Peter Baque with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, who attended the Virginia Light Rail Symposium Friday, provides a quick environmental scan of light rail projects across Virginia. Everybody loves light rail, it appears — they just don’t like paying for it.
There’s a reason we don’t see a lot of light rail projects:. They’re expensive. They require a lot of money up-front to build, and then they require subsidies to continue operating. As the number of transit projects increases, operating subsidies crowd out funds to build new ones. Thus, in a $150 million budget for the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation for public transit systems, $105 million is tagged for operating expenses and only $39 million for capital projects.
If a transportation mode requires massive investment up front as well as ongoing operating subsidies, that should be a clue that it is not economically viable — not with Virginia’s low-density human settlement patterns at any rate. The only strategy that I can think of that would change the economics is (a) to permit greater densities along transportation corridors, which would boost ridership, and (b) use Community Development Authorities along the corridors to issue bonds to pay the up-front costs. Landowners, whose property would gain in value from the improvements, would pay off the bonds through a special tax assessment.
If there is a public benefit to mass transit — primarily less pollution — then a modest public investment could be justified. But there needs to be a methodology for calculating the pollution-reduction benefits, and the subsidies should be proportional.
