Search Results for: rail

Raleigh Rail Rises from the Dead

Two years ago, the idea of building a $1 billion rail system in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area died when the FTA said not enough people would ride it to justify federal funding. But now, a new proposal has been made to build a similar rail system, only this one would cost twice as much money for twice as many miles of rail.

Because, as everyone knows, if building 28 miles of rail line is a waste of money, then building 56 miles makes perfect sense.

Proponents are counting on getting a quarter of the money from Washington and a quarter from the state of North Carolina. Of course, at a mere $35 million a mile, $2 billion won’t be enough to build the proposed 56 miles of light rail, not when most light-rail lines are coming in at $50 million a mile. But they’ll worry about that later.

Who are the “experts” who came up with this plan? To give you a hint, the chair of the citizens advisory committee is a pathologist at Duke University. That certainly makes one eligible to be an amateur transit expert qualified to spend $2 billion of someone else’s money.

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High-Speed Rail to Where?

The state of Minnesota is seriously considering spending $400 million on a high-speed rail line from Minneapolis to Duluth. Duluth? Come on. The Duluth-Superior urbanized area only has about 120,000 people. Duluth isn’t even a part of the Midwest regional rail plan, an ambitious plan to run high-speed passenger trains between Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

A new study says that the Duluth line will cost a bit more than anticipated — $400 million instead of the $350 million estimated a couple of month ago. But proponents insist that the line will generate billions in economic development, reduce congestion, and be environmentally friendly. Yeah, right.

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Is Dulles Rail Dead or Alive?

Dulles Rail All But Dead shrills the Washington Post. The idea of extending Washington’s MetroRail system 23 miles to (and slightly beyond) Dulles Airport has been around for years, but its huge expense — at least $5 billion or more than $200 million per mile — has been daunting.

To provide local matching funds, northern Virginia counties recently created a huge transportation authority that would tax home sales, hotel rooms, rental cars, and auto repairs to pay for local road and transit projects. It was generally understood that a large share of the authority’s money would go to Dulles rail, but local officials were counting on federal funding for at least half the cost of the project.

Only 12 percent of air travelers who fly out of National Airport use MetroRail to get to and from the airport. No other airport rail line in the country carries more than 8 percent of air travelers.
Flickr photo by sethladd.

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Should Kansas City Build Light Rail?

I am in KC today helping the Show-Me Institute educate people about the benefits and costs of light rail. Long-time readers will recall that Kansas City voters approved a light-rail plan after having rejected such plans six times. The Show-Me Institute is releasing a report on the subject by the Antiplanner which you can no doubt find on their web site.

In a nutshell, the voter-approved plan is totally infeasible, as it calls for taking money from the bus system to build rail and presumes that the federal government will pay half the cost — which, the FTA says, it won’t if it means reducing bus service. Plus the current cost projections are 50 percent more than the costs initially projected by the line’s backers.

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Milwaukie Light Rail to Cost (gasp, choke) $1.25 billion

Actually, $1.25 billion is the low estimate for a light-rail line from Portland to Milwaukie, Oregon. Depending on the routing, it could be as high as $1.4 billion, not counting cost overruns.

For those of you not familiar with Portland, Milwaukie is not some distant suburb. It is immediately adjacent to Portland. I used to commute (by bike) through Milwaukie on my way from Oak Grove to Portland, and it was 8 miles to downtown. (I probably also rode faster than the light rail will go.)

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Sticking It to Light Rail

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which President Bush signed last month, is exactly the kind of top-down, centralized planning that the Antiplanner opposes. The act bans incandescent bulbs after 2014, mandates that auto fleets achieve an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, and requires that biofuels be substituted for at least 36 billion gallons of gasoline (about one-quarter of today’s consumption) by 2022.

While many auto opponents have congratulated themselves that the new law “sticks it to Detroit,” the reality is just the opposite. While Detroit may or may not be able to keep up with the Japanese in building fuel-efficient cars, the real effect of an auto-industry wide standard is that it raises the goal posts for people’s fantasized alternatives to the automobile. In essence, this is sticking it to light rail.

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Light Rail Follies #5: An Objective Panel

The Honolulu city council wants to build a rail line. Yet many people in Honolulu think this would be a waste of money, and they are pushing for high-occupancy toll lanes, that can be used by autos and bus-rapid transit, instead. So, to cover its you-know-what, the city council plans to create an “objective panel” of five advisers who will review the alternatives and select the final plan.

Who will be on the panel? A list of people being considered includes a vice president of Bechtel, a former vice president of Siemens, a former Parsons Brinckerhoff planner, and numerous employees or former employees of various transit agencies, nearly all of which run some form of rail transit.

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Light Rail Follies #4: Dallas Builds On Time, Under Budget

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) says that a light-rail line that was supposed to cost $988 million will actually cost $1.88 billion. The first phase of the “orange” line to Irving, Texas, was supposed to be completed in 2011, but due to “unforeseen” increases in costs, DART will delay that by at least a year. Eventually, the line is supposed to reach DFW Airport, but that depends on whether DART can scrape up enough money to pay for it.

Click on map to view or download a larger version PDF (308KB).

DART blames those evil Indians and Chinese, who are not only taking our jobs and decorating our children’s toys with lead paint, they are consuming the steel and concrete we need by building highways. Don’t they know the age of the automobile is over and they should be building light rail instead? In any case, DART claims its experts could not have predicted this and so shouldn’t be blamed. Of course, that is exactly why transit agencies shouldn’t plan rail construction projects — they can’t predict the real costs and so almost always end up over budget.

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Light Rail Follies #3: Seattle Jumps on the Streetcar Bandwagon

Not content with building the most expensive light-rail line in the world, Seattle has to keep up with its Northwest neighbor, Portland, by opening a streetcar line — the unfortunately named South Lake Union Trolley (SLUT). Although this line is only opening today, they are already talking about building more.

Testing the SLUT.Flickr photo by Choconancy.

Streetcars are so insipid that their advocates barely even claim that they have anything to do with transportation. Instead, they are supposed to stimulate economic development — though the only evidence of that is from Portland, which just happened to offer hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies to developers along its streetcar line. Especially when you consider that many of those subsidies went to the construction of parking garages, can anyone really think that the streetcar had anything to do with the developments?

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Denver Light Rail Service Interrupted by Coal Train

A Union Pacific coal train derailed in the path of adjacent light-rail tracks and a Denver light-rail train ran into one of the derailed cars. No one was injured, but the Union Pacific says it may be 36 hours before the line is cleared. In the meantime, rail riders will be bused around the accident.

A slide show shows the wintry conditions in which the accident took place. The light-rail cars are shown only in the second half of the show.
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Of course, buses don’t have this problem. If a bus is involved in an accident, other buses can go around. Rail lines don’t have such easy options, which is one more reason to rely on low-cost buses instead of high-cost rails.