Surface Transportation Innovations
Issue No. 92, June 2011
New BRT Report Pulls Back the Veil I’ve been a fan of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) for many years now, ever since learning of the very impressive system in Curitiba, Brazil (and years later, the equally impressive BRT system on Bogota, Colombia). What has continued to surprise me since then is how infrequently U.S. metro areas opt for BRT, going instead for far more costly and less flexible rail transit systems. So I’m delighted to introduce you to the best report I’ve seen on BRT possibilities in the United States. Released last month by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, it’s called “Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit.” (www.itdp.org/documents/20110526ITDP_USBRT_Report-LR.pdf) Let me first caution you that, as the term is used in this country, there are two different forms of BRT: BRT-lite and BRT-heavy. The former is often called “rapid bus” and is exemplified by LA Metro’s highly successful Metro Rapid: limited-stop service using specially marked buses in mixed-traffic lanes on major arterials throughout Los Angeles County. At very modest cost, Metro Rapid has achieved large gains in bus ridership in numerous L.A. corridors. The new ITDP report is about only BRT-heavy—express services using specialized buses operating mostly on bus-only right of way, on arterials or freeways, with stations rather than just bus stops and many other special features (off-board fare collection, high-level boarding platforms, etc.). The report makes a good case that even though this kind of BRT is far more costly than BRT-Lite, it is less costly than light rail and far more flexible. The report presents a point-scoring system to rate any BRT-heavy system as to how close to “world standard” it is, and also provides profiles of five currently operating U.S. BRT-heavy systems. While all that is good, some of this has appeared in other BRT reports in recent years. What is unique about the ITDP report is its Chapter V: “BRT and the Feds.” For years I’ve wondered, for all BRT’s advantages and the Federal Transit Administration’s recent encouragement of BRT, why nearly all FTA transit grants go to rail projects. Chapter V lifts the veil and explains why. One problem, already pretty well known, is Congress’s tendency to earmark favored transit projects, even when they score poorly in FTA’s evaluation process. But far more serious are the flaws in that evaluation process, which the report discusses under the heading “Leniency of Federal Funding Criteria Towards Dubious Rail Projects.” Local agencies are required to conduct an “alternatives analysis,” but they are allowed to rig the game. One way is to not include a BRT alternative at all, only the required “no-build” alternative. Another is to use “mode-specific constants” when comparing BRT with rail—an arbitrary factor that builds in an assumption that BRT will attract lower ridership per route-mile (or other parameter) than rail. Other techniques are simply wildly over-optimistic ridership estimates and the selection of weak alternatives. The report illustrates these kinds of “deck-stacking techniques” as used for the Woodward Avenue corridor in Detroit, the Purple Line project in Maryland, and the Dulles Corridor in Virginia (West Falls Church to Dulles Airport). In addition to criticizing the FTA for allowing that kind of deck-stacking, the report also notes with dismay the watering down of FTA cost-effectiveness criteria in recent years, most recently FTA’s consideration of adding additional environmental or development factors, which would further reduce the weighting given to cost-effectiveness. And the authors add that “further complicating the appraisal process is only likely to make it even less transparent. This could invite further gaming of the assessment process by project proponents in favor of politically desired outcomes.” After all these words of praise, I do have one objection. As near as I can tell, the only place in the whole 80-page report where priced lanes (HOT or express toll lanes) are mentioned is in the Introduction, on page 7. Everywhere else in the report, the discussion is always about the necessity of having bus-only lanes for BRT, even if this means taking away existing general-purpose lanes. Yet as Ted Balaker and I pointed out six years ago in a Reason Foundation study, variably priced lanes such as HOT lanes are the virtual equivalent of exclusive busways, offering enormous potential for BRT-heavy service without requiring transit agencies to pay the large capital (and political) costs of acquiring and building exclusive bus-only guideways. (http://reason.org/news/show/virtual-exclusive-busways) This is a point the FTA still does not appear to appreciate.
