Search Results for: rail projects

Closing the China-US Freeway Gap

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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With growing recognition that China has become the United States’ main economic and political competitor in the world, many people point to China’s high-speed rail system as evidence that the United States is “falling behind.” But the real transportation gap between China and the United States is not high-speed rail, but freeways. China has about the same number of motor vehicles as the United States. But where the U.S. has about 67,000 miles of freeways and is adding fewer than 800 miles per year, China has 93,000 miles of freeways and is growing its system by more than 5,000 miles a year.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

China began building freeways before it began building high-speed rail and it has built more miles each year and spent more money on new freeway construction (though less per mile) than on high-speed rail. Highway travel has grown faster than rail travel, and the highway system has become particularly important for freight, as it moves about 2.5 times as many ton-miles as rail lines. Continue reading →

$1.5 Million to Scrap $51 Million Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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How much does it cost to repair the damage to streets done by streetcar construction when people finally figure out that streetcars are obsolete? In the St. Louis suburb of University City, which spent $51 million building the 2.2-mile Delmar Loop Trolley, the answer is supposed to be $1.5 million. But anything to do with rail transit has cost overruns, so it is likely to be more.

Streetcars are often touted as generators of economic development, but the Loop Trolley went through a business district that was already thriving. Photo by Paul Sableman.

The Obama administration loved streetcars so much that it gave $25 million of “urban circulator/livability project” funds to St. Louis to cover half the cost of this streetcar. Though that was in 2010, construction didn’t actually begin until 2015. Though construction was completed in November 2016, operations didn’t begin until November 2018. The streetcar ran for just over a year, but having attracted hardly any riders, it ran out of money in December 2019. Continue reading →

How Transit Subsidies Harm Poor People

By | | Policy brief
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The nation’s transit agencies received nearly $56 billion in subsidies from taxpayers in 2019. One frequently used justification for these subsidies is that transit provides mobility to low-income people. Yet in reality transit subsidies do far more harm than good for low-income people.

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Most of the taxes used to support transit are regressive, which means low-income people pay disproportionate shares of their incomes to keep transit going. Yet the goal of most transit capital spending has been to attract upper-income people to ride transit, a goal which apparently has been met as transit commuters have significantly higher median incomes than other workers. Meanwhile, the mobility that transit provides to people who don’t have cars is pathetic, as the typical urban resident can reach 30 times as many jobs in a 30-minute auto drive as a 30-minute transit ride and can actually reach more jobs on a bicycle ride of 40 minutes or less than a transit trip of similar length. Continue reading →

Demand the Right to Pay for Your Own Transportation!

By | | Policy brief
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Sixty years ago, America had the finest transportation system in the world, and it was almost all unsubsidized. Congress had subsidized the construction of some railroads, but that included only about 7 percent of the nation’s rail mileage. Congress had also subsidized the construction of some airports, but by 1960 that was near an end. Most of America’s highways had been built and maintained out of highway user fees such as gasoline taxes and tolls. The nation’s transit systems were mostly private and even the public ones funded their operating costs and many of their capital costs exclusively out of transit fares.

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That began to change in the 1960s. In 1964, Congress promised capital grants to cities and states that took over transit companies. Most of the government-owned transit agencies also used tax dollars to cover part of their operating costs. In 1970, Congress took over the nation’s intercity passenger trains and subsidies to Amtrak exceeded $1 billion a year. In 1981, Congress began diverting highway user fees to pay for transit. This led to such a political demand for those funds that, in 1998, Congress gave up on the idea that expenditures out of the highway transit fund should be limited to user fees paid into that fund. Today, Congress is transferring $10 billion per year of general funds into the highway trust fund to keep the money flowing without raising gas taxes. Continue reading →

Trump Administration Favors BRT

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Transit Administration has announced that it is providing capital funding for twelve transit projects in 2020. Eight of the projects are bus-rapid transit and the other four are extensions of existing rail lines.

The Trump Administration’s proposed 2019 budget called for “winding down” the New Starts (capital grants) program “by limiting funding to projects with existing full funding grant agreements only” (p. 87). Congressional authorization for the New Starts program expires this year, and the budget called for “eliminating discretionary grants programs” including New Starts.

The administration’s proposed 2021 budget calls for renewing the BUILD program (formerly known as TIGER), which is a discretionary grants program, but says nothing about New Starts. This presumably means that the administration still wants to not renew it. Continue reading →

What Were They Thinking?

