Maine's Turnpork Authority bids adieu

Image and caption from Mainebiz.

Maine's Republican party announced over the weekend that Paul Violette, the buck-stops-here Authority in charge of Maine's Turnpork highway spending, has cleaned out his desk and resigned:

Word is coming out of the State House today that Paul Violette will step down next week. Violette was grilled recently by the OPEGA committee about his seemingly indiscriminate distribution of over $150,000 in gift certificates, including over $100,000 in gift cards to luxury hotel chains. Violette claimed he had no record of who the gift cards went to, and claimed that the use of turnpike funds for luxury gifts was an acceptable practice.

"Maine Republicans have been trying to get to the bottom of this kind of nonsense for years," said Maine GOP Chair Charlie Webster. "Now that we're in control of state government, we're finally seeing some results. We can't rebuild our economy without weeding out the cronyism and waste that has become pervasive throughout state government. Quite simply, we need to drain the swamp in Augusta.

This is good news. Regime change is just what we needed to turn the Maine Turnpork Authority into something more respectable - an agency that takes responsibility for moving Maine's people and goods efficiently and cost-effectively, instead of lining its own pockets.

There's still a lot of bureaucratic inertia and cronyism from the old regime. But there's also a clear mandate to do things better, and the remaining staff deserve a chance to live up to our higher expectations.

Kudos to the Republicans who kept the pressure on. Now that we've cleaned out the rot, it's time to work on productive solutions, including new transit services.

Maine Turnpork Authority Broadcasts Its Anti-Transit Outlook

The Maine Turnpork Authority offered up a wonky and unconvincing rebuttal to the Maine Alliance for Sustainable Transportation's regional bus expansion proposal. It's too bad it was published on the Monday of a long weekend, when few people would actually read it, because it does a great job of showing where the MTA's priorities lie.

Author Scott Tomkins, a flack on the Maine Turnpike Authority payroll, makes it clear that his employer has no interest in expanding bus service or reducing Maine's dependence on fossil fuels. To support his regressive and self-serving point of view, Tomkins cites some dubious statistics, like "a 21 percent decline in Zoom ridership from FY 2009 to FY 2010." Ridership did decline last year, but that was mostly because of rising unemployment, which reduced the number of commuters moving between Biddeford/Saco and downtown Portland. In the previous five years, though, ridership on the Zoom had nearly doubled, from 25,000 daily riders in 2005 to 46,000 riders last year, before dipping to 37,000 riders last year.

To take a more useful and honest statistic, the average annual growth rate over the past five years - even when you include last year's dip - has been 11%. That's double-digit growth for the bus. Meanwhile, the growth in vehicle traffic on the Turnpike during the same period has been statistically insignificant - zero, in other words.

Anyway, citing a decline in employment as your reason you're not going to invest in bus service makes it sound like the Tomkins wants our region to fail.

There's also this nugget:

Assuming the same 0.8 percent market penetration as Biddeford/Saco, these two corridors would yield a total of just 66 new bus riders for the additional $7 million MAST proposes to legislatively force the MTA to invest in Zoom.

The current Zoom service does have pathetic market penetration, and that's because the Maine Turnpork Authority is in charge. Other bus systems - ones that have the support of the agencies that fund them - manage to achieve a 5% market share, and as we lay out in our business plan, there's no reason Zoom can't do the same, to more than triple its total ridership.

Unfortunately, the MTA has chronically under-invested in their bus service - it's almost as though they want it to fail. Bus riders don't pay the tolls that funds the Turnpork Authority's bloated payroll, after all...

But that's beside the larger point. Even with a 5% market share, the MTA would still need to provide $2.4 million a year to fund the service. But let's put that number in context: that's roughly as much as the agency would pay in annual interest for its new $40 million tollbooth.

Unlike the tollbooth, though, the bus service would actually provide tangible financial benefits to Maine's economy, saving commuters millions of dollars in congestion and gasoline costs, saving municipalities additional millions in avoided parking subsidies and road maintenance expenses.

