Search Results for: rail projects

A Horrible Way to Be Proven Right

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday was not a proud day for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). The agency spent close to $800 million of federal funds on a so-called high-speed rail project between Seattle and Portland–only “so-called” because top speeds would be just 79 mph, which is conventional rail. Much of the money was spent upgrading existing tracks to give passenger trains a shorter (but less scenic) route through and around Tacoma.

As you probably know, the very first train to use this route derailed on an overpass over Interstate 5, blocking half the freeway and killing at least three, and probably more, passengers. It so happens that Mayor Don Anderson of Lakewood, Washington–about 10 miles north of the crash–warned WSDOT on December 5 that it was not taking safety seriously enough. “This project was never needed and endangers our citizens,” he declared.

To be fair, Mayor Anderson was worried that grade crossings in Lakewood were inadequately protected for 79-mph trains. But his comments more generally suggest that WSDOT was putting the goal of saving Seattle-Portland passengers ten minutes of time–increasing average speeds by just 2.7 mph–ahead of safety. Continue reading →

Throwing Money at Housing Won’t Work

By | | Housing
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Recognizing that “rents are going up much faster than the incomes” in places like New York and Los Angeles, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson recently told NPR that cities need to move “away from the concept that only the government can solve this problem by throwing more money at it.” In response, Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler tweeted, “Secretary Carson, if you don’t think gov’t can provide solutions, then you should step aside and allow someone up to the task to lead.” Apparently, in Oregon it is an apostasy to think that any problem can’t be solved by throwing tax dollars at it.

This is particularly ironic when Portland is now suffering cost overruns on its so-called affordable housing projects comparable to those for its light-rail projects. One project that was supposed to cost $200,000 per unit is coming in at $285,000 per unit–a 42.5 percent overrun. Wheeler proudly tweeted that the city just approved another project with 203 units of so-called affordable housing. Because home prices in a market of nearly 820,000 homes are going to be significantly influenced by the subsidized construction of 203 more–Not!

As the Antiplanner previously noted, “affordable housing is not the same as housing affordability.” Affordable housing is government subsidized housing for people too poor to afford housing. It is not intended or expected to influence the overall housing market because it does nothing about the underlying conditions that have made housing expensive in the first place. The problem in Portland, and the entire West Coast, is that housing is unaffordable to almost everyone, not just the very poor, and the only real solution for most people is to move away. Continue reading →

Transit’s Accelerating Decline

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
3 Comments

Nationwide transit ridership in September, 2017, was 4.6 percent less than in the same month in 2016. That compares to a 3.5 percent drop in August and a 2.8 percent drop in July. Transit ridership for the first nine months of 2017 was 3.0 percent less than the same months in 2016.

These numbers are from the latest monthly data (8.3-MB) from the National Transit Database. As usual, the Antiplanner has enhanced this file (7.9-MB) by adding columns showing annual totals and rows showing totals by transit agency (starting at row 2100) and for the largest 200 urbanized areas (starting at row 3100).

A few months ago, Streetsblog observed that cities such as Houston and Seattle that had redesigned their bus routes (generally by replacing a hub-and-spoke system with a grid system) seemed to be exempt from the decline in transit ridership. That’s no longer the case, as Houston’s ridership declined by 4.3 percent in September and is down by 1.5 percent for the year to date. Continue reading →

Some People Never Learn

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
7 Comments

Denver’s FasTracks plan to build 119 miles of rail transit has failed, reports an article in The Hill — and you know it must be true because the Antiplanner wrote it. The rail lines went way over budget, construction is late, two of the lines that have opened have so few riders that RTD has had to reduce service, and a third line is suffering from technical problems that were solved by the private railroads more than 80 years ago. Despite, or because of, the new rail lines, the share of Denver-area commuters taking transit to work has declined from 5.4 to 4.6 percent.

All of this was totally predictable, and in fact it was predicted by Ralph Stanley, former administrator of the Urban Mass Transit Administration (predecessor to the Federal Transit Administration), in a speech given in Colorado in 1996 and that someone coincidentally sent me yesterday. This speech is interesting enough that I’ve reproduced it below.

Despite this clear failure, rail die hards want even more obsolete transportation in Colorado, as there is now a proposal to run trains from Ft. Collins to Pueblo. Supporters point to the fact that Albuquerque and Salt Lake City both have long-distance commuter trains, but neglect to mention that, by any reasonable measure, those trains are failures too. Continue reading →

The Damage Done by Federal Funding

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Despite the fact that the Trump administration has said that will not sign more full-funding grant agreements for streetcar and light-rail projects, and there are no grant agreements for a Ft. Lauderdale streetcar, someone in the Department of Transportation gave Ft. Lauderdale nearly $61 million for the city’s inane streetcar project. When I asked DC transportation experts about it, the only answer I could get is that the department was “forced” to do so.

So now it is absolutely clear that transit capital grants are given out solely for political purposes, not because they make any economic or transportation sense. While the case could be once made that these projects went through some kind of screening process, today (thanks largely to rule changes made during the Obama administration) the only screening is a fill-in-the-blank checklist.

