But Good Enough For Fox News!

Howard Kurtz, those with long memories will know, had sweet sinecures with both CNN and the Daily Beast (bureau chief!) for reasons that are not easily explicable but were surely bad. He was fired from both in part because of his disgraceful smear of Jason Collins, and in part because he was spending inordinate amounts of time at the platform afforded by his other two jobs to plug an obscure, terrible, and now defunct website. It could safely be inferred that his love for the “Daily Download” was motivated by another conflict of interest, which he denied. You will be highly unsurprised to learn that Occam’s Razor had this right:

Kurtz and Ashburn’s relationship centered on The Daily Download, a puzzling tech website owned by Ashburn (and funded by The Knight Foundation) that culminated, in May 2013, with a video of Kurtz and Ashburn smearing NBA player Jason Collins for coming out as gay. Kurtz was later fired from The Daily Beast and abruptly departed CNN after denying any substantial involvement with the Daily Download.

Yet in a grant proposal submitted by Maryland Public Television to the Knight Foundation on December 10, 2010, Kurtz is listed, along with Ashburn, as a salaried “co-host” of the Daily Download’s 60-second “digital reviews,” which aired on public television, and a “daily blogger” at the Download’s website. One year after that submission, Knight awarded Maryland Public Television $230,000, the majority of which went to Ashburn’s own media company, which helped pay for Kurtz’s extracurricular position.

[...]

The initial proposal’s budget allocated $100,000 each for two Daily Download “hosts,” who in an accompanying “budget narrative” are specifically identified as Kurtz and Ashburn. The same section indicates the pair planned to donate an unspecified portion of their salaries back to Maryland Public Television. (Earlier in the proposal, Kurtz’s donation is described as an in-kind contribution worth $50,000; Ashburn’s donation is not detailed.)

However, a revised budget submitted by Ashburn on November 16, 2011—a year later, and one week after Knight accepted the proposal—indicates that one “host/executive editor” would receive $160,000, and that the other “host” would receive $135,000—a significant increase in each case. (How or whether Kurtz’s “donation” still factored into his compensation is left unspecified.)

There is little doubt that the “hosts” are Kurtz and Ashburn. Throughout these internal documents and in the Knight Foundation’s March 2012 press release, they are the only individuals ever designated as hosts of the Daily Download.

Nice work if you can etc.

At least he’s found a home at Fox News, where he can do some real reporting, like scrolling through Facebook photo galleries for cleavage.

Across 110th Street

Today’s edition of First World Problems:

Anyone who wonders why law school applications are plunging and there’s widespread malaise in many big law firms might consider the case of Gregory M. Owens.

The silver-haired, distinguished-looking Mr. Owens would seem the embodiment of a successful Wall Street lawyer. A graduate of Denison University and Vanderbilt Law School, Mr. Owens moved to New York City and was named a partner at the then old-line law firm of Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood, and after a merger, at Dewey & LeBoeuf.

Today, Mr. Owens, 55, is a partner at an even more eminent global law firm, White & Case. A partnership there or any of the major firms collectively known as “Big Law” was long regarded as the brass ring of the profession, a virtual guarantee of lifelong prosperity and job security.

But on New Year’s Eve, Mr. Owens filed for personal bankruptcy.

According to his petition, he had $400 in his checking account and $400 in savings. He lives in a rental apartment at 151st Street and Broadway. He owns clothing he estimated was worth $900 and his only jewelry is a Concord watch, which he described as “broken.” . . .

Mr. Owens has been well paid by most standards, but not compared with top partners at major firms, who make in the millions. . . When Mr. Owens first became a partner at Dewey, Ballantine, he made about $250,000, in line with other new partners. At Dewey & LeBoeuf, his income peaked at over $500,000 during the flush years before the financial crisis. In 2012, he made $351,000, and last year, while at White & Case, he made $356,500. He listed his current monthly income as $31,500, or $375,000 a year. And he has just over $1 million in retirement accounts that are protected from creditors in bankruptcy.

