Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

Transit ridership is declining and the Trump administration is refusing to giving away federal funds for new transit projects. But Portland’s TriMet transit agency is already buying properties for its new $3 billion light-rail line.

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — which is the real power at Metro, not the elected Metro council — has approved the route for the rail line that is supposed to go from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village, a shopping mall on Interstate 5. The plan calls for bike paths, sidewalks, some new highway bridges (which aren’t included in the cost), as well as 12 miles of light-rail route.

The official projected cost for the project is $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion, but as an analysis by the Cascade Policy Institute shows, the final cost of previous light-rail projects all ended up being as much as 40 percent more than the estimates that had been made at the draft environmental impact statement stage. Metro issued a draft EIS for the project in June. Continue reading

MTA Credit Rating Drops

Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the credit rating for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to A. It was two grades higher than that just five months ago. If it falls five more grades, it will be in junk bond territory.

S&P says that it based the downgrade on its assessment of MTA’s preliminary 2019 budget, which calls for spending $32.5 billion on rehabilitation efforts. Although $10 billion of that would come from bond sales, S&P says that MTA lacks the revenues to repay such bonds. If someone doesn’t find a new source of revenues, S&P warns, it will downgrade the agency’s credit rating still further. Lower credit ratings will mean that MTA will have to pay higher interest rates on future debt.

At the end of 2017, MTA’s long-term debt was $38.3 billion, most of which was incurred to address the last maintenance crisis. Since 2017 it has issued about half a billion dollars worth of additional bonds. This doesn’t count another $20 billion in unfunded health-care obligations. Add in $10 billion in planned bond issues for repair and the agency will owe nearly $70 billion. That’s a lot for a system that earns less than $7 billion in annual revenues and spends roughly twice that on operations. Continue reading

Austin Wants High-Dollar Transit

Austin voters have twice rejected light rail at the polls, so naturally the region’s transit agency, Capital Metro, is eager to try again. Earlier this week, it presented a plan to the Austin city council for eleven transit corridors that could cost $6 billion to $8 billion. As if to underscore the agency’s inability to learn from history, it is calling this plan “Project Connect,” the same name it used for the plan that voters defeated by 57 to 43 in 2014.

While Cap Metro deceptively calls light rail “high-capacity transit,” the Austin American-Statesman more accurately calls it “high-dollar” transit. Light rail was rendered obsolete in 1927 when a company called Twin Coach started producing buses that could move more people for far less money than streetcars or light rail.

Bus or rail, now is not the time for Austin to spend a lot of money on transit. Capital Metro lost 20 percent of its riders between 2012 and 2016, and is down another 2.2 percent in the first six months of 2018. Continue reading

How Do You Define “Viable”?

Among the many wacky proposals for rail transit in this country is a plan to run commuter trains some 50 miles between Las Cruces, New Mexico (population about 100,000) to El Paso, Texas (population around 700,000). Such a project, if it did anything at all, would be most likely to drain jobs from Las Cruces to El Paso. So it is surprising that the main proponent of the project is a New Mexico transit agency, the South Central Regional Transit District (SCRTD).

SCRTD hired a consultant to do a feasibility study that — surprise! — concluded the train was feasible. Of course, to reach this conclusion, the study had to make some heroic assumptions:

  1. That the federal government would be willing to put up a large share of the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  2. That the state government would also be willing to contribute to the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  3. That BNSF would be willing to host commuter trains on its rail line, which it doesn’t want to do.
  4. That surveys of people who say they would be happy to ride the train (without telling them about the fares) really mean anything.
  5. That someone will be willing to subsidize most of the $15 to $20 cost per trip, when anyone who already owns a car could drive the distance for well under half that amount.

Continue reading

Music City Star Still Falls Short

The Middle Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority reported that ridership on its Music City Star commuter train showed a “substantial increase” in its latest fiscal year (which ended June 30, 2018). The agency claimed that the train carried 269,296 passengers in F.Y. 2018 vs. 258,360 in F.Y. 2017.

The Antiplanner isn’t sure why a 4 percent increase is considered “substantial,” especially since the population of Wilson County, which is served by the train, grew by 3 percent. At least it is bucking the trend of transit ridership decline, but that’s not necessarily a reason to celebrate either.

