In a move that surprised no one, the staff of TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, wants to build light rail instead of bus-rapid transit between Portland and Sherwood. Since the Obama administration no longer requires transit agencies to do a rigorous alternatives analysis, this decision was based on subjective criteria and erroneous assumptions, yet will probably not be challenged by either TriMet’s board or the federal government that will have to pay for most of the line.
TriMet’s last light-rail line cost about $168 million per mile. This proposal is for an 11.5-mile line that will cost at least $2 billion, or $174 million per mile. Of course, that cost is likely to go up. By comparison, Portland’s first light-rail line cost only about $28 million per mile in today’s dollars.
A state auditor says TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is falling behind on light-rail maintenance. TriMet’s general manager says that the agency’s pension and health-care obligations are so great that it will have to cut all transit service by 70 percent by 2025 to meet those obligations. So naturally, it makes perfect sense to talk about spending $2 billion that the agency doesn’t have on another low-capacity rail line.
Of course, TriMet’s staff memo about the project repeatedly calls light rail “high-capacity transit.” But light-rail transit can be no longer than a city block or they’ll block traffic every time they stop for passengers. Since downtown Portland has some of the smallest city blocks in the country, TriMet can only run two-car trains, making it one of the lowest-capacity light-rail systems in the country. And since the “light” in light rail is short for “light capacity transit,” Portland’s is low-low capacity transit.
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Buses can move more people than light rail, but TriMet says one of the reasons it prefers light rail is its higher capacity. Bus-rapid transit “would add up to 20 buses an hour to the Transit Mall in each direction,” says the memo, which is a problem because the mall is already being used to full capacity. But the reason why it is at full capacity is because TriMet built a light-rail line on the mall, thereby reducing its capacity from when it was a pure bus mall.
The memo also claims that light rail would attract more riders than buses. This isn’t at all clear from TriMet’s experience. TriMet’s transit ridership peaked in 2009 and has since declined despite opening several new miles of light rail in 2010 and the city’s rapid recovery following the 2008 recession. The Portland Business Alliance’s annual census of jobs in the downtown area, where most transit riders commute to, says that the area had 16 percent more jobs in 2014 than 2009. The census found that transit carried about 1,000 more people to work in 2014 than 2009, but TriMet carried 8 percent fewer riders in 2014 than 2009.
The memo also claims that light rail has a lower operating cost per passenger than buses. But that’s only true if you don’t count maintenance costs, which might be appropriate considering TriMet’s apparent policy of letting trains break down rather than spending money on maintaining the infrastructure. The memo frequently uses the term “cost effective” but never performs an analysis to prove whether rail is actually more cost effective than buses.
In short, the memo is filled with the same old specious ideas that led TriMet to blow $1.5 billion on the Milwaukie light-rail line and other boondoggles. Portland doesn’t need to blow another $2 billion building more light-rail miles that TriMet can’t afford to maintain.
The Antiplanner wrote:
In short, the memo is filled with the same old specious ideas that led TriMet to blow $1.5 billion on the Milwaukie light-rail line and other boondoggles. Portland doesn’t need to blow another $2 billion building more light-rail miles that TriMet can’t afford to maintain.
IMO, this is a failure of transportation planning at the federal level (and it was a problem long before Obama took office). The feds have long required plans to have financial constraint (IMO a good thing), but they still allow (and fund) passenger rail system expansion projects even when there are large maintenance backlogs.
That should stop.
Federal dollars for transit (most of which go for capital spending) should not be used for expanding rail transit when the (unfunded) maintenance backlog is high.
We can have an honest discussion of the merits of funding transit with federal dollars (is it really appropriate to be funding local transit projects this way?) – but as long as there are federal dollars for transit, there should be this (large) string attached.
First, money from the feds is not manna from heaven.
Second, we are broke. Actually worse than broke, because after we pay back nearly $20 trillion dollars we will then be broke with no money.
Third, we have much more important things to spend money on than the tiny fraction of folks that might use this light rail. Like stabilizing the ground under our fuel supply tank farm in N.W. Portland to withstand the big one.
And Maryland is building the Purple Line.
Surely it would be cheaper to hire a fleet of limousines to carry the full passenger load on the same route. What are people thinking??
Bus-rapid transit “would add up to 20 buses an hour to the Transit Mall in each direction,” says the memo, which is a problem because the mall is already being used to full capacity.
20 buses per hour in each direction, or total? Even if they were evenly split by direction, that would still mean running at 6-minute headways, which is pretty low by the standards of US BRT systems. Makes me question the forecasts even more.
But why would they need to be funneled onto the Transit Mall? Why not operate them on a pair of adjacent streets? This classic planner-think: BRT systems need to be designed to operate exactly like light rail systems, even if this means compromising its greatest advantage — operational flexibility. And here I thought Portland was a progressive, transit-oriented city.
Why are they doing this/ the clear answer is to keep their jobs and benefits flowing. “… the agency’s pension and health-care obligations are so great…”
By adding more projects and spending other people’s money, they pay themselves more and increase their future pensions and benefits.
All the talk about caring about commuters and transit is just cover for scamming the funds.
Like so many other things, it isn’t a success unless everyone is doing it. So the system has to keep expanding until (in theory) everyone “has” to ride it because it has passed some critical mass in scale and now goes everywhere everyone needs to go at whatever time you need to go. Utterly fails to take into account that some people don’t want to ride with other people on a trip that takes twice as long as driving in a vehicle that is uncomfortable and public (not private).
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I’ve read here and heard from others that: “Rail is only cost effective in the US for freight, not for moving people.” But that is what mass transit feels like today (I’m sure it doesn’t have to) it feels dehumanizing, like they are treating us like cargo.
As one of my long time compadres used to say about government programs and projects, the costs are the benefits. The higher the costs and cost overruns are, the better off the political classes and the interest groups are.
I missed the part about the Constitutional foundation for the Feds to fund local intrastate light rail.
>But why would they need to be funneled onto the Transit Mall? Why not operate them on a pair of adjacent streets?
Spend much time in Portland? Traffic downtown during peak hours is pretty bad. Running off the transit mall would add a lot of time to trips unless the city dedicates a lane on those streets to buses. If the traffic impact from that is manageable you’ll probably see the space go to bike lanes instead.
Spend much time in Portland? Traffic downtown during peak hours is pretty bad.
I noticed you left out the fact that traffic in Portland is bad because of incessant government meddling designed to make it so. How odd.
The worse demonstration of bias a newspaper can demonstrate is withholding information so the people aren’t even aware of what government is planning in the first place. This then lets the plan get a big head of steam so it can roll over any opposition to it. A $2,000,000,000 dollar boondoggle train is hard to stop once it has left the station and has some momentum. Consider the voter rejected Portland/Milwaukie Orange line. That must be what the Oregonian news paper is hoping for.
Here at the same time local governments are asking to raise our taxes to pay for our real transportation system, our crumbling streets, they are quietly planning to siphon $2 billion dollars of our transportation funds to pay for a silly light rail boondoggle. This instead of spending it on increasing street capacity by adding traffic lanes and widening streets.