In a report whose authors were willing to speak truth to power and make strong
pro-BRT recommendations, their failure to urge the FTA, state DOTs, and local
officials to act on the synergy between BRT and priced lanes is an enormous
missed opportunity. Are Managed Lanes Under-Priced? The question of how to price congestion-relief toll lanes is still a live issue. An important new paper adds to our knowledge of how heterogeneous people’s value of time savings may be in congested expressway corridors. Unlike previous studies of this issue, which have relied primarily on the 15-year-old 91 Express Lanes in California, this new research is based on people using the relatively new managed lanes on the Katy Freeway (I-10) in Houston, opened a couple of years ago. The paper is “Variation in the Value of Travel Time Savings and Its Impact on the Benefits of Managed Lanes.” The authors are Sunil Patil (RAND Europe), Mark Burris and Douglass Shaw (Texas A&M), and Sisinnio Concas (Center for Urban Transportation Research, University of Florida). (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1808035) Patil, et al. understand that revealed preference surveys typically yield low average values of time for commuters, yet they appreciate that those choosing to use managed lanes (MLs) may have much higher values of time for the trips they decide are worth paying for. So they set out to test the hypothesis that people’s value of travel time savings (VTTS) would be higher for what they defined as “urgent” trips. They administered an on-line survey to thousands of people who use the Katy Freeway and have a choice to use its two MLs in each direction. A total of nearly 3,000 people answered all the questions. Among other things, each was presented with a randomly selected pair of questions about mode choice, under ordinary conditions and in an “urgent” situation. There were six of the latter, including travel to an important meeting or event, running late to an appointment or meeting, being worried about arriving somewhere on time, etc. The complete survey data were analyzed using both a multinomial logit model (MNL) and a mixed logit model. The full methodology is explained in the paper, but here I will focus on their findings. Overall, they found that the estimated value of travel time savings “is much higher for all of the six urgent trip situations than for non-urgent situations.” The highest values were obtained for the “running late to appointment or meeting” situation, where the VTTS ranged from $27.90/hour to $47.50/hour. Those values are 3.8 to 5.5 times greater than the implied average VTTS for an ordinary situation (holding all other factors, like time of day, direction, etc. constant). They also found, consistently, that the VTTS for urgent trips was actually higher for lower-income drivers (household income less than $50,000/year) than for middle-income drivers ($50-100K/year). In fact, their results show that “many of the travelers from the medium and low-income groups who are on urgent trips will have VTTS greater than that of travelers from the high-income group on ordinary trips.” The authors guess that this “might be attributed to the fixed-schedule constraints associated with lower-paying jobs,” which strikes me as plausible. The implications for DOTs and toll road companies planning managed lanes projects are profound. Their traffic and revenue projections should not assume that all ML users are engaged in ordinary trips; doing so could significantly understate the travel time benefits of the MLs. The authors illustrate this with a few numerical examples, and suggest that in some corridors “it is possible that the majority of ML travelers are on urgent trips.” While it may be difficult to accurately estimate the percentage of ML customers who will be making urgent trips, failing to take this into account may leave significant money on the table. This research also suggests that instead of merely analyzing variable toll rate structures that will maximize either throughput or revenue, ML traffic and revenue studies should also look into maximizing the economic value of the project. To be sure, this will end up being about the same as maximizing revenue, but the assumptions used in the arriving at that value will be different, seeking to factor in the extent of urgent-trip usage in the MLs. From a macro perspective, it seems to me that the more we
learn about how heterogeneous travelers’ value of time really can be, the
stronger the case becomes for premium-priced express lanes—as opposed to
charging an average peak-period toll to all expressway users. Including Ports and Waterways in the Reauthorization Bill A number of recent news articles have indicated the interest of Rep. John Mica (R, FL), who chairs the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, in crafting a bill that includes not just highways and transit but also possibly ports and waterways. Since Mica generally supports the users-pay/users-benefit principle, he is not proposing that the already strapped Highway Trust Fund pay for such spending. Rather, the money would come from those using ports and waterways. That makes sense, and there is a large need to reform how the federal government currently deals with those issues. For years, port authorities have been complaining, rightly, that the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund is being misused, with Congress spending far less each year on needed dredging projects than what comes in each year from the dedicated user tax