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Category Archives: Transportation

Why Was the Tappan Zee Bridge So Costly?

By | | Transportation
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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 →

November Transit Ridership Down 5.3%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in November 2018 was 5.3 percent lower than in the same month of 2017, according to data (7.4-MB Excel spreadsheet) released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. Both buses and rail lost more than 5 percent of their riders. These declines are in spite of November having the same number of work days in both years.

The first eleven months of 2018 saw 2.6 percent fewer riders than the same months in 2017. Contrary to claims that bus ridership is declining but rail is not, rail ridership actually declined more in 2018 than bus ridership.

However, it is worth noting that some of the commuter rail numbers are preliminary estimates that don’t look right. Though commuter rail has been doing better than most other modes in previous months, the November report indicates a 15 percent decline from November 2017. Supposedly, Boston commuter ridership fell by 45%, New York’s Metro North, Philadelphia DOT, and commuter lines in Connecticut, south Florida, and San Diego all lost 33 to 35%, and Los Angeles lost 25%. Yet other commuter-rail lines seem unaffected. If these numbers turn out to be in error, I’ll post an update here as soon as possible. Even without commuter rail, heavy rail and light rail both declined, though not by quite as much as bus. Continue reading →

Can High-Speed Rail Make Housing Affordable?

By | | Housing, Transportation
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UCLA management professor Jerry Nickerson thinks he has found a solution to California’s housing affordability problems: high-speed rail. Based on years of data, he has concluded that some Japanese who work in Tokyo and other expensive cities make long commutes on high-speed trains to more affordable cities elsewhere in the country.

What a fantastically dumb idea. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped private land right next to the Los Angeles and San Francisco-Oakland urban areas. Most of these acres have little agricultural value and those around San Francisco are currently being used as pasture or range land, meaning they support a few head of cattle, while many of the undeveloped acres around Los Angeles probably don’t even support livestock.

So, to protect these lands from development, California should spend $77 billion to $100 billion or more building a high-speed rail line to the Central Valley, which has some of the most productive farm land in the nation, so that houses can be built on that farm land rather than on the range lands around Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Continue reading →

37 Railroads Fail to Meet Deadline

By | | Transportation
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The Department of Transportation was thrilled to announce that four railroads met the December 31 deadline for installing positive train control. That would be great news if those four railroads were the four that carry about 75 percent of rail traffic in this country, namely BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific.

But it wasn’t. Instead, they were the North County Transit District (in San Diego County), Metrolink (in the Los Angeles area), Port Authority Transit-Hudson, and the Portland & Western (over which Portland’s TriMet operates a commuter train). That means 37 railroads — including seven class I railroads (the above big four, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and Kansas City Southern), Amtrak, two dozen commuter railroads, and a handful of short lines — failed to meet the deadline and received waivers to not do so.

The December 31 deadline is actually three years after the original deadline, which was in 2015. While DOT says that 71 percent of the route miles that are required to have positive train control have it installed, why has it taken so long to complete the system? Continue reading →

The Year in Review

By | | Follow up, Housing, Transportation
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The Antiplanner tends to agree with Dilbert that New Year’s is a random calendar date, but everyone else is looking back at 2018, probably because it provides a good excuse for a blog post. From my point of view, the two most important events of 2018 were the continuing decline of transit ridership and urban planners’ latest victory in their battles against single-family homes.

November ridership data will be out in a few days, and December a month after that, but October data show that year-over-year ridership fell in eleven of the last twelve months, the exception being July when New York subways were recovering from major delays due to repairs in July 2017. Over the last decade, annual ridership in some urban areas has fallen by nearly 50 percent, and it has fallen by more than 15 percent in more than half of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas.

