Three years ago, Oregon politicians managed to get an earmark for an Oregon company to manufacture streetcars. Now it turns out those streetcars are–surprise!–more expensive than anticipated as well as delayed by at least five months.
For the original price of six cars, the company will make just five. Not to worry, says company president Chandra Brown: “You’re not getting less. I actually think you’re getting more. You’re getting a lot better quality vehicle, and you’re getting all the ancillary benefits from it being done here.”
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The new cars will run on what the city admits is “the most expensive streetcar expansion in U.S. history”: nearly $150 million for 3.3 miles. The original virtue of the streetcar, such as it was, was that it was supposed to cost less than light rail–which typically costs slightly less than $50 million a mile. Of course, now that Portland is spending $1.5 billion to build a 7.3-mile light-rail line–that’s more than $200 million a mile–officials can still argue that streetcars are cheap.
The Antiplanner hopes people in Atlanta, Milwaukee, and other cities that are planning streetcars are listening. The first cost estimate you hear will only be a down payment.
The Antiplanner wrote:
The Antiplanner hopes people in Atlanta, Milwaukee, and other cities that are planning streetcars are listening. The first cost estimate you hear will only be a down payment.
But isn’t that very nearly always the case with taxpayer-funded passenger rail projects (be it streetcars, light rail, heavy rail and various kinds of intercity rail, including HSR) in the United States?
And of course, CP, it’s just adding insult to injury, since the streetcars are little more than shiny tourist baubles.
“You’re not getting less. I actually think you’re getting more. You’re getting a lot better quality vehicle, and you’re getting all the ancillary benefits from it being done here.â€
Higher prices? Fewer vehicles delivered? I’m really curious as to what the “ancillary benefits” are.
Does anyone have the data to compare the cost of $150 million for 3.3 miles of street car to the inflation-adjusted cost of building historic street car lines of the equivalent length?
In an effort to answer my own question, I found this from 1905:
Seems like Portland streetcars were never free of politics and that street car companies were not exactly free-market entities.
And my answer from an ad in 1902:
“The City & Suburban Railway Company may be considered a substantial portion of the backbone of this healthy and prosperous community. It has built two new lines this season, which, with its track improvements, has cost the stockholders about $200,000.”
One of those must have been the Brooklyn Line, which seems to be longer than the new east-side line.
Two lines for $200g. In 2010 dollars, that’s about $5 million, perhaps $2.5 million each line. Today, it costs sixty times that. Wow.
Over a billion dollars to move less than 8 miles. For that much, I want gold plated hand rails and leather seats made of the most endangered animal that can be made into leather like Panda or something.
Washington D.C. has a similar problem. They’ve already purchased several streetcars for future use in a line going down H street. What they forgot was where the maintenance shed will go to store all the vehicles during off hours.
When, however, the public is compelled to pay enough to give the street-car monopolists a profit of $6,000,000 more than the cost of the road, a higher fare must be exacted.
Wow. Marxism was already popular in the Northwest even in 1905!
SEPTA is building in house a 1/2 mile streetcar extension of Route 15 to the Sugarhouse Casino for $2-3 million dollars including electrification. SEPTA, Muni, and Toronto Transit are probably the only transit agencies left with the skill to build in-street track with their own forces for a reasonable cost.
I don’t understand why Portland light rail and streetcar construction is so expensive. Possibly it has to do with utility relocations, the amount of time streets are allowed to be closed, or other factors. I’m sure there are costs for consultants and contractors as well. There must be some goldplating also.
Rails, ties, poles, wires, electrical supply distribution and new street surface should cost about $5 million per mile to build if the street can be partially or completely closed to permit the use of normal construction methods. If the costs are higher than that, they aren’t for building the actual trolley tracks and wires.
Now I think streetcars are bogus anyhow, but 2-3 million is much more tolerable than the ridiculous figures being consumed in PDX.
BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese bullet train lost power after being struck by lightning Saturday and was hit from behind by another train, knocking two of its carriages off a bridge in eastern China, killing at least 32 people, state media reported.
I guess we’ll hear more cries for government intervention for safety, just like we hear after blown tires on DC to NYC buses.
