Tag Archives: Snow

Lessons for transit agency funding, finance, and governance – MBTA

It’s been a rough winter for transit in Boston. The agency’s general manager resigned; they’re buried in 90 inches of snow – it’s a natural disaster in slow-motion. All of those problems are piled on top of the MBTA’s structural deficiencies, outlined in this 2009 review of the agency’s finances. The review, led by former John Hancock CEO David D’Alessandro, paints a bleak picture.

Prior to 2000, the MBTA was backward-funding – sending a bill to the state to cover the organization’s annual operating deficit. A reform program sought to make the MBTA fiscally self-sufficient by dedicating a portion of the state’s sales tax revenue to the agency in exchange for a requirement that the MBTA balance their budget every year. This requirement to balance the budget every year would serve as an incentive for the MBTA to control costs and grow revenues.

Often, similar conversations emerge around WMATA, noting Metro’s lack of a dedicated funding source. However, the MBTA case study shows that dedicated funding alone isn’t a silver bullet. There are other elements to the MBTA’s structural deficit beyond funding.

The MBTA blueprint for self-sufficiency was based on several bad assumptions: The plan called for the MBTA to decrease operations costs by 2% a year. In actuality, they increased by an average of 5% per year. Fuel and energy costs account for a large portion of the shortfall as oil prices rose dramatically (and unexpectedly). Sales tax revenues were expected to grow at 3% per year, the actual growth averaged to 1% per year. The net impact, even with rising fare revenue, is a sea of red ink:

Cumulative impacts from the MBTA funding plan, showing large net negative impacts from the baseline.

There are two different kinds of error here: one is a failure to account for uncertainty in the forecast. Sales tax revenue is strongly influenced by the larger economy; fuel and energy prices are similarly based on much larger and unpredictable energy markets. The size of the error also increases with time from the original plan. Error in the MBTA’s fuel cost assumptions gets larger with each successive year from FY01 to FY08 – beware the cone of uncertainty.

The second type of error stems from wishful thinking. While it’s nice to plan on reducing operations costs, and there’s value in budgeting accordingly in order to set a goal to do so, it’s not clear that the legislation had a clear idea for how the MBTA would reduce those costs. Another analysis from the MBTA shows binding arbitration between the MBTA and labor unions imposed substantial wage increases with no regard for the MBTA’s operating deficit. In that light, assuming the MBTA’s operating costs would decrease seems like wishful thinking at best.

The D’Alessandro review notes that the MBTA’s headcount is actually down, yet wages are up. The agency showed progress in reducing costs, but they “could not pare staff below the number needed to move hundreds of thousands of riders across hundreds of routes each workday.” Baumol’s Cost Disease in action – increasing costs without a corresponding increase in productivity.

To meet the requirement to balance their annual budget, the MBTA sought to lower their annual debt service payments by refinancing their debt to push the principal into the out years and lower near term payments. Much of this refinancing simply ‘papered over’ the agency’s structural deficit. Again, the faulty assumptions of the financing plan exacerbated that structural deficit.

The MBTA’s debt load is also a major issue, one that dates back well before the Forward Funding plan. As a part of a 1991 consent decree to get approval for Boston’s Big Dig, the courts required a broad array of transit expansion projects as “environmental mitigation.” The decree did not identify any funding for those projects. Now, the MBTA has a massive amount of debt, of which approximately 2/3rds is dedicated to prior obligations before the Forward Funding agreement or towards state-mandated expansion projects.

(It’s worth noting the decision-making priorities involved in the Big Dig – the massive tunnelling project was only approved because the transit mitigation projects, backed by transit advocates as a way to hitch their wagon to omnipresent highway funding – yet those projects were never fully funded and now play a large role in exacerbating the agency’s stability. Imagine a project that simply removed the Central Artery and ‘replaced’ it with the long-imagined North/South rail link instead; or where the response to the Big Dig proposal was focused on re-defining the project itself rather than just tacking on ‘mitigation’ transit expansion.)

