Search Results for: rail projects

10 Reasons Not to Build High-Speed Rail

By | | Policy brief
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Did you know that a single gallon of fuel is enough to power an entire high-speed train to go from New York to Los Angeles and back? Neither did I, but the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association (US HSR) made this preposterous claim on its web site last week. Someone there apparently figured out that it is ridiculous and took it down, but below is the graphic that accompanied the claim.

US HSR’s claim that high-speed trains can go 6,600 miles on one gallon of fuel is absurd, and its claim that airliners can only go 400 feet on one gallon is also wrong.

Like the claim that one rail line can move as many people as an eight-lane freeway, this claim for energy efficiency is startling enough that we are likely to hear it again as Democrats attempt to spend a few trillion dollars building a high-speed rail system across the country. In preparation for that debate, here are ten reasons why the United States should not build high-speed rail. Continue reading →

Rail Supporters Can’t Tell the Truth from Fiction

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Portland’s regional planning agency, Metro, has put a measure on this November’s ballot to tax all firms with 25 or more employees in order to pay for the region’s latest light-rail scheme. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, the scheme appears to be foundering on the weight of lies told by Metro and the measure’s supporters.

To start, Metro wanted to call the tax a “business tax” even though it would be actually a 0.75 percent tax on payrolls. In other words, it would be an income tax on employees, but it would be invisible because it wouldn’t show on paystubs as a withholding like most income taxes. Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, has used this kind of a tax to pay for its operations and always called it a “payroll tax.” But Metro wanted to call it a “business tax” on the ballot title because it believed Portlanders would be more likely to support taxes evil businesses than poor downtrodden employees.

When challenged, a judge ordered Metro to take “business tax” out of the title but didn’t order it to use the term “payroll tax.” Despite not getting the ballot title they wanted, opponents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the measure. This includes large contributions from major employers including Nike, Daimler Trucks, Comcast, and Tillamook Creamery.

As of September 28, opponents had actually outraised supporters. Contributions to the pro-rail campaign came from rail contractor Stacy & Witbeck, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and engineering consulting firm David Evans & Associates. The Evans firm is the company that got the contract to write the environmental impact statement for building a light-rail bridge over the Columbia River and then spent the money lobbying the Oregon and Washington legislatures to build the bridge. Continue reading →

SunFail: Orlando’s Commuter-Rail Disaster

By | | Policy brief
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Central Florida politicians face difficult choices about the future of SunRail, a commuter-rail line out of Orlando. One question is whether to finish the originally conceived project by improving 12 miles of tracks and building a new station for a cost of about $100 million, which is expected to add 200 riders per day. A second question is whether to build a new extension to the Orlando Airport, which is expected to cost about $200 million.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Beyond new construction, a major problem is how to get anyone to ride the trains, as ridership is well below expectations and 2018 fare revenues only covered 5 percent of operating costs. A final question is how to pay to continue operating the trains, which lost more than $40 per passenger in 2018. The state has been subsidizing operations but wants four county governments to take over. Continue reading →

High-Speed Rail: Yesterday’s Tech Tomorrow

By | | Policy brief
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One of the candidates for president in this November’s election is known by the nickname, “Amtrak Joe.” The Democratic-controlled House wants to triple federal funding for intercity passenger trains. A member of Congress from Massachusetts has proposed spending $205 billion on high-speed rail.


Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

Given the growing momentum behind these ideas, it is instructive to take a look at how well the last frenzied spending on intercity passenger trains worked. In 2009 and 2010, President Obama persuaded Congress to dedicate $10.1 billion to high-speed rail projects around the country. To this was added at least $1.4 billion in other federal funds and at least $7 billion in state and local funds. After ten years, some of those projects must be working, right? Continue reading →

Spending Money We Don’t Have on Projects We Don’t Need

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chair Peter DeFazio yesterday released a proposal to spend tens of billions of dollars the federal government doesn’t have on projects we don’t need. Congressional authorization for federal spending on highways and transit expires this year, and DeFazio proposes to renew this with a program that will increase spending by 62 percent without increasing the taxes that support it.

Whereas the previous law spent an average of $61 billion per year over the last five years, DeFazio’s proposal would spend almost $99 billion a year over five years. At one time, federal spending on highways and most transit came out of gas taxes and other highway user fees and Congress didn’t spend more than came in. Since the mid-2000s, however, Congress has ignored actual revenues and spent billions of dollars a year out of general funds. The 2015 law, for example, simply appropriated $51 billion of general funds into the Highway Trust Fund (which despite the name spends money on both highways and transit).