How far does $375,000 a year go in New York City? Strip out estimated income taxes ($7,500 a month), domestic support ($10,517), insurance ($2,311), a mandatory contribution to his retirement plan ($5,900), and routine expenses for rent ($2,460 a month) transportation ($550) and food ($650) and Mr. Owens estimated that he was running a small monthly deficit of $52, according to his bankruptcy petition. He has gone back to court to get some relief from his divorce settlement, so far without any success.

As the story explains, Owens isn’t really a partner at all any more, but rather a “service partner,” which in the Orwellian argot of big law firms means he’s been “de-equitized,” i.e., he’s salaried employee of the firm, just like the associates and paralegals and secretaries and the guy selling coke in the mail room.

Now if I had a dollar for every story I’ve read in recent years about how mid-six figures doesn’t go very far in Manhattan (or, apparently, Harlem) any more, I wouldn’t have to be making the big bucks by blogging for LGM. Still, this tale of woe is nice example of how economic distress, above the level of brute starvation, is always positional: Owens’ annual salary, stupendous as it might seem in the eyes of the madding crowd, is just two weeks worth of pay for Morton Pierce, his protector at both Dewey and White & Case, and the man who at present is probably standing between Owens and flat-out unemployment. (“White shoe” — meaning old-money WASP — firms like White & Case do not like to see themselves featured in this sort of reportage).

A few other points:

*Citing this kind of thing for why law school applications are down is equivalent of dissuading dreams of athletic greatness by citing the case of a marginal NBA player who got cut and is now having to get by on a $300,000 salary playing for Bologna in the Italian league. Despite his recent status degradation, Owens is still very near the top of the law graduate pyramid.

*This story also reflects the extent to which private legal practice is, even at the most stratospheric levels, now more than ever a glorified sales job. Pierce makes rain, so he and a tiny handful of peers gets paid millions. The most skilled technician, by contrast, is exponentially less valuable to a firm, especially since the value a technically skilled lawyer adds can disappear overnight in the wake of a change in the economic or regulatory environment.

*Owens’ current salary is higher than that of 99.8% of non-instutitionalized adult Americans (or 99.65% of such people who are working or currently seeking work).

Update: Anyone interested in the gritty financial details can read Owens’ petition here.

Canada: Proud Exporter of Insane Children’s Programming

If you’re the parent of a toddler/pre-schooler, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with offerings from channels like Sprout and Disney Jr. . But I think Nick Jr. takes the Emeril Lagasse approach to the kiddie entertainment by partnering with Canadian production companies and insaneing things up a notch.

I’ve talked a bit about “Dino Dan,” but I have a feeling I just left you wanting more, so here’s the more.

“Dino Dan” is a show about a supernaturally-annoying 10-year-old Canadian boy who may or may not be quite mentally ill, and can’t get two goddamn words out of his mouth without mentioning some dumb dinosaur. Now, in the real world (America), Dino Dan would be treated like the world’s most irritating possibly insane nerd, but in La La Land (Canada) everyone can’t wait (and they don’t need to, ‘cuz they’re coming roughly every 5 seconds) for Dan’s next info-nugget… and looks at him raptly as he poops them out. To be fair, that’s what the kids do. The adults look at him like “OH, DAN” with a soupcon of “my soul weeps for this damaged child.” Mostly I reckon they’re smiling because they’re thankful none of the dinos have instructed him to kill anybody. THAT WE KNOW OF.

But the producers of “Dino Dan” aren’t content to stop here. No, they have to insane it up one more notch by casting The Kids in the Hall as teachers and this guy–THIS GUY–as Dan’s uncle.

This poor guy can’t take one more fact about dinosaurs. Not one more.

“Paw Patrol” is about a town called “Adventure Bay,” its endearingly incompetent mayor and its endearingly dumb residents, who elected to put a child and a group of puppies in charge of all their emergency services. It is also about the endearingly dumb child who is always needing the Paw Patrol’s services. Ditto for the endearingly dumb marine biologist, Captain Turbot.

The pups are kept pretty busy by the town’s daily “emergencies:” A winter storm threatens a farmer’s crops. A wind turbine blade breaks. The dumb child steers his homemade go-cart into a “busy” street. The mayor loses her “purse chicken,” Chicoletta. Fun fact: In any given show, you will hear the name “Chicoletta” 50 bajillion times. And I’m only exaggerating a little.