D’Alessandro’s conclusion is stark: “A private sector firm faced with this mountain of red ink would likely fold or seek bankruptcy.”

Yet, at the same time, the MBTA is “too big to fail.” Transit provides a critical service for any large city’s economy. Given the subsidized nature of public transit in the US, any reform must involve the public sector.

Airlines provide an interesting point of comparison: While US airlines operate for-profit businesses, the nature of air transport is deeply intertwined with the public sector. However, US Airlines are private, for profit corporations. Unlike the MBTA, they can seek legal protections to restructure their business through bankruptcy – and every major airline has done precisely that over the last decade. Airlines used bankruptcy to reduce operations costs from long-term labor agreements. German transit agencies have achieved fiscal stability using similar tools.

Unfortunately, the simplified narrative in the wake of the T’s failure to function normally in the face of Boston’s record snowfall has been to set up a false dichotomy between transit system expansion and system maintenance. In spite of the Big Dig deal, the challenge isn’t between expansion vs. maintenance, but between the political governance and funding mechanisms and the technical requirements to operate and maintain the system.

This political challenge isn’t limited to transit. Highway spending is overwhelmingly focused on expanding the system, at the expense of maintaining the system we already have. Angie Schmidt at Streetsblog put it bluntly: More money for transportation won’t matter if we don’t change how that money is spent.

Forecasting uncertainty in practice: Snowperbole

Example of snow forecast communicating levels of undertainty; image from the Capital Weather Gang

Example of snow forecast communicating levels of uncertainty; image from the Capital Weather Gang

Because making accurate predictions is extremely difficult, we can dramatically improve both the accuracy of forecasts and enable effective communication about the forecast by embracing the uncertainty involved in the forecast. This allows decision-makers to both use the information available while understanding the limits of those predictions.

Following forecasts for a “potentially historic” storm set to hit New York and New England, public officials in New York City went to great lengths to emphasize the dangers of the storm. The Governor closed down New York’s subways in anticipation of the storm (showing one of the quirks of New York’s transit governance, local transit is under state control).

There was just one problem: the storm mostly missed NYC.

In their forecast post-mortem, the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang highlighted the key shortcomings of the forecast – a failure to present the level of uncertainty in the forecast.

Why were the forecasts so bad?

It’s simple: Many forecasters failed to adequately communicate the uncertainty in what was an extremely complicated forecast. Instead of presenting the forecast as a range of possibilities, many outlets simply presented the worst-case scenario.

Especially for New York City, some computer model forecasts were extremely dire, predicting upwards of 30 inches of snow – shattering all-time snowfall records. The models producing these forecasts (the NAM model and European model) had a sufficiently good enough track record to take them seriously.

However, some model forecasts (e.g. the GFS model) signaled reason for caution. They predicted closer to a foot of snow.

Part of the challenge here is that most of the forecast was accurate. This was a historic storm; the storm simply tracked a bit further to the east. Areas like New York City were right on the margins, where a small change to the inputs can mean a large change in the outcome – and the forecast did not adequately convey that uncertainty. Add in the fact that the forecast miss happened to be the largest city in the United States, and you have a very public error.

When a forecast is so sensitive to small changes (eastern Long Island, not far away, received 30-plus inches), it is imperative to loudly convey the reality that small changes could have profound effects on what actually happens.

It’s easy to second-guess public officials making key decisions like closing transit systems after the fact (and after the forecast bust), but they can only act on the information that they have in front of them. It’s easy to argue that it is better to be safe than sorry (and this is certainly true – it is better safe than sorry) but there is a real risk of eroding public confidence in these kinds of decisions when the forecast doesn’t pan out. (It doesn’t help that despite closing the subways, the MTA’s snow plan called for trains to remain in operation without passengers to keep the tracks clear of snow)

As some meteorologists suggest, conveying the uncertainty in their forecasts should be a larger element of both the forecast and communication. It’s not just a matter of using the best information available, but also understanding the uncertainty involved.

‘Snow’ links: finding the right level of regulation

Mush on my windowsill.

