Search Results for: rail projects

The Benefits and Costs of Tolling

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The costs of collecting electronic tolls are rapidly declining, particularly for roads that only accept electronic tolls. In 2009, when I was writing Gridlock, the best available estimates indicated that 12 to 23 percent of toll revenues went to collection costs, compared with just 3 percent for state gas taxes.

However, a recent paper from the Reason Foundation claims that the costs of collecting electronic tolls has now fallen to be almost as low as the costs of state gas tax collections. Moreover, once the benefits of using tolls to relieve traffic congestion are considered, tolls become a far less costly way to pay for roads.

Those traffic congestion benefits are the reason why the Antiplanner recently proposed that highways be refinanced out of tolls in the form of vehicle-mile fees rather than gas taxes. Congestion imposes a $100 billion-plus annual cost on Americans; we know how to fix it, and the only thing preventing that solution is inertia.

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Private Buses or Public Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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A team of graphics artists has attempted to map the private buses that carry workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, reports the Wall Street Journal. At least six employers–Apple, ebay, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo–offer such services, but they are very secretive about where they go and how many people they carry.

Click image for a larger view.

The artists who developed the map estimate that these private buses carry about a third as many people as CalTrains commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose. CalTrains cost taxpayers more than $110 million a year, but Silicon Valley firms obviously don’t believe they adequately serve their employees, probably because the rails don’t go near their campuses. Google alone has more than 100 buses in its fleet, about as many as serve the entire fixed-route system in the city of Stockton.

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Champions of Pork

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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For the White House to declare someone a “champion of change,” they apparently have to be a champion of pork. The first person listed helped plan the California high-speed rail system, whose projected costs have more than doubled in since voters approved it in 2008. The original cost projections, made in the late 1990s, were only $15 billion, but the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority has managed to push those costs up to more than $100 billion.

The second champion of change is the CEO of a company that is making electric buses. Each bus is supposed to save transit agencies $100,000 a year in fuel costs (though they don’t say how much the electricity costs). Sounds good, except that three buses and two charging stations cost $5.6 million, which is more than $1.8 million a bus. Since an ordinary bus costs about $300,000, that means it will take more than 15 years to recover the extra cost. Guess the expected lifespan of a bus (hint: it is three years less than 15).

Not only that, “without government funding for research and development, Proterra wouldn’t be in its current position” to make these buses, according to the champion of change. So the buses required subsidies to develop, they require subsidies to buy, and the Antiplanner won’t be surprised if they require subsidies to operate.

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FTA Cost-Effectiveness Rule

By | | Transportation
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As if projects such as the Honolulu rail line aren’t a big enough waste of money, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood is seeking to change the Federal Transit Administration’s process for evaluating grant proposals for rail projects. As if to illustrate the slow and cumbersome nature of federal programs, LaHood originally proposed to revise these rules more than two years ago, and now we are only at the stage of having a first draft for public comment.

In any case, the Antiplanner submitted comments arguing that LaHood’s proposal violates the law in three ways. First, the law requires that transit agencies evaluate the cost effectiveness of transit projects by comparing them with a full range of alternatives. But the proposed rules only require that the cost effectiveness of proposed projects be compared with a “no action” alternative. If no other alternatives are considered, no one will know if a project is truly the most cost-effective way of improving transit.

Second, the law requires that projects be judged based on their ability to improve mobility and reduce congestion. Yet the proposed rules actually reward transit agencies for increasing congestion. While the existing rules require that cost effectiveness be calculated in terms of the cost of saving people’s time, including the time of auto users as well as transit riders, the new rules base cost effectiveness solely on the cost of gaining new transit riders. This means that a project that increases congestion, leading some people to ride transit to escape traffic, will actually be scored higher than one that does not increase congestion.

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Designed to Fail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
38 Comments

Are American cities competing to see which can come up with the most ridiculous transit proposals? If so, Honolulu will probably win, hands down. The nation’s 52nd-largest urban area has only about 950,000 people, yet it is spending $5.3 billion, or more than $5,500 per resident, to build a single 20-mile rail line. That’s probably a greater cost per person than any rail system ever built–and it is just for one line, not a complete system.

The line will be entirely elevated, yet they plan to run just two-car trains, each “train” being about the length of a typical light-rail car (just under 100 feet). This means it will have the high costs of heavy rail and the capacity limits of light rail.

