We have a spate of light-rail follies this week. First up: Crime on Portland’s “MAX” light rail has gotten so bad that, in November, Oregon’s governor directed state police to ride the rails regularly to protect passengers from assaults. “I am absolutely adamant that its citizens feel safe at all times in using a fine mass transit system,” said the governor.

Grateful representatives of TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, expressed confidence that the troopers would be able to solve the gang-related crime problems that have plagued the light-rail system. The troopers “will allow us to better work out a long-term solution with local law enforcement people,” said TriMet’s public services director.

While potential passengers might look upon this action with relief, the only problem is that it happened in November, 1988. When TriMet opened the light-rail line in 1986, it eliminated its transit police because it did not have enough money to both operate light rail and offer passenger security. The light rail gave drug dealers and other inner-city criminals easy access to the suburbs, and soon they were intimidating and assaulting riders.

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The head of St. Louis Metro, Larry Salci (previously) says he feels “disappointment for the taxpayers” because he lost a multi-million-dollar lawsuit over cost overruns against the company that built his latest light-rail line. I’ll bet he does.

If he cares so much about taxpayers, why is he asking them to pay an additional half-cent sales tax so that he can build more light-rail lines (which will no doubt have their own cost overruns)? It is not as if the recent line is all that successful. As the chart below shows, the opening of the line in 2001 was followed by a decline in bus ridership but virtually no increase in rail ridership.

Click for a larger view. The thin red line represents route miles of light rail. The black line is miles of driving.

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I’ve played with the 2006 transit data (previously) some more. The summary file now breaks down trips and passenger miles in each urban area by the main modes: buses, trolley buses, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail.

I then transcribed these numbers to my rail transit data file, which includes data from all rail urban areas dating back to 1982. This file also includes miles of driving, but the Federal Highway Administration hasn’t published 2006 data yet. The file also lists the number of route miles of each form of rail transit, but I wasn’t able to interpret the “fixed guideway” file that came with the 2006 data, so I didn’t fill these numbers in for many cities.

Still, we now can compare trends in transit ridership and passenger miles in the various rail cities. Here are the results.

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The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has published “provisional” data for 2006, including transit ridership, passenger miles, operating costs, energy consumption, and similar numbers for almost every transit system and mode of transit in the country. The data tables are not exactly straightforward, so the Antiplanner has compiled a summary showing the most important numbers by agency and mode and totals by urban area. Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Earlier this year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), the transit industry’s lobby group, was thrilled to report that 2006 transit ridership exceeded 10 billion trips for the first time in 49 years. As exciting as this sounds, it was only 2.9 percent more than in 2005, even though 2006 fuel prices were a lot higher than in 2005.

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Rail advocates sometimes claim that we can ignore the high cost of building rail lines, because “once they are built, they are there forever.” Yes, forever, or about 30 to 40 years, whichever comes first.

Which is why the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), Washington Metro, and Chicago Transit authority are all looking at roughly $10 billion each in rehabilitation expenses in the next few years, little of which is funded. Of the three, BART is in the best shape, saying it needs $11 billion for rehab, slightly less than half of which is funded. The remaining $5.8 billion is still a lot of money just to keep the system going.

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