Search Results for: rail projects

A Critique of LA Metro’s 28 by 2028 Plan

By | | Policy brief
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This policy brief is a summary of a lengthy report by Thomas Rubin and James Moore that was recently published by the Reason Foundation as fifteen separate documents. A complete copy of their report in one document, with a few error corrections and other improvements, can be downloaded here.

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

In February 2019, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) board of directors adopted the 28 by 2028 Plan, which proposes to complete 28 major transportation projects prior to the beginning of the 2028 Los Angeles summer Olympics. This proposal includes 20 projects specified in Measure M, a 2016 sales tax ballot measure, plus accelerates the completion of eight more projects.

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41. Fighting FasTracks

By | | Iconoclast
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Not long after the Preserving the American Dream conference, I was approached by Jon Caldara, who had attended the conference and encouraged me to form an American Dream Coalition. But now he wanted me to come work for his organization, the Independence Institute, Colorado’s free-market think tank.

Jon came to lead the Independence Institute via an unusual path. He had a business doing stage lighting for rock-and-roll bands when he decided to run for the board of directors of Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), whose fifteen members are elected from individual districts. Jon got himself elected by the Boulder district in 1994 and was later named board chair. Although he was unable to prevent RTD from putting light rail on the ballot in 1997, he led a successful campaign against the tax increase. As a result, the institute offered him the job of being its director in 1998.

At the time, Denver already had one light-rail line that, ironically, had been built as the indirect result of the Independent Institute’s actions. The institute’s founder, John Andrews, helped persuade the state legislature to require that RTD contract out a portion of its bus routes—initially 20 percent, later half—to private operators. This reduced costs by almost 50 percent per vehicle mile. Andrews expected RTD would spend the savings expanding bus service. Instead, it used the funds to build the region’s first light-rail line, which in the long run proved to be more wasteful than letting RTD operate all of its buses. Continue reading →

Seattle’s Anti-Auto Policies Hurt the Poor

By | | Policy brief
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Late last month, the Department of Transportation signed a full-funding grant agreement with Seattle’s Sound Transit to partly fund a 7.8-mile light-rail extension to Federal Way, a community midway between Seattle and Tacoma. While the Trump administration has resisted signing any new full-funding grant agreements, insiders say that the department has had to a sign a few because Congress has appropriated the funds, so it is trying to pick the least offensive projects before Congress forces it to spend the money on even worse projects.

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

While there are truly no light-rail projects that are inoffensive, the Federal Way project is worse than most. With a total cost of nearly $3.2 billion, the line is projected to cost more than $400 million per mile, which is absurdly expensive for a low-capacity transit project. Of course, there have been even worse ones, such as the Honolulu rail project, which will cost at least $450 million per mile, and Seattle’s own University line, which cost $626 million per mile. But the average light-rail project now in planning or under construction is “only” $200 million a mile, which itself is outrageous considering the first light-rail projects built in this country cost (in today’s dollars) under $40 million per mile. Continue reading →

A Trillion Here, a Trillion There . . .

By | | Transportation
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Even as California governor Gavin Newsome blames the state’s high-speed rail debacle on the consultants, President Trump and congressional Democrats have tenatively agreed to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure. Some have drawn the wrong lesson from California’s problems, suggesting that government should do everything itself, that privatization is wasteful, and government control is efficient.

In fact, it’s not the consultants, stupid! Nor is it the private sector in general, which has incentives to be efficient so long as it has to rely on market forces rather than a big-government sugar daddy. As the Cato Institute’s David Boaz points out, the real problem is the iron triangle of bureaucrats, elected officials, and private interests (including consultants, contractors, and unions) who benefit from big-government programs. All of them work together to get the programs approved and then have plausible deniability when things inevitably go wrong.

No one should have been surprised that the California project cost far more than originally projected. Wendell Cox and Joseph Vranich predicted it months before voters went to the polls in 2008 (and even their high estimate of $61 billion — $71 billion in today’s dollars — turned out to be low). As the Antiplanner has shown, almost every passenger rail project built by government in the last half century has had a large cost overrun. Continue reading →

Death of a Megafolly

By | | Transportation
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Duke University’s basketball teams inspire hostility nationwide, but now the school has earned the scorn of of nearby community leaders due to its rejection of the $3-billion Durham-Orange counties light-rail project. In refusing to donate land for the rail right of way, Duke cited concerns about electromagnetic interference, vibration, and other threats to Duke research and medical programs.

$151 million a mile to take 0.08 percent of vehicles off the road.

