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Category Archives: Urban areas

Portland Streetcar Jumps the Tracks

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A Portland streetcar went off the tracks last week, totaling three automobiles and injuring at least two people. When the streetcar came to a stop, it completely blocked Grand Avenue, one of Portland’s most important north-south streets, and it took authorities close to six hours to unblock it.

With their slower speeds, streetcars would seem to be less dangerous than light rail, which kills roughly 12 people per billion passenger miles, about twice as many as automobiles in urban areas and three times as many as buses. According to the Federal Transit Administration’s safety data, streetcars have killed an average of one person per year since 2011, but most of those have been in Philadelphia, which I consider to be more like light rail than streetcars.

But Portland’s 30-seat streetcars weigh about twice as much as a 40-seat bus, which makes them far more prone to damage other vehicles. According to one rather sarcastic series of articles, when new Portland’s streetcar killed a few people and the tracks are still fairly dangerous to cyclists. Continue reading →

Qatar Supports the Washington Metro

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Washington Capitals ice hockey team, which plays its home games in downtown Washington, is in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The games go long enough that spectators can’t reliably take DC’s Metro rail transit home, as the trains stop running at 11:30 pm on Monday through Thursday.

This wasn’t a problem in the first two games of a best four-out-of-seven series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, as those games were played in Tampa. In the third game, Metro persuaded Exelon, which owns the local electric company, to donate $100,000 to keep the trains running for an extra hour.

For last night’s game 6, Metro somehow twisted Uber’s figurative arm into contributing $100,000 to keeping the trains running. It seems strange that Uber would give money to its competitor unless it hopes to get some political favors in exchange. Continue reading →

Time to Pull the Plug on SW LRT

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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As noted here before, a light-rail line from Minneapolis to the wealthy suburb of Eden Prairie was originally supposed to cost $1.2 billion for 15.8 route miles, or less than $80 million a mile. Now the projected cost has risen to more than $2 billion for just 14.5 route miles, or around $140 million a mile.

On top of this, the Metropolitan Council, which is planning the rail line, is in a dispute with a local railroad whose right-of-way Metro wants to use for the light rail. The railroad is concerned that light-rail construction will delay its trains. This dispute is being dealt with in a time-honored American fashion in which the railroad is suing the Met Council.

The Met Council is counting on getting $929 million from the Federal Transit Administration, but the FTA hasn’t signed a full-funding grant agreement and the Trump administration is resisting funding any projects without such agreements (though, as noted yesterday, it has made some exceptions). Local governments, however, would be responsible for covering all cost overruns including the recent $200 million increase in projected costs. Continue reading →

The Utah Transit Authority Is No More

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Utah Transit Authority is dead. Long live the Transit District of Utah! Actually, it would be better for taxpayers and most travelers if it didn’t live very long.

“Lavish” is a word that applied to the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which until last week served Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Orem. As of 2016, the agency had spent $1.4 billion in capital costs on commuter trains that carried an average of 8,100 round trips per day. That alone is enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every round-trip rider every three years for the next 20 years. On top of that, fares cover just 15 percent of operating costs.

The people who run the agency are also lavishly paid. A 2014 legislative audit revealed that the agency’s general manager was paid $350,000 a year, including benefits. He wasn’t even the highest-paid person in the agency: the rail service manager was paid more than $450,000. At least one other executive was paid more than $300,000 a year. For comparison, Utah’s governor is paid around $150,000 a year and the head of the state department of transportation receives around $221,000 a year. Continue reading →

Seattle About to Implode

By | | City planning, News commentary, Urban areas
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As the Antiplanner noted last week, Seattle is the only major city whose transit ridership grew in 2017 because the city has concentrated nearly 300,000 jobs in its downtown area. Yet, as noted earlier this week, Seattle transit ridership is starting to decline. That decline may may rapidly accelerate if the city council approves a proposed so-called “head tax” on all businesses that earn more than $20 million a year, which basically means Amazon and a few other companies.

The proposed tax would charge employers 26 cents per hour that each employee works in the city, or about $500 per full-time employee per year. For Amazon, which has something like 40,000 jobs in Seattle, the tax would amount to around $20 million a year — more than a quarter of total head-tax revenues — for the first couple of years, then go up to $30 million a year. The revenues from the tax would be used to provide affordable housing for homeless people.

