Search Results for: honolulu rail

Reason #5 to Stop Subsidizing Transit:
Negligible Social & Environmental Benefits

By | | Transportation
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Public transit helps the poor, saves energy, and cleans the air, right? Not really. Transit is a subsidy to the wealthy as much as it is to the poor, and it really isn’t any greener than driving.

Some low-income people ride transit, but the people most likely to use transit to get to work are those who earn $75,000 and up. According to table B08119 of the Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey, 6.6 percent of people who earn $75,000 and up take transit to work, as opposed to just 6.2 percent of people who earn $15,000 or less.

Nor is transit particularly green, at least, not according to the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. The average car uses about 3,100 BTUs per passenger mile while the average SUV uses about 3,500. By comparison, transit buses and light rail average about 3,800. While heavy rail averages just 2,150 BTUs per passenger mile, that is heavily weight by New York City. Outside of New York, the only heavy-rail lines more energy efficient than cars are in San Francisco and Atlanta. By operating mainly during rush hours, commuter rail does okay at 2,700 BTUs, but many commuter lines, including those in Dallas, Minneapolis, Nashville, and Philadelphia, are worse than driving. Continue reading →

November 8 Ballot Measures to Watch

By | | Transportation
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If you think the presidential election is stupid, just get a look at all of the cities that are voting on stupid rail transit projects. Los Angeles wants $120 billion; Seattle $54 billion; San Diego, $7.5 billion; San Francisco, $3.5 billion; San Jose, $3 billion; Atlanta, $2.5 billion, Kansas City, $2 billion; Virginia Beach, $310 million; and Tigard, Oregon, which has the chance to kill a $2 billion project in Portland. That’s nearly $200 billion worth of stupidity that has rail contractors salivating.

Voters from these cities should look at the experiences other cities have had with rail. Portland opened a new light-rail project a year ago that was supposed to carry 17,000 people a day in its first year. Actual ridership is more like 11,000. Rail apologist Jarrett Walker says he isn’t surprised as rail lines “are designed to encourage denser and more sustainable development in addition to serving people who are there now,” so initial ridership is “almost always disappointing.” C’mon, Jarrett: planners took this into account when they made their projections (or if they didn’t they should have). By the way, the article also says the project came in “under budget,” but it doesn’t say that the budget was almost twice as much as the original projected cost, just one more way transit agencies lie about rail transit.

Speaking of cost overruns, Honolulu is the smallest urban area in America to be building rail transit, and its project, which was originally projected to cost less than $3 billion, is now up to $8 billion and possibly more than $10 billion, which would be more than $10,000 for every resident of Oahu. The city is stuck because it doesn’t have enough money to finish it, but if it doesn’t finish it, the Federal Transit Administration says it will demand that the city return the federal share of the cost.

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Federal Transit Administration has informed Honolulu Area Rapid Transit (HART) that it will not help cover cost overruns associated with the agency’s 20-mile rail line. The project was originally supposed to cost about $5.1 billion, which was already ridiculously expensive, but now is projected to cost at least $8 billion and possibly as much as $11 billion.

The FTA has a long-standing policy that it won’t help cover cost overruns (a policy that is sometimes overturned by Congress). But in this case, the FTA has added a new twist. In light of the cost overruns, HART has proposed to build just part of the project, leaving uncompleted the five miles of the line that would have attracted the most riders. But the FTA says that, in that case, it won’t be giving HART $1.55 billion that the agency is counting on. That means HART won’t even be able to complete the part of the project that it planned.

HART says it is examining its alternatives and hopes to have a viable proposal before FTA by the end of the year. But it probably isn’t looking closely at the most reasonable alternative, which is to completely abandon the project. While it has already sunk several billion into it, abandoning it would save taxpayers billions more in construction costs not to mention an estimated $126 million a year in operating costs. Since the city of Honolulu spends less than $185 million per year operating about 100 bus routes, $125 million is a phenomenal amount of money to spend on just one rail route.
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The Problem with Socialism

By | | Transportation
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Socialists “always run out of other people’s money,” said Margaret Thatcher. “It’s quite a characteristic of them.” Some of the best examples can be found in the field of passenger rail transportation.

California’s plan to pay for high-speed rail with revenues from sales of greenhouse gas cap & trade permits has hit a speed bump. The first sale, which was expected to bring in $150 million, only brought in $10 million. At that rate, it will be centuries, instead of the planned decades, before the line is built.

