with $87-$92 million to fund a major piece of transportation infrastructure that would serve us for decades to come. Considering the drastic decrease in tax revenues brought on by the great recession of 2008 and the near collapse of the auto industry, the prospects of this type of government investment seem completely unrealistic to most people.

In reality, this level of investment is completely realistic, and well within our current abilities. To put it in context, the state of Michigan gave away $95 million dollars in film tax credits in 2010, and nearly as much in 2009. After Snyder cut back this very generous film tax credit to $25 million a year, the industry basically left Michigan in favor of states offering more handouts.

I don't want to turn this thread into a debate about the validity of film tax credits, but it stands as a good example of the ridiculous amount of tax dollars that we are willing to give away in a pathetic attempt to pay "desirable" companies and industries to come to our dysfunctional state.

If we can afford to spend a couple hundred million dollars, during the worst economic crisis since the great depression, in a feeble attempt to lure the film industry to Michigan for a couple years, I don't want to hear any bullshit excuses about how we can't afford to spend a fraction of that to make a major transportation investment that will result in a huge benefit for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of metro Detroit residents for decades to come.

[Dexlin]

Erik, to be clear, the capital costs apparently weren't what killed this, at least not mostly. The formal excuse for killing Woodward LRT was actually operational costs, which seem an even more ridiculous excuse.

However, when you read through years of the mayor's comments in particular, the reason becomes clear. He doesn't care whether it was capital or operational costs, he doesn't want the city spending any money on transit. That much he's made clear time and time again. It's how we get to the BRT plan, which I'm assuming he's only backing because he believes the city won't have to spend any money out of its pocket to build or fund it. If the current RTA ever comes to fruition, I see where he's going: It'll be a public corporation of sorts, so while he'll have to continue to try and kill of DDOT, the city will be spending less and less on public mass transit until all funding for mass transit will fall on the shoulders of the RTA.

It's funny, because while his motivations are different than my own, I think he and I share a similar conclusion. DSR should have been spun off from city government long ago. I can't think of any other major city in which mass transit is an actual city department as opposed to a public agency/corporation. In a city as declined and declining as Detroit, so long as DDOT is attached as a formal city department, it's the worst of both worlds for both the city and DDOT.

You know, I hope the RTA comes into existence, but if for some reason it doesn't, the only that transit within the city of Detroit proper will continue is if DDOT is spun off as a seperate public agency/authority funded by a dedicated millage. Otherwise, it's through. Unlike SMART, Detroiters would support a city transit authority on a millage.

[erikd]

Erik, to be clear, the capital costs apparently weren't what killed this, at least not mostly. The formal excuse for killing Woodward LRT was actually operational costs, which seem an even more ridiculous excuse.

Bing and Snyder have claimed that the Woodward light rail line isn’t feasible because we can’t afford the additional cost of operating and maintaining it. This doesn't make sense to me... Given the facts that busses need to be replaced much more frequently than light rail cars, and busses require more drivers to operate, and busses run on diesel gas, it seems highly unlikely that a Woodward light rail line would be more expensive to operate and maintain than the current fleet of DDOT and SMART busses running on that stretch of Woodward.

The exploding costs of employee benefits [[namely heath care and pensions) and the skyrocketing cost of diesel gas are the primary factors driving the increased operating expenses of our transportation system, so it stands to reason that converting our most heavily used bus line into a rail line would result in a decrease in employee costs, and a decrease in fuel costs. In addition to the immediate savings that should be realized by switching to light rail on Woodward, the future cost savings would be even greater, as the costs of heath care and gasoline are both increasing at a rate much higher than inflation, and are increasing at a higher rate than virtually everything else in America. Perhaps I am missing something here, but so far, I haven't heard anything that says otherwise.

[Dexlin]

You're preaching to the choir, man. None of their excuses made sense. As you pointed out, the capital costs weren't really the issue because the feds would have paid for much of it, and the line had something else that most proposals around the country never had, and that's tens-of-millions of dollars in private funds. The operational costs excuse doesn't make much sense, because as you also pointed out, it's cheaper in the long-run to run LRT cars, especially the longer you extend the line, which is why they wanted to build the entire thing at once up to 8 Mile. What this was was a short-sighted decisions by so-called money men that think they know best, but who have absolutely no idea about mass transit. Penny wise and pound foolish, just like they've always been.

Snyder doesn't believe in investing in anything other that corporate tax cuts, and Bing wouldn't know how to run a bus if one ran over him.

[erikd]

Back to the Bing/Snyder BRT proposal:

Nobody has questioned the blatantly absurd assertion that the $550 million committed to the Woodward light rail line can simply be transferred to pay for a BRT system, nor has anybody pointed out that you can't build 110 miles of BRT for anywhere near $550 million.

