Yesterday, RealClearPolicy published a Q&A with Mr. O'Toole which I thought had some interesting thoughts for Houstonians.
Rail advocates tend to leave out the hidden costs of maintaining railroads over the years. Why are the maintenance costs so high?
Like anything, rails wear out. They have a lifespan of about 30 years. Not just the rails, but the stations, the power-supply systems, the overhead lines, the railcars. Everything wears out after about 30 years. People are familiar with the Washington, D.C., Metro system, which was such a beautiful system when it was first opened. Today, more than 30 years after it first opened, it is rapidly deteriorating. You have problems on an almost weekly basis when sometimes three lines are shut down. The reason is that about every 30 years you have to go back and completely rebuild everything at just about the same cost you spent building it in the first place.
And nobody ever budgets for this.
Certainly, Houston Metro hasn't budgeted for this. Nor have we heard anything about it. You certainly won't hear anything about it from groups such as Houston Tomorrow, or the Citizen's Transportation Coalition. Nor will you hear this from Metro itself.
Of course, proponents will say that Houston's Danger Train is better than those other cities, that we've bought a world class system that, despite our muggy and damaging climate, won't deteriorate, or be affected the way every other system is being affected. They say this with full faith and confidence in Metro's sterling reputation on matters of planning and procurement.
Meanwhile, Metro is spending time and resources feeding a line to one of the Chron's more secretarial journalists that they don't have a SWAT team (despite information on their own website that they do. ) (Sadly, the Chron's own archives [which Begley was seemingly to incurious to search] suggested they did as well) And so Metro goes under the (non) leadership of CEO Tom Lambert, who seems content to turn over the keys to the train to board members who are apparently doing most of the heavy lifting these days.
In short, it's another leadership fiasco to add to the Houston Region's tally.
It's getting close to the point where it's fair to ask if there's anyone currently in charge? Or is Houston just barreling down a weird Kafkaesque path where leaders are there only for photo shoots and political gain while the real decisions are made by the bureaucracy?
