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The Acela Does Not Make Money

By | | Transportation
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Trains magazine columnist Don Phillips is an unabashed enthusiast for passenger trains. Yet his latest column lashes out at Amtrak for repeatedly misrepresenting the Acela–the closest thing Amtrak has to a high-speed train–as profitable.

Amtrak Acela train entering the Washington, DC station. Flickr photo by Steve Wilson.

“Seldom in my life have I seen such a mass of misinformation spread about any one subject as is being spread now about the American passenger train,” Phillips begins. “The misinformation is spread by confused and shallow politicians, young reporters who have no idea what they are talking about, and by Amtrak officials who have learned that they can count on the first two groups to not understand their technical jargon.”

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Cry Me a Tide

By | | Transportation
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Norfolk opened its “Tide” low-capacity rail (formerly light rail) in September, 2011, a mere 16 months behind schedule and 60 percent over the original projected cost. Now, Hampton Roads Transit–the agency that serves Norfolk-Newport News-Virginia Beach–says that the line will cost a lot more to run that it expected, so it will have to raise fares for both rail and bus riders.

Opening day for “the Tide.” Flickr photo by Virginia Department of Transportation.

Actually, they knew it was going to cost a lot to run, but they used federal funds to subsidize operations for the first couple of years. Since fares cover only 14 percent of operating costs (and zero percent of maintenance costs), the transit agency is hoping Norfolk, the state, or anyone else will come up with some of the difference. When the region was deciding whether or not to build the rail line, did the agency tell the public that building rail meant raising fares? Probably not.

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Obama Nominates Streetcar Advocate for Secretary of Transportation

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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America’s transportation system will continue to grind to a halt under Obama’s pick for transportation secretary, Anthony Foxx. Currently mayor of Charlotte, NC, Foxx supports streetcars and other obsolete forms of transit.

It is a measure of the glacial pace of America’s political system that Obama had nearly sixteen months’ notice that current Secretary LaHood planned to step down at the end of Obama’s first term, yet the president required another full three months before finding a replacement. If the administration has anything to say about it, American travelers will move at the same glacial pace: the streetcars that Obama, LaHood, and Foxx want to fund are slower than most people can walk.

Transit advocates often point to Charlotte as an example of a successful low-capacity rail line. With success like this, I’d hate to see a failure: the line cost more than twice the original projection; generates just $3 million in annual fares against more than $20 million in annual operations and maintenance costs; and collects of an average of just 77 cents per ride compared with nearly a dollar for other light-rail lines. Now Charlotte wants to extend the line even though a traffic analysis report predicts that the extension will dramatically increase traffic congestion in the corridor (see pp. 54-56).

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New Low-Capacity Boondoggle Opens

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Last Friday, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) opened the West line, its latest low-capacity rail (formerly known as light-rail) line. Officials gave opening speeches claiming that they built the West line “within the adopted budget” and, at the end of the day, sent a memo to RTD’s board bragging that the new line carried 35,000 passengers on the opening day, well above the projected 20,000 per weekday.

Of course, the reason they carried so many people is that the line was free on the first two days. But RTD officials can hardly open their mouths without some lie coming out.

Start with the claim that they built it under budget. As the Antiplanner pointed out in an op ed in yesterday’s Denver Post, when RTD decided to build the rail line in 1997, it projected a cost of $250 million ($350 million in today’s money). As of 2009, the “adopted budget” was for $710 million, more than twice projected. The actual cost ended up being $707 million, allowing RTD to say it was under the budgeted $710 million but still more than twice the projected cost.

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Michigan Is Full of Nuts

By | | Transportation
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Michigan state representatives Bill Rogers and Wayne Schmidt have set up a task force studying the possibility of a solar-powered, magnetically levitated, high-speed rail line between Detroit and Lansing. A group calling itself the Interstate Traveler Company claims that it can privately finance the entire $1.3-billion cost of the line, and it expects to earn enough profits to be able to give half its gross revenues to the state in exchange for letting them build the lines along interstate highway rights of way.

Interstate Traveler estimates that this 60-mile system connecting Ypsilanti, Willow Run, and Detroit Airport will cost $920 million to build but earn $1.3 billion in annual revenues. But how will the tracks fit into the tunnels that go under the Detroit Airport taxiways? Click image for a larger view.

Interstate Traveler claims it has enough financial backing already to buy an old General Motors factory to use in building the components that will eventually become mag-lev tracks and vehicles. Interstate Traveler’s founder, someone named Justin Sutton, casually talks about spending billions of dollars building additional lines connecting Detroit to Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, and officials in Ypsilanti seem to take him seriously.