Oh, wait.
I also wonder if the “state media” are releasing an accurate count. “At least 32 people” could mean hundreds.
I bet we hear more about Amy Winehouse than this disaster.
I bet we hear more about Amy Winehouse than this disaster.
Agreed. But even if Amy wasn’t an item, much of the media has a love affair with public transit and would probably try to downplay the incident.
By the Source! I was at the pool all day and didn’t hear about Wine-house until 5 pm.
Well, Winehouse was a train wreck.
Anyway, crashes aside, China’s high speed rail has been under scrutiny for various problems. The tickets are too expensive for the public anyway compared to the normal speed trains. Cost overruns are very common, and passenger forecasts are often far too optimistic. Since the introduction of high-speed rail on April 18, 2007, daily ridership has grown from 237,000 in 2007 and 349,000 in 2008 to 492,000 in 2009 and 796,000 in 2010; a negligible amount overall for having nearly 6,000 miles of rail dedicated to it. That’s 8,000 plus my end of this year and nearly 16,000 by 2015. Their own rail minister and proponent of HSR expansion in China, was removed from office on charges of corruption. Millions of dollars of misappropriated funds. The new minister has spoken, due to corruption, safety may have been compromised on some construction projects and completion dates may have to be pushed back. And it’s famous maglev will never recover any of it’s costs even if it’s double filled with passengers for the length of it’s lifespan.
I-93 in Boston had plenty of cost over runs too.
Not an excuse to waste money on “high” speed rail.
Nor an excuse to waste money with freeways.
Freeways are rarely a “waste of money”, but then I wouldn’t expect you to back up your assertion with say, studies or numbers. Like Randal does when he points out the colossal waste of money associated with rail.
One mans trash is an other mans treasure.
Well then that explains a lot about you.
O’Toole’s numbers mean nothing, who cares if 50 cars or 500 car pass by your house during a day. The street is still there.
The street doesn’t require $200 million per mile to construct (from the pockets of taxpayers), and doesn’t require a large continuing subsidy to operate. See, that wasn’t so hard.
Neither does a streetcar line require $200 million per mile to build.
That’s enough money to build 100 miles of streetcar line.
That’s interesting, considering that the Portland one is costing almost 50 million per mile. 100 miles of streetcar line would bankrupt the state and accomplish absolutely nothing, though I’m sure you wouldn’t have a problem with that.
Well what kind or terrain are you building on, things like tunnels & bridges cost big bucks, though that is the same for roads.
Also what is the break down of the budget?
Things like carbarns and streetcars often get thrown into per mile costing, though they shouldn’t be.
So what, you build a hundred miles of streetcars. Their shortlength lines that a bus can do at a fraction of the operating costs. They use existing roads and cost very little to start up. They are flexible so they can be rerouted to nearly any destination while streetcars only go where they’re designated to stop. Construction costs are little when you only build bus stops and stuff. I don’t even think they needed those fancy seperate bus rapid transit lanes. It’s cheaper than light rail but it’s still an excuse so that politicians can spend money.
For years people have always talked about highways, bridges and tunnels being poorly maintained or at risk of collapse .People on this site might use examples in their towns as justification. Except however the number of structurally deficient bridges & roads has been declining for years. The I-35 bridge collapse though sad and tragic was caused be design flaw, not terrible maintenance. The bridge that replaced it was built ahead of schedule on under budget. The bridge is equipped with anti-icing sprayers avoiding the need for salt which we all know is highly corrosive to concrete and steel. And was constructed with high-strength concrete with little exposed steel. There are sensors to measure bridge conditions. It’s innovative and actually pleasing to look at. Meanwhile transit is billions in the red for skipped maintenance with money it doesn’t have nor possibly obtain in a short timeframe even if they doubled fares which only makes it less attractive. You see big transit construction in small cities of less than a million people when large cities are cutting transit services by closing whole lines and stations to compensate for budget shortfalls as high as hundreds of millions of dollars. New Yorks MTA is facing $10 billion shortfall on its $26 billion capital budget for financing longer-term projects. They’re cutting back on bus service to provide money for subway stations that are being repaired. The subways 2nd avenue line and other projects are unnecessary. why not repair all of the rundown/broken/old as subway stations that have no elevators or escalators forcing old people and those on crutches or in wheelchairs have to struggle to go anywhere.
