Search Results for: rail

California Pretends to Start Building High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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With great fanfare, Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown and a host of other politicians signed a rail in Fresno as a symbolic gesture toward starting construction of California’s high-speed rail project. But, despite what they say, California can’t afford to build it, and the plan they can’t afford won’t really be high-speed rail all the way from Los Angeles to San Francisco anyway.

Recall that back in 1994, California estimated that this high-speed rail line would cost less than $10 billion (about $15 billion in today’s dollars). At that price, experts at the University of California calculated, taking the train from Los Angeles to San Francisco would cost almost twice as much as flying and more than driving.

By 2008, when the measure reached the voters, the project’s estimated cost had grown to $33 billion in 2008 dollars (about $36 billion in today’s dollars). Soon after voters approved it, the cost quickly zoomed to $65 billion in 2010 dollars (about $71 billion in today’s dollars).

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The Growing Inanity of California High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne–who claims to be an “unabashed supporter” of high-speed rail–reviews Anaheim’s new train station and finds it “oddly antiseptic.” Hawthorne doesn’t care that taxpayers spent $2,764 per square foot for what is essentially a big glass tent. He is a little disturbed that the design is so dysfunctional that train passengers “exit onto an uncovered platform, take the elevator or stairs [up] to a pedestrian bridge, and then enter the building at its highest interior level” only to have to go back down again to get to ground level.

What really bothers Hawthorne is that the building is “empty of context and obvious character,” and–most devastating of all–“placeless” meaning it would be “equally at home in Tacoma, Wash., or St. Louis.” The architects, he thinks, should have adapted regional forms, similar to the way L.A. Union Station used the Spanish Mission style.

While Hawthorne’s critique is pretty negative, it is also naive. He thinks that reducing “California’s reliance on the automobile is going to require architectural as well as infrastructural leaps of faith.” Sorry, even the most perfect architectural design won’t overcome rail’s inherent disadvantages over the convenience of cars and the low cost of flying.

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High-Speed Rail from Dallas to Ft. Worth?

By | | Transportation
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In the hierarchy of dumb projects, building a high-speed rail line to connect two cities that are just 32 miles a part would rank very high. Yet the Texas Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration are proposing just that: a line from Dallas to Ft. Worth. They are currently asking for comments on the scope of the environmental impact statement, due next Monday, December 15.

Not surprisingly, the biggest beneficiary of this project, so far, is Parsons Brinckerhoff, which seems to have its fingers in every ridiculous rail project in the country. One of the company’s employees is acting as “communications manager” for the project and delivering PowerPoint presentations about it to the public.

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The Alternative to Light Rail

By | | Transportation
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Someone recently asked the Antiplanner whether electric trolley buses or buses powered by compressed natural gas (CNG) were a good alternative to light rail. My initial response was, “why do we need any alternative other than ordinary buses?” But I decided to take a look at the data in the 2012 National Transit Database to be sure that was an appropriate answer.

Five cities–Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco–still operate electric trolley buses. Ten major transit agencies fuel their buses exclusively or almost exclusively with CNG. Only one major transit agency uses liquid natural gas, and one uses a combination of CNG and LNG. Finally, five major transit agencies fuel their buses exclusively or almost exclusively with biodiesel.

My calculations for energy efficiency in BTUs per passenger mile and for greenhouse gas emissions in grams of CO2 per passenger mile are shown in the table below. The calculations are based on standard factors for BTUs per gallon of fuel and pounds of CO2 per million BTUs of fuel. For comparison, I’ve included the average of all motor buses, light rail, cars, and the Toyota Prius. The last column in the table shows passenger miles per vehicle revenue mile, or the average number of occupants on board the vehicle. In the table, “Electricity” refers to buses powered by overhead trolley wires.

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More Rail Fail

By | | Transportation
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Two more rail transit lines are following in the tracks of so many others that have failed to live up to planners’ promises. First, Orlando’s SunRail commuter train is “losing riders at an increasing pace.” The project, which cost a billion dollars and was built partly to persuade the federal government that Florida was serious about supporting an Orlando-Tampa high-speed rail line, has lost 27 percent of its riders since it opened.


SunRail Fail. Flickr photo by Buddahbless.