Tomkins uses his dubious math to conclude that the bus would require "a jaw-dropping $29,756 per-rider subsidy" on the MTA's balance sheet. But that balance sheet doesn't include parking subsidies, or congestion costs, or health care impacts from air pollution and obesity, or gasoline expenditures.

Bus service is only expensive if you look at it through from the point of view of the Turnpork Authority's fantasy-land - a place where parking is always free, gasoline flows like water, car exhaust smells like roses, and no one ever dies of congestive heart failure from too many drive-thru meals.

In the real world, the existing Zoom service - even in its paltry state, with only 2 buses and 10 round trips a day - saves commuters, businesses, and municipalities in Cumberland and York Counties about $1.8 million a year - and that's after you subtract the actual cost of the bus service.

Our proposal aims to double that savings - pumping an additional $2.2 million into the local economy every year.

Here's the math, from our Turnpike for the 21st Century report. Scott Tompkins, you're welcome to try to challenge these numbers, the real costs that Mainers are struggling to pay to drive on your highway...

Round-trip costs between Biddeford and downtown Portland	Single-occupant vehicle on Maine Turnpike	ZOOM bus	Proposed Downtown ZOOM route	Notes
COSTS TO INDIVIDUAL COMMUTER:
Tolls and Fares	$2.00	$5.00	$5.00
Gasoline plus maintenance and insurance	$22.00	$1.10	$0.00	(at Federal rate of $0.55 per mile, assuming a 1.5 mile drive to Biddeford P&R for ZOOM trip)
Public parking in Portland ($5/day)	$5.00	$0.00	$0.00
Loss of productive time	$20.00	$3.33	$0.00	(Turnpike column assumes a 30-minute one-way trip, without congestion delays, at a rate of $20/hour; ZOOM column assume a 5-minute one-way trip to Park and Ride lot)
Total costs to individual:	$49.00	$9.43	$5.00
COSTS PER COMMUTER TO SOCIETY, EMPLOYERS, AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS:
Operating subsidy	$0.00	$15.00	$15.00	Fares cover roughly 25% of ZOOM service costs. Does not include federal tax subsidies for automobile ownership and oil.
Congestion externality	$10.80	$0.54	$0.81	Peak-hour congestion costs on urban LOS E streets and highways is $0.27/mile (TTI 2003 and Littman 2010). ZOOM congestion cost based on an assumed 20 passengers per vehicle, and increased by a factor of 1.5 to account for more frequent stops.
Parking subsidies	$15.00	$10.00	$0.00	Difference between nominal parking rents and market-rate prices for similar real estate in downtown Portland. See Peninsula Transit Study, 2008. ZOOM column reflects subsidies for Biddeford Park and Ride lot, where land values are lower.
Noise, water, and air pollution costs	$3.00	$0.30	$0.45	Average automobile pollution cost per mile is $0.075; the average new diesel bus pollution cost per mile is $0.15. Second and third columns assume an average 20 passengers per bus (Sierra Research 2000, Littman 2010).
Total exported costs:	$28.80	$25.84	$16.26
Sum of all costs (individual plus social):	$77.80	$35.27	$21.26
Total annual costs of 180 commuters (average daily ridership on existing ZOOM route)	$3,360,960	$1,523,664		Based on 2009 ridership and 240 annual work days
Total costs of 294 commuters (projected daily ridership on proposed ZOOM route)	$5,489,568		$1,500,106	Based on a projection of 294 daily riders on the proposed downtown ZOOM route (assuming a conservative 5% market share among workers whose origin and destination are within 1/2 a mile of the route) and 240 annual work days
NET ANNUAL SAVINGS FROM ZOOM SERVICE		$1,837,296	$3,989,462

Sources:

Sierra Research COMMUTER Model, US Environmental Protection Agency Transportation Air Quality Center, 2000.

Evaluating Public Transit Benefits and Costs, by Todd Littman. Victoria Transportation Policy Institute, 2010.

Urban Mobility Study, Texas Transportation Institute, 2009.

