Search Results for: rail projects

Amtrak Infrastructure Boondoggle

By | | Transportation
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If Congress passes the infrastructure compromise reached by the White House and 17 Republican senators, Amtrak will get $66 billion. Amtrak won’t have complete freedom to spend this money however it likes: instead, according to Senator Charles Schumer, $30 billion is for Northeast Corridor backlog and modernization; $16 billion is for other backlog needs; and $12 billion is for new services outside of the Northeast Corridor, “including high speed rail,” as if $12 billion could buy any significant amount of high-speed rail.

Last month, Amtrak revealed that it needs $117 billion to bring the Northeast Corridor up to a state of good repair, so the $30 billion in the infrastructure bill is little more than a down payment. Thus, Congress is continuing its usual pattern of short-funding needed maintenance so that it can fund new projects. After all, if all of the money in the bill went to the Northeast Corridor, senators and representatives in the rest of the country would have little reason to support it.

One of the Northeast Corridor projects funded in the bill is new tunnels under the Hudson River, which are expected to cost $3 billion a mile, more than just about any other tunnels in history. When Slate writer Henry Grabar asked Amtrak CEO William Flynn how he could justify such a high cost, Flynn responded that he didn’t think it was that expensive. Grabar concluded that Amtrak didn’t care about the cost. Continue reading →

Moving from Transit Apartheid to Transportation Equity

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 2014, the Metropolitan Council—the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency—proudly announced that it was adopting a regional transit equity program. Under this program, the region would spend billions of dollars building light-rail lines to wealthy, largely white suburbs. Meanwhile, it would spend a few million dollars building 150 to 200 bus shelters, most of them in low-income, largely black, neighborhoods.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

The claim that this was equitable was so absurd that the council’s announcement might as well have been written by the Onion. Yet this was a continuation of policies that had been followed by transit agencies for several decades. Continue reading →

Ramming Together Two Sinking Ships

By | | Transportation
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The Titanic is sinking! Let’s save it by ramming it into another sinking ship. Maybe together they will survive.

This merger didn’t work out so well.

Probably not. But that seems to be the theory behind proposals to merge Caltrain, which runs commuter trains between San Jose and San Francisco, with the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), which runs heavy-rail transit throughout the Bay Area. Continue reading →

Who Is to Blame for HS2?

By | | Transportation
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HS2, a high-speed rail line from London to northern England, was projected to cost £32.7 billion in 2011 pounds, or about £40 billion in today’s money. After the Conservative Party-run government approved the line in 2012, costs ballooned to the current estimate of £106 billion, a 165 percent increase. The final cost will probably be even more.

HS2 is supposed to be built in two phases: phase 1 from London to Birmingham and phase 2 from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.

Liberals such as the Guardian blame the fiasco on the Conservative government, but they forget that they supported the rail line since the beginning while current Conservative Party leader and prime minister Boris Johnson opposed it. The Guardian cites a report from the National Audit Office that says the government failed to account for the risks and likelihood that the original estimates were too low, something that would have been true of any government that approved the project. Continue reading →

$117 Billion to Save “Almost an Hour”: Who Cares?

By | | Transportation
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Before the pandemic, two people commuted from Podunk, Michigan to Detroit, a drive of about one hour. If someone built them a high-speed rail line, they could save nearly half an hour, assuming they don’t decide to work at home. Of course, the fares they pay would never come close to covering the $6 billion cost of building the rail line, but who cares about the cost per rider?

“Who cares?” seems to be the attitude of the Northeast Corridor Commission, which consists of Amtrak and the commuter rail agencies that run trains on part of the Boston-to-Washington rail system. Where its 2010 master plan called for spending $52 billion in the corridor, the 2021 plan demands $117 billion to keep running trains in the corridor. But who cares about the increased cost? Continue reading →

Transit’s Post-COVID Recovery Is Slowest

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Amtrak’s May ridership surged to 45.2 percent of pre-COVID levels (as compared with May 2019), surpassing public transit, which reached only 42.3 percent of 2019 levels. Transit’s recovery was partly hurt by the fact that May 2021 had two fewer business days than May 2019, but the slow growth makes transit the least-recovered of the various modes of travel.

