The Washington Business Journal published an op ed casting doubt on the proposed, $2.4-billion Purple light-rail line in Maryland suburbs of DC. Since the article is behind a paywall, the Antiplanner is taking the liberty of reproducing it here.
The Journal edited out a few paragraphs; while I’m not complaining, I reinserted them here for sake of completion. Those paragraphs are in italics.
Guest Comment: The Purple Line? No thanks
Washington Business Journal: Feb 6, 2015, 6:00am EST
Randal O’Toole
In the wake of Larry Hogan’s election as governor, Maryland has been inundated with propaganda claiming the Purple Line light rail from Bethesda to New Carrollton will do everything from relieve congestion to revitalize the economy. This is all hogwash.
Light rail is slow, expensive, low-capacity transit that will burden Maryland taxpayers for decades to come. Projections made for the line suffer from what planners call “optimism bias,” meaning they are designed to make a bad project look good. Yet even if you believe the numbers, they don’t justify the cost.
The original cost projection for the line was about $1.7 billion. The price has now risen to $2.4 billion and will probably go higher. Even at the lower cost, the state’s alternatives analysis showed that buses were far more cost-effective at moving people than rail.
The projected 2040 ridership for the line of more than 69,000 daily trips is three times greater than the average light-rail line in the country. Transit ridership is a function of population and job densities and most other light-rail lines serve areas that are much denser than the Purple Line corridor.
New Jersey’s Hudson-Bergen light rail serves an area that has four times the population density of urban Montgomery County and a job center with 123,000 jobs, far more than any point on the Purple Line. Yet the Hudson-Bergen line carries only 44,000 trips a day.
The state’s ridership projections for Baltimore light- and heavy-rail lines all proved to be two or more times greater than actual ridership. If built, the Purple Line will be no different.
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One reason ridership will be low is that trains would be slow. Purple Line trains are expected to average less than 15.5 miles per hour — and that, too, may be an optimistic prediction.
Even if you believe the optimistic ridership numbers, the Purple Line will cause more congestion than it will relieve. The traffic analysis for the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) predicted building the Purple Line would slow average regional traffic speeds from 24.5 to 24.4 miles per hour. Multiply that by the amount of projected traffic and the line will waste 36,000 more hours per day in 2030 than if the line isn’t built.
Nor is light rail good for the environment. The draft EIS found trains would use more energy than all the cars they would take off the road.
While the draft EIS concluded that the Purple Line would use more energy than it saved, the final EIS reached the opposite conclusion, but in doing so it made two fundamental errors. First, it assumed cars in 2040 would be no more energy efficient than in 2010 and it ignored the 67 percent losses in energy during electrical generation and transmission. Correcting these errors reveals that the line will waste energy and raises the question of why Maryland taxpayers spent millions on a document that contains such basic flaws.
Light rail is also dangerous, killing an average of 12 people for every billion passenger miles carried. By comparison, only 5 people die in urban auto accidents per billion passenger miles, and buses are even safer.
Proponents claim the Purple Line will stimulate economic development. In fact, a study funded by the Federal Transit Administration found “rail transit investments rarely ‘create’ new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment.”
Portland, Denver, Dallas and other cities that claim their light-rail lines stimulated development actually spent hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing that development, mostly using tax-increment financing. Where they built light rail and offered no subsidies, they got almost no new development.
Urban areas that spent the most, per capita, on transit capital improvements in the 1990s were among the slowest-growing regions in the 2000s, while the ones that grew fastest were among those that spent the least. The tax burden of rail transit does more harm to the economy than good.
The Purple Line is nothing more than corporate welfare for contractors and railcar manufacturers. The best way for Hogan to revitalize Maryland’s economy is to cancel the Purple Line, Baltimore’s Red Line and similar boondoggles.
Thank you for speaking up on this issue.
Say no to all light rail lines. They are horribly expensive examples of festering corruption. designed to enrich political cronies at the expense of idiotic taxpayers who are sucked in by the “green & sustainable” bullshit that’s been used to apply a environmental sheen to this scam.
These boondoggles are currently draining 100-200 million a mile from taxpayer coffers, and in a few years they will likely be half a billion a mile for a useless toy train which will probably get “choo-choo” sounds to satisfy selfish, sociopathic rail fanatics.
I would also like to add, before I forget, that in my honest opinion, most government planners are subhuman scum who barely deserve to be alive in their current capacity.
I am not sure why the Antiplanner does not use his argument that light rail and subways severely drain and disrupt the existing bus network. Maybe he is trying to reach decisionmakers and even reliable voters, very few of who take the bus.
But I think it is disruptive to the pro-train people to have to defend why existing bus lines that serve people well today need to be changed at a huge cost, and that a certain number of existing transit users will be worst off because of the new huge investment. Fixed rail has to assume a hub and spoke system, while buses can go all directions and will find out which routes and times are popular rather than rely upon planners to predict it.
Randall:
Do you know if it was ever studied to make a much simpler rail project, like say extend the Red Line in an inner circle by using the ROW from Bethesda to Silver Spring for that purpose? I recall in the 1980’s that the only segment being looked at was that portion, but even back then the Light Rail proponents had already gotten the use of Metro technology discounted.
I can’t help but think that a lot of the mobility benefits claimed for the Purple Line come from making that simple link in the Metro system. Much of the rest of the area served would then have been served by a bus transfer off the Red line, or a change of train from Red Line to Green or Orange Line. I would guess that link coul dhave been built years ago for less than $500M, leaving over $2 billion to go to something more useful, like WMATA’s maintenance backlog.