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How Do You Define “Viable”?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Among the many wacky proposals for rail transit in this country is a plan to run commuter trains some 50 miles between Las Cruces, New Mexico (population about 100,000) to El Paso, Texas (population around 700,000). Such a project, if it did anything at all, would be most likely to drain jobs from Las Cruces to El Paso. So it is surprising that the main proponent of the project is a New Mexico transit agency, the South Central Regional Transit District (SCRTD).

SCRTD hired a consultant to do a feasibility study that — surprise! — concluded the train was feasible. Of course, to reach this conclusion, the study had to make some heroic assumptions:

  1. That the federal government would be willing to put up a large share of the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  2. That the state government would also be willing to contribute to the capital costs, which it doesn’t want to do.
  3. That BNSF would be willing to host commuter trains on its rail line, which it doesn’t want to do.
  4. That surveys of people who say they would be happy to ride the train (without telling them about the fares) really mean anything.
  5. That someone will be willing to subsidize most of the $15 to $20 cost per trip, when anyone who already owns a car could drive the distance for well under half that amount.

Continue reading →

Music City Star Still Falls Short

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Middle Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority reported that ridership on its Music City Star commuter train showed a “substantial increase” in its latest fiscal year (which ended June 30, 2018). The agency claimed that the train carried 269,296 passengers in F.Y. 2018 vs. 258,360 in F.Y. 2017.

The Antiplanner isn’t sure why a 4 percent increase is considered “substantial,” especially since the population of Wilson County, which is served by the train, grew by 3 percent. At least it is bucking the trend of transit ridership decline, but that’s not necessarily a reason to celebrate either.

When the train was planned in 2004, it was projected to carry an average of 1,900 weekday riders in its first year and cost $3 million a year to operate (about $3.6 million in today’s dollars). In fact, more than a decade after it opened, it is still carrying less than 1,200 weekday riders, while its operating costs are at least $5.2 million a year (plus it cost about 40 percent more to start up than anticipated). High costs and low ridership mean the costs per rider are around 130 percent greater than expected. Fares, of course, are not, and covered only 17 percent of operating costs in 2016. Continue reading →

When Congress Decides, Money Gets Wasted

By | | Transportation
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Nashville’s Music City Star is a ridiculously wasteful transit project that never should have happened. Now, Democrats in Congress are insisting that it waste even more money.

In 2016, the Star attracted an average of 1,055 daily riders, far less than the 1,900 that was projected when it opened in 2009. Fares of $877,500 covered less than 15 percent of the $6-million cost of operating and maintaining the train.

Congress has directed all passenger-carrying rail lines (and many freight lines) to use positive train control, a technology that is expensive to install and expensive to maintain. The Tennessee Regional Transportation Authority, which operates the Star, applied for and received an exemption from this requirement. Now, House Democrats have challenged that exemption, noting that, “Although the Music City Star is one of the smallest commuter rail operations in the United States, the size of a railroad does not negate the potential for an accident.” Continue reading →

MBTA’s Unsafety Culture

By | | Transportation
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In February, the Boston Globe revealed that an engineer for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) had ten license suspensions and multiple stops for drunken driving on his record. If he wasn’t safe behind the wheel of an automobile, the newspaper asked, how could he be considered safe at the throttle of a commuter train carrying hundreds of people?

MBTA initially denied it was aware of the engineer’s record, something the Globe quickly disproved. The MBTA then said that this employee was a rare exception who somehow slipped through the cracks, possibly, no one said aloud, because his father was a judge.

Challenge accepted, said the Globe, which filed public records requests on the driving records of the agency’s other engineers. It turns out that a few more others also have poor driving records. Continue reading →

DOT Threatens Hudson River Tunnel

By | | Transportation
18 Comments

The Hudson River tunnel project, which was started in 2009, then killed, then revived, now has been killed again by the Trump Administration, at least according to an article in Crain’s business journal. It would be more accurate to say that Trump’s Department of Transportation has challenged the project’s financing plan.

Originally projected to cost $2.5 billion, the project to replace tunnels used by Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains was killed by New Jersey Governor Christie when it inflated to $8.7 billion. The resurrected project is projected to cost $20.0 billion yet now has Christie’s support, probably because he doesn’t expect New Jersey to have to pay for much, if any, of it.

