More on the High Cost of the Purple Line: A Comparison to BRT on the Silver Spring to Bethesda Segment

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Comparison of Purple Line to BRT Cost, Silver Spring to Bethesda

This is a quick post drawing on a report in today’s Washington Post on the implementation of bus rapid transit (BRT) in Montgomery County, Maryland.  The article notes that one of the early BRT routes planned in the county would run from Burtonsville to Silver Spring down US Highway 29, with an estimated capital cost of $200 million.

This would be a distance of 10.2 miles, so the cost would be $19.6 million per mile on average.  This BRT line is currently slated to stop in Silver Spring, but it would be straightforward to extend it along East-West Highway for a further 3.7 miles to Bethesda. Assuming the same average cost per mile, the capital cost of this addition would be $72 million.

The current plan is for the Purple Line light rail line to cover this same basic route, connecting Silver Spring to Bethesda.  As I have discussed in earlier blog posts, the Purple Line is incredibly expensive, even if one ignores (as the official cost estimates do) the environment costs of building and operating the line (including the value of parkland destroyed, which is implicitly being valued at zero, as well as the environmental costs from storm water run-off, habitat destruction, hazardous waste issues, higher greenhouse gas emissions, and more).  The current capital cost estimate, following the service and other cuts that Governor Hogan has imposed to bring down costs, is $2.25 billion.  This also does not include the costs that Montgomery County will cover directly for building the Bethesda station and well as the cost of a utilitarian path to be built adjacent to the train tracks.  The Purple Line would also cost more to operate per rider than the Montgomery County BRT routes are expected to cost, so there is no cost savings from lower operating costs.

The Purple Line would be 16.2 miles long in total.  Using just the $2.25 billion cost figure, this comes to $139 million per mile.  This is extremely high.  Indeed, the Columbia Pike streetcar line in Arlington County, which was recently cancelled due to its high cost, would have cost “only” $117 million per mile despite it being built through a high density urban corridor for most of its entire route.

The distance from Silver Spring to Bethesda on the Purple Line will be 4.4 miles if it is built. This is longer than the direct route by road since it will follow a more indirect path passing up and around the direct route.  Assuming the cost of this 4.4 miles is the same on average as for the rest of the Purple Line (it might be higher due to the need to build some major bridges, including over Rock Creek), the cost would come to $612 million.

The choice therefore is between spending $612 million to build this segment of the Purple Line from Silver Spring to Bethesda, or spending $72 million by extending the BRT.  The Purple Line cost is 8.5 times as much, and government could save $540 million ( = $612m – $72m) by terminating the Purple Line in Silver Spring and using BRT service instead.

As an earlier blog post argued, new thinking is necessary if we are to resolve the very real transportation issues we face in this region.  This is one more example of what could be done.  A half billion dollar savings is not small.

 

The Leading Republican Presidential Candidates on Muslims and Syrian War Refugees

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Republican Candidates photos.001The lead article on the front page of today’s Washington Post reported on what several of the Republican presidential candidates have said they would do in the face of refugees fleeing the war in Syria, and on Muslims (including US citizens) already resident in the US. David Farenthold and Jose DelReal were the authors.  While I do not normally put up posts on this blog that simply summarize other news reports, this article was especially telling. Those who did not see the article should find it of interest.

The first three paragraphs (where I have inserted the name of the candidate being referred to in parentheses; the article identifies them later) are:

One of the front-runners in the Republican presidential race [Donald Trump] said Thursday he would “absolutely” want a database of Muslims in the country and wouldn’t rule out giving them special ID cards that noted their religion.

Another top candidate [Ben Carson] likened Syrian refugees — who are largely Muslim — to dogs. Some of them might be rabid, he said, which was reason to keep them all out.

And a third [Ted Cruz] stood up in the Senate on Thursday and called for banning refugees from five Middle Eastern countries. He was explicit that the point was to keep Muslim refugees out while letting Christians from the same places in.

Expanding on Trump’s stated views, the article later noted:

Donald Trump, who has suggested closing down mosques and increasing surveillance of Muslims, said in an interview with Yahoo News published online Thursday that “we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

When pressed on whether such measures might include tracking Muslim Americans in a database or noting their religious affiliations on identification cards, Trump said: “We’re going to have to — we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely. We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”

Later Thursday, Trump told NBC News that he would “certainly” and “absolutely” create a database of Muslims in the United States, although it was unclear whether this system would track only newcomers to the country or all Muslims living in the country.