DeFazio’s bill would not only increase this deficit spending, it includes a poison pill for highways while it unleashes spending increases on transit. For highways, the bill would include a “fix it first” provisions that says that states cannot increase highway capacity until they get existing roads in a state of good repair. No similar provision is made for transit even though transit is in a much poorer state of repair. Continue reading →

46. More Rail Transit Disasters

By | | Iconoclast
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When Congress created the transit capital improvement grants or New Starts fund in 1991, it required that each proposed project be “justified based on a comprehensive review of its mobility improvements, environmental benefits, cost effectiveness, and operating efficiencies.” Initially, the Federal Transit Administration measured “cost effectiveness” in dollars per new rider: the annual operating cost of the project plus the amortized capital cost divided by the projected number of annual new riders.

While a useful measure, the FTA made no effort to enforce it. While transit agencies calculated that bus projects (such as bus-rapid transit) typically cost about $5 per new rider and rail projects typically cost $20 to $100 per new rider, the agencies routinely selected the rail projects even though they clearly weren’t cost effective.

In 2003, U.S. representative from Oregon, Earl Blumenauer, convinced Congress to carve out a portion of New Starts for what he called Small Starts: smaller transit projects that would only cost a couple of hundred million dollars. He specifically expected that the money would be used for streetcars. Continue reading →

A Tale of Three Private High-Speed Rail Plans

By | | Policy brief
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Federal funding for high-speed rail is dead, at least for the duration of the Trump administration. But at least three private high-speed rail lines are under consideration, and backers say they will not seek any federal funds (other than, possibly, loans) to complete those projects. How likely are these projects to succeed?

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Texas Central

The Texas Central proposes to build a new high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston, the nation’s sixth- and seventh-largest urban areas and two of the fastest-growing regions in the country. The company says it plans to use Japanese Shinkansen trains to travel the 240 miles between the cities at top speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, resulting in an end-to-end journey of ninety minutes. Continue reading →

Front Range Commuter Rail: A Terrible Idea

By | | Policy brief
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The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has issued a request for proposals to plan a commuter-rail line from Ft. Collins to Pueblo, a population corridor just east of the mountains known as the Front Range. CDOT estimates building this line would cost between $5 billion and $15 billion, depending on speed. The agency expects to build all-new tracks within the existing BNSF and UP rights of way, which it says the railroads are willing to allow.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The Colorado legislature gave CDOT $2.5 million for passenger rail studies, and CDOT wants contractors to provide a “clear vision” for a referendum that could appear on the November 2020 ballot. Part of that vision would include an eventual extension to Cheyenne on the north and Trinidad (population under 10,000) on the south. No doubt some of the money spent on studies will find its way into campaign war chests. Continue reading →

Does Rail Transit Stimulate New Development?

By | | Policy brief
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Transit agencies often justify their multi-billion rail projects by claiming that rail transit stimulates new development. This claim has, in fact, been refuted by research funded by the Federal Transit Administration and conducted by transit advocates. Despite their support for rail transit, the researchers reluctantly concluded that “Urban rail transit investments rarely ‘create’ new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment.”

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In other words, development along the rail line is a zero-sum game: more development there meant less development somewhere else in the urban area. Total tax revenues in the urban area aren’t increased by light rail, except to the extent that taxes are raised to pay for it. Continue reading →

Portland Plots Its Next Light-Rail Line

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Transit ridership is declining and the Trump administration is refusing to giving away federal funds for new transit projects. But Portland’s TriMet transit agency is already buying properties for its new $3 billion light-rail line.

Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation — which is the real power at Metro, not the elected Metro council — has approved the route for the rail line that is supposed to go from downtown Portland to Bridgeport Village, a shopping mall on Interstate 5. The plan calls for bike paths, sidewalks, some new highway bridges (which aren’t included in the cost), as well as 12 miles of light-rail route.

The official projected cost for the project is $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion, but as an analysis by the Cascade Policy Institute shows, the final cost of previous light-rail projects all ended up being as much as 40 percent more than the estimates that had been made at the draft environmental impact statement stage. Metro issued a draft EIS for the project in June. Continue reading →