(The Philadelphia Inquirer published the following story by Frank Kummer and Jere Downs on its website on July 27.)
First of three parts
PHILADELPHIA — Steeped in cost overruns and an acrimonious debate about its placement and purpose, South Jersey’s first new alternative to the automobile in three decades debuts this fall in the form of light rail service between Camden and Trenton.
The $1.1 billion, 34-mile line, which aims to boost the fortunes of declining communities along the Delaware River, was not funded at all by the federal government, as is often the case with such projects. That means state taxpayers will pay for it through the gas tax each time they fill up at the pump for years to come.
Nor is the new rail line expected to substantially relieve traffic congestion. Years of study in the 1990s showed rail transit would attract more customers elsewhere in South Jersey. Republican politicians and officials successfully pushed to have the line built as part of their plan to revitalize the Route 130 corridor, a decision that has left many transportation experts skeptical.
“This project is a poster child for how not to plan and make decisions about a transit investment,” said George Warrington, executive director of NJ Transit Corp. and a critic of the rail project, which predates his tenure. “The dots don’t connect when you have a $1 billion transportation project that doesn’t solve a transportation problem.”
In short, the Southern New Jersey Light Rail Transit System is a controversial experiment that makes economic development, rather than transporting commuters, its primary goal. Whether it ultimately succeeds will be closely watched not just in South Jersey but throughout the country.
Of more than a dozen transit experts from around the country interviewed over the last few months, most were pessimistic about the new line’s prospects. Simply put, most contend that the project delivers too little in return for its steep cost.
In the long run, some are excited about the potential the line could have to reshape sprawling, auto-dominated land use in South Jersey. They envision walkable, “smart-growth” communities in the train’s path, beginning with an influx of home buyers from North Jersey riding the train as part of a Manhattan commute.
But as the train prepares to roll – no month has been specified – those hopes appear far off.
Among the obstacles in its path, experts say, is that the line does not connect directly into Philadelphia, the area’s major job center. At its northern end, in Trenton, the line will stop 1.5 miles from the Statehouse complex, library and state museum, and more than a half-mile from the Hughes Justice Complex.
The number of expected riders has plummeted to 2,950 a day, about half the original estimates.
If those numbers hold, the line’s fare-box revenues, when measured against operating expenses, would tie it with Detroit’s for dead last among the nation’s 25 light rail lines, according to figures supplied by the American Public Transportation Association, the transit industry’s lobbying arm.
Given such numbers, the line is expected to generate only about $1.5 million in revenue in its first full year of operation. Meanwhile, taxpayers will be handing over $73 million annually to pay for it, according to state officials.
Development projections also have been downsized. In 1997, a private group hired by NJ Transit predicted a boom of 22,299 new housing units close to the rail stations over 20 years. But a Burlington County development official expects less than half that rate of growth, or 2,500 new homes along the line in that county in the next five years.
Meanwhile, the state Attorney General’s Office is investigating circumstances surrounding the line. At $1.1 billion, the cost is three times the original estimate and the line will open at least a year behind schedule.
Spokesman Peter Aseltine said the investigation is taking place on two fronts: through the Division of Criminal Justice, which is in charge of looking into and prosecuting criminal cases, and the Office of Government Integrity, a unit created by Gov. McGreevey to find and prosecute public corruption, official misconduct, and misuse of public funds. Officials of the office have not said who is being investigated or on what grounds.
Meanwhile, Burlington County politicians, who fought for the project’s current route despite years of studies in the 1990s saying it should go elsewhere, remain upbeat about the line’s prospects.
They say the current Democratic administration is bent on giving it a negative spin. Cost overruns and delays are not their fault, they say.
“It’s a wonderful infusion of dollars for Burlington County,” said State Sen. Diane Allen (R., Burlington), who lives in Edgewater Park. “This is transit money that would have gone to somebody else’s transit line in North Jersey. We competed for it, and we were able to get it.”
Allen and others believe the light rail system will restore some luster to the river towns whose economies faltered as sprawl took root in South Jersey, a trend marked by the closing of the old Camden & Amboy route in 1963. They say that towns outside Burlington County, particularly Camden, also will benefit from the line.
But with 15 of the 19 communities along the line, Burlington County stands to be a prime beneficiary – or loser. Overall, slightly more than 60 percent of the line runs through the county.
Proponents say the line is already working to some degree, attracting businesses and housing developers and pumping up real estate values – though exactly how much is attributable to the rail line is hard to say, given that the region is in a real estate boom.