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Letting the Infrastructure Crumble

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
37 Comments

Portland can spend hundreds of millions on streetcars and billions on light rail. But it is letting its most-valuable asset–the city’s $5 billion road system–fall apart, says an expose featured in yesterday’s Oregonian. The city’s transportation department, says the article, has enough money to hire eight new employees to oversee streetcars, build more than a dozen miles of new bike paths, and co-sponsor a Rail-volution conference in Los Angeles. But it doesn’t have enough many to repave any badly deteriorating street until 2017 at the earliest.

Even when the federal government was handing out stimulus funds in 2009, Portland decided not to put any of the funds into its streets. None of its projects, the city claims, were “shovel-ready” (as if the high-speed rail projects that did get funded were in any sense shovel-ready).

It is hard to see this as anything but malign neglect. Smart-growth advocates (such as Todd Litman, who the Antiplanner debated last week) insist they aren’t anti-automobile. But they are for spending all your transportation dollars on alternatives to the automobile even as your bridges and streets fall apart.

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Why Congress Should End New Starts

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The House Republican transportation bill ends gas tax subsidies of transit and requires that any new rail projects receiving “New Starts” grants meet strict financial tests and not simply be awarded on the basis of some vague concept such as “livability.” In response, Secretary of Livability Ray LaHood says it is vital to keep funding transit out of gas taxes. As an example, he cites the Portland-to-Milwaukie light-rail line, which he says is “an integral part of rebuilding the nation’s economy.”

Really? This 7.3-mile line line is expected to cost $1.5 billion and carry just 9,300 new riders (that is, people who weren’t previously riding the bus) each weekday. Since most people ride round trip, that 4,650 round-trip riders a day. The high cost is enough money to buy each of those new round-trip riders a new Toyota Prius every year for the 30-year life of the project.

This will be the most expensive, and one of the least-used, light-rail lines in Portland. The light-rail will be slower than many of the buses in the corridor–buses that will be cancelled when the rail line opens.

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The Future of New Starts

By | | Transportation
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Should federal transportation funds be distributed to states and cities based on fixed criteria, such as population and land area, or should they be handed out based on the political whims of whoever is in power at the moment? While Republicans in Congress are moving in the former direction, the Obama administration is moving towards the latter approach.

Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed a surface transportation reauthorization bill that would use formulas to distributed almost all federal gas taxes. Among other things, this would eliminate the New Starts transit fund, a multi-billion-dollar annual fund that gives cities incentives to plan high-cost rail transit projects, so they can get “their share” of federal dollars, when low-cost buses would work just as well.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has published draft rules revising the New Starts planning process by making the criteria for transit funding more vague (and therefore more political) than ever before. Where House Republicans would take the politics out of transit funding by turning transit grants into formula funds, the administration’s new rules make transit funding more political than ever by creating vague new criteria that cities can use to justify rail transit projects.

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Highway Cost Overruns

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Numerous state highway programs have suffered cost overruns, say the Gannett papers (which include USA Today). What’s striking from the story, however, is how small and rare the cost overruns really are.

The papers found overruns in 19 states, but they focused on projects that actually had overruns and did not reveal how many projects had no overruns. Of the overruns they found, many were less than 2 percent, most were less than 5 percent, and only three–in New Jersey, New York, and Ohio–were more than 10 percent. The unweighted average was around 7 percent. Since Gannett did not discuss any projects that had zero overruns, the real average must be much less.

This contrasts sharply with rail transit cost overruns, which have steadily averaged around 40 percent. Nearly 10 years ago, Bent Flyvbjerg reported that transit cost overruns in the United States averaged 41 percent while highway overruns averaged 8 percent. More recent research has found similar rail overruns, but the Gannett analysis suggests that highway overruns remain well under 10 percent.

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Moving in for the Kill–or to Be Fleeced?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Voice of Orange County reports that opponents of California’s high-speed rail boondoggle are “moving in for the kill.” But the article presents no clear path for killing the train to nowhere. While there are lawsuits, opponents in Congress, and critics in the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, the final decision will be made by the Democrat-dominated state legislature, which takes its cue from Governor Jerry Brown, who has endorsed the spending of $7 billion on a rail line that few will ever use.

The latest objective poll shows that 37 percent of the people who voted for high-speed rail in 2008 have changed their minds and would vote against it today now that the cost has doubled and the admitted benefits declined. (Only 3 percent of people who voted no say they would vote yes today.)

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