I’m a big believer in the potential for mass transit to help alleviate traffic congestion, but I’m not blind. Heavy rail, light rail and buses are huge money losers. Not only do they fail to pay their capital costs, they don’t even pay their operating costs.
Is that a problem intrinsic to rail and buses, or does it reflect the inability of government to run business enterprises? For a case study, let’s look at the situation at Washington Metro, where labor costs have gotten so out of control that even Washington Post editorial writers are outraged:
SOMETHING IS wrong at Metro when almost 9 percent of its $1 billion operating budget goes to pay overtime to employees. Something is wrong when Metro, whose workforce is comparable to the Los Angeles transit system’s, has at least 10 times as many workers clearing $110,000 a year, thanks largely to profligate overtime policies and practices. And something is wrong when some Metro employees receive overtime pay even while on vacation based on the fact that their usual workweek includes extra hours on the job…
Something is out of whack when one bus driver was able to command $143,000 last year, an income approaching that of the chief operating officer of Metro’s bus division.
Until the Metro gets its act together, Virginians should be very leery of investing more than $5 billion in the Rail-to-Dulles expansion of Metro heavy rail. Not only are the project’s up-front construction costs seemingly escalating with no end in sight, Virginia taxpayers (or Dulles Toll Road commuters) face the prospect of subsidizing an out-of-control Metro workforce.
