Search Results for: rail

California Rail Follies

By | | Transportation
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The California legislature based its approval of the sale of billions of dollars of bonds to start construction of high-speed rail partly on claims that the rail line would help revitalize California’s economy. But now a study from UCLA finds that Japan’s high-speed rail line, one of the most popular in the world, failed to boost that nation’s economy.

“Rather, the evidence suggests high-speed rail simply moves jobs around the geography without creating significant new employ- ment or economic activity” says the study. “As an engine of economic growth in and of itself, CHSR will have only a marginal impact at best.”

The California High-Speed Rail Authority responded to the study by trotting out an architect who claimed all sorts of benefits for the train. Asking an architect to respond to an economic analysis is like asking a plumber for a second opinion on your cancer diagnosis. The plumber might give you the answer you want, but probably not the right answer.

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Cold Feet on Rail Transit

By | | Transportation
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The Virginia legislature appears to have rejected a plan to spend $300 million in state money on construction of the Dulles rail line. This is only about 10 percent of the money needed to finish the line to Dulles airport, but it will put a crimp in plans to do so.

This is a line that everyone from the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA or Metro) to the Federal Transit Administration to then-Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters agreed should not be built. For Metro, not building the line was practically a matter of survival: it can’t afford to maintain the lines it has now, much less any new ones. On top of that, the Silver line will share tracks with the Orange and Blue lines in downtown Washington, and those tracks are already being used to capacity at rush hour. This means every Silver line train will require one less train on the Orange and Blue lines, increasing crowding and likely turning off riders.

For Peters and the FTA, it was simply a matter of cost-efficiency: studies showed that bus-rapid transit would work nearly as well as rail at a tiny fraction of the cost. But developers at Tysons Corner wanted to increase the density of their development, and Fairfax County planners said the area didn’t have the transportation facilities to support more density. So the developers convinced the Virginia Congressional delegation to persuade then-President Bush to overrule Peters’ decision.

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The Post: Not Even Loans for High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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The Washington Post, the newspaper of record from our nation’s capital, is somewhat of a bellwether of public opinion on high-speed rail. Back in 2009, when Obama first proposed to build a high-speed rail network, Post editorial writers were all for it as a way of reducing congestion. In 2010, the paper published an op ed by a National Geographic travel writer who argued that the “benefits of high-speed rail have long been apparent to anyone who has ridden Japan’s Shinkansen trains or France’s TGV.”

By 2011, though, the Post was having second thoughts. In January of that year, the paper argued that the nation should “hit the brakes” on the California high-speed trains, the only true high-speed rail in Obama’s plan (since Florida dropped out). (This editorial led to a letter expressing the opposite view from Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood.)

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FTA Questioned Honolulu Rail Boondoggle

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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Internal emails reveal that Federal Transit Administration officials were skeptical of Honolulu’s plan to spend $5.3 billion on a 20-mile rail transit line. City voters approved this line only after an expensive and hard-fought campaign. One FTA email accused the city of Honolulu of “lousy practices of public manipulation” and argued that the FTA should not only avoid being associated with it, it should “call them on it.”

This and other documents were turned over to plaintiffs in a lawsuit arguing that the city’s environmental impact statement (EIS) failed to consider a full range of alternatives. In a 2006 comment on the city’s plans to write the EIS, FTA staffer James Ryan noted, “We seem to be proceeding in the hallowed tradition of Honolulu rapid transit studies: never enough time to do it right, but lots of time to do it over.” Another FTA official, Joseph Ossi, replied, “This isn’t an FTA issue. Let the city deal with it. They have produced 3 failed projects and are well on their way to a fourth, so why is FTA wasting time on the City’s problems?”

“This is different,” a third FTA staffer, Raymond Sukys, answered. “This time [thanks to a tax increase] they have a huge cash flow which will build something. It seems likely that we will get involved in litigation again especially since we have an erroneous NOI out there. I do not think the FTA should be associated with their lousy practices of public manipulation and we should call them on it.” The “NOI” is the “notice of intent” to prepare an environmental impact statement, and Sukys apparently thought Honolulu’s NOI was insufficient because it failed to identify a full range of alternatives.

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Another Light-Rail Success Failure

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Hampton Roads Transit is claiming success six months after opening its light-rail line in Norfolk. The line is carrying an average of 4,642 riders each weekday, which is far greater than the 2,900 that had been forecast.

“Crowds” of as many as dozens of people look bored and apathetic at the opportunity to take free rides on the opening day for Norfolk’s light-rail line, August 19, 2011. Flickr photo by D. Allen Covey, VDOT.

