Tag Archives: rail transit

Tomorrow, Vancouver Washington voters will be asked to raise sales taxes in order to “preserve existing bus service.” Without the sales tax increase, says C-Tran, the transit agency, “C-TRAN would need to implement a system-wide service reduction of about 35 percent by early to mid 2013.”

It turns out that is a lie. An accountant named Tiffany Couch has scrutinized C-Tran’s budget and projected costs and revenues and concluded that existing taxes are sufficient to maintain bus service for many years.

So why does C-Tran say that service will decline without the tax increase? The answer, says Couch, is that C-Tran has already decided it wants to build a light-rail line connecting with Portland’s light rail. Without the tax increase, C-Tran will have to cut bus service in order to pay for the light rail.

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Nashville’s commuter train, the Music City Star, is “really taking off,” at least according to an op ed in the Tennessean written by the transit agency CEO, Paul Ballard. Actually, the best that can be said for the train is that Ballard hasn’t been fired over it yet.

The Music City Ripoff.

Starting the commuter train cost taxpayers $41 million and operating it cost $3.3 million in 2009. But Ballard points to a 24 percent increase in ridership in the last twelve months so that the train is now carrying an average of 1,225 trips per weekday.

The problem is that 124 percent of nearly nothing is still nearly nothing. Ballard’s agency had predicted that, by 2012, the train would be carrying 1,900 trips per weekday. Unless it gets a 55 percent increase in ridership next year, it’s not going to make it. Apparently, Ballard defines “success” as “we’re still losing more money than we predicted we were going to lose, but not as much as we used to lose.”
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Norfolk Virginia finally opened its light-rail line, and ridership “exceeds expectations” at 5,600 riders a day. Considering they run 212 trains a weekday, that’s just over 26 passengers per train. How many 40-passenger buses would have been needed to handle all that traffic?

Of course, the rail line exceeded expectations in many other ways as well. The 7.4-mile line was originally expected to cost less than $200 million. The final cost was at least $120 million over that. It was also supposed to be open for business in 2008. They exceeded that expectation as well. The original projection was for 10,500 weekday riders by 2021. They’ll have to double ridership to meet that. A lot of city and transit officials also expected the rail line would be a feather in their caps. Instead, they were lucky not to be tarred and feathered when they were run out of town over cost overruns.
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Despite the underestimated costs and inflated ridership numbers, the Federal Transit Administration gave Norfolk light rail a “not recommended” rating in 2004. Too bad the agency changed its mind (or had its mind changed for it by Virginia’s congressional delegation). They could have saved taxpayers a lot of money on a truly wasteful project. But that’s the story of all light rail in a nutshell.

Debates over high-speed rail and federal transit funding have inspired a number of writers asking why conservatives hate passenger trains. Most of them get it wrong.

The real answer is: they don’t. They just hate subsidies, at least if they are fiscal conservatives (as opposed to social conservatives like the late Paul Weyrich).

Case in point: San Francisco’s Central Subway, which, as the Wall Street Journal points out, is going to cost at least $1.6 billion for 1.7 miles of rail that (as the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Tom Rubin, points out) will actually be slower than the buses it replaces (because it will require people to make more transfers). If you don’t have a Wall Street Journal subscription, which I don’t, you can read about it here, here, and here, among other places.

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About thirty years ago, the Antiplanner’s first visited the East Coast, traveling there by Amtrak and riding rail transit lines in as many cities as possible. The Washington DC subway looked like a set from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, with gleaming trains quietly zooming into and out of clean stations that mostly featured high arch ceilings. In contrast, New York City subway cars were covered with graffiti, stations were grimy, and crime was a serious worry.

How things have changed. In the 1990s, Mayor Giuliani saved the city’s subways by, in part, cleaning up the graffiti and controlling the crime. A recent report from the New York Public Interest Research Group finds that New York subways are, for the most part, getting better still, with car breakdowns only once every 170,000 miles in 2010, a 26 percent improvement over 2008.

Meanwhile, Washington subway cars are experiencing breakdowns every 43,500 miles, or more almost four times as frequently as New York’s. One group of cars breaks down every 30,000 miles. A Metro board member calls these cars “dogs,” but he shouldn’t be very proud of the fact that the agency’s newest and most reliable cars break down every 90,000 miles, twice as frequently as New York’s fleet. But perhaps they can take satisfaction in the fact that New York’s worst trains break down every 60,000 miles, or only 38 percent less frequently than DC’s subways.

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