Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) says that a light-rail line that was supposed to cost $988 million will actually cost $1.88 billion. The first phase of the “orange” line to Irving, Texas, was supposed to be completed in 2011, but due to “unforeseen” increases in costs, DART will delay that by at least a year. Eventually, the line is supposed to reach DFW Airport, but that depends on whether DART can scrape up enough money to pay for it.

Click on map to view or download a larger version PDF (308KB).

DART blames those evil Indians and Chinese, who are not only taking our jobs and decorating our children’s toys with lead paint, they are consuming the steel and concrete we need by building highways. Don’t they know the age of the automobile is over and they should be building light rail instead? In any case, DART claims its experts could not have predicted this and so shouldn’t be blamed. Of course, that is exactly why transit agencies shouldn’t plan rail construction projects — they can’t predict the real costs and so almost always end up over budget.

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There is a town in England that is worried that people won’t consider it a “world-class city,” so it has persuaded the government to build it a rail transit line. What is the name of this town? Oh yes, it’s called London.

You can see why London’s political leaders are worried that people don’t consider it to be a “world-class city.” I bet they don’t even have true Neapolitan pizza yet.

Not enough trains to be a world-class city.

Seriously, whenever anyone starts using the term “world class,” better check your wallet, because they mean to pick it. When they emphasize jobs at the top of the list of benefits, you can be sure you are going to lose.

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Let’s say you want to build a rail line and you are convinced, despite all the evidence in my previous posts, that operating it will use less energy per passenger mile than buses or cars. Before you start construction, first ask: How much energy will it take to build the rail line?

Sound Transit, which is building one of the most expensive light-rail lines in the country and is asking voters for money to build another 50 miles that will cost even more, estimates that one of these lines will save 14,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year. But, based on the environmental impact statement for the line, a group called the Coalition for Effective Transit estimates that constructing the line will use enough energy to emit 640,000 tons of CO2. That’s about 45 years’ worth of savings.

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Yesterday, I described how an effective private transit system could be designed for all but the smallest urban areas by simply scaling up the taxicab association model to buses. Rather than use this model, many of America’s subsidized transit agencies have tried a different sort of scaling upwards: from buses to rail. This has led to numerous planning disasters.

Too many public officials imagine that running a rail transit system is just the same as running a bus system, only with bigger vehicles. Jonathan Richmond’s paper (since expanded to a book), The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles quotes the Los Angeles Times: “One of the arguments made most often for the rail line is that it will be cheaper to operate because a single driver on a train can carry up to five times as many passengers as a bus.”

These are, as they say, famous last words. The reality is that a bus system does not scale up to a train system: they are quite different beasts, and running a train system not only requires a completely different set of skills, it entails a much higher risk — a risk that transit agency officials can ignore because they simply impose it on taxpayers and, in the worst cases, transit riders.

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