By | | Policy brief
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If light rail was once viewed as an inexpensive alternative to true rapid transit, some cities saw commuter rail as an even less-expensive way of reintroducing rail transit into their regions. After all, most commuter-rail lines used tracks that already existed, so how much could it cost to run passenger trains on those tracks?

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Beguiled by this reasoning, nearly twenty different transit agencies have built commuter rail in urban areas that didn’t have rail transit in 1980. Many of these proved to be absolute disasters, with fare revenues covering as little as 4 percent of operating costs despite having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on capital costs. This brief will look at various commuter-rail projects that have started since 1980 to see which proved total disasters and which were only partial disasters. Continue reading →

Accelerating Spread of COVID-19 Earns $25 Billion

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies, which are known to be “an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases” but are not effective at much else, received a $25 billion bailout in the $2.2 trillion Congressional coronavirus relief bill. That’s only a little more than 1 percent of the total, but why did the industry get any at all?

When transit agencies asked for the money, the Antiplanner wrote an op-ed arguing against it. Unfortunately, it didn’t reach print until after Congress passed the bill.

Yesterday, which happened to be the day after the op-ed was published, the Department of Transportation announced how the spoils would be distributed. The money is parceled out geographically, so agencies in regions with multiple transit providers will squabble over the funds at the MPO level. Continue reading →

45. The Financial Crisis Wasn’t Pretty

By | | Iconoclast
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“This book should not be necessary,” were the opening words to my first book for the Cato Institute, Best-Laid Plans. It covered the same ground as many previous books, most notably Frederick Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It appears, however, that every generation has to learn for itself the reality that socialism doesn’t work.

Part of the problem is that socialism can mean several different things. One answer is worker ownership of the means of production, but the United States already has that: numerous firms are owned by their workers, and the biggest investors in major corporations are pension funds that exist for the benefit of workers. I suspect that most socialists don’t see this as any different from capitalism because it doesn’t include a role for government to step in to reduce inequality or protect the environment.

Another kind of socialism is a social democracy, which is capitalism with a safety net. The problem is just how big should the safety net be. At its most basic, it seems to include unemployment income for those who lose their jobs along with housing, food, and health care for the chronically unemployed. But where do you draw the line? It seems that all it takes is someone chanting “X is a human right” and sudden X becomes part of the safety net. In addition to free medical care for all, Bernie Sanders thinks the government should provide free higher education, free childcare, and build at least 10 million affordable homes. Lately free public transit has been added to the list of “human rights.” Continue reading →

TriMet Compounding 40 Years of Bad Decisions

By | | Policy brief
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Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has spent nearly $5 billion (in present-day dollars) building 59 miles of light-rail lines. Now the agency says it has to spend another $7 billion correcting the mistakes of its previous decisions. Meanwhile, the city of Portland is responding to urban congestion with a plan that will make congestion far worse.

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The eagerness of Portland officials to build light rail—an eagerness not shared by Portland-area voters—has given the city the reputation of being some sort of transit mecca. The reality is that the urban area’s transit planners have made a series of bad decisions that continue to cost the region dearly. Continue reading →

44. Fighting Obsolete Transit

By | | Iconoclast
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In 1991, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. It should have been called the Obsolete Transportation Inefficiency Act, as among other things it created a multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund to give to cities to build new rail transit projects. This fund, informally called New Starts and more formally called Transit Capital Investment Grants, had no limit on the amount of money any city could take out of it, which gave cities incentives to propose the most expensive projects they could so they could get the most “free” federal money.

This law was actually a continuation of a 1973 law that allowed cities to cancel planned interstate freeways within their borders and spend the federal dollars that would have gone towards building those freeways on transit capital improvements instead. The 1973 law was instigated by then-Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent, who wanted to cancel some freeways in Boston but didn’t want to be accused of “losing” federal transportation dollars. Boston, of course, has lots of rail transit and could easily absorb the federal dollars from a cancelled freeway by buying new railcars, installing new signals, replacing track, and so forth.

Sargent’s law gave hope to Portland Mayor (and infamous pedo) Neil Goldschmidt, who wanted to cancel an interstate freeway in east Portland. But Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, only operated buses, and if it used all of the freeway funds to buy new buses, it wouldn’t have enough money to operate all of those buses. Continue reading →