Search Results for: rail

NM’s Rail Runner Is “Financially Healthy”?

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

I’ve heard there is an election somewhere today, but it doesn’t sound all that important. What is important is that the state of New Mexico recently released a report on the “Cost Effectiveness and Operations of the New Mexico Rail Runner Express.” The most positive finding in the report is that, since hardly anyone was riding the train before the pandemic, the loss of ridership during the pandemic had little impact on the rail line’s finances. Taxpayers provided nearly all of the line’s financial support before the pandemic, and they continue to do so today. The report calls this “financially healthy,” and I suppose it is in the sense that bank robbers are financially healthy until they get caught.

Click image to download an 888-KB pdf of this report.

Such financial health will be small comfort to the state taxpayers who spent some $400 million getting the train running and are on the hook for spending well over $40 million a year operating it. The line carried 1.35 million riders in 2009, the first year it went all the way from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, and ridership declined in almost every year since then. By 2019 it was down 45 percent to 744,000. Operating expenses more than doubled during that time but fare revenues declined until they covered just 7 percent of operating costs. Continue reading →

$553 Million a Mile for Elevated Rail

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

The Honolulu Authority for High-Cost, Low-Capacity Transit (HART) has signed a contract with Tutor Perini to spend $1.66 billion to build 3 miles of elevated rail line. The company will also build six stations on that rail line. This is the biggest contract for the Honolulu rail project let to date, but as expensive as it is, this doesn’t include all of the costs of planning, engineering, and design of the line.

As recently as a year ago, this segment of the project was expected to cost around $1.1 billion, and at least some people believed that the transit agency would have to reject all bids if they came in much higher than that as it simply doesn’t have the funds to complete the project. A previous bid of $2.0 billion by the same company was rejected in 2020, but HART apparently decided it could afford $340 million less than that amount even though it was about $400 million more than expected. Continue reading →

Don’t Invest in a Light-Rail Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Last week, I observed that “Transit’s failure to recover from the pandemic is due largely to its downtown-centric orientation in most urban areas.” An op-ed in yesterday’s Baltimore Sun makes a similar point about the planned Red Line light-rail project for that city. “The problem with Baltimore transit is not that it doesn’t have enough expensive rail lines; it is that its route map is mired in the past,” said the op-ed. “Most of its routes focus on downtown Baltimore.”

Rooted in the past: Baltimore’s light-rail system. As an aside, the Orioles ad features steam locomotive wheels because the Orioles play at Camden Yards Stadium, which was built on a former Baltimore & Ohio freight yard, with B&O’s passenger station incorporated into the station. Photo by Mr.TinMD.

This isn’t entirely a coincidence since the Antiplanner wrote the op-ed. “Before the pandemic, more than 20 percent of downtown Baltimore workers commuted by transit, while less than 6 percent of the rest of the region’s workers commuted on transit,” says the article, echoing what I wrote here last week. “The system’s downtown orientation simply does not work for 94 percent of non-downtown workers.” Continue reading →

Transit $60 Million in the Hole? Build a Monorail!

By | | Transportation
13 Comments

In case anyone believes that transit advocates haven’t completely lost their grip on reality, take a look at Memphis. The new CEO of the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) has “discovered” a $60 million deficit in the agency’s budget that “prior leadership was unaware of.”

Memphis’s transit agency can’t afford to keep its streetcars running and has a $60 million deficit, so naturally people want to build a monorail or light-rail system. Photo by Charles Phillips.

How can you not be aware of a $60 million deficit? According to the new CEO, before she took the job, “MATA’s executive leaders did not have access to the company’s detailed financials.” Why not? How could anyone claim to be a leader and not demand access to financial information for the entity they were supposedly leading? Continue reading →

A Legal Challenge to Austin’s Light-Rail Plans

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking a state court to cancel Austin’s light-rail plans. Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency, persuaded voters to raise taxes to build light rail in 2020. Soon after the vote, however, the agency admitted that rail would cost a lot more than it had claimed and so less would be built than promised. Paxton says that in doing so it has breached its contract with the voters and its plans should be rejected.

Imagining light rail in Austin. Smiling happy people, no cars, and no crime make this scene a complete fantasy. Source: Project Connect.

