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The Antiplanner’s Library: The Great Society Subway

By | | Book reviews, Transportation, Urban areas
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Most DC visitors and residents consider the Washington Metrorail system to be a great success. Among them is Zachary Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. But, as Schrag clearly documents, by the standards of Metrorail’s original planners, it is a dismal failure.

Back in 1962, planners projected that a 103-mile rail system would cost less than $800 million — or about $4.6 billion in 2009 dollars. Moreover, they expected that fares would cover all of the operating costs and nearly 80 percent of the capital costs (pp. 53-54).

As it turned out, the actual 103-mile system that was completed in 2001 covers all of the basic routes of that original plan, yet cost $17.6 billion in 2009 dollars, close to four times the initial projection. Fares cover only about 60 percent of operating costs and, of course, none of the capital costs.

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Relieving Traffic Congestion To Reduce GHGs

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner and other advocates of technical solutions (as opposed to behavioral ones) to environmental problems have long argued that relieving congestion is an important way of saving energy and reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. But this is difficult to quantify.

A recent analysis from University of California researchers finds that relieving congestion on Southern California roads could reduce auto-related CO2 emissions by 30 percent. This is more than even I had expected.

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TriMet’s Latest Big Lie

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
10 Comments

TriMet’s $166 million “Westside Express Service” (WES) commuter rail is a miserable failure. After going 60 percent over budget, it is carrying only about 600 round trips per day. The amortized value of the capital cost alone is enough to buy every one of those commuters a brand-new Toyota Prius every year for the next 30 years. Those Priuses would be cleaner than the WES too.

Click for a larger view. Thanks to Steve Schopp for the photo.

So naturally TriMet wants to “celebrate WES” so much that it is advertising this great project on the back of its buses. Note that it isn’t asking people to actually ride the train, because that would never happen — no offense to Wilsonville, Tualatin, or Tigard, but from a transportation view the train goes from nowhere to nowhere, which kind of explains why hardly anyone rides it.

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Estes Park Repeals TIF District

By | | News commentary
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In what leaders hope to be the start of a movement, nearly 61 percent of voters in the city of Estes Park, Colorado decided to abolish the city’s urban-renewal district. The measure, which was put on the ballot through an initiative petition, also requires voter approval before the city creates another one.

Supporters of the urban-renewal district made the usual
claim that tax-increment financing doesn’t cost anything. In fact, it takes money that would otherwise go to schools and other urban services and puts it in a slush fund for city officials to use to benefit favored developers.

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Airport Executive: Don’t Build Rail to Airport

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Jim DeLong, the former aviation director at Denver International Airport, has a sensible suggestion for RTD: Don’t build a rail transit line to the airport. The airport line, which was originally supposed to cost about $316 million, is now expected to cost $1.2 billion. DeLong says that would be a waste.

Before working in Denver, DeLong directed aviation at the Philadelphia airport, which is connected to downtown and other parts of Phillie by frequent rapid train service. More than 30 million passengers a year use the airport, yet only about 2 million train trips arrive or depart from the airport station, and most of them are airport employees.

DeLong relates that he persuaded SEPTA, the transit agency, and the airport to spend $750,000 promoting the train, but had very little impact on ridership. He concludes that “Men and women who have spent a day or more traveling do not want to wait for a train, even for a short time,” especially when carrying baggage. So he proposes that RTD terminate the East line at Aurora, Denver’s eastern suburb.
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Back in the Air Again: Book Tour Begins!

By | | Housekeeping
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The Antiplanner is spending this week on the road. First, I’ll be participating in a John Stossel show on energy issues. It’s a big topic, so I’ll be lucky to get a 30-second sound bite. The show will appear on the Fox Business network at 8 pm (ET) on Thursday.

Wednesday, I’ll be presenting my book, Gridlock, at the Cato Institute in Washington. Loyal Antiplanner opponent Michael Replogle and relatively neutral Anthony Downs will provide their candid reviews of the book.

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LaHood Eliminates Cost-Efficiency Rules

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that federal transit grants would now focus on “livability.” Buried beneath this rhetoric is LaHood’s decision to eliminate the only efforts anyone ever made to make sure transit money isn’t wasted on urban monuments that contribute little to transportation.

Back in 2005, then-Secretary Mary Peters stunned the transit world when she adopted a “cost-effectiveness” rule for federal transit grants to new rail projects. In order to qualify, transit agencies had to receive a “medium” cost-effectiveness rating from the FTA, meaning they had to cost less than about $24 for every hour they would save transportation users (either by providing faster service to transit riders or by reducing congestion to auto drivers). This wasn’t much of a requirement: a true cost-efficiency calculation would rank projects that cost $0.50 per hour much higher than projects that cost $23.50 per hour; under Peters’ rule, they were all ranked the same. But any projects that went over the $24 threshold (which varied with inflation — by 2009 it was up to $24.50) were ruled out.

After throwing various temper tantrums, transit agencies responded in one of four ways. Those close to the $24 threshold went back and cooked their books to either slightly reduce the cost or slightly increase the amount of time the project was supposed to save. Those that were hopelessly far away from the $24 threshold, but had powerful representatives in Congress, obtained exemptions from the rule. These included BART to San Jose, the Dulles rail line, and Portland’s WES commuter train. Those that didn’t have the political clout either shelved their projects or, in a few cases, tried to fund them without federal support.

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Mercury News Gets It Wrong Again

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The San Jose Mercury-News has long been a booster of ridiculously expensive rail transit projects such as Bart to San Jose. This week, it has a five-part series on the woes facing Bay Area transit agencies.

First, it tells us that, thanks to lower gas prices combined with higher transit fares, “commuters are leaving mass transit for their cars.” Maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem if the paper hadn’t encouraged the region to build such a high-cost transit network.

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Surprise: Another Light-Rail Line Is Over Its Budget

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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“Norfolk leaders want an audit to figure out why its light rail project has gone $108 million over budget,” reports the Associated Press. The city doesn’t need to spend money on an audit. The reason for the overrun is obvious: It’s a rail-transit construction project.

As if that isn’t enough, the line was planned by Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), the company that planned most of the rail transit lines that have gone over budget in the past 50 years. PB also planned and helped build the Big Dig, another urban-planning project that went way over budget.

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Driving, Transit, Cycling Down

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Any smart-growther enjoying a moment of schadenfreude over recent reports of a decline in driving have to recognize that transit ridership is also down. Moreover, the city of Portland, which likes to think of itself as the bicycle capital of the United States, reports that cycling is down as well.

The actual numbers are revealing. Portland estimates that cycling in 2009 was 5 percent less than in 2008. The American Public Transportation Association says that transit ridership in the first nine months of 2009 was 3.8 percent less than the same period in 2008. Meanwhile, driving the first nine months of 2009 is actually 0.2 percent greater than the same period in 2008.

If it is greater, then why the reports of a decline in driving? They are based on a rolling twelve-month average, and the twelve months ending in October, 2009 included the months immediately following the panic and crash of 2008. But thanks to lower fuel prices, 2009 beat 2008 in five of the first nine months of each year despite unemployment.

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