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LA Rail Transit a Failure

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
24 Comments

Los Angeles’ rail transit system is now 20 years old, but the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Tom Rubin, questions whether it should have been built at all. “The push for rail has forced transit ridership down,” says Rubin, who was the chief financial officer of L.A.’s transit agency when the rail lines were planned in the 1980s. “Had they run a lot of buses at low fares, they could have doubled the number of riders.”

Rubin is referring to the fact that in the early 1980s, when LA’s transit policy was to boost bus service by keeping fares low, transit ridership grew dramatically. In 1985, when the agency starting building rail, it raised bus fares and cut service to cover cost overruns. Transit ridership plummeted, and did not recover to its 1985 levels until after 2000.

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Washington Metro Takes Action!

By | | News commentary, Transportation
11 Comments

In an article worthy of The Onion, the Washington Post proclaims that “Dupont Circle escalator incident prompts Metro to take action.” The incident in question was the breakdown of the giant, 130-foot escalators at the Dupont Circle Metro station, which forced patrons to walk or, in some cases, crawl over handrails to adjacent escalators. The escalator problems were compounded by inadequacies in Metro’s radio network that prevented employees from communicating with one another about the breakdown.

Video by Twitter user @giveit2lloyd; view the original here.

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So what great action is Metro taking to deal with the escalators it has failed to keep in a state of good repair? It is providing bullhorns to station employees so they can do better crowd control and communicate with one another the next time the escalators break down. That’s proactive!

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Honolulu’s Rail Plan

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
27 Comments

Yesterday, in response to the Antiplanner’s post about crony capitalism, Scrappy commented that Honolulu needs rail transit to “reduce our carbon footprint, save energy and get us off the maddening addiction to cars.” He added that, “the environmental community in Honolulu is strongly behind rail.”

I appreciate Scrappy’s comment and don’t want to discourage him from participating in this forum, but I find it sad that my former colleagues in the environmental movement have become so innumerate that they would support a turkey like the Honolulu elevated rail plan. The final environmental impact statement for that project is now available. Let’s see what it says about saving energy, carbon, and driving.

Start with energy. Table 4-21 of the FEIS says the project will save 396 million British thermal units (BTUs) of energy each day, or 144,540 million BTUs per year. Sounds great, except that page 4-206 says project construction will cost 7.48 trillion BTUs. That means it will take 52 years of savings to pay back the energy cost. Long before 52 years are up, huge energy investments will be needed to replace rail cars, worn out track, and other infrastructure. So there is likely no net energy savings.

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FTA Wants Your Comments

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
2 Comments

Last January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that he was replacing rules that required that federal transit grants had to be “cost effective” with rules promoting “livability.” Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration asked for your comments on this proposal.

The FTA doesn’t have new rules yet; it just wants to know what you think of the idea. Considering that the head of the FTA has revealed that he is skeptical of expensive rail projects, especially when cities can’t afford to maintain and operate the systems they have, they might genuinely be interested in some new ideas. After all, how livable can a city be where lots of people have given up their cars for transit only to find that the transit agency has stopped running for lack of funds?

Speaking of costly transit, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has just published a new paper on the cost of transit in that state. The paper also shows how Tennessee transit systems use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than cars or even SUVs. The only really efficient transit system, the paper shows, is vanpooling, which is the closest thing most transit agencies have to actual automobiles.

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Making a Virtue of Failure

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

The Antiplanner makes no secret of the fact that I love trains, especially passenger trains. Yet I know that passenger rail transportation is obsolete because it is expensive (compared with either autos or air), slow (compared with air and often with autos), and inconvenient (compared with autos). Unlike some people, I don’t believe taxpayers should subsidize my hobbies.

Despite this, rail advocates far and wide proclaim the virtues of high-speed rail and rail transit. Yet all too often, the virtues they claim are really faults in disguise.