Some argued that Duke’s decision left the project only “99 percent dead” because the GoTriangle transit agency could use eminent domain to take the land from Duke. But, nearly three weeks after Duke made its decision, the GoTriangle board “unanimously but reluctantly” voted to kill the project. Continue reading →

Purple Line Will Be Late and Overbudget

By | | Transportation
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Local officials are “astounded,” astounded I tell you, that Maryland’s Purple Line will be nearly a year late and at least $215 million over budget. The line is being built under a public-private partnership contract, which transit officials claim saves money. But apparently they forgot to write into the contract that there could be no cost overruns. (In fact, public-private partnership contracts are mainly a way of avoiding legal debt limits, since private partner borrowings don’t count against the public partner’s debt even though the contract obligates the public to pay the private partner enough to repay the debt.)

Until recently, the state of Maryland, which is overseeing the project, has claimed that the line would open on time, that is, by March 2022. But now the private partners have informed the state that it cannot possibly open before February, 2023.

The 16-mile light-rail line was supposed to cost $2.0 billion, which was a condition of getting support for the project by Maryland Governor Hogan. But the Federal Transit Administration says it will really cost $2.4 billion, which includes some costs that the Maryland Transit Authority hid from the governor. That’s at least $500 million more than it was expected to cost back in 2011. The latest overrun will increase the total cost by nearly 10 percent. Continue reading →

Putting Transit Over People

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A southern California elected official is challenging the notion that the region can solve its congestion problems by putting more money into transit. Richard Bailey, the mayor of Coronado, has written an op ed titled “It’s time to put roads over transit.” Bailey argues that it is wasteful to put more than 50 percent of the San Diego region’s transportation dollars into transit when transit carries just 3.5 percent of the region’s commuters. He hopes to influence the urban area’s next regional transportation plan.

Bailey’s article caught the attention of a local news station that also interviewed transit advocate Colin Parent (starting at 1:05). Parent noted that there are 64,000 households in San Diego County that don’t have a car and cutting transit would hurt those people who use it as “their primary means of transportation.” Continue reading →

The Utah Transit Authority Is No More

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Utah Transit Authority is dead. Long live the Transit District of Utah! Actually, it would be better for taxpayers and most travelers if it didn’t live very long.

“Lavish” is a word that applied to the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which until last week served Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Orem. As of 2016, the agency had spent $1.4 billion in capital costs on commuter trains that carried an average of 8,100 round trips per day. That alone is enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every round-trip rider every three years for the next 20 years. On top of that, fares cover just 15 percent of operating costs.

The people who run the agency are also lavishly paid. A 2014 legislative audit revealed that the agency’s general manager was paid $350,000 a year, including benefits. He wasn’t even the highest-paid person in the agency: the rail service manager was paid more than $450,000. At least one other executive was paid more than $300,000 a year. For comparison, Utah’s governor is paid around $150,000 a year and the head of the state department of transportation receives around $221,000 a year. Continue reading →

What Does San Antonio Deserve?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Another famous H.L. Mencken quote is, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The Antiplanner was reminded of this by a headline on the San Antonio Express-News editorial page declaring that San Antonio needs “a transit plan the city deserves.” According to the editorial writer, that plan involves a “rapid transit” system that will “entice people out of their vehicles,” “connect all parts of San Antonio,” and “truly free people from traffic.”

The editorial board must not think very highly of San Antonio. It apparently believes that San Antonio residents deserve to pay billions of dollars in taxes to build an expensive transit system that will be regularly used by less than 5 percent of the people. It also believes they deserve the huge traffic congestion that will accompany construction as well as the lies, cost overruns, and ridership shortfalls that are almost invariably associated with transit megaprojects.

It is also possible that the editorial board simply doesn’t know what it is writing about. For one thing, it seems to think that “rapid transit” means fast transportation. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s Transit Fact Book, rapid rail transit (also known as heavy rail) averages just 20 mph while rapid bus averages less than 11 mph. The average speed of auto driving in San Antonio is 33 mph, so rapid transit is not likely to persuade many to stop driving. Continue reading →

2017: Year 1 of Driverless Cars

By | | Transportation
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This year may be remembered as the year that driverless cars became real. This is because Waymo has officially started operating driverless cars, without back-up drivers, in a public ride-sharing service in several suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.

Driverless cars are legal in most states so long as a licensed driver is at the wheel ready to take over if there is a problem the computer can’t handle. Without the back-up driver, they technically aren’t legal anywhere. But the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, has promoted a “rules-free environment” for driverless car experimentation.

This past year was also a record year for Amtrak. This puts the lie to transit-agency claims that low fuel prices are the main culprit behind recent ridership declines. An interviewer asked five transit executives what their most important challenges were and not one of them mentioned competition from ride-sharing companies. Like transit, Amtrak must compete with modes that benefit from low fuel prices, but so far it doesn’t have to deal with ride sharing. The fact that it is doing fine shows that ride sharing, not low fuel prices, are the most important source of transit woes. Continue reading →