Paxton has gotten in trouble over securities fraud and has taken positions on abortion and immigration that I disagree with. I am sure there are rail transit advocates who are gnashing their teeth over the idea that a lawsuit could overturn the “will of the people” to build light rail in Austin. But, while I am obviously biased, I think that defining the election as a “contract” and ruling it invalid if Capital Metro can’t keep its part of the contract is a great idea. Continue reading →

Another Rail Cost Overrun

By | | Transportation
1 Comment

Metro Transit has raised the projected cost of the Twin Cities’ Southwest light-rail line to $2.86 billion, or $197 million per mile for the 14.5 mile line. The news stories say this is up from $2.0 billion, but the original projected cost was $1.25 billion for 15.8 miles or less than $80 million a mile (which is still outrageous for an inflexible, low-capacity system).

Light-rail trains pass through a half-empty downtown Minneapolis. Photo by Andrew Ciscel.

Considering that downtown Minneapolis is ranked as having the third-slowest recovery of the nation’s 56 largest urban areas, and Twin Cities light rail carried only 52 percent of pre-pandemic riders in November, this would be a good time for the region to scrap the project. As I’ve suggested before, it would cost a lot less to turn it into a rapid bus route than to complete the rail project. Continue reading →

BRT “Faster and Cheaper” Than Rail

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The World Bank is promoting bus-rapid transit as “green” and “sustainable transportation” that is “faster and cheaper to build than Metros,” meaning heavy rail. When operated with all-electric buses, says the agency, BRT will “cut life-threatening air pollutants” as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

A bus-rapid transit station in Dakar, Senegal. Photo courtesy of CETUD.

The World Bank is absolutely correct about the faster and cheaper part. However, it is overpromising when it comes to taking cars off the road. “Developing country cities that have not yet fully developed their land use and transportation infrastructure around cars can leapfrog car-centered culture and prioritize efficient, low-carbon urban transport that focuses on people rather than vehicles,” says a World Bank official. This is pure rhetoric that consigns developing cities to economic stagnation. Continue reading →

Building Rail It Can’t Afford to Operate

By | | Transportation
Leave a comment

Washington Metro is facing a $750 million shortfall in its 2025 budget and may have to cut service as soon as next spring. Meanwhile, its board of directors will be asked to approve an expansion of its Blue Line that will cost at least $30 billion and probably much more.

As the Antiplanner noted last July, the new line is supposedly needed because the existing Blue, Orange, and Silver lines all use the same tunnel under the Potomac River and the line can only handle 26 trains per hour. The Blue Line trains were running at capacity when the Silver Line opened, so Metro lost more Blue Line riders than it gained Silver Line riders when Blue Line trains were cut to make room for Silver Line trains. Continue reading →

“Studying” a Rail Line to Longmont

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has announced that it is going to study the “commuter’s dream” of running a commuter rail line from downtown Denver to Longmont, Colorado. This line was originally supposed to be a part of the FasTracks plan approved by voters in 2004, but cost overruns combined with new ridership projections killed it.

One of the reasons why RTD had such large cost overruns was that the airport, Longmont, and several other lines were originally planned to be powered by Diesels but, after the 2004 election, RTD switched to electric power despite the higher costs. Photo by Jarrett Stewart.

FasTracks was supposed to build six new rail lines and a bus-rapid transit line from Denver to Boulder at a total cost of $4.8 billion. Proponents claimed that this cost was highly reliable and there was no way there would be any overruns. But soon after the election, they admitted that costs were creeping up and by 2007 they had ballooned to $7.9 billion. The cost of the Longmont line in particular went from $750 million to $1.5 billion. Continue reading →

Melbourne’s Rail Folly

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

American cities are not the only ones building insane rail projects. Melbourne, Australia’s largest city, is currently building a 56-mile (90-kilometer) suburban rail line. Once projected to cost AU$50 billion (about US$32 billion), the projected costs have risen to AU$125 billion (about US$79 billion). Although construction has already begun, the city doesn’t expect to complete all 90 kilometers for 25 years, by which time the costs will probably have risen much higher.

The Melbourne Suburban Loop under construction. Photo by Rail Projects Victoria.

At the present projected cost, that’s more than $1.4 billion per mile in U.S. dollars, making it the most expensive (in dollars per mile) transit project in the world outside of New York City. One reason for the high cost is that it will all be underground, but plenty of other cities (other than New York) have been able to build subways for less than $1.4 billion a mile, and most of them much less than $1.0 billion a mile. Continue reading →