One high-speed rail blogger, for example, criticizes the Antiplanner for endorsing an emerging technology that will significantly increase everyone’s mobility, not just those who have a driver’s license or who can afford to ride high-priced trains. Why dream about new technologies, the blogger says, when we can spend hundreds of billions on an obsolete technology instead?

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Chicago Rail Tragedy

By | | News commentary, Transportation
14 Comments

A sad story from Illinois: Phil Pagano, the head of Metra, Chicago’s commuter-rail agency, was recently accused of granting himself an unauthorized $56,000 bonus (on top of his regular pay of $270,000) in 2009. The agency initially denied it, but then announced it had suspended Pagano during its investigation, which later revealed that he had written himself forged signatures on checks totaling “about $100,000” (update: now up to $475,000).

In response, a few hours before a planned meeting with the agency’s board of directors, Pagano walked in front of one of his trains and stared into the face of the engineer as it ran him over. In his pocket investigators found “a copy of Metra’s procedures on how to handle a service disruption after a suicide.”

Without making light of this tragic situation, faithful Antiplanner ally Peter Samuel asks a good question: Why do we pay transit agency executives so much money in the first place? Samuel points out that the Illinois Tollway carries ten times as many passenger miles (and infinitely more freight) as Metra, yet the CEO of that agency makes only $189,000 a year.

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Unsustainable Austin

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

Austin (which the Antiplanner visited last week) is the latest city to discover that rail transit is unsustainable transportation. A recent state audit of Capital Metro finds that the agency “has a history of uncontrolled costs and overspending that cannot be sustained.”

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Capital Metro responds that the rail line is safe and claims it is addressing the other issues. But most of its actions are mere window dressing: creating new committees, interagency agreements, and so forth. Probably the best thing the agency can do is simply abandon the commuter-rail line, which would save taxpayers around $10 million a year.

Tucson Cost Overrun

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
19 Comments

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Why We Can’t Go Back

By | | Transportation
32 Comments

Last week, the Antiplanner attended a meeting about high-speed rail sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislators. One of the speakers represented Amtrak, and though she spoke for about 10 or 15 minutes, her entire presentation could be boiled down into one statement: “What Amtrak needs is money, money, and more money.” (Yes, she actually said that.)

This reminded me of a statement made by a representative of the New York City Transit authority last fall at a Federal Transit Administration conference about the deteriorating condition of older rail transit systems. Even though New York’s rail system is in much better shapes than the ones in Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia, the official admitted (in the last slide) that “there will never be enough money” to bring New York’s rail lines up to a state of good repair.

Rail transit and high-speed rail have bottomless appetites for tax dollars, partly because they are politically driven rather than being funded out of user fees. But there is an even more critical difference between modern passenger rail and past transportation innovations.

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How Do You Define Success?

By | | Transportation
47 Comments

All over the country, transit agencies splurge hundreds of millions of dollars building rail lines that hardly anyone uses, then declare the lines to be a great success. There is good reason for that: if they declare federally supported lines to be a failure and quit running them, they have to give the money back to the feds. Since there isn’t much market for holes in the ground, light-rail stations, and other expensive parts of rail infrastructure, it usually seems cheaper to just keep running the http://pharma-bi.com/2009/07/ buy cheap cialis ED is an inability to sustain an adequate erection throughout the sexual act. Also, do consult about generic levitra online generic levitra online your doctor before using these tablets as recommended. The safe use and knowledge of all pharma-bi.com cialis cost low is decreasing day by day. It should cheapest viagra uk not be taken along with any medicine containing nitrates as this may result in adverse side effects. lines.

How do ordinary taxpayers judge whether a transit line is really successful or the transit agency is just claiming it is because it is too embarrassed to admit it wasted so much money? To answer this question, the Antiplanner developed six different tests, including profitability, effects on ridership, and the famous cable-car test, and evaluated more than 70 rail transit systems in about 30 cities using these tests. Cato is publishing the resulting report, “Defining Success: The Case Against Rail Transit” today.