The only problem is that, back in 2003, Hampton Roads Transit confidently predicted the 7.4-mile-long line would carry 10,400 riders each weekday in its opening year. Deft last-minute re-predictions of much lower numbers allow the the agency to claim success when actual ridership is less than 45 percent of the original prediction.

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The Rail Empire Strikes Back

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Rail advocates responded to the Antiplanner recent visit to Charlotte, NC, by inviting William Lind, who bills himself as “a conservative who supports rail transit,” to comment on Charlotte’s proposed Red Line project.

“Real conservatives like commuter trains,” says Lind. How does he know? Because the average income of people who ride commuter trains in Lake County, Illinois is $74,000 a year, while the average income of bus riders in that county is $14,000 a year. Lind takes it for granted that everybody knows that rich people are conservative, and in Lind’s mind rich conservatives know that they deserve to have expensive, tax-subsidized trains while poor people should be happy with relatively inexpensive tax-subsidized buses.

Unfortunately, warns Lind, some rail critics “present themselves as conservatives, but they are not.” I don’t know who he is talking about, since the Antiplanner never presented himself as conservative. Lind goes on to say that these pseudo-conservatives are really libertarians, the difference being that conservatives support rail transit “depending on the project’s merits,” while “libertarians oppose all rail transit all the time.”

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Detroit Light Rail

By | | Transportation
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Detroit’s plan to spend $550 million building a nine-mile light-rail line on Woodward Avenue would be laughable if it weren’t wasting so much money that could actually do something useful if spent on something else. Detroit leaders have convinced themselves that light rail is world-class transportation, that it will be the lynchpin of Detroit’s recovery, and that it will keep young people in the city.

A shadowy group of so-called private investors known as the M-1 Rail group have actually agreed to put up $100 million of the cost of the project. They aren’t expecting any financial return on this money; more than a third of this amount is coming from the S. H. Kresge Foundation and is being donated as an act of charity. Strangely, the arrangement almost foundered on the seemingly trivial question of whether the tracks should go down the middle of Woodward Avenue (as local residents preferred) or be in the curbside lane (as the M1 group preferred). One pundit went so far as to call this the “Lincoln-Douglas debate of our time.” So serious is this debate that one more transit agency leader has lost his job over rail transit.
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Somebody in Detroit should ask some more serious questions about light rail. If light rail can help urban revival, why did Portland need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing development along its light-rail lines? If light rail keeps young people in the city, why does Portland need an urban-growth boundary to do the same? Except for the claim that light rail is far more expensive than buses, about all the other claims for light rail are a bunch of lies aimed at draining the taxpayers (and, in Detroit’s case, some gullible foundation directors) of their money.

Reviving California High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The California High Speed Rail Authority has reason to be thankful this week as the U.S. Department of Transportation gave it another $900 million, keeping hopes alive for the state’s rail program. That means the feds have given the state a total of about $4.5 billion which, when matched with state bonds (which can only be sold when matched by other money) brings the authority’s total funds to $9 billion.

That’s less than 10 percent of what it will cost to build the San Francisco-to-Anaheim line. The authority plans to start building in the Fresno area next year; if it fails to start by September 30, it loses the federal dollars.

Some members of Congress from California want to take back the rail grants. But it is more likely that the only way to stop the authority from spending billions building a train to nowhere is for the legislature to deny its approval of bond sales.

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Even the Washington Post Opposes California High-Speed Rail

By | | Transportation
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Once a supporter, now the Washington Post‘s editorial page says, “Somebody, please, stop this train.”

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High-Speed Rail Is Still Dead (and Let’s Keep It That Way)

By | | News commentary, Transportation
22 Comments

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to spend a token $100 million on high-speed rail after its own transportation subcommittee had zeroed out funding for the program. The purpose, said a rail advocate with US PIRG, is “to keep things on life support until Congress comes to its senses.”

The only way Congress will “come to its senses” and support high-speed rail is if the Democrats take control of both the House and Senate. Does anything think that is going to happen soon? It doesn’t seem so inside the beltway, but to the Antiplanner, $100 million is a lot of money. To just casually throw that around to keep a rightfully defunct program on life support is ridiculous.
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Interesting that US PIRG gets described as a “consumer advocacy group.” The PIRGs were consumer advocates when they were challenging bait-and-switch marketing or promoting auto safety. But promoting a huge construction program whose product few consumers were use is not consumer advocacy; it is corporate advocacy. the Antiplanner wonders how long it will take before progressives come to their senses and figure that out.