Search Results for: rail projects

Ottawa City Council Kills Light-Rail Line

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In what I regard as a victory for common sense, the Ottawa city council has killed a planned light-rail line. Unfortunately, this may be a costly decision as a previous city council had signed a contract to construct the line, and the contractors say they want compensation for the cancellation.

The 18-mile line, which had been approved by the city council last July, was expected to cost CN$778 million, or about CN$43 million per mile. The Province of Ontario had promised to cover about CN$400 million of this cost, leaving the city to find CN$378 million.

Light rail passing high-density housing in Moscow. Photo by Lowell Grattan.

But after having spent CN$65 million on the project, a new city council elected in November decided light rail was a waste of money. In December, they voted 13-11 to cancel just before a contract deadline.

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The Hiawatha Light-Rail Disaster

By | | Transportation
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One of the arguments for light rail is that it is supposed to have lower operating costs than buses. But Minneapolis’ Hiawatha light rail is losing so much money that Hennepin County wants a region-wide sales tax to cover the costs of what Minnesota Governor Pawlenty calls “these very expensive transit projects.” The feds were subsidizing it with a $10 million grant, but that ended last year.

This one 11.6-mile light-rail line costs more than $20 million a year to operate. Farebox revenues cover only about a third of that. Half the rest is paid by the state of Minnesota and most of the other half comes from Hennepin County property taxes.

The light-rail line does not go outside of Hennepin County, so clearly most riders are residents of that county. But some commuters from Dakota and other nearby counties drive to park-and-ride stations and use the rail line. “There is no rational basis why the property taxpayers in Hennepin County ought to be paying for people from Dakota County to use the LRT line,” says one official.

But are they? Half the operating costs are paid by state taxpayers, including taxpayers from Dakota County. All of the construction costs were paid by federal and state taxpayers, including taxpayers from Dakota County. Considering the subsidies Hennepin County transit riders have received, they should pay Dakota County riders to take the train.

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A Look at the Wacky Transit Industry

By | | Transportation
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Today is Earth Day, a day in which we are supposed to celebrate environmentally friendly ideas such as public transit, high-density development, and electric vehicles. My report published last week revealed that the transit lobby has hijacked affordable housing funds so that, in many cities, most of those funds are spent on expensive high-density transit-oriented developments rather than on more affordable low-rise housing.

The Federal Transit Administration has recommended that Congress fund the Inglewood Transit Connector, a $2.0 billion people mover that will be just 1.6 miles long.

Last month, the Federal Transit Administration released its 2025 funding recommendations for transit capital improvements. This allows us to see some of the wacky ideas that the transit industry has come up with in recent years. Continue reading →

Infrastructure Guidelines

By | | Transportation
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With President Biden handing out $6 billion for California high-speed rail projects and $2.2 billion more for other passenger-rail projects, it seems important to review some basic guidelines for infrastructure spending. Nobel-prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, whose work focused on incentives and institutions, once offered the following evaluation criteria:

Elinor Ostrom. Photo by Holger Motzkau.

  • Efficiency: How well are inputs translated into outputs?
  • Fiscal equivalence – Do those who benefit from a system pay at a level
    commensurate with their benefit?
  • Redistribution – Does the system take from the rich and give to the poor or from rich areas to poor areas or rich groups to poor groups?
  • Accountability – Do decisions reflect the desires of final users and other stakeholders?
  • Adaptability – Can infrastructure providers respond to ever-changing
    Environments?

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Why Bus-Rapid-Transit Has Become Popular

By | | Transportation
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Am I ahead of my time or simply out of step with the times? When I began studying light rail, I quickly realized that buses could do everything light rail could do except cost a lot of money. I was especially heartened when Kansas City, whose voters had rejected light rail in something like eight different elections, spent about $3 million a mile (about $4 million a mile in today’s money) installing two bus-rapid-transit (BRT) lines and got 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership, which is more than some light-rail lines get.

