Rail Disasters of the Oughts

Although the Antiplanner spends a lot of blog posts ranting about rail transit, the truth is that all of the rail disasters of the last decade together did not cost nearly as much as certain other government planning disasters that the Antiplanner will cover later this week. Yet new rail transit lines can impose huge costs on local taxpayers, property owners, and — often — transit riders.

The sad fact is that rail transit takes so long to plan and build that just about any line that opened in this decade is really a result of planning that began in the 1990s or earlier. But for the purposes of this list, I mainly considered lines that opened after about 2004. This list is roughly in reverse order of the amount of net waste generated by each line or system.

10. The Music City Star

Relying on existing tracks and used locomotives and passenger cars, Nashville’s 32-mile commuter-rail line cost “only” $41 million to start. This makes it the “most cost-efficient commuter-rail start up in the nation,” says the Regional Transportation Authority — which only proves that transit planners don’t know the meaning of “cost efficient.” The line carried an average of just 252 round-trip commuters a day in 2008. All these people could easily be carried by a handful of luxury long-distance buses costing around $2.5 million.

9. The Westside Express

Though Portland planners love to talk about their light rail and streetcars, you don’t hear them bragging about the Westside Express. Going from nowhere to nowhere and suffering 25 percent cost overruns, this line carries about 500 round-trip commuters per day at a capital cost of about $166 million.

8. Austin Commuter Rail

Scheduled to open in 2008, Austin’s commuter-rail line is over budget and at least two years late. Capital Metro fired its contractors, setting up a potential dispute similar to the one that nearly destroyed St. Louis’ light-rail expansion plans.

7. The Portland Streetcar

Though it didn’t cost nearly as much as the Westside Express, Portland’s streetcar is having pernicious and expensive effects all across the country as other cities scramble to plan and build their own streetcar lines. This is mainly because of Portland’s big lie that the streetcar generated $3.5 billion worth of development, when in fact much of that development would have take place anyway and the rest was government subsidized to the tune of close to a billion dollars.

6. The Wham-Bam Tram

After opening in 2004 at a capital cost of more than $300 million, Houston’s light rail quickly became known for its frequent collisions with automobiles. For more than a year, these collisions took place at a steady rate of about one every four days. Transit officials always blamed the auto drivers rather than the poor design of the system, but it was only when the streets were redesigned that the accident rate declined.

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Commuter-rail service between West Palm Beach and Miami began in 1989, but it is included here because it was in the 2000s that the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority got the funding for double-tracking the entire route at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. This was supposed to significantly increase ridership. Though planners projected the rail line would carry more than 21,000 round trips per weekday by 2015, in 2008 it carried only about 7,600 round-trip commuters per weekday. While this is a 50 percent increase over pre-double-track numbers, the 2,500 new riders are hardly worth the more than $600 million spent on capital improvements in the last decade.

4. FasTracks

Designed primarily to buy off enough politicians and interest groups to sell the idea of a tax increase to the voters, Denver’s 119-mile rail expansion plan was supposed to cost $4.7 billion when it was approved by voters in 2004. The cost has since ballooned to $7.9 billion, then declined to a mere $7.0 billion thanks to the recession. Meanwhile, the increased sales taxes that were supposed to pay for it have not grown by 6 percent per year as planners originally predicted, so they now project a $2 billion shortfall in revenues. Given that Denver’s existing light-rail cars are the emptiest in the nation, ridership projections have fallen so now RTD predicts one of the rail lines will end up costing $60 per rider, nearly four times the original projection. That’s some great planning, Cal.

3. The New Jersey River Line

Built primarily to please southern New Jersey politicians who were upset that New Jersey Transit was neglecting them when it built the overpriced Hudson-Bergen light-rail line in northern Jersey, the River Line cost $1.1 billion and carries a mere 4,500 round trips a day (compared with about four times that many on the much-shorter and slightly less-expensive Hudson-Bergen line). Even Light Rail Now! doesn’t think much of the River Line, mainly because it wasn’t expensive enough as planners chose to save money by using Diesel-powered vehicles instead of electric.

2. The Second Avenue Subway and Long Island Railroad Eastside Access

Now under construction at an estimated eventual cost of $16.8 billion for a mere 8 miles of line, New York’s Second Avenue Subway may well be the most expensive rail line in the world. Except (on a cost-per-mile basis) for the 2-mile Eastside Access of the Long Island Railroad, which is being built at a cost of nearly $8 billion. The Second Avenue Subway is just two blocks from a parallel subway line and is justified by the Federal Transit Administration on the grounds that it will save some transit riders 30 seconds apiece. The Eastside Access line will connect Long Island Railroad riders (who now terminate at Penn Station) to Grand Central Station, thus allowing some of them to avoid a change of trains (or, to be fair, two changes of trains because there is no direct subway access between Penn and Grand Central — another example of bad planning from a long-ago decade).

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has committed to build these expensive projects even as it seems to be in a perpetual financial crisis and is cutting both subway and bus service. It is hard to see why federal taxpayers, who are picking up part of the cost of both projects, should have to pay to save wealthy New Yorkers a few seconds of time each day.

1. Central Link Light Rail

Manhattan at least has the virtue of having densities that supposedly support rail transit (though not the capital costs or even all the operating costs). Seattle can make no such claim. Yet it has just completed the most expensive light-rail line in the world and plans to soon start another that will be even more expensive. At $2.1 billion (some say much more) for 14 miles, Central Link’s cost per mile is about three times the average for other light-rail lines. This is because it is entirely grade-separated, meaning it has all the costs of heavy rail but the capacity limits of light rail. Why didn’t Sound Transit just build a BART-like system? Probably because, like someone who orders a room smaller than they need in order to make their events look popular, Sound Transit knows that crowded, low-capacity light-rail trains will look better than empty high-capacity heavy-rail trains.

Other Candidates

The truth is that rail transit is an obsolete technology that does not belong in any American city except New York, and I am not even convinced that they can make it work there without questionably heavy subsidies. Certainly all new rail transit lines are a waste, which means that other worthy candidates for this list include Albuquerque commuter rail, Phoenix light rail, Salt Lake City commuter rail, Norfolk light rail (which is both over budget and behind schedule), and Charlotte light rail. I probably left them off the list as much because I know less about them than the ones above than because they are less disastrous.