Search Results for: amtrak boston 151 billion

Because $117 Billion Wasn’t Expensive Enough

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In 2010, Amtrak proposed to spend $117 billion to upgrade its Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail corridor. This idea was so unrealistically expensive that the Antiplanner called it “gold-plated high-speed rail.”

Apparently, Amtrak wants platinum plating instead, as its 2012 update to the proposal has raised the cost to $151 billion. This includes some additional bells and whistles, including a $7 billion revamp of Washington, DC’s Union Station (see Amtrak’s report for complete details).

Amtrak either hasn’t heard or doesn’t care that high-speed rail is dead (except for a train to nowhere in California) or that the federal government is about out of money. Instead, says Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman, it wants to be “ready” in case someone accidentally drops $150 billion or so in its path.

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Slow & Boring vs. Fast & Wasteful

By | | Transportation
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Matthew Yglesias thinks that Amtrak’s latest “vision” is “slow and boring” and that Amtrak instead should spend money on high-speed trains in the Boston-Washington corridor. But Yglesias’ vision is no better; it might be faster, but it also means faster spending of money on worthless projects.

Amtrak’s 2021 “vision” for expanding its rail service. Click image for a larger view.

The first thing to note is that Amtrak’s latest plan is not so much a vision as it is a smorgasbord of pork barrel. Amtrak told the states, “We have this free federal money to spend; if you want some of it, draw some lines on a map where there are rail lines and maybe we’ll spend it there.” What Yglesias calls a vision is a taxpayers’ nightmare of idiotic rail projects. Continue reading →

How San Jose Held Up Google for $200 Million

By | | City planning, Policy brief
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Last month, the San Jose city council approved a plan for Google to practically double the size of downtown San Jose. The plan allows Google to build up to 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 to 5,900 housing units, 1,100 hotel/extended stay units, and half a million square feet of retail or cultural space on 80 acres of land located just west of downtown. The site is immediately adjacent to the San Jose train station, which serves commuter trains, light rail, and Amtrak.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

According to city planning documents, this is exactly the kind of development San Jose was looking for in this area, one which (according to a staff presentation) would “create a vibrant, welcoming, and accessible urban destination consisting of a mix of land uses and that are well-integrated with the intermodal transit station.” Yet in order to get the project approved, Google had to put up $200 million for various special interest groups who were protesting the plan. This may actually have the perverse effect of discouraging future development in the city. Continue reading →

Does Transit Cost-Effectively Help the Poor?

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Almost every effort to justify subsidies to urban transit makes similar claims: transit supposedly saves energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, promotes economic development, relieves congestion, and helps low-income people. Previous policy briefs have shown that, in all but a handful of urban areas, transit uses more energy and produces more greenhouse gases than the average car; often makes congestion worse; fails to promote economic growth; and hurts the 95 percent of low-income workers who don’t ride transit.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

But what about the 5 percent of low-income workers who do commute by transit (or, at least, did so before the pandemic)? For some transit advocates, it’s not enough that nearly 80 percent of the costs of transit are subsidized. They argue that, to truly help low-income people, transit should be free. Is transit a cost-effective way of providing mobility needed to thrive in modern cities? Continue reading →

1. A Tale of Two Train Disasters

By | | Policy brief
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In 2004, Denver-area voters approved a sale tax increase to pay for “FasTracks,” a plan to build 119 miles of rail transit lines in the metropolitan area. In 2008, California voters approved the sale of bonds to pay for the construction of a 520-mile high-speed rail line between Los Angeles/Anaheim and San Francisco/San Jose. FasTracks is within a metropolitan area and high-speed rail is supposed to connect several metropolitan areas, yet there are a lot of similarities between these two projects.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Both rely on technologies that were rendered obsolete years before they received voter approval. The agencies sponsoring both projects ignored early warning signals that the projects were not cost effective. Both had large cost overruns. Advocates of both lied to voters about the benefits and costs of the projects. Due to poor planning, both projects remain incomplete. Despite the failure of the projects to date, both have adherents who hope to complete them. Continue reading →

Dumb Trains

By | | Transportation
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Economist Mike Arnold argues that the Sonoma-Marin “SMART” commuter train is “falling short of its promises,” and those who say it is doing well are using “alternative facts” (or, as Colbert would say, “truthiness”). Among other things, he says that, of 26 commuter rail operations in the U.S., SMART’s ridership ranks only number 23.