Days go by, emergencies are handled and never is it acknowledged that a small child and a group of talking puppies are the town’s only non-idiot residents. It’s…pretty great.

Presumably Chase, “Chase is on the case!” the police dog will never be called out to a domestic violence situation. And if he does–Since this is Adventure Bay (in Canada)–you can assume he’s just breaking up a fight between siblings who both wanted to take out the recycling bin.

Full disclosure: I actually think both shows are really, really cute. “Paw Patrol” has really grown on me, which is great because my son is obsessed with the Halloween episode. I’ve probably seen it 20 times.

If I ever have another child, she will surely be named “Chicoletta.”

So Many Kristallnachts

You might prefer to think that the crank letter Erik noted earlier was nutpicking, only the conservative blogosphere finds his ideas fascinating and would like to subscribe to his newsletter. Marginal increases in tax rates, some attempts to enforce federal regulations, an isolated minor incident of vandalism — just like systematic paramilitary violence and concentration camps, I’m sure you’ll agree. (Cf. also “being criticized for demanding more taxpayer money after you’ve nearly blown up the world economy to reward your workers for doing such a bang-up job is just like being tortured to death by a mob.”)

It should also be noted that the original letter writer is a man of many talents, having written a novel that combines bad wealth porn with bad softcore porn-porn. Subscribers to third-tier winger publications should expect their copies in the mail imminently.

…More from Krugman.

Guest Post: One Last Post About the LSA

[Many readers will be familiar with Michael Bérubé -- distinguished scholar and author, outgoing Grand Poobah of the MLA, blogger emeritus, and no relation to the Bérubé doing a surprisingly decent job coaching the Flyers and sadly probably the best player the Flames received in exchange for Doug Gilmour. He's been engaged in some fascinating distinctions on Facebook concerning the MLA and the academic job market, and has graciously agreed to allow his final word on the subject to be published here so we can discuss it. --SL]

So I am trying to figure out just how I got caught up in debates about the Modern Language Association even though I am no longer an officer or committee member. In fact, I have no official relation to the MLA any more– I am just an ordinary member (though people still address me as “Mr. President,” and I have to say it does have a nice ring to it). So why do I bother, and why do I get defensive and frustrated whenever I hear “the MLA has not done anything about X” (where X is usually “the working conditions of contingent faculty”)?

And then the other night I realized: this here is one reason why.

People– MLA committee members, contingent faculty themselves– worked on that document. (MLA staff helped!) It was written so that people– faculty on and off the tenure track– could take it to their home institutions, to deans and provosts and department heads, and get stuff done to improve the working conditions of contingent faculty. And it incorporates the MLA Statement on Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members, which I wrote way back in aught-three when I was an Executive Council member. Is it enough to end the exploitation of adjuncts altogether? No. No one thing is. But it is the Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession’s blueprint for people who want to try to improve contingent faculty working conditions on their campuses. (You can print it out and take it to your campus, free of charge!)

Now, most of the time, when I point this out to people, suddenly the goalposts move. People who had just finished saying “the MLA has never addressed this” (and who had no idea that the MLA even has a Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession) then shift to “oh yeah, of course I know the MLA has addressed this, but it hasn’t done anything to enforce it”– as if any scholarly organization, be it the MLA, the AHA, the AAA, or the APA, could do that. For comparison’s sake: the AAUP has a comprehensive policy document on contingent faculty. It is terrific. The AAUP can’t enforce that, either.

(As an aside, it really is remarkable what people think the MLA can do. For example: I like very much Miriam Burstein’s argument that departments should fund their graduate student jobseekers both before and after the Ph.D. Seriously– you want to run a graduate program? Fine. Then fund your graduate students, especially when they are looking for jobs. But when she says the MLA can monitor and penalize departments that don’t do this, I had to ask how. The exchange is here. Seriously, if a UC-Riverside did a bad thing– I am talking totally hypothetically here– and the MLA banned it from the convention and the Job Information List, and this hypothetical UC-Riverside advertised elsewhere and conducted its interviews by Skype instead, who among the legions of academic jobseekers would say “hell no, I’m not taking a tenure-track job at this hypothetical UC-Riverside– why, the MLA banned it from their convention!”)