LazyReader wrote:
I don’t even think they needed those fancy seperate bus rapid transit lanes. It’s cheaper than light rail but it’s still an excuse so that politicians can spend money.
No, the buses do not need separate lanes, but if they have them (where traffic is severely congested), or run on HOV/Toll or HOV lanes, then their reliability goes up and the cost of running them goes down.
Meanwhile transit is billions in the red for skipped maintenance with money it doesn’t have nor possibly obtain in a short timeframe even if they doubled fares which only makes it less attractive.
I agree.
You see big transit construction in small cities of less than a million people when large cities are cutting transit services by closing whole lines and stations to compensate for budget shortfalls as high as hundreds of millions of dollars.
More than anything, this is a failure at the federal level.
New Yorks MTA is facing $10 billion shortfall on its $26 billion capital budget for financing longer-term projects. They’re cutting back on bus service to provide money for subway stations that are being repaired. The subways 2nd avenue line and other projects are unnecessary. why not repair all of the rundown/broken/old as subway stations that have no elevators or escalators forcing old people and those on crutches or in wheelchairs have to struggle to go anywhere.
Though if there is one rail transit project in the United States that has merit (and I believe the forecast ridership numbers are credible), it’s the Second Avenue Subway in New York City.
Lazyreader;So what, you build a hundred miles of streetcars. Their shortlength lines that a bus can do at a fraction of the operating costs.
THWM: Though rail operating costs tend to be half of that of buses.
Lr;They use existing roads and cost very little to start up.
THWM: Well that’s short term vs. long term.
Lr; They are flexible so they can be rerouted to nearly any destination while streetcars only go where they’re designated to stop.
THWM: Though you don’t run buses off-road too often.
Lr;Construction costs are little when you only build bus stops and stuff.
THWM: It’s the exact same stuff for streetcars too. A sign & a shelter.
Lr;I don’t even think they needed those fancy seperate bus rapid transit lanes. It’s cheaper than light rail but it’s still an excuse so that politicians can spend money.
THWM: For the sake of example Portland once had around 200 miles of tram line so the city does have a back log.
Lr;For years people have always talked about highways, bridges and tunnels being poorly maintained or at risk of collapse .People on this site might use examples in their towns as justification. Except however the number of structurally deficient bridges & roads has been declining for years. The I-35 bridge collapse though sad and tragic was caused be design flaw, not terrible maintenance. The bridge that replaced it was built ahead of schedule on under budget. The bridge is equipped with anti-icing sprayers avoiding the need for salt which we all know is highly corrosive to concrete and steel. And was constructed with high-strength concrete with little exposed steel. There are sensors to measure bridge conditions. It’s innovative and actually pleasing to look at. Meanwhile transit is billions in the red for skipped maintenance with money it doesn’t have nor possibly obtain in a short timeframe even if they doubled fares which only makes it less attractive. You see big transit construction in small cities of less than a million people when large cities are cutting transit services by closing whole lines and stations to compensate for budget shortfalls as high as hundreds of millions of dollars. New Yorks MTA is facing $10 billion shortfall on its $26 billion capital budget for financing longer-term projects. They’re cutting back on bus service to provide money for subway stations that are being repaired. The subways 2nd avenue line and other projects are unnecessary. why not repair all of the rundown/broken/old as subway stations that have no elevators or escalators forcing old people and those on crutches or in wheelchairs have to struggle to go anywhere.
THWM: That’s retro fitting, that isn’t always cheap and easy to do.
CPZ;LazyReader wrote:
I don’t even think they needed those fancy seperate bus rapid transit lanes. It’s cheaper than light rail but it’s still an excuse so that politicians can spend money.
No, the buses do not need separate lanes, but if they have them (where traffic is severely congested), or run on HOV/Toll or HOV lanes, then their reliability goes up and the cost of running them goes down.
THWM:I’m not against taking existing lanes on freeways and turning them into Bus/Taxi/HOV lanes. Though it also depends on the amount of traffic too.
