The Chronicle‘s Mike Snyder reports that METRO’s light rail plans have run into problems:
An unexpected demand for additional justification for two planned Houston light rail lines raises doubts about Metro’s relationship with a federal agency it is counting on for funding, Metro President Frank Wilson said Tuesday.
A letter from Sherry Little, deputy administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, withdraws that agency’s approval of preliminary engineering studies and other elements of rail lines planned for the North and Southeast corridors.
The letter, which Wilson said arrived Friday, said Metro must do additional environmental studies, including public hearings, before it can acquire land and start construction. It said Metro’s October decision to build light rail in all five of its transit corridors, rather than bus rapid transit that could be converted to rail in four of them, requires the extra information and review.
Wilson said Metro already had provided almost all of the requested information and can quickly generate the rest. He said, however, that the letter’s content and tone suggest that the healthy working relationship the two agencies have enjoyed may be deteriorating.
“There is a very hard edge to this letter,” Wilson said. “They’re acting as if light rail transit is a whole different planet” from bus rapid transit, when “the only real difference is the vehicle.”
Apparently, the difference is somewhat more significant, or the technical experts in the FTA wouldn’t have asked for better documentation.
Just because the newspaper of record in Houston frequently rhapsodizes over METRO press releases and pretty graphs from transit organizations that merely advocate for community involvement (*wink*) doesn’t mean the people in D.C. who actually approve the funding for these boondoggles are similarly pliant. That seems to have piqued Mr. Wilson!
In reality, METRO’s zig from light rail for all corridors (as promised in the 2003 referendum), then zag to bus rapid transit for some corridors (nowhere mentioned in the 2003 referendum, but favored by the feds), then zig back to light rail for all corridors has created these difficulties, as the FTA letter makes clear — although if we are to believe Christof Spieler, who is quoted once again in the article (and who, admittedly, does produce very pretty graphs), this is no big deal.
Unsurprisingly, no critics of METRO’s light rail operations and policymaking are cited by Snyder.
UPDATE (12-06-2007): As Michelle Mittelstadt’s story in today’s Chronicle makes clear, METRO has only itself to blame for the possible delay to its construction plans:
Before Metro’s board voted in October to rework its plan for new rapid transit lines, the agency’s president was warned by the Federal Transit Administration that such a change could result in delays and force a return to the drawing board, federal officials said Wednesday.
That message was repeated with far greater detail when Metropolitan Transit Authority President Frank Wilson met with FTA officials in Washington on Nov. 14, FTA Associate Administrator Wes Irvin said.
“There was no blindsiding from this agency to Houston Metro,” Irvin said.
Wilson said this week that the FTA’s decision to withdraw its preliminary engineering approval for rail lines planned for the North and Southeast corridors, officially outlined in a letter to Metro on Friday, came as a shock.
Frank “Procurement Disaster” Wilson was not entirely forthcoming with the truth. How… shocking!
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