Jackson County and Union Pacific came to an understanding on purchasing the 15.5-mile Rock Island Corridor and two smaller spurs between Kansas City and Lee’s Summit for $59.9 million earlier this year. With the $10 million federal grant, the county residents will still need to fund a $50 million purchase.

But as the map above demonstrates, those purchases still leave the county well short of functioning commuter rail lines, without additional right-of-way or agreements with freight rail companies.

It is not simply a matter of purchasing track. The city has an ongoing dispute with freight companies over how commuter trains will arrive in downtown Kansas City. Regional planners are pushing for a connection with the streetcar at River Market, but Kansas City Southern Rail (KCSR) opposes this idea because it would jeopardize operations at Rock Creek Junction. KCSR suggests a connection at Union Station, but that could raise construction costs to $1.5 billion.

Using freight rail lines to get commuter rail into downtown Kansas City is no small problem, as the city is the country’s second largest freight rail hub, and rail lines downtown are already congested. Aside from providing a source of employment, having such a large freight rail hub has positive benefits for Kansas City’s manufacturing competitiveness. It would not be economically sound for the county to jeopardize freight efficiency to heavily subsidize the commutes of fewer than 4,000 residents.

While the county does not know how it will connect commuter rail to the city center, it is clear how it will pay for it: higher taxes. The county already has a plan to implement a county-wide 1 cent sales tax. But sales taxes are already very high in Kansas City. With the city still not giving up on a more expansive streetcar network, also to be funded with sales taxes, the increased tax burden may harm the city’s competitiveness. A yes vote is certainly not guaranteed.

The county does not yet have a plan for a functioning commuter rail system, and implementation depends on a tax that voters have not yet accepted. County officials should recall this before spending $50 million on right-of-way. They should also consider that Saint Louis is implementing Bus Rapid Transit, which can easily handle 4,000 commuters a day, for under $40 million. As for Kansas City residents, they should ask why city planners waste millions of dollars planning rail plan after rail plan without the approval, or even in the face of explicit disapproval, of voters.

The post Another Push for Rail Transit in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Normally, I would be thrilled. But, sadly, the study wildly misrepresents Abhi’s and my work.

We were cited in a study published by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), an organization that initially began as a public interest law firm founded by perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader. There are now many state-based PIRGs, who, according to the organization’s mission statement, stand up to powerful special interest groups in order to advocate for the American public.

In February 2010, U.S. PIRG published “The Right Track: Building a 21st Century High-Speed Rail System for America,” about the benefits of intercity high-speed rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama invited states to apply for federal funds that would be devoted either to updating railroads or to building entirely new rail systems. Authors Tony Dutzik, Siena Kaplan, and Phineas Baxandall argue in the paper that additional funding is necessary to bring America up to speed, as it were.

“The worst, most costly mistake America can make going into the 21st century is to not invest adequate resources in upgrading and expanding our passenger rail network,” write Dutzik, Kaplan, and Baxandrall (emphasis theirs).

This blog post is not to argue with PIRG’s conclusion — I believe others can, and have, argued persuasively that government-provided, high-speed rail is costly and usually doesn’t deliver what’s promised. Instead, this post is about academic integrity.

U.S. PIRG cites Abhi and me as the source for the following:

Missouri has applied for funding to pave the way for future 90 or 110 mph service continuing from St. Louis to Kansas City. The projects would reduce delays on this corridor by 48 percent, increasing the number of trains arriving on time from 19 percent to over 80 percent.

The cited source is an article we wrote titled, “High-speed rail predicted to travel much slower than advertised.” I re-read the article, hoping to find where Dutzik, Kaplan, and Baxandrall could have interpreted our work to indicate that “Missouri has applied for funding to pave the way for future 90 or 110 mph service continuing from St. Louis to Kansas City.”

I can’t find specific text that backs up the 90 or 110 mph service to which the PIRG authors refer. I did find the following in our article:

[…] trains traveling the route between Kansas City and Saint Louis would travel much slower. According to the state’s preliminary application for federal funding, those trains would travel an average of 55 mph after improvements, a 5-mph increase from the current average speed.

And:

In order for passenger trains to reach a maximum speed of 110 mph on the route between Kansas City and Saint Louis, a large portion of the track would need to be rebuilt as a double track, Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said.

“I don’t think anyone is seriously thinking of higher than 90 between Kansas City and Saint Louis,” said Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who studies transportation issues.

In fact, a takeaway point of our article was that there is a difference between maximum speed and average speed. Just because some state governors say that a high-speed rail train will hit speeds of 100 miles per hour doesn’t mean that your travel will remain at that constant speed. More than likely, your average speed will be much slower, with the train hitting that maximum speed for a short duration of time.

PIRG also notes, in the sentence attributed to us, that “The projects would reduce delays on this corridor by 48 percent, increasing the number of trains arriving on time from 19 percent to over 80 percent.”

According to the state’s application, we wrote in our article, trains were rarely arriving on time in Missouri:

According to the preliminary application, only 18.6 percent of trains running between Kansas City and Saint Louis arrived on time during the federal fiscal year of 2008.

So, I suppose that’s how the authors arrived at the figure of 19 percent. And we did write that the Missouri Department of Transporation (MoDOT) had estimated that, with improvements, the percentage of trains arriving on time would increase to 80 percent (we wrote that the estimated figure was 80 percent, not over 80 percent, as written in the PIRG paper). But Abhi and I also noted that trains had been arriving on time more than 90 percent of the time in recent months. And, to my dismay, I cannot find in our own work the 48-percent delay reduction figure that PIRG attributes to us.