At a certain point rail is more viable than buses.
CPZ;Meanwhile transit is billions in the red for skipped maintenance with money it doesn’t have nor possibly obtain in a short timeframe even if they doubled fares which only makes it less attractive.
I agree.
You see big transit construction in small cities of less than a million people when large cities are cutting transit services by closing whole lines and stations to compensate for budget shortfalls as high as hundreds of millions of dollars.
THWM: I haven’t seen that any where.
CPZ; More than anything, this is a failure at the federal level.
New Yorks MTA is facing $10 billion shortfall on its $26 billion capital budget for financing longer-term projects. They’re cutting back on bus service to provide money for subway stations that are being repaired. The subways 2nd avenue line and other projects are unnecessary. why not repair all of the rundown/broken/old as subway stations that have no elevators or escalators forcing old people and those on crutches or in wheelchairs have to struggle to go anywhere.
Though if there is one rail transit project in the United States that has merit (and I believe the forecast ridership numbers are credible), it’s the Second Avenue Subway in New York City.
THWM: The 2nd Avenue line isn’t a new line, it’s a very much delayed subway replacement of an elevated line.
Though you also have to keep in mind that the USA is missing 100,000+ miles of rail line too.
Polly want a cracker, for repeating everything I said. Streetcars are expensive. You need rail, rail cars, right of way, lights, signs, stops, overhead wires, switching stations, power converters and substations so you don’t overload anything. Then of course funnel vast sums of money into the unions. The advantage of a diesel bus is it’s power supply is readily available anywhere it goes. Trams can cause speed reduction for other transport modes (buses, cars) when stops in the middle of the road do not have pedestrian refuges, as in such configurations other traffic cannot pass whilst passengers alight or board the tram. When operated in mixed traffic, trams are more likely to be delayed by disruptions in their lane. Buses, by contrast, can sometimes manoeuver around obstacles and the mechanical breakdown of one bus does not default the entire system until it is repaired. The middleground of this would be a trolley bus which runs on overhead wires but uses rubber wheels.
The United States has 140,000 miles of rail across the country. Despite difficulties, in 1997 alone the United States moved 2,165 billion ton-kilometers of freight, the European Union moved only 238 billion ton-kilometers of freight. America dedicated it’s rail to freight. Europe has dedicated so much of it’s rail to passengers they have little room for freight anymore. By 2000, the share of U.S. rail freight was 38% while in Europe only 8% of freight by rail. Railroads carry a variety of commodities, coal being the most single important commodity. In 2006, coal accounted for 21 percent of rail revenue. What’s gonna happen when coal becomes less and less crucial to our energy supply, what will they transport. The fastest growing rail traffic segment is currently intermodal. Intermodal is the movement of shipping containers or truck trailers by rail filled with finished products or other goods.
Even if you build seperate bus lanes, you could convert it to an HOV lane as well. It’s a carpool lane and what’s a bus other than a big carpool sort of. Carpooling is rarer than one would think in America. You assume the people you wan’t to carpool with go to the same place as you be it work, home, or out to eat or play.
There are only 9 cities in America that have populations of a million or more. A few are close but typically less than 600,000. With nearly 200 cities with less than half a million people, some of which are gambling with transit schemes of their own and thousands of small towns and cities with less than 50 thousand. Big box (high occupancy) transit is not practical for most cities. You start with the fact you’re running transit all day long when it’s mainly used during rush hour. The idea of transit being energy efficient only applies if you can fill a majority of it’s seating, but you often don’t especially newer transit systems in those moderate sized cities but it costs as much to build that system in small cities than it does in big cities and it uses the same amount of energy to move an nearly empty train than a fully occupied one. The average light rail car is never more than one-sixth full to capacity. And now you taking transit to pick up people far out from distant suburbs so it doesn’t fill up until you’ve reached the city center and if you have to switch train lines well that’s more energy your using. That’s why you don’t want high occupancy transit, you want low occupancy transit that offers direct point to point transportation. Overall it makes no sense to have large transit systems anymore especially when we can have small box transit (buses, shuttles, jitneys and minibuses) that takes groups of people where they want/need to go specifically then home again and simply shut down when rush hour ends while using those small road vehicles to pickup the strays during odd hours of the day. Wait until it’s needed then go out and do it again. You don’t have to burrow huge amounts of capital from the feds or raise bonds in the millions or billions, requires very little construction if at all and saves energy overall by not having large mostly empty vehicles going out through most of the day.
