Search Results for: rail projects

A Global Leader in Obsolete Technology

By | | Transportation
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Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg wants to make the United States the “global leader” in high-speed rail. That’s like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives, all technologies that were once revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today. High-speed trains, in particular, were rendered obsolete in 1958, when Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner, which was twice as fast as the fastest trains today.

Slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than either one.

Aside from speed, what makes high-speed rail obsolete is its high cost. Unlike airlines, which don’t require much infrastructure other than landing fields, high-speed trains require huge amounts of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. That’s why airfares averaged just 14 cents per passenger-mile in 2019, whereas fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela averaged more than 90 cents per passenger-mile. Continue reading →

Bay Area Arrogance

By | | Transportation
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The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) has seen ridership fall in every year since 2015. The district was originally created to bring office workers from the suburbs into downtown San Francisco, yet downtown is now a ghost town with some of the highest vacancy rates in its history and actual occupancy rates — that is, offices that are actually being used — are probably below 20 percent. BART’s latest ridership numbers themselves are less than 15 percent of 2019 levels. Many of San Francisco’s high-tech employers have already announced that they will allow many of their employees to continue to work from home after the pandemic.

What better time is there for BART to announce its proposal to significantly expand its service? Called Link 21, the heart of the proposal is to build a second tube under the bay connecting San Francisco with Oakland costing a mere $30 billion. Continue reading →

2019 Passenger Costs and Subsidies

By | | Transportation
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The Federal Highway Administration has posted most highway finance spreadsheets for the 2019 Highway Statistics, which means we now have almost all of the data we need to calculate transportation costs subsidies for airline, highway, Amtrak, and transit passengers. A couple of airline numbers are only available for 2018, but those numbers don’t change much from year to year so should be a good estimate for 2019.

Americans spent an average of 25.0 cents per passenger-mile driving their cars, light trucks, and motorcycles, while highway subsidies averaged 1.1 cents per passenger-mile. Subsidies to highway trucking, incidentally, averaged 0.8 cents per ton-mile. Continue reading →

Transit Doesn’t Need to Respond to Reality

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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When the pandemic shut down brew pubs, many breweries went into the business of making hand sanitizer. Ford used one of its auto parts plants to make 50,000 ventilators. Various drugmakers were able to create vaccines in just nine months.

Transit agencies, meanwhile, continued to trundle their empty buses and trains around American cities. Those that were planning new construction projects have made little or no efforts to revise their plans in response to an almost certain downturn in business.

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A Billion Here, a Billion There . . .

By | | Transportation
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The city of Honolulu has now officially admitted that completing its misbegotten rail transit project will cost more than $10 billion and that it won’t be done until 2033. When first proposed back in 2006, it was supposed to cost less than $3 billion and when construction began in 2013 it was supposed to begin operations early this year.

Although it will be completely elevated, leading the Federal Transit Administration to classify it as heavy rail, the trains Honolulu has purchased will only have the capacity of light rail. It is costing more per urban resident than any rail line in the world, yet it won’t be able to carry as many people per hour as a bus-rapid transit line.

Meanwhile, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), which has suffered its own cost-overruns, is enthused about the idea of spending $2.5 billion for a 45-mph Front Range train from Ft. Collins to Pueblo. RTD’s own FasTracks rail project ended up costing more than twice as much as was promised to voters, forcing RTD to at least delay construction on a proposed line to Longmont.

When that line was at the stage that Front Range rail is at now, RTD estimated that it would cost $211 million. By 2008, the cost had risen to more than $700 million and the line was expected to carry so few riders that taxpayers would end up paying $60 a ride. Continue reading →

What Infrastructure Crisis?
Bridges & Roads Are In Great Shape

By | | Policy brief
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America’s bridges and highways are in very good to excellent condition, according to data recently released by the Federal Highway Administration (FHwA). Moreover, to the extent that their condition is changing over time, it tends to be improving as highway agencies replace outdated infrastructure and conduct regular maintenance on existing infrastructure.

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

These conclusions are completely contrary to the story told by interest groups such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose latest infrastructure report card gave highways a “D” grade and bridges a “C+.” These groups want Congress to pass a giant infrastructure bill, spending money the nation doesn’t have building infrastructure the nation doesn’t need, all to the benefit of engineers and other groups supporting such a bill. Continue reading →

Greasing the Gears of Deficit Spending

By | | Transportation
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Washington Metro says it will have to end weekend train service, close 19 rail stations, and reduce bus service by 45 percent if Congress doesn’t give the transit industry $32 billion (on top of normal federal funding of $13 billion) in 2021. In order to keep from making similar cuts, San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) says it will spend money that voters had approved for roads on transit instead. All over the country, transit agencies are preparing for doomsday, when they run out of the $25 billion that Congress gave them (in addition to the normal $13 billion) in 2020.

The New York Times editorial board thinks it has found the solution to problems like these: pork barrel. “Nothing greases the gears of government quite like pork,” it says. Specifically, the Times calls for a return to earmarks, which were banned in 2011 when a Tea Party-dominated Congress rebelled against wasteful spending.

During most of the twentieth century, Congress appropriated transportation dollars in general categories, such as airports, highways, and railroads, and gave them to state agencies to decide how best to spend them within broad guidelines. This was based on a philosophy of government that the local people understand their problems better than people sitting in offices in Washington DC. Continue reading →

Amtrak Continues to Lie

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak is maintaining the twin fictions that subsidies from state taxpayers are “passenger revenues” and that depreciation isn’t a real cost even though its accountants list it as an operating cost on its consolidated financial statements. Based on these fictions, Amtrak claimed that it was “on track to break even financially for the first time in its history” in 2020.

The pandemic derailed that fantasy, so now Amtrak claims that it lost $801 million in fiscal year 2020 (which for Amtrak ended on September 30). Yet a close look at its unaudited end-of-year report reveals that the actual operating losses were well over $2 billion.

The end-of-year report says that Amtrak received $342 million in state operating subsidies, up $110 million from 2019. It counts these as passenger revenues even though most of the passengers on state-supported trains would never have ridden those trains if they were asked to pay the full fares. Continue reading →

Vote No, They’ll Build It Anyway

By | | Transportation
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In 1998, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. So TriMet, the region’s transit agency, built it anyway.

In the recent election, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. Now TriMet is salivating at the possibility that the next Congress will pass an economic stimulus bill that will allow it to build it anyway, perhaps by requiring only 20 percent local matching funds instead of the current 50 percent.

Portland’s first light-rail line, which opened in 1986, cost about $30 million a mile in today’s dollars to go east from downtown Portland to Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. The second line, which opened in 1997, cost about $75 million a mile in today’s dollars to go west from downtown Portland to Beaverton and Hillsboro. Continue reading →

Biden Appoints Congestifiers

By | | Transportation
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Phillip Washington, the transit executive who thinks Los Angeles isn’t congested enough, has been named the leader of Biden’s transition team in charge of the Department of Transportation and Amtrak. Washington is the CEO of Los Angeles Metro, the main transit agency in Los Angeles County.

A year ago, as Los Angeles bus ridership was collapsing due to LA Metro’s insistence on building expensive light rail, Washington blamed the loss of bus riders instead on Los Angeles’ famously uncongested freeways. “It’s too easy to drive in this city,” he told the Wall Street Journal. To restore bus ridership, the city has to “make driving harder.”

“Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them,” Washington also told the Journal. He will clearly fit right in to Biden’s top-down view of how the world should work. Washington’s support for obsolete light-rail transit will go hand-in-hand with Biden’s support for obsolete intercity passenger trains. Continue reading →