I’m sitting in DC, looking out a window at a mushy, mostly liquid ‘snow’ storm named after an obscure federal budgetary procedure. There’s a joke in there somewhere about failing to meet the hype. But instead, I’ll offer some links to articles of interest over the past few weeks.

Regulatory challenges. Slate blogger Matt Yglesias is buying a new house, and instead of selling his old condo, he plans on renting it out and turning it into an income property. He documents the bureaucratic red tape encountered in the process to make this business legal, highlighting the absurdity that drives people nuts about government bureaucracy – the fact that none of the hoops you must jump through seem to actually matter to the regulatory issue at hand:

The striking thing about all this isn’t so much that it was annoying—which it was—but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be—making sure I’m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation. The part where the unit gets inspected to see if it’s up to code is a separate step. I was instructed to await a scheduling call that ought to take place sometime in the next 10 business days.

Yglesias notes that DC fares poorly on many metrics of regulatory efficiency and friendliness to entrepreneurs. Granted, those rankings all ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as they often fail to measure what really matters and instead focus on indicators not directly linked to entrepreneurship (there is also the matter of state-by-state rankings lumping in a city-state like DC into their metric – not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison).

The real issue, as Yglesias touches on in a later blog post, isn’t whether regulations are good or bad, but whether the regulations we have are effective and if they cover the right topics:

The way I would put this is that the American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated. It is much too difficult to get business and occupational licenses; there are excessive restrictions on the wholesaling and retailing of alcoholic beverages; exclusionary zoning codes cripple the economy; and I’m sure there are more problems than I’m even aware of.

At the same time, it continues to be the case that even if you ignore climate change, there are huge problematic environmental externalities involved in the energy production and industrial sectors of the economy. And you shouldn’t ignore climate change! We are much too lax about what firms are allowed to dump into the air. On the financial side, too, it’s become clear that there are really big problems with bank supervision. The existence of bad rent-seeking rules around who’s allowed to cut hair is not a good justification for the absence of rules around banks’ ability to issue no-doc liar’s loans. The fact that it’s too much of a pain in the ass to get a building permit is not a good justification for making it easier to poison children’s brains with mercury. Now obviously all these rules are incredibly annoying. I am really glad, personally, that I don’t need to take any time or effort to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury emissions rules. But at the same time, it ought to be a pain in the ass to put extra mercury into the air. We don’t want too much mercury! We don’t want too much bank leverage!

The more ideological stance (regulation is bad!) might be easier to communicate; it might resonate with the public based on their experience at the local DMV. It’s a complicated reality, and our regulations not only need to reflect that, but also likely need periodic review and revision.

Regarding a common issue in the urban context, Matt writes:

“This city has too many restaurants to choose from” is not a real public policy problem—it’s only a problem for incumbent restaurateurs who don’t want to face competition.

This reflects some of the tension on liquor license moratoria in DC (see the discussion about IMBY DC). The contrasting position is that restaurants do indeed create some negative externalities that need to be addressed. The challenge for public policy is then in addressing the negatives without falling into the trap of mis-stating the problem.

Regulatory reform. Assuming we correctly state the problem, then what do we do to change things? DC is forming a task force to look at these issues. In some googling of related articles, I ran across an old op-ed from Helder Gil about a potential direction for regulatory reform, radical simplification:

One solution is the radical simplification of existing business laws and regulations. “Radical simplification” is the wholesale rethinking of a law’s original intent, its current actual effect and whether those two points still intersect in a way that advances public policy.

Consider the contrast to DC’s zoning regulation review process, and the power of the status quo bias. Even the terminology of ‘zones’ is no longer useful, Roger Lewis writes:

Let’s dump the word “zoning,” as in zoning ordinances that govern how land is developed and how buildings often are designed. Land-use regulation is still needed, but zoning increasingly has become a conceptually inappropriate term, an obsolete characterization of how we plan and shape growth.

I would go farther than Lewis and suggest that the terminology is not the only problem; the content of the regulations is also problematic. Lewis goes on to list numerous shortcomings of the existing regulatory framework – perhaps inadvertently making the case for radical simplification?