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The 2014 New Starts Recommendations

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, the Antiplanner took a quick look at the Federal Transit Administration’s 2013 New Starts program. Now the agency has released its 2014 New Starts Report, which includes eight new projects.

Four of the eight projects are bus-rapid transit, which can mean anything from running buses on existing streets to building expensive new busways. A proposed BRT in El Paso appears to be closer to the former as it is projected to cost $43 million for a 17-mile route, or less than $3 million per mile. At the other extreme, a BRT in Lansing is projected to cost $215 million for an 8.5-mile route, or more than $25 million per mile. This is undoubtedly a huge waste.

Two of the remaining four projects are extensions to existing light-rail lines. Denver proposes to spend $211 million building a 2.3-mile extension of one of its light-rail lines. At $92 million per mile, this is less than the national average for light rail, but still outrageously expensive, especially considering Denver built its first couple of light-rail lines for less than $30 million per mile.

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The Best for the Most Ridiculous

By | | Transportation
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The lyrics to what some people claim is the best rock-and-roll song in history were the inspiration for what some say is the best newspaper headline in history. The article is about one of the most ridiculous ideas in history, which is spending more than $150 million rebuilding a former rail line from Armagh (population under 15,000) to Portadown (population 22,000), in Northern Ireland.

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The Antiplanner is not Irish enough to have ever actually visited Armagh or Portadown, and I don’t have data about Northern Ireland that is separate from Great Britain. But it seems likely that transport habits are not much different in Northern Ireland than in the rest of Ireland, and Eurostat says that trains carry less than 3 percent of passenger travel in Ireland, while cars move 84 percent and buses do the rest (click on “Modal split of passenger transport”; Eurostat doesn’t separate out air travel). Building a rail line between two small cities is not going to change that, and even if it did, there any no reason to think that taxpayers will get any benefits from funding it. Of course, reason usually has nothing to do with these rail proposals, so naturally some people want to do it anyway.

Importing Boston’s Failures to Honolulu

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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One of the intriguing things about rail transit is how much more the CEOs of rail transit agencies get paid than those of bus-only agencies. Yet that high pay comes with a high risk of failure and disgrace, as it is much more difficult to build and run rail lines than to simply manage bus service.

Case in point: Dan Grabauskas, CEO of Honolulu’s “rapid transit authority” and the highest-paid city official in Honolulu. What did Grabauskas do to merit this position?

It turns out that his main qualification is having helped run the Boston rail system into its present deteriorated condition. In 2009, Grabauskas resigned from that position in disgrace. Some claim he was forced out by a Democratic governor for the sin of being appointed by the previous Republican governor, yet there is no doubt that Boston’s rail lines were in terrible shape, with frequent delays, at least two recent crashes (including one blamed on rusty signal wires that killed a train operator), and miserable customer service.

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The Jones Act: Another Form of Economic Repression

By | | Transportation
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As a transportation expert, the Antiplanner was invited to join a radio show about the effects of the Jones Act on Hawaii. I’m not an expert on the Jones Act but was able to do some quick research.

The Jones Act gives Matson, which has regular service between the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii, and Horizon an oligopoly in shipping to and from Hawaii. Wikipedia photo by Aykleinman.

For those who don’t know, the Jones Act, officially known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, requires that any waterborne shipments between two U.S. ports must be done on ships built in the United States and at least 75 percent owned and crewed by U.S. citizens. The law’s goal of protecting the U.S. merchant marine fleet has largely failed: when the act was passed, the United States had thousands of large cargo vessels plying the seas; today it has less than 200.

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The Dallas Green Line Is Brown

By | | Transportation
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“The Dallas-Fort Worth region is currently designated as a serious non-attainment area for ozone by the Environmental Protection Agency,” says page 1-8 of the final environmental impact statement for Dallas’ Northwest Corridor rail project. This is also known as the Green Line extension of an existing low-capacity rail (formerly known as light rail) line.

“The project corridor [is] one of the most congested highway corridors in the region,” the FEIS adds, noting that “Travel time delay and congestion levels in the corridor are increasing.” So naturally, the Dallas Area Slow Transit (DAST) decided to build a $1.8 billion, 28-mile low-capacity rail line to solve these problems. (For some reason, the FEIS and DAST’s web site erroneously call the agency “Dallas Area Rapid Transit,” but there is nothing rapid about low-capacity rail.)

So how well does $1.8 billion worth of low-capacity transit do at solving problems of congestion and air pollution? Not well at all, at least if you believe the FEIS, which was written by proponents of the project. According to page 4-13, it takes virtually no cars off the road. However, it has a huge impact on intersections: according to page 4-16, seventeen intersections that will have A, B, or C levels of service without the project will have D, E, or F with the project. At least one goes all the way from A to F.

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