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Northwest High-Speed Rail Cluelessness

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A couple of days ago, the Antiplanner noted that cities fail to learn from each other’s experience with rail transit disasters. It turns out that states don’t learn either, as the state of Washington is considering creating a high-speed rail authority and giving it millions of dollars to study a high-speed rail line from Eugene to Vancouver, BC.

Of course, such an authority worked so well in California, where costs have more than doubled, the project has been delayed for years verging on decades, and proponents’ claims that fares would cover operating costs are so unlikely as to be laughable. If it doesn’t work in California, which has the densest urban areas in the United States, how can it possibly make sense in the Pacific Northwest, where populations and densities are much lower?

The article is accompanied by a photo of a Siemens prototype high-speed rail car. My 66-year-old eyes can’t read all of the writing on the side, but if Siemens were honest it would read, “Connecting cities at half the speed and ten times the cost of flying.” Continue reading →

Public Transit for Others

By | | Transportation
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More than eighteen years ago, the Onion reported that “98 percent of commuters favor public transit for others” so that everyone else can drive on uncongested roads. That hasn’t changed, as in 2016 Los Angeles overwhelming voted for measure M, which will spend $120 billion on transit improvements, yet ridership there has dropped from 600 million trips in 2016 to 550 million annual trips in 2018.

To find out why this is happening, UCLA researcher Michael Manville, an associate professor of urban planning, did a survey of 1,450 Los Angeles-area voters and found out the Onion was right: very few voters supported the transit tax because they expected to ride transit. Instead, nearly 70 percent of supporters voted for it because they thought it would relieve congestion and reduce air pollution.

“In truth, taming traffic isn’t what transit does best,” observes CityLab in its review of Manville’s study. “Done right, it brings low-cost, efficient mobility to the masses, even when the roads are jammed.” But spending $120 billion on high-cost, low-capacity transit lines is hardly the definition of “done right.” Continue reading →

Honolulu Rail Disaster

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Recent audits of Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) by the city of Honolulu and state of Hawaii provide a backroom view of how the rail transit-industrial complex is scalping taxpayers. Honolulu’s rail line, which was originally supposed to cost less than $3 billion, is now expected to cost well over $9 billion, thanks to poor planning and HART essentially letting the foxes (in the form of outside contractors) guard the chicken house (the public purse).

The first of four state audits (summarized here) says that the city hastily signed contracts committing itself to the project before all environmental and financial reviews were completed. The audit doesn’t say so, but the city did this to prevent opponents, who were marshaling legal and political forces against the project, from stopping it. Continue reading →

End the Shutdown Now!

By | | Transportation
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The government shutdown has reduced DC Metro ridership by 25 percent and Metro revenues by $400,000 a day. This has led senate Democrats to demand an end to the shutdown in order to save Metro. After all, as everyone knows, the main purpose of the federal government is to provide customers to transit agencies like Metro.

The senators representing Maryland and Virginia — Ben Cardin, and Chris Van Hollen, Mark Warner, and Tim Kaine — have issued a joint statement calling the shutdown “wasteful” and “destructive.” “At a time when Metro already is undertaking substantial, disruptive projects to improve safety and reliability,” they said, “President Trump’s shutdown is jeopardizing the health and stability of the entire Metro system.”
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But what better time to shut down the government than when Metro is doing “disruptive” projects? Should Trump have waited until everything was fixed to shut it down? (As if that’s ever going to happen.) The reality is that Metro itself is wasteful and destructive, and when it has a $25 billion maintenance backlog the addition or subtraction of $400,000 a day isn’t going to make much difference.

Blowing Up the MTA

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New York governor Andrew Cuomo says he wants to “blow up the MTA.” He is angry because MTA had decided to shut down the L subway line, one of the most heavily used lines in Brooklyn, for 15 months for repairs without telling him that it could have done the repairs while still running the trains, albeit with some delays.

Cuomo claims he went along with the proposed shutdown, which some called “L-mageddon,” until an angry constituent asked him why he hadn’t considered the alternative of keeping the train going on a limited basis. He had replied that he was relying on the experts to tell him what could be done, but the constituent pointed out that the experts said the state couldn’t replace the Tappan Zee Bridge, but he found a way to do so.

So Cuomo went back to the MTA which said yes, it was possible to keep the trains going while doing the repairs. After adopting that plan, Cuomo told the New York Daily News that he wants to “blow up” the MTA for not being accountable to anyone. Continue reading →

Purple Line Will Be Late and Overbudget

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Local officials are “astounded,” astounded I tell you, that Maryland’s Purple Line will be nearly a year late and at least $215 million over budget. The line is being built under a public-private partnership contract, which transit officials claim saves money. But apparently they forgot to write into the contract that there could be no cost overruns. (In fact, public-private partnership contracts are mainly a way of avoiding legal debt limits, since private partner borrowings don’t count against the public partner’s debt even though the contract obligates the public to pay the private partner enough to repay the debt.)