“There should be a lot of systems beyond databases,” Trump said. “I mean, we should have a lot of systems.”

Later in the article:

Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) said the attacks were part of a “clash of civilizations” — essentially casting the Paris attackers as products of Muslim society rather than a radical group apart from it.

And finally Jeb Bush (along with Ted Cruz again):

Two other candidates — Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and former Florida governor Jeb Bush — suggested this week that the United States should accept Christian refugees from Syria but not some or all of the Muslim refugees.

According to today’s (November 20) Pollster results on the preferences of Republican voters (Pollster averages out the results from recent individual polls), these five candidates together account for 75% of Republican voter presidential preferences.  Trump is first by a substantial margin, followed by Carson, Rubio, Cruz, and Bush, in that order.  No other candidate seeking the nomination receives more than 3.3% of Republican voter preferences.  It is likely that one of these five candidates will receive the Republican nomination.

This is scary.  Perhaps the statements were not fully thought through.  We will see whether and to what extent the candidates seek to “walk back” the statements in the coming days. But these gut reactions (if that is indeed what they are) to the tragedy in Paris, on the treatment of those whose religion is Islam, and how they see refugees from the Syrian war, should at a minimum make us wonder how they would respond if they were faced by a major crisis as president.

Facts vs. Polemics on Unauthorized Immigration of Mexicans to the US

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Stock of Mexican Unauthorized Immigrants in the US, 1995 to 2014, #2

Annual Net Flow of Mexican Unauthorized Immigrants to US, 1996 to 2014

In the heated rhetoric of the current Republican presidential campaign, one would think that the US is being flooded by illegal immigrants from Mexico, slipping through a porous border with President Obama unwilling to do anything about it.  Calls are being made for a bigger, taller, and longer wall, more aggressive policing of the border, and the forced deportation of those who are already living here.  These calls have been a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s campaign from the day he announced his candidacy (when he asserted Mexico is “sending” criminals, drug pushers, and rapists to the US).  More recently, in the November 10 Republican presidential debate and in more detail in the days after, Trump called for the creation of a new special police force, a “massive deportation force”, which would aggressively pursue and deport those in the US who were believed to be illegal. Yet Trump has for some time now been at the top of polls of Republicans as their choice for president.

But what are the facts?  The US is actually not being flooded by illegal immigrants from Mexico. Nor has the supposed “problem” become far worse under President Obama.  The Pew Research Center released on November 19 a report with careful estimates of the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico residing in the US.  The report brings up to date figures the Pew Center had released previously for earlier years.

The chart at the top of this post is a replication of the chart presented as Figure 5 in Chapter 1 of their report, with figures on the estimated total number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants resident in the US by year.  The second chart is then simply the net annual flows as calculated from the numbers on the totals in the first chart (the change from one year to the next).  It should be noted that Pew Center presented estimates only for 1995, 2000, and 2005, before going to annual figures.  Hence the figures on net flows for 1996 to 2000 and 2001 to 2005 assume equal annual changes.

The Pew Center estimates that the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants resident in the US reached a peak in 2007, and has since fallen substantially.  The falls in 2008 and 2009 can probably be attributed mostly to the severe downturn in the US in those years, when jobs were scarce and more Mexicans immigrants chose to return to Mexico than come to the US.  However, it is significant that as the US labor market has strengthened since 2009, with the unemployment rate hitting just 5.0% recently, the net outflow of Mexican immigrants continued.  In each and every year of the Obama administration there has either been a net outflow, or no net change, in the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the US.

There are many reasons for this, including stepped up and more effective border enforcement as well as more deportations.  The Pew Report provides a good review of the factors, and I will not go into them all.  But one fact to note is that in FY2013, with Obama as president, the number of deportations reached a record high of 315,000, an increase of 86% from the level in 2005.

One may debate what the appropriate policy should be.  In my view, while immigration has been controversial throughout US history, the US has always also always benefited from it. Recall the discrimination against Catholic immigrants from Ireland in the early and mid-1800s, and yet how such immigration developed into an important part of what made the US what it is now.  There is little reason to believe that this time is different.

But regardless of whatever one’s policy views are, one should start with the facts.  And it is clear that the Republican candidates for president do not have these straight.