Virginia Light Rail Woes

The city manager for Norfolk, Virginia, has been forced to resign due to allegations that she knew about light rail cost overruns but failed to inform the city council. The senior vice president for development of Norfolk’s transit agency, Hampton Roads Transit, has also quit in response to allegations that her mismanagement led to the cost overruns.

When Flickr user DearEdward took this photo in July, 2008, Hampton Roads Transit was promising to start operating Norfolk’s light rail in December, 2009. Now it has postponed the opening to late in 2011.

They follow the transit agency’s previous general manager, who was forced to quit a year ago when the cost overruns first came to light. Meanwhile, Hampton Roads Transit has announced that the light-rail line is not only $106 million over budget, it is at least 16 months behind schedule. The most recent scheduled date for opening the line, May 2011, has been postponed indefinitely because of delays in delivering and installing safety equipment.

For example, it may buy sildenafil uk be encouraging for you to hear that sporadic ejaculation prior to time. The cheap viagra relaxed muscle works perfectly in time of need. If the law of karma were put into play now, the spirit of Christmas would burn as intensely bright for the mayor and his firefighters as it will be for the couple whose home they intentionally destroyed by their refusal sildenafil 100mg viagra to save it. levitra on line sales He is an industrialist and philanthropist. Norfolk wanted to use the light rail as the centerpiece for turning its downtown into a New Urban community “where people can work, shop, eat, and play.” That dream is also falling apart, as Farm Fresh, a major supermarket that opened downtown just three years ago, has announced that it is closing. Norfolk’s downtown now features “hundreds of empty condos, apartments, and storefronts.”

The officials who have been forced out of office complain that it is unfair that they were targeted for criticism, and perhaps it is. After all, nearly all light-rail lines go over their projected costs, yet officials and planners are rarely called to account for the overruns. Perhaps the Norfolk officials’ real failing was in failing to manage the media to make people think the project was successful no matter what the cost.

Consider, for example, Charlotte, North Carolina. Although Charlotte’s Lynx line is roughly comparable in length (9.6 miles) and cost ($460 million) to the lines in Minneapolis (12.3 miles; $715 million) and Houston (7.5 miles, $400 million), Charlotte’s carries only about a third as many riders as the other two. (Yes, the Lynx line is newer, but by their second full year’s of operation, the Minneapolis and Houston lines both carried far more passengers than Lynx in its second year.)

Despite its anemic ridership, Charlotte officials have convinced many that their line is a great success and that Charlotte should build more light-rail and commuter-rail lines. The transit agency is nearly broke, but it wants the city to double the fee to a consultant that is helping it “creatively finance” the new lines.

Years ago, the Antiplanner knew many government-employed economists who took it for granted that any decisions decided democratically were economically efficient. But just because Charlotte transit officials are able to lie more convincingly than those in Norfolk doesn’t make Charlotte’s light rail an economic success. It may only mean that Charlotte has a bigger budget for lying public relations.

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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.

12 Responses to Virginia Light Rail Woes

  1. metrosucks says:

    Well let’s see. I want to cut off the libtard complaints at the knee.

    After all, the Norfolk project is failing because people just don’t believe in the magical choo choo trains. If you believe in choo! choo!, developments will spring up, people will “work, shop, eat, and play” around the choo choo, and everyone will be happy. This is all the fault of those stingy, mean right wingers who just won’t believe in the choo choo, and more importantly, freely and happily fork over “their” money for more useful purposes like hearing choo! Choo!

  2. Borealis says:

    To metrosucks,

    Please just let people make their own comments. If the opponents want to go extreme, then let’s just wait for them to do it. They might surprise you.

    Plus, there are some substantive ideas to talk about. Erroneous estimates are a huge deal and greatly undermine democratic decisionmaking. It would be interesting to see data on whether light rail estimates are more inaccurate than other bond proposals.

  3. bennett says:

    Borealis says: “Erroneous estimates are a huge deal and greatly undermine democratic decisionmaking. It would be interesting to see data on whether light rail estimates are more inaccurate than other bond proposals.”

    A couple of thoughts. I’m thinking that erroneous estimates sole purpose is to garner support for projects. I wonder, from a socio/political view, if these lies are even necessary. So much political support has been garnered for many of these rail projects I’m not sure that telling the public up front that the project is going to $338 million instead of $232 million would make any bit of difference on whether the project got approved. Maybe it would have, I don’t know. Just a thought.

    Low balling costs in endemic of public financed development projects. While I have a dearth of empirical data to support this claim (I’m sure Mr. O’Toole can back it up), in my estimation rail, in particular HSR, seems to be the most erronious.

    Sometimes the erroneous estimates take a different forms. Here is Austin, TX we put a large amount of tax dollars into financing toll road construction. The projected costs were right on, but it turns out that it is going to take twice as long to recoup the investment than promised.