Until recently, the state of Maryland, which is overseeing the project, has claimed that the line would open on time, that is, by March 2022. But now the private partners have informed the state that it cannot possibly open before February, 2023.

The 16-mile light-rail line was supposed to cost $2.0 billion, which was a condition of getting support for the project by Maryland Governor Hogan. But the Federal Transit Administration says it will really cost $2.4 billion, which includes some costs that the Maryland Transit Authority hid from the governor. That’s at least $500 million more than it was expected to cost back in 2011. The latest overrun will increase the total cost by nearly 10 percent. Continue reading →

The APTA Solution to Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association issued a press release last week announcing that transit ridership in the third quarter of 2018 had declined, something that will not be news to Antiplanner readers. But APTA held out some glimmerings of hope.

Among other success stories cited by APTA, Grand Rapids transit rejuvenated ridership on its least-used bus route, increasing boardings from 50 rides a day to 1,100. Riverside Transit in California increased its ridership by 2 percent. How did they accomplish this? Grand Rapids quadrupled service and cut fares to zero. Riverside cut fares to 25 cents. Other transit agencies, such as Seattle’s Sound Transit, saw modest ridership gains after boosting service.

In short, the key to transit’s recovery is to increase costs and decrease revenues. This must be the reasoning behind the streetcar movement: streetcars have much higher capital, operating, and maintenance costs than buses and most streetcars are so poorly utilized that many cities give away rides for free. APTA data doesn’t separate streetcars from light rail, but FTA third-quarter data show that streetcar ridership has grown 18 percent in the last five years, mainly because so many new streetcar lines have opened. However, ridership fell between 2017 and 2018, so the transit industry needs to keep opening new high-cost, low-revenue lines to keep up the momentum. Continue reading →

Why Was the Tappan Zee Bridge So Costly?

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New York completed construction of a new Tappan Zee Bridge, allowing the state to implode the old one this past weekend. But a comparison of the two bridges raises the question: why is bridge construction so expensive?

The original bridge cost $81 million in 1950 dollars. Using a GDP deflator, that’s less than $700 million in today’s dollars. Yet the replacement bridge cost $4 billion, well over five times as much.

First, it should be noted that the bridge is in a stupid location where the Hudson River is three miles wide, while a few miles downstream it is just a mile wide. That significantly increased the cost of both bridges, but the location was selected due to politics: under an interstate compact, all bridge tolls across the Hudson within 25 miles of the Statue of Liberty go to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. New York Governor Dewey wanted to keep the tolls to help pay for other roads, so he chose a location just two-tenths of a mile outside the 25-mile radius. Continue reading →

A $2 Billion Streetcar for St. Paul

By | | Transportation
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Milwaukee opened a new streetcar line at the beginning of last November, and it is attracting fewer than 2,300 trips a day. Since it makes 144 one-way trips a day, that’s an average of fewer than 16 people per trip.

Fares are currently zero, so if they ever start charging fares — they’re supposed to after a year, but some that were supposed to eventually charge are still free — ridership will fall even lower. Despite this, the city has already committed $20 million to extend the line (though the Federal Transit Administration rejected an application for matching funds).

Meanwhile, in St. Paul, momentum is growing to have a streetcar there as well. “I’ve never met anyone who is nostalgic for a bus,” says an official with the St. Paul Streetcar Museum. Of course, if you were nostalgic for buses, you wouldn’t go to a streetcar museum, would you? Instead, you might go to the Museum of Bus Transportation in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Or, closer to St. Paul, you might go to Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of Greyhound and home of the Greyhound Bus Museum. Continue reading →

Chicago-St. Louis HSR Is a Dud

By | | Transportation
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When President Obama announced that high-speed rail would be a part of the 2009 economic stimulus program, Illinois immediately applied for federal funding for a high- (really moderate-) speed rail route from Chicago to St. Louis. According to the application (54 megabytes), the state would double track the existing line, owned mostly by Union Pacific, and run trains at up to 110 miles per hour. It would also increase the frequency of those trains from five to eight per day.

The state predicted that ridership would more than double from 521,000 trips year in 2008 to 1,210,000 trips in 2014, the first full year of operation. By 2018, the fifth full year, ridership would further increase to 1,339,000. (The application is actually inconsistent about how many riders were carried in 2008; page 33 says 521,000 while page 59 says 881,000. According to Amtrak, it was 476,000.)

So how well has that worked out? According to Amtrak’s FY 2018 performance report, ridership on the Chicago-St. Louis trains had grown to 586,200 trips in 2018. That’s 23 percent more than Amtrak’s number for 2008, but 56 percent short of the projected ridership. Continue reading →