The good news is that Ft. Lauderdale opened the bids for the streetcar construction that was originally projected to cost $142 million, and it now appears the costs will be closer to $270 million. The bad news is that the city will now be desperate not to give up the $61 million from the feds and will find some way to build it anyway. Continue reading →

This Is Why Cap-and-Trade Is Stupid

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
4 Comments

Despite the fact that Los Angeles voters agreed to spend $120 billion on light rail and related transportation projects last November, the region’s transit agency, Metro, says it has a $280 million shortfall in extending its Gold light-rail line 12.4 miles to Montclair. Cap-and-trade to the rescue! Members of the state legislature representing the area have proposed to use cap-and-trade funds to fill the gap.

The cap-and-trade or emissions trading system allows people to spend money buying the right to emit greenhouse gases, and the state uses that money to do things that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The result is a more efficient allocation of resources than if the state were to simply order everyone to reduce emissions by an arbitrary amount.

So spending cap-and-trade revenues on light rail would make sense if light rail reduces greenhouse gas emissions. But does it? According to page 4.9-33 of the supplemental environmental impact report for the project, the line would actually increase emissions. But that’s okay, says the report, because “the project would contribute less than 0.00001% to the GHG burden for the planet.” Continue reading →

Purple Line Losers

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Travelers and taxpayers both lose as Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao caved in to Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan and Democratic Congressional delegation by approving federal funding for the Purple Line. As Antiplanner readers know, the state’s own transportation analysis found that the Purple Line will dramatically increase congestion in Montgomery County suburbs of Washington DC, while the $5.6 billion cost represents exactly $5.6 billion that could have been spent to better effect on just about anything else: buses, roads, schools, or health care, to name a few things.

Administration officials justified the decision by saying that the project was too far along to cancel and the planned public-private partnership was something that President Trump wants to encourage. But, in this case at least, the public-private partnership does not save any money or produce any better service; it is merely a way of avoiding debt limits because the debt from the project will be on the books of the private partner, not the public agency.

As for being too far along to stop, every project on FTA’s New Starts and Small Starts list has already received some federal money for engineering and design work. The Department of Transportation recently told Durham to go ahead with engineering work on its light-rail project, so it too will presumably reach the point where it is “too far along” to stop. Continue reading →

House Bill Kills Tiger, Cuts New Starts,
Keeps Amtrak, Earmarks Gateway

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The House Appropriations Committee has released a proposed 2018 transportation funding bill that follows the administration’s proposal to end the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program. This program, which spent $500 million a year funding numerous streetcar projects and other boondoggles around the country, was originally created to stimulate the economy. While there is no evidence that it actually did stimulate the economy, the economy arguably doesn’t need to be stimulated any more.

The bill funds $2.75 billion (a $500 million reduction from 2017) for the transit capital investment program (a.k.a. New Starts) and directs the Secretary of Transportation to “continue to administer” the program in accordance with the law. However, it doesn’t specifically mandate that the secretary sign any new full funding grant agreements, and so long as they remain unsigned, projects without such agreements can’t be funded.

As the Antiplanner predicted, the House rejected the administration’s proposal to stop funding Amtrak long-distance trains. Half the states are served only by long-distance trains, so cutting those trains effectively tells half of Congress that their interests are less important than those of the other half. The administration would be done better to propose to give Amtrak incentives to increase ridership in the form of 10 cents in subsidies per passenger mile carried. Since current federal subsidies average more than 20 cents a passenger mile (plus more from the states), this proposal would have led to a debate over “how much should the subsidy be?” rather than “which states should get subsidies?” Continue reading →

Tax You, Tax Them, Tax Everyone Else

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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To help “close a budget gap,” Washington Metro is scheduled to raise fares and cut service later this month. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which represents 88 percent of Metro’s employees, calls this the “pay more, get less” plan.

In response, the union issued its own plan to cut fares and increase service. It could have called this the “pay less, get more” plan, but instead it called it “fund it, fix it, make it fair.” The union didn’t originate this slogan; instead, it seems to be a mantra for the “transit justice” community, which seems to believe that, because a few low-income people ride transit, everyone should be subsidized.

For the “fund it” part of the plan, the union calls for the creation of assessment districts that would pay fees–not taxes–to help run the system. The union plan tries to imply that only the wealthy owners of properties whose values are enhanced by the transit system would have to pay, but when an assessment district was created to fund construction of the Silver Line, owners of properties miles away from any transit station were forced to pay as much as those next door to a station. Continue reading →

Stop the COPs

By | | Transportation
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One of the issues in the Twin Cities is whether to build the Southwest light-rail line from Minneapolis to the wealthy suburb of Eden Prairie. As is typical of successive light-rail projects, the Southwest line is expected to cost twice as much as the region’s previous line, which cost twice as much as the one before that. In the case of the Southwest line, that means a current projected cost of $1.858 billion, which is up from the previous estimate of $1.25 billion for what was going to be a longer line (15.8 miles vs. 14.5 miles) just five years ago.

When the projected cost had reached $1.77 billion, the plan called for the state of Minnesota to contribute $160 million. But, fed up with cost overruns, the state legislature backed out, leaving a large hole in the project’s budget. The feds had promised to pay for half provided the state and local governments secured the other half. To keep the feds from also backing out, the transit agency had to find a spare $160 million.

In the Twin Cities, the transit agency is also the metropolitan planning organization whose purpose is to distribute transportation funds to various transit projects and local road agencies, which creates a suspicious conflict of interest. The Metropolitan Council has unsurprisingly decided that transit is the best way to relieve congestion even though light rail actually makes congestion worse. However, most of the federal and state gas taxes it receives can’t be spent on transit, so it can’t simply use them to fill in the $160 million gap in the Southwest route’s budget.

Continue reading →