Search Results for: rail

More Overbudget Rail Projects

By | | News commentary, Transportation
16 Comments

The planned Honolulu rail line is likely to go at least 30 percent over its projected costs, and ridership is likely to be 30 percent less than forecast, according to a new report commissioned and released by Hawaii’s governor. The report cost $350,000, which means it commands more respect than if one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies had written it for free. (Actually, one of the Antiplanner’s faithful allies, Tom Rubin, did help write the report–but not for free.)

The report says the rail line, which the city projected would cost $5.5 billion, is likely to cost at least $1.7 billion more. While local voters approved a sales tax increase to pay for the line, the report projects that tax will be insufficient to pay for the rail line. Over the next 30 years, “The total capital and operating subsidy paid by local taxpayers” on top of the sales tax “is estimate to range from $9.3 billion . . . to $14.5 billion.”

“Transit system usage and fare revenue are likely to be substantially lower than is project,” adds the report, “since the Plan’s projection would require an unprecedented and unrealistic growth in transit utilization for a city that already has one of the highest transit utilization rates in the country.” Update:The full report is downloadable from a state web site. Continue reading →

Gold-Plated High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

Recently, someone asked the Antiplanner why Amtrak’s high-speed rail plan is so expensive. They were referring to a proposal published in late October to increase speeds in Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor to 220 mph.

The plan calls for spending $117 billion in the 427-mile corridor, for an average cost of nearly $275 million per mile. That’s almost ten times Florida’s projected cost of $30 million per mile and close to three times California’s projected cost of about $95 million per mile. Wikipedia reports that France kept the cost of one line down to $25 million per mile, but only by making compromises with grades and curvature. Continue reading →

Arithmetic-Challenged Favor High-Speed Rail

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
45 Comments

On Monday, the Washington Post published a devastating critique of high-speed rail written by journalist Robert Samuelson. In fewer than 800 words, Samuelson blows up just about all the arguments put forth in favor of rail. An 8-word summary: costs are too high and benefits too low.

One person who remains unconvinced is the popular innumerate, Matthew Yglesias. Normally I would not personalize an issue by calling attention to someone’s disability, in this case Yglesias’ inability to deal with simple arithmetic. But by describing me as a “car-subsidy shill,” Yglesias shows he is math challenged.

Apparently, if you believe, as I do, that all modes of transportation should be paid for by users, and not by tax subsidies, then you, too, are a “car-subsidy shill.” Here is a simple lesson in arithmetic: if users pay for all of something, then subsidies are zero. That makes me a “zero-subsidy shill.”

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Phoenix Transit Cuts: Caused by Light Rail?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Phoenix’s transit agency, Valley Metro, claims that its new light-rail line is a great success, but the Antiplanner is reserving judgment until we have actual data. In the meantime, news reports indicate that Valley Metro is failing to improve bus service as promised when voters agreed to increase the sales tax to support “roads and rail” in 2004.

Of course, the agency blames the problem on the economy. But, as the Coyote blog points out, this is disingenuous. Nearly half of transit’s share of the sales tax increase goes for light rail, and most of that goes to pay back the loans incurred to build the light rail.

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NJ Governor Cancels Raildoggle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
17 Comments

The big transportation news while the Antiplanner was in Japan was that New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie cancelled a major rail construction project: a planned new tunnel under the Hudson River. Spurred by cost overruns, Christie said “far more than New Jersey taxpayers can afford and the only prudent move is to end this project.” The tunnel was originally projected to cost $5 billion, but the latest estimates are as high as $14 billion.

Soon after the announcement, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood met with Christie to twist his arm “present a number of options” to keep the tunnel project alive. Christie agreed to revisit the decision, though he remains painfully aware that the project is ruinously expensive for New Jersey.

Christie’s decision, assuming it is sustained, raises an intriguing question: what other raildoggles are susceptible to similar cancellation by a single official such as a governor or mayor? This is especially pertinent as many fiscally conservative candidates are likely to take office in January.

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Another Rail Project Goes Overbudget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
15 Comments

With phase 1 already under construction, planners now say that phase 2 of Washington’s Dulles Airport rail line will cost almost 50 percent more than previously projected. Of course, the bus-rapid transit project that most people wanted could be running today at a fraction of the cost.