When Atlanta opened its streetcar line, it offered the service for free for a year. As soon as it began charging a dollar a ride, ridership dropped by nearly 50 percent. Now the state of Georgia is threatening to shut the line down because of inept management resulting from a lack of funds.

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New Starts 2017

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Transit Administration has published its New Starts recommendations for 2017. The recommendations include profiles of more than 60 different transit projects, including bus-rapid transit (BR), streetcars (SR), light rail (LR), commuter rail (CR), and heavy rail (HR). Only 60 projects are shown in the table below as a few, such as the San Antonio streetcar, have been cancelled or at least are “on hold.”

CityProjectModeMilesCapitalCost/mi
PhoenixS. CentralLR5.0531106
TempeStreetcarSR3.018361
LAConnectorLR1.91,403738
LAStreetcarSR3.87520
LAPurple 1HR3.92,822720
LAPurple 2HR2.62,467949
Sac'toStreetcarSR4.215036
CalTransElectrifiedCRC51.01,75934
San DiegoMid-Coast LR10.92,171199
San Fran.CentralLR1.71,578928
San Fran.Van NessBR2.016381
San JoseEl Camino BR17.418811
San JoseBerryessaHR10.22,330230
San RafaelSMARTCR2.14320
Santa AnaStreetcarSR4.128970
DenverEagleCR30.22,04368
DenverSE ExtLR2.322497
Ft. Laud.WaveSR2.817362
Ft. Laud.BrowardSR5.00
J'villeEastBR18.5342
J'villeSWBR12.9191
OrlandoOIACR5.522541
OrlandoSouthCR17.218711
OrlandoNorthCR12.2696
HonoluluHARTHR20.05,122256
ChicagoAshland BR5.411722
ChicagoRed & PurpleHRC5.6957171
Indy.Red BR13.1967
BostonMedfordLR4.72,298489
MarylandPurpleLR16.22,448151
Gr. RapidsLakerBR13.3715
LansingMichiganBR8.516419
Minn.Blue extLR13.010
Minn.OrangeBR17.01519
Minn.SWLR14.51,774122
K. CityProspectBR10.0545
CharlotteBlue extLR9.31,160125
CharlotteGoldSR2.515060
CharlotteBlueHRC9.6404
DurhamOrangeLR17.11,800105
Albuq.RapidBR8.812614
Reno4th StBR3.15317
RenoVirginiaBR1.86033
AlbanyRiverBR15.0352
AlbanyWashingtonBR8.0648
NYCCarnarsieHRC6.027446
NYCWoodhavenBR14.023117
ColumbusClevelandBR15.6473
PortlandMilwaukieLR7.01,490213
PortlandPowellBR14.0755
DallasCBDLR2.4650271
DallasRed & BlueLRC48.11192
El PasoMontanaBR16.8473
Ft. WorthTEXRailCR27.299637
HoustonUniversityLR11.31,563138
ProvoBRTBR10.515014
EverettSwiftBR12.3675
SeattleCenterSR1.3135104
SpokaneCentralBR5.87212
TacomaLink extSR2.416669
A “C” after a mode abbreviation means that project is a capacity increase or reconstruction of an existing line. An “ext” at the end of a project name is an extension of an existing line. There are 60 projects in the table; to see all 60 at once, select “Show 100 entries.” Projects are sorted in alphabetical order by state, but you can resort by any column.

For the projects in this year’s report, the average cost of new streetcar lines is $45 million per mile; light rail is $163 million per mile; heavy rail is $347 million per mile; and commuter rail is $38 million per mile. Of course, cost overruns are likely for a majority of these projects, so the final costs are likely to average 20 to 50 percent more. Even without the overruns, these costs are outlandish, as the nation’s first light-rail lines cost only around $10 million to $25 million per mile (after adjusting for inflation), and streetcars were supposed to be even less expensive than that.

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Cars Saving Energy Faster Than Transit

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The average automobile on the road in 2013 used 1.2 percent less energy per mile than in 2012, according to table 2-15 of the latest edition of the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. Both cars and light trucks achieved about the same gain.

Click image to download a 12.9-MB PDF of the data book. Click here to access individual spreadsheets of all the tables and charts in the data book.

In contrast, says the datebook, the average transit bus used 0.9 percent more energy per mile in 2013 than in 2012. Worse, the average number of people on board transit buses declined slightly, so buses used 1.0 percent more energy per passenger mile.