The Increasingly Lonely Road

Last summer, when gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon, the driving factors behind the price-spike were supply (the world's oil resources are limited and the remaining oil is increasingly expensive to extract) and demand (on top of growing consumption in the U.S., the economies of China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies were growing at a breakneck pace, and sucking up an increasing portion of the world's oil supplies).

Then the global recession happened, and oil prices settled down - but still nowhere near the levels where they had been in the 1990s. You might recall that some people blamed "speculators" on last summer's price spike. The recession, I think, proved the falsity of that claim: through the depths of last fall's credit freeze, "speculators" with any cash to spare were few and far between (and its unlikely that the few that remained would have bothered with oil futures). Yet oil prices, adjusted for inflation, still remained much higher than they were in 1998, the peak of the Clinton-era boom.

So where do we stand now, looking toward recovery? Don't look now, but gasoline prices are creeping up towards $3 a gallon again. On the supply side, some new oil discoveries represent the payoff from increased exploration from the days when prices were sky-high. But those new discoveries are still hard to get to, and the oil is going to be expensive to extract.

On the demand side, lots of unemployed people stopped driving and almost everyone resolved to drive less to save money in the United States this past year, and consumption dropped a few percentage points. But while we were taking a breather, emerging Asian economies continued to grow at a breakneck pace - the global credit crisis registered only as a brief dip on their GDP growth charts, and now they're growing as fast as ever.

So where does that leave us? On the supply side, the global "pie" of oil supplies is a little bit larger, provided the customers are willing to pay more for their slices. But on the demand side, countries like China, India, Russia, and Brazil are gobbling up a lot more oil.

So when our economy returns to "normal", and if we go back to the gas pumps to consume as much oil as we did in 2007, we're going to have to pay a lot more for it, because hundreds of millions of people in the developing world are also making bids to buy this limited resource.

More realistically, though, Americans probably aren't going to go back to the gas pumps the way we did in 2007, ever again. We're driving less as we get older, and those of us who still do drive are going to drive for shorter distances in more fuel-efficient vehicles. And prices will remain high, as demand elsewhere in the world gulps up the remaining oil. That's the conclusion of a number of commodities experts and economists summarized in this article from Barron's. An excerpt:

Unfortunately for U.S. drivers, $3 or more might be the new norm...

"It's pretty clear that the 2007 level will be the peak in [domestic] gas consumption for a long time to come, if not forever," says Ed Morse, the former head of commodities research at Lehman Brothers and now a managing director at Louis Capital. Goldman Sachs expects the nation's gasoline demand to fall 0.5% in the second half, tick up 1% in 2010, then remain flat in 2011, as supplies tighten and prices stay high.

This has important implications for state highway agencies, which rely on per-gallon gas taxes for their budgets. If gas consumption is declining or flat, that means there's going to be less money available for highway construction - even as construction costs continue to increase. Raising gas taxes will only serve to depress demand even further, and cause more people to drive less as a way to save money.

States like Maine will increasingly have trouble maintaining existing roads, and building new roads (and increasing our maintenance costs even further) will be out of the question entirely.

That's the fiscal reality. But it's anyone's guess when the alternate-universe space-cadets in Augusta, who are still planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on freeway widenings, will get the message.

CLEAN-TEA will revolutionize federal transportation policy

Later this year, Congress is expected to pass a new transportation bill, which will set the country's transportation and infrastructure priorities. It's long been expected that the new federal transportation policy would address climate change, since automobiles and light trucks generate over 20% of the nation's greenhouse gases.

Last week, a formal bill was introduced. It still has a long way to go, with countless revisions and amendments in the works. But the broad outlines look to be positively revolutionary. Quoting from a March 12 press release from Rep. Earl Blumenauer's (D-OR) office [emphases are mine]:

Washington, DC – Yesterday, Sens. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) and Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), Steven La Tourette (R-Ohio), Melissa Bean (D-Ill.), and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) introduced The Clean Low-Emissions Affordable New Transportation Equity Act or CLEAN TEA.  The bill is predicated upon passage of a comprehensive climate change bill, such as the one considered by the Senate earlier this year, which would generate revenue for the Federal government. Under CLEAN TEA, ten percent of the revenue would be used to create a more efficient transportation system and lower greenhouse gas emissions through strategies including funding new or expanded transit or passenger rail; supporting development around transit stops; and making neighborhoods safer for bikes and pedestrians...

