Search Results for: rail projects

When the Economist Lost Its Way

By | | News commentary
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Last week, the Economist published an article about when the New York Times lost its way. The article traces it to a June 2020 opinion piece by conservative U.S. Senator Tom Cotton that provoked such outrage among Times staffers that the editorial page editor, James Bennet, was forced to resign. Since Bennet now writes for the Economist, and in fact was the author of this article, it is easy to see why he would consider that incident to be a turning point for the Gray Lady.

In 2020, the Economist argued that countries should take advantage of the pandemic to enact draconian policies aimed at reducing climate change.

While it is easy to argue that the New York Times lost its way long before that incident, I have a different question: When did the Economist lose its way? The weekly magazine that calls itself a newspaper was founded 180 years ago based on the principles of free trade and free markets. Yet it seems to have forgotten those principles today, advocating for more and more government control of the world and national economies. Continue reading →

Turning Colorado into Greenwich Village

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The state of Colorado will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2026, and to celebrate the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has proposed what he thinks is a “visionary” land-use and transportation plan. In fact, it is just a tired old rehash of recent urban planning fads that are based on obsolete views of how people want to live.

Click image to download a 9.2-MB PDF of this 34-page report.

The plan is partly a repackaging of a bill the governor promoted in the last session of the state legislature that would have given cities housing targets and required them to build more multifamily housing to meet those targets. The bill was defeated thanks to strong opposition from city governments that didn’t want the state to preempt their zoning powers, but that didn’t sway Polis. Continue reading →

The Rise and Fall of Bogotá’s Rapid Buses

By | | Transportation
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The New York Times reviewed (non-paywall version) the ground-breaking bus-rapid transit system in Bogotá Columbia 23 years after it opened. The TransMilenio bus system first opened in December 2000 under fiscally conservative mayor Enrique Peñalosa and each route-mile is capable of moving more people per hour than New York City subways.

A high-capacity TransMilenio bus. Photo by Felipe Restrepo Acosta.

The system almost immediately doubled transit ridership, partly because the rapid buses were much faster than the buses they replaced but also because Bogota has a lot of low-income people who don’t own cars whose mobility was greatly enhanced by faster transit. Columbia had well under 200 motor vehicles per thousand people in 2000 (compared with more than 800 in the U.S.) and even today Columbia has fewer than 300 vehicles per thousand (compared with more than 900 in the U.S.). Whatever the reason, the rapid bus system carries up to 2 million riders a day, which is more than some U.S. light-rail lines carry in a year. Continue reading →

MBTA’s State of Bad Repair

By | | Transportation
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Back in 2003, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) estimated it had a “state-of-good-repair” backlog of $2.3 billion (about $3.7 billion in today’s dollars). Proving that the people running the agency are incompetent, instead of fixing their backlog they decided to build a new 4.3-mile light-rail line that just happened to cost $2.3 billion.

One of MBTA’s light-rail trains. Although the MBTA operates several different light-rail lines, they are nearly all painted green and are known as the Green Line. Photo by Adam E. Moreira.

Congress became aware of the maintenance backlog for transit systems nationwide and since 2015 it has given out $26.65 billion in grants to fix tracks, vehicles, and stations. Problem solved, right? Continue reading →

Evidence That Planners Are Dumb

By | | Transportation
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The United States is not the only country where transit agencies are wildly spending on questionable projects that suffer huge cost overruns. In Canada, Toronto opened its first subway in 1954 at a cost of just $11 million per mile — $90 million per mile in today‘s U.S. dollars. The city is currently building a subway line that was supposed to cost almost US$1.0 billion a mile, but with cost overruns is expected to cost as much as US$1.4 billion a mile.

Toronto subway. Photo by Tim Adams.

