Public-Private Partnership is Key to Rail
The Dallas Morning News reports that DART and Fort Worth's The T are exploring partnering with private companies to accelerate the construction of the Cotton Belt commuter rail line by as much as 15 years. The line would run from DART's Red Line station at George Bush Turnpike in Richardson to the DFW airport and on to Fort Worth. The first section could open as early as 2013.
Key to the project would be a public-private partnership that would exchange private funding for the rights to operate the line. Given that fare revenue alone is not expected to make the project profitable, DART and The T are exploring the possibility of sharing in the increased property tax revenue expected to be generated by developments along the line.
Given that DART board member John Danish just estimated that funding for DART's Orange Line to Irving might be short as much as $190 million, some kind of creative public-private partnership may be the only way the Cotton Belt line can ever get built.
Railroad history in America has always involved a public-private partnership, much more so than highways. DART should be commended for exploring just such a partnership to make a reality a long-planned and much-desired east-west line between the northern suburbs and DFW airport.
In that previous paragraph, I originally wrote that an east-west rail line was "much-needed." I changed it to "much-desired" and even that might be wishful thinking on my part. A DMN reader commented that Dallas differs from New York or Chicago in that our downtown is small in comparison to those cities, implying that there won't ever be enough demand for public transportation to downtown to make rail lines economically feasible. In that case, east-west lines make even less economic sense. That said, if private investment thinks it's worth the risk, the rest of us should get on board.
GOP Win By Losing
Michael Landauer, in The Dallas Morning News, suggests that the Texas GOP actually wins by failing to pass their requirement for voters to show a photo ID at the polls. He argues that the issue is popular with voters and easy to cast those opposed to it as wanting to steal elections. According to Landauer, keeping it around as an issue for future elections will help the GOP in rallying the base and fundraising.
The nominal reason why the GOP supports the measure is to prevent voter fraud. But there's so little documented evidence that such fraud exists that passing voter ID will have negligible impact on fraud.
Democrats claim that passing voter ID may inconvenience some voters enough to suppress the voter turnout somewhat. In the battle of public perception, Democrats call the bill a voter suppression bill, not a voter identification bill. The votes suppressed may trend Democratic. Whether there's substance to this claim is debatable.
The real value of voter ID seems to be as a wedge issue to get out the vote. Landauer argues that the issue favors the GOP. But for every conservative convinced of massive voter fraud by illegal immigrants or groups like ACORN, there may be an Hispanic voter who sees this as a GOP effort to disenfranchise Hispanics. The election calculus is difficult to measure. But Landauer's analysis might explain best why a voter ID bill has such a difficult time getting passed. Both parties like the politics of the issue just the way they are now.
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