Comments on: Heroic Assumptions

By: markm

markm — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:54:36 +0000

MJ: It may not be perjury, but selling stock to private investors with a prospectus like that is fraud.

By: MJ

MJ — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:57:55 +0000

Perjury liability is an inappropriate response, as the authors of the studies (either government employees or consulting firms) are not under oath when they produce their findings.

The core problem is that the people working on these studies, especially the consultants, have no incentive the get their forecasts right because they bear none of the consequences of an inaccurate (usually high) forecast. The public agencies that hire them often insinuate (or simply tell them outright) that what they want is a doctored forecast that makes the project look viable. The only real cure for this is putting more risk on the backs of private investors who will have to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to optimistic demand forecasts.

This is not a perfect solution (see what has happened recently with the privately-funded Las Vegas Monorail), but would be a step in the right direction.

By: tomw

tomw — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:51:35 +0000

Marla: how about they get put on the hook for the deficit? That’d slow down proponents of exaggerated ridership, no? Perjury liability is not enough.
tomw

By: MJ

MJ — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:58:08 +0000

Adam Summers over at Reason’s Out of Control blog had a blog post about this a couple of days ago. He pointed out that the ridership forecasts for this project have gone from 23 million annual riders a decade ago to 117 million just before the Prop 1 bond referendum, to 90 million just days after the bond referendum passed, and back down to 41 million now. The forecasts are all over the place, but CHSRA still cannot seem to put confidence intervals on their forecasts (ridership or cost), as pointed out by the CA Legislative Analyst’s Office. Also, Summers points out that interestingly the revenue forecasts have not changed, even with the wild swings in forecast demand. Figure that one out.

You bought it, California.

By: Marla Singer

Marla Singer — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:17:03 +0000

Stories like this (along with Climate[whatever] and Gruber) make me think it might be a good idea to attach perjury liability to the authors of studies created to support cost or revenue assumptions in legislation. (Not that I believe this would ever happen).

By: roger the shrubber

roger the shrubber — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:28:44 +0000

in an entirely unrelated development, the multi-zillion dollar las vegas monorail – which was sold to the public, “simpsons” style, as ‘the safest bet in town!’ – declared itself bankrupt yesterday. this one week after its head had angrily written the local paper a letter denying they were in any financial straits. you see them occasionally, when you drive behind the strip, tootling along up there, every car maybe 5% filled.

clearly, what we needed was *high-speed* monorail. by god, we’d have lotsa riders THEN!!

By: spiro

spiro — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:25:00 +0000

This all reminds me of the Simpsons “monorail” episode.

By: Don Lloyd

Don Lloyd — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:11:11 +0000

One big advantage of over-estimating the ridership by orders of magnitude is that, if the system ever goes into operation, reducing the fares to zero will not significantly increase the operating losses. Therefore, from the beginning, the fare-collecting mechanisms and system can be made out of cardboard cutouts. In fact, the same thing applies to ridership, if it drops to zero, it won’t much impact the losses either. So the trains themselves can be cardboard cutouts capable of displaying political advertising.

Regards, Don

By: Rolo Tomasi

Rolo Tomasi — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:19:44 +0000

In light if these numbers, it is obvious that CA will need to promise to have painted flames on the side of the train.

By: Not Sure

Not Sure — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:24:00 +0000

“Ridership and cost concerns aside, I wonder over how much of itâ€™s planed route it will be allowed to operate at â€œcruising speedâ€.” – Another guy named Dan

Ridership and cost concerns aside, I wonder how much of itâ€™s planned route will be over the habitat of some endangered bug or bird.

If a private business wanted to build anything that expansive, progressives would be going apeshit. But if the government’s doing it, everything will turn out just fine.