First off, the only reason we have $550 million to spend on a light rail line is because private donors have put up $125 million, and the federal government has agreed to put up most of the the rest of the cost. Without the $125 in private funding, the $350-$400 million in federal funding goes away.

Secondly, the 110 mile BRT system supported by Bing and Snyder will cost FAR MORE than $550 million. The Euclid line in Cleveland [[built in 2008) is a good example of a recent BRT line, and it cost them $200 million to build that 7 mile line. That works out to 28.5 million per mile of BRT, which is over five times more expensive than the cost that Bing and Snyder are claiming. The actual cost of the 110 mile BRT system proposed by Bing and Snyder is over 3 BILLION dollars, not $550 million.

Given the 60/40 federal match available under the new starts program, the local and state governments would have to come up with about 1.2 billion dollars in order to qualify for 1.8 billion dollars in matching federal funds to build this proposed 3 billion dollar BRT system.

It is insane for us to turn down the Woodward light rail funding, which requires an incredibly small amount of local funding, in favor of a much larger project, which requires a huge amount of local investment, and is very unlikely to garner enough public support to actually come to fruition. The combination of private and federal funding for the Woodward light rail line is a very rare and special gift that we can not afford to turn down. Every other city in the world would bend over backwards for the chance to build a $550 million light rail line with only a small percentage of local dollars required.

[corktownyuppie]

You're preaching to the choir, man. None of their excuses made sense. As you pointed out, the capital costs weren't really the issue because the feds would have paid for much of it, and the line had something else that most proposals around the country never had, and that's tens-of-millions of dollars in private funds. The operational costs excuse doesn't make much sense, because as you also pointed out, it's cheaper in the long-run to run LRT cars, especially the longer you extend the line, which is why they wanted to build the entire thing at once up to 8 Mile. What this was was a short-sighted decisions by so-called money men that think they know best, but who have absolutely no idea about mass transit. Penny wise and pound foolish, just like they've always been.

Snyder doesn't believe in investing in anything other that corporate tax cuts, and Bing wouldn't know how to run a bus if one ran over him.

I totally agree that it's cheaper in the long-run to run LRT cars, for sure. Te problem is that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. With the LRT plan [[one which I'd personally prefer), the operating costs would come from only one source...Detroiters. With the BRT plan, the operating costs get spread over the entire region.

Why don't we just do LRT across the entire region? Well, because now the capital costs are way over the budget.

Why doesn't the region chip in and pay the upfront capital costs since it's cheaper in the long run? Because 99% of the region never uses transit and aren't politically motivated to spend even the money on operating costs, let alone the higher price tag for the capital expenses.

Well does that make them short-sighted, penny-wise, and pound-foolish? Yes, of course it does. But they're not the ones suffering from a dearth of transit options. They're fine with the world just the way it is, thank you very much. Is it fair that they have all the money and they don't care? It doesn't matter whether or not it's fair. They have the money, and right or wrong, their lives won't be positively affected in any tangible way in the short- to intermediate-term by transit.

Well doesn't transit eventually benefit us all in the long-term? Well I believe it does. But convincing people to make large, short-term investments in exchange for a long-term benefit takes major salesmanship and high degrees of trust. [[Imagine a moment, being one of the first people to buy life insurance: "So wait, you want me to pay you $1,000 a year...so that one day, when I die, and I'm not here to verify it, and it might be 20 years from now...you'll write a check for $100,000 to my children?" Think about how much trust that requires. Or another example, think about how difficult it is to convince troubled high school student that a high school diploma and college degree will be worth foregoing an opportunity right now to make tons of money selling drugs. It's the same challenge.) And right now -- and for very good reason, suburban residents don't have a lot of trust in Detroit residents or their leadership.

So this is the political puzzle. And in my opinion, any solution which brings all parties to the table to begin working together and building trust with some emphasis on tangible, short-term results...is crucial, even if it means the investment is short-sighted. Once you have the roots of trust and partnership, it'll be much easier to change the BRT lines to LRT lines...and then we can use the existing buses to expand the system with new routes.

Nothing happens until we convince the people who control the money to spend it. And if that means that\ they get to make decisions we don't agree with...then -- to some extent -- we should be willing to take it if brings all the players together to get this off the ground.

[ghettopalmetto]

I totally agree that it's cheaper in the long-run to run LRT cars, for sure. Te problem is that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. With the LRT plan [[one which I'd personally prefer), the operating costs would come from only one source...Detroiters. With the BRT plan, the operating costs get spread over the entire region.

