Here’s his take:

“With respect to the ignored capital costs for heavy rail, you will be interested in BART’s current view of their needs. I believe BART has a longer system than WMATA. but only half the patronage. They say they need $500 million a year for the next 25 years. That’s a lower number than WMATA will probably require.

“Allowing WMATA to present accounting reports without estimating the costs of maintenance and capital improvements is an accounting scandal that’s worse than the publicized big company tiffs that talk about whether expenditures were operating (expensed) or capitalized (deferred) [AOL] or where the income was recongzined [Enron].

“With WMATA, the whole topic of capital costs is simply ignored.

“The American Public Transport Assoc. puts out all kinds of propaganda about how heavy rail has a high “farebox” recovery. This is akin to the nuclear power industry, which always has the lowest marginal cost to produce a kilowatt of electricity, but has huge capital costs to get there.

“The construction of new nuclear plants in this country parallels the building of new heavy rail systems — nothing since the 1970s, for the same reason: capital costs are too high. Bus systems have lower “farebox” recovery, but much lower capital costs.

“The solution is to raise transit fares to European and Japanese levels so these systems can pay for themselves. That’s about 50 cents per mile. Wonder how many politicians here have the courage to do this?

For years, BART was scared to charge anything to park at BART stations.

“Not having to consider capital costs, nice business.”

Indeed.

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