As Oklahoma City metro-area officials call for construction of a $1.8 billion commuter rail system connecting Edmond, Oklahoma City, and Norman, they have indicated roughly half the funding will come from federal grants and half from a sales-tax increase.

But the SoundTransit system in Seattle, which operates both light rail and commuter rail systems similar to the one proposed in Oklahoma City, indicates that the proposed sales-tax increase could be just the first of many tax increases required to keep the commuter rail system afloat.

“It’s endless,” said Bob Pishue, transportation policy fellow at the Mountain States Policy Center.

When the Sound Transit commuter rail system was originally launched in Seattle in the 1990s, it was funded with a three-tenths of a cent sales tax and a car-registration fee, Pishue said. Since then, numerous tax and fee hikes have been added to prop up the system. The rail service is now funded with a 1.5-percent sales tax rate, car-tag fees, rental-car taxes, property taxes, and even state subsidies provided from a share of revenue collected through a complicated climate-tax program in Washington state that has effectively increased the state’s gas tax by up to 60 cents per gallon.

“They sell it as an asset, but what it really is,” Pishue said, “is a liability.”

In most cities, he noted that the cost of maintaining a rail system rises faster than the amount of revenue dedicated to the system, leading to various forms of taxpayer bailouts, including tax increases.

The fares paid by passengers typically cover only 5 percent to 10 percent of operational expenses on most commuter rail systems, Pishue noted, while the capital expenses of the system are fully borne by area taxpayers.

And even with all the tax increases provided to the SoundTransit system, it is still marked by financial instability. A recently approved expansion of the Seattle rail system has created a deficit of $34.5 billion through 2046.

“If they told the public the real cost,” Pishue said, “the public wouldn’t have approved it.”

In his August “State of the City” address, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt argued that traffic congestion on metro highways will only get worse as the area population continues to grow in coming years. He indicated the proposed commuter rail system will head off that problem.

Citing Census data, Holt said people in the Oklahoma City area spent an average of 19.2 minutes driving to their jobs in Oklahoma City in 2005. Today, that drive-time figure is nearly three minutes longer than in 2005.

Holt said the proposed 39-mile, 10-stop commuter rail system in the Oklahoma City area will “preserve our quality of life by alleviating traffic congestion.”

But that hasn’t been the case in Seattle.

INRIX, a transportation data and analytics company, ranks Seattle as the tenth-most congested city in the nation.

Pishue offered a short response to claims that commuter rail reduces traffic congestion: “It really does nothing.”

He noted that rail systems lack the passenger capacity (or demand) to have a meaningful impact on traffic congestion.

“You could probably double the transit ridership or triple it in that region, and it would still do nothing because it’s such a small number,” Pishue said. 

Even though the Seattle area is “denser, more populated,” Pishue noted that transit in general (buses, light rail, and commuter rail) serves only “about 5 percent of daily trip demand for $100-plus billion in rail, more than $1 billion a year in bus operations.”

“It’s less than 5 percent of trip demand for $100-and-some billion and about $3 billion a year in subsidies,” Pishue said.

And many rail systems, including the proposed Oklahoma City commuter rail, are based on the idea that people need to get to the downtown area to work—which is not the case in most U.S. cities.

“Downtown isn’t where the jobs are,” Pishue said. “The jobs are all over the place.”

Oklahoma City metro-area officials project the proposed commuter rail system will have a per-hour peak direction capacity of only 600 to 2,400 passengers.

The 2020 population for counties in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area was 1,425,695.

If a commuter rail system is created in the Oklahoma City area, there’s little reason to expect the average citizen will see any benefit via reduced drive times, but there’s good reason to expect the average citizen will bear added financial costs to sustain it, Pishue noted.

“It’s an old-school model that just doesn’t work,” Pishue said, “and it’s extremely costly.”