Lots of interesting discussion on this thread. Great!
I understand that lots of people want to criticize “subsidies,” but that is sort of a loaded term. Some (not all) “subsidies” are spending that provides multiple benefits, and it depends on your point of view which benefits are subsidized and which are investments.
A local road provides access to build houses, a road for cars, a road for handicap access, pedestrian access, bike access, bus access, school bus access, private auto access, police access, fire and medical access, sewer and storm water access, electrical and phone access, cable TV and internet access, etc. I am not sure which service is subsidizing which, but it seems like a lot of overlapping efficiencies.
LazyReader:
New Yorks MTA is … cutting back on bus service to provide money for subway stations that are being repaired.
Because as limited as the NYC subway system is in covering NYC aside from central Manhattan and part of Brooklyn, it caries over twice the number of people as the bus system which blankets NYC.
Nobody wants to ride your dirty stinky smelly buses! Don’t you get it?
The subways 2nd avenue line and other projects are unnecessary.
The east side of Manhattan has one north-south subway line ubnder Lexington Ave. serving about 750,000 people without cars. Despite running 10 car trains every two minutes at rush hour, it is packed to the gills with riders, and it fails to come anywhere near where most people live, which is along 1st and 2nd Aves. The city used to have elevated lines on 2nd and 3rd Aves. which were going to be replaced by a 2nd Ave. Subway and were torn down during WWII to make battleships under the promise that a new subway would be built in the late 1940’s after the war was over. That didn’t quite happen, did it? But a hell of a lot of residential towers were built up and down the island under the promise that it would be built then, or maybe in the 1970’s when it was promised again, or maybe now.
NYC only contributes something like multi billions of dollars more in taxes than it gets in spending from the Federal Government every year, but you begrudge it one long subway line costing less than $1 billion per year to construct that is desperately needed.
Maybe if the tax money of NYC no longer needed to be thrown away on defense contractor welfare queens in places like Alabama and Kansas, or lazy ass rice famrers welfare queens in Mississippi and Arkansas who need multi-million annual subsidies each to grow little plants that 3rd worlders seem to manage cultivating without US government backing, then NYC would pay for it themselves and you wouldn’t need to complain about what they are doing with their own money?
Lazy Reader:
Despite difficulties, in 1997 alone the United States moved 2,165 billion ton-kilometers of freight, the European Union moved only 238 billion ton-kilometers of freight. America dedicated it’s rail to freight. Europe has dedicated so much of it’s rail to passengers they have little room for freight anymore.
Wow, do you know anything about Europe at all?
Europe doesn’t haul much freight by rail because it has these marvellous low-cost freight conveyances called Seas – the Baltic, North, Mediterranean, Adriatic, Black, Agean, Irish, etc. Oh, and don’t forget the Atlantic Ocean. The Europeans use that the sea to haul around all the freight that isn’t on rail. The sea also presents some issues with using rail, namely getting across it. American doesn’t have seas bissecting parts of the continent or seperating 65 million people on a coupel of islands.
Also, a huge chunk of American RR ton miles is hauling coal around the country. The Europeans use more nuclear and renewable energy, so they need less coal, thus less freight rail.
There are only 9 cities in America that have populations of a million or more. A few are close but typically less than 600,000.
Boston and Washington and San Francisco are all less than a million. Does Washington Metro or Muni and BART or the MBTA make no sense for transportation in the core of those areas?
Isn’t a better measurement of urbaization total population of the metropolitan area, or even better, average density in the metropolitan area?
The average light rail car is never more than one-sixth full to capacity.
I don’t know where you get that figure from because when trolley cars are entering the downtown core, they are usually packed, but the typical personal car seats 5 and usually carries 1, and the typical SUV or minivan seats 7 or 8 and rarely has more than 2 or 3 in it, and more frequently just 1. How different is that?