Beware non-governmental regulation. To be clear, these challenges are not solely governmental. The burden often falls on the government in protecting the public purpose, but governments are not the only entities with the common good in mind. Consider the home-owners association.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on an epic legal battle between a Fairfax County HOA and a member over a very minor size violation for a political sign. HOA representatives on a power trip sought to impose penalties for violating rules that were not expressly granted to the HOA in the association’s bylaws. The HOA lost the case, the resulting legal fees bankrupted the association, forcing it to pursue the sale of a privately-owned park area.

These kinds of battles are common – and often invoke words like ‘tyranny’. They highlight both challenges of regulation and also of governance. Clearly, the content of some regulations are an issue, but so is the process for changing or even just reviewing those regulations.

Perhaps HOAs are not strictly necessary for a grouping of semi-detached homes (as is the case in the Fairfax County example), but some level of common-area administration is necessary in multi-unit buildings, no matter how you slice it. The need for HOAs also raises the question about the role of home-ownership in multi-unit buildings and the regulatory environment that enables it (see Stephen Smith asking “why do condos even exist?” at Market Urbanism) – which, after all, is a relatively young and untested legal field.

Snowpocalypse III – Linkage

Image from Wayan Vota on Flickr

Some more pleas for realistic expectations: Ryan Avent chimes in on the economics of it all, and Jon Chait notes the basic, physical problem with dealing with so much snow in such a short period of time:

In my neighborhood, like much of Washington, people park along the street. When it snows, plows go down and shove the snow away from the middle of the street and toward the sides. When it snows large amounts, the plows create massive snow barriers between the cars and the street. Digging out one’s car becomes a huge task. You have to scoop all the snow off the car itself, around the perimeter of the car, and this is just a tiny warm-up to the major task, when you have to breach the snow wall so that your car can get out to the street. This is even harder than it sounds. Every shovelful has to be carried back form the middle of the street and deposited on the front lawn.

Before the latest snowfall, the barriers in my street stood at around three or four feet. When the plow comes, they’re just going to get bigger. The nearly-intractable problem here is that there’s simply no place to put the snow. All the spare space along the side of the street is taken up by parked cars. The snow has nowhere to go.

One part of the solution is to truck the snow away to a remote location. Washington is already beginning to do this. With enough money to hire enough trucks and equipment, the government could probably remove all the snow. But this is a massive project that would take an unthinkable commitment to finish. I’m wondering if I’ll see my office again until spring, or spring-like weather.

This is the crux of the issue. Where is it going to go? Who’s going to move it? Any solution requires participation from the city’s residents.

Gabe Klein agrees – where is it going to go? Dr. Gridlock’s blog has some good notes on the challenges:

“This is no longer just a plow operation,” said Gabe Klein, director of the District Department of Transportation. “There is too much snow accumulation on some streets for the plows to adequately move the snow, the snow has to be physically removed and hauled away. This will add some time to our cleanup efforts but we have crews working around-the-clock to minimize how long and to assist us in being as efficient as possible.”

In addition to 250 to 270 pieces of equipment for plowing and treating roadways, the city has deployed specialized equipment such as backhoes, frontloaders, dump trucks, and dumpsters.

Dumpsters, eh? Sounds unorthodox. Speaking of unorthodox…

Snow removal tools, realistic and not: The City Paper has some great suggestions for makeshift snow removal tools – but missed one of the obvious ones I’ve seen out there – the dustpan. In previous snow storms, I’ve seen cutting boards and spatulas making their way from the kitchen to the front yard. Still, that’s not as sweet as the flamethrower option (appropriately tagged under ‘cool shit‘).

Don’t bring the grill inside: Just don’t do it. Seriously.

And then there’s this:

Snow perspective, in graph form.

Since we’ve now eclipsed the seasonal record, it’s worth noting how unusual it is for DC to get lots of snow in a season, to say nothing about snow storms coming back to back. Let’s look at the history:

We’re now well above that blue star for the 1898-99 season record. As Gabe Klein noted on Kojo yesterday, you can’t budget for those intervening years and then expect to deal with the extraordinary snowfalls.