on cargo containers. But there are more fundamental problems with this trust fund. First, nearly all the dredging projects (which, by law, must be done by the Army Corps of Engineers) are selected via congressional earmarks, chosen from a list which the Corps has vetted by means of a benefit-cost assessment. Ports whose projects fail to achieve an earmark sometimes go ahead and use their own funds to hire a dredging company to do the needed work. But that very fact suggests that we rethink the whole idea of a centralized trust fund for port dredging. Ports are inherently in competition with one another: Los Angeles and Long Beach compete with Oakland and Portland and Seattle and Vancouver; Miami competes with Ft. Lauderdale and Jacksonville; Savannah competes with Charleston, etc. There is no need for a federal body to sit in judgment on which projects should get funded. If a port needs dredging, its users can and should pay directly, as part of that port’s operating cost. So the best reform in this case would be to abolish the harbor maintenance tax and the trust fund it poorly supports. That would also eliminate one of the larger sources of congressional earmarking. Eliminating the harbor maintenance tax would be a modest help to plans to expand short-sea shipping of containers, since those carriers currently are subject to the tax but derive no benefits from it, since their vessels don’t require the channel depth needed for ocean-going container ships. But I still remain highly skeptical of the fledgling “marine highway” program, which was mandated by the 2007 Energy Act. All it takes to become a skeptic is to read the Maritime Administration’s April 2011 report to Congress, “America’s Marine Highway.” It makes a grandiose case for the vital role that containers and trailers on barges and roll-on/roll-off vessels can make: relieving highway congestion, saving energy, reducing greenhouse gases, providing a more resilient transportation system, improving national defense (via subsidized ship-building, of course), etc. But you will search in vain for any real numbers documenting the magnitude of such benefits or comparing them to taxpayer costs. At some points, this 71-page report is surprisingly honest about the weakness of its case. Consider this from p. 23:
In other words, hardly anyone will do this unless they are heavily subsidized to do so. Elsewhere, under the heading of Marine Highway Research (p. 44), the report describes “proposed” research that would seek to quantify public benefits (such as reduced congestion, reduced emissions and energy use, etc.). That’s just great: Congress creates the program based on nice-sounding generalities and several years later the agency in charge modestly suggests that maybe, if somebody gives it some research money, it will attempt to see if the program’s benefits could conceivably be worth its costs. My advice to Chairman Mica on America’s Marine Highway is to pull the plug before it starts spending serious money. Finally, we come to inland waterways, supported by another failing trust fund. The Waterways Trust Fund gets its revenue from a 20¢/gallon diesel fuel tax paid by barge operators who move bulk cargo. By law, this Trust Fund is supposed to pay half the cost of building, maintaining, and modernizing or replacing locks and dams on inland waterways. General taxpayers pay for the other half—and also for all the dredging needed to keep those channels (like the Lower Mississippi) navigable. The Army Corps does all the lock and dam work, as well as the dredging. So what we have here is another large subsidy, rather than a real users-pay/users-benefit situation. The Administration’s budget proposal called for a “historically low” funding level for the Corps, which has prompted the Waterways Council (representing the barge operators) to propose an increase in their diesel tax in exchange for commitment to a 20-year spending plan for lock and dam modernization and applying the 50% user-support rule only to projects larger than $100 million. So the subsidy game would continue. The best approach here would be to increase the user tax to whatever level would fully support an industry-agreed plan for both lock and dam improvements and ongoing waterways dredging. And apply that tax to all users of the inland waterways, not just barge operators. Chairman Mica is right to see value in
users-pay/users-benefit. In the new era of fiscal constraint, where general
fund monies will be increasingly scarce, the best way to safeguard needed
infrastructure investments is to make them purely user-funded. That means
strengthening the users-pay/users-benefit principle. After having been criticized by both sides last fall when I wrote about pending congressional proposals to increase the federal truck weight limit to 97,000 lbs. (requiring six rather than five axles so as to spread the heavier pavement loading), I hesitate to jump back into the issue. But bills on both sides of the issue are once again pending in Congress. Companion bills in both houses would raise the six-axle limit to 97,000 lbs., but a Senate bill by Frank Lautenberg (D, NJ) would retain the current 80,000 lb. limit on Interstates and extend it to the entire 160,000-mile National Highway System. It’s important to keep in mind that the states are the owners, operators, and maintainers of all of these highways (but Congress gets to set the rules in exchange for providing federal funding). The increase to 97,000 lbs. and six axles would not be imposed on any state; it would merely