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Tag Archives: light rail

Stopping Transportation Megafollies

By | | Transportation
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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 →

Transit Is About Downtown

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, likes to say that “transit is about downtown.” This is because most transit lines represent spokes focusing on a downtown hub, making it easy for people throughout an urban area to take transit downtown, but difficult for them to get from anywhere outside of downtown to somewhere else that is outside of downtown.

This can be seen in the above map of Denver’s 2004 rail transit plan known as FasTracks. All of the rail lines but one converge on downtown Denver, where about 20 percent of the 120,000 workers take transit to work. Even though downtown has less than 10 percent of the region’s jobs, 40 percent of all transit commuters in the region commute to downtown jobs. (All of these numbers are from Cox’s 2014 Central Business District report, which is based on 2006 data.) Continue reading →

Sanity in the Valley of the Sun

By | | Transportation
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The Phoenix city council is considering delaying or even killing some planned light-rail lines because it is concerned that city streets are falling apart and too much money is being spent instead on an insignificant form of travel. The council considered but rejected a similar proposal a couple of months ago, but since then two councilors who opposed the proposal have been replaced and at least one of them is inclined to favor streets over rails.

As of 2016, light rail carries less than 0.2 percent of all travel in the Phoenix urban area. The 2016 American Community Survey says that the same tiny percentage of commuters take light rail to work, which is unusual as transit’s commuter share is usually much higher than its total share. Phoenix light-rail ridership in the twelve months ending in June, 2018 was down 4.4 percent from the previous twelve months. Transit ridership for Phoenix as a whole is down 5.6 percent for the same time period.

Phoenix is one of many Sunbelt urban areas in which rail transit makes no sense at all. Aside from the Antiplanner’s argument that buses can move more people than light rail, rail systems only make sense where there is a high concentration of downtown jobs that a hub-and-spoke transit system can serve. According to Wendell Cox’s calculations, downtown Phoenix has only about 26,000 jobs, which is just 1.4 percent of jobs in the metropolitan area. Continue reading →

Light Rail Is Criminogenic

By | | Transportation
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The Guardian reports that a movement has begun in Baltimore to shut down the city’s light-rail lines because of the crime they spread. The liberal Guardian makes this out to be a racial issue, but actually it is just a safety issue.

Architect Oscar Newman discovered several decades ago that some designs are criminogenic, meaning they attract crime, while other designs deter crime. While criminals are more likely to be poor, Newman showed that poor people of all races were much less likely to engage in or be victimized by crime if they lived in areas that were non-criminogenic.

Newman had noted that poor people living in some neighborhoods suffered from lots of crime while the same class of people living in other neighborhoods experienced almost no crime. To find out why, Newman compared design features with crime reports on thousands of city blocks. His work was successfully replicated on a much larger scale by later researchers. Continue reading →

Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Transit ridership is declining and the Trump administration is refusing to giving away federal funds for new transit projects. But Portland’s TriMet transit agency is already buying properties for its new $3 billion light-rail line.

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — which is the real power at Metro, not the elected Metro council — has approved the route for the rail line that is supposed to go from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village, a shopping mall on Interstate 5. The plan calls for bike paths, sidewalks, some new highway bridges (which aren’t included in the cost), as well as 12 miles of light-rail route.

The official projected cost for the project is $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion, but as an analysis by the Cascade Policy Institute shows, the final cost of previous light-rail projects all ended up being as much as 40 percent more than the estimates that had been made at the draft environmental impact statement stage. Metro issued a draft EIS for the project in June. Continue reading →

Austin Wants High-Dollar Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Austin voters have twice rejected light rail at the polls, so naturally the region’s transit agency, Capital Metro, is eager to try again. Earlier this week, it presented a plan to the Austin city council for eleven transit corridors that could cost $6 billion to $8 billion. As if to underscore the agency’s inability to learn from history, it is calling this plan “Project Connect,” the same name it used for the plan that voters defeated by 57 to 43 in 2014.