So I should be happy about recent reports favoring BRT.

  • As noted above, the World Bank reports that “Bus Rapid Transit takes cars off the road and moves people quickly, providing the benefits of metros at a fraction of the cost.”
  • An article in Research in Transportation Economics found that the values of homes within a 20-minute walk of a bus-rapid transit station increased by 5 to 7 percent and the total increase in property values was six times the cost of the BRT projects.
  • Jarrett Walker reports “good outcomes” from a new BRT line in Portland, specifically a 30 to 40 percent increase in ridership.

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The FasTracks Failure

By | | Transportation
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In 2004, Denver voters approved spending $4.8 billion building six new rail transit lines, and the first line opened ten years ago. This was soon followed by four more to the gushing praise of various outsiders.

Inside Denver, however, people are beginning to realize that the whole thing was a miserable failure, suffering massive cost overruns and never attaining its ridership projections. The West line, which had its tenth anniversary last week, never carried as many passengers as were projected in its first year. It’s too bad that the reporters who are questioning this now weren’t asking the same questions in 2004. Continue reading →

Transit Agencies Go Insane

By | | Transportation
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Earlier this month, the Federal Transit Administration published its annual report on funding recommendations for transit capital improvement grants. Each year, I review the accompanying list of projects being planned or under construction to see how much construction costs have grown since the previous year. This year, however, transit agencies seem to have learned a lesson from the pandemic and have curtailed their wild spending on pointless projects.

Sound Transit is building light rail on what was once freeway lanes across Lake Washington. Photo by Sound Transit.

Just kidding. In fact, they are spending more than ever. In the 1990s, light-rail lines that cost $50 million a mile ($100 million in today’s dollars) were considered extravagantly expensive. A decade ago, the average light-rail line cost about $125 million a mile ($160 million in today’s dollars). Last year, average light-rail construction costs had risen to $278 million a mile (about $310 million today). Continue reading →

Failing to See the Forest for the Trees

By | | Transportation
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New York University’s Transit Costs Project has issued its final report on why it costs so much to build transit infrastructure in the United States. While some of the answers appear reasonable at first glance, the report suffers from the researchers not asking the right questions.

Click image to download a 26.4-MB PDF of this report.

In its review of Boston’s Green Line, the report notes that “Understaffed agencies lacking experience with large capital construction projects struggle to manage consultants.” One result is less than half the costs of the project went into construction; the rest went to pay consultants. We’ve seen that happen with Honolulu and other rail projects as well. Continue reading →

You Get What You Pay For

By | | Transportation
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Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, has a 19.6-mile light-rail system that consists of a north-south line intersecting an east-west line. It cost $475 million, or less than $25 million per mile. That sounds like a good deal compared with U.S. lines now under construction or in planning, the least expensive of which is more than $135 million a mile and the average cost is more than $275 million a mile.

Addis Ababa’s light-rail line. Photo by A.Savin.

There’s just one little problem. Although the light-rail system is just seven years old, it is already suffering serious maintenance problems. Only eight of the city’s 41 light-rail trains are functional, and the city has resorted to operating just every other day in order to do track maintenance. The city estimates it needs $60 million to restore the system to full capacity, which it doesn’t have. Continue reading →

Engines of Equality

By | | Transportation
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A recent article in the New York Times is off-target when it calls automobiles “turbo-boosted engines of inequality.” The article points to some genuine problems, but those problems are not the fault of automobiles. Nor is “accessible public transportation” the solution, as the article claims in its conclusion.

The most egalitarian transportation since the first warlord tying a horse to the first chariot made fast transport accessible only to the elites. Image from 1985 Yugo brochure scanned by Tony DiGirolamo.

The truth is that automobiles are the most egalitarian form of transportation since walking. Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities. It was only when Henry Ford developed the moving assembly line that mechanized transportation became available to the vast majority of people. Continue reading →