Search Results for: rail projects

$82 Million Per Mile Is Cost Effective?

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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Last week, the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council approved a new light-rail line between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul. As approved, the 11-mile line will cost $909 million, or more than $82 million per mile.

Socialist light-railism in Minneapolis.

The Met Council’s original proposal, which was projected to cost $990 million, was rejected two years ago by the Federal Transit Administration. Under cost-effectiveness criteria that the FTA established in 2005, any project that cost $24 or more “per hour of transportation system user benefits” would be ineligible for federal funding. The $990 million Central Corridor line was projected to cost $26.05 per hour; cutting the cost to $909 million would improve this to a mere $23.80 per hour.

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The Anti-Car Movement in Britain

By | | Transportation
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British auto drivers pay something like $4 in auto-related taxes for every dollar that the government spends on highways. The surplus goes for transit, intercity rail, and other government operations.

Meanwhile, the government is doing much to discourage auto driving, including installing speed humps, red-light cameras, and the famous cordon charge for entering inner London.

All of this rankles Malcolm Heymer, a civil engineer and member of the Association of British Drivers. Heymer gave a presentation (10MB) at the San Jose Preserving the American Dream conference last weekend. You can also download the text of his presentation, which is only 248-kilobytes.

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Transit Lobby Backed Up by $2.3 Billion in “Suspicious Transactions”

By | | Follow up, Transportation
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Siemens, the maker of light-rail vehicles, has admitted to finding $2.3 billion in “suspicious transactions” — meaning probable bribes — on its books. Company salespeople apparently bribed government officials around the world to get them to buy Siemens products.

The German government recently fined the company about $300 million for the $635 million in suspicious transactions that it had previously reported. Now it appears this has only scratched the surface of the company’s moral problems.

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New Starts Still Suffer Overruns, Ridership Shortfalls

By | | Transportation
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How close to rail transit projects come to meeting their promises of being completed on budget and attracting the projected number of passengers? If you listen to transit agencies, almost every project is completed on time and beats its ridership goals. But those numbers aren’t very reliable as the transit agencies base their claims on projections made shortly before the projects were completed, not when the decision was made to build them.

In the early years of the Bush administration, the Federal Transit Administration commissioned a study to find out how well they were doing. The study was completed in 2003 — and the FTA then sat on it for four years. Now, they have finally released it, and you can download it here (4.4 MB Word file).

Is this light-rail project really necessary?
Flickr photo by brewbooks.

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RTD to Raise Transit Fares

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) convinced voters to increase the sales tax dedicated to transit from 0.6 to 1.0 cents per dollar so that it could build six new rail lines. Now it says tax revenues are falling short of projections, while costs are higher than expected. So it is raising transit fares, which will only reduce ridership and harm transit-dependent people.

This is a completely predictable result of trying to build a rail megaproject. It is one thing to run a bus system where the capital costs are low and don’t require either long-term borrowing or long-term cost projections. It is quite another thing to plan a ten- or more year construction project that requires a thirty- or more year mortgage.

Blocking traffic.
Flickr photo by Jeffrey Beall.

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Personal Rapid Transit in Morgantown, WV

By | | Transportation
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Back in the 1970s, some people thought that personal rapid transit (PRT) would replace the automobile. By sometime early in the twenty-first century, we would all be traveling in small, computerized vehicles riding soundlessly on fixed tracks. The vehicles would go nearly 100 miles per hour, and each car would go exactly to where its occupants wanted to go over the least congested route.

I’ve been intrigued by this concept since 1972, when I heard a presentation about it by a consulting firm named Deleuw-Cather to the Portland city council. DeLeuw-Cather was trying to get some city to buy into the idea, and it claimed that the Germans and Japanese were experimenting with this system and had solved most of the technical problems.

Wikipedia photo by Darren Ringer.

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Lakewood Gets Ripped Off

By | | City planning
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Deals like this always make you suspicious. Someone bought some land in Lakewood Colorado for $650,000, and eight days later sold it to the city of Lakewood for $1.1 million.

The city, which thinks it got a good deal, plans to use the land for “affordable housing” next to a projected light-rail station. But why didn’t the city buy it eight days earlier when it could have saved almost half the cost? Does the previous landowner feel ripped off when they could have made $1.1 million if they had sold to the city instead of the middle-man?

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Bay Freeway Update: No Traffic Snarls

By | | Follow up, News commentary
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Will the tanker truck accident that destroyed a key part of the San Francisco Bay Area freeway network cost commuters millions of dollars a day? Will those commuters respond by switching to public transit? So far, the answers seem to be “no” and “maybe.”

Flickr photo by Thomas Hawk

The closure of a freeway interchange that normally sees 80,000 vehicles a day did not result in huge traffic jams yesterday or this morning. Many people may have used the free public transit offered by the state, but so far no reliable reports have said how many. (Transit was free yesterday only; today it should be back to normal fares.) Continue reading →

Nation’s Worst Transit Agency Counting on Gas Reaching $6/Gallon

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The board of directors of the nation’s worst-performing transit agency agreed that they recklessly approved spending hundreds of millions of dollars on BART and other rail projects without knowing where they would find the money to complete and operate the projects. But they expect “gas would be $6 or $7 a gallon in the next five or six years and there would be a much greater demand for BART.”

Since transit riders only pay a fraction of the operating costs and none of the capital costs of transit, even if demand for BART increased it would not magically generate funding for a $4.7 billion extension of BART to San Jose.
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If gas prices don’t rise, they will be broke. If gas prices do rise, they will still be broke. Since it is the taxpayers, not the board, who must pay the cost, they don’t care. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

The Nation’s Worst-Managed Transit Agency Hires a New CFO

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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After building more light-rail lines than it can afford to operate, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has made so many service cuts that it has lost a third of its riders. VTA’s chief financial officer resigned after an outside audit (previously discussed here) criticized the agency for building expensive rail projects to politically powerful (but auto-liberated) neighborhoods without ensuring that the agency had the funds to operate the system.

Last June, angry voters turned down a sales-tax increase designed to help the agency get back on its feet and build more rail lines. Now, under pressure to prove they can be fiscally responsible, the board of directors has hired a new “temporary” CFO, paying him $13,600 for 39 weeks of work.

Excuse me, what was that? Not $13,600, you say, but $13,600 per week? For 39 weeks? That’s $530,400. The previous CFO only got $200,000 a year, meaning his weekly wages were less than a third of the new guy’s. No wonder he did such a lousy job — they weren’t paying him enough!

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