Most federally supported transit projects are funded on a 50/50 plan, where the federal government pays up to 50 percent of the cost of the project while state and local government pay the rest. The states of New York and New Jersey had agreed to a 50/50 plan for the Gateway project (as the Hudson River tunnel project is now known): 50 percent paid for with federal grants and 50 percent with federal loans. Continue reading →

Rail Runner Runs Away with Taxpayers’ Money

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
26 Comments

Commuter rail on existing tracks sounds seductively attractive at first glance. You don’t have to buy right of way or build new rail lines; you merely have to make a few upgrades and buy some used commuter cars and locomotives and–voila!–you have a hip new rail transit line to attract Millennials to your urban area.

If politicians ever did more than take a first glance at these projects, they would realize that it never works out that way in practice. Costs are a lot higher than expected, and even if you only run a handful of commuter trains a day going a maximum of 40 miles per hour, the feds have added to your costs by requiring you to install the same positive train control systems designed to handle the hundreds of 110-mph trains per day that use the Northeast Corridor.

Worse, existing freight lines rarely go where people want to go, so ridership is often low and fares sometimes cover less than 10 percent of operating costs, and of course zero percent of capital costs. Orlando’s SunRail fares aren’t even enough to pay for the ticket machines, much less any of the costs of operating the trains themselves. Continue reading →

The Hidden Cost of Rail Transit

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Pity Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency. It has an opportunity to include bus-rapid transit stops on a freeway that is now under construction–but it doesn’t have the funds to pay for them.

The Texas Department of Transportation, which is building the freeway, needs $18 million from Capital Metro now to buy the extra land needed for the bus stops. But Capital Metro doesn’t have it. Nor does it have the $105 million more needed to actually build the bus stops.

Where could it get the money? The best way would be to shutter the agency’s pathetic, 32-mile commuter-rail line. In 2015, Capital Metro spent more than $20 million operating and maintaining this line, but received less than $2.5 million in fares. The trains carried fewer than 1,500 round trips per day, which means each daily round-trip rider cost taxpayers nearly $12,000.

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“Stability” Is Another Word for “Lack of Accountability”

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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A bill in the California legislature would give Caltrain, the commuter trains that connect San Jose with San Francisco, “permanent financial stability.” That’s good news if you think you will be riding Caltrains one thousand years from now, but it’s bad news for the taxpayers who will have to “permanently”–however long that is–pay for running empty trains.

Many transit agencies already have dedicated funds, by which they mean taxes that go straight into their coffers, but those that don’t whine and moan endlessly about how they would be much better off if only they had a dedicated fund. They even love to make fine distinctions: Atlanta’s MARTA complains that it has no dedicated funds from the state, but it does get a 1 percent sales tax, half of which has to be spent on capital improvements.

Transit advocates also like to point out that highways were built with a dedicated fund. Yet the gas taxes that go into that fund are highway user fees. In that sense, every transit agency has a dedicated fund because it gets to keep its user fees. Continue reading →

Rhode Island Throws Good Money After Bad

By | | Transportation
13 Comments

Thanks to bad planning on the part of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, a handful of commuters are getting free rides on commuter trains for the rest of the year. In 2012, the state opened new commuter rail stations and started service between Wickford Junction and Providence, with trains going on to Boston, at a cost of $50 million (half of which came from the federal New Starts program).

Wickford Junction’s $25 million train station and parking garage. RIDOT photo.

A large chunk of the money went to build an 1,100-space, four-story parking garage in Wickford Junction. The state was counting on the claims made by so many other cities that rail transit (with a little help to developers such as parking garages) would stimulate new development. Continue reading →

Denver Solves a Problem

By | | Transportation
6 Comments

Since it opened a little more than a year ago, Denver’s airport rail lines, known as the A Line, has had a serious safety problem: the crossing gates aren’t reliable. Now Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) claims it has solved the problem, which is transit-speak for they haven’t solved the problem; they’ve just given up.

According to Denver Transit Partners, the private consortium that built and operates the line, “the problem with the crossing technology is impossible to fix.” Instead of fixing it, they’ve gotten a waiver from the Federal Railroad Administration to allow them to run the trains anyway–provided they have human flaggers at every crossing, which costs about $6 million a year.

Supposedly the crossing gate system is incompatible with the positive train control that the federal government also requires. The Antiplanner doesn’t claim to be an expert on railroad signal technology, but the basic principles behind positive train control were developed more than 100 years ago by Frank Sprague, the electrical genius who also developed the first workable electric streetcar, the first electric rapid transit system, and the first high-speed electric elevators. Continue reading →