Shown are transit trips from the National Transit Database, and airline trips from Transportation Safety Administration, and Amtrak passenger miles from the May performance report. Driving is in vehicle miles from the Federal Highway Administration’s Traffic Volume Trends; May highway data won’t be out for another week or so.

As usual, rail transit is doing worse than bus transit when compared with 2019, but rail has also recovered more since 2020. Most of rail’s recovery is in heavy rail and commuter rail; light rail’s recovery is only slightly faster than transit buses and hybrid rail (meaning Diesel-powered light rail) isn’t even recovering as fast as buses. Continue reading →

First World, Second World, Third World

By | | Transportation
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Someone should teach The Hill‘s headline writers a little history. A recent article about why we should give more subsidies to Amtrak and high-speed rail was headed, “The US is a first-world nation with a third-world rail system.”

Actually, the United States is a first-world nation with a first-world rail system which is probably the best rail system in the world. The only other contender for the title would be Canada.

Few people seem to remember that “first-world” terminology grew out of the Cold War. At that time, the First World consisted of capitalist countries such as the United States and Canada while the Second World was socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and China. The Third World included developing countries that hadn’t really decided whether they were going to follow the capitalist or socialist model (with those that failed to choose capitalism remaining poor today). Continue reading →

How San Jose Held Up Google for $200 Million

By | | City planning, Policy brief
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Last month, the San Jose city council approved a plan for Google to practically double the size of downtown San Jose. The plan allows Google to build up to 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 to 5,900 housing units, 1,100 hotel/extended stay units, and half a million square feet of retail or cultural space on 80 acres of land located just west of downtown. The site is immediately adjacent to the San Jose train station, which serves commuter trains, light rail, and Amtrak.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

According to city planning documents, this is exactly the kind of development San Jose was looking for in this area, one which (according to a staff presentation) would “create a vibrant, welcoming, and accessible urban destination consisting of a mix of land uses and that are well-integrated with the intermodal transit station.” Yet in order to get the project approved, Google had to put up $200 million for various special interest groups who were protesting the plan. This may actually have the perverse effect of discouraging future development in the city. Continue reading →

Infrastructure Arithmetic

By | | Transportation
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The White House and Senate Republicans have compromised on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Meanwhile, President Biden and Republican leaders have agreed to a $579 billion infrastructure bill.

Since $579 billion is less than half of $1.2 trillion, both of these statements can’t be true — and yet they are. The difference is that the $1.2 trillion includes “baseline spending,” or the amount that would have been spent on infrastructure even if no bill were passed. The actual infrastructure bill would only include $579 billion of new spending. That’s quite a concession on the part of the White House, which had originally proposed $2.3 trillion in new spending, or nearly four times as much as the bipartisan agreement. On the other hand, $579 billion is exactly $579 billion more than Republicans had proposed to spend before Biden released his original proposal on March 31.

At the same time, the so-called baseline appears to represent the amount that would be spent on surface transportation by the bill proposed by House Democrats, or about $78 billion a year. This is a large increase from the amount that has been spent in the past few years, which has been about $55 billion a year. In order to get the total above $1 trillion, allowing the president to save some face, the $78 billion a year is extended for eight years, even though the House bill would authorize only five years of spending. Continue reading →

Jane Jacobs and the Mid-Rise Mania

By | | Housing, Policy brief, Regional planning
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The next time you travel through a city, see if you can find many four-, five-, or six-story buildings. Chances are, nearly all of the buildings you see will be either low rise (three stories or less) or high-rise (seven stories or more). If you do find any mid-rise, four- to six-story buildings, chances are they were either built before 1910, after 1990, or built by the government.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

Before 1890, most people traveled around cities on foot. Only the wealthy could afford a horse and carriage or to live in the suburbs and enter the city on a steam-powered commuter train. Many cities had horsecars—rail cars pulled by horses—but they were no faster than walking and too expensive for most working-class people to use on a daily basis. Continue reading →