Any reason why light rail couldn't be implemented under the auspices of say, a Regional Transit Authority? An RTA might even be able to *gasp* develop a long-term transit implementation plan that includes improvements in the suburban counties as well. Hell, if Virginia, Maryland, DC, and the federal government can make such an idea work across state lines....

Oh wait--that would just be a suburban power grab intended to disenfranchise Detroiters. Because we all know that the suburbanites want nothing more than to own DDOT's world-class bus system.

[adamjab19]

This bus line stuff needs to get together. I can't think of a better time to support a tri county wide transportation system than right now with gas prices rising. I would love to take a bus to a day time tigers game and be able to take the same bus back in the evening. Not have to get off at State Fair and switch in the evening hours...

For how nicely our roads are laid out this system could be so well connected it's not even funny. Go up gratiot, van dyke, woodward, michigan ave etc...it's all right there! Just get it together to send a bus or two up and down the damn roads from country side to river!

[corktownyuppie]

Any reason why light rail couldn't be implemented under the auspices of say, a Regional Transit Authority? An RTA might even be able to *gasp* develop a long-term transit implementation plan that includes improvements in the suburban counties as well. Hell, if Virginia, Maryland, DC, and the federal government can make such an idea work across state lines....

Oh wait--that would just be a suburban power grab intended to disenfranchise Detroiters. Because we all know that the suburbanites want nothing more than to own DDOT's world-class bus system.

My expertise on this is limited, so I invite anyone to correct me if I'm wrong. I think the problem with LRT from the perspective of an RTA is that the upfront capital cost would be enormous. Far, far more than anything that we're getting from the feds. And given that the suburbs are already reluctant to subsidize operating costs with a regional tax, I don't think the political will exists to write the big check up front.

[ghettopalmetto]

My expertise on this is limited, so I invite anyone to correct me if I'm wrong. I think the problem with LRT from the perspective of an RTA is that the upfront capital cost would be enormous. Far, far more than anything that we're getting from the feds. And given that the suburbs are already reluctant to subsidize operating costs with a regional tax, I don't think the political will exists to write the big check up front.

As has already been stated:

1. The capital costs to construct the Woodward Light Rail were already in place.

2. If you can't afford to run LRT, how can you afford to run buses--which are much more labor and fuel-intensive--on the same route?

3. The suburbs already fund SMART with a regional tax.

[mwilbert]

1. The capital costs to construct the Woodward Light Rail were already in place.

My memory is that the M-1 people still hadn't agreed to pony up their part of the money when the plug got pulled. Do I misremember?

[ghettopalmetto]

My memory is that the M-1 people still hadn't agreed to pony up their part of the money when the plug got pulled. Do I misremember?

If that were the case, the project would not have been awarded the federal funding that had been approved.

[corktownyuppie]

As has already been stated:

1. The capital costs to construct the Woodward Light Rail were already in place.

I must be misunderstanding. The Woodward Light Rail -- whose capital costs were already in place -- were not a region-wide service. It stopped at 8 mile. The up-front capital for LRT was in place for the small plan. The tri-county plan does not have enough up-front capital for LRT.

2. If you can't afford to run LRT, how can you afford to run buses--which are much more labor and fuel-intensive--on the same route?

You can't run them on the same route. But they were never meant to be the same route. The M-1 LRT plan had a route which was much, much shorter than the tri-county plan.

3. The suburbs already fund SMART with a regional tax.

Yes, but that's not the same as a Regional Transit Authority. Each of the suburbs have the option of opting out of the SMART plan...which, of course, dilutes the funding source.

We need a strong RTA which represents all counties but has the authority to tax everyone in it as well.

[Dexlin]

Anyway,

Anyone know if public hearings have been scheduled for SB909? All I can find on the legislature's website is that the bill was introduced [[late January) and referred to the Transportation Committee. Has the Senate [[or even the House) Transportation Committee yet scheduled public hearings on the bill[[s)?

[Novine]

I don't think any hearings have been scheduled. It sounded like legislators were going to give all of the transportation bills the slow walk with talk of hearings being held across the state this spring and summer. Snyder's people have been out making some effort to sell the proposals.

http://www.freep.com/article/2012022...CFRONTPAGE%7Cs

[professorscott]

I believe there is a hearing, open to the public, of the Senate Transportation Committee to receive testimony on SB 909 and the related bills tomorrow at SEMCOG. I think it's at 2 p.m. in the big conference room. Can anyone confirm this for certain?

[Zaiko]

I'm told that yes the senate transportation committee is coming to hear testimony about the RTA.

It's at SEMCOG. 2pm.

[Detroitnerd]

How does one get a bus to SEMCOG HQ?