be allowed, if a state DOT could be persuaded (or required by the state’s legislature) to implement the higher limit. Many highway engineers would object, arguing (I think, correctly) that a large fraction of the bridges on the highways involved would be over-stressed by gross weights higher than the bridges were designed for. We already have 13.7% structurally deficient bridges across the country, so unless a state had a near-term plan in place to strengthen or replace the bridges likely to be used by heavier trucks, upping its weight limit would be irresponsible. And even doing that would still leave the question of enforcement. It’s one thing to mandate that 97,000 lb. trucks use only certain bridges, but how enforceable would that be in the real world? On the other hand, as one who strongly favors a decentralized federal system, the idea that the central government in Washington, DC would tell the owner-operators of the states’ highways how to run them strikes me, in general, as overkill—especially so if extended to the 160,000 miles of NHS routes. So there is a case for the feds to back off and allow each state to make its own decisions on truck size and weight—as they were largely free to do before the 1991 federal freeze on size and weight. Then again, the rationale for creating the Interstate system
was to have a uniform, nationwide superhighway network with the same standards
everywhere, to facilitate Interstate commerce. I accept that case, despite my overall decentralist
framework. That’s also why I support an Interstate 2.0 program, under which the
federal government would assist the states in reconstructing and modernizing
the Interstates for a 21st-century America that is a far different
place than the 1940s country for which the current Interstate map was drawn up.
And that replacement system should be designed from the outset with heavy-duty
truck-only lanes, capable of handling longer combination vehicles such as
triples and turnpike doubles. Uniform size and weight standards would apply to
the rebuilt Interstate system, nationwide. But other than that, states would be
responsible for the rest of the highway system, and could set their own
standards. Progress on Interoperable Electronic Tolling Back in November, I wrote about the U.S. toll industry’s Alliance for Toll Interoperability moving to create a License Plate Interoperability Hub. In plain language, this would be a national clearinghouse in which participating toll road operators could gain access to each others’ state motor vehicle license plate and vehicle registration databases, as already exists in the Northeast and Midwest for the E-ZPass system. I’m pleased to report that in response to the ATI’s RFP to set up a demonstration hub, 11 firms submitted proposals, including several large toll system providers, a major French toll road operator (Cofiroute), a major bank card processor, and several more-specialized firms. ATI plans to select three companies, to each develop a demonstration hub and test it for three months with real data this fall. These initial tests will be limited to license plate camera readings, but future plans include processing transponder readings, as well. (www.tollroadsnews.com/node/5313) In related news, the E-ZPass Group has established a working group with Florida’s SunPass to develop interoperability between these two systems, representing nearly all the electronic toll collection east of the Mississippi (and 70% of all such toll collection nationwide). As Peter Samuel explained in TollRoadsnews (May 19th), interoperability between these two systems would mean that “vehicles with E-ZPass transponder accounts would be able to drive on Florida’s many toll roads and have their regular E-ZPass/I-Pass/iZoom/FAST LANE accounts debited for the tolls. Also, Florida motorists with SunPass or the compatible Orlando brand E-Pass could drive throughout E-ZPass territory and have their Florida accounts debited. Tolls in North Carolina would also be part of the E-ZPass/SunPass interoperability.” (www.tollroadsnews.com/node/5306) Once national interoperability has been achieved, which is ATI’s goal, interesting possibilities emerge. At last month’s International Bridge, Tunnel & Turnpike (IBTTA) conference on interoperability in Dallas, Ed Regan of Wilbur Smith Associates outlined a scenario in which that goal is achieved by 2016, while tolled managed lanes are added to congested expressways, many of which are Interstates. The growing familiarity with toll finance and electronic toll collection (along with continued declines in fuel tax revenues) could then set the stage for reconstructing the aging Interstate system via toll-based financing, getting seriously under way in 2015 through 2025. In his presentation, Regan projected that the fraction of U.S. motor vehicles with transponders will increase from about 15% today to 40% in 2025 as these developments proceed. I’m broadly in favor of this kind of scenario, which will
require significant easing of current federal restrictions on Interstate
tolling. An excellent step would be for Congress, as part of the current
reauthorization, to remove the numerical limits from the two current Interstate
tolling pilot programs, while leaving intact the existing restrictions on the
use of toll revenue (which ensure that tolls paid by Interstate users are used
for Interstate modernization only). Note: I don’t have space to list all the transportation conferences going on; below are those that I or a Reason colleague am participating in.
