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Category Archives: Transportation

Unsafe at Any Speed

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Three months ago, Washington MetroRail’s Blue and Orange lines shut down when parts fell off the braking gear of one of the railcars, damaging another car. Hundreds of riders had to evacuate and train service was delayed for hours.

The disk brake that fell off the Metro railcar in December.

Metro initially blamed the malfunction on “premature wear,” but another railcar’s brakes fell apart in a similar manner just a month later.

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FTA Cost-Effectiveness Rule

By | | Transportation
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As if projects such as the Honolulu rail line aren’t a big enough waste of money, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood is seeking to change the Federal Transit Administration’s process for evaluating grant proposals for rail projects. As if to illustrate the slow and cumbersome nature of federal programs, LaHood originally proposed to revise these rules more than two years ago, and now we are only at the stage of having a first draft for public comment.

In any case, the Antiplanner submitted comments arguing that LaHood’s proposal violates the law in three ways. First, the law requires that transit agencies evaluate the cost effectiveness of transit projects by comparing them with a full range of alternatives. But the proposed rules only require that the cost effectiveness of proposed projects be compared with a “no action” alternative. If no other alternatives are considered, no one will know if a project is truly the most cost-effective way of improving transit.

Second, the law requires that projects be judged based on their ability to improve mobility and reduce congestion. Yet the proposed rules actually reward transit agencies for increasing congestion. While the existing rules require that cost effectiveness be calculated in terms of the cost of saving people’s time, including the time of auto users as well as transit riders, the new rules base cost effectiveness solely on the cost of gaining new transit riders. This means that a project that increases congestion, leading some people to ride transit to escape traffic, will actually be scored higher than one that does not increase congestion.

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Designed to Fail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
38 Comments

Are American cities competing to see which can come up with the most ridiculous transit proposals? If so, Honolulu will probably win, hands down. The nation’s 52nd-largest urban area has only about 950,000 people, yet it is spending $5.3 billion, or more than $5,500 per resident, to build a single 20-mile rail line. That’s probably a greater cost per person than any rail system ever built–and it is just for one line, not a complete system.

The line will be entirely elevated, yet they plan to run just two-car trains, each “train” being about the length of a typical light-rail car (just under 100 feet). This means it will have the high costs of heavy rail and the capacity limits of light rail.

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Letting the Infrastructure Crumble

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
37 Comments

Portland can spend hundreds of millions on streetcars and billions on light rail. But it is letting its most-valuable asset–the city’s $5 billion road system–fall apart, says an expose featured in yesterday’s Oregonian. The city’s transportation department, says the article, has enough money to hire eight new employees to oversee streetcars, build more than a dozen miles of new bike paths, and co-sponsor a Rail-volution conference in Los Angeles. But it doesn’t have enough many to repave any badly deteriorating street until 2017 at the earliest.

Even when the federal government was handing out stimulus funds in 2009, Portland decided not to put any of the funds into its streets. None of its projects, the city claims, were “shovel-ready” (as if the high-speed rail projects that did get funded were in any sense shovel-ready).

It is hard to see this as anything but malign neglect. Smart-growth advocates (such as Todd Litman, who the Antiplanner debated last week) insist they aren’t anti-automobile. But they are for spending all your transportation dollars on alternatives to the automobile even as your bridges and streets fall apart.

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Toronto Transit Chief Fired

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In an unusual move, Toronto’s transit commission fired its chief executive, Gary Webster, because he didn’t think it was cost-effective to build an expensive subway. (Usually, transit chiefs are fired for building an expensive rail line.)

Actually, Webster thought that light rail was more cost-effective than subways. But Toronto Robert Ford wanted subways. He asked Webster for an objective evaluation of the two, and Webster presented a persuasive report favoring light rail. Apparently, Webster didn’t get the memo that he was supposed to skew the analysis in favor of the mayor’s preferences. The mayor tried to bury the report, but when the city council voted to support light rail instead of subways the mayor retaliated by convincing five members of the nine-member transit commission to fire Webster “without just cause.” That decision will cost the city $550,000, Webster’s severance pay.

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Another Light-Rail Success Failure

By | | News commentary, Transportation
18 Comments

Hampton Roads Transit is claiming success six months after opening its light-rail line in Norfolk. The line is carrying an average of 4,642 riders each weekday, which is far greater than the 2,900 that had been forecast.

