Two different things: Building a rail system and paying to operate it

From Honolulu Civil Beat:

Honolulu’s City Council leaders are struggling with how to cover millions of dollars in new rail construction costs so they can appease the Federal Transit Administration. They’ve proposed squeezing that money into next year’s city operations budget, which is already stretched thin.

But that challenge raises a bigger question — one that locals have asked for years. How does the city intend to pay for rail once the trains start running?

The city’s leaders still don’t know the answer...

Passenger fares will only cover a fraction of the cost, so the city will have to make up an annual shortfall of about $100 million once the full 20-mile, 21-station system opens.

Other transit systems around the country often rely on dedicated tax sources, such as a sales tax for transit, to cover those costs. Honolulu doesn’t have that.

Kobayashi and other longtime critics of the island’s elevated transit project say Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration has avoided the issue.

The current dilemma over how the city might pay for as much as $44 million in costs to oversee rail construction, Kobayashi says, foreshadows worse problems ahead if the Caldwell administration doesn’t start planning how to pay for the system’s operations...

Rob's comment:

Everybody likes trains. As Honolulu is beginning to understand, getting enough money to build train systems---or, to be more exact---beginning to build them, may be easier than finding the money to operate the systems after they are built.

Honolulu is facing that issue now. The SMART system will be facing it soon. The legislation authorizing California's high-speed rail project---and the promise to voters during the 2008 campaign to pass Proposition 1A in 2008---prohibits any public subsidy to operate the system if/when it's ever built: see pages 8 and 9.

John Pritchett

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones