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Toronto Transit Chief Fired

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In an unusual move, Toronto’s transit commission fired its chief executive, Gary Webster, because he didn’t think it was cost-effective to build an expensive subway. (Usually, transit chiefs are fired for building an expensive rail line.)

Actually, Webster thought that light rail was more cost-effective than subways. But Toronto Robert Ford wanted subways. He asked Webster for an objective evaluation of the two, and Webster presented a persuasive report favoring light rail. Apparently, Webster didn’t get the memo that he was supposed to skew the analysis in favor of the mayor’s preferences. The mayor tried to bury the report, but when the city council voted to support light rail instead of subways the mayor retaliated by convincing five members of the nine-member transit commission to fire Webster “without just cause.” That decision will cost the city $550,000, Webster’s severance pay.

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Another Light-Rail Success Failure

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Hampton Roads Transit is claiming success six months after opening its light-rail line in Norfolk. The line is carrying an average of 4,642 riders each weekday, which is far greater than the 2,900 that had been forecast.

“Crowds” of as many as dozens of people look bored and apathetic at the opportunity to take free rides on the opening day for Norfolk’s light-rail line, August 19, 2011. Flickr photo by D. Allen Covey, VDOT.

The only problem is that, back in 2003, Hampton Roads Transit confidently predicted the 7.4-mile-long line would carry 10,400 riders each weekday in its opening year. Deft last-minute re-predictions of much lower numbers allow the the agency to claim success when actual ridership is less than 45 percent of the original prediction.

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The Rail Empire Strikes Back

By | | Follow up, Transportation
63 Comments

Rail advocates responded to the Antiplanner recent visit to Charlotte, NC, by inviting William Lind, who bills himself as “a conservative who supports rail transit,” to comment on Charlotte’s proposed Red Line project.

“Real conservatives like commuter trains,” says Lind. How does he know? Because the average income of people who ride commuter trains in Lake County, Illinois is $74,000 a year, while the average income of bus riders in that county is $14,000 a year. Lind takes it for granted that everybody knows that rich people are conservative, and in Lind’s mind rich conservatives know that they deserve to have expensive, tax-subsidized trains while poor people should be happy with relatively inexpensive tax-subsidized buses.

Unfortunately, warns Lind, some rail critics “present themselves as conservatives, but they are not.” I don’t know who he is talking about, since the Antiplanner never presented himself as conservative. Lind goes on to say that these pseudo-conservatives are really libertarians, the difference being that conservatives support rail transit “depending on the project’s merits,” while “libertarians oppose all rail transit all the time.”

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One More Chance

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Construction on Honolulu’s ill-conceived rail line–at least $5.7 billion, and more likely at least $7 billion, for a 20-mile elevated line–is supposed to start next month. Polls indicate that voters who once supported the project have turned against it. Fortunately, Hawai’ians have one more chance to stop this idiotic project before too much money is wasted.

Artist’s conception of Honolulu’s planned elevated rail line.

The incumbent pro-rail mayor, Peter Carlisle, who filled the seat in a special election when the previous pro-rail mayor made an ill-fated run for governor, is up for reelection this year. A surprise entry into the race is Ben Cayetano, Hawai’i’s governor from 1994 to 2002, who decided to run solely to stop the rail project.

“Adding $5 to $7 billion in debt for an elevated, heavy rail system that will not reduce traffic congestion and will suck the air out of the city’s ability to provide more important basic services does not make sense,” says Cayetano in a comment posted on an interview where Senator Daniel Inouye endorses Carlisle. The only other major candidate in the race is also pro-rail.

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The Seductive Appeal of Value-Capture Finance

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Urban areas
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Today, the Antiplanner is in North Carolina, where transit agencies seem to be competing to plan the wackiest, most-expensive rail transit lines that few people will ever use. Right now, the leading contender must be Raleigh, which (according to a paper by UNC-Charlotte transport professor David Hartgen and transit accountant Tom Rubin) is planning a light-rail line that will cost $33 per trip and a commuter-rail line that will cost $92 per trip.

The Antiplanner, however, is in Charlotte looking at a proposed commuter-rail line that is expected to cost more than $450 million to start up and is projected to carry only about 5,600 trips (meaning 2,800 round trips) a day in 2025. The Antiplanner calculates that, for about the same price as the rail line, taxpayers could give every one of the 2,800 riders a brand-new Toyota Prius every other year for the life of the rail project.

This rail line is such a dog that not even the Federal Transit Administration will help pay for it. So the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) is proposing that local cities and counties cover half the costs, while the other half would be shared by CATS and the state of North Carolina. Under a proposed financial plan, five cities and two counties are to use “value capture” to raise their half of the money.

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Building Eyesores Creates Jobs, Especially When You Tear Them Down

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Honolulu has the best bus system in America, taking a higher percentage of commuters to work and carrying more daily riders per capita than any other bus system. But just having the best bus system isn’t good enough for some people, who just have to have a rail line to have “real transit.” So the city is about to break ground on a 20-mile-long elevated rail line that is expected to cost $5.27 billion ($260 million per mile), and will probably end up costing more. The city has already spent $350 million just planning the rail line–enough to operate its bus system for nearly two years–without laying a single inch of track.

