Search Results for: rail

The Daily Disaster That Is DC MetroRail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A lot of Washington Post reporters must ride the Metro Rail system, as the paper has published several articles about the system’s decline in the last few days. First was the February 10 report that ridership had fallen to its lowest level since 2004. On February 12, the Post published a lengthy list of ideas for improving ridership solicited from ten experts.

Then came a February 19 report of “candid talk” by Metro’s new general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, and board chair Jack Evans about the system’s deterioration. “Somehow our reliability has fallen apart,” said Evans. By “somehow,” he means, “no one was willing to spend the money required to maintain the system.”

“The longer-term solution to that is obviously the 7000-cars,” said Wiedefeld, referring to Metro’s latest order of railcars (the original cars were the 1000-series, second were 2000s, etc.). Of course, new rail cars won’t fix the signals, the broken rails, the computer guidance system, or the smoke in the tunnels.

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San Jose Proves BRT Can Be as Wasteful as Light Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority–a perennial contender for the title of the nation’s worst-managed transit agency–is building a bus-rapid transit line, and it is proving as much of a disaster as some of its light-rail lines. It was supposed to open two months ago, but now appears that it won’t open until 2017. Torn-up streets are damaging businesses along the route, and VTA is having to pay them compensation, making the project far more expensive than expected.

The problems have gotten so bad that the chair of VTA’s board, Perry Woodward, has written a highly defensive op ed not to apologize to taxpayers but to argue that the damage done by this project to the local neighborhood has been more than made up for by all the good things VTA has done in the last twenty years.

What good things? Santa Clara County taxpayers voted to tax themselves to relieve congestion by building more roads, and they proved that you can, after all, build your way out of congestion: congestion levels declined for several years despite a rapid increase in local jobs. But then the county made the mistake of merging its congestion management authority with its transit agency, and pretty soon the transit agency stole all the congestion relief money to fund its expensive projects. The result has been some of the nation’s emptiest light-rail trains (an average of 18 passengers per car vs. a national average of 24) and rapidly rising congestion.

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This Just In: Light Rail Fails to Relieve Congestion

By | | Transportation
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The Los Angeles Time seems surprised to report that Los Angeles’ 9-mile-long Expo Line has failed to relieve congestion in the corridor it serves. Rail and bus boardings increased about 6 percent after the line opened in 2012 (at least some of which would be due to transfers of passengers from bus to rail who previously could go the entire distance of their journey by bus), but the rail line had no “significant or consistent impact” on auto traffic.

Many people believe rail transit depends on population density, and if so then the Expo Line should be a perfect candidate, as the area it serves has 26,000 people per square mile (about the same as New York City and nearly ten times the average urban density in the United States). On one hand, even that’s not dense enough for rail to attract a lot of riders. On the other hand, light rail is really low-capacity transit, so is truly the wrong solution for areas of high transit demand.

As the L.A. Times observes in other articles, rail does benefit some people. First, it gives perverts opportunities to engage in anonymous sexual harassment. Second, it gives politicians opportunities to spend a lot of money: with the prompting of Governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles is considering spending billions of dollars on six more rail lines.
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California High-Speed Rail Will Be Late,
Over Budget, and Obsolete

By | | Transportation
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The Los Angeles Times has a special report finding that the California high-speed rail project will cost far more and take far longer than the rail authority is promising. The official cost estimate remains $68 billion for an abbreviated system despite the fact that a 2013 Parsons Brinckerhoff report to the authority said there was no way the project could be done for that price.

P-B’s report was “never made public” and the rail authority refused to release it under the state public records act. However, “an engineer close to the project” slipped a copy of the report to the Times.

The rail authority has established a record for ignoring such reports. In 2012, another consultant told the authority that costs should be revised upwards by 15 percent. The authority simply fired the consultant.

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More Ridiculous Rail Projects

By | | Transportation
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Arizona has just published a draft environmental impact statement for a proposed moderate-speed (80-120 mph) passenger train between Phoenix and Tucson. The 116-mile route is projected to cost $4.2 billion to $8.4 billion depending on the route. At the low end of this range, the cost per mile would exceed $36 million, which should easily be enough to add four new lanes to the existing freeway (not that it needs them).

Louisiana wants to spend a mere $260 million for a so-called commuter train between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Since then-state governor Bobby Jindal vetoed the idea of spending $500 million on a moderate-speed train in 2009, the new proposal is for a train whose top speed over the 80-mile route would be 79-mph. Initially, as few as one train per day would go each way, which pretty much make the idea a complete joke. Despite this, the idea is popular: at a recent forum for gubernatorial candidates, most candidates agreed that the state’s infrastructure was crumbling and they supported the idea of building more infrastructure that could crumble in the future.