Likewise, there are physical limits to how fast you can remove snow, and when the snow is accumulating faster than that rate, you’ve got a problem.

City Paper has a survey of ANC commissioners, asking about their street conditions. Gary Thompson has some good perspective on snow removal:

Gary Thompson, of ANC 3G, who lives in the 2800 block of Northampton Street NW: “My own street’s been plowed very well,” he says. “They’ve done an excellent job plowing, especially under the circumstances. There have been a few forgotten streets here or there, like a dead end culdesac,” but the city is catching up. “People are very quick to complain,” he says. “But Mother Nature is what it is. It’s a pretty powerful storm.”

Ben Thomas, not so much:

Ben Thomas, of ANC 7E, who lives in the 1100 block of Chaplin Street SE: A plow came by sometime last night, he reports (the second of two times a plow has made an appearance during D.C.’s three snowstorms this season). “They don’t really do anything but pile the snow against peoples’ cars,” he says. But the street is at least passable. “I saw a car go by a little while ago,” he says.

That’s what plowing does – it moves snow around. And that works pretty well when you get a little snow here and a little snow there. When you get 40 inches in a matter of a few days, there’s only so much you can do within the realm of what’s physically possible.

Perspective, please.

Snowpocalypse III – the removal

Photo from InspirationDC on Flickr.

Well, it’s official. The winter of 2009-10 is now the snowiest winter on record in DC, eclipsing the snow season of 1898-99 That’s saying something, since DC’s current official weather station is at National Airport, which has abnormal weather conditions compared to the rest of the District, thanks to being surrounded by water on all sides and at low elevation. That 1898-99 record wasn’t taken at DCA of course, since the airport then was nothing but Potomac River mud flats. Hell, heavier than air human aviation wasn’t even around yet.

So, we’ve got a lot of snow. Now we have to deal with it.

While grades for this current snowfall are obviously yet to be determined, DC did an excellent job for the first round back in December. The response to round two this past weekend was also, all things considered, quite effective.

I bring this up because I hear a lot of complaints about snow removal, and almost all of them strike me as a product of unrealistic expectations and a lack of experience dealing with snow.

Snow doesn’t magically disappear. Having grown up and lived in several cities in the Midwest frostbelt, I’ve dealt with plenty of snow. It seems to me that many DC residents equate snow plowing with making the snow disappear – this simply isn’t the case. Plowing moves snow around. In the Midwest, you get used to this – snow sticks around, and you learn to deal with it. Snow Emergency routes will get plowed down to the pavement, but most residential streets will have snow on them until winter ends – this is considered ‘plowed’ because those streets are more than passable.

Still, snow takes up a lot of space – even Minneapolis has run out of places to put it this winter, forcing them to implement permanent one-side parking restrictions as the ever-growing snowbanks are encroaching on street space.

Shoveling is your responsibility. Plenty of DC bloggers have noted this (as is the case in just about every snow city in the US), but the responsibility for sidewalk snow removal falls on residents/tenants/occupants/owners.

“It shall be the duty of every person, partnership, corporation, joint-stock company, or syndicate in charge or control of any building or lot of land within the fire limits of the District of Columbia, fronting or abutting on a paved sidewalk, whether as owner, tenant, occupant, lessee, or otherwise, within the first 8 hours of daylight after the ceasing to fall of any snow or sleet, to remove and clear away, or cause to be removed and cleared away, such snow or sleet from so much of said sidewalk as is in front of or abuts on said building or lot of land.” (D.C. Code § 9-601)

There are good reasons for this – the city is struggling to deal with the current snowfall – adding miles and miles of sidewalks to their duty list would make the task impossible. There’s absolutely no way such removal could be handled in a timely fashion. It’s your civic duty, it’s good public policy, and (when people are engaged with the snow culture), it works far better than any other option.

