Search Results for: rail projects

The Ethics of Planning

By | | Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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Imagine you are the director of a federal agency that gives grants to state and local governments. Suppose a researcher in your agency’s department finds that the local governments to which you give grants routinely lied on their grant applications in order to get the money.

Do you:
a. Root out and punish the states and cities that lied?
b. Tighten up your grantmaking procedures to make sure that future lies are exposed? or
c. Use your political power to have the researcher transferred to a dead-end job and ordered never to do research on your agency’s programs again?

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Boston: Success Story or Disaster?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Boston began planning for compact development and rail transit in the early 1970s under Governor Francis Sargent. Sargent appointed Alan Altshuler, a transportation professor at MIT, to be his Secretary of Transportation.

Sargent and Altshuler decided that freeways were destroying Boston, so in 1972 they cancelled almost all new highway construction inside route 128 (a beltway around Boston). They convinced Congress to allow states that cancelled urban interstates to spend the federal money allocated to the interstates on transit instead.

Since the money could only be spent on capital improvements, that meant rail transit; buses just weren’t expensive enough. ($100 million buys a lot of buses that the local government then has to operate, but it may buy only one rail line, so the operating cost obligations are a lot lower.)

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Baptists, Bootleggers, and Transportation Planning

By | | Transportation
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In 1983, an economist named Bruce Yandle suggested that the demand for much government regulation came from a loose alliance of what he called Baptists and bootleggers. The “Baptists” represented moralists who argued that government needed to regulate–for example, by banning liquor sales–for the good of society. The “bootleggers” represented businesses who quietly profited from those regulations–for example, makers and dealers of illegal alcoholic drinks.

This combination explains the political demand to build rail transit in cities where at least 95 percent of travel is by automobile. The anti-auto moralists provide grassroots support for rail projects. The bootleggers–rail contractors, railcar manufacturers, and property developers–provide the financial support, usually in the background.

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FRA Puts Price Tag on Overnight Amtrak Routes

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) estimates that adding 15 new overnight routes to Amtrak’s system will cost taxpayers $46 billion to $59 billion (see pages 80 to 159 of this 18.8-MB file) plus increase Amtrak’s annual operating costs by $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion. The FRA did not estimate ridership or fare revenues, but it did estimate that adding these routes would reduce driving by 0.014 percent and the annual number of highway accidents by 0.016 percent.

Click image for a larger view.

Amtrak currently has 15 overnight train routes that carried just over 2.0 billion passenger-miles in 2023 (see page 7). These routes cost $1.3 billion to operate in that year (not counting depreciation) and earned just under $600 million in fare revenues. Amtrak admits all of them except the Virginia-Florida Auto Train lost money, and when depreciation is counted that train probably lost money as well. Continue reading →

He Lived Long Enough to Become the Villian

By | | News commentary
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“You either die a hero,” said a character from a Batman movie, “or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Neil Goldschmidt, who died last week four days short of his 84th birthday, was once my hero but died the leading villain of Oregon politics.

The official portrait of Mayor Goldschmidt.

After working as a legal aid lawyer for several years, Goldschmidt joined his friend, homebuilder Tom Walsh, in running as reform candidates for the Portland City Council in 1970. Portland, they said, was run by a “good old boy” network that left minorities, low-income people, and many others out of the system. Goldschmidt won; Walsh lost. Continue reading →

A Mere $100 Billion More

By | | Transportation
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The California High-Speed Rail Authority recently released a new draft business plan saying that it needs only $100 billion more to finish the project. The plan admits that the agency expects to spend more on the 171 miles between Merced and Bakersfield than the $33 billion it had projected the entire 463-mile project would cost when voters approved it in 2008. Even with a recent federal grant, the agency only has about $25 billion for the project, most of which it has already spent.

Click image to download a 17.8-MB PDF of this plan.

As shown on page 65 of the plan, the current projection is that the final cost of the project will be between $89 billion and $128 billion, with $106 billion supposedly being most likely. It pairs this with a projected cost of $211 billion “that would be necessary to construct the equivalent highway and air passenger capacity.” However, this is entirely bogus. It assumes, for example, that the only way to increase airline capacities is by building new airports; increasing the size of planes flying between LA and San Francisco is somehow impossible. It also assumes that new freeway lanes would have to be constructed the entire distance between LA and the Bay Area, even in places that aren’t expected to be congested in the future. Continue reading →

San Jose Transit Insanity

By | | Transportation
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Someone recently asked me what I thought were the nation’s worst-managed transit projects. I suggested the Honolulu rail was number 1, the Maryland Purple Line was number 2, and BART to San Jose was number 3. But maybe I underestimated the insanity of the BART-to-San Jose line.

It’s even worse than Mr. Arnold suggests. In 2001, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) did its initial alternatives analysis comparing BART with a wide range of alternatives including buses, bus rapid transit, commuter rail, light rail, and “Diesel light rail,” which is what the FTA now calls “hybrid rail.” BART was picked because they thought it would get the most riders even though it was also by far the most expensive. Continue reading →

FRA Dreams Up Amtrak Schemes

By | | Transportation
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Ever been in Billings, Montana and wanted to go to El Paso? Or have you been in New York and wanted to spend 36 hours traveling to Dallas? How about going from Minneapolis to Denver via Pierre, South Dakota? Or Detroit to New Orleans? These are just some of the 15 new long-distance trains that the Federal Railroad Administration has tentatively proposed to add to Amtrak’s network.

Click image for a larger view. Click here to download the full draft proposal that was released last week.

Some of the proposals would restore Amtrak routes that have been discontinued, including trains from Salt Lake City to Seattle, Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, Chicago to Florida, and Chicago to Seattle on the former Northern Pacific route through southern Montana. Other proposals would restore trains that were discontinued even before Amtrak, such as New York to New Orleans via Chattanooga and Montgomery, which would be in addition to Amtrak’s current New York-New Orleans route via Charlotte and Birmingham. Continue reading →

Transit Carried 73.7% in December

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 73.7 percent as many riders in December 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. As I predicted last month, this was a slight decline from the 74.9 percent reported for November because November had one more business day in 2023 than 2019 while December had one fewer.

Amtrak ridership, as a share of 2019 levels, declined from 103.1 percent in November to 93.6 percent in December according to Amtrak’s monthly performance report released last week. This may suggest that holiday travelers are still wary of taking trains. It also raises questions about why Amtrak numbers have been bouncing up and down so much over the past several months. Air travel has not been so bouncy: according to TSA passenger counts, air travel grew from 101.2 of 2019 levels in November to 103.1 percent in December. Continue reading →

Do More Subsidies Increase Efficiency?

By | | Transportation
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Streetsblog posted an article yesterday that quotes and attempts to refute the Antiplanner by claiming that increasing subsidies to transit agencies actually makes them more efficient. The article, written by former Strong Towns staffer Kea Wilson, misinterprets both the Antiplanner’s quote and the meaning of efficiency.

Does reducing the share of transit costs that are covered by farebox revenues increase efficiency? Photo by AgentAkit.

Transit systems get more efficient when they are more heavily subsidized, Wilson asserts. How can this be true? Efficiency is economically defined as “when all goods and factors of production in an economy are distributed or allocated to their most valuable uses and waste is eliminated or minimized.” Before the pandemic, transit agencies were typically spending four times as much money moving someone a passenger-mile as automobiles. That sounds pretty inefficient to me and increasing subsidies even more is likely to be even more inefficient. Continue reading →