No One’s Riding Light Rail, So Reduce Fares and Build More

Planners predicted that Norfolk’s Tide light-rail line, which opened in 2011 60 percent over budget and 16 months behind schedule, would stimulate economic development along its route. But little development is taking place, so the Virginian Pilot has come up with a grand idea: reduce fares by two thirds. That, the paper’s editorial writers guesstimate, should attract 1,000 more riders per day, which they hope will generate the development planners promised.

Looks fast, but the schedule indicates it takes 26 minutes to go 7 miles for an average speed of 16 mph.

There are a lot of problems with this proposal, not least of which is the fact that rail fares in Norfolk are already the second-lowest in the country, after Houston’s. Though the nominal fare is $1.50, which the Pilot proposes to cut to 50 cents, actual fares collected in 2012 averaged just 50 cents a ride, compared with 35 cents in Houston but $1.39 in Denver. The national average for low-capacity rail is 98 cents, while the average Hampton Roads bus rider pays 91 cents.

“It’s time to end the pretense that a 7-mile starter light rail line can on its own attract enough fare-paying riders to substantially offset the cost of operations,” says the Pilot. In fact, that pretense ended long ago. Farebox revenues barely covered 5 percent of operating costs in 2012. When the line was under construction, planners predicted it would cost $6.5 million a year to operate; it actually cost $12.6 million in 2012. But even at $6.5 million, fares would have covered little more than 10 percent of operating costs.

The low fares mean one of two things: either Hampton Roads Transit is already giving away trips to nearly half its riders or it is vastly over reporting the actual number of riders. The latter would not be surprising, as transit agencies in Charlotte and Salt Lake City exaggerated light-rail ridership, while Hampton Roads Transit officials have been proven to lie to the public in the past about such things as construction costs.

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A third problem is that the type of development planners want–which Wikipedia describes as transit-oriented development in “a smart growth transit corridor to help guide growth using compact mixed-use development practices”–is simply not that popular with most people. That means developers won’t build it unless it is subsidized. I suspect Norfolk planners have zoned everything around the rail stations for such development, so with insufficient subsidies developers are going elsewhere to build what people want rather than what planners want.

The Pilot should ask why this kind of development is so desirable that Norfolk and nearby cities should spend hundreds of millions of dollars on little-used rail lines to stimulate it. It doesn’t significantly reduce driving, and even if it did, it wouldn’t save energy because (according to the 2012 National Transit Database) Norfolk’s rail line uses far more energy than cars: 5,400 BTUs per passenger mile in 2012 compared with an average of less than 3,400 for cars and 4,100 for light trucks (and 3,700 for Hampton Roads buses). Nor does the housing itself save energy, as the per-square-foot energy consumption of multifamily housing is greater than single-family.

The big problem with reducing fares is that it is exactly the opposite of a sensible policy for transit. Rail transit costs a lot more to run (not to mention more to build and more to maintain) than buses, so fares should be more, not less. Hampton Roads Transit spends $6 a vehicle mile running its buses, and whopping $38 a mile running its low-capacity rail cars. If you believe the agency’s ridership numbers, the average number of people on board the railcars is 17, compared with 10 for the buses, so the operating cost per trip is more than $9 for rail and less than $4 for buses. Bus trips are also longer–an average of 6 miles vs. 4 for the rail–so the rail cost per passenger mile is almost 3.5 times as much as for bus.

(You can perform all these and more calculations yourself, for Hampton Roads Transit as well as any other transit agency, in this spreadsheet summarizing the 2012 National Transit Database. See this post for an explanation of how to use it.)

Rail transit is supposed to be about bringing large numbers of people into major job centers. But there are no major job centers in the region, or at least none served by the Tide rail line: Norfolk has only about 24,000 downtown jobs, less than 3 percent of the metropolitan area. Transit subsidies are also supposed to help low-income people who don’t have cars reach jobs, but the 2012 American Community Survey found that only 2.6 percent of workers in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach urban area lack cars, and half of them travel to work by car, while only 32 percent ride transit (table B08141).

So the real problem is persuading the Pilot and other opinion leaders in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area that the Tide rail line is a dismal failure. Not surprisingly, many people don’t care about the facts and want to expand the system. This would be piling insanity on top of insanity. Rail transit makes no sense for the Hampton Roads region.