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Oops–We Forgot About the Operating Costs

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The city and state officials who promoted construction of Honolulu’s rail transit line now admit that they don’t know how they are going to pay for the cost of operating that line. Between 2019, when the first part of the line is expected to open for business, and 2031, those costs are expected to be $1.7 billion, or about $140 million per year. In 2011, the annual operating cost was estimated to be $126 million a year.

Honolulu has about a hundred bus routes, which cost about $183 million to operate in 2013, or less than $2 million per route. The rail line will therefore cost about 70 times as much to operate as the average bus route.

Officials project that rail fares will cover less than a third of operating costs, but that’s probably optimistic. They are predicting 116,000 daily riders in 2030, which works out to about 5,800 riders per mile. That’s more than the number of riders per mile carried by the Chicago Transit Authority, Atlanta’s MARTA, or the San Francisco BART system–and considerably more than carried by heavy-rail lines in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Miami.

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Farms vs. Transit in Hawai’i

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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Now that Honolulu’s insanely expensive, low-capacity rail line is under construction (and over budget), Oahu land-use advocates are upset that the city wants to rezone 1,289 acres of farms for residential development. At least some members of the city council claim to have been shocked to learn that just 17 percent of the island is still suitable for farming while 27 percent has been urbanized.

Sadly, efforts to protect farmlands in Hawai’i are something of a joke considering that Hawai’i’s land-use laws–the strictest in the nation–were supposedly passed to protect farmlands and yet in fact are responsible for destroying Hawai’i’s agricultural industry. The land-use laws made Hawai’ian housing so unaffordable that farmers can’t pay workers enough for them to be able to live there. As a result, the state has lost most of its pineapple, sugar cane, and other crop production to other Pacific islands such as Fiji.

Comparing a map of Oahu land-use designations with the route of the rail line reveals that the rail line will cross only a few tiny areas of land zoned for farming. In fact, a lot of the land around Kapolei that is zoned urban hasn’t yet been developed and could still be used for farming, but why bother if you can’t afford to grow crops?

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Outrageously Expensive Transit

By | | Transportation
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The average cost of light-rail construction has grown to nearly $200 million per mile, according to data in the Federal Transit Administration’s 2016 proposal for capital grants to transit agencies under the “New Starts/Small Starts” program. This is up from $176 million a mile in the 2015 plan.

San Diego, which started the light-rail craze when it built the nation’s first modern light-rail line in 1981 at an average cost of well under $10 million per mile–less than $18 million per mile in today’s dollars–wants to spend $194 million per mile on a new Mid-Coast line. Boston, which can’t afford to maintain its existing increasingly decrepit rail system, wants to spend $489 million per mile on a 4.7-mile extension of one of its light-rail lines. The least-expensive light-rail line in the budget is a 2.3-mile extension to an existing light-rail line in Denver costing a mere $98 million per mile, nearly twice as much as the least-expensive new light-rail line in the 2013 plan.

Streetcars, which were supposed to be cheap, are costing an average of $59 million a mile, up from $46 million a mile in last year’s plan. That’s less than a third the average cost of light rail today, but still more than three times as expensive as San Diego’s original light-rail line. (I’m counting the Tacoma rail line as a streetcar, as it uses equipment that is nearly identical to the Portland streetcar; Sound Transit and the FTA call it light rail mainly to justify taxing Tacoma residents to help pay for the outrageously expensive light-rail lines being built in Seattle.) The FTA proposes to fund another streetcar line in Charlotte, and streetcars in Sacramento and Fort Lauderdale are also in the plan though not recommended for immediate funding.

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Cost Overrun; Revenue Shortfall

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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To almost no one’s surprise, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) has announced that the rail project it is building will cost at least 10 to 15 percent more than estimated, while the revenues from the general excise tax that is supposed to pay for the project are, so far, $41 million less than expected.

A 10 to 15 percent cost overrun isn’t large as rail projects go, but this is an expensive, $5.2-billion project to start with, so 10 to 15 percent is $500 million to $780 million. HART officials blame the cost increase partly on the lawsuits that, unfortunately, failed to stop this waste of money, but even they say that the delays only increased costs by $190 million. Since the project isn’t even supposed to be completed until 2019, there is plenty of time for overruns to mount up to be far greater than projected today.

Rather than make the sensible move and simply cancel the project, the city is debating how to pay for the overruns. One idea is to divert to rail $200 million in federal money that is now being spent on Honolulu buses. Another idea is to extend the excise tax, which was supposed to expire in 2022, for a much longer period of time. Either way, they would take money that would have been spent on something productive and devote it to a complete boondoggle.

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