And of course, on another side note, there are plenty of other things I did with the organization over the past ten years. I did these things for many reasons, one of which was that I was deeply frustrated with how the organization worked in the 1990s, and decided to get inside and help change it. Like by serving on the task force that produced this document, one important aspect of which tried to open the doors for a wider range of scholarly work online and off. Or like by drafting policy statements on foreign language learning, attacks on ethnic studies, the closing of university presses, and the right of scholars to travel freely across international borders, with a special emphasis on US borders. The reason these things needed to be written is that the MLA, like other scholarly organizations, is asked to sign other groups’ statements on such things all the time. Especially with regard to foreign language study, those statements tend to be inadequate for the purposes of most MLA members, insofar as they are all about economic competitiveness and national security. So I wanted to help fix that, and I modeled these on AAUP Policy Documents and Reports (the “Redbook”).

So when people say “the MLA has never bothered to address X in the past twenty-thirty-whatever years,” they are actually pissing on the work of a whole mess of people– not just me, but MLA staff and MLA members from all ranks of the profession. (And of course the only recompense MLA committee members receive for their hard work as editors, referees, and task force members– and only if they serve on a committee that meets F2F– is a trip to New York, a couple of meals, and a hotel stay. Sure enough, because academe is chock full of cranks, people have been complaining about that too, including someone who was offended that the hotel he stayed in was too nice for a humanities organization. Amazing but true fact.) Some of the people who say this actually do know better, but have MLAnimosities that go back to the time of the Boer War. But most of the people who say it don’t have the first clue what the MLA has or hasn’t done, or can and can’t do. It is funny … I am feeling an uncanny sense of déjà dit….

If you click on that last “hyper” link, check out the paragraph about what happened when I actually took an MLA statement back to Penn State in 2002. It’s paragraph number eight, if you’re in a hurry. The antepenultimate one. The point is that MLA statements about the profession are supposed to work that way: people are supposed to take them to their departments and colleges and see what they can do. And note that someone responded in comments that the MLA should make the Job Information List free to all members. Guess what? They did that! And you know what else– one of those senior staff members who is the object of that slash-all-the-senior-staff-salaries-because-somehow-adjuncts-will-benefit petition* negotiated a deal with Interfolio that drastically reduced the costs of job searches for jobseekers. Just because it was the right thing to do.

Oh, and if you want information about academic labor and staffing at individual institutions– yes, every single institution of higher education in the United States– with comparative data from 1995 and 2009? (It’s very helpful if you are trying to figure out which institutions have cut back drastically on tenure-track lines.) Check out this awesome database, also compiled by one of those senior staff members whose work nobody understands or credits (or, sometimes, deliberately pisses on, because Boer War). If you’re a contingent faculty member at any institution in the US, you can upload your information to that database anonymously. It’s a lot like Josh Boldt’s Adjunct Project– to which, of course, it includes a handy “hyper” link!

OK, that is all. I am going back to posting things about Jamie, because that is what social media were invented for. And of course I have an Institute to run and a sixty-student 100-level science fiction course to teach. So if you’re an MLA member and you want the MLA to do stuff differently, nominate yourself for a committee that does things you care about. They take self-nominations all the time, partly to get new people involved and partly because self-nominated people almost always accept when they are asked to serve.

