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More Tales of Rail Failure

By | | Transportation
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The ink is barely dry on California legislation to start building high-speed rail, and now they reveal a $2.5 billion hidden cost that wasn’t included in previous estimates, that being the cost of tunneling the final mile into San Francisco. It shouldn’t really matter, as they don’t have the money to build the last 130 to 150 miles of rail from the Central Valley to San Francisco anyway.

On top of that, California residents are discovering that their high-speed rail authority has been keeping controversial aspects of the planned route as secret as possible, at least until it is too late for people to do anything about it. For example, the plan calls for running the track 75 feet above the city of Alhambra, which is likely to be a major eyesore.

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Brookings Discovers Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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Brookings Institution economist Clifford Winston points out in the Wall Street Journal that driverless cars will render high-speed rail and urban real transit even more obsolete than they already are. The Antiplanner, of course, brought driverless cars to the attention of WSJ readers two years ago.

Winston’s major point is that, rather than build high-speed rail, we should concentrate on rebuilding and redesigning our highway system to prepare for the increased driving that this new technology will inevitably bring about. He proposes, for example, to create more highways dedicated to cars rather than open to both cars and trucks. Such roads could be built with thinner pavement and narrower lanes. This might make sense, though the benefits of having multiple kinds of vehicles sharing the costs of the same infrastructure seem very high.
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Some states simply refuse to consider the effects this new technology will have on travel habits. Oregon, for example, has proposed a 2050 strategic transportation plan that counts on getting people out of their cars and onto transit, leaving the highways for trucks. This simply is not going to happen, but never underestimate the ability of Oregon planners to substitute their own fantasies for reality.

The Stigma of Buses

By | | Transportation
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Margaret Thatcher was once quoted as saying, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” In fact, according to Wikiquotes, “There is no solid evidence that Margaret Thatcher ever quoted this statement with approval, or indeed shared the sentiment.” Nevertheless, people still insist that buses carry a “stigma” not shared by trains.

Portland transit expert Jarrett Walker argues that “we should stop talking about ‘bus stigma.'” In fact, he says, transit systems are designed by elites who rarely use transit at all, but who might be able to see themselves on a train. So they design expensive rail systems for themselves rather than planning transit systems for their real market, which is mostly people who want to travel as cost-effectively as possible and don’t really care whether they are on a bus or train.

This view is reinforced by the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union, and particularly by a report it published written by planner Ryan Snyder. Ryan calls L.A.’s rail system “one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer money in Los Angeles County history,” while he shows that regional transit ridership has grown “only when we have kept fares low and improved bus service,” two things that proved to be incompatible with rail construction.

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Entropy Killing DC Metro Rail

By | | Transportation
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Washington Metro’s computers crashed twice this past weekend, forcing all trains to stop and stranding passengers for up to 30 minutes. This is just the latest example of how the aging transit system is slowly falling apart.

It is hard to imagine today what kind of computers Metro used in 1976, when it opened DC’s first new rail line. Programming probably used COBOL or some other now-archaic language. (The Antiplanner has heard rumors that the COBOL programmers who wrote the software that runs the San Francisco BART system refuse to ride the trains.) Anyone who has an older computer knows that things go wrong and those cumulative failures add up until eventually the system just does not reliably work.

In any case, the Metro system has roughly a $10 billion maintenance backlog. As a result, rails break; trains fall apart during operation; computers crash; and the agency’s bureaucracy can’t even keep up with the problems.

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California Rail Follies

By | | Transportation
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The California legislature based its approval of the sale of billions of dollars of bonds to start construction of high-speed rail partly on claims that the rail line would help revitalize California’s economy. But now a study from UCLA finds that Japan’s high-speed rail line, one of the most popular in the world, failed to boost that nation’s economy.

“Rather, the evidence suggests high-speed rail simply moves jobs around the geography without creating significant new employ- ment or economic activity” says the study. “As an engine of economic growth in and of itself, CHSR will have only a marginal impact at best.”

The California High-Speed Rail Authority responded to the study by trotting out an architect who claimed all sorts of benefits for the train. Asking an architect to respond to an economic analysis is like asking a plumber for a second opinion on your cancer diagnosis. The plumber might give you the answer you want, but probably not the right answer.

