Death to the Purple Money Eater

Maryland’s Governor-Elect Larry Hogan has promised to cancel the Purple Line, another low-capacity rail boondoggle that would cost taxpayers at least $2.4 billion to build and much more to operate and maintain. The initial projections for the line were that it would carry so few passengers that the Federal Transit Administration wouldn’t even fund it under the rules then in place. Obama has since changed those rules, but not to take any chances, Maryland’s current governor, Martin O’Malley, hired Parsons Brinckerhoff with the explicit goal of boosting ridership estimates to make it a fundable project.

The last time the Antiplanner looked at the Purple Line, the draft EIS (written by a team led by Parsons Brinckerhoff) was out and it projected the line would carry more than 60,000 trips each weekday in 2030. This is far more than the 23,000 trips per weekday carried by the average light-rail line in the country in 2012. Despite this optimistic projection, the DEIS revealed that the rail project would both increase congestion and use more energy than all the cars it took off the road (though to find the congestion result you had to read the accompanying traffic analysis technical report, pp. 4-1 and 4-2).

A few months after the Antiplanner made these points, Maryland published Parsons Brinckerhoff’s final EIS, which had a new, but still optimistic, ridership projection: 65,000 riders per day in 2030. This seems totally unrealistic when compared with light-rail lines today.

Boston and Los Angeles have the most heavily used light-rail systems in the country. Boston has five light-rail lines that carried an average of fewer than 50,000 weekday riders in 2012. Los Angeles has four lines that carried an average of 45,000 riders per weekday in 2012. One line in Los Angeles, the Blue Line, carried 82,000 riders per weekday. It may be the only light-rail line in the country that beat the projections for the Purple Line.

Considering the huge demographic differences between Boston, Los Angeles, and Montgomery County, Maryland, it isn’t credible to think that the Purple Line’s performance will approach Boston and L.A. rail lines. First, urban Suffolk County (Boston) has 12,600 people per square mile and urban Los Angeles County has 6,900 people per square mile, both far more than urban Montgomery County’s 3,500 people per square mile.

As the Antiplanner has frequently noted, however, it is not population densities but job densities that really make transit successful. Boston has 243,000 downtown jobs, the destination of most of its light-rail (Green Line) trips. Los Angeles has 137,000 downtown jobs, and all but one of L.A.’s light-rail lines go downtown. The exception, the Green Line, serves LAX, which has 135,000 jobs.

Montgomery County really has no major job centers. The closest is the University of Maryland which has about 46,000 jobs and students. Though it is on the proposed Purple Line, the campus covers 1,250 acres, which means many students and employees will not work or have classes within easy walking distance of the rail stations. The FEIS projected that the three campus rail stops would together attract only 6,050 daily riders in 2040.

In terms of distribution of jobs and people, Montgomery County is more like San Jose than Boston or Los Angeles. San Jose has three light-rail lines, but on average they carry fewer than 35,000 riders per day, little more than half the number projected for the Purple line.
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Given the FEIS’s higher ridership numbers, it’s not surprising that it reported that the line will save energy and reduce congestion, the opposite of the DEIS findings. However, a close look reveals that, even at the higher ridership numbers, these conclusions are suspect.

The traffic analysis for the DEIS estimated the average speeds of auto traffic in 2030 with and without the Purple Line. Without the line, speeds would average 24.5 mph; with the line, they would average 24.4 mph. Multiplied by the large number of travelers in the area and this meant a loss of 13 million hours of time per year.

The traffic analysis for the FEIS made no attempt to estimate average speeds. Instead, it focused on looking at the level of service (LOS)–a letter grade from A to F–at various intersections affected by the rail line. Without the line, by 2040 15 intersections in the morning and 16 in the afternoon would be degraded to LOS F. With the line, only 8 in the morning and 15 in the afternoon would be LOS F (p. 30). So that makes it appear that the rail line is reducing congestion.

A careful reading reveals this isn’t true. For the no-build alternative, planners assumed that absolutely nothing would be done to relieve congestion. For the rail alternative, planners assumed that various mitigation measures would be applied “to allow the intersections to operate in the most efficient conditions.” It seems likely that these mitigation measures, not the rail line, are the reasons why the preferred alternative has fewer intersections at LOS F.

Meanwhile, the energy analysis contains two serious flaws. First, it assumes that cars in 2040 will use the same energy per mile as cars in 2010. In fact, given the latest fuel-economy standards, the average car on the road in 2040 will use less than half the energy of the average car in 2010.

Even more serious, the final EIS assumed that each kilowatt hour of electricity needed to power the rail line required 3,412 BTUs of energy (calculated by dividing BTUs by KWhs in table 4-41 on page 4-142). While one KWh is equal to 3,412 BTUs, due to energy losses in generation and transmission, it takes 10,339 BTUs of energy to generate and transmit that KWh to the railhead (see page A-18 of the Transportation Energy Data Book). This is such a rookie mistake that it seems like Parsons Brinckerhoff’s experts would have had to work hard looking the other way for it to slip through. In any case, after correcting both of these errors, the rail line ends up using more energy than the cars it take off the road, just as the DEIS found.

In short, Maryland’s ridership projections for the Purple Line are extremely optimistic, but even if they come true, the Purple Line is likely to increase both traffic congestion and energy consumption. There is no valid reason for funding this turkey, and Governor-elect Hogan should chop off its head.

Note: The original edition of this post said that the DEIS projected 36,000 weekday trips and the final projected 46,000. As corrected above, the real numbers were over 60,000 trips (depending on the alternative) in the DEIS and 64,538 trips in the FEIS. While I apologize for the error, these higher numbers merely underscore my point that the projections are unrealistically high.