While some of the decline is due to increasingly unreliable rail systems in New York, Washington, and a few other cities, most of it is due to factors beyond transit agency control: the growth of ride hailing, the growth of other alternatives such as electric scooters, and the growing affordability of driving as oil prices remain low. The question isn’t whether transit will recover; it is whether it will be able to survive at all, especially outside of New York City and the six other cities (Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington) where transit still makes a difference in the day-to-day life of the average resident. Continue reading →

Ft. Worth Rail Boondoggle Opens This Week

By | | Transportation
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The Fort Worth Transit Authority, also known as Trinity Metro, will open TEXRail, a new commuter-rail line from downtown Ft. Worth to the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport, at the end of this week. Built at a cost of more than a billion dollars, the line is expected to carry an average of 4,000 round trips per weekday in its first year. It probably will fall short.

When the project first appears in the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts reports, for 2014 (but based on 2012 data), it was supposed to be 38 miles long, cost under a billion dollars, and attract nearly 10,000 weekday riders (5,000 round trips) in its first year of operation. By 2016 the cost had risen to well over a billion despite chopping off 11 miles west of downtown Ft. Worth, leaving just 27. This pushed projected first-year ridership down to 8,300 weekday trips (4,150 round trips).

Now that the money has been spent and it is too late to do anything about it, the transit authority is projected TEXRail will carry 8,000 riders per weekday, probably low-balling the 8,300 figure in case ridership falls short. And it is likely to fall short, as the Trinity Railway Express, a 34-mile commuter-rail line from Ft. Worth to Dallas, carried only 7,400 weekday riders in 2017, a number that has dropped by nearly 1,000 since 2014. Continue reading →

Amtrak’s Real Problem

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak is under fire from a lot of pro-rail groups and experts. “The Amtrak era is over,” declared a recent op-ed in Railway Age magazine by F.K. Plous, who works for Corridor Rail, a “passenger rail development, finance and management company.” Amtrak, continues Plous, has “no goals, no growth strategy and no meaningful success/fail criteria.” However, instead of defunding it, Plous predictably proposes even more subsidies managed by a new agency or company (perhaps Corridor Rail?) that would somehow be better than Amtrak, and of course, backed up by “all the statutory, budgetary and bureaucratic resources needed to take passenger trains into the post-Amtrak world.”

Railway Age is hardly a railfan magazine, but it is not the only passenger train supporter that is critical of Amtrak. A few months ago the Railroad Passenger Association (formerly the National Association of Railroad Passengers) released a study claiming that Amtrak accounting was “fatally flawed” resulting in a “a false framing of Northeast Corridor services as ‘profitable’ and the rest of the system as ‘unprofitable.'” In fact, says RPA, all of Amtrak’s routes are unprofitable, which leads it to the curious conclusion that all should be subsidized even more.

Trains magazine joined the fray with an article in its January 2019 issue that partly relied on the RPA report and partly on its own research arguing that Amtrak’s management has a “no-growth policy” that results from “misplaced priorities.” Much of the article is based on an accounting system that was developed by an outside agency that Amtrak doesn’t trust and doesn’t use. But Trains seems to think that, despite not using it, it has somehow distorted Amtrak’s policies. In any case, the magazine’s conclusion is the same: Amtrak is awful, give it more money. Continue reading →

Korea Shuts Down High-Speed Airport Train

By | | Transportation
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Korea recently decided to terminate its AREX (Airport Railroad Express) train service from Seoul to Incheon Airport. This service began in 2014 as one of the projects for getting the country ready to host the 2018 Winter Olympics. International passengers could leave the Incheon Airport (which serves Seoul) and take a KTX (Korea Train Express) train about 100 miles direct to PyeongChang, where the Olympics took place, on a new high-speed rail line built to that region.

Korea’s KTX trains were based on French TGV designs; the first ones were built in France while later ones were built in Korea under license to and using many parts imported from France. Wikipedia photo by Subway06.

After the Olympics ended, however, ridership on the airport line dwindled. The 44 trains a day (22 in each direction) carried an average of 78 people. Since the trains had well over 300 seats, they operated just 23 percent full, and were most heavily used on weekends while weekday trains were nearly empty. If all of the train passengers were air travelers, they accounted for less than 1.5 percent of people arriving or departing from Incheon Airport. However, it is likely that many of the rail passengers were airport employees, not air travelers, which means the train probably carried around 1 percent of airline passengers. Continue reading →