Search Results for: rail

High-Speed Rail Part 1: Japan

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
11 Comments

The presidential nominating conventions are over, so we can now turn back to more serious business, like debating rail transit. As it happens, Californians will get to vote this November on whether to sell $9 billion worth of bonds to start building high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

With a current total estimated cost of $30 billion ($45 billion when branches to Sacramento and San Diego are included) and rising, California high-speed rail is a megaproject of truly disastrous proportions. As one California writer says, it “would make the Big Dig fiasco in Boston look like a small scoop.”

Japanese high-speed trains on display.

Before looking at the California plan in detail, it is worth examining high-speed rail in other countries. The best place to start is Japan, which introduced high-speed rail to the world in 1964.

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When One Rail Line Is Not Enough

By | | Planning Disasters
6 Comments

The Chicago Transit Authority offers elevated train service from both O’Hare and Midway airports to downtown. But that wasn’t enough for Mayor Daley. After all, other world-class cities like Amsterdam, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Moscow offer express — i.e., non-stop — train service from their airports to downtown.

Because Chicago’s El has no passing sidings, all trains must stop at all stops — horrors! Express service would supposedly save travelers between O’Hare and downtown 9 minutes (21 vs. 30) over existing train service.

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Solid Gold Light Rail

By | | Transportation
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RTD, Denver’s overpriced transit agency, has published a draft environmental impact statement for the proposed Gold rail transit line, which is supposed to go from Denver northwest to Wheat Ridge. Back in 2000, when RTD did a “major investment study” of this corridor, light rail was expected to cost $281 million. By the time FasTracks was put on the ballot in 2004, the cost had risen to $355 million.

Now, RTD says the line will cost more than $600 million, which is a lot for a mere 11 route miles. Moreover, RTD has changed the proposed technology to something it calls “electric multiple-unit commuter rail,” which sounds something like the Chicago Electroliners or some of the Philadelphia commuter trains.

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Railroad Gets Burned

By | | Wildfire
27 Comments

The Union Pacific Railroad has agreed to pay the Forest Service $102 million — the largest wildfire settlement in history — for causing a fire in California’s Feather River Canyon. Though railroad employees were almost certainly responsible for the fire, the UP could have used some better lawyers or, better yet, some economists among their expert witnesses.

Normally, if you start a fire that gets out of control, you are responsible for paying suppression costs — in this case, $22 million. But this time, the judge also ordered the railroad to pay the estimated damage to “public scenery and recreation and habitat and wildlife,” which added $80 million to the total. On top of that, the UP may have to cover the Forest Service’s costs of reforesting the burned acres.

At first glance, this sounds just. Except it isn’t clear to me that the fire actually did any damage to scenery, recreation, habitat, or wildlife. On top of that, if the Forest Service is so concerned about such damage, why didn’t it do something to fix the problems as soon as the fire was put out? In fact, it did nearly nothing for years.

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Housing, Poverty, Crime, and Light Rail

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
21 Comments

A recent article in The Atlantic indirectly sheds some light on Portland’s light-rail crime wave. The article notes several research studies have shown that demolition of major housing projects, such as Chicago’s Cabrini Green, was soon followed by suburban crime waves. Residents of the housing projects used section 8 vouchers to move to lower-middle-class suburbs and, in some cases, brought the crime with them.

Moving poor people from public housing to private rental housing was supposed to help them get out of poverty, meaning children would be more likely to graduate from high school and adults more likely to get a job. But a reanalysis of the research on which this claim was based found that the sample size was small and that people who moved actually worked less in their new homes than when they lived in the projects.

Portland did not have high-rise public housing projects, but it did have a concentration of low-income people who were pushed out of their neighborhoods by urban-growth-boundary-induced gentrification. Portland planner John Fregonese puts a positive spin on this, saying that “segregation is breaking down in Portland.” While it is soothing to think that Portland is getting more integrated, it does not necessarily mean the lives of the people forced out by gentrification have improved.

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Another Portland Light-Rail Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
5 Comments

Comments on the draft environmental impact statement for the Milwaukie light-rail line (that’s Milwaukie, Oregon, not Milwaukee, Wisconsin) are due on Monday, June 23. You can email your comments to Metro or send a letter or make a phone call to Metro. If you want to download the DEIS in two documents instead of eleven, the Antiplanner’s loyal ally, Jim Karlock, has posted it on one of his web sites.

Although it is doubtful that Metro cares what the Antiplanner thinks, here is what I will tell them, though possibly in more polite language.

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Metrorail Continues to Fall Apart

By | | News commentary
15 Comments

An Orange line train derailed on Monday as it headed out of Washington DC to the Court House station in Virginia. The cause of the accident is not yet known, but a previous derailment in January 2007 was blamed on “shoddy maintenance.”

“Metro’s failure to keep up with basic maintenance and refusal to take safety steps recommended for years by internal and external reviews were the likely causes” of that previous derailment, says the Washington Post‘s summary of the federal investigation into that derailment. Considering that Metro is still well behind in its maintenance program, it will not be surprising if this week’s derailment is also due to maintenance shortfalls.

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Rail Transit Contributes to Global Warming

By | | Transportation
39 Comments

Update: Fixed links to paper.

Most light-rail lines use as much or more energy per passenger mile as an average SUV, and many emit more pounds of CO2 per passenger mile than the average automobile. Moreover, the energy efficiency and CO2 emissions of automobiles are steadily improving, while the energy efficiency of both bus and rail transit are declining. Thus, cities that want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions would do better to encourage auto drivers to buy more fuel-efficient cars than to build rail transit lines.

Those are the main conclusions of the Antiplanner’s new Cato paper, “Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” While some rail transit operations are energy and CO2 efficient, the energy and CO2 costs of construction overwhelm any savings. Thus, from an environmental viewpoint, rail transit is almost always a bad investment.

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Miami’s Rail Folly

By | | News commentary
6 Comments

Back in 1984, Miami opened a 20-mile elevated rail line. The line was so expensive, and ridership so poor, that the city never did much to expand the line (though it is getting in line for $1.4 billion in federal handouts for proposed expansion).

Flickr photo by .Zickie.

Now the railcars the run on the line are worn out. The transit system was supposed to overhaul the cars nearly a decade ago, but deferred it for lack of funds. Now it has to choose between spending $300 million on repairs or $350 million on a new fleet.
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Flickr photo by ASurroca.

The Antiplanner suggests a third alternative: junk the system. Ridership has grown by a mere 26 percent since 1990. During the same time period, regional bus ridership has grown by 69 percent. Miami transit riders would do a lot better if some of that $300 or so million were put into bus improvements, Miami taxpayers would be glad to see the rest left in their pockets, and Miami sightseers would enjoy seeing more of the sky.