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Monthly Archives: December 2018

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 →

Don’t Be Like [Insert City Name Here]

By | | City planning, Regional planning
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Emily Badger, who is fast becoming the Antiplanner’s favorite writer at the New York Times, has an article this week about how cities are trying not to be like certain other cities. Seattle doesn’t want to be like San Francisco; San Francisco doesn’t want to be like Manhattan. Kansas City doesn’t want to be like Denver.

“You don’t want to become Manhattan (too dense), Portland (too twee), Boston (too expensive), Seattle (too tech-y), Houston (too sprawling), Los Angeles (too congested), Las Vegas (too speculative), Chicago (too indebted),” says Badger. Too bad she had to spoil it by including Houston, which (as she pointed out in a previous article) many people think is the model other big cities should follow.

Part of the problem is that people just don’t like big cities. The same Gallup poll that found that more Americans of all age groups would rather live in rural areas than big cities also found that more Americans of all age classes would rather live in a suburb of a big city than in a big city itself, and that more Americans of all age classes except 18-29 year olds would rather live in a small town than a big city (and among 18-29 year olds the difference was only 1 percent). People dislike big cities because they tend to be more congested, impersonal, and crime-ridden than small cities or suburbs. 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 →

Enjoy Your Subway Ride

By | | Transportation
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A few days ago, a man struck a woman with a metal pipe in a Manhattan subway station. A day or two before that, a man attempted to sexually assault a woman in a Brooklyn subway station. A few days before that, a man pushed a woman onto the tracks at another Manhattan subway station. A few days before that, a man trying to steal a backpack slashed the victim with a knife.

Lots of people ride the subways and they are still safe for most riders. But New York police say that transit crime is increasing even as overall crime in the city is on the decline.

Despite this, we — or at least New Yorkers — are supposed to “fall in love with stuffy, crowded subways,” argues Aaron Gordon in Medium. “If we’re ever going to make cities work,” says Gordon, “we need to accept, and come to love, a fundamental truth: Packed urban transit is good urban transit.” Continue reading →

Why Public Transit Is Crumbling

By | | Transportation
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Someone over at the Nib has a lengthy explanation of why public transit is crumbling. Apparently, it’s due mainly to the Koch Brothers and the Antiplanner. While it would have been more realistic picturing me on a bicycle than behind the wheel of a car, I am nonetheless flattered; yet the reality is a little bit more complicated.

The article — okay, it’s a web comic — suggests that transit can somehow transform cities into clean, healthy, crime-free paradises. Light-rail lines, the authors suggest, fall short of this dream because they generally don’t have a dedicated right of way and therefore “aren’t fast or reliable and don’t carry enough passengers to reduce traffic.” Thus, they explicitly endorse “rapid transit,” meaning bus or rail lines that have their own dedicated rights of way.

While transit had an impact on American cities before the automobile became ubiquitous and more recently has had similar impacts on cities in developing countries that still have low rates of auto ownership, there’s little evidence that dedicated transit lines can transform auto-oriented cities. Indeed, heavy investments in transit have had negligible effects on cities other than by increasing the tax burden on their citizens. Continue reading →

Fixing DOT Could Save $248 Billion

By | | Transportation
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The federal government could save nearly $250 billion over the next ten years if it fixed some of the problems with its transportation programs, says a new report from the Congressional Budget Office. The report lists 72 different ways Congress could reduce spending and 40 different ways it could enhance revenues in order to reduce the federal deficit. The savings in modifying transportation programs are some of the largest in the possible reductions in discretionary spending.

The report lists five specific transportation reforms:

  1. Eliminate funding for Amtrak, which would save $20 billion;
  2. Eliminate the Essential Air Service program, saving $4.5 billion;
  3. Limit highway and transit funding to expected revenues, saving $116 billion;
  4. Eliminate the Federal Transit Administration, saving $87 billion; and
  5. Increase the passenger fee for aviation security, saving $21 billion.

Continue reading →

Emissions-Free Buses?

By | | Transportation
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The California Air Resource Board has passed a regulation mandating that all transit buses in the state be electrically powered by 2040. Portland’s TriMet has also vowed to eliminate Diesel buses from its fleet by 2040. The motivation behind these goals is supposedly the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Not surprisingly, there’s another hidden motivation. The federal government will cover 80 percent of the cost of a Diesel bus. But it will cover 85 percent of the cost of “low- or no-emissions buses” and 90 percent of the cost of related bus equipment and facilities. That means transit agencies can use their local funds to buy as many electric buses as Diesel buses even if the electric buses cost considerably more. According to one report, a typical Diesel bus costs $500,000 and an electric bus costs $800,000, but those numbers can vary quite a bit depending on how many buses a transit agency orders.

Electric buses come with another cost. According to the Federal Transit Administration, electric buses in Seattle break down every 2,771 miles, while Diesel buses break down only once every 17,332 miles. Continue reading →

BART: The Bay Area Transit Disaster

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Ridership on the $1.2 billion Bay Area Rapid Transit line to San Francisco Airport — which was never very high in the first place — has declined by 10 percent since 2013, which translates to a $4 million annual loss in fare revenues. Ridership on the $500 million BART-funded cable car to the Oakland Airport, which was also well below expectations, declined by 6 percent in the past two years, equal to about $620,000 in lost revenues.

BART blames ride hailing services for the loss in business, claiming that no one could have predicted the rise in such services when the agency planned these lines. Ride hailing is very predictable now (hindsight being 20:20), yet BART is still planning new lines, including an extension to Livermore, a second transbay crossing, and of course the line to downtown San Jose.

To pay for these new lines, as well as reconstruction of existing lines, BART asked voters to approve $3.5 billion in new funding in 2016 — and spent two years and an unknown amount of tax dollars promoting the ballot measure (without actually mentioning the measure) with the slogan “it’s time to rebuild.” It also failed to report these expenditures in a campaign filing statement, for which it was fined a whopping $7,500 by the state Fair Political Practices Commission. As one voter noted, “that’s not a fine; that’s a fantastic investment.” Continue reading →

VTA Faces $25 Million Deficit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which the Antiplanner has sometimes called the nation’s worst-managed transit agency, is facing a $25 million deficit next year, which will probably lead to service cuts. As the Friends of Caltrain (the commuter rail line that connects San Jose to San Francisco) note, the elephant in the room is whether VTA should go forward with its plans for billions of dollars of capital projects when it can’t afford to run the system it already has.

Friends of Caltrain doesn’t specifically say so, but the real elephant is VTA’s plans to extend the BART line to downtown San Jose. VTA is “97 percent complete” building a 10-mile line from Fremont to Berryessa (a neighborhood in north San Jose). This line, which is costing $2.3 billion, was supposed to be open at the beginning of 2018, but thanks in part to a scandal over a contractor’s use of used parts in construction, the opening has been delayed until late 2019. (An update from Friends of Caltrain says the VTA board was willing to look at capital projects, but still did not specifically mention BART.)

Extending the line another 6.5 miles to downtown San Jose is expected to cost another $4.7 billion, or more than $720 a mile, mainly because much of it will be underground. VTA expects to ask the Federal Transit Administration to cover $1.5 billion of this amount, leaving local taxpayers to cover the rest. If this project is ever completed, BART riders arriving in downtown San Jose are likely to find a stripped-down transit system that probably won’t take them where they want to go if it is more than a couple of blocks from the BART station. Continue reading →