Perspective matters. Other cities might be better at dealing with snow, and they might have a stronger snow culture to deal with shoveling and whatnot – but let’s not forget that this particular snowfall is exceptional. These kinds of storms, dumping several feet of snow on an area, will cripple even the best-prepared cities. As noted above, this is the most snow DC’s ever had on record. Sure, it’s a ballpark total similar to the average snowfall in Minneapolis, but the snow in Minnesota comes in small increments that are much easier to deal with than the huge storms we’ve seen.

All of that record snowfall has basically come in three storms. Even the best prepared snow cities will be slowed down significantly by storms of that magnitude, especially when they hit back-to-back.

Snowpocalypse III – time to assess blame

Blame this guy:

Snowpocalypse II – the aftermath

Some more pics from walking around Capitol Hill today:

Different shoveling philosophies

Those who’ve lived in snowy places know this as a matter of fact – it’s a lot easier to shovel 5 inches of snow 5 different times throughout a storm than it is to try to shovel 25 inches all at once. End result? A narrow little path. Better than not shoveling at all, however.

Eastern Market Metro canopy

The snowplow brings mixed blessings for those trying to dig out

Lincoln Park

Makeshift sledding in the alley next to Mott's Market

Salt and infrastructure beneath the city

Ever wonder where all that road salt comes from? A question that’s quite topical today. Mammoth has a post up on an operating salt mine beneath the city of Detroit.

Detroit Salt Mine

John Nystuen has a discussion of the legal implications, acquiring mineral rights for salt 1,000 feet below the surface of an active city. His map of the area shows the approximate extent of the mine in Southwest Detroit.

Approximate extent of the Detroit Salt Mine. Image from John Nystuen

Nystuen notes that the shape of the mine lends itself to the economies of scale in negotiating mineral rights contracts with the larger, industrial landowners. The main east-west axis that connects these areas lies beneath a rail yard. Much of this area of Detroit is extremely industrial. The middle branch of the mine above extends right up to the edge of Ford’s massive Rouge complex. This above-ground landscape has some fascinating visuals, particularly as it ages but remains in use.

The layers of underground infrastructure are fascinating – everything from storm and sanitary sewers, subways, aqueducts, and other utilities – to active industry such as this. DC doesn’t have the same kind of active resource extraction, but it does have some massive water supply infrastructure that feeds the city’s reservoirs. Not all of it is active, either – but the vestiges of these underground operations on the surface of the city is quite interesting.

McMillan Sand Filtration site. Image from M.V. Jantzen on flickr.

This isn’t new ground for Mammoth. Mammoth’s interest in the forms of infrastructure and the design of spaces “looking for an architect” is fascinating, I always look forward to reading their thoughts on the matter. Of particular interest is the disconnect between designed, architectural spaces and networked, infrastructural ones. For some reason, there’s enough of a disconnect where the infrastructural frameworks lack the design gravitas – not everything can be a Calatrava-designed bridge, nor does that bridge alone show the true nature of the network’s design.

Metro snow operations

Given the heavy (and ongoing) snowfall, Metro is only operating rail service in select underground locations, in order to prevent trains from getting stranded as accumulating snow makes it difficult to maintain contact with the third rail, and also to use existing tunnels to keep rail cars dry and operable, rather than buried in snow and exposed to the elements in Metro’s rail yards.

The adjusted service map looks like this:

Metro's snow map. Image from WMATA.

Riding the trains today, the service is essentially single-tracking in the underground portions of the system. The segments of each open line in the middle have both tracks open, with each line essentially having two trains to cover the entire length of a line – they shuttle back and forth on a single track, passing each other on the double-tracked stretch in the middle.

Waits for the trains are long, and as is usual during single tracking operations, the PIDS aren’t all that reliable for train arrival times:

PID at U St, during snowpocalypse

In the single-tracked areas, the extra track is being used for train storage so that there are rail cars ready to enter service as soon as tracks are cleared:

Storage train riding out the storm at U St.

Metro did a good job of getting the system up and running again after the December 19th storm, opting to prepare the entire system for Monday’s rush rather than restore service immediately. They’ll likely do the same this time around.

City Block

a work in progress…