One way to save money, planners say, would be to build the terminus of the project so far away from the Dulles Air terminal that hardly anyone will want to walk to or from the rail line. Of course, if no one rides it, that would also mitigate one of the other problems the rail line is going to cause: congestion on the subway route in downtown Washington.

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High-Speed Rail Deathwatch

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
4 Comments

Will a high-speed rail line ever be built from San Francisco to Los Angeles? The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) has less than 10 percent of the money it needs to build this line. The plan is increasingly under fire from local and state organizations. On one hand, President Obama’s vague and controversial proposal to spend $50 billion to “rebuild 150,000 miles of roads [and] construct and maintain 4,000 miles of railway” could keep the California project alive. On the other hand, if Republican Meg Whitman is elected state governor this November, she could kill the program.

Can’t afford to build it; can’t afford to run it. Maybe it isn’t needed?

A recent op ed in the San Francisco Chronicle succinctly points out that projected costs have nearly doubled since voters approved the plan, adequate funding is unavailable, and–“with 10 airports and six competing airlines”–the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor doesn’t need high-speed rail anyway.

Perhaps most important, the measure approved by voters in 2008 forbade any tax subsidies for operations. Yet recent recalculations of ridership projections and costs make it clear that fares will never cover operating costs, so even if they build it, they would not be able to run it (at least, without changing the law and finding money for operating subsidies).

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More Rail Skeptics

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

“We need to rethink rail,” says Fred Jandt, the editor of Mass Transit magazine. After first defending his credentials as a rail and transit advocate, he admits, “Rail is expensive.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it is “prohibitively” expensive, he says, “but it may be something we need to rethink.”

This need-to-rethink was inspired by Joel Kotkin’s recent article in Forbes. Though Jandt is put off by Kotkin’s use of the word “boondoggle,” he admits that Kotkin’s “piece was more carefully considered with numbers to back up the writer’s arguments.” (Kotkin’s numbers come from Antiplanner allies Tom Rubin and, no doubt, Wendell Cox.)

It is hard to tell from Jandt’s rambling blog post just how he thinks rail can be rethought, but he suggests that “we need something in-between what we have for rail and what we have for buses” and points out that “most of the movement has been made on the bus side. Buses have moved more toward trains than the other way around.” In other words, buses are flexible: they can act like buses, but they can also act like railcars (i.e, bus-rapid transit). Railcars can act like railcars, but they can’t act like buses.
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We Want High-Speed Rail, As Long As It Is Free

By | | News commentary, Transportation
21 Comments

Americans want high-speed rail, as long as someone else pays for it. States are chuffed upset, for example, because the federal government now says it wants the states to put up 20 percent of the capital cost. The original Federal Railroad Administration grant guidelines issued back in 2008 suggested that the feds might pay all of the costs. Though they added that states that provided matching funds might be more likely to get federal grants, no doubt some states feel betrayed by this change of policy.

Someone is going to say, “but the federal government paid 90 percent of the cost of interstate freeways, so why will it only pay 80 percent of the cost of rail?” The crucial difference is that both the federal and the state shares of the interstates were paid out of gas taxes, in other words, user fees. (Though called a “tax,” the gas tax was a user fee because it was imposed only on purchasers of gasoline–98 percent of which was used for driving–and because state gas taxes from the start, and federal gas taxes after 1956, were dedicated to highways.)

The interstates were also built on a pay-as-you-go basis: no borrowing in anticipation of future federal gas tax revenues. This introduced feedback into the system: if people didn’t drive, there was no money to build roads. That’s why it took longer than expected to complete the systems: not because people didn’t drive on the interstates–they drove on them like crazy–but because neither Congress nor the states indexed gas taxes to inflation.

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A Light-Rail Line That Pays for Itself?

By | | Transportation
23 Comments

Faithful Antiplanner ally Craig sends this amusing article from the Portland Oregonian in 1988. Unfortunately, a subscription to NewBank is required to view the link, but the gist of the article is that Congress gave Portland’s TriMet transit agency $6.2 million to subsidize a development on the city’s light-rail line that would make the light rail “self-supporting.”

The plan was called “Project Break-Even,” and as then-city Commissioner (now U.S. Representative) Earl Blumenauer explained it, “what is contemplated here under Project Break-Even is targeted economic development where government money is used to kick things off, but most of the investment is from other sources.” In other words, although the term probably hadn’t been coined yet, they were subsidizing a transit-oriented development.

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