Massachusetts officials are once again talking about connecting Boston’s North train station (which sends all-important trains to Portland, Maine) with its South Station. The connection, which would cover less than 3 miles, is estimated to cost $2 billion to $4 billion.
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Self-Driving Cars Superior to Light Rail in Canberra

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Canberra, Australia’s capital, is considering spending close to $1 billion building a light-rail line. But a new study by computer programmer Kent Fitch finds that shared, self-driving cars make a lot more sense.

Where light rail would lose money, a fleet of shared, self-driving cars could earn a profit. Where light rail would serve just one corridor, self-driving cars would serve the entire urban area. Where light rail would require a massive expenditure on new infrastructure, self-driving cars would use existing infrastructure. While light-rail would require people to walk to stations and wait for a railcar, more than 96 percent of self-driving car patrons would have to wait less than a minute for a car to meet them at their door.

Fitch observes that Canberra, being entirely a twentieth-century city, is simply not designed for public transit, which is why ridership on the city’s stagnant or declining. When a city is too decentralized for “medium-box” transit like buses, the solution is not to go to “big-box” transit, which only works if a lot of people want to go from point A to point B at the same time. Instead, the solution is smaller-box transit, such as shared cars.

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Metro Admits Light Rail Is Slow

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, is proposing a “faster transit line to Gresham.” Gresham happens to be the terminus for Portland’s first light-rail line, which opened 29 years ago. But the “faster-transit” line will use buses, not rail.

Before the Gresham light-rail line opened, Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, operated express buses between downtown Portland and Hollywood, Gateway, Gresham, and other neighborhoods along the rail corridor. All of these were cancelled when the light-rail opened, even though the busses were faster than the trains. This is one reason why Portland transit ridership plummeted during the 1980s.

In proposing a faster-transit line to Gresham, is Metro tacitly admitting that light rail was a mistake? Only indirectly. The bus routes is is proposing won’t be express buses but bus-rapid transit, and as such probably will be a little slower than the light rail, at least between downtown Portland and Gresham. They’ll just be faster than the existing conventional bus service.

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Austin-San Antonio Rail Insanity

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin is congested, so obviously (to some people, at least) the solution is to run passenger trains between the two cities. Existing tracks are crowded with freight trains, so the Lone Star Rail District proposes to build a brand-new line for the freight trains and run passenger trains on the existing tracks. The total capital cost would be about $3 billion, up from just $0.6 billion in 2004 (which probably didn’t include the freight re-route).


Click image to download a PDF version of this map.

By coincidence, that was the projected capital cost for the proposed high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando (cancelled by Florida Governor Rick Scott), which are about the same 80-miles apart as Austin and San Antonio. But, despite the cost, Lone Star wouldn’t be a high-speed rail line. According to a 2004 feasibility study, trains would take about 90 minutes between the two cities, with two stops in between. While express trains with no stops would be a bit faster, cars driving at Texas speeds could still be faster.

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DC Metro Shut Down by Derailment

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Parts of the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines were shut down for eight-and-one-half hours after a train derailed before 6:00 in the morning at the Smithsonian stop near downtown Washington, DC. Although Metro hasn’t yet determined the cause of the derailment, it seems likely that the service interruption is due to poor maintenance, which has caused many other incidents. The accident also illustrates a fundamental problem with rail transit: when one train breaks down, an entire line–or, in this case, three lines–can be shut down.

Metro continued to run trains in the outer reaches of the system, but stations between Federal Center and McPherson Square–in other words, nearly all downtown stations on the Blue/Orange/Silver lines–were closed. The Red and Yellow/Green lines were unaffected, and Metro provided buses for passengers on the other lines needing to reach downtown.

By 2:30 pm, Metro had opened four of the six affected stations and ran trains on one track. Both tracks were in operation by midnight, and Metro hopes to have service completely restored this morning.

More Lies in Light Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Phoenix voters will decide next month whether to extend the current transit sales tax (set to expire in 2020) through 2050 and increase it by 75 percent (from 0.4 percent to 0.7 percent). This would supposedly be enough to fund at least three more light-rail lines plus several bus-rapid transit lines.


According to Valley Metro, this beautiful vacant lot across the street from a light-rail station is Escala on Camelback, a mixed-use development with 160 condos and 15,000 square feet of retail space that was supposed to be completed in Fall, 2010. It remains vacant today.

The big argument from rail advocates is that Phoenix’s first light-rail line, which opened in December, 2008, generated $7 billion in economic development. Not so much. A new report from the Arizona Free Enterprise Club shows that the light rail generated very little, if any, new development.

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