  4. Francis King says:

    Charlotte $50m/mile
    Minneapolis $58m/mile
    Houston $53m/mile

    It’s starting to look as if we can predict the cost of a light rail system.

    Tide, Norfolk Light Rail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide_Light_Rail.

    Tide, $288m, 7.4m = $38m/mile. Add $106m overrun, and the new cost is, um, $53m/mile.

    🙂

  5. Francis King,

    $50 million a mile is a good average starting price, but light rail costs aren’t always that predictable. Adding lots of bridges and tunnels can greatly increase the cost. For example:

    Seattle’s central link light rail: $170 million per mile
    Seattle’s north link light-rail: $220 million per mile
    Portland’s Milwaukie light rail: $200 million per mile

  6. the highwayman says:

    Other than things like bridges & tunnels. There’s a break down of that per mile cost too, infrastructure(stations, maintenance areas), vehicles & etc. A mile of track costs around $1 million, it’s just the other things that get added on that make it look bigger than it really is.

  7. Andrew says:

    bennett: The idea that engineering/construction consultants purposefully lowball estimates to governments to get infrastructure projects rolling is insulting. Blowing an estimate on the lowside usually gets you blackballed from further work with the agency or authority because it blows a hole in carefully constructed capital budget programs, thus jeapordizing other projects and the careful balance of political support which goes in to funding transportation and similar infrastructure in a state.

    In my own experience, most cost overruns occur because of delays and changes to programs caused by politicians or government managers. In one example I am familiar with, a manager decided he didn’t like or trsut a contractor that had been awarded a $80M contract for a portion of work and had their contract terminated. After the lawsuits, hiring of an interim contractor, hiring of a new final contractor, program delays and escalation, etc., this shoot from the hip decision had added $150 million to the cost of the project. It wasn’t something inherent in the project or a lie told by anyone – just a ridiculously ill-advised action taken by someone given the power to make a decision of this magnitude but without having to bear any responsibility for the outcome.

  8. Andrew says:

    highwayman – Another big cost variable is the number of vehicles needed for the operation. With vehicles costing millions of dollars each, project costs per mile can swing wildly depending on the planned headways, speeds, and consist lengths. These then also affect overall fleet size, which then drives operating costs because of the need to hire additional operators and maintenance personnel to handle the slow trains and larger fleets.

    This is why it is so important for the planning process to consider operational efficiency. But in my own experience, this is rarely considered as a prime reason for undertaking particular actions when a new rail line is engineered, and the result is the continuing construction of lines which fail to meet the achievements of the Interurbans and early electric suburban railways of the 1920’s.

    Very few modern light rail lines can hold a candle to the design and operating standards of the Chicago, North Shore, and Milwaukee, or the Philadelphia and Western, to name just two well-known examples of speed and efficiency from the past. The same goes for new heavy rail lines which cannot match up with the four track express-local systems seen on the NYC Subway, the Broad St. Subway in Philadelphia, and the Red/Purple line in Chicago. The high top design speeds on WMATA, PATCO, and elsewhere have not been matained over time because the lack of express operating ability limits their actual time savings in real operation (and thus also the amount of people they can attract to the system) versus the run up in costs from power consumption.

  9. Francis King says:

    Antiplanner wrote:

    “$50 million a mile is a good average starting price, but light rail costs aren’t always that predictable.”

    Yes, absolutely. And what goes for light rail, is doubly true of BRT. But we had four approximately comparable schemes, chosen by Antiplanner, and all priced at the same cost per mile, except one. It took me about 60 seconds to find the odd one out. This should at least have led to questions being asked about why this scheme was so inexpensive, and whether or not the prices were accurate.

    Please see Figure 1 of this, to see the spread of construction costs: http://www.transportpolicy.org.uk/PublicTransport/AdvancedBuses/AdvancedBuses.htm

    The mid-point cost in Figure 1 is about $37m/km or $59m/mile. $38m/mile works out at $24m/km, well towards the bottom end of the range.

    Maybe the Federal Transit Agency needs to do some research on this, or maybe there’s some data out there already (I will have to take a look). But projects, to go back to your original point, should not be out by $100m. We should be able to predict costs much more accurately by now.

  10. bennett says:

    Andrew,

    I’m in agreement with you. I think its often political hocus pocus that is to blame for erroneous estimates, not the private contractors. In my experience “delays and changes to programs caused by politicians or government managers” are often foreseeable by the powers at be. This political football game is what makes the estimates erroneous. The contract the engineering/construction consultants sign, is malleable to many of the politicians overseeing the projects. “Change of order” is no big deal to these politicians, but seriously costly. In other words, the “low ball” is crafted from the public side, not the private (sheesh, I sound like a danged Antiplanner here).

  11. Scott says:

    Builders often low-ball bids to get public work.
    That’s fairly common knowledge.
    The left has blinders to so many things.

  12. the highwayman says:

    The right has blinders on too for that matter.

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