The public-private joint venture potentials presented by monorail technology and development will permit government transportation authorities to strategically apply their limited financial resources. With all public transportation system development dependent on labyrinthine application and funding processes, local communities and regional governments engage in a perpetual pursuit of funding adequate to implement their respective transportation plans and services. This has had the unfortunate effect of local transportation authorities applying for what is most likely to be funded, based on past success in securing resources for transportation system development. While discouraging innovation, these processes tend to produce predictably marginal, yet vastly overpriced systems, which seldom live up to the predicted ridership or planned objectives of the systems’ designs.
Operating at great ongoing deficits, virtually all public transportation systems remain buried in debt, while poor planning and increasingly costly operation and maintenance require ever increasing public taxpayer subsidies. The mutually beneficial joint venture proposals presented here are the first, and most viable proposals capable of breaking the cycle, and departing from the current public transportation financing dilemma. With local government relieved of both the rigors and limitations of federal and state funding, as well as the inevitable deficit financing of local transportation services, private investors and monorail system builders can assume the majority of financial responsibility for building and operating mass transportation systems.
Local transportation authorities can be further assured that any joint venture funding and implementation would not divert funding from other competing transportation projects, or from government general funds. This competition for limited resources has politicized transportation funding and implementation processes, and has distorted the rational planning of regional transportation networks.
As completely public services, facilities and property, mass transportation systems throughout the United States do not expand or contribute to the tax base of communities or states. Monorail guide ways, stations and other structures may be assessed as the improvements on otherwise tax exempt public property. Joint development agreements can be specifically drawn to place all privately developed facilities on local property tax rolls to serve as a stable source of income and financial support to local communities. This steady, predictable flow of tax revenue would be a departure from, and a remedy for the present transportation funding regime, which produces vast sums of money in the planning and construction phases of system development, but little or no revenue to support their long term operations and maintenance.
Foregoing initial compensation for their contribution of right of way property, local governments can contribute vital incentives to the development of monorail systems by private entities, while securing new transportation improvements, economic growth and property tax revenues to support their communities for decades into the future.