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Metro Says Heat Wave Not “Extreme”

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A Washington, DC, Metro train broke down for unknown reasons and another one jumped the tracks in another routine day for DC rail transit. The derailment was caused by a “heat kink” in the tracks, and Metro says it normally slows down trains during “extreme heat,” but hadn’t decided to do so in this heat wave.

Metal expands when it gets warm, and railroads used to leave gaps between the rails every 35 feet or so to allow for such expansion. But modern railroads weld the rails together to form a continuous ribbon that is prone to kinking at high temperatures. To deal with this, they use special allows that, they hope, won’t buckle in hot weather. The alloys used on Metro rails are good to temperatures up to 95 degrees, which DC exceeded for 11 days straight. Apparently, no one at Metro remembered to issue the slow orders.

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Environmentalists Destroy Boston Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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The Metropolitan Boston Transportation Authority (MBTA, or “T” for short) is in deep financial trouble, with nearly $9 billion of debt and a $3 billion maintenance backlog that is growing more every year. According to a Boston Herald op ed by Harvard researcher Charles Chieppo, the blame for this can be placed on the Dukakis administration and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

When Massachusetts was planning the Big Dig, CLF sued demanding investments in transit to mitigate the air pollution generated by new auto traffic resulting from the Big Dig’s minor expansions in highway capacity. Dukakis settled by agreeing to build 14 new transit projects.

In fact, those transit investments did little or nothing to clean the air. For one thing, relieving congestion actually reduces air pollution. For another, cars today are so clean that persuading people to ride transit instead does little for air quality.

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California Itching to Lose a Decade

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, the California legislature voted to destroy the state’s economy for another decade. The 21 senators who voted for the measure told the public they were approving a high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but everyone knows they barely have enough money to build from Fresno to Bakersfield.

In voting to borrow $4.5 billion as a down payment on a rail line that is certain to cost at least $68 billion, and more likely over $100 billion, the legislature is risking the state’s entire economic future. The state already has a $16 billion deficit in its budget (which it closed only with one-time tricks and the promise of increased taxes), and the rail line will immediately increase that by more than a quarter of a billion per year, and in the long run (if it continues building) by much more.

This is not about jobs. More jobs are going to be killed by running up tax rates (or further cutting services) to pay for the deficits. This is not about transportation. Though advocates promise fast downtown-to-downtown travel times, only 2.5 percent of Los Angeles-area jobs are located in downtown LA, so few residents will ever have reason to ride the train. This is nothing more than pork barrel.

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Does Transit Promote Urban Development?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Back in 1995, the FTA asked transit advocates Robert Cervero (of the UC Berkeley planning school) and Samuel Seskins (of Parsons Brinckerhoff) whether transit let to changes in urban form. After reviewing the literature, they concluded that “Urban rail transit investments rarely “create” new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment” (page 3). They added that this “redistribution” mainly favored central city downtowns at the expense of the suburbs.

I’ve been citing that study as definitive for many years, but recently someone asked me if there is anything more recent. As a matter of fact, there is.

In 2010, Brookings published Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects (volume 3), which included a paper by USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliano and one of her colleagues that addressed the same question. Based on “more than three decades of research,” they “found little evidence that transit investment has had significant impacts on urban structure.”

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More Evidence That Portland Is Nuts

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, has made the largest cuts in its history, including reductions in bus service, fare increases, and elimination of free rail rides in downtown Portland (the free bus rides were eliminated last year). Meanwhile, it is using nearly $10 million of money supposedly dedicated to the Milwaukie light-rail line to remodel its offices.

Portland’s mayor and alleged pedophile Sam Adams considers TriMet’s subsidized passes for “youths” to be one of his “favorite program,” so he has proposed to fund it by charging TriMet $2 million for using city property for its bus shelters and benches. What an innovative financial tool!

Apparently, all that broke government entities need to do is requisition funds from other broke government entities. TriMet can build its next light-rail line by charging the state rent for taking cars off the road. The state can fund its k-12 educational programs by charging the universities for the future college students it is providing. The federal government can eliminate the national debt by charging water districts for the clean water that runs off of federal lands. Pretty soon everyone can own money to everyone else and we can all pretend that they cancel out (ignoring, of course, the original investors who will lose their shirts, but they’re probably part of the 1 percent so they deserve it).

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