Amazon was so perturbed by this that it halted construction on a new office tower it was building in downtown Seattle and threatened to pull all of its employees out of another existing building. When Seattle city councillor Kshama Sawant held an outdoor press conference, laid-off construction workers disrupted the meeting with shouts of “no head tax.” Despite this, members of the city council insist they will approve the tax. Continue reading →

What Does San Antonio Deserve?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Another famous H.L. Mencken quote is, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The Antiplanner was reminded of this by a headline on the San Antonio Express-News editorial page declaring that San Antonio needs “a transit plan the city deserves.” According to the editorial writer, that plan involves a “rapid transit” system that will “entice people out of their vehicles,” “connect all parts of San Antonio,” and “truly free people from traffic.”

The editorial board must not think very highly of San Antonio. It apparently believes that San Antonio residents deserve to pay billions of dollars in taxes to build an expensive transit system that will be regularly used by less than 5 percent of the people. It also believes they deserve the huge traffic congestion that will accompany construction as well as the lies, cost overruns, and ridership shortfalls that are almost invariably associated with transit megaprojects.

It is also possible that the editorial board simply doesn’t know what it is writing about. For one thing, it seems to think that “rapid transit” means fast transportation. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s Transit Fact Book, rapid rail transit (also known as heavy rail) averages just 20 mph while rapid bus averages less than 11 mph. The average speed of auto driving in San Antonio is 33 mph, so rapid transit is not likely to persuade many to stop driving. Continue reading →

Anatomy of a Transit Disaster

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), San Jose’s transit agency, has been making a series of happy-talk advertisements about how transit is green, is faster than driving, and reduces congestion. Of course, it is none of those things: VTA uses about as much energy and producing as much greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average SUV; VTA light-rail trains average less than 16 mph and its buses less than 12; and rather than reduce congestion it is increasing it as its poor service leads people to give up transit and drive instead.

The reality is that VTA’s transit and transportation planning has proven to be a disaster for Silicon Valley. In 2000, VTA buses and light-rail transit carried 55.6 million riders, or more than 36 trips per capita in the San Jose urban area. Ridership grew to 57.3 million in 2001. But then the dot-com crash hit, reducing jobs and ridership. Desperate to avoid defaulting on the huge loans it had taken out to build light rail, by 2005 VTA had cut bus service by more than 20 percent. Even though the number of jobs declined by only 9 percent, ridership fell by more than 30 percent. Continue reading →

Seattle Fails the Streetcar Intelligence Test

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Streetcars are supposed to be the least-expensive form of rail transit, yet Seattle is spending $177 million building a 1.2-mile streetcar line. At $147.5 million a mile, that’s more expensive than many light-rail lines.

The 1.2-mile City Center Connector will connect the 1.3-mile South Lake Union Trolley and the 2.5-mile First Hill streetcar.

Moreover, the plan of the city (which is building the streetcar) appears to be overly optimistic about both ridership and operating costs. The city already has two streetcar lines, and the new one will connect the two. But since the two existing lines parallel each other, connecting them — creating a U-shaped route — doesn’t necessarily make them a lot more useful to riders. As shown in the map above, the connecting line will give riders more access to downtown, but no one except a few streetcar enthusiasts is going to want to ride from one end of the South Lake Union line to the other end of the First Hill line. Continue reading →

NIMBYism Not the Real Problem

By | | Housing, Transportation, Urban areas
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The California legislature is getting some push back on S.B. 827, which proposes to eliminate zoning in most of San Francisco, Oakland, and other “transit-rich” cities. So legislators have announced a new proposal, A.B. 2923, which would allow the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) to build whatever it wants on land it owns, most of which is presumably near BART stations.

Home sweet $2 million home. Photo from Google streetview.

There’s no doubt that Bay Area housing is too expensive. An 848-square-foot home in Sunnyvale just sold for $2 million (a $550,000 premium over the asking price), or $2,358 per square foot. Increasing numbers of people are buying homes sight unseen. For some, commuting from Bend, Oregon is a viable option because the cost of flying is less than the cost of housing in the Bay Area. Continue reading →

Utah Legislature to Utah Transit Administration:
Stop Wasting Money. Here’s More

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Utah politicians are proud of all of the light-rail and commuter-rail lines that the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) has managed to build. But to do so, UTA has built up $2 billion of debt, and 30 percent of its revenues must go to service that debt. This greatly reduces its ability to improve transit to serve a growing area.

Now the state legislature has found a solution to this problem: Abolish UTA. Or, to be precise, replace it with a new entity that has a new governing body, new taxing authority, and restrictions on how it can spend its money.

Unfortunately, merely replacing UTA’s fifteen-member board with a three-member commission won’t solve the real problem: the agency has always gone for the high-cost solution to any problem. For example, as of the end of 2016 it has spend $2 billion (in 2016 dollars) constructing a commuter-rail system that barely carries 8,000 roundtrips per weekday. This is almost unimaginably wasteful, except it just a matter of course for the transit industry. Continue reading →