Andrew, you have no credibility. You just want to see rail built to selfishly benefit yourself and your vision of how transportation should work, to hell with the costs!
As for highwayman, well, I need not repeat what others have said.
Metrosucks you don’t care about costs, you just have an extremist ideological bent.
Andrew, we might as well be debating with with people in brown shirts & white hoods. It’s the exact same mind set, hate and more hate for the sake of hate.
BART, like other transit systems of the same era, connects outlying suburbs with job centers in Oakland and San Francisco by building out lines that paralleled commute routes of the region’s freeway system. Individual BART lines were not designed to provide frequent local service, as evidenced by the system’s current maximum achievable headway of 13.33 minutes per line. Now they wanna spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire 700 new rail cars that they won’t fully receive until 2024. Maybe by canceling it’s ambitious multi billion dollar BART to Silicon Valley and San Jose projects. Free up billions that could be used to operate and actually improve bus service by easily acquiring new buses that they could use immediately in the Bay Area.
Lazy Reader:
BART Headways are 5 minutes on the Pittsburg line and 15 minutes on the other lines. The Richmond-Hayward line bypassing San Francisco effectively doubles headways on the Richmond and Hayward spurs to 7.5 minutes with the ability to transfer in Oakland to other trians.
Headways through the Transbay Tube combine to 24 trains per hour, and the combined line through San Francisco is the limiting factor in system capacity. Obviously any future expansion of the system with additional branches or higher headways would require another Transbay Tube.
As to buses, people do not want to ride slow buses stuck in traffic around the Bay. If they wanted to do that, they could do it today. There is certainly no shortage of bus routes there, but rail has over 50% of the entire transit market around the Bay despite having a very limited number of routes.
Bear in mind that BART carries only a very small percentage of commuters in the Bay Area, 5% according to another comment on this blog. Yet it steals almost half of Bay Area transportation money, by some accounts. Mass transit is supposed to be a cost-effective commuting option for lower income people, for the most part, not a luxury option for fat cats like Andrew. Especially since government is involved and with government comes significant waste when anything beyond basic levels of service are pursued.
“Mass transit is supposed to be a cost-effective commuting option for lower income people…”
…which means it has to be subsidized, as low income individuals will never be able to cover the operating costs through fares. Also, since the train is running anyways, why keep “fat cats like Andrew,” off the train? More ridership is a win for everyone right?
Are you suggesting that only poor people be allowed to ride transit? Maybe a means test to determine fares? Can you foresee any problems with this type of system?
Of course I am not advocating means testing. I am advocating that transit be planned & run in a way designed to be beneficial to lower income riders, (its greatest users in most metro areas), instead of developing gold-plated pork systems designed to be pleasing to the sensibilities of people like Andrew. For example, that sort of thinking would get rid of wasteful PORK like MAX (or at least not build any additional lines), WES, and the streetcars in Portland (for example), and focus on sensible bus service, with new hybrid buses that the Feds would pay for anyway, for the most part.
Surely that sounds sensible to you.
metrosucks:
I am advocating that transit be planned & run in a way designed to be beneficial to lower income riders, (its greatest users in most metro areas), instead of developing gold-plated pork systems designed to be pleasing to the sensibilities of people like Andrew.
The greatest users of transit in metro areas with well developed transit systems are low, middle and upper-middle income workers and students, not the poor on welfare. Making the system as convenient as possible for commuters and students tends to make ridership much higher than an all bus system could ever hope for and also make the system more convenient for low income riders by improving the system economics and justifying the existence of more routes to more places due to higher overall system ridership.
Since you bring up Portland, its worth noting that rail makes up 39% of transit ridership with just 5 routes. Tri-Met would be an utter irrelevancy if not for having light rail.
Since you bring up Portland, its worth noting that rail makes up 39% of transit ridership with just 5 routes. Tri-Met would be an utter irrelevancy if not for having light rail.
Trimet is known for inflating MAX ridership to make MAX seem successful. Furthermore, they have almost no fare enforcement, meaning most people ride free. Fare enforcement is such a large problem that the local paper has run multiple articles on it.
The real reason Trimet drags it feet on enforcement, of course, is that it knows ridership will drop when everyone is forced to pay.