______

* As if that petition weren’t misguided enough as it is, some of the signers are even more amazing– including people in the upper echelons of the profession, like David Halperin of the University of Michigan (not an MLA member, but apparently pissed that there are some MLA staff in his income bracket), and a guy named Kyle Whitney who writes, “(1) Don’t make yourselves rich off of us (2) Use our membership dues and fees for something other than making executives millionaires.” Is Kyle Whitney actually paying membership dues to the MLA? Please. Is the Pope a Marxist? In fact, of the 52 “supporters” who signed that petition, gave their names, and offered reasons for their support, only six – six– are MLA members. And there’s more: of those six, four are “life members”– who pay no membership dues (this includes a named chair at an elite private college). You will not be surprised to learn that the author of the petition is not an MLA member, either. But the point remains that the MLA is ripping these people off, and that must stop. Or, as one signer puts it, “The MLA hierarchy–now accepted practice–that allows adjuncts to work in a system of indentured servitude is inherently unfair.” Bad MLA, allowing adjuncts to work in that system for its own benefit and then charging them $6.25 for granola bars. Really, of all the weird-ass things I have seen in this business, this year’s complaints might very well be the weirdest-assest. The entire “ratio” thing is based on the premise that the MLA employs adjuncts, and has taken the volume of Misinformation About the MLA to 11. But as I have remarked in a Facebook thread, claiming that MLA staff salaries are contributing to the immiseration of adjuncts is a little like David Horowitz claiming that tuition increases at American universities have been caused by Cornel West’s speaking fees. So here is the petition to reduce Cornel West’s speaking fees.

Last but not least, about the MLA Executive Director herself. I have to think that the petition is really all about her, even though it targets every senior staff member. I mean, are people seriously upset that directors of departments in a major scholarly organization, people with 20, 30 years of seniority and experience, are earning 125-175K, just like some full professors at large universities? Do they really think that these salaries come from the dues of adjuncts? Someone posted the MLA’s 990 form on Twitter, and the petition reproduces one page– the page about executive pay. Did anyone read the page that reports revenue? (And don’t even bother with the page that reports how much the MLA pays its presidents and vice presidents and Executive Council members. I will tell you. Zero dollars and zero cents, tax free.) Total revenue, 15.8 million; revenue from dues– 2.4 million, or 15 percent of total revenue. The dues structure itself is markedly progressive– and will stand up well in comparison to any similar organization (which is why the AAUP modeled its new progressive dues structure on it). Anyway, Rosemary spent yesterday in Washington, in a legislative briefing on adjunct issues organized by the New Faculty Majority in connection with that report released by Rep. George Miller, and attended by about thirty Congressional staff members. It is just part of the job– the kind of thing she and MLA staff do all the time (when I attended the NFM summit in January 2012, MLA Director of Research David Laurence went with me). I am beginning to think that scholarly associations that really don’t give a shit about adjuncts have been exempt from the kind of criticism Rosemary and her staff have been getting precisely because no one expects them to respond to these issues.

Deep Bore Tunnel ongoing disaster update, or why no new transportation megaprojects should ever be designed for cars only, in one chart

I was a bit surprised to get some pushback on the notion that deep bore tunnel project in Seattle was a terrible idea in my previous post on the subject. I think I can see where it comes from psychologically–the viaduct, while ugly and extremely unsafe in an area of seismic activity, is an very efficient and useful piece of infrastructure. Seattle traffic is pretty bad, and the idea of taking something so big and important out of the picture without replacing it with something that’s also big and important is understandably alarming.

Going back far enough, the possibly plausible alternatives to the tunnel were: retrofit the viaduct, rebuild the viaduct, build a big urban waterfront freeway, build a shallow ‘cut and cover’ tunnel with downtown exits, and a ‘enhanced roads and transit’ option which contained a substantial non-freeway road in the place of the viaduct, a widening of I-5 to increase capacity on the other freeway through downtown, and a series of other improvements to help address in increase of traffic downtown. To be clear, there are no great options here: one can find serious problems and shortcomings with all of them. (The rebuild option, for example, demands an answer to the question of traffic flow during the 8-10 years it would probably take to construct it). Some of these, including retaining/rebuilding the viaduct and the urban freeway, were undoubtedly aesthetically worse options than the tunnel, but the tunnel was the worst option from a strict cost/benefit analysis of all the possibilities for what should be a profoundly obvious reason: a majority of current viaduct users use it to get in or out of downtown, not to get through it quickly, and the tunnel is too deep to include any downtown exits. Astonishingly, they decided to knowingly replace an important piece of infrastructure with the one option that had no utility for a majority of users of the viaduct.

