Michael T. Packard
Engineer & Safety Consultant

KSL was right on with its Paying the Piper editorial a few weeks ago. Communities across America, including Utah, must seize the opportunity to cut waste.

We do live in extraordinarily hazardous times. Dealing, over the long haul, with the economic, medical, business, retirement, environmental, security/terrorist, and business challenges…. will require an economy that is enabled to operate at the greatest possible efficiency. We need a complete user-paid freeway grid. But, we’re wasting the money to pay for it.

All Waste is Local, (except for the dealer’s cut as only part of our tax dollars return from Washington) to borrow and modify a figure of speech from Tip O’Neal. We must shoulder the responsibility to observe, learn, and ferret out to eliminate rampant government waste and foolishness. Commuter Rail is unjustifiable waste. Utah should ask the Federal Transit Administration to deny UTA a Full Funding Grant Agreement for it.

A May 2005 GAO report GAO-05-423 of an Expert Panel, “The costs and Benefits of Transit and Highways” noted that comparisons between transit and highways, especially between modes like bus versus freeway spending, have never been done. The introduction to the report by America’s Auditor General warned that our economy and security were in peril if we didn’t get spending under control. Cost Benefit comparisons in transit versus roads would be necessary part of America’s belt tightening.

A more recent GAO report, GAO-05-674 has stated that the FTA would refuse projects with “low” cost justification, i.e., with incremental cost per new boarding of over $25; that’s $50 a day for a round trip for each new rider, (about 3,300 new 2-way riders a day by 2025). This Commuter Rail has a cost of $25.32 per boarding, and rising! It is actually in the lowest category!
UTA’s operating costs are likely to increase for four reasons:

• Cost for its annual consumption of 1.4 million gallons of diesel fuel for its locomotives has jumped by about $2 million.
• Labor and management cost will jump if UTA hires a railroad to run the trains; union railroad employees are paid double or more what UTA operators and support staff are paid.
• UTA has a 10-year history of per-rider costs escalating at 4 times the national average, i.e., at 3 to 4 times the rate of inflation, as shown on its’ National Transit Database reports to the FTA.
• Lastly, UTA’s Aug. 05 5309 New Start report shows them producing locomotive emissions as though they were using the newest and cleanest locomotives; this would cost millions more in annualized capital cost and rebuild costs than being grandfathered with dirtier used diesels.
  This may add up to $5 million in added annual costs, pushing UTA’s real cost rating further down in the lowest grouping.

As I mentioned in an op-ed piece published two months ago in the Deseret News, there is virtually no congestion reduction for highway users. All the benefits are for transit users. I include a graph of Table 5.1 2030 PM Peak Period Travel Time Comparisons, in the FEIS, which UTA left incomplete to avoid showing the virtual non-existence of travel time gains for cars on user-paid highways.
Commuter rail is an environmental fraud. Locomotives will produce 40 to 50 times more of the worst pollutant, NOx, than would be saved through reduced auto VMT.

UTA’s required reports and Environmental Template 6 and assumptions by the Federal Transit Administration that underlay these reports is a comedy of errors, misrepresentations, plausible deniability, and outright transit-boostering fraud. A report on this mess will be made next week.

As puny as the benefits of this old train would be, Utah will net nothing at all for at least a decade. The environmentalists who stopped Legacy Highway will have wiped out these benefits:

• UBeT, Rocky and the Sierrans will have caused over 20 million hours of avoidable congestion to gain just 5.5% more protected land and dictatorial control over transportation plans with models-based lawsuits;
  • The added delay wipes out the 6,400 hours per day of User Benefit calculated by the FTA for about 15 years,(averaged).
  • The congestion and added attendant pollution wipes out RCR’s small environmental benefits till after 2020.
• The cost of the delay to drivers, truckers, and businesses will exceed $1/4 billion. Add that to the $230 million in Legacy costs UDOT claims. Add all this to the ultimate price tag for socialized transit in the corridor.

For whatever high principles of government Utah lays claim to, it should repudiate this wasteful anachronistic train. Lead the way to helping our state and the nation survive troubled times.