Sen. Tom Carper said: “Today, we fund our transportation system through a gas tax, meaning we pay for roads and transit by burning gasoline. When people drive less, our transportation budgets dry up. This means states and localities that reduce oil use, lower greenhouse emissions and save their constituents money end up getting their budgets cut. But CLEAN TEA reverses this negative funding policy by sending money to states and localities based on how much they reduce emissions. Now, we in the Congress have the great opportunity to address many national problems at once – finding additional funding for transportation infrastructure, building money-saving transportation alternatives and lowering greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.”

“Reducing emissions from the transportation sector will not only help us achieve our global warming goals, but will provide additional benefits to the environment, public health, the economy, and quality of life,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer.  This legislation will help finance our shift to a low-carbon transportation system that provides transportation choices, creates safe and healthy communities, and saves consumers money. I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure that any climate legislation we advance in the House recognizes the opportunities provided by the transportation sector.”

This arrangement could very well benefit Maine: our current greenhouse gas emissions are high, but Mainers have a high propensity to use transit and rail services where they're available (witness the success of the privately-run Concord Coach intercity bus service, or the Downeaster). A few new transit routes along key corridors - Portland to Lewiston/Auburn, Bangor to Ellsworth, Biddeford/Saco to Portsmouth - could reduce Maine's greenhouse gas emissions considerably, and put our state at the front of the line for these new federal investments.

But it can only happen if our state and regional transportation agencies stop wasting their time and our money with zombie highway expansion plans from the 20th century. A $40 million tollbooth on the Maine Turnpike, for instance, won't do squat to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions: legacy highway projects like these are a waste of precious money that would be better spent on better bus service.

The takeaway for Maine is this: if our state wants to receive federal support for infrastructure in the future, we need to start planning smaller highways and expanded transit services today yesterday.

Highway to Irrelevance: The Decline and Fall of the Maine Turnpike Authority, Part 3

Suppose you run a business, but your operating costs are increasing and people aren't buying what you're selling like they used to.

If you operate in the free market, you'd better cut back, reduce overhead, and either lower your prices or make big improvements in your product to bring your customers back.

If you're a dinosaur bureaucracy like the Maine Turnpike Authority, on the other hand, you keep on offering the same product, raise your prices 30%, and keep on planning a $200 million expansion based on chimerical growth projections.

It's sad but true. The Maine Turnpike witnessed a 2% decline in traffic this past year - the first decline in traffic in the toll road's 61 year history. At the same time, basic freeway maintenance costs are up nearly 40% since 2005.

Maine drivers and shippers are desperate for alternatives to the Maine Turnpike's 1950s-era transportation "solution." Their product sucks: why would anyone choose to pay more to spend unproductive time behind a steering wheel, when one could take the wi-fi-enabled Downeaster instead? Or enjoy the guilty pleasure of a mediocre movie on one of Concord Coach's hourly buses?

But instead of improving their product (say, by offering their own wi-fi-enabled commuter buses) the Turnpike Authority has decided to keep their crappy thing going, only at higher prices. Beginning February 1st, tolls on the Turnpike will be 30% higher.

The Turnpike Authority is obviously unfamiliar with basic economic theory, which maintains that an increase in your prices will generate a decrease in sales (or tolls, in this case). A meta-analysis of 101 studies on gasoline price elasticity by economist Molly Espey found that the short-run price elasticity of demand for gasoline is -0.26, and the long-term price elasticity is -0.58.

In other words, a 10% increase in this particular cost of driving will result, on average, in a 2.6% decline in driving in the short term, and a 5.8% decline in the long term.