“Crowds” of as many as dozens of people look bored and apathetic at the opportunity to take free rides on the opening day for Norfolk’s light-rail line, August 19, 2011. Flickr photo by D. Allen Covey, VDOT.

The only problem is that, back in 2003, Hampton Roads Transit confidently predicted the 7.4-mile-long line would carry 10,400 riders each weekday in its opening year. Deft last-minute re-predictions of much lower numbers allow the the agency to claim success when actual ridership is less than 45 percent of the original prediction.

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Back to the Drawing Board

By | | Transportation
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Besieged by fiscal conservatives for deficit spending and by the transit lobby for eliminating a guaranteed source of transit subsidies, Speaker of the House John Boehner has postponed consideration of the transportation bill (which Roll Call calls the “transit bill” even though transit gets only about 20 percent of the money). In a post on the Cato Institute’s blog yesterday, the Antiplanner makes some suggestions for fixing the bill.

There are really three ways that House Republicans could try to compromise with Senate Democrats. One would be to include earmarks and other pork barrel in the bill, which Democrats and many Republicans love but Tea Party Republicans hate. The second would be to give more money to transit at the expense of highways–and in particular to allow transit to keep a share of federal gas taxes.

The third way is to spend more than the government is taking in. The 2005 bill provided guaranteed spending every year, but due to the recession gas tax revenues declined after 2007, leading to deficit spending. When House Republicans made a proposal last summer to reign in spending to be no more than revenues, Democrats wailed that the bill would cost thousands of jobs.

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The Rail Empire Strikes Back

By | | Follow up, Transportation
63 Comments

Rail advocates responded to the Antiplanner recent visit to Charlotte, NC, by inviting William Lind, who bills himself as “a conservative who supports rail transit,” to comment on Charlotte’s proposed Red Line project.

“Real conservatives like commuter trains,” says Lind. How does he know? Because the average income of people who ride commuter trains in Lake County, Illinois is $74,000 a year, while the average income of bus riders in that county is $14,000 a year. Lind takes it for granted that everybody knows that rich people are conservative, and in Lind’s mind rich conservatives know that they deserve to have expensive, tax-subsidized trains while poor people should be happy with relatively inexpensive tax-subsidized buses.

Unfortunately, warns Lind, some rail critics “present themselves as conservatives, but they are not.” I don’t know who he is talking about, since the Antiplanner never presented himself as conservative. Lind goes on to say that these pseudo-conservatives are really libertarians, the difference being that conservatives support rail transit “depending on the project’s merits,” while “libertarians oppose all rail transit all the time.”

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Why Congress Should End New Starts

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
27 Comments

The House Republican transportation bill ends gas tax subsidies of transit and requires that any new rail projects receiving “New Starts” grants meet strict financial tests and not simply be awarded on the basis of some vague concept such as “livability.” In response, Secretary of Livability Ray LaHood says it is vital to keep funding transit out of gas taxes. As an example, he cites the Portland-to-Milwaukie light-rail line, which he says is “an integral part of rebuilding the nation’s economy.”

Really? This 7.3-mile line line is expected to cost $1.5 billion and carry just 9,300 new riders (that is, people who weren’t previously riding the bus) each weekday. Since most people ride round trip, that 4,650 round-trip riders a day. The high cost is enough money to buy each of those new round-trip riders a new Toyota Prius every year for the 30-year life of the project.

This will be the most expensive, and one of the least-used, light-rail lines in Portland. The light-rail will be slower than many of the buses in the corridor–buses that will be cancelled when the rail line opens.

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One More Chance

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
14 Comments

Construction on Honolulu’s ill-conceived rail line–at least $5.7 billion, and more likely at least $7 billion, for a 20-mile elevated line–is supposed to start next month. Polls indicate that voters who once supported the project have turned against it. Fortunately, Hawai’ians have one more chance to stop this idiotic project before too much money is wasted.

Artist’s conception of Honolulu’s planned elevated rail line.

The incumbent pro-rail mayor, Peter Carlisle, who filled the seat in a special election when the previous pro-rail mayor made an ill-fated run for governor, is up for reelection this year. A surprise entry into the race is Ben Cayetano, Hawai’i’s governor from 1994 to 2002, who decided to run solely to stop the rail project.

“Adding $5 to $7 billion in debt for an elevated, heavy rail system that will not reduce traffic congestion and will suck the air out of the city’s ability to provide more important basic services does not make sense,” says Cayetano in a comment posted on an interview where Senator Daniel Inouye endorses Carlisle. The only other major candidate in the race is also pro-rail.

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