Search Results for: rail

Another Rail Cost Overrun

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Metro Transit has raised the projected cost of the Twin Cities’ Southwest light-rail line to $2.86 billion, or $197 million per mile for the 14.5 mile line. The news stories say this is up from $2.0 billion, but the original projected cost was $1.25 billion for 15.8 miles or less than $80 million a mile (which is still outrageous for an inflexible, low-capacity system).

Light-rail trains pass through a half-empty downtown Minneapolis. Photo by Andrew Ciscel.

Considering that downtown Minneapolis is ranked as having the third-slowest recovery of the nation’s 56 largest urban areas, and Twin Cities light rail carried only 52 percent of pre-pandemic riders in November, this would be a good time for the region to scrap the project. As I’ve suggested before, it would cost a lot less to turn it into a rapid bus route than to complete the rail project. Continue reading →

BRT “Faster and Cheaper” Than Rail

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The World Bank is promoting bus-rapid transit as “green” and “sustainable transportation” that is “faster and cheaper to build than Metros,” meaning heavy rail. When operated with all-electric buses, says the agency, BRT will “cut life-threatening air pollutants” as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

A bus-rapid transit station in Dakar, Senegal. Photo courtesy of CETUD.

The World Bank is absolutely correct about the faster and cheaper part. However, it is overpromising when it comes to taking cars off the road. “Developing country cities that have not yet fully developed their land use and transportation infrastructure around cars can leapfrog car-centered culture and prioritize efficient, low-carbon urban transport that focuses on people rather than vehicles,” says a World Bank official. This is pure rhetoric that consigns developing cities to economic stagnation. Continue reading →

Building Rail It Can’t Afford to Operate

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Washington Metro is facing a $750 million shortfall in its 2025 budget and may have to cut service as soon as next spring. Meanwhile, its board of directors will be asked to approve an expansion of its Blue Line that will cost at least $30 billion and probably much more.

As the Antiplanner noted last July, the new line is supposedly needed because the existing Blue, Orange, and Silver lines all use the same tunnel under the Potomac River and the line can only handle 26 trains per hour. The Blue Line trains were running at capacity when the Silver Line opened, so Metro lost more Blue Line riders than it gained Silver Line riders when Blue Line trains were cut to make room for Silver Line trains. Continue reading →

“Studying” a Rail Line to Longmont

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Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) has announced that it is going to study the “commuter’s dream” of running a commuter rail line from downtown Denver to Longmont, Colorado. This line was originally supposed to be a part of the FasTracks plan approved by voters in 2004, but cost overruns combined with new ridership projections killed it.

One of the reasons why RTD had such large cost overruns was that the airport, Longmont, and several other lines were originally planned to be powered by Diesels but, after the 2004 election, RTD switched to electric power despite the higher costs. Photo by Jarrett Stewart.

FasTracks was supposed to build six new rail lines and a bus-rapid transit line from Denver to Boulder at a total cost of $4.8 billion. Proponents claimed that this cost was highly reliable and there was no way there would be any overruns. But soon after the election, they admitted that costs were creeping up and by 2007 they had ballooned to $7.9 billion. The cost of the Longmont line in particular went from $750 million to $1.5 billion. Continue reading →

Melbourne’s Rail Folly

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American cities are not the only ones building insane rail projects. Melbourne, Australia’s largest city, is currently building a 56-mile (90-kilometer) suburban rail line. Once projected to cost AU$50 billion (about US$32 billion), the projected costs have risen to AU$125 billion (about US$79 billion). Although construction has already begun, the city doesn’t expect to complete all 90 kilometers for 25 years, by which time the costs will probably have risen much higher.

The Melbourne Suburban Loop under construction. Photo by Rail Projects Victoria.