Here's the takeaway: if you're talking about a 30% increase in tolls, as the Turnpike proposes, then we can expect a lot more people to try carpooling, or the bus, or the train, or staying at home. So once again, alternative transportation advocates can take heart in the Turnpike Authority's head-in-the-sand management: tolls go up, fewer people drive, and we get cleaner air and safer streets. Thanks, Maine Turnpike Authority!

Change is coming

In two months, we'll have a city-dwelling, bike-riding president and a rail-commuter vice president.

Throughout his campaign, Barack Obama made it clear that he understands the relationships between global warming, the health of our cities, our reliance on expensive oil, the health of our economy, and our transportation system.

Maine's Turnpike Authority and Department of Transportation have consistently proven that they don't understand the connections among these challenges. During the next four years, these agencies will either change radically, or find themselves starved of funding.

Among those in the running to lead the federal Department of Transportation are Congressman Earl Blumenauer (who gets around car-free in DC with his bike and deserves a lot of credit for making the other Portland the transit and bike-friendly nirvana it is), Congressman Jim Oberstar, and Jeanette Sadik-Khan, a congestion-pricing advocate who is currently tearing out car lanes and replacing them with protected bike lanes and public plazas in New York City. All three have done a lot to tear down highway-building orthodoxy already, and all three would bring tremendous changes to federal transportation policy.

Already, Democrats in Congress are talking about a "green infrastructure" stimulus package, which could invest billions in transit projects and basic maintenance nationwide. Because Maine's DOT has dropped the ball on planning new transit services, Maine won't even be at the table for hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of federal funds.

The Turnpike Authority and MDOT need to get with the program. It's our way or the highway - and the highway isn't an option anymore.

Freeways Without Futures, part 1

Unfortunately, discussions about freeways dominated the joint Portland-South Portland City Council meeting last night. As if the concrete fantasies of Augusta's hidebound engineers are the most pressing issues facing our cities.

Fortunately, though, the discussion focused on how the Turnpike Authority and Maine Dept. of Transportation just can't afford to build new freeways. Of course, that's never stopped them from building freeways before, but wherever this bolt of fiscal responsibility came from, it's a welcome change. Here's Portland Press Herald staff writer Elbert Aull's report:

Falling traffic numbers have put plans to widen a stretch of the Maine Turnpike in Greater Portland on ice.

The turnpike authority has decided to delay adding two lanes to the highway from Scarborough to Falmouth for at least two years, said Conrad Welzel, head of government relations for the turnpike authority.

The decision comes at a time of rising fuel prices and sluggish monthly traffic numbers on Maine's busiest highway corridor.

But then, Aull writes about a $20 million project to widen I-295 between Fore River and the Maine Mall (right next to the state's most polluted waterway, Long Creek): "About $20 million... [to] widen a stretch of I-295 between exits 3 and 4 in South Portland and renovate interchanges in South Portland, Portland, Falmouth and Yarmouth has already received federal funding and will move forward next year as planned, department officials said."

Really? $20 million for a highway widening (pictured above) along a corridor that holds one of the richest opportunities for transit in the state? For half the price, our cities could build a modern bus rapid transit system between the Mall and downtown Portland:



If MDOT is really serious about widening this freeway at a time when the agency can't even afford to fill potholes, businesses can't afford to pay truckers, and commuters can't afford to fill their gas tanks, then we the people of Maine need to get serious about a lawsuit to stop this destructive waste of money.

Highway to Irrelevance: The Decline and Fall of the Maine Turnpike Authority, Part 2

In the lead editorial of the Portland Press Herald, Maine's leading newspaper takes a look at the balance sheets of the state's two major transportation bureaucracies. Their conclusion is in the editorial's sub-headline:

The Maine Turnpike Authority and other transportation officials have to rethink plans.

The newspaper notes that Turnpike traffic is following the trend of car sales and SUV manufacture in a steep decline (previously written about here). This means that the Turnpike Authority and MDOT are collecting less money from tolls and gas taxes: toll revenue, in particular, is "about $546,000 less for this year over last and well below the 2.5 percent increase that had been projected."

"Executive Director Paul Violette is well aware, the trend has long-term implications for transportation planning.