When the train was planned in 2004, it was projected to carry an average of 1,900 weekday riders in its first year and cost $3 million a year to operate (about $3.6 million in today’s dollars). In fact, more than a decade after it opened, it is still carrying less than 1,200 weekday riders, while its operating costs are at least $5.2 million a year (plus it cost about 40 percent more to start up than anticipated). High costs and low ridership mean the costs per rider are around 130 percent greater than expected. Fares, of course, are not, and covered only 17 percent of operating costs in 2016. Continue reading

Can New York City Afford Its Subways?

This is a question the Antiplanner asked almost exactly one year ago, but it comes up again because New York governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor Bill de Blasio are still arguing who should pay to repair the subways. Those subways are contained entirely within New York City. They were built by New York City. They are owned by New York City. Yet New York City mayor Bill de Blasio argues that all of the projected $37 billion cost of restoring the subways to a state of good repair should be paid by the state, not the city.

de Blasio’s reasoning apparently is that, although the city owns the subways, it has leased them to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that also manages commuter trains and other transit lines that connect New York City with suburbs in Connecticut and New York. de Blasio claims to fear that, if the city gives any money at all to the MTA, it will spend some of that money on transit outside of the city.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is willing to meet de Blasio halfway, agreeing that the state will pay for half the cost if the city picks up the other half. “We’ve lost a year because the city wouldn’t pay” its share, he says. Comments on the Gothamist article reporting Cuomo’s statement show that New York City residents don’t think much of this argument. Continue reading

The Future of San Antonio Transit

Someone asked the Antiplanner to briefly review the prospects for public transit in San Antonio. Much of my answer would apply to many other urban areas as well.

1. Transit Is About Downtown

A century ago, most urban jobs were downtown and people walked or rode transit to those jobs from dense residential areas. Today, only about 7.5 percent of urban jobs are located downtown; in San Antonio it’s about 6.2 percent.

Source: Wendell Cox, United States Central Business Districts for downtown jobs; 2010 American Community Survey table B08301 for percent of transit commuters. Continue reading

Portland Streetcar Jumps the Tracks

A Portland streetcar went off the tracks last week, totaling three automobiles and injuring at least two people. When the streetcar came to a stop, it completely blocked Grand Avenue, one of Portland’s most important north-south streets, and it took authorities close to six hours to unblock it.

With their slower speeds, streetcars would seem to be less dangerous than light rail, which kills roughly 12 people per billion passenger miles, about twice as many as automobiles in urban areas and three times as many as buses. According to the Federal Transit Administration’s safety data, streetcars have killed an average of one person per year since 2011, but most of those have been in Philadelphia, which I consider to be more like light rail than streetcars.

But Portland’s 30-seat streetcars weigh about twice as much as a 40-seat bus, which makes them far more prone to damage other vehicles. According to one rather sarcastic series of articles, when new Portland’s streetcar killed a few people and the tracks are still fairly dangerous to cyclists. Continue reading

Qatar Supports the Washington Metro

The Washington Capitals ice hockey team, which plays its home games in downtown Washington, is in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The games go long enough that spectators can’t reliably take DC’s Metro rail transit home, as the trains stop running at 11:30 pm on Monday through Thursday.

This wasn’t a problem in the first two games of a best four-out-of-seven series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, as those games were played in Tampa. In the third game, Metro persuaded Exelon, which owns the local electric company, to donate $100,000 to keep the trains running for an extra hour.

For last night’s game 6, Metro somehow twisted Uber’s figurative arm into contributing $100,000 to keeping the trains running. It seems strange that Uber would give money to its competitor unless it hopes to get some political favors in exchange. Continue reading

Time to Pull the Plug on SW LRT

As noted here before, a light-rail line from Minneapolis to the wealthy suburb of Eden Prairie was originally supposed to cost $1.2 billion for 15.8 route miles, or less than $80 million a mile. Now the projected cost has risen to more than $2 billion for just 14.5 route miles, or around $140 million a mile.

On top of this, the Metropolitan Council, which is planning the rail line, is in a dispute with a local railroad whose right-of-way Metro wants to use for the light rail. The railroad is concerned that light-rail construction will delay its trains. This dispute is being dealt with in a time-honored American fashion in which the railroad is suing the Met Council.

The Met Council is counting on getting $929 million from the Federal Transit Administration, but the FTA hasn’t signed a full-funding grant agreement and the Trump administration is resisting funding any projects without such agreements (though, as noted yesterday, it has made some exceptions). Local governments, however, would be responsible for covering all cost overruns including the recent $200 million increase in projected costs. Continue reading