Lake Oswego, a suburb of Portland where development began over a hundred years ago, has learned the hard way about the strings that come with taking federal money:
In the dim light of recent news and numbers, you’ve probably forgotten that the Lake Oswego streetcar was, once upon a time, a project worth celebrating as a wise and timely investment. […]
But the value of that astute move has been all but lost in the recent traffic of misleading budget numbers and the self-defeating “environmental impact” process mandated by the leaden, one-size-fits-all feds. […]
But the streetcar is the environmental alternative when a community is wrestling with carbon footprints, traffic congestion and our addiction to OPEC, and the draft environmental impact study — draft, mind you — placed an 18-month hammerlock on the project.
“Interminable and ridiculous sums up the federal process,” says Judie Hammerstad, the former Lake Oswego mayor. “Portland circumvented it with its first streetcar by not asking for federal funds. We don’t have that luxury.”
“To get federal funding, you have to do an environmental impact statement,” notes Doug Obletz, who heads the project team. “The federal government dictates the process.”
That does no one any favors, save the Dunthorpe residents who will move heaven and rail-line to ensure a streetcar never intrudes upon the sanctuary of their river estates.
In exchange for this needlessly complex review, the feds pick up 60 percent of the project cost, which has been mischievously pegged in the vicinity of $458 million.
And here’s how the money was spent:
Another is the cost of the draft EIS, a 543-page report that cost — thanks to the feds — $4.3 million to produce.
Let’s put that price tag in perspective. If you paid a reasonably bright engineer $75 an hour and gave her 3,000 hours to work through traffic patterns, noise issues, job creation and design options, the tab would be $225,000.
The draft EIS cost 19 times that amount, and no one even blinks. “It does seem like a lot of money,” said Bridget Wieghart, a project manager at Metro, “but it’s fairly typical for this kind of process.”
Obletz breaks it down for us: $470,000 for the conceptual engineering, which TriMet couldn’t handle on its own; $440,000 for the traffic analysis, performed by David Evans and Associates; $1.37 million for additional consulting fees and the writing assignment; another $1 million for Metro’s input; $150,000 for “public outreach” …
And, yes, that $330,000 to Shiels Obletz Johnsen, which bills at a rate between $60 and $200 an hour.
Once upon a time, the streetcar was low tech, low overhead, low design and construction costs, and worth celebrating. “A beautiful, streamlined process,” Obletz says.
Then the feds showed up. And the train wreck began.
Systemic Failure talks a lot about the private consultant scourge, but I’m still not exactly sure why this is more of a problem in American than it is elsewhere. Is it pure rent-seeking on the part of the consultants? Does the federal government mandate such an expensive and intrusive process (I’m talking here about the aforementioned protests from Dunthorpe)? What’s stopping the agency from paying a couple of hundred grand and not letting vested suburban interests interfere?
Alexander Craghead says
January 1, 2011 at 10:10 pmTwo immediate things.
First, mostly due to NEPA, but also bloating in the funding and appropriations mechanisms at USDOT (things Oberstar wanted to fix but that House leadership decided wasn’t as important to the agenda as, say, healthcare), Federal funding takes ridiculous amounts of time and money. There are a number of transit agencies in recent years — NM’s RoadRunner commuter rail is one example — that have shunned Fed funds and went entirely local funded precisely because of the time, money, and strict ridership requirements of FTA funds.
Second, Dunthorpe is more than a vested suburban interest. It’s home to one of the wealthiest (if not THE wealthiest) neighborhoods in the region. It is also home to a former U.S. Senator who is strictly opposed to the project. All this adds up to politics and impending litigation. The opposition is not entirely unreasonable, given that the form of transport (“rapid streetcar”) is untried in both the region and the country, and the right-of-way has been encroached on so far that there are garages, gardens, fences, and houses all within less than ten feet of the railhead. When people refer to Dunthorpe as NIMBYs, they aren’t being figurative!
Alexander Craghead says
January 1, 2011 at 10:10 pmTwo immediate things.
First, mostly due to NEPA, but also bloating in the funding and appropriations mechanisms at USDOT (things Oberstar wanted to fix but that House leadership decided wasn’t as important to the agenda as, say, healthcare), Federal funding takes ridiculous amounts of time and money. There are a number of transit agencies in recent years — NM’s RoadRunner commuter rail is one example — that have shunned Fed funds and went entirely local funded precisely because of the time, money, and strict ridership requirements of FTA funds.
Second, Dunthorpe is more than a vested suburban interest. It’s home to one of the wealthiest (if not THE wealthiest) neighborhoods in the region. It is also home to a former U.S. Senator who is strictly opposed to the project. All this adds up to politics and impending litigation. The opposition is not entirely unreasonable, given that the form of transport (“rapid streetcar”) is untried in both the region and the country, and the right-of-way has been encroached on so far that there are garages, gardens, fences, and houses all within less than ten feet of the railhead. When people refer to Dunthorpe as NIMBYs, they aren’t being figurative!
Stephen says
January 2, 2011 at 1:39 amHm, yeah, “rapid streetcar” does indeed seem like an oxymoron. Is it grade-separated? How does it differ from light rail? And also, I’m a little confused about your right-of-way/railhead remark – are you saying that it basically doesn’t have an exclusive right-of-way? Or that things are just so close to it that accidents could happen?
Rhywun says
January 2, 2011 at 4:38 amMy guess is their marketing team is trying to cash in on the fact that the term “streetcar” seems to be making something of a comeback here in the US – but I agree it’s a bit confusing. Even in the old days, this would not be called a “streetcar” – the “rapid” bit seems to imply features like grade-separation and/or fewer stops that characterized lines which were once called “interurbans”.
Alexander Craghead says
January 2, 2011 at 5:30 amBy from the railhead, I mean the distance from the outside rail and an object the cars would need to clear. Think visually of the clearances between the sides of a transit vehicle and the walls of, say, and LRV tunnel or a newer subway. Now imagine the walls as the back fences, garages, and houses of that area. In some places people have front gates that have nowhere to go but to swing over the tracks that are there now. (It’s an old freight rail line that’s been out of service since the 1980s.)
As for rapid streetcar, what they mean is using streetcar vehicles — smaller than an LRV, more standing room, not able to be coupled to additional vehicles — but running them for long segments on private right-of-way (not in a street) at higher speeds (35+). So basically it’s similar to LRT but using streetcar equipment. There’s some belief that in this case this method is being used because shoe-horning a LRT line into the right-of-way would be impossible.
Lastly, note the estimate for this ($450m) is nearly twice the cost of a comparable length LRT line in Portland, the Interstate MAX line of about five years ago which weighed in at $250m.