Second, Seattle’s seven-year-old South Lake Union Transit (SLUT) streetcar has continually failed to attracted the predicted number of riders. Both the SLUT and SunRail were counting on rider fares to help pay operating costs; the SLUT’s shortfall has required repeated bailouts of the line.

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More Light-Rail Critiques

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Sorry about the light postings this week, but I’ve been pretty busy talking with people about light rail. Here is my presentation about light rail in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), Florida, and here is my presentation about light rail in Austin, Texas.

These are large files–Pinellas is 18 MB, Austin is 24–and they don’t include the videos I used for those presentations. If you want the videos, which are self-driving cars, click here to download a 44-MB zip file with three videos that I used in both presentations.

Next week I go to Denver for the 2014 American Dream conference, so postings may be light then as well. The week after that I’ll be back in Minneapolis to debate Myron Orfield over land-use regulation and density. That should be fun.

Light Rail and Streetcars

By | | Mission
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The Antiplanner (along with co-author Jeff Judson) has an op ed in the San Antonio Express News on what San Antonio should do now that it has given up on the streetcar. My presentation to the San Antonio Tea Party on a similar subject is available for download as a 35-MB PDF.

At least some people in San Antonio think the city should adopt a smart-growth plan to deal with the million people who are likely to move to the area in the next 30 years. But roughly a million people moved to the area in the last 30 years without dire consequences (except for the congestion that resulted from planners’ obsession with rail transit while they ignored efficient solutions such as traffic signal coordination), so it isn’t clear why a new plan is needed.

Here are the speaking events I know about for the next few days. First, this afternoon (Monday, September 8), from 4:30 to 6:30 pm, I’ll be speaking about the Pinellas light-rail plan at a public forum at the IRB Sushi Restaurant in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida.

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No One’s Riding Light Rail, So Reduce Fares and Build More

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Planners predicted that Norfolk’s Tide light-rail line, which opened in 2011 60 percent over budget and 16 months behind schedule, would stimulate economic development along its route. But little development is taking place, so the Virginian Pilot has come up with a grand idea: reduce fares by two thirds. That, the paper’s editorial writers guesstimate, should attract 1,000 more riders per day, which they hope will generate the development planners promised.


Looks fast, but the schedule indicates it takes 26 minutes to go 7 miles for an average speed of 16 mph.

There are a lot of problems with this proposal, not least of which is the fact that rail fares in Norfolk are already the second-lowest in the country, after Houston’s. Though the nominal fare is $1.50, which the Pilot proposes to cut to 50 cents, actual fares collected in 2012 averaged just 50 cents a ride, compared with 35 cents in Houston but $1.39 in Denver. The national average for low-capacity rail is 98 cents, while the average Hampton Roads bus rider pays 91 cents.

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Another Inane Low-Capacity Rail Plan

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Some people in Durham, NC, want to build a $1.4-billion, 17-mile light-rail line, and the region has been spending millions of dollars planning it. A quick review of the project’s alternatives analysis reveals that planners and consultants have done everything they can to bias the analysis towards rail.


A Durham transit bus in front of Durham’s $10 million downtown transit station.

The most important thing to note is that planners projected that either of two bus-rapid transit alternatives would attract more transit riders than light rail (p. 5-78) at little more than half the cost (p. 5-105). But the analysis nevertheless recommended in favor of light rail, partly because “public and agency support” supposedly favored rail over bus and partly because of rail’s “demonstrated” ability to promote compact development.

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Low-Capacity Rail Fails Again

By | | Transportation
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After a soccer game last week in Santa Clara, California, people complained about lengthy waits to get a light-rail train home. The game attracted more than 48,000 fans, but only about 8,300 of them were able to take the light rail to and from the stadium–and it took 90 minutes to move that number away from the event.


“Mass Transportation,” a painting by Grif Teller used on the 1955 Pennsylvania Railroad calendar.

The sad thing is that transit agencies such as the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) have propagandized the wonders of light rail, calling it “high-capacity transit,” so that people actually believe it can do things like fill and empty a stadium with 68,000 seats. The reality is that light rail cannot come close to doing this, at least not without taking many hours. VTA should give up and rely on buses instead.

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