Death of a Megafolly

Duke University’s basketball teams inspire hostility nationwide, but now the school has earned the scorn of of nearby community leaders due to its rejection of the $3-billion Durham-Orange counties light-rail project. In refusing to donate land for the rail right of way, Duke cited concerns about electromagnetic interference, vibration, and other threats to Duke research and medical programs.

$151 million a mile to take 0.08 percent of vehicles off the road.

Some argued that Duke’s decision left the project only “99 percent dead” because the GoTriangle transit agency could use eminent domain to take the land from Duke. But, nearly three weeks after Duke made its decision, the GoTriangle board “unanimously but reluctantly” voted to kill the project.

The decision led to a twitter storm of criticism from people who apparently believed that Duke had denied them their God-given right to ride a train. One person pointed out that, just seven years ago, Duke had “enthusiastically supported” the light-rail project.

Duke’s letter, however, noted that such support was conditional. Specifically, since 1999, it had asked GoTriangle to find a different route that could avoid the risks to Duke’s research and medical facilities, and GoTriangle had ignored these requests.

Elected officials were especially disappointed by the decision. “We are taking a huge hit,” says Durham’s mayor, Steve Schewel. “We’re giving up $1.25 billion in federal funding by not moving forward with this.” But, since it is a $3 billion project, Duke’s decision is saving local taxpayers $1.75 billion, not to mention annual operating subsidies of at least $20 million a year.

For all that money, the project would have almost no impact on the region’s transportation system. The traffic analysis found that 80 percent of light-rail riders would be former bus riders and light rail would take less than 0.1 percent of vehicles off the road (see table 5.2). Far from relieving congestion, light rail would make it worse in downtown Durham and other locations, and part of the increased costs of the project are the “mitigation strategies” needed to offset this increase in congestion. Of course, most people wouldn’t know this because most people wouldn’t bother reading appendices K2 through K11 of the draft environmental impact statement.

What makes Durham leaders think they need rail transit anyway? Not counting streetcar lines in Little Rock and Kenosha, the smallest urban area to have some form of rail transit is Albuquerque, population 760,000. (New Haven, Ogden, and Provo also have rail transit lines connecting them to larger cities.) The Durham urban area has just 389,000 residents. The Omaha, Fresno, Colorado Springs, Bakersfield, Madison, Spokane, and Boise urban areas, among many others, are all larger than that.
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One person who gets it is the Antiplanner’s new best friend and Trains magazine columnist Fred Frailey. Citing a New York Times article about the “moral outrage” people are feeling about Duke’s decision, Frailey notes that one former mayor of Durham compared the decision to the time when Duke “called in police ‘to gas and beat students’ amid civil rights protests in 1969” while another accused Duke of denying “cheap, reliable transportation to the working people who scrape by, cooking and cleaning for the legions of college students in the Research Triangle.” ($3 billion is cheap?)

Phrases like these set off Frailey’s bullshit detector, he said, but it was not until he reached the 21st paragraph of the story that it happened to mention that the project was going to cost $3 billion for 17.8 miles, or “$169,491,525 a mile” (Frailey’s emphasis). “How can you spend $169,491,525 per mile building a light-rail line through the suburban sprawl of the Research Triangle?” Frailey asks.

To be fair, the actual construction and right-of-way acquisition cost was estimated to be $2.7 billion, while the rest was interest. But that’s still north of $150 million a mile. What Frailey didn’t realize was that even $169 million a mile was below average for light-rail projects currently being planned or built. The average cost of light rail in FTA’s 2019 New Starts report was more than $201 million a mile. This average is tilted by Boston’s 4.7-mile Green line at $488 million a mile; Seattle’s 8.5-mile Lynnwood line at $361 million a mile; Seattle’s 7.8-mile Federal Way line at $277 million a mile; and Phoenix’s Northwest line at $212 million a mile, not to mention the 1.9-mile Los Angeles Regional Connector at $738 million a mile and San Francisco’s 1.7-mile Third Street connector at $928 million a mile.

In any case, Frailey may be a bit embarrassed to find himself agreeing with the author of Romance of the Rails, but he admits that “Now we’re into the real moral outrage, and it is my own.” He concludes by suggesting that Duke “make advanced mathematics mandatory — teach people to count to $3 billion.”

In reviewing this project just before Duke made its decision, the Antiplanner noted that, back in 2012, the project alternatives analysis estimated that it would cost just $1.2 billion (which was a typo; it was actually $1.4 billion, or $1.6 billion in today’s dollars). But going even further back to 2001, the project’s major investment study estimated light rail would cost just $330 million. That’s about $456 million in today’s dollars, or roughly a sixth of the most recent estimates. Before the 2001 major investment study, there was a major investment study in 1998, which I can’t find on line but which probably estimated even lower costs.

According to the FTA, if Duke had agreed to donate the land and the federal government had signed off on the $1.25 billion grant request, revenue service would begin in 2028. Considering that the first major investment study was commissioned before 1998, the planning and construction period for this project would have been longer than the 30-year lifetime of the project.

Obviously, there’s something wrong with our transportation planning system that it takes so long to do a project. But there’s also something wrong with our planning system that an idiotic project like this one would get so far along before leading decision makers said, “This is a stupid waste of money; let’s do something more sensible.” Unfortunately, GoTriangle’s cancellation will just see federal funds reprogrammed into some other megafolly. But at least Durham and Orange county taxpayers can thank Duke for finally stopping this one.