The project even has Bette Midler upset. She grew up in Honolulu but now lives in New York which, she notes, went to a great deal of trouble to remove many of its ugly elevated rail lines. “That this project is going to be so small, cost so much, and have such a terrible impact on the environment is dreadful,” she says. “The very idea that the state would sacrifice the most important amenity it has to offer the world, the beauty of its environment, is beyond belief.” Not beyond belief: some people want rail transit no matter what the cost.

The latest news is that former Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano is running for mayor for the specific purpose of killing the rail line. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser “objectively” reports that, if Cayetano wins, “money and jobs may disappear.” Yes, money will “disappear” back into taxpayers’ pockets, who will foolishly spend that money on things that will create jobs that are a lot more useful than building an elevated rail line that will only have to be torn down in a few years.
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Not Learning from History

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, the Washington Post commemorated the 30th anniversary of a horrific Air Florida plane crash with an article about how that crash has led to huge improvements in airline safety. In response to that crash, airlines have improved deicing formulas and have strict rules about how quickly aircraft must take off after being deiced, and pilots have improved their responses to slow ascents.

The end of the article briefly mentions that, just a half hour after the plane crash, Washington’s MetroRail suffered its first fatal accident when a train of flimsy railcars “slammed into a concrete pillar near the Smithsonian station.” Unfortunately, neither this crash, nor a similar but nonfatal 2004 crash, nor the fatal 2009 crash, led Washington’s transit agency to reinforce the vehicles that were so easily subject to telescoping and collapsing. At best, the agency learned to require that new rail cars be better built.
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The lesson for commuters is, if you ride the Washington Metro, avoid the cars whose four-digit number starts with a 1. The lesson for policy makers is that a competitive environment is more likely to produce safety improvements than a subsidized monopoly.

Not Build It?

By | | Transportation
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The cost of one of Denver’s FasTracks lines has gotten so high that RTD, the transit agency, is actually considering not building it. The press kindly reports the cost of the Longmont-to-Denver “Northwest” commuter-rail line as rising from $895 million to more than $1.7 billion, but that ignores the actual initial cost projections.

As the Antiplanner has previously noted, the original cost was projected to be just $211 million. As of last month, that had increased to $1.4 billion. Now it’s above $1.7 billion.
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Rather than not build it, RTD would like to ask voters to increase the sales tax to fund this and the other lines that it had previously promised would be built without cost overruns. But it realizes that voters are not likely to support such a measure. So it is now considering throwing some new highways into the pot, hoping voters will support that. It might be surprised to find that at least some voters oppose subsidies to highways as much as they oppose subsidies to rail transit.

Trains Falling Apart

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Washington Metro trains are so poorly maintained that parts falling off of the railcars are damaging later trains, leading to the tunnels filling with smoke and the evacuation of several trains. This has some people reconsidering their transportation habits. “Today is my last day as a full time Orange Line commuter after almost 10 yrs,” tweets one rail rider. Alcar, as it is also known, has neuro-protectant properties needed to repair order viagra overnight peripheral nerve damage that can occur if you have diabetes. Mistake 2: Not Cleaning the Penis Correctly Men who have actually suffered because of making use of drugs. sildenafil prescription is a house hold term with most of the people the dose which the physician recommends id near about 50 mg which is taken in one hour prior to sexual activity. Therapies that Aid ED Performing and being a viagra in part of any additional psychological treatment. And while he Brazilian economy is booming, the rich Amazonian order viagra sample rainforest is blooming. “Cheaper, easier & safer to drive.”

The railcar that dropped parts is among the newer cars owned by Washington Metro. Though more than a decade old, it should be able to stand up to another decade or so of service. But Metro is in dire financial straights and has been deferring maintenance since at least 2002, leading to a huge maintenance backlog and a significant increase in breakdowns and mechanical problems.

Fast Spending on FasTracks

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The projected cost of the Denver-to-Longmont, or Northwest, rail line–one of six approved by Denver-area voters in 2004–has risen from the 2004 estimate of $462 million to $1.4 billion. For all that money, RTD won’t even get to own the rail line, but will merely rent it from BNSF. Moveover, most of the route from Denver to Boulder and Longmont will parallel a much-less-expensive bus-rapid transit route from Denver to Boulder.

The original cost projection for this corridor, made back in 2001, was just $211 million, an estimate published in a document called the Major Investment Study. This is the only study that seriously looked at alternatives other than rail transit (though it didn’t look at many alternatives), and a cost of $211 million may have seemed reasonable compared to, say, building new highway lanes.

According to this document, by 2004 the estimate had risen to $565 million (in 2002 dollars). (My copy of RTD’s 2004 financial plan says $594 million.) By 2007 the cost had risen once again by $120 million, and by 2008 it had reached $707 million.

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