While Cap Metro deceptively calls light rail “high-capacity transit,” the Austin American-Statesman more accurately calls it “high-dollar” transit. Light rail was rendered obsolete in 1927 when a company called Twin Coach started producing buses that could move more people for far less money than streetcars or light rail.

Bus or rail, now is not the time for Austin to spend a lot of money on transit. Capital Metro lost 20 percent of its riders between 2012 and 2016, and is down another 2.2 percent in the first six months of 2018. Continue reading →

Charlotte’s Transit Disaster

By | | Transportation
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Ridership on Charlotte’s new $1.1 billion (actually closer to $1.2 billion) light-rail line is well below expectations. But that’s okay, says the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), because they expected it to be below expectations.

The line was projected to carry an average of 18,900 weekday trips in its opening year. When combined with the existing light-rail line, which carried about 15,750 weekday trips in 2016, the total should have been more than 33,500. In fact, it carried just 24,544 weekday trips in May, two months after its March opening.

According to CATS, the shortfall is entirely due to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte ending its Spring semester. “You go from a 28,000- or 29,000-student campus down to 4,000,” said CATS spokesman Olaf Kinard. “For us to have over 24,500 riders [in May] — that’s strong.” Students get free transit passes, so CATS is essentially depending on free riders to justify its expenditure of more than a billion dollars. Continue reading →

VTA’s Transit-Superiority Complex

By | | Transportation
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San Jose light-rail ridership is declining, so the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) wants to speed up light-rail trains to make them more attractive to riders. To do this, the agency wants to give light rail the priority over cars, bicycles, and pedestrians at all intersections.

Having to “slow down to avoid hitting somebody that may be crossing the tracks,” says a VTA board member, “slows [the light-rail trains] down quite a bit.” Light-rail trains in downtown San Jose are “possibly some of the slowest in the country,” says a news report. “People are beating transit on their e-scooters,” frets San Jose’s mayor, who also happens to chair VTA’s board. “We’ve got to speed up the light rail trains, so that way, folks will be motivated to use them.”

San Jose light rail is far from the slowest in the country. According to the National Transit Database, it averaged 15.9 miles per hour in 2016, slightly better than the national average of 15.3. While they (along with all other light-rail lines) are slower in downtown, it’s the average speed that counts for attracting riders. Continue reading →

Broward County Fails to Learn from History

By | | Transportation
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The Broward County commission voted six to one to put a measure on the ballot to raise sales taxes by a penny to pay for transportation improvements. This tax, which is expected to raise about $350 million a year, will do such things as “enhance traffic signal synchronization, develop safe sidewalks and bicycle pathways, expand and operate bus and special needs transportation, [and] implement rail along approved corridors.”

That all sounds so reasonable until you get to the last one. Then it becomes clear that nearly all of the money is going to be soaked up planning and building a east-west light-rail line to complement the north-south TriRail commuter rail line. Never mind that light rail was obsolete ninety years ago.

This is the same county commission that spent fourteen years and millions of dollars planning a Fort Lauderdale streetcar project that was finally abandoned when construction bids proved to be far higher than the county had expected. Clearly, most of the commissioners haven’t learned the most important lessons about rail transit: that it takes too long to plan and build, costs too much, and always costs more than planners claim. Continue reading →

Taking the Not-Stupid Option

By | | Transportation
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The Puget Sound Transit board of directors considers themselves to be between a rock and a hard place. The projected cost of the eight-mile Northgate-Lynnwood light-rail line has risen from a low of $1.2 billion to $3.2 billion. The agency is counting on getting more than a billion of that from the Federal Transit Administration, but the Trump administration has been stingy about funding new projects.

So should the board commence construction now even if it means foregoing federal support? Or should it wait until federal support is assured and take the risk that costs will rise even more?

How about a third option: Don’t build it at all. It would have been a stupid idea if it cost just $200 million. It was a really stupid idea at $1.2 billion. It is an extremely stupid idea at $3.2 billion. It’s stupid because buses can do everything light rail can do, but do it more safely and at a much lower cost. Continue reading →