San Jose Light-Rail Service Resumes

Last week, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) resumed “limited” light-rail service for the first time since the May 26 shooting at VTA’s maintenance center. Service began on the Orange Line and part of the Green Line. A week later, part of the Blue Line opened along with another segment of the Green Line. VTA has to test tracks on each segment before it can open; some lines were lower priorities, said the agency, because they carried few riders, providing further support for the Antiplanner’s belief that light rail was the wrong technology for San Jose in the first place.

VTA closed its light-rail system for more than three months and part of the system will be closed for even longer. Photo by Minh Nguyen.

VTA claims it closed down the light-rail operations “to give employees time to heal from the traumatic experience” of the May 26 shooting. But transit advocate Eugene Bradley pointed out “that other major cities that experienced violent disruptions of transit, such as New York and London, managed to restore service within hours.” Not only did VTA not run light-rail trains for three months, for much of that time it didn’t provide light-rail riders with alternative bus services. “VTA is showing the world how to not recover from a tragedy,” said Bradley. Continue reading

The Tide Celebrates Ten Years of Waste

The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in the Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60 percent cost overrun.

The Tide light rail in downtown Norfolk. Photo by Dean Covey, Virginia Department of Transportation.

The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit agency lie. The original projections estimated that the rail line would carry 10,400 riders per weekday in its opening year. That would be about 1 million riders in less than four months. In fact, it carried less than half that, just 4,900 riders per weekday in its first year, and took eight months to reach 1 million riders. Continue reading

The Failure of Dallas TOD

The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), the transit agency serving Dallas and a dozen other cities, is proud of the fact that it has built the longest light-rail system in the country. It is almost as proud of the many transit-oriented developments (TODs) built near light-rail stations. Of course, it never mentions that many if not most of those developments were subsidized through below-market land sales, tax-increment financing, and other government assistance.

Apartments and condos surround the Las Colinas light-rail station in Irving, Texas, yet that station attracted only 137 round-trip riders per weekday in 2019.

To transit advocates, such subsidies are justified because they boost ridership. But is there cause for such justification? How well have transit-oriented developments worked in promoting DART ridership? Continue reading

VTA to Resume Running Light Rail — Someday

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) announced that it is going to resume running its light-rail trains. It doesn’t know when it is going to do it, but it has a plan. The plan is pretty vague but it hints the trains might be accepting passengers again by the end of July, although the agency’s CEO admits that mid-August is more likely.

As Antiplanner readers will remember, on May 26, a disgruntled employee killed nine other VTA workers at the light-rail maintenance center and then shot himself. The shut-down of the maintenance center meant no light-rail trains could run while police were doing their investigation.

To make matters worse, VTA said it didn’t have enough bus drivers to replace light-rail service. What buses and drivers it had were dedicated to the “regular bus network that serves the majority of our riders who rely on public transit the most,” the agency said. Continue reading

The Columbia River Crossing Rises Again

After being declared dead seven years ago, the proposal to replace the bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been revived. Proponents of a new bridge have a web site that must be designed for Generation Z, as I find it pretty incomprehensible.

The original Pacific Highway bridge, now known as the Interstate Bridge, had two lanes of traffic including room for trolley cars.

Part of the existing structure opened as a two-lane bridge in 1917, and its capacity was doubled by building a duplicate bridge in 1958. Later the bridges were re-striped for three lanes to match the Interstate 5 freeway lanes north and south of the river. 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

Vote No, They’ll Build It Anyway

In 1998, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. So TriMet, the region’s transit agency, built it anyway.

In the recent election, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. Now TriMet is salivating at the possibility that the next Congress will pass an economic stimulus bill that will allow it to build it anyway, perhaps by requiring only 20 percent local matching funds instead of the current 50 percent.

Portland’s first light-rail line, which opened in 1986, cost about $30 million a mile in today’s dollars to go east from downtown Portland to Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. The second line, which opened in 1997, cost about $75 million a mile in today’s dollars to go west from downtown Portland to Beaverton and Hillsboro. Continue reading

Rail Supporters Can’t Tell the Truth from Fiction

Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, has put a measure on this November’s ballot to tax all firms with 25 or more employees in order to pay for the region’s latest light-rail scheme. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the scheme appears to be foundering on the weight of lies told by Metro and the measure’s supporters.

To start, Metro wanted to call the tax a “business tax” even though it would be actually a 0.75 percent tax on payrolls. In other words, it would be an income tax on employees, but it would be invisible because it wouldn’t show on paystubs as a withholding like most income taxes. Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has used this kind of a tax to pay for its operations and always called it a “payroll tax.” But Metro wanted to call it a “business tax” on the ballot title because it believed Portlanders would be more likely to support taxes evil businesses than poor downtrodden employees.

When challenged, a judge ordered Metro to take “business tax” out of the title but didn’t order it to use the term “payroll tax.” Despite not getting the ballot title they wanted, opponents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the measure. This includes large contributions from major employers including Nike, Daimler Trucks, Comcast, and Tillamook Creamery.

As of September 28, opponents had actually outraised supporters. Contributions to the pro-rail campaign came from rail contractor Stacy & Witbeck, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and engineering consulting firm David Evans & Associates. The Evans firm is the company that got the contract to write the environmental impact statement for building a light-rail bridge over the Columbia River and then spent the money lobbying the Oregon and Washington legislatures to build the bridge. Continue reading

Driving Bounces Back

The mayor of San Diego wants to spend $177 billion expanding the region’s transit system in order to make San Diego like “Barcelona, Madrid, Paris.” Meanwhile, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris are becoming more like U.S. cities, at least in terms of the transportation habits of their residents. Driving is the dominant form of travel in all European cities and is rebounding fast after pandemic lock-downs.

Of course, driving is rebounding even faster in the United States, according to INRIX estimates. Total driving at the end of June, the entire month of July, and the first week of August was more than it had been in the weeks before the pandemic. Of course, it was the middle of winter before the virus, but that’s still an impressive comeback.

Interestingly, that driving hasn’t brought congestion back to its pre-COVID levels. Morning rush-hour driving in most urban areas was only only around 70 to 80 percent of pre-shutdown levels while afternoon rush-hour driving was 80 to 90 percent, with afternoon levels exceeding 100 percent in just a couple of urban areas. As a result, rush-hour speeds are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic. Continue reading

Kill the Purple Line

Anyone who carefully read the environmental impact statement for Maryland’s Purple Line would know that the proposed light-rail trains would be slow, would make congestion in the region worse, and that buses could move as many riders for a lot less money. It wouldn’t have taken much more research to learn that Maryland had a history of badly overestimating ridership and underestimating costs of its rail transit lines and that the ridership projections for this line had been particularly overinflated in order to make it eligible for federal funding.

Of course, most people didn’t read those documents or do the research, and many chose instead to believe the hype. So Maryland gave a $5.8 billion contract to a consortium of companies to build and operate the line. When, predictably, the line ran into delays and cost overruns, the companies withdrew from the project.

This naturally led opponents to urge Maryland to take this opportunity to cancel the project. Even if you believed the unrealistically high ridership estimates made before the contract was signed, the pandemic has probably decimated the market for transit. Continue reading