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Streetcar Woes

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland opened its new east side streetcar line a couple of weeks ago, but the real story is in the Lake Oswego plant that is supposed to be making streetcars to run on the new line. In 2011, the company, United Streetcar, announced that its first streetcars would be several months late and it would only be able to build five streetcars for the price of six–and the company’s president was brazen enough to say, “You’re not getting less. I actually think you’re getting more.”

The company’s streetcars are essentially copies of the first streetcars the city bought from a company in the Czech Republic. The price of the Czech streetcars was $1.9 million apiece (only about six times more than a bus that has more seats). The cost of United Streetcar’s first streetcar? $7 million. If Portland is lucky, it will eventually get five for an average of a little more than $4 million each–but hey, they’re made in the USA (a requirement for federal funding).

Strangely, the city didn’t complain about getting short-changed one streetcar, and it’s response to the delay was to spend more money hiring a company, LTK Engineering Services, to monitor the company making the streetcars, paying it $1.35 million to date. So far, only one of the five streetcars is out on the streets (or, fairly frequently, in the repair shop). To prod United Streetcar into finishing the other four, which are several months behind schedule, the city is about to hand over another $386,000 to LTK.
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How does LTK spend that money? It has eight engineers watching over the shoulders of the workers at United Streetcar, for each of whom it bills the city a mere $162 an hour. Don’t worry, says the city; there are plenty of “contingency funds” in the project’s $148.3 million budget to cover this cost.

Who says streetcars aren’t cost-effective? They are pretty cost-effective for LTK, not to mention United Streetcar.

How Does Amtrak Determine Fares?

By | | Transportation
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A transit advocate who calls himself Captain Transit asks, “How can Amtrak charge so much for the Northeast Corridor?” His answer, which he claims to have arrived at with the Antiplanner’s assistance, is that buses carry the low-income passengers in this corridor, so Amtrak can get away with charging first-class rates for high-end passengers.

That’s not exactly correct: there are low-cost buses in a lot of Amtrak corridors, but only in the Northeast Corridor does Amtrak collect average fares exceeding 32 cents per passenger mile. In fact, fares for the Northeast “regional” trains (which is what Amtrak calls the non-Acela trains in the corridor) average 42 cents a passenger mile, while the Acela fares average more than 75 cents a passenger mile (these numbers are from 2011 and are calculated based on page C-1 of Amtrak’s end-of-fiscal-year performance report).

As near as I can tell, Amtrak’s route structure is politically determined. Amtrak trains serve at least one city in all but two of the contiguous 48 states, and that is several states more than when Amtrak was created in 1971. Amtrak could only benefit by adding routes through more states, each of which have two senators. (Significantly, the two contiguous states that Amtrak doesn’t serve, Wyoming and South Dakota, each have only one representative in Congress.)

On the other hand, Amtrak’s fare structure is market driven. This doesn’t mean Amtrak sets its fares to make a profit; obviously it doesn’t. Instead, it sets its fares to be as high as it can get in each market. For example, Amtrak fares between Chicago and Minneapolis are nearly twice airfares because Amtrak has only one train on this route that continues on to Seattle, and Amtrak doesn’t want Chicago-Minneapolis passengers to take seats that might otherwise be filled by Chicago-Seattle passengers.

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Amtrak President Exaggerates

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak President Joseph Boardman scored a point when he announced that Amtrak operates the Rocky Mountaineer, a cruise train that takes passengers from Vancouver to Whistler and the Canadian Rockies. He made this announcement at the September 20 House Transportation Committee hearing about 41 years of Amtrak deficits.

The Antiplanner had offered the Rocky Mountaineer as an example of a private rail operator taking over when the government–in this case, VIA Rail Canada–stops serving a route. VIA ended service on the Vancouver-Calgary route in 1990 (the Antiplanner was on the last westbound train), and the Rocky Mountaineer almost immediately began offering cruise trains. Today this company offers several different routes, including some also served by VIA.

Not operated by Amtrak.

So when Boardman said the Rocky Mountaineer “is actually operated by Amtrak,” the mostly pro-Amtrak audience laughed at the Antiplanner’s silliness for using this as an example of privatization. The only problem was that Boardman’s statement was a slight exaggeration–as in totally untrue.

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Privatize or Contract Out?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
28 Comments

The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) spends $50 million more than its peers on employee benefits, says KPMG in an audit of the agency. Reducing benefits to national average levels (easier said than done) and contracting out some services such as cleaning would allow MARTA to erase a $33 million deficit in its annual budget.

Comparing a transit agency to its peers is like criticizing a bank robber for stealing more than home burglars. The fact is that they are both ripping people off, and just because some are a bit less rapacious doesn’t make them any more morally correct.

Private jitney in direct competition with MARTA bus.

So the Antiplanner has a more aggressive agenda: complete privatization. Atlanta is one of the few cities that doesn’t outlaw private transit in competition with the public agency, and as a result it has a number of private jitneys that operate without subsidies and often charge riders less than MARTA. The jitneys even stop at MARTA’s bus stops.

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Jerry Brown Tries the Google Car

By | | News commentary, Transportation
21 Comments

California Governor Jerry Brown rode in a self-driving car with Google co-founder Sergey Brin on their way to Google headquarters, where Brown signed legislation creating a framework for introducing driverless cars into California by 2015. Meanwhile, automakers are incrementally automating driving with the introduction of a variety of new technologies.