Update on PPP Legislation Bus Toll Lanes Study Nearing Launch in Tampa GDOT Puts PPP Managed Lanes on Hold British Highway Users Back Road Pricing Porous Asphalt Pavement Offers Benefits Historian Sees Parallels between HSR and Transcontinental
Railroad How Shale Gas Changes Energy Outlook “Determining whether the federal government—rather
than state or local governments—should fund infrastructure projects
depends, at least in part, on whether a project will benefit the nation as a
whole more than it will a particular state or locality. Economic efficiency
could be improved if the federal government limited its support to projects
(such as the Interstate highways) that offer significant multistate benefits,
leaving state and local governments to fund projects with more localized
benefits. If the people who benefit from a project bear its costs, the
likelihood is diminished that too large a project (or too many projects) will
be undertaken or that too many infrastructure services will be consumed
relative to the resources needed to provide them.” “Planning only for the current level of delays leaves the
region at a competitive disadvantage, given the low delay rankings of the New
York [expressways]. Therefore, this analysis goes a step further by postulating
higher standards, i.e., a lower level of acceptable delay closer to the norms
experienced at most major [expressways] in the nation. The actions to address
current [expressway] capacity limitations will also be judged against these
higher standards. Rather than institutionalizing a low level of service that
permanently locks the region into the worst [expressway] delays in the nation,
these higher standards would establish a level of service that would allow the
region to thrive.” “[S]tandard theory says that people respond to prices. Surely people should respond to increased petrol prices by changing their mode of travel. But why hasn’t it happened in the past? More important, will it magically happen in the future? The answer is that most drivers do respond to increased oil prices, but they have many choices as to how to respond. You may switch to public transport, provided it takes you where you want to go at a reasonable price. The problem is that part of the ‘reasonable price’ includes the price of the increased time it takes to get to the final destination. . . . So, given time, people change their behavior in many ways, so as to maintain the comfort, convenience, and overall efficiency of the car. For example:
--Owen McShane, “The Public Transport Revolution: Why Does It Never Arrive?” New Geography, May 1, 2011 (www.newgeography.com/content/002207-the-public-transport-revolution-%E2%80%93-why-does-it-never-arrive). “[C]oastal Californians would have to live
cheek-by-jowl—as do Japanese people in the megalopolis that stretches
from Tokyo to Osaka—to have any chance of a high-speed rail service that
offered at least half a dozen trains an hour and did not require huge taxpayer
subsidies. Few would be prepared to make such a sacrifice. With petrol costing
half the price paid in Japan and Europe, they will doubtless continue to use
their cars for two-to-three hour journeys and fly for anything longer.” “Silicon Valley, the world’s predominant high-tech
concentration, remains to a large extent a vast suburb. The headquarters of
such firms as Intel, Apple, and Google are not in urbanized, transit-oriented
San Francisco, but in sprawling, car-dominated places like Santa Clara,
Cupertino, and Mountain View. Although there are some pockets of density, the
Valley essentially functions along suburban lines with no significant real
urban core. Transit ridership in the Valley now stands at 3 percent, closer to
a Phoenix or Houston than a New York or San Francisco.” “Because of the current public financing pressures, some [rail]
infrastructure managers expect the private sector to step in to bridge the
funding gap through PPPs. Fitch believes PPPs are no panacea and must not be
considered a funding method, but rather a procurement method. As such, they are
helpful where they can bring better value for money. This is particularly true
where private partners are incentivized to perform better. In some cases, such
as very large and complex projects, PPPs may not be appropriate at all. When [rail]
PPPs are implemented, it is generally not easy to attract private investors,
because rail projects are particularly complex. Investors are concerned with
managing risk, and in rail projects even more than for other infrastructure
segments, this needs to be transparently documented, thoroughly analyzed, and
wisely allocated. Since most debt investors are not familiar with rail
projects, a lot of project preparation and investor education will be necessary
to ensure a good understanding of the sector and the projects by the financial
community.” Reason Foundation
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