Last week, I reported that Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan says that we need density to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, Salt Lake City’s Mayor Rocky Anderson says that his region should build more light rail in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Both of these ideas are wrong. Building light rail is increasing greenhouse gas emissions in Salt Lake City. Building high-rise condos instead of single-family homes is increasing greenhouse gas emissions in Vancouver.
The Maricopa County Sheriff is investigating possible corruption in the construction of the $1.4 billion, 20-mile Phoenix light-rail project.
The investigation may relate to the project’s former construction chief. Last October, it was discovered that she offered to pay a consultant team extra money if it hired a friend of hers. When the firm refused, she revoked a $150,000 work order for the company. When this was made public, she was fired, but the agency decided what she did was only unethical, not illegal.
The Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which operates transit along the Wasatch Front from north of Ogden to south of Salt Lake City, opened its first light-rail line in 1999. Since then it has added to its light-rail system and last year began building its first commuter-rail line.
Now the agency is proposing to increase transit fares by 33 percent (phased in over two years) and, at the same time, to cut many of its bus routes. This has led to a storm of protest from transit-dependent people who say the revised bus routes will greatly reduce their mobility.
Photo courtesy UTA.
Today’s entry in the April Fool’s week of transit follies is a sad story of a light-rail project that threatens to destroy a transit system in spite of the wishes of the transit agency and other urban leaders. In 2006, against the recommendations of the entire Kansas City political establishment, voters approved a measure to build a light-rail line.
In 2005, Kansas City did a wonderful thing: It started a bus-rapid transit system the way bus-rapid transit ought to be done. The transit agency didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars building exclusive bus lanes. It didn’t buy million-dollar buses just to have a semi-futuristic look.
Today’s installment in our April-Fool’s week of transit follies deals with an agency that runs only buses, not trains. The Rapid, also known as the Interurban Transit Partnership, runs the bus service in the Grand Rapids, Michigan urban area (which covers five cities plus Grand Rapids).
On May 8, the transit agency will ask voters to renew the property tax that supports it. But the agency isn’t satisfied with a renewal; it wants an 18-percent increase in the tax. Does it deserve it?
Today we continue our April Fools week of transit follies with the Second Avenue Subway. This hugely expensive project proves that, if Manhattan didn’t exist, no one would build it today.
Phase I of the Second Avenue Subway will extend all the way from 63rd Street to 96th Street, a distance of 2.3 miles. As the name implies, it will go underneath Second Avenue, meaning it is just two blocks from the Lexington Avenue Subway. Eventually, the city wants to extend the subway in both directions to a total length of 8.5 miles.
The cost for this modest little rail line? A mere $4.7 billion for phase I, and a total of $16.8 billion for the entire length. That works out to about $2 billion per route mile. (Since there are two miles of track per route mile, that means a mere $1 billion per mile of track.)
What better way to celebrate April Fools week than with a series of transit follies! Each day this week, the Antiplanner will describe a transit folly that is not in Portland, Denver, San Jose, or another city that I’ve harped on so much in the past. By the end of the week, I hope you will agree that transit agencies everywhere in the U.S. have been made foolish by the misincentives created by federal pork barrel.
Light-rail trains get a chuckle over how transit agencies have fooled taxpayers into supporting their ridiculously expensive rail lines.
First up is the North Shore Connector, an extension of Pittsburgh’s light-rail system. Imagine you run the Port Authority of Allegheny County, the transit agency that serves Pittsburgh, a region of about 1.5 million people. But your region’s population is declining. Pittsburgh’s population is declining. Downtown Pittsburgh is declining. Transit ridership is dropping like a stone.
So what do you do? Why, spend $435 million on a 1.2-mile extension of your light-rail line! Of course, it is so logical. Especially when most of it is other people’s money (or, as a powerful Pennsylvania state senator calls it, “OPM”).
I’ve previously noted that the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) may be the nation’s worst-managed transit agency, at least among those serving big cities. Now a new report commissioned by VTA’s own board of directors confirms many of my concerns.
The new report was written by a company called Hay Group. Most consultants fawn all over their clients, but this report is surprisingly frank. Among other things, it accuses VTA of building “capital projects” (i.e., light rail) that benefitted politically powerful neighborhoods without insuring that it had the money to operate those projects. The result is low ridership and high operating costs.
When there is just one car, it is not a train. Flickr photo by LazyTom.
Urban planners have a special talent no one else has, and that is the ability to detect the sense of a community, even if the community consists of millions of people. Our loyal friend, Dan S., has demonstrated this ability for us at least a couple of times.
Soon after (and possibly even before) Columbus sailed to the New World, Portuguese and Basque fishing boats were catching cod in the Grand Banks, the shallow seas around Newfoundland. By the 1960s, fishers were removing as many as 800,000 tons of cod from the Grand Banks each year. But in 1992, this seemingly inexhaustable fishery collapsed, forcing Canada to declare a moratorium to allow the fish to recover. No such recovery has taken place, and cod remain nearly non-existent in the area.
Part of the problem was that the Canadian government allowed the use of bottom trawlers that scraped the sea floor and destroyed the habitat vital for young cod. But a new book, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future, places even more of the blame on the goverment planners in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The Atlantic Dawn, the world’s largest fishing trawler, can catch enough fish on one voyage to produce 18 million meals.
