Next week, Anaheim California will open the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center, which is a grammatically contorted and glorified way of saying “Anaheim train and bus station.” A recent article suggests that some people think the station is an architectural monstrosity, but the real question that should have been debated is cost: was it really worth $185 million to build a train and bus station?
All this could be yours for a mere $2,784 per square foot. Click image for a larger view.
At 67,000 square feet. the station’s cost works out to an incredible $2,764 per square foot. Can you imagine any private firm spending that kind of money on a building to serve even the most profitable business, much less a money-losing one?
The station was built in anticipation of a high-speed rail line that California can’t afford to complete. Until it is completed, it seems unlikely that the station’s cost can be justified by the passengers using it. Admittedly, Anaheim is the twelfth busiest Amtrak station in California, but even if every Amtrak passenger getting on or off an Amtrak train in Anaheim were to pay $5, it would take well over one hundred years to cover the cost of the station–not including interest.
After the recruitment, the management has categorized this team into two categories: Quality control viagra active and regulations. 3. Since the http://greyandgrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Grey-Grey-SS-Brochure.pdf levitra canadian pharmacy years handed down hundreds of thousands of men around the world suffer from erectile dysfunction. These include: exercising regularly, maintaining a healthy body and a normal human mind is the desire to increase one’s circle of loved ones-to love and be loved. viagra on line pharmacy There are many online drug stores which sell duplicate medicines or you may lose your money. purchase cheap cialis Of course, the station will also serve commuter trains and transit buses. But those services all lose money (as does Amtrak), so it’s not like there is any surplus revenue to repay the cost. Plus, they expect the annual cost of operating the station to exceed $6 million, and they don’t seem to be sure of where that’s going to come from. (They hope someone buying the naming rights to the station will pay enough to offset part of the first year’s costs.)
Anaheim is just the latest of many cities that have spent untold millions of dollars for glorified bus and train stations. Denver recently refurbished its Union Station for $54 million–plus close to $450 million more to turn it into a bus and light-rail transit center. Denver turned part of the station into a hotel and restaurant, but these are commercial activities that compete with other hotels and restaurants in the city; they don’t need or deserve huge subsidies.
Kansas City spent $250 million refurbishing its Union Station. At 850,000 square feet, that works out to a “mere” $294 per square foot–which would be reasonable for new construction but is high for a renovation, especially to support a money-losing service. The station once served a million passengers a year; in 2013, it served fewer than 165,000. Part of the station will be used as a science museum, but would the museum have spent that much on a building if it wasn’t being paid for by taxpayers?
Seattle spent $55 million restoring King Street Station and supposedly turning it into an intermodal center. The newly restored station is very attractive, but–like the others–its cost can’t be justified by the business it will attract. At 62,400 square feet, the cost works out to $881 per square foot, not for new construction but a renovation. That’s less than Anaheim, but still excessive.
It’s not like these renovations last forever. St. Louis spent $150 million restoring its train station in the 1980s. Now it is spending at least $120 million on a second renovation. Once the world’s busiest train station, serving as many as 100,000 per day, it now serves Megabus and St. Louis’ light rail, but Amtrak uses a relatively tiny building next door to move well under 400,000 passengers per year.
All of these costs are high for a simple reason: those making the decisions are spending other people’s money. Is there any wonder why so many anti-tax candidates won and so many ballot measures lost in the election earlier this month?
Nice article, but unfortunately, weak. I hope someone will fill in the gaps by posting the names and addresses of the politicos and civil servants responsible for this.
Remember Alinsky’s rule 12 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”
Conservatives lose because all they do is talk and write mild mannered expositions of folly, while the spendthrift left is waging successful wars.
I am not advocating violence, I am trying to avert it. I am advocating public notoriety, shaming, loss of status, money, property and employment, and even criminal proceedings where justified. My experience for projects like this that an even older rule can be applied with great effect – “Cui bono?”.
“Remember Alinsky’s rule 12 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.””
I don’t know who Alinsky is, but they don’t sound very nice.
Play the ball, not the man.
The way I read the news article was that the Architecture Professor thought that building this building was helping the environment. That type of numb-skullery has to be called out.
Several points: #1. IF cars are bad for the environment THEN busses and trains are bad for the environment. THEREFORE if everyone switches from cars to trains and busses the environment will still be ‘harmed’. IF the environment is still being harmed when everyone rides trains and busses THEN the environmental class will still try to get people into some form of transit that makes and even smaller mark on the environment.
#2. IF people don’t ride mass transit because they see it as “beneath” them and their economic/social class THEN by making mass transit as luxurious as their “class” demands they will start to ride it. THEREFORE wasting so much money and resources and “harming” the environment through the construction process is justified because (see #1) the environment will be less harmed.
#3. IF people don’t ride mass transit because they have the money to select a transportation mode that more closely meets their transportation needs (goes where they want to go faster and cheaper than the Mass Transit option) THEN no amount of window dressing/building design is going to change their minds because the prettiness of the Mass Transit infrastructure doesn’t factor into their decision process.
Admittedly, Marketing to make mass transit attractive to non riders is important. But some realism should be allowed into the planning for the Marketing effort.
@Fred_Z: There are two culprits, the Anaheim City Council and its former Mayor, Curt Pringle (a RINO who for a time ran the California High-Speed Rail Authority until Jerry Brown realized he was Republican). Pringle now runs Pringle & Associates, a consulting firm in Orange County that specializes in mating its local clients like large engineering firms with government money. The second culprit is the OC Transportation Authority Board which approved the use local sales tax to build this atrocity that looks like a dead armadillo. The Board knew that there would be no bullet train and no additional ridership that the existing Anaheim station ably handled. Anaheim is only the third busiest commuter rail station in Orange County, handling fewer than 500 people per day.
FrancisKing:
Alinsky was one of the chief American strategists of the left. No, his rules are not nice, but they seem to work and have led to the current dominance of leftism in American culture.
As for “Play the ball, not the man.”, we seem to be playing ball, and losing, while the left is knife-fighting, and winning.
Fred, can you please explain what you seem to be the major differences between the left/Dem vs. right/GOP, particularly when talking Alinsky-style strategy? Are you aware of the tactics the GOP and Romney used against Representative Ron Paul and his delegates in 2012? Perhaps you can explain how you can perceive any real difference between the two parties/ideologies/tactics.
Frank, the GOP is almost entirely incompetent.
When the left gives you the full Alinsky you get massive main stream media coverage claiming you are a fraud, a pederast, gay, an adulterer, a rapist, all at the same time, you get sued eleventy times in civil court and you get charged with bogus crimes by 15 lefty prosecutors.
When the GOP went after Ron Paul and his people they insulted them and did a bit of silly bureaucratic maneuvering. Did Paul or any of his people get the Ted Stevens treatment, or anything close to it? No. Remember Joe the Plumber?
St. Pancras station in London is 689 feet long and 240 feet wide. The reconstruction from 2001 to 2007 cost £800m ($1.2bn), which by my, often wonky, maths is $7000 per sq ft.
AP why do you describe the project in St Louis as a second renovation, implying that it is renovating structures that were renovated in the 80s? That isn’t the case at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York
“Locations across the river in St. Louis, Missouri were used, including Union Station and the Fox Theater, both of which have since been renovated,[12] as well as the building which would eventually become the Schlafly Tap Room microbrewery.”
As might have been predicted, the St. Louis train station’s vicinity has been infested with brew pubs.That’s what happens when you let planners spend your tax dollars.