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How Do You Define “Viable”?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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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.

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El Paso Falls for Streetcar Scam

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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El Paso is spending $90 million building a 4.8-mile streetcar line. For that price, they could have built close to 9 miles of four-lane freeway. The streetcar will connect the University of Texas El Paso with downtown, which suggests that they don’t expect many students to go downtown. If they did, they would have provided a bus service, which would have been faster and could move more people per hour.

In the course of paying for the streetcar, the city paid $3.2 million to an email phishing scammer. Two payments intended for the construction company were “misdirected” to another account. The city discovered the scam in early October and tried to cover it up but held a press conference about it yesterday.

The Antiplanner applauds the city for admitting it fell victim to a phishing scam. Now I’m waiting for the city to admit that it fell victim to the streetcar scam. That will be harder. Washington DC, for example, is home to one of the most embarrassing streetcar failures in the country, yet it is already planning another line. El Paso is more likely to argue that the phishing scam it fell for will promote economic development than admit that the streetcar it is building is also a scam.
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