Burlington City real estate agent Bob Haines says his office is selling houses to people who intend to take the rail line to Trenton, and then Amtrak to New York.
“Property values have been going up all over. I can’t tell you that this is all light rail,” he said. “I think it’s part of the story. In Burlington, you’re going to be able to walk to a train [and] leave your car in a garage.”
But proponents concede that the line by itself will not provide the “silver bullet” needed to boost the sagging Route 130 corridor.
“The value, when you compare what has been spent compared to what the benefits will be, is very poor,” says Donald Nigro, president of the Delaware Valley Association of Railroad Passengers, which has criticized the line’s placement.
Adrian Moore of the Reason Public Policy Institute, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit think tank, is blunt.
“We looked at some of the early reports and feasibility studies,” said Moore, whose group frequently analyzes the merits of mass-transit projects. “We said the numbers don’t add up. This was a boondoggle. And the fact that they didn’t get a federal grant just makes it a local boondoggle.”
Others take the long view.
“This is not a white elephant. It’s going to prove to be a very pink elephant,” John Tucker, vice president of operations at Amtrak and former chief of SEPTA’s regional rail system. “Let me describe it this way. Penn Station opened in 1910 in the heart of Manhattan. Grand Central opened in 1913. A lot of Midtown was very low-end slums.
“It is no accident that 20 years later, the Empire State Building was built halfway between those two major terminals,” Tucker said. “It didn’t just pop out of the ground randomly. It happened because it was walking-distance access to two major terminals to housing developments in suburban areas.”
Even Warrington, the NJ Transit head and a chief critic of the project, says it is in everyone’s interest to make the best of the situation.
For if the line fails, mass-transit advocates fear that could crush any chance of state spending on mass transit for South Jersey for years to come – including a more important secondary leg envisioned for Gloucester County.
“Even though it is not the ideal location, we all have a great stake in this not failing,” said Barbara Lawrence, executive director of New Jersey Future and a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Transportation appointed by Gov. McGreevey. “If it fails, policy makers in New Jersey and around the country will point to it as a reason not to do light rail. They are going to come and visit this one and say, ‘Look what happened in South Jersey.’ ”
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NJ Transit’s board of directors endorsed the current alignment of the light rail line in November 1996, shortly after a study estimated the cost at $314 million, not including operating expenses.
But almost immediately, warnings were sounded that it would be expensive and plagued by low ridership.
The Delaware Valley Association of Railroad Passengers issued a policy statement in April 1997 that the proposal lacked detailed information about operating costs and recovery of expenses and had no “credible” information about ridership figures.
But that was in the heady 1990s, when light rail lines were a fad and state coffers were flush with money. Politicians pushed ahead. Editorial writers praised the proposal. Critics were dismissed as NIMBYs – people who wanted it anywhere but in their backyards.
The line will debut in more sobering economic times, with state agencies taking deep cuts to balance the budget.
The cost of the line is onerous.
For the next 10 years, New Jerseyans will shell out $73 million a year to support the line after debt, operations and maintenance are folded together.
At the end of those 10 years, the operations and maintenance contract will expire. But after that, taxpayers still will be paying out another $48 million per year until 2018 to cover debt payments, and a final $5 million in 2019.
The debt payments will come from the already overburdened Transportation Trust Fund, which is primarily funded through a 10.5-cent-per-gallon motor fuels tax, the 6 percent sales tax, and a tax on refined petroleum products.
State transit officials say they resent the light-rail payments from the trust fund. Last fall, some of those officials testified they were facing a backlog of about $2.5 billion in projects they will not be able to get to over the next five years.
Maintenance already has been deferred for years on some aging infrastructure because of tight funding.
“NJ Transit’s core mission is not economic development. Our core mission is congestion relief,” Warrington said in an interview this year. “When you have limited resources, and we have serious problems today… . I’m watching a billion dollars go out the door for a 20- or 25-year economic development project.”
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The U.S. Department of Transportation has historically bankrolled up to 90 percent of the construction costs of large road and transit projects alike. Those grants are linked to a years-long federal ranking process that judges a proposed project’s ability to relieve traffic congestion and, more recently, to use land wisely.
Fueled by the success of new rail lines in Portland, Ore.; San Diego; San Francisco; and Dallas, U.S. cities challenged with congestion and sprawl have clamored for federal funding for rapid transit. In a 2002 report, the Federal Transit Administration announced it was evaluating 110 proposed transit projects – a demand that exceeds the supply of federal grants available by an estimated 500 percent.