"'We have a shift in the paradigm here,' he says. That shift could translate directly into putting off turnpike expansion projects, something Violette says his board will be discussing in coming months.

"Already, a widening of the turnpike north of the I-295 interchange has been delayed from 2010 to 2015, and Violette says that project and others could be further delayed if fuel prices stay high and people drive less. 'Some of the things we've been looking at could get pushed beyond our 10-year planning window,' he says."

We wonder if one of those things might be their $40 million tollbooth? (see also The Decline and Fall of the MTA, Part 1). Certainly their multi-million dollar new headquarters building, which required blasting a rocky hilltop to pricey smithereens out on outer Congress, is still under construction, which means that the new palace passes the MTA's dubious fiscal sniff-tests.

The Press Herald concludes that "The tricky part is that no matter how many cars are on the road, the snow still has to be cleared and old bridges need to be replaced and roads repaved. Look for transportation planning to be a major challenge in Augusta in 2009."

Indeed- the only way to pay for a billion-dollar backlog of maintenance projects is either to raise taxes on drivers, or reduce costs and value-engineer.

And the Maine Turnpike Authority's bureaucratic overhead is an awfully ripe, low-hanging fruit on the cost-cutting side of the equation.

Highway to Irrelevance: The Decline and Fall of the Maine Turnpike Authority, Part 1

Gas is over $4 a gallon and rising, greenhouse gas regulations are imminent, truck companies are losing market share to trains and ships, and Americans are clamoring to leave the suburbs and get better transit.

These are fascinating times, with revolutionary changes in how we get around just starting to happen. Ridership on the Downeaster train was up another 37% last month. Portland is about to implement a visionary new transit plan. While gas prices crimp households' disposable incomes, Americans and our economy as a whole are desperate for ways to drive less.

And in the middle of these revolutionary changes, one of Maine's biggest transportation bureaucracies, the Maine Turnpike Authority, is working hard to... build a new $40 million toll plaza?! Are you shitting me, MTA? This is the most pressing work you dopes need to be doing right now?

It's more outrageous than fiction, but the Turnpike Authority is moving ahead with plans to replace a good-enough existing toll plaza with a supersized, $40 million facility. $40 million for a McMansion toll booth.

The same amount of money could pay the capital costs of expanding Amtrak service from Portland to Lewiston. Wouldn't that be nice? Tough shit, you're getting a tollbooth instead.

I know I'm not the only one to be slapping my forehead at the MTA's idiocy right now. Today's Portland Press Herald features two letters to the editor from disgruntled neighbors of the proposed Taj Mahal Toll Plaza:

"The conceptual design of the proposed York tollbooth is larger than the toll barriers on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the lighting at the new location would be brighter than three Wal-Mart Supercenters. Does spending $40 million to supersize the York toll plaza make sense when the annual revenue would be virtually unchanged? ...

"Everyone who uses the tollbooths in Maine would pay for this new plaza with increases in tolls. To fix the problems at the current site does not warrant a $40 million, state-of-the-art New Jersey tollbooth in Maine. Wouldn't that money be better spent on roads and bridges in the rest of the state?"

Unless you work at the MTA, the answer to this rhetorical question is obvious.

Compared to the Maine Turnpike Authority, even Exxon Mobil looks like a radical Earth-First collective. At least they're acknowledging the fact that things are changing (see billboard).

Here's my prediction: gas prices will continue to go up, Turnpike traffic will continue to decline, Mainers will continue to clamor for more affordable transportation choices, and the MTA will continue to waste the public's time and money with idiotic engineering wet-dreams like this one, instead of real transit-based solutions.

As this goes on, more and more people will realize that the MTA is doing nothing to solve Maine's transportation crisis: in fact, that they're a big part of the problem. And they have to go.

I give the MTA two to three more years of existence, tops, before the state Legislature consigns them to the dustbin of bureaucracies lost. Hopefully it will be sooner. In a new feature here at the Rights of Way blog, I'll be tracking the Decline and Fall of the MTA right here... stay tuned for many (but not that many) future chronicles.