For a variety of reasons, by the end of the process the politically viable options appeared to be the deep bore tunnel and enhanced roads and transit plan. The latter drew a lot of skepticism, including from some people who should have known better, in part because it just seemed implausible that a bunch of little things could replace one really big thing. But in order to respond to such fears, we need look no further than WSDOT’s own study of the options. Dominic Holden (in what is probably the single best summary of the comprehensive case against the tunnel) explains:

The most compelling evidence for I-5/surface/transit is buried in the state’s own SDEIS. In an appendix of a transportation discipline report, WSDOT cites the miles of travel, hours of travel, and hours of delay that would exist if we built the I-5/surface/transit option. To compare that data to the tunnel, The Stranger filed a records request with the City of Seattle to obtain the most recent data the state is using to forecast miles traveled, hours traveled, and hours of delay on the tolled deep-bore tunnel.

The data shows surface/transit performing slightly better in the downtown system overall, with fewer miles traveled, fewer hours traveled, and less delay. Specifically, hours of delay would drop from 37,500 hours with a tolled tunnel program to 36,700 hours with a surface option. Hours of overall travel drop from 106,600 to 103,600, and miles traveled drops from 2.5 million to 2.4 million.

Granted, these aren’t huge differences. But this data proves something very important: The much more expensive tunnel doesn’t perform any better than I-5/surface/transit.

That flies in the face of Governor Gregoire and other tunnel advocates who have insisted the I-5/surface/transit option won’t work. When I asked about the traffic impacts of the tunnel at a press conference on October 29, Gregoire said, “The alternative [to the tunnel] is taking 110,000 cars and putting them on I-5 and the streets of Seattle. You want to see a stalled city, you take those 110,000 cars.” But the state’s own data shows that downtown is actually more “stalled” with a tunnel.

This is not at all surprising, when we bear in mind that the majority of viaduct users will find the tunnels useless, even before we consider those who’ll avoid it for purposes of fare avoidance (more on that below). Furthermore, there are increasingly good reasons to take WSDOT’s future traffic projections with a hefty grain of salt–there’s a good chance they’re overestimating future traffic in and through downtown Seattle. Along with their national counterpart, WSDOT’s projections have been overshooting actual traffic for a good while now. A devastating chart from Sightline provides some visualization of this phenomenon:

The USDOT has been overestimating future vehicle miles traveled for a long time now. And this trend is continuing: they overestimated 2013 vehicle miles traveled by 11%. In 2012. WSDOT is not appreciably different than USDOT on this issue; their long-range forecasts for 2008 ended up overestimating VMT by well over standard deviation (see pg 9 here) but despite that error, their 2010 model predicted in the dip would return to 20th century growth rates in 2011, and continue on that trajectory until 2030, essentially replicating the now evident folly on the graph above.  But the declining trend in Washington dates back over a decade–there were fewer VMTs total (not per capita in this growing region, but total) in 2012 than 2002. And WSDOT is still using these clearly broken projection models. In some cases, this makes their projection models overestimate the utility of their projects, but in the case of of the tunnel project, where the budget relies on revenue projections from future tolls, it also means this is another way they’re underestimating the total cost.

Speaking of tolls! Back when the tunnel project was politically vulnerable, WSDOT did its projections for toll revenue based on $3.50/$4.00 tolls. As a matter of basic fairness, tolls should if anything probably be higher than this. But as a matter of avoiding massive toll avoidance, especially in a region with little history of and tolerance for tolling, this seemed obviously and totally unviable. Now they’re  admitting as much: the draft proposal from a meeting of the Advisory committee on tolling and traffic management two weeks ago is now online, and it shows that they’re recommending a toll of $1 ($1.25 during peak hours) to avoid massive toll avoidance. While that figure might be low enough (although some people will still avoid any toll on general principle), their projected revenue figure of 1.1 billion over 30 years requires an average of over 91,000 daily trips in the tunnel. Relevant facts: there are presently about 105,000 daily trips on the viaduct. Over half of them end or originate downtown. Overall traffic has been flat to slightly declining for over a decade. In order for the numbers to support this revenue forecast, we have to believe the same models for projecting VMTs–the very same ones that have been systematically and badly wrong for a while now–will somehow start being correct again.

