How Much For Naming Rights?
Norfolk is looking at selling the naming rights to their light rail line (LRT) - the train, the stations, the parking, the whole enchilada - or possibly just parts of it. They’re saying that can get $29 Million ‘over about 20 to 30 years’ - whatever that means. The article also states that the Cleveland Healthline BRT is getting $11 Million over 10 years. In each case, that would work out to about a million dollars a year. This struck me as very odd because, as you know, I think LRT is almost a decent way to travel and I think BRT is the pits.
A million dollars a year to put your name on a few buses? I’m not buyin’ it. Especially hospitals — is there any business that is less suited to sponsoring buses than a hospital?
Turns out, the numbers get confusing. When the Norfolk LRT line is finished, it’ll stretch about 7 miles - similar to the BRT line in Cleveland, so no major discrepancy there.
This summer, Streetsblog echoed a report which talked about the $12 million price tag for the Cleveland BRT naming rights ($12 million, $11 million, close enough). I was pretty sure, though, that I’d read about naming rights for the BRT being priced around half that - and that’s what this Michigan-based newspaper blog post from November says - $6 million over 25 years. An older Cleveland.com blog post (from February 2008), echoes the ‘$6 million, 25 years’ numbers. And and RTA Press release confirms the lower numbers (pdf).
If the $6 million/25 years numbers are true, that would represent about a quarter of the value of the $11 million/10 years numbers - down from about a million a year to about $250,000. Still, I think those hospitals got sold a bill of goods, too — they overpaid by about 90%. In fact, I expect there’s a clause in the contract that allows the hospitals to terminate that contract if and when the BRT really starts falling down. And since we haven’t heard about the tainted concrete, yet, I imagine that means it is tainted — the mayor probably fought for a delay in the test results and is now ready to perform damage control. This is just speculation, of course - hopefully we’ll know more soon.
End of the day, it could be that nothing has been reported incorrectly at all - though this does seem a bit unlikely. These deals are set up with a lot of incentives, so those initial deal numbers could be based on all sorts of things which might try to guesstimate the relative success or failure of the line, and that would include how the overall economy is doing, how the local Cleveland economy is doing, etc.
Any deal as long as 30 years, however, as is the case with Norfolk, should pretty much be rejected out of hand by taxpayers. There’s no rational basis for politicians and corporations to come up with that lengthy a contract term — except deceit.
Side note - the projected cost of the Norfolk light rail is about $290 million - it’s probably safe to add another 20% to get a real estimate of the cost - that gets us up to about $350 million. The Cleveland BRT was $200 million, and as far as I can tell, it came in on budget (Though, I’ll admit that it just seems odd that that figure seems to have been set and never once budged. It’s just odd, that’s all I’m saying.) So, if you’re in Cleveland right now, are you having second thoughts about your fancy new BRT? $150 million difference - that’s a lot of money - but there it is. You bet the future of your city on a bus — do you want a do-over?
Places like New York City and San Francisco can succeed in spite of BRT — we already have decent rail infrastructure, relatively-speaking. Here in San Francisco, our BRT projects are throwaways - nobody cares about Geary and Van Ness - they’re traffic sewers and they’re going to remain traffic sewers - we don’t need any new development or ‘TOD’ to justify spending infrastructure money — the ridership is already there. People will realize what happened after they see these gargantuan buses running up and down the street, and some will be angry, but they’ll get over it. Hopefully we’ll get a couple of bike lanes painted on the street, so those who are truly fed up can hop on their bikes. Our kids will figure out the rest.
But Cleveland is…Cleveland. Cleveland has the Browns. Cleveland can’t rely on Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge — they have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the worst weather of any city in the Milky Way. Cleveland planners just took their most important corridor and converted into a busway. I don’t know if BRT can single-handedly kill a city, but with Cleveland as our BRT guinea pig, we might get to find out.
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