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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

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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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Only $379 Million Per Mile

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, the Phoenix airport proudly opened its “Sky Train,” a 1.7-mile automated rail line connecting the terminal to the nearest low-capacity rail station. This is only the first step: a 0.7-mile extension will open in 2015 and a 2.5-mile extension is supposed to open in 2020.

Click image for a larger view. Flickr photo by Nick Bastian.

Total project cost is $1.58 billion, up from a 2003 cost projection of $700 million (about $900 million in today’s dollars). Assuming no more cost increases, that’s about a 75 percent overrun.

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Baltimore’s Red Line Low-Capacity Rail Project

By | | Transportation
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Last week, the Antiplanner looked at Maryland’s Purple Line low-capacity rail (formerly known as light rail) project and showed that it both increased congestion and wasted money. Today, I’ll take a quick look at Baltimore’s Red Line low-capacity rail project, which is also being planned by the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT).

Some think MDOT wants to build the Red Line mainly for political parity: since it is planning the Purple Line in the DC metro area, it has to have a companion project in the Baltimore area. There may be some validity to this rumor as the Red Line is an even greater turkey than the Purple line.

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A Modest Proposal

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner has been reading lots of rail transit plans lately and it strikes me that the standard jargon for different kinds of rail systems is confusing. Most people think that the terms “light” and “heavy” rail refer somehow to weight, when they don’t. By extension, if trains look heavy, they must be heavy rail.

This results in the most confusion between heavy rail and commuter rail. Both use the same weight of rails, so lots of people call commuter rail “heavy rail.” In fact, weight has nothing to do with it–most light-rail lines are built with the same weight of rails as heavy-rail lines.

As the Antiplanner has noted before, the terms “light” and “heavy” really refer to carrying capacity. Light rail is short for “light-capacity” rail while heavy rail is short for “heavy-capacity” rail. The confusion results because the term “heavy” is rarely used to mean “high” while “light” is rarely used to mean “low.”

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Regional Transit for Indy?

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner was invited back to Indianapolis yesterday to testify to the Senate Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee on a proposal to create a regional transit agency for Indianapolis. Currently, the transit agency is limited to serving Marion County, but Indianapolis suburbs extend well beyond that county’s limits.

While this seems like a no-brainer, it is not. Proponents of regional transit have made it clear that they want to build a light-rail line that will cost well over a billion dollars and either bus-rapid transit on dedicated lanes or light-rail lines in other parts of the region. Even if that weren’t the case, the regional transit idea is just another case of “bigger is better,” when in fact allowing smaller transit agencies to cross county lines if that is where their patrons want to go could be far more efficient.

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You can download my testimony in PDF (2.8 MB) or Word format.

The Purple Money Eater

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner is particularly interested in the cost effectiveness of transit projects, and Maryland’s Purple Line is a prime example of an agency selecting just about the least cost-effective alternative. According to the DEIS, the cost of attracting one new rider to the “TSM” alternative is about $9; the low- and medium-cost BRT alternatives are about $14; the high-cost BRT is about $20; and the light-rail alternatives range between $22 and $24. The preferred alternative is the second-most expensive and, at $23 per new rider, the second-least cost-effective.

Put another way, the preferred alternative attracts about 134 percent more riders than TSM, but to get those riders the annualized cost is more than six times greater. Relative to the TSM alternative, the cost of getting one more transit rider on the preferred alternative is almost $34. At this rate, someone who makes a daily round-trip each work day under the preferred alternative who wouldn’t have under TSM would cost taxpayers nearly $16,000 a year.

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Purple Congestion Eater–or Congestion Maker?

By | | Transportation
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Residents of Montgomery County, Maryland, are skeptical of a proposed light-rail line known as the “purple line” (to distinguish it from the DC area’s Red, Orange, Blue, Yellow, and Green heavy-rail lines). AAppropriately so: The Antiplanner has reviewed the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) and found it to be biased and misleading.

Click on image to download entire, 37-MB DEIS. Click on the link in the above paragraph to go to the DEIS web page where you can download selected chapters.

The DEIS considers seven alternatives to doing nothing: one called “transportation system management” (TSM), which is basically improving bus service without significant new infrastructure; low-, medium-, and high-cost bus-rapid transit; and low-, medium-, and high-cost light rail. (Planners call these “low-, medium-, and high-investment alternatives, but it is only an investment if you get a return.) For a route of about 16 miles, the capital costs range from $5 million per mile for TSM to $92 million per mile for high-investment rail.

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More California HSR Follies

By | | Transportation
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Quentin Kopp, the man who more than any other single person is probably most responsible for the California high-speed rail project, now says the project is illegal and has filed a declaration in court saying so. In response, the California High-Speed Rail Authority–which was created by a law Kopp wrote and which Kopp later headed–is suing Kopp, California farmers who oppose the project, the Antiplanner, and, well, any other skeptics in an effort to get a court order giving it $8 billion to start construction on the train to nowhere.

Kopp’s argues that the authority has “mangled” the original plan for a 220-mph rail line in order to keep costs down. That original plan, which was supposed to cost $45 billion, is now expected to cost somewhere closer to $117 billion. Since the authority doesn’t have that money, it has adopted instead a $68 billion plan to build a “blended” system that uses some existing tracks and some new tracks. But the trains on this system won’t go from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 4 hours and 40 minutes as the law requires.

Of course, the authority doesn’t have $68 billion either, so the likelihood of this blended plan ever being completed is slim. But it needs a plan of some kind in order to justify spending the $8 billion it does have building a line in California’s relatively thinly populated Central Valley.

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New Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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Back in the early 1980s, San Diego spent an average of $7 million per mile–about $17 million in today’s dollars–building two light-rail lines. In the mid-1980s, Portland spent $15 million a mile–about $28 million in today’s dollars on the eastside light-rail line.

The Antiplanner is convinced that neither of these expenditures was worthwhile. Yet their cost is but a pittance compared to what transit agencies are spending today. For example, the 2013 New Starts projects include 26 different commuter rail, light-rail, and heavy-rail plans.

Of the seventeen light-rail plans, not a single one is expected to cost less than $50 million per mile, and only one is less than $60 million. The average cost of all seventeen is $138 million per mile. Even taking out three very expensive projects–mostly underground–that cost an average of $727 million per mile, the remaining light-rail plans cost $110 per mile.

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