On October 23, Volvo and the Embassy of Sweden are co-sponsoring a Washington, DC seminar to discuss the policy implications of autonomous vehicles. The seminar will include speakers from Volvo, Google, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Center for Automotive Research. The Antiplanner can’t make it, but readers in the Washington DC area may want to reserve a spot.

Volvo’s contribution to the technology focuses on road trains, in which a lead vehicle is driven by a professional and other vehicles can follow without active drivers. The system has been tested in Spain with just 20-foot gaps between vehicles. Volvo hopes the system will also improve fuel economy by about 20 percent.
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USA Today‘s Interesting Arithmetic

By | | News commentary, Transportation
25 Comments

USA Today reports that “fewer Americans commuting solo.” As the story says, “The dismal economy and skyrocketing gas prices may have accomplished what years of advocacy failed to: getting more people to stop driving solo.”

To put some numbers on this, Wendell Cox
points out that the number of people commuting solo has declined from 104.86 to 105.64 million. That’s a minus 780,000-person decline, also known as an 780,000 person increase.

A few days ago, USA Today reported that “bikes rule the road” in Portland. In fact, the 17,000 people commuting to work by bicycle reported by USA Today increased to nearly 19,000 in 2011, but this still represents less than 7 percent of commuters. So in what sense can 7 percent “rule the road”? Perhaps only because the 202,000 commuters (73 percent) who drive to work live in fear of hitting a cyclist. Continue reading →

Back in the Air Again

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

Today the Antiplanner is in Washington DC to testify at a hearing on Amtrak subsidies. The Antiplanner will tell the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee that it should “support privatization of Amtrak, in the context of a broader effort to end federal subsidies to and unfair taxation of all forms of transportation.”

My testimony points out that Amtrak is the most costly form of intercity transportation we have, costing (with subsidies) about 60 cents per passenger mile, compared with about 16 cents for air travel and less than 10 cents for the “new model” of bus service pioneered by Megabus. While Amtrak is a little more energy efficient than flying, at the rate both modes’ energy efficiencies are changing, by 2030 flying will require less energy to move passenger miles than Amtrak (and so will driving).
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With Amtrak fares costing, on average, twice airline fares, Amtrak is really just a subsidy for the rich. The testimony speculates that, if Amtrak were privatized, we would see a growth of “cruise trains” in the West similar to Canada’s Rocky Mountaineer, which now has four or five different routes including one that starts in Seattle, Washington. But even if we did not, the country would be better off relying on cars and relatively unsubsidized buses for short distances and airlines for long distances.

Highway Fund Uncertainty Leads to Ratings Cut

By | | News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

Citing uncertainties about the health of the federal Highway Trust Fund, Fitch has cut its ratings on state highway bonds in several states from AA- to A+. The bonds being cut are “grant anticipation revenue” or GARVEE bonds, which are supposed to be repaid out of federal grants.

In recent years, Congressional overspending of the Highway Trust Fund has required Congress to periodically appropriate general funds to transportation. Fitch is worried that Congress may fail to provide such funds, and is also concerned that recent passage of a two-year (instead of the traditional six-year) reauthorization of federal transportation programs creates uncertainties about those programs.

Certain transit agencies also saw their ratings cut from A- to BBB+. These include the Chicago Transit Authority, New Jersey Transit, and the Alaska Railroad, all of which receive federal transit funds out of the Highway Trust Fund. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the highway portion of the Highway Trust Fund will run out of money in 2014 and the transit portion will run out in 2015.

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DC Metro Continues to Decline

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
14 Comments

It’s a sign of distinction that the Washington Metro Rail system has not one but at least two blogs dedicated to documenting the system’s poor operating condition. One of the blogs reports that, in July, MetroRail suffered from nearly 500 problems that led to a “deviation from normal scheduled service,” all but about 20 of which were due to maintenance failures.

The other blog reviews a recent WMATA report on the system’s health and concludes that “it’s the trains, stupid,” meaning that the train cars are experiencing so many breakdowns that “Metro should lay off the track work for a while” and concentrate on repairing the railcars.

The problem with that is that tracks and signals are responsible for lots of problems too. Broken rails are common, with an average of nearly one cracked rail a week in 2011. Faulty signals, of course, were responsible for the crash that killed nine people in 2009. Signals may cause the fewest number of equipment-related train delays, but nobody wants to admit they were busy fixing doors but letting people die because they neglected the signals.

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Clackistanis Threaten Portland Light Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
19 Comments

In all the times it has been on the ballot, Clackamas County has never voted for Portland light rail. But Portland planners were determined to run a light-rail line into the urban heart of the county, so they persuaded the county commission to give them $20 million of the $1.5 billion cost of the 7.7-mile rail line.

Residents, who had previously recalled several city commissioners from office over light rail, didn’t take this sitting down. Instead, a group that calls itself “Clackistanis” put a measure on the ballot directing the county commission to spend no county resources on light rail without voter approval. The commission responded by scheduling a $19 million bond sale to take place a few days before the vote.

Rail opponents filed a lawsuit attempting to stop the measure. The county responded by canceling the bond sale just a day before the Oregon Supreme Court issued a restraining order against the sale.

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