Furthermore, it is strange that the PIRG authors attributed these figures to a brief article written by Abhi and me, rather than to the entities and published reports that are the direct source of the estimates we used. We simply reported what the transit improvement claims were; we did not verify them.

Finally, we represent merely one citation of 238 in this particular U.S. PIRG publication. If our work was misrepresented, it is certainly possible that other authors or facts were misrepresented, as well.

I will let Abhi have the last word, via this statement that he sent to me:

That researchers affiliated with the Show-Me Institute have been critical of high-speed rail projects in the state is readily apparent. In fact, pieces of published scholarship and blog content can be read as direct critiques of fundamental arguments that lie at the core of the paper released by PIRG. It is important to stress, however, that these disagreements are not on trial in this post.

This post was motivated not by an inclination to re-engage debate on high speed rail, but rather to offer a clarification of prior work and expound on a teachable moment: misrepresentation of this nature, however slight, damages the academic enterprise. Though the transgression was minor, such acts of misrepresentation represent a deficiency in either academic integrity or academic rigor that can damage the credibility of all parties involved. Scholarship with such errors invites not just skepticism on the quality of sources, but on the quality of the contentions they support.

The post U.S. PIRG Publication Misrepresents Substance of Show-Me Institute Article appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

So, now that we have an opportunity to “save,” “keep,” or “retain” — choose your favorite active verb — yet another downtown employer, Peabody Energy Corp., through an outlay of millions of dollars, our local elected officials contend that local government faces the prospect of either doing something or doing nothing. If St. Louis does nothing, then the city faces the prospect of possibly “losing” 500 jobs, which could tarnish the “image” of downtown. If St. Louis does something, then the city could pat itself on the back for giving tax dollars to a Fortune 500 company.

Development “incentives” are anything but. On their face, they may appear to influence the course of business development, affecting company decisions to locate or to relocate. In reality, private market forces and intangibles determine business behavior in the marketplace.

As best I can discern, the only behaviors that government “incentives” encourage are the development of relationships between government officials that have been statutorily charged with bestowing our money to entities of their choosing and the corporations that so often laugh all the way to the bank.

Here at the Show-Me Institute, we have a different term for “incentives” of this variety: Corporate Welfare.

The provision of these welfare benefits on a case-by-case basis creates such a distorted environment for the exchange of goods and services as to necessarily disadvantage all market actors that do not receive the benefits in question. Ironically, rather than solving problems, these programs create problems, most notably that of rent-seeking by others.

At the end of the day, when the 10-year bonds or the five- to 25-year tax abatements are firmly in place and not subject to judicial abrogation, they do nothing to address underlying business conditions that make plausible a company’s purported threats to relocate.

Government incentives for some create an economic burden on others, ultimately proving a disincentive for many to engage in commerce.

Count me among those supportive of the position that it’s unwise when local government spends tax money in this manner.

The post Should We Save, or Should They Go? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This initially sounds great (I am definitely in favor of a better-looking city), but after factoring in the cost of $89 million from Missouri taxpayers, the plan begins to lose its luster.

Private developers are footing the majority of the bill, but the remaining government intervention into this real estate market seems ill-advised. When an investment becomes economically viable, a private entrepreneur will usually dive in with no cost to the state. Whenever the government involves itself in a market, on the other hand, either through subsidies or special taxes, it entails some amount of dead-weight loss, but by placing some trust in reducing burdensome regulation and allowing the market to work, we can eliminate some of this wasted productivity.

If politicians had a demonstrated track record of choosing investments that paid off, there could be an argument for such targeted tax credits — but no such track record exists. If no private developer finds it worthwhile to redevelop a set of properties without receiving massive tax credits, the project is probably not an efficient way to invest our tax dollars, especially at this time when fiscal discipline is so important. The government would better serve the people of Missouri by trusting the market to do its job.

The post Faith in the Free Market appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The bridge at the heart of the lawsuit belongs to Union Pacific Railroad, which purchased it from the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad in 2004. The dispute has come about because in 1987 MKT reached an agreement with the state that gave the DNR nearly 200 miles of right-of-way for use by the Katy Trail project. That agreement specifically excluded the Booneville lift bridge, although the state was given assurances that the railroad would not modify the bridge in such a way that the Katy Trail would be disrupted.

Since that agreement was reached, the DNR has decided not to use the bridge for trail purposes, and the bridge is currently not being used by anyone at all. To make absolutely certain that the DNR’s intentions were clear, and to guarantee that the railroad had no further duty to maintain the bridge for trail purposes, the DNR officially released and permanently waived any rights it might have had to use the bridge.

The attorney general’s misguided lawsuit, which has already cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, basically claims that the DNR has no authority to say that it isn’t interested in using the bridge. Nixon wants to force the DNR — against its avowed desires — to claim a right to keep using the bridge even though it does not fit into their plans for the Katy Trail.

Even though two courts have now thoroughly rejected Nixon’s arguments about the bridge’s ownership, he is vowing to press on — at taxpayer expense — to the Missouri Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that Union Pacific, the rightful owner of the bridge, now wants to make use of its raw materials for another bridge and Nixon should be ashamed for using taxpayer dollars in his personal quest to prevent them from doing so.

The post Lawyers Continue Rolling in Taxpayer Dollars appeared first on Show-Me Institute.