That might not be fair considering that many commuter rail systems operate over far greater distances than SMART, whose line is 43 miles long. For a better idea of how the SMART train stacks up, I compiled data for other new commuter-rail operations below. I left out legacy operations in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and CalTrains in San Francisco as these are all going to do far better than most of the new ones. I also left out Amtrak’s Downeaster, which is an intercity (Boston-Portland) train that the FTA includes in its database as it has received from FTA funding. I included lines the FTA calls “hybrid rail” such as trains in Austin and Portland as the local transit agencies often call these commuter rail. All of the data are from the 2017 National Transit Database except for the SMART train, which didn’t begin operating until FY 2018; for this I took data from Arnold’s article.

TrainWeekday
Trips		Route
Miles		Trips/
Mile		PM/VRM
(Occupancy)
LA Metrolink51,27634015132
FL TriRail13,9997618434
DFW Trinity7,4132827025
DC-Virginia19,0029121059
DC-Maryland34,09723614542
Seattle Sounder17,2178021758
SD Coaster4,970519828
MSP North Star2,819358235
Denver A Line20,9562874836
Orlando SunRail3,4131621320
SCL FrontRunner17,5846029323
Nashville Star1,082176623
NM Rail Runner2,825575028
Altamont4,985717051
NJ River Line8,6332830531
SD Sprinter8,2671650932
Portland WES1,7981512223
Austin MetroRail2,904329043
DFW A-Train1,841218814
SMART2,4004356~15

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What We Know About High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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In early 2016, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) published a 187-page report on interregional travel, which it defined as trips between 100 and 500 miles. To help publicize the report, the federally funded TRB placed a five-page summary in the May-June, 2016 TR News.

In response, rail advocate Vukan Vuchic, who is an emeritus professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a lengthy diatribe, published as a letter to the editor in the September-October 2018 TR News, complaining that the TRB report had a “negative tone” about high-speed rail. Vuchic’s case is weakened by the fact that he appears to have only read the five-page summary, not the entire 187-page report. Yet even that summary had plenty to say about high-speed rail, and much of it in the Antiplanner’s opinion was far too optimistic.

Vuchic charges that the report makes an “incorrect claim that HSR might only be feasible for the Boston-Washington.D.C., corridor.” In fact, neither the summary nor the full report made that claim, but the report did conclude, after many pages of lengthy analysis, that “In the United States, the NEC is unique in having many of the geographic, demographic, and demand conditions that European and Japanese experience suggests are favorable to public investments in intercity rail” and thus “presents far less uncertainty [than other corridors] with regard to the potential for passenger rail investments, including investments in high-speed service.” “Uncertainty” and “feasibility” are two completely different things.

Contrary to Vuchic’s heated letter, the Antiplanner would argue that the interregional transportation report spends far more pages on high-speed rail than makes sense for the United States. By the modern definition of high-speed rail — trains with top speeds faster than 150 mph — high-speed rail has zero market share in this country. Based on what we know about high-speed rail in other countries, it is fair to say that it will never be relevant here outside of the Boston-Washington corridor, and even there it is only “feasible” if we ignore capital and maintenance costs. Continue reading →

Premature Celebration

By | | Transportation
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The Atlantic may be a bit premature in heralding “the triumphant return” of private passenger trains. This claim is based on the Florida East Coast (FEC) Railway’s All Aboard Florida plan to build and operate for-profit passenger trains from Miami to Orlando.

The success of this supposedly unsubsidized train depends on, among other things, the willingness of the federal government to loan the company $1.6 billion to start the service. The plan is to improve 195 miles of existing track and build 40 miles of new track, plus passenger stations, all of which is expected to cost around $2.5 billion.

To partly fund the project, FEC recently stunned the bond market by selling $405 million worth of bonds promising to pay an incredible 12 percent return. Of course, at rates like that the bonds sold quickly, but at a time when comparable bonds are offering to pay just 6 percent, this raises questions about why the railway is offering to pay twice as much.

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The Railroaded Not Taken

By | | Transportation
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Reeling from a scandal in which ministry employees allegedly embezzled at least $28.5 million, China has dismantled the Ministry of Railways and replaced it with a state-owned company. Managers of the new China Railway Co. had hoped that they would be given the Ministry’s assets but not its debt. However, the government says they will have to deal with its debt as well–all $428 billion of it (2.66 trillion yuan).

China’s high-speed fail.

Restructuring will not save China from that debt, which either taxpayers or creditors will have to cover–it certainly won’t be repaid out of rail fares. The debt is roughly $73 million for each of the 5,840 miles of high-speed rail lines built by the Ministry. This suggests that China got off cheap considering that California is planning to spend close to $300 million per mile for its high-speed rail, while Amtrak wants to spend $345 million per mile ($151 billion divided by 438 miles) building a new Boston-to-Washington high-speed rail line.

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