In what I regard as a victory for common sense, the Ottawa city council has killed a planned light-rail line. Unfortunately, this may be a costly decision as a previous city council had signed a contract to construct the line, and the contractors say they want compensation for the cancellation.

The 18-mile line, which had been approved by the city council last July, was expected to cost CN$778 million, or about CN$43 million per mile. The Province of Ontario had promised to cover about CN$400 million of this cost, leaving the city to find CN$378 million.

Light rail passing high-density housing in Moscow. Photo by Lowell Grattan.

But after having spent CN$65 million on the project, a new city council elected in November decided light rail was a waste of money. In December, they voted 13-11 to cancel just before a contract deadline.

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The Christian Science Monitor has another puff piece about streetcars and how Portland’s streetcar attracted “around $2.5 billion” worth of development. I don’t need to repeat again that this development was really attracted by other subsidies.

The article quotes Urban Land Institute researcher Robert Dunphy, who says that streetcars are not transportation but “amenities.” The article says that “most streetcars operating today — with the exception of those in larger cities such as Portland or San Francisco — fall into that category.”

But San Francisco doesn’t have any streetcars (unless you count cable cars, which are quite a different beast) and Portland’s streetcar is clearly an amenity. I suspect the writer is confusing streetcars and light rail. Another recent article about the wasteful San Jose BART extension confused light rail with commuter rail.

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Dave Barry’s column welcoming people to the Superbowl in Miami has some interesting comments on Miami’s rail transit system.

Miami’s rail system “does not go to many other places that many Miami residents would like to go, which is why most of them do not use it,” says Barry. “To them, the Metrorail train is a mysterious object that occasionally whizzes past over their heads, unrelated to their lives, kind of like a comet.”

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The Wall Street Journal today has a lengthy article about the Siemens company bribing government officials to get contracts. Among other things, Siemens builds light-rail cars.

As far as I know, Siemens has never bribed an American public official to get a contract to for its rail cars — at least, not in the sense of paying people under the table. Instead, it routinely makes large contributions to political campaigns involving light rail.

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About twenty-five urban areas had rail transit in 2005. Transit systems in five of these lost market share to the automobile, they gained in eight, and in eleven they held their own (when measured to the nearest tenth of a percent). Data for the twenty-fifth, New Orleans, are not available.

“Holding their own” may sound good for transit systems in our auto-oriented society. But it is a disappointment when so much more has been promised for the expensive rail lines being built in so many cities. This is especially true when all but seven of these transit systems — rail and bus — carry under 2 percent of total passenger travel in the regions they serve.

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Rail transit continued to do poorly in many American cities in 2005, at least judging from transit data recently released by the FTA. The FTA publishes data in two different forms. The first has data in rather cryptic files that are easy to manipulate as spreadsheets. The second has almost identical data that are easier to read but harder to work on.

To simplify matters for you, I took the data I think are most important and put them in one downloadable spreadsheet. This file includes, for every transit agency and every mode of transit they operate: operating costs; capital costs; fares; trips; passenger miles; vehicle revenue miles; and vehicle revenue hours. The file also tells what urbanized area the agency operates in.

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