At the present projected cost, that’s more than $1.4 billion per mile in U.S. dollars, making it the most expensive (in dollars per mile) transit project in the world outside of New York City. One reason for the high cost is that it will all be underground, but plenty of other cities (other than New York) have been able to build subways for less than $1.4 billion a mile, and most of them much less than $1.0 billion a mile. Continue reading →

Biden’s Senior Rail Moment

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All during the debate over the 2021 infrastructure bill, President Biden kept talking about how much the country would benefit from high-speed rail even though there was no high-speed rail in his own version of the bill. He seems to be having another senior moment with his proposal to build a railroad from India to Europe via Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

The problem with this plan is there are 600 to 700 miles of Arabian Sea between India and United Arab Emirates. If you are shipping from India to Europe, once you transfer cargo from a train to a ship, you might as well run the ship all the way to Europe because it costs a lot less than transferring the cargo back to a train and running a train to Europe. Continue reading →

Chicago-St. Louis Rail Failure

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Nearly two months ago, the Antiplanner reported that, after spending $2 billion, the Chicago-St. Louis high-speed rail would be speeded up from an average speed of 55.7 miles per hour (for the fastest train in the corridor) to 59.6 miles per hour. These higher average speeds were to go into effect on June 26 and would supposedly reduce travel times between Chicago and St. Louis by half an hour from what they had been before spending the money.

I am reminded of this by an article in the paper edition of Trains magazine, which reported that trains were indeed speeded up on June 26. However it turns out the gains are even worse than I reported. Yes, one of the five trains in the corridor will go an average of 59.6 miles per hour (but the others will go slower). But the $2 billion spent in the corridor didn’t come close to fulfilling the promises made when the federal government handed out the funds in 2010. Continue reading →

Transit Ridership Down? Build More Rail!

By | | Transportation
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Like San Francisco BART, the DC Metro rail system is facing a fiscal cliff, with a $750 million projected shortfall in operating funds in 2025. So why is the agency considering spending tens of billions of dollars on a new rail extension that will increase annual operating costs by $200 million?

For a mere $40 billion or so, DC Metro Rail can go from this. . .

Like BART, DC’s rail system historically has covered a high percentage of its operating costs with fares. Though that has declined from 68 percent in 2011 to 48 percent in 2019, the agency was still more vulnerable to ridership declines than agencies such as San Jose’s VTA, which before the pandemic covered less than 10 percent of its operating costs out of fares. Continue reading →

France Bans Rail Competitors

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Supposedly, European high-speed trains are so successful that the airlines stop operating when new high-speed rail corridors open. The reality is much more dismal: in order to guarantee customers for its trains, France is banning airline flights in corridors served by high-speed rail. This is a tacit admission that government-owned trains can’t compete without forcibly shutting down competitors.

Under the new rule, commercial air flights are banned in corridors where trains can make the same journey in under 150 minutes. So far, this is limited to Paris-Bordeaux, Paris-Lyon, and Paris-Nantes. The French government wanted to extend it to five more city pairs, but the European Commission ruled that France could only ban air travel in corridors that had not just fast but frequent rail service. Members of France’s Green Party also want to extend it to corridors where trains make the journey in under 240 minutes. Continue reading →

Railroad Land Grants: Boon or Boondoggle?

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I wrote several posts for my other blog, Streamliner Memories, that are relevant here as well. Recent news stories have asked why projects like the California high-speed rail and Honolulu rail line are so expensive. The answer is that the politicians who support these projects don’t care about the cost because someone else will have to pay it. Or rather they do care but for them the cost is the benefit — the more they spend, the more might be turned into contributions to their future political campaigns from grateful contractors.

This 1939 report from the Department of the Interior lists 105 railroad, wagon road, canal, and river improvement land grants made by Congress in the 19th century and how many acres various transportation companies ended up receiving for those grants. A few of the grants, including the massive Northern Pacific grant, were still open with the grantees hoping to get several million more acres. Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of the report.

We saw an early example of this in the First Transcontinental Railroad and later railroads supported by large federal land grants. Railroads weren’t the only transportation projects supported by federal land grants: there were also canals, wagon roads, and river improvements. As it happens, I live near one of the wagon road projects that turned out to be a giant scam in which a few people got more than 860,000 acres of federal land for doing little more than driving a wagon across the state of Oregon. Continue reading →