Surprise: SMART train going broke!

Comment by Seamus O'Ramus

In the Marin Independent Journal:

While Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit officials praised the progress made after two years of passenger rail service in the two counties, new financial projections show an uncertain future for the transit service.

If the agency does not make any changes to its operations in the coming years, it faces completely depleting its operating fund balance and reserves by 2024, PFM financial adviser Sarah Hollenbeck told the SMART board of directors Wednesday. Another $9 million will be needed to bring the financial picture into balance, Hollenbeck said.

“I think there is no question that we’re getting the clear sense that, even to continue operations, we have to think strongly about how to restructure and looking toward a (tax) renewal,” Damon Connolly, a board member and Marin County supervisor, said at the meeting...(SMART could go broke by 2024, analyst tells board)

Rob's comment:

Be sure to read the more than 100 comments to this story, particularly those by Richard Hall:

"Not only did they not have the money to build the promised line and bike path, they overcommitted on the backloaded bond and don't even have the money to run the shortened line for the duration of the current tax which runs until 2029; they run out of money to operate the train in 2024."

The SMART train is a perfect example, though smaller than the projects studied in this book, of how developers and project supporters operate against the public interest, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition:

"Martin Wachs interviewed public officials, consultants and planners who had been involved in transit planning cases in the US. He found a pattern of highly misleading forecasts of costs and patronage could not be explained by technical issues and were best explained by lying. 

In case after case, planners, engineers and economists told Wachs that they had to 'cook' forecasts in order to produce numbers that would satisfy superiors and get projects started, whether or not the numbers could be justified on technical grounds." (pages 46-47)

Once a project is started and criticism grows, project supporters argue that good money most be thrown after bad so the original investment isn't wasted!

Or as Robert Moses put it: ''Once you sink that first stake, they'll never make you pull it up.''

See also Why is everything late, over-budget, and broken in San Francisco?, SMART train beginning its death spiral? and Willie Brown: Dig a hole and fill it with money.