by GERALD NEILY
Recently, the Brew mentioned a Maryland Transit Administration document that has been floating around Baltimore in certain circles, a “Risk Assessment Report” that describes possible cost overruns for the $1.6 billion Red Line east-west rail project.

A Brew reader challenged us to show the report dated 8/21/09, obtained by a citizen under the Freedom of Information Act from the Federal Transit Administration, so here it is. Perhaps the most accessible — and revealing — part of the 26-page report is a Letterman-esque list – “Top 10 Cost Risks”.

The reader, “Marin,” seemed to suggest that the rundown of risks was of little significance because “of course, the City has an interest in preventing cost overruns — as those would undermine the credibility of future projects.”

Another way to look at it: the report is all the more significant because it attempts to address the credibility problem the MTA already has. This is the agency that built their central light rail line between Hunt Valley and Glen Burnie at a cost of about fifty percent over budget, necessitating a delay in the construction of much of the second track for over a decade.

So, let’s read between the lines of this report, a systematic analysis of potential cost overruns for their Red Line “Locally Preferred Alternative” route. The meat of the report is on pages 16 and 17, the “Top 10 Cost Risks,” determined by the MTA from a mathematical formula incorporating estimates of the risk and mitigation costs from a list of 53 “active” risks:

Top 10 Cost Risks

1 – Requiring a second track in the tunnel under Cooks Lane “for operational reasons” instead of the single reversible track in the plan.

2 – Requiring crossover tracks in the underground sections.

3 – Requiring tunnels underneath US 40 West at various locations in the vicinity of Edmondson Village and Rosemont in response to community “pressure”.

4 – Requiring more expensive geological “ground improvement” for digging into the underground stations.

5 – Negotiations with Norfolk Southern and adjacent homes for the bridge over the Bayview railroad property, which may also contain hazardous materials.

6 – Requiring additional work if a significant underground archaeological site is uncovered.

7 – Requiring a Project Labor Agreement which would increase labor costs

8 – Requiring smaller and thus more expensive contract bid packages in response to desire of the Associated General Contractors.

9 – Requiring more tunneling underneath Boston Street in Canton in response to “pressure from the community”.

10 – Requiring more “ground support” for the existing Howard Street CSX freight rail tunnel, which will be above the Red Line tunnel to be built underneath it.

This Top Ten list can be summarized as Operational Risks (#1 and #2), Community/Stakeholder Risks (#3, #5 and #9), Geological Risks (#4, #6 and #10) and Labor Risks (#7 and #8).

Geological risks are the only true unknown, which is an inherent risk of tunneling. The MTA has already begun doing test borings along the underground segments of the Red Line, much of which was formerly underwater until gradually filled in over Baltimore’s history using oyster shells and other harbor muck. We won’t really know what is there until the digging really happens, much as Boston discovered as its recent “Big Dig” highway project took place to the tune of many billions in cost overruns.

Community risks, that pressure would build to force more digging and mitigation, have been well-publicized and are the most expensive under the MTA’s worst case scenarios, but are coupled with a smaller probability factor that they would actually happen. The MTA’s annotation of the cost entry for a tunnel under Edmondson Avenue says: “This is a show stopper,” meaning that it is so expensive that it would never happen and would stop the whole project instead.

Labor risks have not been well publicized, and instead, the City has presented their rosy study of the economic impact of hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the city. Labor representatives will no doubt be seeking their moments of maximum leverage to impose their demands, but at this point, it is in labor’s interest to support the project.

Which leaves us with Operational risks, the two ranked highest by the MTA, but paradoxically the type of issue which the MTA has the most experience with. It should be well within the MTA’s capabilities to assess the impact of a mile long single track tunnel under Cooks Lane on the operation of the Red Line trains, and yet this “Risk Assessment Report” prolongs the uncertainty and risk which pervades this issue. In fact, there was no appreciable change in the operating assumptions (speed and frequency of trains) between the MTA’s previous reports, which assumed a two track tunnel, and the “Locally Preferred Alternative” which assumes only a single reversible track tunnel.

This raises the question: What will the MTA know later about this issue that they don’t know now, and when will they know it?

Since, to many people, a single track tunnel with trains in alternating directions every four minutes around blind curves and grades is simply an abomination, what the MTA’s “risk” seems to suggest is not “operational”, but political. Will the MTA be simply shamed into building a double track tunnel even if they don’t have the money? This hypothetical question was actually played out in the city’s expressway wars of the 1970s and 1980s. The expressway bureaucrats kept succumbing to increasingly expensive plans until the project finally became too costly to build and died of its own weight.

This may be the real definition of “risk”, not the risk of two 50 mph subway trains barreling toward each other on the same track.

Risk #2, requiring underground crossover tracks, is a similar but less dramatic illustration of the same issue. The MTA has underground crossover tracks on its existing Metro subway, and they use them often to divert trains around problem track areas and for periodic routine maintenance. Eliminating these underground crossover tracks would mean that during such times, there could be only one train in one direction between the Canton and Poppleton stations on either side of downtown, a distance of over three miles. This would mean extremely infrequent service, on the order of a train every 17 minutes which was the constraint on the current light rail line before it was fully double tracked.

The MTA must know all this, and more, so what is the real risk being assessed in their “Risk Assessment Report”?