The federal process is cumbersome and lengthy. But for those that qualify, the payoff is huge. In North Jersey, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail System will receive $1.1 billion in federal funding. The shorter, more complex line will cost a total of $2.6 billion, but includes a 50 percent longer operations and maintenance agreement than the South Jersey line.
In the early ’90s, the professional planners with NJ Transit were intent on securing such federal funding for a South Jersey light rail line. To that end, they commissioned exhaustive studies on a line that would relieve traffic congestion in the rapidly growing areas of Gloucester County and central Burlington County.
But Burlington County political leaders – who had pull within the Republican Whitman administration – wanted the line as part of their ambitious plan to revitalize the Route 130 corridor. Officials there expect the line to work hand-in-glove with plans to bring in new stores and businesses and revamped shopping plazas.
The late State Sen. C. William Haines (R., Burlington) was the Senate Transportation Committee chairman and, as such, played a key role when it came to allocating money for transit projects. Haines made no bones about wanting the light rail line for Burlington County.
In early 1996, Haines had written legislation ordering a study for a light rail leg that would cut through Burlington County’s Delaware River towns.
Within months, consultants DMJM+Harris and Booz, Allen & Hamilton released a feasibility study. No federal funding was ever sought for the river route. As a result, there was no federal review, which could have taken years. Warrington said he believes the backers were following “the path of least resistance.”
By November of that year, NJ Transit’s board of directors had voted to build the line along the river in Burlington County.
Assumptions made in that study and other forecasts for the line have changed dramatically.
For example, ridership forecasts have spiraled downward, to slightly more than half the original estimates used to justify the line.
The 1996 DMJM+Harris report, called Special Study No. 2, estimated there would be about 5,600 individual riders per day for a total of 11,200 trips.
A year later, DMJM+Harris revised those figures downward, to 4,650 riders daily.
Now, as the trains prepare to roll, a new study by NJ Transit calls for only 2,950 riders – 47 percent fewer than in the original forecasts.
NJ Transit officials say the numbers have dropped because early assumptions were based on what is now outdated information. In one example, the research assumed that the trains would run until midnight, or late enough so that people going to what is now the Tweeter Center in Camden could take the train home.
But those assumptions were made before the state had any claim on the existing railroad it planned to use. NJ Transit later negotiated a one-time payment of $67.5 million to Conrail to buy the railroad while agreeing to limit its own use of the tracks from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. It granted Conrail use for freight in the remaining time overnight. Federal rules prevent light rail cars and freight lines from running at the same time.
That means that people who might consider taking the train to the Tweeter Center would not be able to return, given that many concerts do not finish until after 11 p.m.
Joyce Gallagher, an assistant manager of the rail line, said the last train would have to leave Camden by 9 each night to assure the line is cleared by the time the freights start rolling.
The state is trying to renegotiate the agreement to extend the hours, but nothing has been promised.
Other factors contributed to the decline in projected ridership.
NJ Transit once assumed that it would end bus service on routes parallel to the train line. Recently, the agency decided to keep the bus routes. Nor, NJ Transit says, did the studies take into account that the line did not connect directly with PATCO’s High-Speed Line for a one-seat ride into Philadelphia.
Along the way, NJ Transit has also widely varied its estimates of how many homes would be built in the corridor because of the train.
In 1996, Special Study No. 2 stated, “It is estimated that there will be 4,050 units developed through the year 2020 because of the presence of the new rail stations.”
A 1997 study estimated that the rail line would generate more than quadruple that number – 22,299 housing units by 2020. That’s nearly equal to all the housing units in Beverly, Bordentown City, Bordentown Township, Burlington City, Burlington Township and Edgewater Park combined. That optimistic outlook was modeled after development that has sprouted around Bay Area Rapid Transit stations in the San Francisco area – a region most unlike South Jersey.
In March, NJ Transit once again scaled back its predictions for development in the corridor, revising it downward without releasing specific figures.
Alexandra Harris, a spokeswoman for DMJM+Harris, declined to comment on the accuracy of the studies, deferring calls to NJ Transit.
Now, at least a year behind schedule, construction on the line is pretty much complete. The sleek new railcars are undergoing final testing.
Come this fall, at an introductory rate of $1.10 a ticket, the line will begin its journey. Whether it succeeds as an economic development engine may not be known for 20 years.