WSDOT’s other current megaproject that is going quite badly in the 520 bridge replacement. For fun, here’s a projection vs. reality history of traffic on the bridge in chart form, courtesy of streetsblog:

How should we think about WSDOT and USDOT’s systematic failure to adjust to what is clearly a major change in the trendline on VMT? Clearly, simple bureaucratic interia is part of the story. But I think it’s instructive to compare WSDOT to another local bureaucratic agency currently engaging in a tunneling megaproject: Sound Transit. One commenter on the previous post criticized me for complaining about cost overruns thusly:

I challenge you to name a single $3Bln project that has come in exactly on-time and on-budget. I don’t think I’ve been on a $3Mln project that has met those two criteria (for keyboard commandos – talk to someone in tech and see what their opinion is). If you require that, you end up with people completely sand-bagging their projections, and then the project will look so bad, it won’t get started.

He’s certainly not wrong that most megaprojects have cost overruns. But commenters immediately and correctly noted that U-link, Sound Transit’s light rail tunnel from downtown to the University district, which is over 80% complete, is on track to open six months early and over 100 million under budget. (It doesn’t quite meet the commenters’ criteria for a $3 billion project, as it was only a $1.95 billion project). A bit of history: Sound Transit was created in the mid 90′s to deal with the Puget Sound region’s staggering lack of regional mass transit. They currently run a very useful and well used network of regional express buses, and heavy commuter rail from Tacoma and Everett to Seattle, but their most important charge was building a new light rail system. ST started out more like WSDOT–massively underestimating costs and underestimating time needed on the initial light rail line. Once that became apparent, in 2002 there was a major leadership shakeup. Since then, ST estimates have been sober and conservative–the bids for future tunneling expansions of light rail are already coming in well under budget. In 2008, despite the initial overpromise and despite the first light rail line not even being open yet, voters in the Puget Sound approved by wide margins round II of ST funding, which raises $18 billion over 30 years to fund, primarily, major extensions of the current light rail system. For well-crafted public transportation projects, lying about actual cost and time needed to completion is not necessary to engender sufficient political support. For roads-only projects, this is not the case: the first version of ST II failed the year prior, when it was tied to major new roads spending. And Washington politicians understand this: the Republicans in the state senate (and two “democrats” who switched side to give Republicans control of the chamber) refused to pass a bill that would give King County permission to raise taxes to close a funding gap for Metro bus service unless it’s tied to their unpopular, pork-larded, low on maintenance and high on new projects roads bill. Why? Because they know they can’t pass it unless the transit-starved voters of King County are essentially extorted into supporting it (Happily, that horrible bill was not passed, and King county found a legal way to potentially raise revenue without state authorization). WSDOT’s future as an agency of its current size and scope depends on misleading the public about the true costs of their projects (I’ve ignored here, of course, the environmental impact of building the future infrastructures for cars).

It’s heartening to see the current troubles leading not just transit advocates but conduits for the center-right version of conventional wisdom like Dori Monson jumping on the kill the tunnel bandwagon. (And he is not the only well-connected person hinting that rumors from insiders suggest the situation with Bertha is considerably more dire than has been publicly acknowledged). We need to build an infrastructure for the actual future–the one where VMT decreases are a long term trend, not a recession driven anomaly, and where global warming is real–not the future WSDOT won’t stop foolishly projecting.  WSDOT in in desperate need of a ST-2002-style shakeup. The 10% or so of the tunnel completed could make a pretty cool skate park.

….A commenter asks how confident we should be that the current VMT trend is real and not noise and recession-driven. It’s a reasonably question and I give my answer in the comments, but in poking around I found another chart, this one VMT per capita coming out of recessions. The recent recession was, of course, the worst of the bunch, with the sorriest recovery, so this isn’t necessarily unimpeachable evidence that something else is going on. That the levelling off occurred around 2004 nationally (and earlier in some places, including the Puget Sound) is more strong circumstantial evidence. Sightline daily’s “Dude, Where are my Cars?” series is good on this.