Ft. Worth Rail Boondoggle Opens This Week

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.

Trinity Metro have so little confidence about ridership that they plan to give away all rides for free during the month of January. After that, fares for the full 27-mile trip are expected to jump to all of $2.50. In 2017, fares on the Trinity line averaged more than $4 while operations and maintenance costs averaged more than $19 per trip, for a loss of around $30 per round trip. With lower fares, TEXRail will lose even more.

The agency promises that the train will save the average rider 21 minutes per day. That may be the savings over taking a bus, but the full trip is supposed to take 52 minutes, compared with an estimated 31 minutes driving the same distance.

The tentative schedule calls for running one train an hour 24 hours a day (though three late-night trains won’t go the entire length). The transit authority told FTA that it would run two trains an hour during peak periods, but it has apparently given up on that idea. Could that be because it fears it wouldn’t able to fill the trains?

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What has gotten into the North Central Texas water supply that made Dallas want to build the nation’s largest light-rail system and Ft. Worth want to build another commuter-rail line after the failure of its first one? If it makes sense anywhere, commuter rail only makes sense in areas that have hundreds of thousands of downtown jobs most of whom take transit to work. Like most sun-belt cities, Ft. Worth doesn’t qualify.

According to Wendell Cox’s analysis of census data for downtown areas, Ft. Worth had fewer than 40,000 downtown jobs in 2008, and only about 2 percent of them took transit to work. Running a slow train that only serves a few of the city’s neighborhoods is not going to increase that much.

Transit riders are more sensitive to frequencies than to whether a transit vehicle runs on rubber tires or steel wheels. A bus carries fewer people than a train, but that’s a virtue, not a flaw, because it allows for higher frequencies. If Ft. Worth had used buses rather than rails for this route, it could have run those buses every 10 or 15 minutes, attracting a lot more riders. Of course, considering that Ft. Worth Transit has lost 20 percent of its riders in the last decade, even bus-rapid transit probably makes little sense on this route.

This illustrates one of the problems with starting new rail services that take years to plan, design, and build. Ft. Worth officials will say they couldn’t have known that the cost per mile would increase by 50 percent or that ride hailing would capture at least 20 percent of the city’s transit riders by the time this project was completed. But they should have known that something would go wrong considering that almost every other rail project built in the last 50 years has had cost overruns and ridership shortfalls.

It is quite possible that Ft. Worth officials really don’t care about transit ridership, cost effectiveness, or the effects of future technologies on the use of obsolete ones. They may have just wanted to build an urban monument. And that’s what they have: a monument to stupidity.