Search Results for: rail

Charlotte Light-Rail Boondoggle

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Cost overruns on a light-rail system in Charlotte, NC, have proven so great that voters have collected enough signatures to put a measure on this November’s ballot to repeal the half-cent sales tax that supports rail. To support the program, the University of North Carolina – Charlotte (UNCC) published a supposedly independent study claiming to find that light-rail was a good investment.

The study only added to the project’s embarrassment, however. First, critics claimed that some of the data in the study were obtained from biased sources, and the authors of the study admitted that the data came from a pro-light-rail web site. Based on this, the UNCC study concluded that there were no cost overruns, which the authors later agreed was wrong.

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Scaling Transit, Part 2: Buses to Rail

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, I described how an effective private transit system could be designed for all but the smallest urban areas by simply scaling up the taxicab association model to buses. Rather than use this model, many of America’s subsidized transit agencies have tried a different sort of scaling upwards: from buses to rail. This has led to numerous planning disasters.

Too many public officials imagine that running a rail transit system is just the same as running a bus system, only with bigger vehicles. Jonathan Richmond’s paper (since expanded to a book), The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles quotes the Los Angeles Times: “One of the arguments made most often for the rail line is that it will be cheaper to operate because a single driver on a train can carry up to five times as many passengers as a bus.”

These are, as they say, famous last words. The reality is that a bus system does not scale up to a train system: they are quite different beasts, and running a train system not only requires a completely different set of skills, it entails a much higher risk — a risk that transit agency officials can ignore because they simply impose it on taxpayers and, in the worst cases, transit riders.

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Light Rail Stations Magnet for Crime

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Add two more costs to the exhorbitant price of light-rail transit: crime, and the cost of preventing such crime. Portland’s TriMet transit agency is spending $560,000 dollars adding security cameras to five light-rail stations — that’s $112,000 per station.

“Crime activity,” says the Gresham police chief, “has increased in the areas along the platforms.” This is hardly news. A decade ago, the Milwaukie police chief told me that police throughout the Portland area knew that the opening of a light-rail station would be followed by an increase in property crime in the vicinity.

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Minneapolis Light Rail Loses Another Passenger

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A woman who stumbled as she tried to board a light-rail train in Minneapolis fell under the train and was killed. Horrifically, the driver of the train did not realize what had happened, so proceeded to take the blood-splattered train four more stops to the end of the line.

Passengers on board the train said they heard knocking on the doors, then “bup bup bup bup,” and then saw blood spattering the windows. But none bothered to inform the driver even though the trains are equipped with a passenger-to-driver intercom.

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Charlotte to Revote on Light Rail

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Angry taxpayers raised enough money to collect tens of thousands of signatures to put a transit tax back on the ballot in Charlotte, NC. Charlotte-area voters had approved a half-cent tax to support light-rail construction in 1998.

But cost overruns made the project controversial, and opponents want to stop the transit agency from beginning construction on more lines. The voters will get a chance to repeal the tax in November, just a few weeks before the first line opens for business.

Will Charlotte drivers switch to light rail or do they just want other people to switch so they can drive on uncongested roads?
Flickr photo by jacreative.

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Will Seattle Spend $10.8 Billion on 50 Miles of Light Rail?

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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Sound Transit, which is way overbudget in the construction of Seattle’s first light-rail line, now wants voters to approve a measure to build 50 more miles of light rail for the modest cost of $10.8 billion (in 2006 dollars). That’s a mere $216 million per mile, which is about four to five times the average cost of light-rail construction elsewhere.

I suspect this is going to be an uphill battle for the transit agency, if only because the Seattle Times article reporting this story emphasizes a much-higher figure of $23 billion (which includes projected inflation and some finance charges). Newspapers that want to promote light rail usually underplay the cost, but the Times feels burned by the last rail plan, which it supported, and which ended up costing far more than was projected.

Sound Transit, which wants to build 50 more miles of light rail, is also running commuter trains. Ridership proved so far below forecast levels that the agency ended up selling many of the commuter cars it had purchased for the operation.
Flickr photo by MGJeffries.

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Denver Rail Still on Track — Barely

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The latest estimates say that Denver’s FasTracks rail projects are only $1.5 billion overbudget, not the $1.8 billion originally reported. The $300 million savings comes from such things as single-tracking light-rail lines that were originally planned to be double tracked.

Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) plans to make up the $1.5 billion by selling $800 million more bonds (thus making for a longer pay-back period), and asking the federal government for more money. But officials still expect a $400 million or so shortfall.

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Monorail for Portland?

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
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When I was a kid, I had a toy monorail. It looked like a rocketship, only pointed on both ends, or possibly two airplane fuselages back to back, and it hung from a thin, round metal rail. I saw one on a web site about historic toys once, but can’t find it now.

Now a former Boeing engineer wants to build a full-scale monorail like it in Portland. Instead of calling it a monorail, which is what it is, he calls it an “air tram,” possibly because he thinks that will sell better in a city that has already built an aerial tram.

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Rail/Fire Plan Not Followed

By | | Transportation, Wildfire
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Here’s an interesting congruence of two of my favorite topics: fire and rail transit. Albuquerque’s new commuter train was running by the Islete Pueblo, which was doing a prescribed burn of some of its grassland. The railroad tracks formed one of the borders of the fire, and passengers reported they could feel the heat of the flames as the train passed by.

Apparently, fire plans required that fire managers notify the railroad before doing prescribed burning, but they failed to do so. As New Orleans learned, plans aren’t much good if you don’t carry them out.
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Don’t forget to watch the hot video of the train going by the fire.

My, My, Light-Rail Corruption!

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The Maricopa County Sheriff is investigating possible corruption in the construction of the $1.4 billion, 20-mile Phoenix light-rail project.

The investigation may relate to the project’s former construction chief. Last October, it was discovered that she offered to pay a consultant team extra money if it hired a friend of hers. When the firm refused, she revoked a $150,000 work order for the company. When this was made public, she was fired, but the agency decided what she did was only unethical, not illegal.

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