Be careful what you wish for in terms of outsourcing public services (transit)

Today's Post has another story about the proposed Dulles Corridor "silver" Metro line, tunneling and a counter-proposal to build it from a development group including one of the primary landowners in the Tysons Corner area, the West Group. See "Virginia to Review Rival Bid For Tysons Rail Extension."

Last week, in my discussion of the Examiner's ideological writings about federal funding for WMATA, which they call the largest earmark in history, rather than looking at the issue from a reasoned "newspapers are card-carrying members of the Growth Machine" manner, I criticized the Examiner for writing that WMATA ought to be contracting out services. The paper said this is done throughout North America, but then a letter to the editor from the stooge of anti-transit, Wendell Cox, only listed examples from Europe and Australia.

But I discovered later in the week that the MBTA railroad services have been contracted out to a private consortium, including an ex-MBTA manager (that's how this stuff works--Michael Stevens, ex-director of the DC Marketing Center, has been hired to create a BID in the Anacostia Waterfront-baseball stadium area).

(Many railroad passenger services around the country are managed by Amtrak.) According to the Boston Globe, customers and MBTA aren't happy about how the contract is going. See "Commuter rail snags prompt a showdown" and "Heated meeting held on rail snags" as well as this piece from the Bad Transit website, "Breaking News - Commuter Rail trains often late!"

Plus, it was controversial when the State of Virginia, under the Republican governor, contracted with a private consortium, rather than WMATA to design the Dulles Corridor system.

Frankly, now I am completely terrified about this.

Bechtel is the lead engineering group of the Dulles Corridor project.

The same company that was the leading member of the Bechtel and Parsons Brinckerhoff joint venture that managed the construction of the Central Artery project in Boston, one that has been determined to have serious problems, from tunnel leaks to a woman being crushed to death by falling ceiling tiles.

This isn't the kind of outsourcing record I'd be looking to reward...
Relatives of Milena Mora Vargas Delvalle, of Costa Rica, who was killed when concrete ceiling panels fell onto her car in one of Boston's Big Dig tunnels late Monday night, attend the Morales funeral in Moravia, Wednesday July 19, 2006 in Costa Rica. (AP Photo/Cristobal Herrera)

Similarly, there were a fair number of train crashes in Britain before the system, in part, was renationalized.

It ought to make you wonder about the ideologues pushing for privatization and outsourcing of public services at every turn.

Index Keywords: transit