Light rail in Canada has also undergone huge price inflation. Edmonton opened North America’s first modern light-rail line in 1978 at a cost of US$47 million a mile in today’s money. Today, Calgary, Hamilton, Kitchener, and Toronto are all planning or building light-rail lines that are expected to cost at least US$300 million a mile, and several of these have had cost overruns of as much as 180 percent. Continue reading →

No Amount of Money Is Too Much

By | | Transportation
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Is there any transit construction project that is so expensive that a transit agency will say, “Let’s not do this”? The Antiplanner has argued that the answer is “no”; instead, the only question agencies ask is, “Where are we going to get the money to do this?” Evidence for this view has recently come to light in San Francisco and Baltimore.

Architect’s model of the planned San Francisco transit center. Note the bottom level has commuter trains on the outer tracks and high-speed trains on the center tracks even though the prospects of high-speed rail ever reaching San Francisco are dimming every day.

Last January, I observed that the price of a 1.3-mile commuter-rail extension that San Francisco was planning had increased from $5.0 billion to $6.7 billion, or more than $5 billion a mile. I pointed out that there were several viable alternatives to spending what would be a record amount of money per mile on a transit project, including replacing the trains with buses or terminating the trains at a different location just seven minutes away. Now comes the news that the cost of the project has increased again to $8.25 billion, or more than $6.3 billion a mile. Continue reading →

Transit Slowly Recovers

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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U.S. transit systems carried 73.9 percent as many riders in September 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is transit’s highest level, as a percent of 2019 numbers, since the pandemic began. This is particularly remarkable as September 2023 had one less business day than September 2019.

Highway data for September 2023 are not yet available. This chart and post will be updated when they are released.

Transit was aided by the fact that September ridership in the New York urban area, where 46 percent of all transit rides take place, reached 78.6 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Transit is also doing better than average in Los Angeles (79.3%), Miami (83.4%), Dallas (78.4%), and Houston (87.2%). Washington reached 73.8 percent, just slightly below the national average. Ridership continues to be below average in Chicago (63.1%), Philadelphia (59.4%), Atlanta (60.6%), Boston (64.0%), Phoenix (55.8%), and San Francisco-Oakland (64.4%), to name a few. Although transit ridership is slowly recovering, it is still well behind driving, which first reached 100 percent of pre-pandemic miles in June, 2021. Continue reading →

Betteridge’s Law Applies Here

By | | Transportation
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“Will Twin Cities to Duluth train succeed where it once failed?” asks a headline from a St. Paul news station. As Betteridge’s law of headlines states, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no,” and I’m pretty sure that applies here.

Should Minnesota’s failed commuter train be supplemented by a failed intercity passenger train? Photo by Jerry Huddleston.

There are exceptions to Betteridge’s law, of course. For example, this 2019 headline, “Could the Commuter Rail from Minneapolis to Duluth be a Flop?” poses the same question in the opposite direction. One of the two headlines violates Betteridge’s law. My money is on the law applying to the first but not the second. Continue reading →

HSR: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone

By | | Transportation
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The Mineta Institute — named after a San Jose congressman who was Secretary of Transportation in 2001 through 2006 — has a new report claiming that high-speed rail will produce huge economic and environmental benefits. Rather than being based on any careful analyses, it basically repeats old claims that are even less valid today than when they were first made.

Click image to download a 3.1-MB PDF of this report.

For example, the report cites the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s claim that rail construction “has generated an estimated 74,000 to 80,000 job years, $5.6 to $6.0 billion in labor income, and $15 billion to $16 billion in economic output between 2006 and 2022.” That’s like saying that buying a $100,000 car generates $100,000 in income. It might be income for someone, but for the person buying, the $100,000 is a cost, not a revenue. Continue reading →

Changing the Game for the Worse

By | | Transportation
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A 3/4-cent sales tax increase for transit is “seen as a game-changing model to fund transit service — and the envy of many cities nationwide,” reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. What the article doesn’t say is how the tax will change the game for the worse for transit riders and transportation users in general.

Twin Cities transit ridership had been going downhill before the pandemic, declining nearly 10 percent between 2015 and 2019. Photo by Metro Transit.

What this means is that Metro Transit will no longer care about ridership numbers. Instead, it can freely spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on projects that do little to generate ridership with no repercussions. Continue reading →