BART Is in Self-Destruct Mode

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority (BART) spends a lot of money, and anytime a government agency has a lot of money to spend, there is a potential for corruption. For example, a month ago it was revealed that BART spent $350,000 to help one homeless person.

These $2 million cars were recently delivered to BART along with three times the service delays as the 40-year-old cars they replaced, which is a problem that should have been examined by the inspector general.

That revelation came from the BART Inspector General’s office, which was created in 2018 (about 50 years too late) to monitor BART spending. But BART itself hasn’t been too thrilled about having someone look over its shoulder. Continue reading

BART Outlook Grim Because Managers Dim

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) says that its financial outlook is “grim” and it may have to ask voters for a tax increase to keep running. As of December, BART was still carrying just 25 percent as many passengers as it carried before the pandemic.

BART spent nearly $2 million apiece on 775 of these railcars, which first went into service in 2018. In December 2020, BART halted delivery on the new cars because they were so unreliable.

In a presentation to the agency’s board of directors, staff noted that Congress had given $1.3 billion in COVID relief funds. It has used just about half of that and is burning through the rest at a rate of $25 million a month. At that rate, it has enough to keep going for about two more years. Continue reading

More Rail Follies

Speaking of faulty railcar wheels (which I wrote about in Monday’s post regarding the Hawaii rail debacle), Washington’s Metro has been forced to drastically reduce rail service due to wheel problems that are causing its trains to frequently derail. The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that Metrorail trains have suffered dozens of minor derailments since the 7000-series of cars were put into service in 2015.

A Blue Line train derailed last week, and investigators found that it had actually derailed twice before that same day. Many other trains were delayed as it took two hours to evacuate the 187 passengers on board. In a press conference early this week, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the derailment could have been “catastrophic” if the wheels had hit the third rail that powers the trains.

As a result, Metro is taking the 7000-series cars out of service for at least a week while it tries to determine what to do about the problem. Since those cars make up 60 percent of the system’s operable fleet, that means reducing service from as frequently as every five minutes to as infrequently as every half hour. Continue reading

More Honolulu Rail Follies

You don’t hear much about Howard Hughes anymore, but he — or, more precisely, a real estate development company named after him — is helping to delay completion of the Honolulu rail line, the $12 billion project we love to ridicule. Hughes is the midst of developing a master-planned community called Ward Village that’s smack in the pathway of the rail line, and the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) says it wants two acres for the line.

Hughes is willing to sell the land to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART), but there is a teensy disagreement over the value of the land. HART offered Hughes $13.5 million; Hughes thought it was worth “about” $100 million more. HART is attempting to take the land by eminent domain, leading Hughes to counter sue, asking for $200 million in damages. HART has already approved $23 million to pay its legal fees in the eminent domain suit.

I wonder if HART is trying to pull the same fast one that Denver’s RTD tried, which was to claim that the rail line would increase the value of the remaining property so landowners should be willing (or forced) to sell the land needed for the train for less than market value. Hughes, however, will probably argue that the success of its development makes the remaining land in the development even more valuable. Continue reading

Dueling Databases

Outside of New York City, rail transit construction costs in the United States aren’t any higher than the rest of the world, according to a preliminary report from the Eno Transportation Foundation. The report is based on a database of 171 projects in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

In a stark example of high-cost, low-capacity transit, Sound Transit spent well over $500 million per mile building an underground light-rail line from downtown Seattle to the University of Washington. Photo by Joe Goldberg.

Not so fast, says the Transit Costs Project (a part of New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management). This program has compiled a much larger database of 574 projects, and it shows that U.S. costs are twice almost everywhere else in the world. Continue reading

More Reasons Not to Ride Transit

Ridership on New York City subways may be down by 66 percent, but two things that haven’t declined on the subways are violent crime and vandalism. Homocides, rapes, and burglaries have all increased since the pandemic began, reports the New York Times.

Just last week alone, a woman was shoved onto the tracks in front of an on-coming subway trains; a man was also pushed onto the tracks; a Broadway actor was beaten severely enough to require surgery; and two men beat a woman for telling them to wear masks. And those were only the most horrific attacks of the week. Continue reading

Yesterday’s Transit Ten Years from Now

France is spending $45 billion on 120 miles of new subways designed to better connect Paris with its suburbs. Known as the Grand Paris Express, the project would add four new lines to the Paris subway system.

Map of planned new subway lines by Hektor.

At $380 million per mile, the cost sounds cheap by American standards. Yet it has already suffered huge cost overruns, as it was projected to cost just $27 billion as little as four years ago. Continue reading

Five Reasons to Raise Subway Fares

Some people at UC Berkeley published an article this week giving “five arguments for making subways free.” Yet it is more realistic to think that fares should be raised, not reduced.

The five arguments in the Berkeley article are:

  1. Marginal costs are low because capital costs have already been spent;
  2. Externalities are low especially if the subways get cars off the road;
  3. No more waiting in lines to pay;
  4. Subways help poor people and stimulate the economy;
  5. There are increasing returns to having more riders.

Some of these depend on the system, yet the Berkeley article makes no distinction between such extremes as the New York City subway, which is the heaviest-used transit system in the country, and the Baltimore subway, which is a joke. Other arguments are simply wrong. Continue reading

Learning the Right Lessons

For the third time, Gwinnett County voters rejected a plan to raise their taxes in order to expand the metropolitan Atlanta rail system into their county. Only three of the five main counties in the Atlanta urban area are part of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), and transit advocates have long blamed any MARTA failures on the reluctance of the other counties to join.

Thou shall not pass into Gwinnett County. Photo by RTABus.

Some implied that anyone who voted against MARTA expansion into Gwinnett County was racist. But it’s not racist to object to spending billions of dollars on an obsolete technology to serve a dying industry. Continue reading

Stopping Transportation Megafollies

A commentary in Governing magazine argues that the Trump administration erred in demanding that California return the federal grants used to build its incomplete high-speed rail project. After all, the alternative to not building it is to build it, and that would require at least another $35 billion in federal funds, which Trump does not want to provide.

The other problem is that demanding a refund for incomplete projects creates a perverse incentive for states and cities to finish projects even after they have realized they are a waste of money. “Sometimes common sense wins out only after construction of a megafolly has begun,” says the commentary. “States and cities shouldn’t have to complete projects that they never should have started just to avoid returning federal money they’ve already spent.”

The commentary specifically cites the Honolulu rail line, whose costs have grown from $5 billion when it received federal funding to nearly $10 billion today. The project has been so mismanaged that the Federal Transit Administration has filed three subpoenas for thousands of pages of records. The city probably has enough money to finish 16 miles of the planned 20-mile line, but if the federal government demands a refund if the entire line isn’t finished, it will have to impose another $3 billion or more in taxes on local taxpayers to finish a white elephant. Continue reading