Back in the Air Again

The Antiplanner will be in Littleton, Colorado tonight talking about housing issues. The event is open to the public and starts at 7 pm at the South Fellowship Church, 6560 South Broadway. If you are in the Denver area, I hope to see you there.

In the meantime, interesting news from Sacramento: the regional transit district is considering shutting down one of its light-rail lines for lack of ridership. As the Antiplanner noted two months ago, the agency has lost more than 26 percent of its transit riders in the past six years and has raised fares by 10 percent to make up for the lost revenue.

The light-rail line that it is considering shutting down is only 1.1 miles long–so it is more like a streetcar line–and it attracts just 400 riders per day. Despite this poor record, Sacramento still wants to build a 3.3-mile streetcar line.
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This is the city whose 2006 Regional Transportation Plan concluded that all previous plans’ attempts to reduce driving and promote more compact development had failed–and so decided to do more of the same. Government planners can’t learn from their mistakes because, once made, the special interest groups that benefit from those mistakes will lobby hard to perpetuate them.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

2 Responses to Back in the Air Again

  1. bennett says:

    Surprised Sac-town transit folks don’t understand fare elasticity. Raising fares to make up for lost revenue due to low ridership is only shooting yourself in the foot. If the problem is nobody uses the service, how is making it more expensive going to solve that problem?

  2. kens says:

    Sacramento RT built this stub of a rail line, possibly illegally, with $39 million (IIRC) of local sales-tax dollars (and no federal dollars) that had been specifically designated in a voter-approved initiative for something else: planning work for the entire (13-mile?) line, which was supposed to go all the way to the airport. I say possibly illegally because, at the time, I prodded the Sac Bee transportation writer to look into the legality of using most of the funds instead for construction, and the two legal experts he contacted both said it was questionable. But without a lawsuit, there was nothing to stop RT from going forward with the switch.

    I’m surprised they’re able to manage even 400 daily riders. The line transverses and terminates in an industrial area with no residents and few jobs. I’d guess most of the riders are downtown workers using it as a remote parking lot. Hardly serving the purpose of reducing driving. I imagine RT built this as a “foot in the door,” figuring it would be easier to get funding to extend an existing line than to fund an entirely new line.

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